August Paris Shops: French Holidays (all business closes) New Year's Day; Easter Mon-l day; Ascension Day (Thursday, 40 days after Easter); Whitmonday1 (7 weeks after Easter); Bastille Day (July 14), the big national holiday, with dancing in the streets and fireworks and fun; Assumption Day (Aug. 15); All Saints' Day (Nov. 1); Armistice Day (Nov. 11); Christmas Day. And remember that during the whole month of August Paris shops are at least moribund. Most of them close entirely and post a sign to that effect; Fermeture Annuelle. Hundreds of restaurants also close for all of August Throughout the year, many high-grade shops close on Saturdays, while many small ones and popular ones close on Mondays.
Perfumes are a natural bargain-buy in Paris, and if you pay with travelers checks you may now better the bargain by about 12 per cent at most shops, depending on the free rate of the franc. There are, as everyone knows, certain U.S. customs restrictions on importing French perfumes, but at present these seem to be very liberal, permitting the U.S. resident to bring in (within his free customs allowance) "one Bottle of each fragrance of each brand." This should be checked at the time of your purchase. Reputable shops in Paris keep posted on the rulings.
I might mention here a special seasonal exodus. Parisians seem to move out of their city at the beginning of August like a race of lemmings making their instinctive trek. Garnerers of statistics have shown that the Great Exodus involves about half of the entire population, believe it or not. As many as a quarter of a million Parisiens and Parisiennes have joined the holiday trek in a single day; 160,000 a day, by all means of transportation (chiefly trains), is the computed average for the peak ten days of the mass hegira. This means that the abandoned city is taken over by foreign tourism, and at a rather undesirable time, for Paris, like New York, can be fearfully hot and sticky in August. And unlike New York it closes and shutters thousands of its small shops for the entire month.
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