An Updated Paris Ripe for Visiting

No sooner had Monsieur Los Pasos, the building concierge, left us in the apartment on Rue Raffet than we threw open the windows and long-closed shutters, the better to survey what would be home for the next month in Paris.

We looked out on the shrubby entrance courtyard and the tree-lined street beyond leading to the sprawling Bois de Boulogne just a five-minute walk away. No farther were most of the shops we would need, and the ubiquitous Metro and several bus lines linking us to the city at large.

Twenty years had passed since I last lived here, then with a young and growing family. So my wife, Joan, and I decided to devote this year’s vacation, sans enfants , not to traveling but to updating Paris’ charm and livability. Though the intervening decades have brought brief visits to the city, they had scarcely provided time to catch up on many of the urban developments that have taken place.

Adequate Apartment

The apartment, rented from a Massachusetts couple through an ad in Harvard magazine, included two comfortably furnished rooms, a small dining alcove, an even smaller kitchen and an old-fashioned bathroom with a tub, a bidet (surmounted by a useful clothes-drying rack) and a gravity-fed toilet. The monthly rent worked out to about $37 a night.

It proved a fine and peaceful launch pad for our forays into Paris, the Ile de France and day trips to the slightly more distant cathedral cities of Rouen to the west and Amiens to the north.

We had time, too, to rent a car for a week’s off-season ramble through Brittany and along the Normandy coast--with the extra pleasure always of returning “home” to our apartment in Paris.

If we had just been passing through town we might have been struck most by the new and well-publicized public spaces developed over the last decade. These include the bustling Pompidou Center in Le Marais, Paris’ oldest neighborhood; Pompidou’s new neighbor, the Fo rum , a bustling commercial-recreational complex emerging on the site of Les Halles, the displaced wholesale market, and the technology museum under construction where beef once became steak at Patin on Paris’ northeast edge.

But as residents, some more homely improvements also impressed us.

For one thing, the hypermarche , or super-supermarket, has definitively arrived. Those operated by the Inno (for Innovation) and Euromarche chains in our neighborhood of Passy-Auteuil offered a vast selection of meat, fresh produce and wines as well as nonfood items, and featured as modern a checkout system as we have encountered.

Less welcome, but probably necessary, given the inevitable growth in vehicular traffic, are the parking meters and self-park vending machines that have sprouted along streets where motorists once merely placed cardboard disks on their cars’ dashboards--a low-tech but effective means of parking control. By setting the hour of arrival in one “window” of the disk, the deadline for leaving was displayed in another.

Modernized Phones

On the other hand, the antiquated telephone system of less than a decade ago has been thoroughly modernized. By adding an inexpensive computer, le Minitel, callers have access to services not yet available in this country, where regulators are still scratching their heads over whether local phone companies or outside vendors should be allowed to provide them.

Meanwhile, in much of France, phone customers can punch up on their Minitel screens a selection of menus from restaurants and starting times for movies as well as order a wake-up call, look up phone numbers and buy or sell stock.

“We don’t have Minitel,” confided former neighbor Jacques Bloch, an importer of gems, as we sipped Champagne in the garden of his home across the Seine in St. Cloud. “But it enables my son to lose money more quickly at the Bourse (the Paris stock exchange)!”

As for TV, the two channels available 20 years ago have increased to six, accompanied by commercials, alas, but also by a welcome increase in independence from the government.

Although there are more French-produced TV entertainments, the most popular series continue to be made in the U.S.A. They include “Deux Flics a Miami” (“Miami Vice”) and “Columbo.” The latter has made actor Peter Falk enough of a celebrity, in Columbo’s rumpled raincoat, to inspire one advertiser--Moulinex--to hire a Columbo look-alike to promote its appliances.

And TV 6 carries the CBS Evening News each morning --with French subtitles.

On more basic terms, Paris has never been cleaner. Green-uniformed crews riding green-and-white vehicles pick up the garbage and sweep down the gutters daily, although they seem to be waging a losing battle to Paris’ sizable population of otherwise urbane dogs.

Along such heavily trafficked pedestrian areas as the Champs-Elysees, however, the cleanup crews, riding under the banner Proprete de Paris, have begun patrols of motorcyclists whose machines vacuum up after the hounds.

Welcome Innovation

Paris’ most welcome new service for travelers may be the Carte Orange. The Orange Card is the key that unlocks the region’s well-developed and thoroughly integrated express and local subways, bus systems and rail network. The card and an explanatory brochure are available at most Metro stations. Rates vary depending on how much territory a traveler wants to cover, but even the maximum tariff is significantly less than $20 a week.

One day we rode the swift and comfortable RER, the regional Metro, to St. Germain-en-Laye, Louis XIV’s birthplace a dozen miles west of Paris. After lunching on the terrace at Jennifer’s, we crossed the street to stroll in the castle’s extensive grounds and enjoy the panoramic view back over the Seine Basin where the Eiffel Tower proves a distant exclamation mark.

Time slipped by and we found ourselves with only an hour before Joan, a dance teacher, was due in class back in Paris. No problem with the Orange Card. The RER whisked us back to the Arc de Triomphe in 15 minutes. There, we switched to the local Metro that took us to our neighborhood for a change of clothes before catching a city bus that delivered Joan on time to Club Gymnase.

Her health club was yet another of the discoveries attributable to our month’s residence on Rue Raffet. The Club Gymnase is a network of 11 fitness centers in the Paris area similar to those found in U.S. cities of any size. Most customers buy annual memberships, but 10-visit packages are offered, too, working out to about $8 a visit.

The well-equipped centers not only offer the usual exercise equipment and stationary bicycles, but free weights, aerobics classes at most hours and jazz classes that Joan, a demanding critic, found of surprisingly high quality for a fitness center.

Some Club Gymnase facilities also have swimming pools, tennis courts and tanning salons; others offer instruction in golf, martial arts and boxing. All have clean dressing rooms equipped with lockable lockers.)

We discovered Club Gymnase by chance after I introduced Joan to what must be one of Paris’ best-known restaurants not included in most guidebooks--perhaps because it serves just one item. The sign, on Boulevard Perreire one block north of the Porte Maillot Metro stop, says Relais de Venise, but thousands of faithful customers know it simply as L’Entrecote.

If France’s national dish is steak and fries, which many of our Paris friends acknowledged, the Entrecote is the temple where devotees pay homage to the humble steak-frites in its most exalted form.

Your French will get only minimal exercise there, because the waitresses invariably ask only how you want your steak cooked. The contre-filet is served sliced and napped in what the house calls its famous sauce, based on the meat juices.

The pommes allumettes --or match-stick potatoes--are equally famous. To that, add a bottle of the restaurant’s reliable Reserve, or house red. Figure on about $40 U.S. for two, including wine and dessert, plus a 15% tip.

Resist, if you can, the desserts--most notably the rich profiteroles au chocolat --ice cream-filled cream puffs covered with chocolate sauce.

If you can’t resist, well, there’s always Club Gymnase, just down the street.