Bonjour, Friends!

Fall arrived like a friend who doesn't knock. It simply walked in and made itself at home. The air turned crisp, carrying that unmistakable autumn scent: wet leaves mixed with fresh bread, and rain on old stone.

We bundled up in warm jackets for Heritage Days, when Paris opens doors usually kept locked, like hidden chambers in government buildings, and places you've wondered about but never seen. There's something beautiful about a city trusting its people with its secrets and hidden spaces.

The cooler weather also pulled me toward a photo adventure with a longer lens instead of my usual compact 40mm. Different tool, different Paris. The riverbank and the Louvre appear different when viewed through a 200mm lens, including architectural geometry I'd never noticed before. Sometimes the best way to rediscover a familiar place is simply to change how you look at it.

➡️ What to do this weekend in Paris: Sortir à Paris lists things to do this weekend in Paris and Île-de-France, with highlights across festivals, exhibitions, concerts, and family activities.

➡️ Amex Just Launched Its Own Travel App (Finally) With These 5 Exciting Features: AFAR reports that American Express has launched an Amex Travel app featuring integrated booking, rewards, lounge wait times, curated inspiration, and a digital passport.

➡️ Reopening of the Tours de Notre-Dame circuit: The official Towers of Notre-Dame site announces the Tours de Notre-Dame reopened September 20, with e-ticketing, no on-site sales, 424 steps to climb, and self-guided visits only.

➡️ 10 Fascinating Monuments In Paris Not Enough People Visit: Offbeat France highlights 10 lesser-known Paris monuments worth visiting, from a Roman arena and medieval towers to memorials and statues across the city.

Last week, we launched our Seine River walking guide, and the feedback from early buyers has been wonderful. Thank you!

With this guide, you'll experience Paris the way my tour guests do, by following the river that has shaped the city for 2,000 years. Perfect whether you're visiting for the first time or ready to see familiar streets through different eyes.

What you get:

Beta pricing continues: $9 instead of $39. We'll gradually raise the price in the coming weeks as we enhance the guide. The best part? It's digital, so early adopters get all future updates automatically!

Charles Marville holds a unique place in Paris's memory. Between 1865 and 1868, Napoleon III commissioned him to document medieval Paris before Haussmann's transformation swept it away. The result: thousands of photographs capturing a city on the brink of its greatest metamorphosis.

What makes Marville extraordinary is that he inadvertently created a treasure map. His lens captured the narrow streets that had pulsed unchanged since the Middle Ages, the labyrinth surrounding Notre-Dame, the dense quarters near Hôtel de Ville, and entire neighborhoods that moved at the pace of footsteps rather than imperial ambition.

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Most of that medieval maze vanished beneath today's plazas. But walk behind Notre-Dame down Rue Chanoinesse, and you're threading through one of the few arteries Haussmann somehow overlooked. The limestone walls Marville photographed still stand, worn smooth by eight centuries of Parisian hands.

The real revelations emerge in the Marais, where entire medieval streets played dead during renovation, surviving by being forgotten. Rue des Rosiers and Rue des Ecouffes, for example, remain arteries that still pulse with their original rhythm, buildings leaning together like old conspirators.

Walking with Marville's photographs as a guide transforms you into an urban detective. That awkward angle where ancient streets meet Haussmannian boulevards? His images reveal medieval patterns fighting against geometric perfection. The strange courtyard behind that modern façade? Marville shows it hiding there for six centuries.

What emerges is profound: Haussmann's Paris didn't replace medieval Paris, but absorbed what it couldn't destroy. The grand boulevards imposed new rhythms, but the old city's DNA survives in protected pockets, adapted courtyards, and streets that refused geometric conformity.

Marville gave us more than documentation. He created a handbook for reading Paris's layered identity, teaching us to see not just what Haussmann built, but what he couldn't bring himself to erase completely.

As we approach the end of September and fall into autumn, this song teaches us how seasons and heartbreak become indistinguishable, both more beautiful for their brevity.

Joseph Kosma composed it, and Jacques Prévert wrote the lyrics that weave falling leaves into falling love; however, Yves Montand's 1946 recording made it eternal.

You may know it as "Autumn Leaves," but the French original carries something untranslatable, that post-war Parisian mixture of loss and hope, memory braided with season.

Want to experience Paris beyond the guidebooks? Join me for private walking and/or biking tours for fascinating stories, hidden corners, and local insights that make this city extraordinary. From the bohemian streets of Montmartre to the medieval layers of the Marais, each tour combines history, recommendations, and the kind of authentic discoveries that turn a visit into a love affair with Paris.