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Letter From Paris - Harriet Welty-Rochefort - The No Stress Café. The words fairly jumped from the pages of the French Sunday newspaper I was reading. What on earth could a no stress café be, especially when "no stress" is an oxymoron in Paris?

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The Most Beautiful Avenue In the World - Richard Erickson - The Champs-Elysées - 'The Most Beautiful Avenue In the World' - is a phrase almost routinely used by local flacks under contract to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. You may live in a town or city regularly characterized as 'The Most Beautiful In the World,' so you know what I mean. Paris itself slightly too falsely modest to make this claim even though it could probably get away with it - it settles for the 'Most Beautiful Avenue' instead.

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La Rue de Lappe - Thirza Vallois - Rue de Lappe, with its cheap bars and dance halls, would later become a dingy, ramshackle substitute for the Boulevard du Temple. Frequented by defiant, troublemaking apaches in their bell-bottom trousers and shapeless caps, and by their female appendages, the gigolettes, this was the sort of place that attracted such people as Henry Miller and was romanticised by the likes of Léon-Paul Fargues. Inhabited by metal-workers in pre-Revolutionary days, it became in the 19th century the headquarters of the Auvergnat colony. (This piece is excerpted from Thirza Vallois' book Around and About Paris.)

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French History - March - Events: Bizet's opera Carmen premiers in Paris 3.03.1875; Napoléon Bonaparte marries Josephine de Beauharnais 9.03.1796; First public striptease act 13.03.1928; Eiffel Tower inaugurated 31.03.1889; Births: Cyrano de Bergerac 6.03.1619; Marcel Marceau 22.03.1923 René Decartes 31.03.1596.

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