I've been in Paris for a few days. But I haven't posted because, at least in the fancy hotel where I stay, the wireless system always daunts me. Right now, mirabile dictu, it works. So here goes. Of course, "no one" is ever in Paris during August. Which is as true as saying "everyone is in Provence." (American version: "Everyone is in the Hamptons.") There are plenty of people in Paris right now, even Parisians, and not only those who are poor. But la fermeture annuelle is in full swing, and certainly among restaurants. Superficial impression: a restaurant is not cited in the Guide Michelin if it's not out during Août. This is not the case with the Paris Zagat's. But Zagat's is for Americans, and there are plenty of us here. So you can find a restaurant but the pickings among provisioners of true cuisine are slim, although the simple cafes will leave you neither hungry nor dissatisfied. I'm a Left Banker, the 6th to be precise. I recall some thirty-odd years ago suggesting to Woody Allen (and Diane Keaton) that we eat at some restaurant on this side of the river. (He was filming "Love and War" then.) And he said, "I never eat on the Left Bank. I once found a cockroach in the bath at the Pont-Royal." Ah, the travails of a Manhattanite. I won't tell you about our picking him and Diane up at their hotel (Plaza Athenee, as I recall) and going to the restaurant (Vivarois, then new to three fork cohort), in a Rolls Royce (his), except that Ed Zwick, fresh out of Harvard and a summer as a TNR intern, was with us. Working with Allen was his apprenticeship. But this is Paris 33 years later. Of course, then was Vietnam. Now is Iraq. The hatred for America then was so palpable on the streets, and it is even visible now. This is not just because I happen to be here when Sarkozy is president and during the very days of his meeting with George W. and George H.W. at the family "cottage" in Kennebunkport. I do puzzle about what subjects were on the table. I imagine talking with pére being much more taxing than talking with fils. After all, Herbert Walker thinks he knows everything and the press has reinforced that sense by contrasting him starkly to his son, who doesn't think he knows everything but believes he is virtuous. The pater familias is too smart to think that about himself. He's also made much too much money to believe that. The demography of Paris arrondisements is curious. The 6th--and to a lesser extent the 7th--presents a pleasant and peaceful compote of middle class tending to young and educated French people (many with books under their arms), Asians and Africans, interacting. In the 5th, the economics drifts downwards and the population has darker skins, North Africans. I have not seen a chador or a burkha on the left bank. Nor in the sectors of the right bank in which I walked, the 1st, the 2nd, the 4th, its own mélange of chic men and women, gays, Jews, Arabs. To be sure, I did not go the banlieues where the vast numbers of Muslims, mostly North African Arabs, have concentrated. Paris center is a segregated city. You have to go far beyond the boulevards of Baron Haussmann even to notice the people who have transformed French society for the worse and stimulated its politics to the good. Oh, yes, I did see many women dressed in the Islamic garb that seems to threaten so many. They were on the Champs Elysées, not here, not there, but where tourists come to look and buy. I went into Louis Vuitton, a label I know from my youth as the dauntingly heavy and hard luggage my rich aunt use to take on her trips to Europe on the Queen Mary. As everyone knows, Louis Vuitton is now much more than that and much more fashionable. And extraordinarily expensive. What my aunt would call "dear." In any case, the religiously bedecked Muslim women--except for the very few with top to bottom camouflage, covering even the wrist and ankle, those sensual points of the female anatomy--actually revealed quite a lot. They wore make-up including lip liner and provocative lines around their eyes; their hair had been to a hairdresser at least as expensive as John Edwards. And, as almost everyone knows, what covers up also reveals. Alas, these were not Arab women from the banlieues. They were tourists, wealthy tourists, not experiencing the weak dollar and the strong Euro. Remember: oil has pumped in an additional $1.7 trillion dollars into the gulf economies in 2007 alone. Not just $1.7 trillion, mind you. That's just the surplus since oil went over $35 a barrel. I'll have other observations about Paris in the next few days.