PARIS–When I arrived at the hotel, the first thing I noticed was the silence.
There was no one in the Hôtel de Varenne’s small courtyard, nor were there any other guests at the reception desk. A bald, somewhat corpulent fellow was seated in the cozy, wood-paneled lobby. He checked me in and handed me my room key. He wasn’t wearing a mask. Aside from the modern, credit card-style key, the place reminded me of the kind of timeless Parisian hotel that could have made a cameo in a ‘60s-era Truffaut flick. That is, until I glanced at the transparent barrier between the receptionist and then over to the sizable bottle of hand sanitizer sitting on a shelf beside the narrow staircase to the left of the desk.
A quick once-over of these items that have become commonplace in public spaces put an abrupt stop to any lingering daydreams involving French New Wave cinema, and snapped me back to the sobering (and surreal) present day. It was a balmy Sunday afternoon and France, one of the European countries hit hardest by the coronavirus, had emerged from a two-month lockdown less than a month ago. Restaurants, cafes and bars in Paris had been given the green light to reopen less than a week before my visit.
“How long ago did you reopen?” I asked the man at the desk.
“Madame,” he replied in a grave tone of voice, seemingly perplexed by my question. “We never closed.”
Cue the Twilight Zone theme.
“That can’t be true,” I mused to myself as I ascended the staircase to my room with my French partner—in my articles he’s known as Monsieur—in tow. Although hotels were permitted to remain open during the lockdown, some 75 percent had closed anyway because of a lack of clientele. And given how quiet the hotel was post-lockdown, it was difficult to imagine anyone staying here while the country was in full-blown pandemic crisis mode.
We continued down the narrow hallway, and I listened for muffled voices as we passed the row of closed doors. Still nothing. Our jewel box-sized room was papered in pale saffron jacquard and overlooked the courtyard. I looked out the window. Still deserted. I was becoming increasingly convinced that we were the only guests.
Although I have lived in Paris for about five years, it’s been a long time since I’ve experienced the City of Light as a tourist. After several years of dealing with the infamous French bureaucracy, transport strikes, crowded metro cars, and brutal heat waves without air conditioning, it’s easy for the elegance and grandeur of the city to become eclipsed by a hundred daily annoyances.
But now with Paris emerging from le confinement, I was curious as to what awaited the city’s visitors. Hence, the last-minute hotel reservation in the posh, but touristy 7th arrondissement. Home to the landmark D’Orsay and Rodin museums, the Eiffel Tower, and several embassies, the neighborhood is popular with first-timers. This is the corner of the city comprising wide avenues, striking Haussmann apartments and stylish elderly dames walking their poodles in the evenings. What it lacks in excitement, it more than makes up for in postcard-style prettiness.
The Hôtel de Varenne is located in a former 19th-century mansion and is just a three-minute walk from the Rodin museum. I chose it because I had passed by the courtyard a few years ago on the way to an appointment and also because it was one of the few hotels in the area that was open. Although the government gave the go-ahead for bars and restaurants to reopen from June 15, many of the establishments weren’t yet prepared to do so. As a result, finding accommodation and dining options took me a good hour or so of internet research. Fortunately, this is expected to change in the coming weeks as more eateries and hotels welcome tourists once more.
After plunking our bags down on the carpeted floor, we left the hotel and walked a quick three minutes to the metro.
“Your mask,” I reminded Monsieur as we descended the stairs to the station. Masks are mandatory on public transport, and for the most part Parisians are complying. There were very few people on the platform, and circles had been painted onto the floor with three feet of space between each to remind riders to respect social distancing measures. Passengers are permitted to fill every other seat—both in the station and in the metro cars. Monsieur looked around the station and shook his head.
“What world are we living in?” he murmured, glancing at the signs and the masked passengers. It wasn’t the first time he had posed this rhetorical question, and I imagined he wasn’t the only one in France to do so over the course of these past difficult months.
Although the mask was a bit uncomfortable in the late-June humidity, the metro car was carrying very few passengers. Having braved many a stifling midsummer metro ride, this was something I could get used to.
We were en route to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which also typically gets a lot of tourist traffic. Situated in the neighboring 6th arrondissement, the area is well known for its expat literary history. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other prominent members of the ‘20s-era Lost Generation were one-time residents, and Gertrude Stein held her salons at her apartment on rue de Fleurus.
Several of the cafes frequented by Hemingway and the gang still exist, but the cheap and shabby district has since morphed into one of the city’s most affluent with chain retailers and luxury art galleries long since replacing the low-rent residential hotels and mom-and-pop stores. Foreign tourists don’t seem to mind this, however, and summer crowds can be common.
We headed down rue du Four for some shopping. The sign on one mid-market chain retailer read that the store had closed indefinitely—a casualty of the coronavirus? Many other shops had posted signs instructing customers to don face masks and reassuring those who entered that the hand sanitizer was available and that dressing rooms were regularly disinfected. There are also limits on the number of people allowed in a store at any given time. Four seemed to be the most common maximum permitted in the snugger boutiques. Once inside, however, it was business as usual, apart from face masks on all the salespeople.
The shopping done, we headed toward Boulevard Saint-Germain, only to be distracted by the melancholy strains of a cello. In the Place de Furstenberg, a young man with a curly mop of brown hair was playing before a crowd of less than 10. It was Fête de la musique, a typically boisterous annual music festival that marks the beginning of summer and can rage on into the wee hours. This sparsely attended, open-air solo was the opposite of the typical high-energy beats of past festivals, but it felt appropriate for the times.
“Liberation,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Paris Under the Occupation, “does not bring unadulterated joy.” He was referring to a different era of course, but the words also resonate in post-lockdown Paris. At the Café de Flore, where Sartre was a regular, the mood was upbeat but cautious as patrons tried to navigate the new rules. The small, round tables had expanded from the terrace onto the sidewalk to the left of the cafe—some of them several meters away from the building. The parade of widely spaced tables along the band of asphalt reminded me of the images of dislodged bistro tables and chairs bobbing in the gray waters that covered Piazza San Marco during the floods in Venice last winter.
We settled into one and signaled a server to bring us a menu, and I was baffled when he reappeared with a small, laminated card bearing a QR code. Such menus allow diners to access a restaurant’s offerings online via their phones. In the age of coronavirus, disposable and digital menus are apparently becoming increasingly common. Given the circumstances, it makes sense. However, it still felt a bit strange not to be able to page through the familiar, hand-held version.
Next stop was Cézembre, an intimate bistro specializing in a tasting menu of innovative meat and fish dishes. There too, the requisite bottle of hand sanitizer was positioned near the entrance, and the young, blond server was wearing a mask. About half of the tables were filled and there was a safe distance between customers. After over three months of non-stop cooking, it felt great to dine out again, and although I hated to admit it, I liked all the space between the tables and not having to worry about stepping on someone’s toe if I left my chair.
Our server told me that Cézembre had only reopened three days ago. Things were slower, she said, but she felt hopeful that business would rebound. Unless… her voice trailed off.
“Unless there’s a second wave,” Monsieur seemed to read her mind.
“Yes,” she echoed. “Unless there is a second wave.”
We all crossed our fingers, and I ordered another glass of wine.
The next morning, I was awakened by a strange dragging noise in the courtyard below me. I peered out the window just in time to see a man wheeling a suitcase towards the hotel’s exit. It seemed there had been at least one other guest after all.
The dining room was off-limits, so we took our croissants, tea, and coffee in the courtyard. Once again, we were alone. The silence was occasionally broken by the sound of hammering next door, where a building was undergoing renovations. I kept half-expecting another visitor to settle into a nearby table, but it never happened. We had the entire courtyard to ourselves.
When I returned to the lobby to check out, I asked the receptionist—a different gentleman than the one who had checked us in—something I had been wondering about since our arrival.
“Are we the only guests here?”
“You and one other,” he replied. “It has been…épouvantable (terrible).”
I thought of the man wheeling his suitcase across the courtyard. Was the receptionist referring to him? There are only 26 rooms in the hotel, and such small hotels are typically booked solid during the summer months. The receptionist told me that the hotel had recently reopened, contracting his predecessor’s previous statement. A rebound was unlikely, he added, until tourists returned to Paris again.
France dropped its internal border controls on June 15 and is welcoming travelers outside the Schengen zone from early July. However, Americans are not among them. As infection rates have stabilized in Europe, they have soared in the U.S. With more than 2.7 million cases and counting, the U.S. holds the dubious distinction of being the nation the hardest hit by the virus. Although necessary, such a ban spells more trouble for the Hôtel de Varenne and other lodgings in the city that depend on American tourist dollars.
At the metro station, Monsieur took the train in the direction of home and I headed back to the 6th arrondissement. Both the Eiffel Tower and the city’s major museums had yet to reopen, so I headed to the Luxembourg Gardens after popping into a bakery to grab a baguette sandwich for an impromptu picnic in the park. I found a quiet spot, claimed one of the park’s numerous green metal chairs, and dug in.
In her novel Good Morning Midnight, British author Jean Rhys describes the gardens as a “gentle and formal place,” and I agree that there is an elegant and timeless quality to the park. Children have been launching wooden sailboats into the large fountain in front of the Sénat for almost 100 years, and Arthur Jacques Leduc’s bronze statue of the herd of deer and its majestic buck has been occupying a small patch of lawn since the late 19th century. If you look past the clothing styles and the smartphones it could be 1925, or 1985, or the early days of the new millennium.
No one in the park was wearing a mask, and had I not known otherwise, it could have been any typical Monday afternoon pre-pandemic. Small groups of young people gathered on benches and couples snuggled up to one another. It was the closest to normalcy I had felt in the city since prior to the lockdown.
Thinking back on the 24 hours as a Paris tourist, I would describe the mood in the 6th and 7th arrondissements as one of cautious optimism. After two months of being shut inside, people are eager to resume their routines, but there is also an apprehension that the virus will flare up again.
Elsewhere, there has been a sense of frustration with the ongoing social distancing restrictions that has fostered desire to rebel and live in the moment. While Saint-Germain-des-Prés was serene on Sunday night, thousands of people gathered near the Canal Saint Martin and on the lawns of the Invalides for lively street parties in honor of the Fête de la musique. Police fired tear gas at crowds near the Invalides and unsettling images of wall-to-wall partyers were broadcast across French media the following day. Some condemned the irresponsibility of the revelers on social media, while others sympathized with the collective desire to forget the virus and dance.
On the way to the park, I passed Le Pont Traversé. The landmark bookshop with the ink-blue façade had, until six months ago, been selling antique and used books since the late ‘40s. At first I thought the bookshop may have been a casualty of the virus, but it turns out the owner had decided to retire and wasn’t able to find anyone else who was willing to take on the astronomical rent. I looked at the empty, shuttered shop and felt a bit sad, even though the loss of another beloved bookstore shouldn’t have been surprising. The landscape of the city has been slowly changing for decades now, especially in the 6th arrondissement.
By contrast, coronavirus hit the city suddenly, and post-lockdown Paris is still taking shape. It’s impossible to know what shops and eateries will ultimately survive and whether hand sanitizer, masks, and sizable gaps between restaurant tables will be here to stay. A new Parisian landscape is emerging, but what it will look like in the months and years to come remains to be seen.
After lunch, it was time to slip another mask and head for the metro. I hesitated, though. I wanted to enjoy my last moments as a tourist before returning to reality, so I hung out a bit longer. The sun was shining and the small group of teenagers a few feet away erupted in raucous laughter. To my right an elderly couple on a bench were clasping hands. It was the Jardin du Luxembourg as I have always known it, and its steadfast sameness was a reassuring sign that after three long months, the city was slowly coming back to life.
