Under the spell of a living art

Home for now/Paris: In the first of a series in which our correspondents abroad write about their adopted cities, Lara Marlowe describes the age-old pull of Paris

If you've tried all the usual haunts, how about something more offbeat?

Picnic on the quayside by the Seine. Take cushions and a tablecloth, along with a baguette, cheese, pâté, salad and a bottle of wine. There's a three-quarters perspective of the flying buttresses of Notre Dame behind the cathedral on the Left Bank. The Pont des Arts and Solférino footbridges are great locations but tend to be crowded. My favourite place is on the Right Bank between the Concorde and Alexandre III bridges. You can watch the Eiffel Tower blink blue for 10 minutes at the top of every hour.

Chiner - the French verb that translates as "go antiquing" or "bargain hunting". You need several hours for the main flea market, at the Porte de Clignancourt. The Porte de Vanves is a back-of-the-lorry affair, but I've found some small treasures. For bibliophiles, Place Georges Brassens, in the 15th arrondissement, has the city's biggest used-book market.

Thursday night at the Musée d'Orsay. France's main impressionist museum is open until 10 p.m. on Thursdays, when there are rarely crowds and the summer-evening light shows the paintings to their best advantage. The museum has an elegant, relatively inexpensive restaurant.

For two decades French governments have talked about decentralising France. They've passed law after law, poured money into regional councils. To no avail: France will always be Paris.

Balzac understood the irresistible pull of the capital. It is, he wrote, "a city that swallows up gifted individuals born everywhere in the kingdom, makes them part of its strange population and dries out the intellectual capacities of the nation for its own benefit. The provinces themselves are responsible for the force that plunders them. . . . . And as soon as a merchant has amassed a fortune, he thinks only of taking it to Paris, the city that thus comes to epitomise all of France".

I've already lived three lives here: as a student at the Sorbonne in the late 1970s, as a struggling freelancer in the early 1980s and as an Irish Times correspondent since 1997. Over the years, friends and professional contacts from my three epochs have melded.

Though I remain a foreigner, I know this city better than any other: the way it begins to stir, later than other capitals, around 8 a.m., the crush of the metro in rush hour, the priceless silence of Sunday. Nothing, in the 28 years since I first set eyes on Paris, has broken its spell over me.

The ponderousness of French bureaucracy can make Paris a frustrating city to work in, but the surroundings make up for it. When I first read this quote from Zola in Alistair Horne's wonderful Seven Ages Of Paris: Portrait Of A City, I felt I could have written it myself: "I love the horizons of this big city with all my heart. . . . Depending on whether a ray of sunshine brightens Paris, or a dull sky lets it dream, it resembles a joyful and melancholy poem. This is art, all around us. A living art, an art still unknown."

To live in Paris is a constant journey between past and present. There are countless personal memories, of a student garret and the flats one has rented, of meals in restaurants and the dresses you fell in love with through shop windows.

Some of the associations are incongruous: the Ranelagh metro station reminds me of the Monets in the Musée Marmottan and the Afghan embassy, where I picked up a visa after September 11th. The Palais de Justice makes me think of Marie Antoinette, awaiting execution in the conciergerie, and the endless hours I spent there during the investigation into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

One of my favourite poems about Paris is Muriel Spark's The Dark Music Of The Rue Du Cherche-Midi. Spark wrote these lines about a street where I lived, but it holds true for the entire city: "Suppose that I looked for the street of my life, / where I always / could find an analogy. There in the / shop-front windows and in the courtyards, / the alleys, the great doorways, old convents, baronial / properties: / those of the past."

Paris seems to heighten one's moods and intuitions, but it also brings you closer to history. I've liked the somewhat garish Pont Alexandre III even more since Mitterrand had its statues of winged horses covered with gold leaf. When I interviewed the Russian-born writer Andrei Makine this year I read his account of the inauguration of the bridge, in 1900, in the presence of the ill-fated Tsar Nicholas. Now I imagine Nicholas spreading mortar with a golden trowel and the poet José Maria de Heredia haranguing the imperial couple with his ode to Franco-Russian friendship.

Most of my mental landmarks in Paris are literary or artistic. There's a building down the street with a plaque saying Proust spent evenings there with his friends the Daudet brothers. When I walk past, if I'm not concentrating on my next newspaper article, I imagine Marcel wearing evening clothes with other young men around a table in a poorly lit wood-panelled room.

The building I live in was built in 1880. It was a time when the arts flourished, when Monet, Manet and Renoir would meet to discuss painting. Though they tended to live in the 8th and 9th arrondissements, across the river, I like to think that impressionist painters - Monet himself? - once sat in my salon.

Baron Haussmann (who called himself a demolition artist) ordained that Paris should be a 19th-century city. Though many regret the razed, winding streets of earlier centuries, the Haussmannian apartment buildings, with their moulded stucco ceilings, marble fireplaces and modern plumbing, were a revolution in living standards and remain comfortable today. Gustave Caillebotte's painting of workmen scraping a parquet floor captures their grace.

Several times a year the French festoon all government buildings with red, white and blue tricolours. Though they are celebrating the end of the first World War, or the second World War, or Bastille Day, you're tempted to take the flags as personal encouragement, the way the poet Apollinaire did on July 13th, 1909, when he concluded in a poem: "They put out the flags in Paris because my friend André Salmon is getting married."

Some of the most moving documentary footage I have ever seen shows French and US troops arriving in Paris 60 years ago this summer. On August 25th Paris will celebrate its liberation from the Nazis, and the flag-lined streets will be worth seeing.

Apollinaire, the first great French poet of the 20th century, survived the trenches of the first World War only to be killed by the Spanish flu. There's a plaque on the building where he died on Boulevard St Germain. Apollinaire was not a native Parisian - in fact neither of his parents was French - but he proved yet again Balzac's maxim that the capital swallows up all that is best in the country.

Apollinaire's Zone is to the French language what T. S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock is to English. On the night before he is to be guillotined a convict relives his life, walking in his imagination through the streets of Paris. I've long intended to use Zone as a sort of guidebook for an all-night promenade across the city.

"You read the handbills the catalogues the singing posters / So much for poetry this morning and the prose is in the papers," says Beckett's translation of Zone. At my newspaper kiosk in the morning I often think of "the prose in the papers". I used to watch the old green and white Berliet buses hurtle down the boulevards and recall Apollinaire: "Now you walk in Paris alone among the crowd / Herds of bellowing buses hemming you about / Anguish of love parching you within / As though you were never to be loved again."

Recently, I found a notebook that I filled with poems and quotations during my last year at university in Los Angeles. I didn't know then that I would return to Paris, and this text by Camus reflected my nostalgia: "Paris is far away, Paris is beautiful; I have not forgotten her. I remember her twilights. . . . The evening falls, rustling and dry, over the rooftops blue with smoke; the city rumbles dully, the river seems to reverse its course. I wandered then in the streets."

Whenever I can I walk in Paris at sunset. The light, especially on long summer evenings, is incomparable. Paris still seems to rumble, but at its heart the Seine flows silently, the city's soul, splendidly indifferent.

Three things I miss about Ireland

Killiney bay The most beautiful place on Earth. I miss walking down the embankment on the public land on Vico Road, crossing the footbridge over the DART tracks and heading down to the strand. I can sit for hours on a rock there, meditating or not even thinking. Nowhere else feels as secure and peaceful.

Dalkey village Especially the Exchange Bookshop, where I've bought some great second-hand books, including Jorge Amado's Gabriela, Clove And Cinnamon and Joseph O'Connor's Star Of The Sea. Michael Simmons is the hospitable owner, and the shop doubles as a sort of business centre, with a photocopier and fax machine. I also miss a hot whiskey beside the fireplace in Finnegan's, particularly in the winter.

Food When I return to France I bring soda bread and Wrights' wild smoked salmon. I also buy orange marmalade - the coarse cut with the cat on the label - in Ireland. (French marmalade is watery and tastes strange.) I miss Cavistons Seafood Restaurant in Sandycove. The SuperValu in Dalkey sells hazelnut yogurt, potato salad, and garlic bread that you heat up in the oven. I've never found any of these in Paris.