‘The Last Night in Paris’

A love song to my favorite city

(One in a personal series of songwriting narratives: simple recordings, lyrics, and origin stories.)

I still marvel that the universe and the French authorities have allowed me to move to Paris. After many years of longing, working, raising awesome kids and watching them go off in their own directions — and then a year and a half of COVID, for heaven’s sake — I got to follow my heart to this place that’s really not at all what most people would’ve predicted for me.

Paris: stylish, Old World, monumental, brusque, self-assured, hypercool.

Me: blue jeaned, folksy, ‘nice’ (read: conflict avoidant), shy with an awkward edge, way not cool.

(That’s the stylish Parisian, not me, in the photo above.)

(And a different one below.)

But here I was, head over heels for this place from the mid-nineties on: in fact, as soon as I saw it through my adult eyes.

Of course, much of our clichéd image of Paris is just that. There are sweet street scenes everywhere.

The French love their dogs and the dogs go everywhere with them. In Paris, you don’t see the cats, except occasionally in a café or a store, running the place. The others stay home, ruling their families from behind apartment doors.

And people do sit for hours, doing whatever they please, in groups, in pairs, or quite contentedly by themselves. It is the culture.

I visited once as a college student, in the 1970s, and actually preferred England and Germany, for heaven’s sake. Italy was too hard on a couple of young girls: harassed in the streets everywhere. And in Paris, the bed was creaky and lumpy and the toilet was down the hall. Those were the olden days.

Now the French have shoehorned private bathrooms into all the hotel rooms and English is — alas, but luckily for me — pretty much universally studied in school.

From 2008 on, I tried to visit annually just before my university year began. Every year it was hard to leave, and as life developed, my family evolved, and retirement loomed, the reasons to return to the US evaporated, one by one.

I wrote this song in the midst of that process.

The lyrics:

The last night in Paris I walked the Champs Elysées Sadder than I’d dared to be since I came away I blamed it on an early flight; I blamed it on the misty night That wrapped my new scarf round my shoulders In that last café

I told monsieur that I’d be fine My eyes will water after wine I told myself to think of you Not leaving out all we’d been through

Instead I thought of Paris The river and the ancient squares The lovers and the bon vivants Tous les fous, les étrangères La cité de l’amour, la vieille cité de ma tristesse The city of my aching soul, the city I know best

Midnight rain on cobbled streets A shining path for weary feet Of refugees and restless minds who seek, and sometimes find

The last night in Paris I walked the Champs Elysées Clearer than I’d dared to be Since I came away For you’d moved on — the children gone — No need to be a paragon of quiet rage In middle age No need to board that plane.

— Mina Carson, 2011

For a long time I thought the idea of walking the Champs Elysées on the last night was too horrid to have been real — that I used the name to fit the cadence of the lyric. But then I discovered this photo from the year before I wrote the song.

Oh, lord, there is ‘monsieur’ (smiling at somebody’s stuffed toy), and there, indubitably, is the Arc de Triomphe, anchoring one end of the Champs Elyseés. That must have been a hard night for me, indeed.

You hear in the song one of the things that ties me to the city: the long, long tradition of refugees from more repressive places washing up on the banks of the Seine. Of course, migrants and pilgrims from Middle Eastern and African societies have had a particularly difficult time in France, because of skin color and imputed religious and cultural beliefs. As I write this in 2023 we are in the midst of yet another difficult, contentious episode.

But for many other refugees, Paris has been a wonderful place to hide, and an open city for dreamers. You see, above, I wrote “étrangères,” the feminine form of “strangers” or “non-French” people. Since the mid 1800s Paris has offered a home to women who didn’t fit into their countries or families of origin. The sheer indifference of most Parisians, the unwritten law of live and let live, has protected these women — lesbians, artists, writers, and rebels— and allows them to nurture parts of their beings that are discouraged or repressed at home.

(I’ve just finished reading Kerri Maher’s sweet novel, The Paris Bookseller, which deftly recreates the expat and French writers’ community around the twinned bookshops of Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, themselves lovers and friends for many years. I also recommend Greta Schiller’s lovely documentary, Paris Was a Woman (1996), reliably available on Kanopy. There’s a lot more reading and viewing to recommend, but I’ll save that for future posts.)

“Tous les fous” (all the crazy people, or all the fools) refers to a wonderful café on the Left Bank that seems to have disappeared. While it lived, I took some friends there during the week of the annual Beaujolais Nouveaux celebration. We stumbled into the party quite by accident, which is how some of the best things happen here.

Of course there are other cafés for ‘fous’ in Paris; just because one or two disappear, we need not panic. The one above is on the village-like Île Saint-Louis, in the middle of the Seine.

I am hoping now that for me, there will be no ‘last night in Paris,’ unless we’re talking about the fun event we were lucky enough to attend…or the, you know, end of things. Ahem.

Another songwriting narrative:

And a little more Paris:

Thanks for stopping by!