The last time (or the first time) I was in Paris (I can’t remember that detail, but I was with some guy who I also can’t remember), I went to the Place des Vosges, and was just blown away by its beauty: the age of the buildings and the serenity of the square. In my memory, it was about the size of two football fields and had multiple squares within a larger rectangle.

Turns out, though, there is just one square and it’s not even that big, at least in comparison to other Parisian parks. Here, for example, is just one very small corner of the Tuileries:

Even while I was standing in the center of the Place des Vosges, in my mind’s eye, I could see my memory of the square and it looked nothing at all like the real thing in which I was actually standing, yet the image in my head felt more real than the actual park in which I stood.

This contradiction made me think about Ernest Hemingway and A Moveable Feast, the greatest book, in my opinion, about Paris.

For many of us, a la Hemingway, Paris is real, of course, but it is mostly true. That’s why Midnight in Paris, in which Woody Allen imagines a Hollywood screenwriter in Paris with his (awful) fiancé who is transported to 1920s Paris is beloved by so many us: Imagined Paris is more real than real Paris.

Much as I love A Moveable Feast and Midnight in Paris, I have to say one of my favorite Paris movies is Before Sunset because Jesse and Celine in Before Sunrise illustrate my younger days of travel and adventure.

Of course, Jesse and Celine meet again, although not when they planned to meet, one year to the day after they said goodbye, but years later in Paris, and they walk through the city. Neither of them are the way they remembered, but they share the memory and the truth of their meeting on the train in Vienna and the day and night they spent together.

My favorite scene in the movie is not their meeting again in Shakespeare & Co. or their stroll through Paris. It’s the end, when Jesse, who is now married and a father, has to decide if he’s going to, once again, say goodbye to Celine. Jesse is deciding whether love and romance can be real. Can a real life in Paris match the romance and truth of Paris?