Paris Pages Own Reporter Risks Feet in Pre-dawn Paris Dash Today.

Ride to Paris Too Complicated to Describe; Early Return Ride Near Warp Speed, Equally Complicated.

Her theory that moving in any direction was better than not moving, brought us to Paris - to the Champs-Elysees no less, and to the area of the Opera in 90 minutes. Except for the 'lost' part in the western suburbs, it was no worse than a typical Friday night. That doesn't mean, that if you were 30 minutes behind us, you got through nearly so easy. If drivers have a bad trip one day, they change their time. On some days, everybody changes their time to the same time; and then it's a really bad day.

The City or Paris' 'Plan Bus' doesn't suit everybody; but every little bit helps.

So, in Paris, just after 8 this morning. What can I do for you? It's still dark. Nothing is open, except hundreds of bars and cafes, selling hundreds of thousands of croissants. Traffic is moving, you can walk. I inspect the Christmas windows of the 'Grands Magazins' on the boulevard Haussmann. The lights are nice - the windows only so-so. There are only a few pedestrians and a few cyclists, and as the minutes ticks by, more and more couriers on scooters and motorcycles.

A young lady hitching west cannot get a ride; this driver indicates he is heading west in order to go east. Might be true. She tries other cars. Cars from St Lazare are starting to honk as other cars on Haussmann don't clear the intersection. The young lady drifts west.

It is bitingly cold, with a cutting wind drilling through from the east. Around Madelaine, Hedidard is festive while Fauchon looks gloomy; but I notice that there is a cafeteria downstairs so I try it. Double express, croissant, and apple-puff thing, for 37 francs. (Only about $7.00; not bad, considering.) Sit down, there's two free papers: France-Soir and Figaro, and I read about yesterday's demos, mostly in France-Soir, because Figaro frowns on 'demos' as being a bit too working-class; and it's typography is nearly unreadable as well as having a layout as dull as ditchwater.

Grands boulevards, grands magazins; at 8:45 this morning; real colors stupendous - for two blocks.

At Concorde, I gain height to get the full panorama of the place full of glass, steel and rubber. I can really feel the wind, blowing from the Tuleries. I look. Hey, where's my photo? The place is not full - the whole south end and the bridge are nearly empty; and there's no jam on this lower end of the Champs-Elysees. Everybody is clustered on the north side, near Rivoli, rue Royale and the Hotel Crillion. Maybe they have good croissants there.

I inspect rue Rivoli. The sun is hitting the facades of the arcades now, if I look to the east and into the wind. Not much traffic; just the usual clutch of stop-light sprinters - light goes green and they're gone, into the Concorde mess. Then the next lot comes. Ordinary. Very few taxis, I don't know why. On Rivoli, none of the usual tour buses. Where are they?

All the little streets are starting to fill with cars and bikes and scooters and motorcycles, and rear-view mirrors, on the sidewalks. Often, it's easier to walk down the middle; certainly faster. By lunch-time, this back-street clog is getting really thick. Honking doesn't help, but drivers try it anyway. Delivery trucks unloading jam whole neighborhoods. Cars idle, trucks idle, the winter air begins to foul.

When Cathy dropped me I didn't pay as much attention as I should have, and I almost don't make my ride back. As we leave her building's garage, there's a truck unloading - for the next hour - at one end of her one-block street and a solid jam at the other corner. A break appears just as we arrive and we nose in.

Into traffic that starts, stops, flows around, backs up for redirection, oozes towards its destination, through the seams between buildings, and soon enough we too are on Rivoli and through the Concorde mess and down the Seine to cut west along the right bank to short-cut through the bottom of the 16th, to Auteuil, to the autoroute de l'Ouest - the A13 - and rumms, up through the horrible tunnel - and then this pilot Cathy, ace Paris transport-strike driver, takes another secret route which adds ten minutes to the trip, instead of just whistling down to Marly's white horses - but what the heck; from Opera, she did it in a hour.

An extra ten minutes in no big thing - compared to the three hours many are going through, often a lot of it on foot, for the same trip.

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Updated 12/95