The first French bed I slept in was at the Fondation des États-Unis within the 100-acre residential campus of the University of Paris. It was not the Paris of the Left Bank, neither of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre nor of Janet Flanner (the New Yorker's peerless columnist Genêt), certainly not of Colette. Below my window, traffic thundered along the wide Boulevard Jourdain, along which 5,000+ fellow students grazed, searching for a sense of the city. Even that amorous American Benjamin Franklin would have been hard-pressed to uncover a sniff of romance amid such busy sterility.

But we young had come to study. I took a course at the Sorbonne called Introduction to French Life. One glorious day I escaped the class walk through the Tuileries Gardens, kicked a chestnut into the air, and took a daringly expensive glass of wine at Ruc-Univers (now just the Ruc), a café across from the Comédie Française on what was then Place du Théâtre Français. (Today it's Place André Malraux, where I have performed that ritual of freedom for more than 40 years.)

In the smaller streets of our campus' quartier, cobbled and dark, we discovered a tiny zinc bar where a wiry small waitress sang out salade de to-MA-tuh! and slapped down brimming bowls of tasty tomato soup. Once after dinner we walked “up” Jourdain and I stuck in my thumb, pulled out a plum, and fell in love with a tarte mirabelle.

Across Jourdain from the Cité Universitaire lay Montsouris, an 1870s quarry transformed into parkland, today a cherished 50-acre greensward. (An engineer of the project committed suicide on opening day in 1878 when his artificial lake suddenly went dry.) I did not visit the Parc Montsouris; I did not know then that Georges Braque had occupied a studio nearby in the street named for him.

Besides, my new friend Julia had gone to Montsouris with a boyfriend and had not liked her untoward experience there.

The Paris that mattered took some getting to. I descended into the Métro at station Cité Universitaire bound for Denfert-Rochereau (where in the Catacombs rest several million skeletons, skulls, and crossed tibias) and beyond to St-Michel, the center of the students' universe. (In St-Michel the bookstores grow/Between the cafés, row on row.)

Summer reached Paris in September. Uncomfortably warm, I wore my black turtleneck sweater anyway and tried to brood, world-worn, at some sidewalk café. I wanted to smoke, slowly, a Gaulois but was afraid of choking; you can't brood importantly while choking. A crise had settled down in Suez and the untidy Algerian war worried on. In an unimportant café, I ordered the poison of the day. (Having confused poison with fish, poisson, I left in humiliation before it arrived.)

Insurrection in Morocco, Maurice Utrillo's death from pneumonia, squabbles within the Radical Socialist leadership: These were shadows. I strolled beneath the arches of the Rue de Rivoli and stepped, shaking, into the majestic Hôtel Meurice. I wiggled my fingers in the fine fountains of the Place du Théâtre-Français, fell into a kaleidoscope of stained glass in Ste-Chapelle, and shivered at the naughtiness of a night in Pigalle: “Deux à la Fois? Pourquoi Pas?” (“Two at Once? Why Not?”). Uncertain what it meant, I did know better than to ask.

One late afternoon, golden with St. Martin's summer, I almost fainted at St-Germain-des-Prés because even within its modest confines there is too much to know. To soothe my soul, I bought a black béret.

I had been sent to France not to prance about Paris but to study science politique and the notion of Europe (then called the Common Market) at the University of Strasbourg in Alsace. Inevitably, the time came to take the train to what I considered a provincial backwater. (We Parisiennes are such snobs.)

Looking back, I see a naïve schoolgirl standing along Boulevard Jourdain and waving for a taxi to take her and her steamer trunk (the size of a Citroën) to the railway station. She waits and waves, waits and waves, misses her escort and assigned train.

Somehow (the details are long forgotten), she arrives in early evening in Strasbourg, alone, with no notion of where to go, of where to stay. It is, of course, a Friday; there is no possibility of help until Monday morning.

To my amazement, the girl checks her trunk at the station's consigne and walks directly across the street to the fanciest hotel available (the Terminus-Gruber, it was), checks in, and orders an extravagant bowl of fraises du bois (wild strawberries).

Georgia Hesse is widely admired as the founder of the San Francisco Examiner's travel section, where she served as travel editor for 19 years. She is now a full-time freelance travel writer and photographer who has received many awards, including the Ordre du Merite from the French government in 1982. She teaches writing and frequently appears on local radio.