Still, there is no place in the world quite like Paris (and I've looked).

With my transportation fortunes brightening rapidly, I took a train (!) from Istanbul to Athens (towering mountains, shepherds and sheep, a Thessaloniki thunderstorm), and then an airplane (!!) from Athens to Paris.

In between, I spent a day alongside throngs of tourists in Athens seeing the Acropolis and assorted other old shit that left me, if you can't tell, a bit cold. Someone’s bound to point out that I'm a History major. Let me live.

When I was seven I had a calendar of photographs from the Greek Isles, and I've never forgotten the deep blue of the ocean in those pictures. Inspired by these memories, I took an eight hour ferry to the island of Santorini to stay for five days.

Every day in Santorini I stayed on the beach until the last light finally disappeared around ten in the evening. I swam, read a long book and otherwise did as little as possible. No place looks how it does in calendars, but Santorini does (with the exception that on one afternoon there was a visiting karate team whose members were jumping from iconic white roof and blue-domed church to another— an innovative variation on the theme just in time for the 2008 calendars).

I could go on fawning for several paragraphs, but it should suffice to say that Santorini is stunning, and that the ocean was blue enough to satisfy even memories formed at the age of seven-- the peak of the Crayola years, when one is particularly attuned to bold colors (box of 64, not a poor man's 8-count)-- and not impressed by just anything.

Since I have the obscene privilege of having been to Paris three times before, I didn’t arrive this time around particularly wanting to climb the Eiffel Tower, see the view from Notre Dame, or visit the Louvre, though these are all perfectly pleasant things to do.

This time around, I just wanted to know if Arthur and Henri were alive. Because if they were, I needed to bring them back into my life.

I met Arthur and Henri on a miserably hot July day four years ago. It was the last day of the Tour de France, when the riders enter the capital and complete eight laps around the length of the Champs Elysee before a winner is finally named. It’s an event that draws immense crowds every year, and any cycling aficionado knows that in order to get in a good position to watch the final stage, you need to arrive at around six in the morning. I’m not a cycling aficionado, and if nothing else I’m a sleep aficionado, so I walked up to the boulevard at 3:00 in the afternoon, half an hour after the riders were scheduled to arrive.

I managed to push my way through the crowd to climb up onto the window ledge of a bank building. An old man and a boy were already standing there, having recognized the rare perch from which, if you could remember to hold on and manage not to get heat stroke, you had a decent chance of not falling to death or disfigurement. But if we could breathe a little more freely than the people down below, none of three of us on the ledge could see the race any better from where we were standing, and soon we were a bit starved for entertainment.

Within fifteen minutes twelve-year-old Arthur and Henri (his father, but at 68 old enough to be his grandfather) had struck up a conversation. Over the next three hours we had glimpsed, two times (through the crowds, behind lampposts, through the branches of trees), what may or may not have been Lance Armstrong’s yellow jersey, and in the long periods of waiting in between, we had discussed everything from Eminem, to my high school soccer team’s training regimen, to a comparison of conditions for cows on dairy farms in the United States and France. (I would later learn that both Henri and Arthur have a charming and inexplicable affection for all things cow.) When the race was over we exchanged addresses, said goodbye fondly and went our separate ways.

It had been a lovely encounter but I didn’t expect to hear from them again. However a few weeks after my return to California I had a card bisected into two halves by a hand-drawn line. The top half was filled with Henri’s small, idiosyncratic and semi-legible script, the bottom half with Arthur’s loopy cursive misspellings.

From that first short card, our correspondence continued consistently for three years, with Henri and I exchanging letters that were often three or four pages long two or three times a year, and Arthur sending postcards from his summer vacations. I wrote to Henri about applying to colleges and the debacle of the 2004 elections, about my travels in Northern Ireland and India, the devastation in New Orleans, and my despair at watching Zinedine Zidane get ejected from the World Cup final.

On blue construction paper, lined paper and Christmas cards, Henri wrote to me about the books he was reading, the progress he was making (or not making) on his paintings and collages, the rioting in the Parisian suburbs, the French reaction to the American elections, the trouble he had getting Arthur to clean his room, and the brief news report he’d seen on French television that had shown footage of Yale (they’d looked closely, but hadn’t managed to spot me).

He wrote to me about many more things in moments when his handwriting became so loosely formed as to be illegible. If you’ve ever walked into my room and seen me holding a letter two inches from my face, then holding it at arms length trying to catch the light in just the right way, chances are I was trying to read one of Henri’s letters. Henri was too old, and Arthur too young, to want to give up our letters for e-mails, and in the end it was better that way. If half of what Henri had written was routinely indecipherable, the thought and care he had put into each letter was plain.

Two years after our first meeting I was going to Paris again, so Arthur and Henri sent me their phone number and told me to call them up. On a Saturday afternoon I took the metro to their small apartment not far from the Eiffel Tower, and Henri drove us to the field where Arthur’s soccer team was halfway through a game. We watched the second half and then the three of us went to lunch in Chinatown, wandering through the bazaar afterwards, sizing up the jade lions and wooden snakes.

They told me to call them the next day and I did. I took the metro to their apartment and we wandered through the street market nearby, had a cup of tea at the bistro on the corner and visited Henri’s artist friend who, scandalized, recounted his recent run-in with the Parisian police (he had been hanging around his gallery one night in dark clothes and a Batman mask, and a passing pedestrian had reported a robbery in progress).

They told me to call them the next day and I did. I took the metro to their apartment and during Arthur’s lunch break from the school he attended a couple blocks away, we quickly ate the three course meal Henri had prepared. Arthur ran back to school, Henri and I had another cup of tea at the bistro and browsed through the selection at the bookstore next door to their apartment.

I flew back to Yale the next morning, and the long letters kept arriving a couple times a year; each semester, not long after finals were finally over, I wrote them long letters back.

And then, about a year ago, the letters stopped. Since it was not unusual for several months to go by between them it was awhile before I noticed. I rummaged around for the last thing I’d received from Henri, a quick postcard from a vacation promising a long letter once he returned to Paris the following week. Alarmed, I wrote him and Arthur a letter and waited, but nothing came back. Months later I wrote another short note, but still nothing.

After nine months had gone by without any news I would periodically type their names into Google or the websites for Parisian newspapers, worried that they had been killed in a car accident, or that Henri might have had a heart attack-- he would have been 72 by then, and if he had, in fact, died, it wouldn’t have been surprising if Arthur had been unable to reply to any of my letters . Dozens of scenarios ran through my head, but there wasn’t much more I could do to find out what had happened to them from the other side of the Atlantic.

I had long ago misplaced their phone number, so not knowing what else to do, on the morning of my first full day in Paris I got on the subway and went to their apartment. The bookstore Henri had taken me to years ago seemed as good a place as any to start. A somewhat surly older man was sitting behind the desk and when I asked, he told me that he did know Henri. “Do you know if he still lives next door?” The man asked me how I knew him, and I told him I was his American friend. “Yeah, he’s still next door.”

The surly man went back to his accounts. “If I leave you a note would you mind passing it on to him when you see him?” The man shrugged: “If you want.” At the end of twenty minutes at the back of the bookstore painstakingly writing out a letter to Henri in French, the surly man’s cheerful wife walked in the bookstore, exchanged a few words with her husband, and walked over to me.

“Are you Maura?” she asked me excitedly. I was. “Henri will be so glad to know you’re here, he’s told me all about you. He’s in the hospital right now, he had an operation on his eye and it got horribly infected.” I shot a quick glare at surly man in the corner, crumpled up my nearly finished letter and, despite myself, I broke into a relieved smile. The woman had already dialed Henri’s hospital room, and she thrust the phone into my hand. Within seconds Henri’s voice was at the other end of the line, shocked to hear from me, but evidently delighted when I asked if I could stop by during visiting hours. By the time I’d hung up the phone the woman at the bookstore was passing me a hand-drawn map with directions to the hospital.

Two hours later I walked into Henri’s hospital room. I found him sitting in a chair by the window wearing a bandage over one eye, but otherwise looking like a relatively healthy 72-year-old man. On the bed beside him there was a book on astrophysics, and another book, lying open and already half-read, entitled Why Cows Can’t Go Down Stairs.

He smiled warmly when I walked in, offered me a chair, and immediately launched into one of his characteristic speeches that went on, with only minimal interjections on my part, for nearly an hour and a half-- about health care, anarchism, the menace of Nicolas Sarkozy, and the wonders of cows and the cosmos. And then, finally, he got to why he’d stopped writing.

He was terribly sorry, the last year had been very hard with Arthur, who was going through a rocky adolescence. The last time I’d seen Arthur he’d been a rosy-cheeked and particularly sweet-natured thirteen year old, if a bit shy, and I wondered what kind of trouble he could have gotten himself into in two short years. Henri told me that Arthur had spent half of the school year in the bistro across the street, or riding his moto around, smoking cigarettes and staying out with friends every night until 2 AM. Henri is already acutely philosophical and sensitive in disposition, and since he's retired he has all the time in the world to worry about Arthur, his only child.

In the latest episode, not a week before, the police had called Henri into the neighborhood precinct to collect Arthur after he’d been arrested for tagging. The building he’d chosen had been slated for demolition anyway, and Henri conceded that the police might have shown his son some leniency-- had Arthur not made the small mistake of informing the officers that he refused to answer any of their questions until they asked them in proper French.

As I’d always been charmed by Arthur’s frequent and often egregious spelling and grammatical mistakes (and had never envisioned him the future academicien he now, apparently, would style himself to be), I couldn’t help but see a good deal of humor in his classically French declaration. Still, I did my best not to show it, because Henri was clearly worried to death about his son. He told me that in the last year he had stopped painting-- had stopped everything, really. He had gotten my letters and had started to write back a couple of times, but he'd always stopped not even halfway through. He just couldn’t do anything. We talked for an hour longer, and when I finally stood to go, I told him that I hoped he’d write to me even if things weren’t going well. Henri smiled, promised that he would, and told me how happy he was that I had come.

Having successfully tracked down Arthur and Henri, I spent my remaining four days walking around Paris the best way I know how—with no plan and all the time in the world. Because when you don’t have a plan in Paris, things just happen; because to try to mold the greatest city in the world to your will is hubris.

Paris is the greatest city in the world because if you climb up on a window ledge, you will climb down with two friends; and if you lose them, just come back—Paris will find them.

Paris is the greatest city in the world because the woman selling olives in the marketplace scowls when you ask for a second sample (how could you not be familiar already with the over two dozen varieties she has devoted her life to selling?) And because the woman who sells you the slice of spinach and cheese tart gushes (after the sale has been made and the money handed over and nothing other than the purest appreciation for her metier could have inspired her to say it): “magnificent … she [the tart] is just magnificent!”

Paris is the greatest city in the world because there are streets named for a dragon, a wooden sword, the four winds, mules’ tracks, the “honest bourgeoisie” and something called “looking for noon.” And because on one of these streets there is a stroller stopped mid-sidewalk, sending passing pedestrians on a detour onto the road because its two-year-old occupant is down on his hands and knees drawing with chalk (because there’s no helping when and where inspiration deigns to strike).

Paris is the greatest city in the world because a scoop of pear Berthillon ice cream is simultaneously exactly what a pear tastes like, and better than any pear that ever could have graced this earth; because the petit pain figue noix at Poujauran bakery is handed to you still warm; and because while you sip your mint tea from a glass in the salon of the city’s main mosque on a rainy day, little birds land on the chairs nearby and flit in and out of the brass Moroccan lamps overhead.

Paris is the greatest city in the world because on an evening dubbed La Fete de La Musique, bands take to street corners in every neighborhood across the city to play free concerts (classical, jazz, indie, klezmer, tango, punk, drumming, Piaf standards, Scottish bagpipes and covers of the Clash)— some of them decent, the rare two or three good, a good deal of it horrendous, but taken together something wonderful and unexpected. Because as I walked away from the boisterous public sing-a-long attended by over a hundred people in the corner of the Place des Vosges (balding guitar man in the center of the crowd flinging stacks of xeroxed lyrics into the air like confetti before each song as hands shot up to snatch the lyrics as they fluttered down), I was almost knocked over by two teenaged girls chasing a runaway orange balloon. And because as I walked along Boulevard Richard Lenoir many hours later, I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was looking for, exactly, but I did know that there was a small brass band and a few scattered second-liners just steps ahead of me feeling out a path through the night.

In the weeks before my arrival, I had made a plan with Pan Pan (who’s in Geneva for the summer) to meet up with her during my last day there. It would be her first time in Paris; she’d be arriving in the morning and taking an early train back the following morning.

A couple of days before she was supposed to arrive, Pan Pan wrote to say that every single hostel in the city was booked for that night.

For a couple minutes this seemed like a problem. But Paris is an insomnia-inducing city-- why do something as trivial as sleep in a place like that? If we had no place to sleep, then all the better. We just wouldn’t sleep.

This plan got off to an auspicious start when we actually managed to find each other in the train station without any problems. Things started going quickly downhill when we tried to leave the train station. I stepped off the escalator and noticed that Pan Pan, behind me, did not. “Um … Maura? I think I’m stuck.” I looked back and Pan Pan’s loose pants were, indeed stuck in the bottom of the escalator. Within a few moments several gendarmes had descended on the escalator and were cutting Pan Pan free with a hunting knife while Pan Pan held onto the waistband of her pants (what little remained of them) to keep from flashing all of Paris. Within another few moments Pan Pan had bought and changed into a skirt from a shop in the train station. As we left the train station, we walked over a vent in the sidewalk emitting large upwardly gusts of air. As Pan Pan walked over it, her skirt flew up and she flashed all of Paris. Things were going well so far. A few minutes later, the torrential rains began.

But only a fool would let destroyed pants, involuntary exhibitionism and near-biblical rains ruin a day in Paris. Until night fell we walked across the entire city, right bank and left, Ile-de-la-Cité and Ile St.-Louis, making our way from bakery to outdoor market to ice cream stand to cheese store to bakery (again), stopping to study the exteriors of whatever tourist attractions we happened to come across along the way, but saving our entry fees for the good stuff: food.

If you need to stay up all night in Paris and you’ve made the mistake of walking around all day, by 1 AM you will already be wondering if you're going to make it at all. There isn’t much open at this time of night, but there is a 24-hour McDonald’s at Place de la République where for €1 the girl behind the counter will give you a token and point you to the coffee machine next to the toilets. You will put your token in the machine, and watch as dense brown and vaguely milky liquids pour, steaming, into the cup. You will look back at the girl as if to say, for fuck’s sake, this can’t be what it’s supposed to look like, but she isn’t paid minimum wage working all hours of the night to be your shoulder to cry on. You will take your “coffee” to a plastic chair by the window, and it will look vile. Drink it anyway.

You will drink it anyway because you’ll want to be awake between 2 and 6 AM in Paris. When the McDonald’s nightman will tell you that you have to visit the Congo—and will even go so far as to write down his banlieux street address (no phone, no e-mail) to let him know when you’re ready to go, because he has family there who will look after you. When you will unknowingly walk away from where you will think you were heading, and only realize your mistake three miles later, when you will realize, too, that with five more hours to kill the whole thing can hardly be called a “wrong turn.” When a drunk Vana White will stand unsteadily on the sidewalk displaying, to no one in particular, the paint samples in a darkened storefront. When the square outside Notre Dame will be emptied of people and filled with chairs. When you will come upon a sober and startlingly normal guy of about your age walking down the street, and without any preamble he will ask you a question, then at the next intersection turn and walk away, leaving you to ponder an exchange so effortless and mundane that it could have happened between old friends on a living room couch in the afternoon, had it not happened with a stranger on the streets of Paris nearing dawn: “Do you know how to speak Chinese?” he will have asked you. “It must be a very difficult language, you know, a character for every word and all .... But the writing is so pretty.”

Around six, when you and Pan Pan finally will be able to walk no further, you will collapse against the wall across from the bakery in the subway, sitting there like bums while you wait for it to open. And after awhile a decently-dressed black man will come up to the two of you, say something quickly, walk away, walk back: he was sitting right over there (he will point, your heads will follow) and they told him to leave. But he just wanted to get some coffee (you will nod) you don’t see those fucking gendarmes saying a word to the two of you, do you? He will mumble to himself, walk away and then, just as you turn to look at Pan Pan because you are astonished by the eloquence of his enraged movements, his subway soliloquy, he will turn on his heel and all he wanted was some fucking coffee. Sometimes these racist cops just make him wanna (he will walk a few paces away, sigh heavily, stride quickly back) just make him wanna (he will pinch the hem of his shirt, will pull it up slightly and let it drop) just make him wanna, wanna (he will lift the hem again and grab for the gun that will not be tucked in the waistband of his trousers) shit GODDAMNIT. Show me a man bored by Paris, and I will show you a man who is no longer interested in life, and probably never was.

A couple of weeks after I left Paris my mom e-mailed me from California to say that a letter had arrived from Henri, did I want her to open it? I did.

“I went back home Saturday,” he had written on stationery that features a cow in a green pasture watching an old-fashioned locomotive. “My eye is regaining its images at the speed of a small train!” When you open the card, the cow has climbed on board and is riding in the freight car.

There are several nearly illegible paragraphs, and then, at the end, this:

“For me this stay [in the hospital] was like a voyage where I’ve re-learned what life makes you forget: sight, life holds so few things: a few drops and some friends.”

Which is not so very much. And which, after all, is enough.

Love,

Fitz