ATHENS — Of the blasphemy about to be uttered some might say, and not indefensibly, that its source — namely, moi — has beaucoup de baggage. After all, considering la Tour Eiffel and the Tuileries in spring, the tang of a steaming French onion soup supped in a cozy corner bistrot, the sizzle of Brigitte Bardot, or at least the sirens she used to set off: Who could fail to be seduced by Paris?I would be fooling myself if I said there was not a lot to love about la Ville Lumière. Venice is the Lion City and arguably more romantic but Paris is a brooding tigress, her charms programmed to slay. As a young intern at France-Soir, the newspaper founded by leaders of the Résistance in 1941 and now, sadly, defunct, I had the run of the town as I accompanied reporters to press conferences and cultural affairs, and savored long lunches with colleagues who indulged my less than intrepid French and poked fun at everything from my shock at drinking wine in the middle of the day to my “so American” inexperience in matters amatory. They did it with a mix of welcome mischief and camaraderie. Not a day went by on le city beat that I wasn’t very aware life on the banks of the sinuous Seine was miles away from high school, and much else American. Clutching my Hemingway by day, falling asleep to Gainsbourg by night, surrendering to the simple pleasures of a good coq au vin and ridiculously complicated but also delicious pastries, I think I was more in love with the City of Light than Emily in Paris.If there is any romance that does not diminish with time, though, I certainly haven’t found it yet. Any that lasts will know oscillations in intensity that may have been there from the beginning, but such is the predicament of beauty: It can obscure, and the beauty of Paris can be blinding. On a subsequent sojourn I settled in the Marais, to my mind the most gorgeous precinct of Paris. It is where all the aristocrats dwelled before Louis XIV drew them out to leafier quarters at Versailles. Most of their original mansions, the hôtel particuliers that line the streets around the regal Place des Vosges, remain — no small feat, given what the previous century dished out to Paris.The thought of Nazi soldiers prowling those streets is a heavy one, and though they left the medieval tangle intact what they destroyed will never be replaced. The Marais is a place of singular elegance, trendy boutiques, and ghosts. Of the more than 11,400 French Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust, many hundreds lived here before they were sent to the concentration camps. Plaques on building façades throughout the quarter commemorate this unspeakable tragedy that transpired with official French collaboration, and for which France to its credit has officially apologized.In the Rue des Rosiers there stood more recently a Jewish restaurant called Jo Goldenberg. There, in August 1982, members of a splinter group of the PLO opened fire with machine guns, killing six people, including two Americans, and injuring 22 more. The restaurant did not close until 2006, but whenever I walked by in the years before that, I felt a kind of frisson that had nothing to do with romance. Outraged by Hitler’s murderous march across Europe, my grandfather enlisted in the U.S. Army — to this day, I do not know if he knew what he was getting into. I do know that he was among the men who stormed Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. On the 60th anniversary of D-Day, when I was living in Paris, I took my brother and father to Saint-Lô, the Norman city pulverized by American and German bombardment during the Battle of Normandy, and that my grandfather helped to liberate.We returned to Paris and were walking near the church of St. Sulpice, close to the fabled Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter, when I caught sight of a giant red swastika painted over a wall just opposite a trendy boutique. Mortified, I directed my Dad’s attention to the boutique so that he wouldn’t see it; he probably wondered what interest I thought he could possibly have in ladies’ high-end footwear but, voilà: Who wants to mess up a simple stroll in Paris?Not me. Yet over time I found it harder to look away. Nazi graffiti paled in comparison to some of what turned out to be stirring in 21st-century France. One of the craziest jobs I ever had was working at a French photo agency in the southern reaches of Paris. Working daily betwixt hardened war photographers and shameless paparazzi — each group equally fearless and fairly entertaining, too — I was comfortably ensconced in an American expat’s life as I captioned fantastic photos by day and hunted down the latest trendy bistros for a guidebook I was writing by night. Sometimes, I even made time for le brunch.One morning at the office a folder of photos landed on my desk: I had been covering lots of celebrity news, so I assumed it would be some paparazzi spy shots of Angelina Jolie in a hotel lobby or what have you. It was not. This was February 2006. Inside the folder were unpublished photos of the funeral of Ilan Halimi, a young Parisian Jew who over the course of several terrible days in late January and February of that year had been kidnapped, tortured, and finally murdered by a group of 27 young French individuals who called themselves the Gang of Barbarians. The photos depicted, as words cannot, the absolute anguish of Halimi’s family as his coffin was lowered into the French earth. It was my task to describe this for newspapers around the world. To do so properly meant following the grim story to its minutest detail, and as I did so the realization started to sink in that there was much more to Paris than palace gardens and charming cafes. I tuned in to French TV shows to hear pundits and commentators insisting that anti-Semitism had nothing to do with the crimes, which were staggering in their cruelty, even though the kidnappers openly said they targted the Halimi family because they believed all Jews were rich. After years of living in Paris, I could let certain things go — like foie gras, escargot, the incomprehensible paucity of properly crispy bacon. Not this. There was shock in France over the Halimi murder, to be sure, but to my memory it fell short of outrage, and there is a difference — the former evaporates with time; the latter might lead to actual change. I began to see, one small but ineffaceable disappointment at a time, why Paris always made the veteran British journalist and travel writer Jan Morris feel ill at ease.Somewhere in Paris today there is a plaque to Ilan Halimi, and that is good. His mother, sensibly, moved to Israel. In January 2015, sitting at a news desk in Tel Aviv, I covered the attacks at Charlie Hebdo in which a pair of gunmen killed 12 people in the heart of Paris. Two days later another assailant armed with assault weapons walked into a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris and killed four people, taking several more hostage. These senseless attacks and the siege of the Bataclan theater months later that left 130 innocents dead were beyond appalling, but they did not surprise me. Not much, anyway.Is the truth about Paris simply that in the end, beauty is overrated? Maybe. It is at once an extraordinary place, mostly for the history it possesses and the aesthetic profile it cuts, but how it piques: A war rages in Europe and the spunky pride of Paris, Emmanuel Macron, believes he can lecture an American president about what does and does not constitute genocide. Fine.It is more than the entrenched if genteel anti-Semitism that caused Paris and me to part ways. It is freeing to realize that Paris does not hold the monopoly on the necessary ingredients for making a metropolis truly cosmopolitan. There is an article today in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, headlined, “Directors, Designers, Advisers, They’re All Here: The Russian Elites Fleeing the War to Israel.” For many of those “elites” — actually mostly just working creative types — sunny, freewheeling Tel Aviv will henceforth be their principal urban perch. Not Paris. As for me I will always have Paris, for the city is indeed that moveable feast Papa Hem relished as a young buck in those heady years after World War I, and she is a marvelous professor of many things. Yet when I took off from Charles de Gaulle, leaving behind the Paris gloom for the promise of the New York sun, it was pas de regrets all the way home.
