Carnet de Voyage: A Vintage Paris Travelogue

I packed a basic travel art kit and imagined myself back in Paris after a nearly 40-year hiatus.  It was a trip I’d dreamt of all those years.  As I zipped shut a pouch full of glue sticks, watercolors, pens, pencils, and brushes, I felt a jumble of nervousness and excitement.

I was a young woman in college on my first visit to Paris.  Making my return, I’d just turned 60.  Was much changed in the city I’d held so close to my heart after all those years?  Would it still hold the wonder and magic for me that it did then?

Any apprehension I may have had disappeared the moment the wheels of the jet left the ground.  I was going back to Paris.  I was giddy!  Allons-y!

For months, I’d imagined my first morning in Paris - meeting the host of my Montmartre apartment, dropping off my bags, and going straight to a cafe for strong espresso and a croissant.  As I thought about my trip, I began to imagine the carnet de voyage, the travel journal, I would create on this very special return to Paris.

I’ve been creating journals, artist notebooks, on all of my trips for many years.  I create them by repurposing old books and filling them with menus, metro tickets, museum guides, and pocketed treasures collected while visiting my destination.  Putting my travel journal together before departure intensifies my excitement about the journey.  For this trip however, I had another plan.

I had decided to make my journal, from start to finish in Paris, starting with a visit to the Marche aux Puces de Vanves and the Marché du Livre Ancien et d’Occasion, or the old and used book market in the Parc Georges Brassons.  I headed both places my very first day in Paris.  Here I found the perfect old book to use as my journal cover, along with beautiful French ephemera - postcards, letters, hand-calligraphed documents, vintage lace, button cards…so many treasures.

Returning to my apartment on Butte Montmartre, loaded down with old books and papers, a bottle of wine, a wedge Camembert, a jar of pate, and a basket of strawberries, I settled in to create.  By the end of the evening, I had taken apart one of my books, cut papers to fit within the cover, and began chronicling the day’s adventure at the flea markets.

Mindful that I would spend most of my days on foot exploring Paris, I created a book that would fit in my bag with my pouch containing a small tin of watercolors and travel paintbrushes, a pen, a glue stick, a small ruler, and a tiny pair of scissors.  I wanted to be able to sit in a cafe, on a museum bench, on the steps in front of Sacré Coeur, and pull out my book and supplies to capture a memory, affix a receipt from lunch to a page, or write a postcard to myself and tuck it between pages.

I was in Paris for ten days, and with each day my travel journal got fatter and fatter, full of items gathered throughout my explorations, photos taken on my phone to be printed that evening in my apartment with my pocket printer, a feather picked up near the Tour Eiffel, a bookmark from Shakespeare and Companyand so many other little treasures that would help me relive my wonderful reunion with a city I hold so dear once I returned home and to the busy-ness of life.

As it turned out, Paris had not changed all that much in my 40-year absence, and neither, really, had I.  Bien sur, certain modern conveniences were evident, as were my grey hair and laugh lines.  But at her soul, Paris was still the City of Light I remembered with such fondness and she spoke to my heart as if we’d never parted.

This essay originally appeared online at France Today magazine.  You can see it here.