Don't worry, I won't babble on about my Paris trip for days and days, but I'd like to note one last memory: the bits of literary Baltimore scattered around the city. A couple of tidbits:

During Paris' literary fervor, when Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce and others mingled on the Left Bank, a central meeting place was the bookstore run by Sylvia Beach, a former Baltimorean. She nurtured young writers, and even published Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses when the established houses would not touch it. Her shop, which closed during World War II, is not related to the one that now operates under that name, though both clearly share a deep love of books.

In the Centre Pompidou, the main museum for modern art, I came across Jacques Lipchitz's bust of Baltimorean Gertrude Stein. Stein left Johns Hopkins medical school to pursue a writing career, and settled with other ex-pats in Paris. She also introduced Baltimore's Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta, to such artists as Henri Matisse, which led to the remarkable Cone collection, now in the Baltimore Museum of Art.