Bonjour Paris!

Come, help me celebrate the publication of my children’s book, LITTLE MONKEY AT THE PARIS ZOO. I’m taking a journey back through time in Paris and around France. Join me!

My first trip to Paris was in 1966. I was on my way to the Institute de Touraine for their summer program.

Here I am in front of the fountain in the Place des Vosges in the Marais. Victor Hugo's house is in this area, also the Rodin Museum.

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LITTLE MONKEY AT THE PARIS ZOO by Priscilla Kurz, available spring, 2022, at

priscillakurz.com. Push Bookstore button at top of screen.

Student Days

When I arrived at the Institute de Touraine in the Loire Valley, I soon discovered that no English would be spoken at school. This was difficult for me as in my three years of French in high school and two years of French literature in college, we spoke English most of the time. Slowly, I began to understand simple questions and was able to reply to them in a mixture of my high school and college French, with some help from Latin and English cognates thrown in.

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LITTLE MONKEY AT THE PARIS ZOO by Priscilla Kurz, available in February, 2022, at

priscillakurz.com. Push the Bookstore button at the top of the screen.

Hotel de Ville in Tours, France

On July 14, Independence Day in France, I walked up the long boulevard in Tours from my student pension to see the parade in front of the town hall, the hotel de ville. Victor Alexandre Frederich Laloux, beaux-arts architect 1850-1937, who was born in Tours, designed what is one of the most charming examples of such a building. It looks like an old-fashioned wedding cake, my wedding cake! And just as delicious. It was under construction during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, long after royalty frequented the Loire valley for hunting.

It still seems odd to me that military tanks were displayed in the Independence Day parade in France and that everyone dressed up. A 4th of July day parade in the US was kids on bicycles and all of us in shorts. But this was Europe after the second world war and the history, culture and disposition were different from the US.