A little Paris with a great big pool

When the sun rises over the Hotel de Ville at the Paris Las Vegas resort and casino, light bathes the swimming pool under the Eiffel Tower. The hotel and grounds would be a tight squeeze on the Ile de la Cite: The Vegas version has an 85,000-square-foot casino, shopping arcade and 2,916 guest rooms, each about four times larger than the claustrophobic chambers you generally find in France. Onion soup in the casino’s Mon Ami Gabi bistro is cheesier and the onions sweeter than at Cafe de Flore on the Left Bank.

I moved to Paris a little more than a year ago because I thought it was perfect. But having just returned from a two-night stay at Paris Las Vegas, I must admit that the city on the Seine could take a few notes from the resort in the Nevada desert.

With temperatures in the 90s last month in Paris -- the real one -- kids were jumping into the Trocadero fountains on the west side of the French capital. Obviously, a big, beautiful Vegas-style pool is needed at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, preferably surrounded by cabanas equipped with TVs, like the ones at Paris Las Vegas.

Granted, the 540-foot Vegas Eiffel Tower is half the size of the one in France but an excellent replica, resistant to fires and earthquakes. The Vegas version, constructed in 1999, is welded together not riveted like Gustave Eiffel’s; the fake rivets simulate the original. It is illuminated at night but more discreetly than the garishly search-lighted Eiffel Tower in the City of Light. Three of its legs are inside the casino, with its perpetual-blue-sky ceiling, giving tower visitors easy access to the slots. Instead of the cheesy little Eiffel Tower keyrings sold as souvenirs in the capital of France, here you’ll find tower-shaped cocktail glasses big enough for quart-size strawberry daiquiris and sexy wire-mesh miniatures of the monument containing chocolate-flavored condoms, raspberry body heat gel and moist towelettes.

At the Vegas Eiffel Tower in you don’t have to climb a single step. A glass-lined elevator takes you to the top in 90 seconds, where you scan the horizon in vain for Sacre-Coeur and Montparnasse.

Never mind. At least here you have the slightly higher Stratosphere, the Chrysler Building at New York, New York, and a sterling view of the water show at the Bellagio, all ringed by hot red mountains, as far from the orderly, green French countryside as the planet Uranus.

Which brings me to something else: The great monuments of Paris, France, really ought to be closer together, because it’s a long hike from the Eiffel Tower to the Opera, Louvre, Arc de Triomphe and Hotel de Ville. At Paris Las Vegas, I could almost reach out and touch them all from the window of my seventh-floor room.

I could go on. With the euro still comparatively strong, I got a great rate when I traded my currency for gambling chips.

After exchanging bonjours with staff members, I could lapse back into English without shame or regret.

With my French bread at Mon Ami Gabi, I automatically got butter, which you have to beg for at bistros in France.

But when I took a bite, a wave of homesickness flooded through me. The bread was crispy, not chewy, as it is in France. And it arrived at the table in a hygienic white paper bag. In the real City of Light, boulangeries sell baguettes unwrapped and it is customary to nibble off the ends on the way back home.

Details like that just can’t be duplicated. They are why I love Paris, France, and was always conscious of the wizard behind the curtain at Paris Las Vegas.

But you have to hand it to Caesars Entertainment for the care and attention that went into the copy. Even French visitors to Vegas, who constitute the city’s fourth-largest foreign tourist market, are impressed, said company spokeswoman Stacy Solovey-Hamilton.

While there, I met a bona fide Parisian working at the reservation desk for the resort’s Eiffel Tower restaurant. We talked en francais a little, but when I asked her what she liked about Paris Las Vegas, she lapsed into English and said, “Eet’s a pairfect repleeca!”

Other Parisians I know either turn up their noses at Paris Las Vegas or say they love it but wouldn’t want it in France. Erika Yowell, senior media relations manager for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said people in France treat her like a star when they hear where she lives. “They can’t wait to go to Las Vegas,” she said. “Then they get home and wonder what it was all about.”

I too wonder what it’s all about, why we take pleasure, like children, in miniature replicas of famous places. Among those to which other Vegas resorts pay tribute -- with varying success -- are Venice, Italy, Monte Carlo, the Sahara Desert, ancient Egypt and Rome.

Nor is the phenomenon limited to the kitsch-loving United States. Brussels has its Mini-Europe, where you can see Mt. Vesuvius and Big Ben. There’s diminutive Holland, complete with windmills and canals, in Nagasaki, Japan, and another one right in the Netherlands, near the Hague.

No matter how masterful the copy , it is bound to be skin-deep, substituting breadth for depth, fun and games for the subtler, more complicated pleasures that can be appreciated only by visiting the original.

Despite the conveniently situated, cosmetically perfect blandishments of Paris Las Vegas -- the nothing-but-blue-skies over the casino -- the resort ultimately made me yearn for my adopted home, lousy French onion soup and all.

To me, Paris, France, will always be the one true City of Light, even if I wouldn’t mind a swimming pool at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at latimes.com/susanspano.