Handbags adorn a shop window at exclusive Nina Ricci in Paris, a city synonymous with style. Photograph by Theo Westenberger

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Avenue Montaigne puts the fanciest part of Fifth Avenue to shame. [My daughter] Jenny and I are here on a mission. We’re going to Nina Ricci because I want some of the soap of the same name that’s in the hotel—its scent is divine. We go past the Christian Dior store and look into the windows at strappy red and yellow satin shoes, at exotic handbags with large beads for handles, at black lingerie that says as clearly as the Eiffel Tower that you’re not in Kansas.

The Eiffel Tower’s first-floor restaurant (in background), Altitude 95 offers diners first-rate views—without the rain. Photograph by Theo Westenberger

At Nina Ricci, I ask Jenny to tell the saleswoman what I’m looking for. The woman says they have no soap. Well, just the scent then, I say. The woman lets me smell the perfume. No, I say, it’s not that. She tells me they do have another scent, but it’s for men. I sniff. Voila! I say I don’t care if it’s for men; I’m going to wear it anyway. The saleswoman shrugs in that French way and puffs a little air out of her perfectly lipsticked mouth. “Why not?” she says to me—in English. “Perfume ’as no sex.”

Excerpted from “The Gift of Paris,” by Elizabeth Berg. Read the complete story in the March 2000 issue of TRAVELER.