Sunday nights in Paris are like the aftermath of a party. A pervasive quiet settles over the city that persists through Mondays, the calm broken only by the grind of garbage trucks picking up the weekend’s detritus. It’s my favorite 24 hours of the week: there’s an intimacy so palpable I can feel Paris breathe.
For me, a Sunday night stroll is easier than wandering the streets in the early morning. I’m a night owl. But one recent Monday after a restless night, I ditched the lavender eye pillow, pushed myself out of bed, and locked the door behind me as the city was waking up.
* * *
I don’t catch dawn breaking, that happened while I was debating whether or not to make another go at sleep. Instead, I’m treated to the weekday morning deluge of adults accompanying tiny people with high-pitched voices and enormous backpacks to school before going to work themselves. I’m walking against the current. Further on, an English-speaking child with a French-speaking nanny struggles to explain the word “spit” and attempts to hawk a loogie. I’m downwind.
The narrow streets on the way to the river are deserted now, but a garbage truck passes through, leaving an evaporating trail of diesel fumes. I catch a whiff of piss, a reminder of a late night, or perhaps a person “SDF”—sans domicile fixe—homeless.
Along the Seine, the Voie Georges Pompidou is a bike superhighway, Paris’s own daily Tour de France. Riders zoom past, hunched over handlebars; a few ride upright, hands free; all have ear buds or headphones. Crossing to the cobblestone walking path takes patience, a silent prayer that this will not be the moment I trip. The fog lifts, burnt off by a bright sun journeying across a cloudless blue sky.
There’s a spot with pastel-colored café tables and chairs. I order an allongée at a portable counter on a wooden deck and carry it to a table on the river side. This means crossing the superhighway twice, once with a coffee in hand. But by now the bike riders have given way to runners. I peel a clementine I’ve brought from home and drink the not-very-good allongée. It doesn’t matter: I can have a great coffee any time, but it doesn't come with the view.
At an hour when I would usually be snug under the covers, I pass under two bridges, walk up a ramp, and re-enter the neighborhood. Eschewing the main drag, an east-west artery in medieval times as well as now, I meander east on ancient streets whose contours are softened by the angle of the sun, pass buildings whose stories I know, stop at a favorite boulangerie, a M.O.F., Meilleur Ouvrier de France, for a croissant.
The children are gone from Place des Vosges. Someone in spandex jumps rope under the watchful eye of a trainer. And a forgotten soccer ball I’d seen near a sculpted shrub when I set out a couple of hours ago is gone, too.
* * *
The sun is in the west now. The intervening hours make the morning walk seem distant. I’ve worked and worked out, run errands. Before the day is over, I will stop in a café and run into a friend who is just leaving, who on the way out tells the waiter to bring me the large glass of Bandol, not the small, and I will laugh and nod.
But before then, in a park on the tip of an island in the middle of the Seine that was once outside the city walls of Paris, I turn my face toward the sun. The children are back, this time with grandparents who sit on green benches and talk in low murmurs. A little girl of five or six calls a handsome, more-salt-than-pepper-haired man “Papa,” and something makes me think she is his second family, that somewhere from another life, he has adult children.
The hierarchy of children at play is universal: the leader; the bossy one; the eager one; the one happily going it alone, lost in an imaginary reverie. Loud, running helter-skelter, and inadvertently hilarious, they are more interesting to watch than the adults. Two little girls wear the same white polka-dotted navy dress but with different color tights. A little boy with tousled blond curls hops on one foot. I think about how oblivious they are to growing up in this sublime city.
Cooler, rainy weather is moving in for the next several days. At the end of the week, there’s even a possibility of snow, which, should it happen, would be a cruel joke for poisson d’avril, April Fool’s Day. But for now, there’s warmth in the waning hours of the sun.