The Best Women's Travel Writing Read Online Free PDF

still, she can’t pack, she suffers from motion sickness, she is terrified of volcanoes, and she once (three days into the Aldo Leopold wilderness) tore up the map. If she couldn’t write her way to the sense of things, she would probably just stay home. Currently an Olive O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University, Molly Beer’s most recent travel writing appears in
Vela, Salon, Guernica, Perceptive Travel,
and
Glimpse,
where she was a 2010 Correspondent. She is also the co-author of
Singing Out,
published in 2010.

MARCIA D e SANCTIS

    Twenty Years and Counting
    On the things we set in motion.
    S ince 1784, Le Grand Véfour has occupied the northwest corner of the Jardins du Palais Royal in Paris. The restaurant seems forever married to the phrase “venerable institution,” because if only for the roster of French luminaries—from Napoleon to Victor Hugo to Jean-Paul Sartre—who have warmed its velvet banquettes over the years. And then there’s me. One fall afternoon twenty years ago, I had my wedding dinner there.
    Just weeks later, a young Savoyard chef named Guy Martin was plucked from the Hotel Château de Divonne in the tiny Lake Geneva spa town of Divonne-les-Bains to lead Le Grand Véfour into the twenty-first century. I had never met Guy Martin, but this year, at both of our two-decade marks, I wondered if there might be parallels between the life of a restaurant and the course of a marriage. So I returned to Le Grand Véfour to raise a glass to history—France’s, the restaurant’s, and my own.
    I first ate at Le Grand Véfour in the summer of 1983 with a sporty count named Nicolas who squired me around Paris in a Fiat Spider, but whose diminished circumstances became obvious when the bill arrived. He was a couple hundred francs short. But what did I care who paid the check? Champagne was coursing through our veins, and the restaurant’s gilded opulence gave us the sensation that we were tucked inside a fancy chocolate box. Despite its age, Le Grand Véfour had the order and polish of something new and, for me, uncharted. Glass panels lined the dining room, along with portraits of fleshy, bare-breasted goddesses bearing peaches or colored ices—paintings 200 years old, but with hues and sentiments as fresh as that July morning. All around me, the thrill of seduction mingled with the tranquility of permanence.
    The scent of tarragon wafted up from my lamb chops, and cassis ice cream added another layer of pleasure, which— along with Nicolas’s hand intermittently grazing my thigh under the table—heightened the anticipation in all my senses. The bubbly, his lips on my bare shoulder, a warm summer night—Le Grand Véfour was promise itself and the pure essence of Paris. I never forgot it.
    Eight years later I was back, living in Paris and working as a journalist, traveling for stories in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. When I got engaged to Mark, an American sculptor, there seemed no question that we would forego the big to-do stateside and get married in the city we now called home. He had bought my engagement ring—a gorgeous and well-worn platinum, diamond, and sapphire band—at an upscale pawnshop on the rue de Turenne for 1,200 francs, or about $200 at the time. Our rented apartment had a fancy Marais address, but I’d spent the better part of the previous year steaming off the stained brown wallpaper that covered every inch of the place, substituting the bare light bulbs on the ceiling with fixtures from the market at Clignancourt, and hiding the prewar linoleum under carpets I bought at souks from Istanbul to Fez.
    In France, no one cared where we had gone to college or what our fathers did back home. We worked hard, scraped by, consorted with journalists and artists, and weren’t on any regular family dole that propped up our lifestyle. Still, I was the youngest of four unmarried