This in itself is the stuff of a romantic evening, but the Champ-de-Mars goes further than that.
It was the main site of the 1867 Exposition Universelle—this wasn’t the expo for which Eiffel built his landmark (that was in 1889), but it was the show at which the bateau-mouche was first introduced into Paris. This age-old venue for Parisian snuggling was given its first outing during the Expo, after a boatbuilder called Michel Félizat was commissioned to bring thirty or so specially built sightseeing vessels up from his workshops in the Mouche area of his home city, Lyon.
And one of the most famous visitors to the 1867 Exposition, who therefore certainly came walking in the Champ-de-Mars, was Paris’s greatest-ever romantic, the future King Edward VII of Britain, or Dirty Bertie as he was known to his friends (and no doubt to many Parisiennes) when he was still just a prince.
Bertie was so fond of organizing romantic getaways in Paris with his mistresses—and, it should be added, his wife—that at one point the French secret police was having him followed to make sure that he was only meeting up with politically ‘safe’ lovers. And every time he received an official invitation from Paris to come for a state visit, he was on the boat almost as fast as you could say RSVP. We can be sure, then, that it was a very cheerful Prince Bertie, with a pronounced romantic glint in his eye, who came to the Champ-de-Mars in 1867.*******
He was back at the Champ for the 1878 Expo (to see the recently invented telephone and the head of the future Statue of Liberty) and yet again in 1889 to admire the Expo’s spectacular entrance arch, aka the Eiffel Tower and, of course, to revisit the Folies-Bergère and his private room at Paris’s most luxurious brothel, Le Chabanais.********
What Edward didn’t get was a chance to wander through the Champ-de-Mars gardens, arm in arm with his loved one du soir, as the Eiffel Tower’s 20,000 lightbulbs explode into shimmering splendour, filling the whole night sky in front of them. This intensely romantic experience, provided courtesy of France’s excellent electricity network, is reserved for modern lovers …
A room with (or without) a view
On my first trips to Paris as a penniless student, I never bothered to book a room. In those days, there were no cheap on-line reservations, and no websites to help you choose. The thing to do was to emerge from the railway station and find somewhere affordable that looked as though the plumbing might work. Preferably a place that had locks on the doors.
It all felt incredibly romantic, mainly because Paris was the only capital city in Western Europe where a penniless student could afford to sleep somewhere other than a youth hostel, campsite or railway-station bench. Cuddle up with your girlfriend in a hotel double bed? Only millionaires could afford that, surely?
Looking back with slightly less fuzzy hindsight at my first forty-franc (about six euros) room near the Gare du Nord, the lack of windows and fire escapes was potentially lethal, the slimy green patch on the wall was probably not an abstract oeuvre left behind by a Dadaist painter, and it really wasn’t that convenient to share a bathroom that was about half an hour’s walk away along dingy corridors littered with drunk students.
Luckily for visitors, many of those old hotels have now been revamped to attract better-off clients. This means that Paris’s accommodation is gaining in style (and price), but is also creating new dangers—it is, for example, becoming essential to make sure that you don’t book a hotel so boutiquey that you can’t work out how to sit on the chairs or turn the lights on.
Despite all the guidebooks and travel websites, however, choosing a hotel in Paris can be difficult. In any part of the city that takes a visitor’s fancy, there will be dozens of hotels, many of them in the same price bracket. But more than the neighbourhood, it’s vital to check up on the exact location of the building and its different rooms—on a large or small street, near a junction with traffic lights, above a café, overlooking a street market. All of these can ensure that you will be seeing (and hearing) more of Paris by night than you might have planned.
Many visitors think it’s romantic to open their window in the morning and gaze down on a typical Paris street scene. But often they are heading for disappointment—instead of seeing a flour-encrusted boulanger carrying a fresh batch of baguettes to the corner bistro, or a concierge throwing out an artist’s used paint tubes, early-morning street voyeurs are more likely to see office workers dashing for the métro, a green-clad street cleaner brushing out the gutter, or, of course, a dog owner taking the mutt for a spot of surreptitious pavement polluting.
Guests who have been given a room on a lower floor will probably have opened the window before dawn to ask the binmen if they could possibly fit padding on to the wheels of the dustbins, or to try and identify the whirr-hiss, whirr-hiss noise, like a motorized python, that wrenched them from their sleep. It will probably be a little street-cleaning vehicle with a rattling engine and high-power water hose—a guaranteed dawn wake-up call.
Even those who have chosen a hotel room on an upper floor in a quiet street, with good double-glazing to deaden the noise of midnight revellers, can find the Paris experience disappointing if the only thing romantic about their room is that it’s so small they can’t actually get out of bed.
Below, therefore, are three of my favourite romantic hotels, which
