Updated by: June 10, 2026
Snowfall
It was snowing when I arrived.
I had just come out of an audition at RADA in London, jumped straight on the Eurostar with a ring in my pocket and didn’t tell anyone where I was going.
I took her to the Fontaine Saint-Michel. Her father’s favorite place in the world, he had worked at the Paris Observatory just around the corner.
I asked her to marry me.
She cried. The snow kept falling. We found a restaurant nearby and sat by the window and ate something I can’t remember because I wasn’t really paying attention to the food.
Paris is the most beautiful city in the world. The boulevards that Haussmann carved through the city in the nineteenth century are genuinely breathtaking. Napoleon commissioned a city worthy of an empire and he got one.
There is a condition known as Paris Syndrome. It affects tourists every year, predominantly Japanese and Chinese visitors, who arrive carrying an image of the city built from films, fashion and fantasy — and quietly fall apart when confronted with the reality.
The Japanese Embassy has repatriated tourists requiring medical assistance to get home.
They came for a city that only exists in the mind. Paris has never pretended to be that city.
Paris doesn’t need to live up to anything. It just needs to keep snowing on the right night, at the right moment.
Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder
