Bring your kids to Paris …

by David Benjamin

“Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

PARIS—It’s a typical café restaurant in the Latin Quarter, whose breakfast fare largely consists—unless challenged—of coffee brewed in a magnificent, chrome four-spigot espresso machine, and bread (croissants and pain au chocolat). But the American male, in a voice with the volume and range that might qualify him as the ring announcer for a heavyweight title bout, was begging to differ.

From a puzzled but patient serveur, he was demanding decaf cappuccino with oat milk, plus non-fat organic Greek yogurt and gluten-free granola, for four—himself, his wife, a three-year-old and an infant strapped into a forty-pound, four-wheel advanced tactical baby stroller.

My first impulse was to sidle over to Dagwood and ask him to please tone it down. My second thought was to pull over a chair and recite to him a few relevant verses from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, particularly the passage in which the old sailor, guilty of an impetuous avicide, is hung around the neck with a dead seabird. This pair of fecund millennial yuppies were in Paris, the most beautiful and complicated city in the world, each fitted with an albatross necklace.

They brought kids.

Someone—a travel agent, the check-in clerk at the airport, a TSA frisker, any friend! Have they no adult friends?—might have told them, no! Don’t take the kids. Better to leave them in a nice kennel, where they can play with the dogs. Kids like dogs, they don’t like France. There is nothing in Paris—it is a resolutely adult city despite all those charming Doisneau photos of rollicking street urchins—that is not of the remotest interest to a three-year-old. Nothing to see, nothing she will consent to eat, nowhere to play, not enough toilets, no cartoons on TV, no TV. Oh, sure, she can watch SpongeBob on Mommy’s smartphone. But she could do that back in Tuckahoe and spare the $1,500 air fare.

But wait! There’s EuroDisney? C’mon, Mom. You got one of those in Anaheim another in Orlando, without the passports and the $1,500 air fare.

And then, there’s the rugrat in the stroller? The kid’s not just one metaphorical dead albatross. We’re talking a whole goddamn flock. Paris is a city with enough staircases, if you strung them all together, to reach the peak of Mont Blanc and head back down again, all the way to Italy.

Bring your kids to Paris, Brianna and Tyler, and spend every night eating pizza at 5:30 surrounded by people from Kansas and Utah, instead of escargots and blanquette de veau with a bottle of Côtes-du-rhône at a civilized hour, after dark, among French people who don’t wear baseball caps during meals.

Bring the brat to Paris and you won’t have to bother—won’t be able to, won’t want to—push her up the green and shady, untrampled back side of Montmartre past Au Lapin Agile, to stroll the interior of Sacre Coeur and slip into the secluded garden inside the secretive Musée Montmartre. Don’t worry, You’re not missing much.

Bring your mozniks to Paris, Bryce and Heather, and you’ll not be tempted to settle down for an hour in the sunshine at a café terrasse on the boulevard Montparnasse to sip kir and watch the artists and weirdos, tourists and beautiful people bustle past. The kids will start to fidget in five minutes, one will spit up on your cashmere and the other will be building into a tantrum before the waiter delivers your drinks.

Bring your kids to Paris, Meagan and Morgan, and forgo the leisurely ordeal of strolling the shady avenues of Père-Lachaise, the world’s most remarkable cemetery, searching for the last resting places of Moliére and Apollinaire, Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. The hills and cobblestones will incapacitate the stroller and turn the bored, puling, footsore toddler onto the midget Grim Reaper on crack.

Bring the offspring to Paris, Kirsten and Kyle, and never mind slipping into a cozy museum like the Maillol, where—without kids—you might otherwise meander the galleries and weave among the muscular nudes in the sculpture room, emerging after an hour or so in time for lunch at the rue de Grenelle open market or in one of a dozen bistros, cafés and restaurants within ten minutes’ walk, during which, if you notice, you will (thankfully) see no children.

Haul the kiddos to Paris, Brad and Ashley, and you’ll avoid the pleasure of roaming the Jardin de Luxembourg, seeing the sensuous Auguste Ottin statue of Polyphemus surprising Acis and Galatea, other statues by Delacroix and Aime-Jules Dalou and the miniature Statue of Liberty, not to mention the fruit garden, the beehives and the alterkockers playing petanque. And there’ll be no lounging in the green chairs by the lagoon watching frustrated parents help their kids float elusive toy boats above the carp and among the terns.

Bring the children to Paris, Carlos and Courtney, and you won’t even bother to think about stretching your dinner at Aux Crus de Bourgogne—just off the bright, lovely market street, rue Montorgueil—from 8:30 to midnight, through three courses and two bottles plus cognac and a series of toasts with your French neighbors at the next table, who turn out to be a fashion photographer and his partner, Jean-Louis, who swears, when he was only nineteen and still heterosexual, he had a steamy but heartbreaking affair with Dietrich.

Bring your toddler and infant to Paris, Lauren and Liam, and you’ll spare yourself the shoe leather of walking the full length of the Palais Royale, starting at the Comédie-Française, continuing through the window-shopping paradise along the colonnade, until finally popping back onto the cobbled rue de Beaujolais, and moseying a little further north on rue Vivienne to the slightly touristy but elegant and congenial Le Grand Colbert where, if you’re lucky, you can nosh grenouilles and bulots at the same table where Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton and Keanu Reeves sparred wittily in Something’s Gotta Give.

Go ahead, George and Gracie. Bring your kids to Paris, and turn the City of Light into Newark.