A Moveable Feast: Writer Mary Morris Returns to Paris

"To a man looking for fresh eyes, everything about Paris fascinates." Brassaï wrote these words in his memoir about Henry Miller, The Paris Years. Because I am heading to Paris this month for the first time in three years, these words ring very true.

The last time I was in Paris I was in a wheelchair, which I affectionately named Duncan. Trust me, it was no way to travel, clomping along the cobblestones and narrow side streets of Paris. Now I am going back to do what Miller loved to do, and what Paris is known as one of the greatest cities in the world for: walk.

As a girl, I lived in Paris from 1967 to '68. It was a lonely, cold, glorious, insane time. I studied cooking and failed my French class. I lived in a working-class neighborhood with Joelle, my dear French mother, recently deceased. It was in the 13th arrondissement, the district of Paris Miller refers to as the most putrid, impoverished, decadent, hungry, filthy, redolent and so on neighborhood of the entire city.

I don't know if this is true, though when I lived there it was a solid, working-class neighborhood with shift workers coming and going as I came and went from my classes.

Why Paris? Why French? Why me? When I was a girl growing up in suburban Illinois, my mother (who had never been to Europe) began a crusade to have French taught in the public school. She believed that, starting in 6th or 7th grade, children should start learning a language, and for her it was French.

My mother longed to travel. She named our dog Renoir. She had the heart for France and, I believe, if she'd been born in a different era, she would have created a fashion line and gone to Paris regularly. Instead, she was locked into Girl Scouts meetings and Flag Day marching bands.

But she wanted me to learn French. Once a week, she sent me to see Monsieur La Tate. Monsieur La Tate had a strange, sad tic that made his head flash back and forth all the time, and he clearly hadn't foreseen his life's destiny as being my instructor in rudimentary French. Nonetheless, I went. I was dutiful. And I learned.

In high school, we were given an aptitude test in language. Weirdly, the test was administered in Kurdish. You had half an hour to memorize Kurdish grammar and vocabulary, and then you took the test. In all my years of testing, I never scored higher than I did on that language aptitude exam.

I took AP French. My mother eventually got our local school to start teaching French, and in college, for reasons that, even as I write this, remain obscure (though perhaps not to Dr. Freud), I became a French scholar-a degree I would never complete at the graduate level, but I still learned.

In 1967, I sailed on the SS France. My mother stood on the dock. Before leaving, she said, "You take yourself with you." I arrived in Paris in time to become part of the student revolts of 1968. Paris got under my skin.

Miller understood what Paris had to offer him. He referred to the city as "mother, mistress, home and muse." As Brassaï said, Miller tried to understand how Paris worked its magic on him, but the answers were "innumerable, intangible and ineffable."

On his first trip to Paris, Miller did not fall in love with the city-but when he returned for the second time, the city grabbed him by the throat. He cut his writerly teeth there. After spending his days and nights in its bars and cafes, Miller wrote in Remember to Remember, "One needs no artificial stimulation in Paris to create. The air is saturated with creation."

Miller never read books for their meaning. He read a book because it touched something inside of him that made him think and feel and write more. Later in his life, he admitted that he had read at least 5,000 books in his life and perhaps 50 of them had really mattered.

I picked up this Brassaï book because it was sitting on my bedstand. Larry, my husband, thinks he bought it at St. Mark's Bookshop as a good book to take away with us to Paris. I am devouring it as I would a meal. I am dog-earing, underlining, making big check marks everywhere. It is becoming one of those books that matters to me.

I envy Miller. He went to Paris and had no money, no resources, no hope-and as he wrote in the opening pages of Tropic of Cancer, "I am the happiest man alive."

Mary Morris is a writer, teacher and traveler. Her many novels and story collections have been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Swedish and Japanese. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and daughter and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College. A Moveable Feast was excerpted from her blog The Writer and the Wanderer.