Paris never loses its touch
CASTILLE PARIS
THE slogan Paris has been using to lure Brexit-sore Londoners is “frogs not fog”. In fact, the fog was wrapped around Paris when we nipped over there for a recent Saturday night, the Eiffel Tower barely visible.
The evening before we watched the final episode of The Affair, in which Dominic West pretends to be an American in Paris. There are walks along the river, fashionable people in art galleries, bookshops and passionate professors. That is about the sum of it.
You can walk in Paris as you can in London. We strolled from Gare du Nord to the Castille Paris hotel near the Place Vendôme. The hotel is next to Chanel — Karl Lagerfield drops in, and even he could not be offended by the taste. It’s 18th-century opulent Italian, and the 108 rooms feel like apartments. Our room had a mezzanine bedroom and windows the full length of both floors. You can gaze down at Rue Cambon and watch people shop, or lie on the sofa reading — either suits the mood of the place.
We looked for a place for lunch,nch, wandering down Avenue de l’Opéra towards the Louvre and the Tuileries. We picked a small restaurant with a cheerful window, ate mussels and duck and salad with a carafe of red wine.
At dusk we walked across the Pont Royal and back across the Pont de la Concorde, across the Place de la Concorde and to our hotel. The Castille Paris serves dinner but we were seeing an old friend near the heavily guarded Elysée Palace. So we walked around the diversions and wandered back at midnight. The hotel was quiet, save for a young American woman in the lobby reliving her social life on her phone.
Breakfast is served in a sunny room looking out at the courtyard — I would highly recommend the scrambled eggs — then we picked up our bags and walked back to the station, and were home by tea. At its best, using Eurostar is as easy as walking. A 24-hour trip to Paris. A spring burst of romance.
Details: Paris
Eurostar (03432 186 186; eurostar.co.uk) runs from St Pancras to Gare du
Nord from £58 return. Castille Paris, a Starhotels Collezione hotel (0033 1 4458 4458; castille.com) has doubles from ¤220, room only.