Paris, Monday 16th March

Terrible article in the NYTimes yesterday about Europe by Steve Erlanger. I didn’t read the whole thing though, the part where he gets into the Black Death. But what an accumulation of clichés and banalities in the opening paragraphs.

We voted around lunchtime, came home, stayed inside until late afternoon, then went to the park, which was unusually crowded—nowhere else to go, I guess, all the places people might usually go on a Sunday (most stores aren’t open anyway on Sunday in Paris) being closed. The cherry trees were beautiful and it has been many years since we were here to see them. When the sun started to go down, we moved to the east side of the park where there were even more people, so many there wasn’t an empty chair. We hovered, at a safe distance, until some people got up and commandeered theirs, and read for a while at a safe distance from others, until my husband, who is a virologist, said he could smell virus wafting over the flower beds and we went home.

This morning we are thinking we should leave the city while we still can.