The day started with the smell of warm flour and butter wafting out of a small artisan bakery near our hotel. Our windows wide open taking in the fresh air that Paris has to offer. I grabbed a fresh baguette, the kind that cracks perfectly when you tear it, and feels warm as you chew it. I walked through quiet streets that were slowly waking up. There’s something about eating bread still warm from the oven that makes you feel like you’re participating in something timeless, like stepping into a small, edible ritual.

With baguette in hand, we made our way to Père Lachaise Cemetery. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect—cemeteries, to me, have always felt quiet in a kind of eerie, distant way. But Père Lachaise was different. Somehow, the space felt sacred and alive at the same time. Ivy crawled up the old tombstones, birds sang from the trees overhead, and scattered throughout were visitors walking slowly, reverently, reading names and leaving flowers. It wasn’t just a place for mourning—it was a museum of memory. You could almost feel time folding in on itself.

We learned that the cemetery was established by Napoleon in 1804, partly as a way to relocate the dead from crowded inner-city graveyards. In order to make it popular, the city moved in some “celebrities” of earlier centuries—like the philosopher-theologian couple Héloïse and Abélard. They were buried together long after their deaths, their love story becoming part of the cemetery’s mythos. Their tomb became a symbol not just of romantic devotion but of how France chooses to memorialize both intellect and passion. For me, standing in front of their grave felt like standing at a threshold between the private and the public, where a deeply personal story had been transformed into national memory.

What really struck me throughout the visit was how seriously Paris takes the act of remembering. Even graves here seem to be curated with aesthetic care—sculpted angels, stained glass, engraved poetry. There’s a sense that the lives lived here deserve to be remembered beautifully. In some ways, it reminded me of other places we’ve visited throughout this trip: Hemingway’s favorite cafés, with their worn wooden tables and framed photographs, or even the ornate halls of the Palace of Versailles. Paris doesn’t just preserve the past—it honors it, wraps it in gold leaf or granite, and invites you to pause in front of it.

Walking through Père Lachaise also felt surprisingly relevant to our course. The American writers we’ve been studying—Hemingway, Baldwin, Stein—each came to Paris seeking inspiration, but they also came to preserve themselves in some way. Their work, their cafés, and even their apartments have now become literary landmarks. There’s a kind of quiet irony in the fact that Jim Morrison, an American artist who found fame partly through his rejection of American norms, is buried here too. His grave was crowded with visitors, many of them quietly mouthing lyrics or leaving handwritten notes. It made me wonder if he realized that in death, he would become part of the city’s curated legacy—just like the poets and painters before him.

After the cemetery, I wandered through Le Marais and stumbled upon a vintage market that felt like its own kind of archive. Vendors were selling old film cameras, stacks of postcards, and art deco jewelry. I flipped through a crate of vinyl records and found an old Billie Holiday album. It felt like a continuation of the morning, but instead of marble tombstones, these were everyday artifacts—objects once held, worn, used. And like the graves at Père Lachaise, these objects weren’t just remnants of the past—they were stories waiting to be re-lived.

Later, as I sipped a noisette at a café nearby, I started thinking about how Paris holds onto things. Not just buildings or objects, but moods and moments. Maybe that’s why so many American writers found a kind of freedom here—not just because Paris allowed them to express themselves, but because it gave their expressions permanence. In America, things often move fast and are forgotten just as quickly. But in Paris, even the most fleeting idea can be given a statue, a plaque, or at least a café table to rest on.

I keep coming back to something a classmate said while at a café Hemingway consistently went to: “Paris makes you feel like you’re part of a bigger story.” At the time, I nodded, thinking it was poetic but a little idealized. But now I understand what she meant. Walking through Père Lachaise and Le Marais, eating baguette from a neighborhood bakery, tracing the footsteps of writers and thinkers and lovers—it all makes you feel like you’re being folded into the city’s collective memory. And the more time I spend here, the more I realize that the city doesn’t ask you to leave your past behind. It asks you to bring it with you.

Even the baguette from this morning, eaten while walking to the cemetery, felt like a nod to some older way of life. In Paris, memory isn’t frozen—it’s baked fresh daily, passed down in stories, preserved in stone, and waiting on a table beside your coffee.