Paris for Dreamers

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Paris for Dreamers

Paris inspiration by Katrina Lawrence, author of THE PARISIAN CORSET (December 2026) and PARIS DREAMING Hi, I’m Katrina. Because, yes, we’re dreamers. Kat x

After working as a beauty journalist for many years, I took time off a few years ago to write my first book, Paris Dreaming: What the City of Light Taught Me About Life, Love & Lipstick. After the launch I began to realise that I’m not alone, that there are countless other Paris dreamers out there. We see the world, particularly Paris, through pink-tinted glasses (la vie en rose, and all that). We

’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve watched Sabrina and Funny Face and Midnight in Paris. We love the city in a way that borders on obsessive compulsive disorder — no visit is ever enough. It’s like we keep a little bit of Paris within — an inner Parisienne, let’s say. Alas, we can’t all be Parisiennes, and we can’t all up and move there. We have our own homeland and family and reality. So Paris remains the dream, the place we go to as often as possible in order to recharge our spirits, to colour our world. And when we’re there we want the dream Paris. And that inspired me to work on a new book, Paris for Dreamers: Whimsical Walks Through the City of Light’s Delights. It’s a collection of walks I love for the way in which they tell a story about Paris in a moment in time or through the eyes of past Parisians. They’re wanderings I’ve honed over the years, and I felt the need to share these with other like-minded souls. I know there are countless guides to Paris out there, but this one is for those who like to walk on a deeper level, passing through all sorts of portals of time, meeting fascinating characters and collecting titbits of trivia along the way. I’ve also launched a website, which I plan to grow in numerous ways. For now I’m offering personalised travel tips; simply order, answer the questions in the form at checkout, and I’ll make it my mission to deliver you travel advice as perfectly tailored as a Chanel couture jacket. You’ll also find oodles of information on our favourite city, all written with your dreamy needs in mind. I can’t wait to share this dream of a Parisian adventure with you.

10/07/2026

The legendary author Marcel Proust was born 10 July 1871. When the Ritz opened in 1898, Marcel was a dandy of a socialite beloved by countesses and courtesans alike, and the hotel instantly became a favourite hang.

But the aspiring author was tiring of high society. Not that the nervous soul was excited about the looming new century. Writing was his mechanism for coping with uncertain reality as much as recording a world slipping away.

When not out wining and dining, Marcel would bunker down in his cork-lined bedroom scribbling into notebooks into the wee hours. Eventually came a brick of a book, Remembrance of Things Past, which spannedseven volumes and 3000 pages – and boasted the longest sentence in French literature: 847 words!

Marcel’s stream-of-consciousness style of writing initially seemed a foreign language. Many publishers rejected the manuscript. One remarked, ‘I just don't understand why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he rolls about in bed.’ Another later wrote to Marcel that turning him down ‘remains one of the greatest regrets of my life.’

Remembrance quickly became a classic not just for the way to it captured the Belle Époque, but for being a masterpiece of literary modernism. In these days of soundbites and social media, it can seem impenetrable, but it has beautifully meditative qualities – tackling it requires a total commitment to the moment.

It also has relevance in its madeleine scene. In the first volume, the narrator nibbles on this classic French teacake and the moment triggers a gush of memory, sending him in a sensorial time capsule to his childhood, and on to pages and pages of recollections.

In French, the expression ‘une madeleine de Proust’ refers to any sensory experience that takes you back to a happy place – the aroma of sunscreen, the taste of Sunday roast, the feel of velvet ribbons …

And if you love a literal ‘madeleine de Proust’? The ultimate place to enjoy one is at afternoon tea in the Ritz’s Salon Proust, the alcove where the author used to while away hours in observation of society life. If this doesn’t send you off into nostalgic raptures yourself, it will at least be a happy place of the present kind.

04/07/2026

For an icon so American in spirit, the Statue of Liberty is actually very French at heart. A little history to explain …

In 1871, French politician Edouard de Laboulaye approached sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who specialised in colossal statuary, with a big idea. The Americanophile envisioned a gift from the French nation to the United States, a monument to the countries’ shared commitment to democratic freedom.

An excited Bartholdi ventured to America to raise interest in a national fund-raising movement. Once convinced the support was there, he got to work on a concept. Named Liberty Enlightening the World, Bartholdi’s model was approved in 1875 by the Franco-American Union.

Now came the tricky matter of logistics. Bartholdi turned to his old mentor, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (of Notre-Dame restoration fame) for advice. Viollet-le-Duc recommended hand-hammered copper sheets, and worked to come up with an innovative interior solution, for he knew that stone would not cut it for such a mammoth undertaking.

Viollet-le-Duc’s death in 1879 handed the task to an up-and-coming engineer, Gustave Eiffel, an expert in wind resistance after having built numerous bridges and viaducts. Eiffel reworked Liberty’s interior, creating a tall central pylon as the main support structure, to which he attached an iron skeleton.

As Lady Liberty took shape, she began to soar above the Paris skyline. Thousands flocked to her birthplace – the workshop of Gaget, Gauthier et Companie, just north of Parc Monceau – to admire this new landmark.

By 1884, she was ready for her new home, a site that had just been approved by Congress. Carefully dismantled and packed into 214 numbered creates, she set sail for New York Harbour, where she was pieced back together, a monument to the power of dreams as much as democracy🗽

Source: Dawn of the Belle Epoque by Mary McAuliffe 📖

02/07/2026

When twenty-four-year-old Emma Smith arrived in Paris in the summer of 1948, her debut book, The Maidens’ Trip, was about to hit shelves, and she was working on what would be her 1949 novel, The Far Cry. As chronicled in the excellent Les Parisiennes by Anne Sebba, Emma escaped the stifling heat of her cheap Left Bank hotel room by taking her typewriter to Square du Vert-Galant (at the western tip of Île de la Cité), where she sat riverside on the cool flagstones, tapping out words all day long.

One day, the photographer Robert Doisneau was wandering by, snapping images for Paris Match magazine. His photograph of an engrossed Emma, barefoot and breezily dressed, typewriter perched on lap, has to this day been the poster child for Paris as a writer’s city.

To read more of my latest Journal post on why Paris is the perfect place for writers, click the link below …

https://www.katrinalawrenceauthor.com/journal/paris-writers-city

01/07/2026

Some from Claude Monet on this first day of July, the month of the water lily - the painter’s beloved flower: ‘Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.’ 🪷

28/06/2026

There’s an old French expression that I love: esprit de l’escalier. It translates literally as ‘staircase wit’.

The term was coined by Denis Diderot, the freethinking, freewheeling Parisian philosopher of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, an era when social success meant shining in the literary salons with your sparkling banter and bons mots. As an editor of France’s first encyclopedia, Diderot also penned numerous essays, one of which noted the frustrating phenomenon of formulating the perfect comeback only when at the foot of the stairs, en route home.

But really, I just wanted an excuse to post pretty pictures of some of my favourite Parisian staircases …

Photographed: Musée Rodin, Musée Gustave Moreau, Petit Palais, Maxim’s, Musée Nissim de Camondo, Musée Jacquemart-André, Musée Picasso & Galerie Véro-Dodat.

25/06/2026

The sign of this antique boutique - L’Objet Qui Parle (86 Rue des Martyrs, Paris 75018) - translates as The Object That Speaks. Isn’t that the most perfect name? One of the things I most love about vintage shopping is searching out something – whether a grand piece of furniture or a sweet little curio – that seems to want to tell a story. Something that, even if it’s chipped or cheap, still feels special and resonant, as though it’s a memory holder. Admittedly it’s a little bittersweet to not be able to hear its stories, and to wonder why something so precious has been lost to its original owner. As for any boxes of random black-and-white photographs and nameless framed portraits: it breaks my heart a little that these one-time loved ones have ended up so dusty and forgotten. Then again, it’s also an honour to give an old object a new life, infuse it with new memories and stories 💛

21/06/2026

Françoise Sagan was born on this day in 1935. Her breakthrough debut novel, Bonjour Tristesse, was released eighteen years later. It’s the most glamorously world-weary book – a novella, really, not even 40,000 words, but it’s all the more perfect for that.

I discovered Bonjour Tristesse as a teenager, in Paris, and was instantly obsessed with its worldly and precocious anti-heroine, seventeen-year-old Cécile, and her rogue of a widower father. This is the actual copy I bought from a Parisian bouquiniste. And though I hate to admit scrawling over something so historic (this is a 1954 edition 🙈), I couldn’t help myself – I’d recently started learning French, and I breathlessly scribbled translations on every page in consultation with my travel dictionary, as well as highlighting phrases I loved the sound of. This brilliant book has so many expertly crafted lines (and perfectly choreographed scenes), although you can’t go past the killer opening sentence: ‘A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the strange and beautiful name of sorrow.’

Again: Françoise Sagan was only eighteen years old when she wrote this!

Critics at the time were appalled, saying her decadent story would lead youth astray. They called her immoral, amoral, a ‘charming little monster.’ But she couldn’t help her outlook – she belonged to a new Parisian generation, one that had grown up in the darkness of N**i occupation, that had seen the depths to which humanity could descend. In their post-war era, they were both blasé and optimistic, and this book captures that liminal world, suspended one summer, when the future – and Cécile – could go either way.

And perhaps that’s what makes the bittersweet Bonjour Tristesse so popular and so alluring even now – especially now. Because while the story foreshadowed a cynical, superficial future, it revels in nostalgia for a moment of sun-soaked, southern-French, hedonistic happiness. And who wouldn’t want a regular dose of that?

19/06/2026

Today is, apparently, World Sauntering Day. Of course, every day is a sauntering day in Paris, where it’s a time-honoured tradition to ‘flâner’ – to roam about with no particular purpose. The act can be traced back to the early nineteenth century, when covered arcades were burrowed into city blocks, giving the public clean and paved surfaces for the first time. A few decades later, Paris was made over into a capital of grand boulevards and wide footpaths that begged to be walked on, and buildings so beautiful they demanded admiration – with enough ‘old Paris’ remaining for those wanderers who are ever in search of the past. As Edmund White writes in his brilliant book, The Flâneur, ‘Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.’ 🤍🩶🤎

16/06/2026

Today is Bloomsday, named after Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, the 1922 novel that’s set on this single day in 1904. It’s also the day on which Céline and Jesse (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke) meet in the 1995 movie Before Sunrise. And there is a Paris link to all of this, bear with me … James Joyce, the author of Ulysses, lived in Paris for twenty years – it’s where his controversial novel was first published, by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company (then at 12 Rue de L’Odéon). And Before Sunrise’s wonderful sequel, Before Sunset (2004), is set in … you guessed it, with the opening scene taking place in Shakespeare and Company (now at 37 Rue de la Bûcherie). So, if you’re looking for something to read or watch on this Bloomsday, you now have a perfect option 🌸

12/06/2026

Sharing a glimpse of the cover of my debut novel, THE PARISIAN CORSET, which is inspired by the true story of French Vogue during WWII and the mystery surrounding an iconic fashion photograph.

THE PARISIAN CORSET will be available 1st December thanks to HarperCollins Books Australia.

More to be revealed next month, both here and on my new website, the link to which is below. Please come visit! I plan to share various musings about a few of the things I most love: words, history and – of course! – Paris.

Thank you, Lizzie Renkert Creative, for the website design of my dreams 💗

https://www.katrinalawrenceauthor.com

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