A Special Exposition of the Paris Pages:

Vintage Paris Postcards - Page 1

by Carolyn Daily O'Connor

Most postcards are general views. The close-ups are real collector's items -- finding them and paying for them. I used my Michelin Guide to Paris (the edition purchased for a 1981 trip) to identify as many of the places in the postcard I could.

My visits to Paris were in 1965 (three days on an initial tour to Europe); 1967 (four days with my sister and my first Bastille Day there); June 1980 (five days by myself when I added the Place des Vosges to my favorite areas; October 1980 (five days with my Mother before and after a trip to the Châteaux of the Loire) when I got some great slides of the Luxembourg Gardens with fall color -- an early frost that year;

May 1981 (five days in Paris with two friends on a trip that included Mont St. Michel, Nimes, Avignon, Vezelay and Fontainbleau); March 1982 (two weeks just in Paris with one sidetrip up the Seine with a French-speaking group to try out the French I had been taking at the Alliance Francais in Chicago); October 1982 (three days in Paris on my honeymoon): and return visits to Paris with my husband the summers of 1984 and 1986.

I've stayed in hotels on the Champs-Elysées and the Opera Quarter but definitely am a Left Bank person. On three of the last four visits we stayed at the Hotel de Seine on Rue de Seine -- not quite as noisy as the heart of the Latin Quarter but still lots of street life.

Several of the cards were in French. I could get the gist of the messages but couldn't transcribe them word for word in French let alone translate the whole message. I've given you a flavor of the messages and included whole messages from cards in English that I thought had something to say.

Most of the postcards are from the first decade of this century. The newest one used is more than 75 years old.

To page 2 of Vintage Paris Postcards.