AS PROMISED, DEAR READERS, THIS WEEK I’M GOING TO TALK ABOUT PARIS.

We began our journey into France from Zurich, Switzerland on the TGV, France’s famed “bullet train.” I’d never been on a modern high-speed train before, and the experience was exhilarating. Our train wound its way through tunnels and pastoral valleys, making its way out of the Alps at a velocity that occasionally touched a hundred miles per hour.

Once out of the Alps and onto the French lowlands, however, the train could really stretch its legs, and the speeds doubled, to around 200 mph. There is nothing like moving at near-aircraft speeds in a ground vehicle. We would go past small towns in seconds, and every building closer than about 200 feet was an indistinct blur from my double-paned window. It occurred to me that any luckless cow that blundered onto the tracks at the wrong time would be all but vaporized by the impact of a train going that fast.

We pulled into the Gare de Lyon, an enormous train station in eastern Paris, just after sunset, then took a regional train (the RER, similar to BART in its role in the transportation system of Paris, but far quieter and more comfortable) to the Châtelet-Les Halles station complex near the Pompidou Center. It must be one of the biggest subway stations on Earth. It contains a shopping mall with hundreds of stores, and has so many metro lines coming into it that getting from the platform for the Metro 1 line to the Metro 14 line felt like a Homeric journey: through the mall, down two escalators, through a long corridor, across several hundred feet of moving sidewalk, up and down stairways at either end of more long corridors — on and on it goes, deep into the Earth.

Finally, we emerged into a damp night and made our way to our hotel a couple blocks from the station. Exhausted, we pretty much went right to sleep, lulled by the rain as it increased in intensity outside.

We awoke the next morning to a sun just breaking through the clouds and made our way a few blocks to the Notre Dame cathedral, which is on the Île de la Cité, an island in the middle of the Seine, the river that (roughly speaking) bisects Paris. After taking a few photos, we boarded one of those open-topped tourist buses and began a motorized tour of the highlights of Paris.

Paris is an almost overwhelmingly beautiful city. Not only in the elegant 5th or 6th arrondissements, but through every place the bus took us, I was surrounded by breathtakingly beautiful architecture and public spaces. It was as if the primary mission of the builders of the city was to make a place that is above all achingly lovely.

Rome, too, is a beautiful city, but while the majesty of Rome is very masculine — its public buildings exuding an air of authority and decorum — Paris by contrast has a beauty that has an unmistakably feminine quality. There is something almost lace-like in the cast-iron railings that are a standard feature in Paris architecture, and the larger government buildings and old imperial palaces are elaborately ornamented and embellished to the point that some looked almost like wedding cakes rendered in honey-colored stone.

I mentioned in this space a couple weeks ago that the streets of Rome are where its citizens live out much of their lives — in cafés and restaurants and public squares and monuments, a strong contrast with the comparative isolation of Americans. Paris, I found, is even livelier than Rome, in part because it is richer and more populous than it the Italian capital. Speaking of which, I come across the idea pretty regularly that Paris is some sort of socialist hellhole, like something out of “Doctor Zhivago.” If it is, someone forgot to tell the French. I saw uncountable numbers of top-of-the-line Mercedes, BMWs and Peugeots disgorging elegantly dressed people on streets lined with tony shops and boutiques, and apartments in the 7th arrondissement that sell for well into eight figures.

But back to the street life in Paris. I kind of expected the stereotypical French sidewalk café to be a relic of Hemingway-era Paris, more or less a show for tourists. What I found was that those cafés are an important part of French life, and they are absolutely everywhere in the city. We walked the streets of the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne, and it seemed that every third building had a café with tables spilling out onto the narrow cobbled lanes, thronged at all hours with students engaged in passionate debate about Camus, Proust, Balzac and Sartre.

The day before we took a train to Normandy (the subject of next week’s column) I met a former co-worker named Tristan who has dual citizenship. He was born and raised in France, but emigrated to the states 20 or so years ago, then moved back to France when the tech company we both worked for went belly up a few years ago.

I offered to buy him dinner if he would show us an authentic French dining experience. We went to a little restaurant in the 11th district where he lives, and I heard him explaining in French to the waitress that we wanted the most French experience possible. We started with cocktails — I had my usual scotch, everyone else had cognac — and then a variety of French specialties were brought to the table at a leisurely pace. We ate our food slowly. The meal was punctuated by much conversation and sips of an excellent burgundy, followed by crème brûlée and after-dinner drinks (the French call it a digestif) of a French variety of brandy called Armagnac.

I will always remember that dinner, both the food and the conversation. I wish such experiences were easier to come by in the States.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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