It was hard not to take it personally.
The moment my mother and I stumbled off the plane onto Parisian soil this past June, the city was getting away from itself in a most unusual way.
Too-close-for-comfort terrorism alerts were being issued to Americans traveling to France. Torrential and relentless downpours of rain were pummeling the streets. The Seine was flooding to a historic level. A strike by transit workers and airport employees was looming. Unseasonably cold temperatures were forcing us to forego wearing the Paris-style fashions we had dreamily packed in our matching luggage sets. And, in an emergency act of protecting its antiquities from drowning, the Louvre had the nerve to close its doors - literally as we were arriving at the ticket booth - rendering us unable to so much as snap a prized selfie of us surrounded by hundreds of other tourists snapping selfies of themselves snapping selfies with Ms. Mona Lisa.
Frankly, the City of Light was looking more like the City of Uh-Oh, and I’m fairly certain my mother wanted to cry. After all, this was the highly-anticipated mother-daughter trip she’d been planning for a year now. A vacation to celebrate our triumphant survival through a previous year of abysmal woes. A vacation that had already been postponed once and had a lot riding on it emotionally and spiritually. A vacation that, at this point, seemed would have been better spent in the Bahamas. Or Trenton, New Jersey.
It was a hunk of meat that turned things around for Mom and me.
Some ten years ago, I went to dinner one night with no expectations. A
London newspaper had asked me to write about Lapérouse, an old warhorse
of a restaurant overlooking the Seine on the Left Bank—it was doing
historic Paris restaurants, and this one’s been around forever. I
politely suggested that there might be better candidates, because as
far as I knew, this place was still a slumbering tourist table flogging
its past: it has several charming tiny private dining rooms with badly
scratched mirrors—as the legend goes, these cuts were made by ladies
testing the veracity of newly offered diamonds (real diamonds cut
glass). 
The Isle St. Louis is like the Nantucket of Paris. One of the ancient islands in the middle of the Seine, with Notre Dame at its tip and many picturesque bridges connecting it to the Left and Right Banks, its narrow streets are quaint and relatively free of traffic, with a concentration of shops and galleries; therefore, it tends to be much populated by Americans, who don’t seem to have been discouraged either by the metro strike or by the plunging dollar from flocking there.
Our excitement builds as our tiny Peugeot navigates the streets of Paris heading for rue du Cherche-Midi and my mecca,