Paris from a car window was a different thing entirely from Paris in a photograph.
I had looked at photographs. Everyone had looked at photographs. Paris existed in the collective imagination before it existed in reality, pre-assembled and pre-romanticized, the city you thought you knew before you'd ever stood in it. I had carried my version of it for years the way you carry things you've been promised, carefully and with a kind of patient faith that the reality would eventually justify the anticipation.
The reality was doing considerably more than justifying it.
It was the light first. The particular quality of Parisian afternoon light that people wrote about and painted and spent entire careers trying to capture and that turned out to be a real and specific thing and not a romantic in
