Bonjour, Friends!

Some neighborhoods in Paris feel less like moving through a city and more like paging through a dream, and this week I take you through one of those neighborhoods.

I just published a new YouTube video: a slow wander through Montmartre. If you’d like to feel what it’s like to be here on an ordinary, slightly magical day in Paris, you can watch it below.

Tonight I’m heading to Paris Photo, the big photography fair that turns the Grand Palais into a maze of images from all over the world. I’ll be wandering through frames of other people’s cities before coming back to mine, and I’ll report back in next week’s issue with what I find.

In the meantime, here are some stills I captured of Montmartre while making the video this week.

➡️ An American’s Guide to Thanksgiving in Paris: HiP Paris offers an American expat's guide to celebrating Thanksgiving in Paris, focusing on finding traditional ingredients and embracing community.

➡️ Paris Icon La Tour d’Argent Unveils Reimagined Historic Wine Cellars: Wine Spectator reports that Paris icon La Tour d’Argent has revamped its vast historic wine cellars and is launching guided tours of the 300,000 bottle collection beneath the restaurant.

➡️ My search for the perfect steak frites in Paris, the staple of French brasserie cuisine: The Guardian follows a British travel writer on a quest to find the perfect steak frites in Paris.

➡️ The oldest hotel in Paris hides at the end of a covered passageway: Paris Secret spotlights Hôtel Chopin, a tiny 19th‑century hotel tucked inside Passage Jouffroy that has never closed a day since 1846.

The beta launch of The Ultimate River Walk is coming to an end, and the guide has grown up enough to earn a new name: The Paris Welcome Walk.

What started as a simple river walk has evolved into a true Paris Welcome Kit. In the past weeks, we’ve already added:

And by next week, we expect to add a 70-page Arrondissement Guide to help you decide exactly where to stay and where to play in Paris.

Because this is a digital guide that works like an app, everyone who buys it now will automatically receive all future updates at no extra cost.

This is the last chance to get it at the beta price. The price goes up next week as The Paris Welcome Walk officially takes over.

For most of its life, Montmartre sat beyond the city limits, a hill of windmills, vineyards, and low taxes. Parisians came up here for cheaper wine and a bit of freedom from the rules below. The city finally annexed it in 1860, but you can still feel that “just outside” energy on the streets.

That glowing white basilica appears harmless, but it was conceived in the late 19th century as a form of national penance following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the trauma of the Paris Commune. Yes, it’s a pretty church, but it was born as a political statement in stone about guilt, order, and who gets to define redemption.

The legends are true: Picasso, Modigliani, Toulouse‑Lautrec, and company really did haunt these streets. The rent was cheap, the light was good, and the wine flowed (as well as absinthe). But over time, “Montmartre, the bohemian hill” turned into a kind of early lifestyle brand. What began as genuine poverty and rebellion eventually got repackaged as an ambience you can buy by the glass.

In the late 19th century, while Baron Haussmann was transforming central Paris into grand boulevards, some of the people displaced ended up in Montmartre. On the northwest slope, they built the Maquis, a self‑built sprawl of wooden shacks, goats, gardens, and muddy paths. Long before it was a romantic “village,” parts of Montmartre were basically a hillside squat.

Even the word “Montmartre” carries an argument inside it. It possibly comes from Mons Martis, the Hill of Mars, because the Romans had temples up here. Another theory is Mons Martyrum, the Hill of the Martyrs, associated with Saint Denis, the bishop said to have been executed on the hill in the 3rd century.

Either way, buried inside the name of this very Instagrammed neighborhood are ghosts: Roman gods, early Christians, and a city that has been rebranding the same hill for nearly 2,000 years.

If you want the deeper stories behind Parisian icons, come walk the city with me.

It feels fitting to share a Dalida song this week, as we linger on Montmartre, the neighborhood where she lived. Here is one of her classics, “Parole, Parole” – a duet about promises, charm, and all the words that float in the air and never quite land.

Custom routes. Real local stories. Zero tourist traps.