We did a lot of eating with a few museums and some long walks thrown in here and there.

After our first day of sightseeing (Champs Elysee, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, etc.) we were among the first to arrive (at a little after 7:30) at La Fontaine de Mars, a casual country-French restaurant recommended by Patricia Wells, the restaurant critic for the International Herald Tribune. As luck (and good planning) would have it, it was only a few blocks from our hotel. Maybe because of the English-language newspaper recommendation, this was the only place we ate that had an English version of their menu. A lot of Americans came in shortly after us, and the French began to arrive as Lynn was finishing her cassoulet and I my duck confit -- a great introduction to traditional French fare.

We had decided before we left to try one three-star restaurant and had a reservation at Arpege, an intimate modern restaurant with walls of light wood and lalique glass panels, for noon the next day. (It was so intimate that Lynn's lasting impression is of waiters constantly running into each other.) After a leisurely stroll to and around the Rodin museum, we arrived at 1 p.m. for a two-hour, six-course extravaganza that began with a poached egg yolk topped with chive mousse and a touch of maple syrup. Although it soundsstrange, it was strangely delicious. An ambrosia-like onion soup followed and the meal went uphill from there. I won't describe all the courses, but a pear and roquefort tart that appeared before the dessert was one of the most memorable. I didn't think I would ever be hungry again but after several miles of walking up Montmartre, hearing the nuns singing at mass in the Sacre Coeur and walking back, we had a late supper in a tiny wine bar near our hotel where we shared a meat plate and a cheese plate and a cheap bottle of wine.

For lunch the next day after walking through the Marais to the Place de Vosges, we stopped at Leon near the Bastille monument for mussels. Lynn calls the place a Denny's that serves mussels -- they offer them about 20 ways and there's no way we could finish them. They're served in a huge La Crueset-type pot. After an afternoon at the Picasso Museum, Ste Chapelle and the Hotel de Ville, we walked about an hour and 15 minutes to the very south end of the city to a frenetic little place called La Regalade. Not much English spoken here -- except by two Gucci-clad women (one American, one British) who sat at the table next to us and discussed which issue of Town and Country had run the review of this unassuming place. The food certainly deserved a good review. It was great, inexpensive and worth the walk (although we opted for a metro ride home). I had a pan fried calamari served with a squid ink risotto and a delicious layered chocolate dessert with fresh mint ice cream. Lynn said she had the best soup she's ever had -- a cream of asparagus poured over a touch of foie gras as I recall.

Sunday lunch, after our wanderings through a few open air markets, was at Tour D'Argent, a venerable old restaurant with a view down the Seine toward Notre Dame. At a little corner table by the window we gorged ourselves on duck -- the restaurant's specialty for more than 100 years. We had a half bottle of one of the best white wines I have ever had --a Mersault. I wrote the name down, but couldn't find it in any wine store. After lunch, we were given a personal tour of one level of their massive two-level wine cellar -- a tour that Lynn had requested when she made the reservation several weeks earlier. Incredible. Some of the wines were from the century before last. We walked back down the bank of the Seine, imagining ourselves in a Fred Astaire movie and spent the rest of the afternoon at the Musee D'Orsay and the evening on boat ride. Believe it or not, we were still too full at 10 p.m. to eat anything that evening.

We were famished the next day, though, after spending all morning looking at all of the French and Italian paintings ever painted -- in the Louvre. We would have seen all the Flemish and Dutch as well, but that section was closed. We found a little cafe that served Tartines, which turned out to be fancy open-faced grilled cheese sandwiches (mine was buffalo mozarella with zucchini and tomato, and Lynn's was goat cheese), each served with a glass of wine the proprietor had chosen to go with each sandwich. The place was called Androuet en Pouse, a branch of a famous cheese restaurant. After an afternoon at Notre Dame and wandering around the Ile St. Louis, we discovered a small, serene restaurant called Les Glenans near our hotel with a tangerine color scheme and a formally attired maitre d' who said "vous etes bienvenue" when we arrived at 8 p.m. We ordered "le menu" and had a great meal of salmon terrine, fresh fish with roasted potatoes and caramalized onions, and chocolate creme brulee for dessert. A bottle of white wine from the Loire was included for about $30 per person.

We spent our last full day in France at Versailles, wandering the palace, the grounds and the open markets in the village square. I got it into my head that I wanted lobster for my last dinner in Paris so Lynn and I wandered around, enjoying the sites and checking out restaurant menus here and there to see if anyone was serving lobster. We found a little place about a half-mile from our hotel called La Bamboche that offered an inviting platter with the lobster tail meat, the lobster claw, a cold lobster mousse and a hot lobster broth. I decided to go all out and had a cream of leek soup with lobster ravioli to start. Couldn't begin to conquer the cheese plate that I thought would be a nice finale to the meal.

After some last-minute shopping the next day, we ate an early lunch in a little bistro that seemed to be a hangout for government workers. We ate extremely fresh salmon and shared a sinful profiterole, grabbed our bags and hopped the train for the airport.