In the last week before Christmas, Paris turns gold. The light comes in low over the Seine by three o'clock, the shop windows glow from four, and at five the Champs-Élysées light up all the way to the Arc de Triomphe. The whole world will be looking at the city on the 24th, when the last season of Emily in Paris arrives on Netflix. We would rather be in it, for the three days before.
Tuesday morning: a village square in the fifth
Half past nine on Place de l'Estrapade. Baguettes in the window of the bakery, a café putting out its chairs, and two streets away, the dome of the Panthéon in the winter haze.
This is the Paris the films borrow: a small square, a few trees, the neighbourhood buying bread. Emily lived here, at no. 1. The square has not noticed.
Tuesday, 1pm: lunch at Colette's table
The Palais-Royal garden, bare for winter, the lime trees cut square, the fountain still. Under the arcades, a door, and behind it, gilt, mirrors and painted panels under glass.
Le Grand Véfour has served at this address since 1784, when it opened as the Café de Chartres. Five tables still stand where they always stood, each with a small brass plate: Napoleon and Joséphine, Balzac, Victor Hugo, who always ordered the vermicelli and the lamb, Cocteau, and Colette. Colette lived upstairs. In her last years, when she could no longer walk, she was carried down on a chair to dine. The restaurant reopened at the end of May 2026, with Bruno Doucet in the kitchen.
Tuesday, 3pm: Rodin's garden as the light goes
Rue de Varenne. The gate of the Hôtel Biron, the light already low and pink, and above the garden wall, the gilded dome of the Invalides. In the frost, The Thinker sits where he has always sat. Further on, The Gates of Hell.
Before it was a museum, this was a house of rented rooms. Matisse lived here, and Cocteau, and Isadora Duncan. The poet Rilke, then Rodin's secretary, told him about it, and in 1908 Rodin took four rooms on the ground floor for his studio, and it became his museum two years after his death.
Wednesday, 5.30pm: Cézanne under the glass roof
The Grand Palais after dark. Iron and glass overhead, the city lights through the roof. At the entrance, two bathers side by side: a small one by Cézanne, and a large one painted by Peter Doig in 2023.
"Cézanne et nous" puts 69 of his works next to 105 by artists who could not stop looking at him, from Matisse and Picasso to Joan Mitchell. Picasso called him "my one and only master". You walk through it as through a conversation across a century. It runs until 17 January 2027, until 7.30pm, and until 10pm on Fridays.
Wednesday night: a quiet street at the top of the avenue
Rue Balzac, a minute from the Étoile. A few doorways, almost no traffic, the noise of the avenue suddenly gone. Balzac died here, in 1850, the man whose name is on a table at the Véfour.
The Hôtel Balzac reopened in 2024 after a full renovation: 58 rooms and suites, some facing the Eiffel Tower, a member of Relais & Châteaux. Pierre Gagnaire's restaurant is next door, with a private entrance from the hotel.
Thursday, Christmas Eve: the choir under the vault
A quarter to eleven on the quays. The towers of Notre-Dame lit above the black Seine, the square full of coats and scarves and breath in the cold air. Inside, under the restored vault, white and new, the singers of the cathedral's choir school take their places.
Last Christmas, the cathedral held its vigil at 11pm with the Maîtrise, then Midnight Mass, with no booking needed. The doors are in the centre of the square, facing the Last Judgment portal. The 2026 times will be published on the cathedral's website.
Three golden days
A village square before ten. Lunch at Colette's table. Rodin's garden at dusk, Cézanne after dark, a room with the tower in the window. And on Christmas Eve, the choir under a vault that the whole world watched burn, and then rise again.
