Sin of the Month • Abby Bardi
	Paris

When you tell people you're going to Paris, they get a dreamy look in their eyes and sigh "Paaaaaris," as if in their youth they had strolled the banks of the Seine with some illicit lover before being torn asunder from him or her by world war. Even if they have never set foot there, they breathe the word "Paris" as if conjuring up romantic visions. So much for all that stuff about Liberty Fries.

The fact is, Americans are madly in love with Paris, and all that anti-French sentiment we heard a year ago is just sour grapes–we pretend to dislike the French because their food is too good, they are too fashionable, and they drink far too much wine but, in fact, we envy them.

On the other hand, when I told my dentist I was going to Paris in the springtime, he said, "You'll freeze your ass off." I took his word for it and proceeded directly to the Burlington Coat Factory, where I managed to find a raincoat with a zip-out lining. Let me say that I did not once have to zip out its lining. There is nothing romantic about scurrying through the Tuileries while an icy wind whips dust in your eyes but, despite that, April in Paris really was fantastique.

My husband and I went there to visit my daughter Hortense, who is spending a semester there studying at the Sorbonne–at least, that's what she says she's doing, though I have yet to see evidence of any studying. I thought the only parentally responsible thing to do was to make sure she was okay, so we selflessly took time out of our busy schedules purely for her welfare.

Yeah, right.

The fact is, I recently had a French windfall: not long ago, I opened an envelope from my agent and discovered a surprise check–royalties from sales of my novel, Le Livre de Fred, which for some reason has done well in France. I decided it would be only fair to bring some of the money back to the French and spend it on cheese, wine, and Hortense.

However, although we were staying in a hotel right next door to where she lives, behind the Louvre, we barely saw Hortense. (By the way, this is not her real name. Years ago, she forbade me to write about her, but I got her to agree to it if I didn't specifically identify her. At least, she sort of agreed). Her friend Sheila (not her real name either) was visiting at the same time, so mostly, Hortense and Sheila went out to bars and clubs and picked up French guys while my husband and I went to museums and monuments and ate fabulous meals without them.

Sheila had saved up all year for her visit to Hortense but had neglected to bring enough money to subsist while there. The large supply of Luna bars she had brought with her were gone by her second day (I think Hortense ate most of them). She could not afford the subway, so every time we went anywhere with them, we handed Sheila a Metro ticket and lectured her on the evils of turnstile-jumping, but on several occasions, she managed to sneak in with Hortense while our backs were turned.

One evening at the Bastille Metro stop, a subway police officer cornered Sheila and fined her 20 Euros for not being able to produce a ticket, which caused her to admit that we had been right all along, something you would never hear from Hortense. I was very impressed by the passionate argument that ensued between the officer and Hortense, all in French–at least she's learning something over there. Later, we told Sheila that for the rest of her life she could tell people she had nearly been imprisoned in the Bastille, but she didn't seem to find that as funny as we did.

So while we experienced the tourist's Paris, standing in long lines for the Louvre, eating escargots in the Latin Quarter, buying socks with Eiffel Towers on them, Hortense and Sheila breezed around the city as if it were their own personal playground. Though it was impossible not to notice the increased security–the armed guards in all the train stations, the metal detectors in the Louvre–they seemed gloriously indifferent to it.

But for adults, this aspect of Paris casts a shadow on its romantic ambience, and while we're being realistic here, it's hard not to remember that Paris was once occupied by the Nazis, and that the now-trendy Marais district, which houses the Jewish Quarter, was once imperiled. My friend Barbara was there recently, and as she was eating a delicious meal, she realized that she was in the same deli, Chez Jo Goldenberg, that was bombed in 1982 by Abu Nidal. Jo Goldenberg himself lost his entire family in Auschwitz.

But the youth who crowd the cafés don't seem to be thinking about the dark history of Paris, but about how amusant it is to eat a three-course, three-hour meal and then wander the streets, which are busy at all hours, laughing and kissing. (I haven't seen so much smooching in public since high school.) If the recent Madrid bombings have unnerved anyone, you couldn't tell from the crowded commuter trains and the carnivalesque atmosphere of the city at night.

The day after we left, the French police shut down the commuter line, the RER, as well as several Metro stations, because of CIA-reported threats of attack. I called Hortense and asked her if she had been affected by the incident. "We were Greatly Inconvenienced," she said, still sounding annoyed. She added that Sheila had remarked, as they waited nearly an hour for the Metro to re-open, "After all this, there had better be a bomb on that track."

"Sounds great," a fellow-mom said when I told her about our trip, and about how Hortense has taken to Paris like a canard to l'eau, and how she can argue with a gendarme like a fishwife (mariée de poisson?). "But aren't you worried about her?"

"Bien sur," I said. But then, there are a million frightening things your child does that you don't think about, or even know; perhaps it was more dangerous for Hortense to have spent four years in the culture of an American high school. Long after the fact, she has confessed all sorts of hair-raising things to me–the time she claimed to be staying overnight at a friend's house but was actually at a rave, the time she ended up vomiting onto a curb somewhere in Baltimore, the time everyone in the car she was in was too drunk to drive so she insisted on taking the wheel, though she did not yet have her license and was known in her Driver's Ed class by the nickname of "Crash"…in comparison with this, Paris seems relatively safe.

As my husband and I sit in our kitchen savoring the last drops of our French wine and eating the last shreds of the heavenly Camembert I smuggled home (triple-bagged in plastic, it still stank up my luggage), it seems tragic that the romance of Paris, of youth, of life itself, must be blighted with fear and ugliness. Of course, this is nothing new–not only has Paris always been like this, but as we all know, if we have been around long enough, life has always been like this; all of its pleasures are the flip side of its pains, and no matter how much fun we're having, somewhere, someone in the world is suffering.

So you might as well enjoy Paris while you can–you're only young, and for that matter, middle-aged, once.

"We'll always have Paris," my husband and I say, and we toast.