I love Paris. For a long time I kept a large map of this grande passion on my bathroom wall. After a while, I thought I knew its outlines so well, that if I was ever lost in this city, I would have only to enter a sidewalk pissoir, stand with my eyes closed, and there the map would appear. It didn't work. Fortunately, they have 'you-are-here' displays outside Metro stations, so I don't have to depend on my bladder for directions.

Paris makes me feel sophisticated and well-traveled, triggers a taste for savoir faire that tempts me into giving the impression that I've been here often, when in truth, I've probably been to Dublin more (see – I'm still doing it). But I have managed irregular visits, during which my lodgings careened from the luxurious to the merely picturesque. The most fun was the bright and bouncy Club Med Hotel in Neiully, where the party never seemed to stop, but my favorite was the George V, located on the right bank about midway between the Arch de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. The managing director was the legendary Paolo de Pol, a great raconteur. One evening in the early '80's, while arranging complimentary reservations for me at the Crazy Horse Saloon, a popular 'art du nu topless joint across the street, he hinted mysteriously about old steamer trunks gathering dust in the cellars of the hotel. Lost and forgotten, some had been there since the 1920's and earlier, he said. There might be a story behind them, he added, tapping his nose slyly, then ducked his head toward the receiver to speak with the manager of the Crazy Horse. Simultaneously, an assistant arrived for a meeting, so the tale was gone forever. Frustrated, I wrote a short story about them, called "Hem and Ho," which I've yet to sell.

The Tuilleries blooms for visitors.

"Steamer trunks?" The younger man said.

He visualized them, guarded by chicken wire and covered with dust, deep in the hotel's catacombs, like lost magnums in forgotten wine cellars. Keys gone and locks rusted, stacked neatly and unremembered, they sat undisturbed for nearly a century, their peeling stickers the last hurrah of grand hotels, fashionable spas, and luxury ocean liners that no longer existed.

"Yes, and one contains the pearl necklace I once gave Mata Hari," the old man replied.

But that's another tale. In the meantime, I quickly learned that without a five-star hotel to telephone ahead, I was just another American tourist, special service and ringside tables denied me, and worse, unlikely to find anyone willing to even speak English to me. Waiters, especially, are emphatic about this.

I imagined how different and rewarding it would be to envision Paris in company with people who did speak the language, people who lived here. I imagined a Paris open to me, its soul unlocked, a Paris that would allow me behind the language barrier, where for once, I would be inside looking in.

I was about to get more than I bargained for.

The Holiday Inn in St. Germain des Pres is a gleaming green and white piece of home, smack in the Sixth Arrondissement. On this balmy evening in late August, the modest lobby, all carpet and comfortable chairs, is crammed and noisy – not with its usual complement of Delta flight crews and American tourists – but with French students, all friends of my son, Mike. He is athletic director of the French-American School in Mamaroneck, NY, and these are his former pupils, back home in France for university. Counting girlfriends, there are 13 in all, and they haven't seen each other for a while. We're all going out for dinner. I receive a call in my room from my son, Chris: "Hey, are you coming down soon? Mike's kids are all here, and the front desk is getting nervous."

Walking in Paris is an experience at the best of times, but now with our chattering group crowding the sidewalks and spilling over into the streets, dodging the two motor scooters weaving among us, everyone offering contrasting directions, it becomes a demonstration of youthful exuberance. If we draw stares – especially at the viejo with them – well, this is the outrageous Sixth, and I'm having as much fun as the rest. I mention to one of the young ladies in our group, an American herself, but home in Paris for the summer from the Dalton School in New York, how difficult and alien it sometimes feels for visitors.

French-American students hold their first annual reunion.

"If Americans would just try to speak a bit of French," she explains, "people here would be so pleased and much friendlier."

So it is true – they are just waiting for us to stumble through a few phrases, and arms will fly open in welcome. I can't wait to try my tiny vocabulary and ridiculous accent: "quelque chose pour libre?" (Anything for free?).

After much back and forthing up and down narrow alleyways, we find our place, and crowd down the length of two tables of a generic student hangout – groups charging in and out, foul blue air, pitchers of beer slopping left and right. Above the din, I talk with tall, gangly Quentin, who is surprisingly conversant about world history and geopolitics for one so relatively young – a tribute to the French educational system, even if he went to high school in the U.S. At least he is aware of the rich history our two nations share.

The Sixth Arrondissement runs along the Seine on the left bank, a wedge of artistic topography between the river and the Boulevard Montparnasse, studded with historic import, especially for the literary-minded: Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, Dos Passos – the liste de luminaries is long and varied. Strolling here is like a walk across the printed page – every street is a paragraph. During the 1920's, the caf é s and bars jostled with genius: Man Ray, Isadora Duncan, Picasso; and a generation before them, C é zanne, Degas and Gauguin. Clustered about are their equally famous hangouts: Le D�me, Le Rotonde, Le Select. Every time I come to Paris I yearn to sit awhile in these places, order a drink and muse, and every time I am hustled past for one reason or another. Over there on the Boulevard St. Germain, for instance, is the Brasserie Lipp, where Hemingway sat on a bench with his back against the wall, drinking beer and eating french fries. There's the Auberge de Venise, at 10, rue Delambre. In the 20's, it was known as the Dingo Bar, and they all met for drinks before going out for the evening: Ernest and Hadley, Scott and Zelda (although Fitzgerald was already famous and rich and drinking away his talent. I always visualize him at the Ritz Bar, anyway). Today, the names are exam multiple-choice from required reading, but they are real to me: the crowd in the Dingo for instance, that became "The Sun Also Rises." We pass Les Deux Magots – packed with self-conscious tourists, then later the Caf é Le Flore, where Sartre and Beauvoir managed to be existentially depressed despite the gay surroundings.

The era has been well chronicled, including by Hemingway himself in "A Moveable Feast." One cannot just drop by of an afternoon and recreate it – it requires time and a certain state of mind. But right now we have only two days in Paris, so we must limit ourselves to what we consider the highlights – Louvre, Eiffel, Triomphe, Invalides – the usual immortals.

We had arrived indirectly from Berlin by train in mid-morning at the Gare de l'Este, and by mid-afternoon were sprawled across the sidewalk at a caf é near the Eiffel Tower, where the waiter had just presented l'addition charging the equivalent of $8 dollars apiece for a glass of beer. Immediately we send Edouard, a tall, baby-faced lad with piercing blue eyes and trendy dreadlocks resembling orange broccoli, in to confront the waiter.

"But what should I say, Coach?" he asks Mike.

"Tell him this isn't Madison Square Garden." Mike instructs, referring to the inflated prices.

"Yeah, we're not the Griswolds," Chris adds, referring to the clueless family in "National Lampoon's European Vacation." Less than reinforced by the instructions, but game all the way, our student reappears with a discounted tarrif. We have struck a blow for visitors from everywhere (including Eddy – he's from Brussels).

The following morning is spent at the Louvre – joining the crowds of Japanese tourists in front of the Mona Lisa, breaking house rules by firing off flash pictures of the old girl, cramped and refracted in her bulletproof bower. The floors creak magnificently under tired feet, and we snag a table for luncheon on the balcony overlooking the courtyard and the glass pinnacle rising from the ground like the tip of a time-traveler's nosecone. Flanked by marble busts of artists and immortals lining the railing, we enjoy surprisingly tasty sandwiches and cold bottles of Sprite.

One of the nice walks in Paris that I have always loved is the stretch from the Louvre up toward the Place de la Concord. Paris itself seems not so crowded this August, and the fountain in the Tuileries Gardens on a hot summer day offers a few empty chairs set in the dusty, crunchy gravel around the pond. It's a fine place to relax and watch the children launch wonderfully painted sailboats across the sparkling water. Next to the wheeled cart dispensing the boat rentals, the heavily tanned proprietor sits chatting in English with a friend. (Too bad he's not a waiter). I think of all those who have come to this cart over the years, some famous, most not, but all of them coming away knowing there was no better place to bring a child on a Sunday morning – Paris beneath a high blue sky, with a bit of wind to push a bright sail across this little sea of imagination.

Summer and a stroll through a Paris park.

With only one full day, we decide to skip the Impressionists in the new Jeu de Paume: it's as cluttered and confusing as a pipe factory. Instead, we go over and shop along the Rue de la Rivoli, passing the Crillion, where the German General Staff lorded it up during the Second World War. Across the grand circle at the Ritz, around the corner on the Rue Cambon side of the hotel, the entrance to the Hemingway Bar is darkly inviting on a hot summer day. It survived Hemingway, who claimed to have liberated it from the Germans in 1944 (when it was only the Ritz bar), and the barman can create the perfect drink for your companion, if you are lucky enough to bring the right one. Proust would come over regularly to the Ritz, book a room upstairs and have a private dinner served, tipping lavishly. Later, toward the end of his life, strength ebbing, he would send his housekeeper's husband around for beer and ice cream.

We cross the Seine on the Pont de la Concord and cool our feet on the green grass in front of the Place Des Invalides. Inside, the immense oaken sarcophagus in Napoleon's Tomb squats as majestically as ever on green granite, looking as if it were to set sail for Egypt at any moment. Outside, waves of Japanese schoolgirls crowd past, uniformed and carefree in their short plaid kilts. The clusters of old Legionnaires in wheelchairs outside the courtyard eye the girls for a few intense moments, then pull their eyes back to their primary mission, glaring at visitors in possession of all their limbs. Inside the museum, amid armor, uniforms and battle flags stretching back through centuries of wars, is Napoleon's portable writing desk. He jounced all over Europe from campaign to battle, writing love letters to Josephine on that fragile box, and there it sits in its glass case, ink-stained and weathered. Amazing. Paris remains historic and romantic in a thousand ways.

I am back in Montparnasse. It is too far to go over to Fauchon on the Place de la Madeleine – that cornucopia of a food hall, that delicatessen of dreams – where Alice B. Toklas shopped for fresh greens to bring back to No. 27, Rue de Fleurus, in front of the Jardin du Luxembourg, to tempt her companion, Gertrude Stein. It's too far as well for another favorite, the Place des Vosges, the almost perfectly preserved 16th century square where Victor Hugo had a house. A few blocks away from there, off the beaten tourist track, the furnishings from Proust's cork-lined bedroom await visitors at the Mus é e Carnavalet, a series of 17th century mansions devoted to the history of Paris. (Proust's original bedchamber, by the way, is now the boardroom of a bank on the Boulevard Haussmann, in the building once owned by his family).

But once again, I must save such pleasures for another visit. I settle for one of the world's original department stores, Bon Marche, on the rue de S�vres, not too far from our hotel. This is another Paris tradition in the spirit of Fauchon, and after a few cold beers at the caf é across the street with Chris, we spend a few hours shopping for gifts, a Dior necktie, and some fancy shirts. The young lady behind the perfume counter speaks lovely English, and loads us down with a bagful of free samples. Exam attrition has reduced our student group, and so, on our last night in Paris, we discover a smaller venue, a narrow two-story house tilted over a cobblestone street. Postage stamp dining areas have been squeezed anywhere a tiny space exists (a sure sign of great food?). The kitchen is on the second floor, along with another bar and larger dining room. A monk's procession of darkly dressed waiters with heavily laded trays winds past our lodgment in a window casement, negotiating the torturous spiral of the rickety wooden staircase. Outside the open window crowds drift past in the soft night, and shadows from the candles on the tables below us on the sidewalk flicker on the walls of the building opposite. A small man in a tuxedo selling roses appears, and is dragged into a group picture. He shrugs away muttering ("crazy French kids!")

Finally, the moment has arrived. The menus are presented. My mind gurgles like an empty stomach. This elaborately printed la carte will spin a tale of magnificent dishes and sauces, I know, each description soaring like a Debussy melody. Glorified by the romance of the French language, even the most humble collation of herbs and spices will be transformed by a veritable Beaumarchaisian libretto of epicurean invention into a concoction that the great culinary impresario Fran�ois Vatel might be proud to set before Louis XIV. Let us begin!

Our students are pressed into translating. But as the minutes pass, and I wait in salivatory anticipation, the table begins to resemble a classroom during final exams – faces are contorted, heads scratched, surreptitious glances passed among the examinees, small mutterings under the breath.

Finally I can wait no longer: "Guys, what's the problem," I cry. "What looks good tonight?" my dreams of a fabulous dinner are sagging like a ruined souffl é .

All faces turn to Mike in consternation: "Coach, we don't understand this stuff," Thomas pipes up. "We don't know what all these things are. They're all fancy dishes, and we don't eat at places like this, except with our parents." It's the curse of MacDonald's.

I love Paris.