Paris

PARIS -- It was a final-round match between teen-age French Open champions, the defending champion Monica Seles and the 1989 winner, Arantxa Sanchez Vicario.Each is prone to figuring out footwork from the baseline and communicating effort and enthusiasm with a barrage of gutturals, grunts and groans.The vocal track from this lively confrontation yesterday rang out as loudly as its catapulted ground strokes on a dim, gray afternoon more reminiscent of March on the moors than springtime in Paris.

PARIS -- You could get to like Andrei Medvedev.On Court Central yesterday, dressed in a baggy white shirt and black and white plaid shorts that made him look more ready for a backyard barbecue than a tennis match, he blitzed French Open favorite Gustavo Kuerten, 7-5, 6-4, 6-4.And then he came into his post-match interview and wowed his audience with grace, humor and goodwill."

PARIS - Any world history student knows the French are touchy about the subject of foreign occupation. Yet once a year for three weeks, they cede 2,200 miles of roadway to an army of cyclists from two dozen countries, form the world's largest reception line on either side of the course and sincerely root for the best man to win. Lance Armstrong owns all of this once again: the mountains, the straight-aways, the fields of lavender and sunflowers, the...

PARIS -- It's a bit early to announce the end of the century. But the spring fashion collections being shown here are so wacky and wild, decadent and even demented at times, that it looks like the Fin de Siecle Follies are in full swing here if nowhere else.The first sign of slippage came at the Thierry Mugler Western Round Up, when Ivana Trump, recently divorced from Donald, stepped along the runway dressed like Miss Kitty from "Gunsmoke."Since then, there have been men in corsets, women in butt-baring body suits, dogs in fishnet stockings, a candle-lit fashion show in a subway station and a fashion riot in a rainstorm.

PARIS -- Hammer pants, samurai pants, genie pants - the kinds of trousers you thought were gone forever were, believe it or not, the centerpiece of the Paris men's shows. After the skinny, cropped, ankle-baring looks in Milan, Italy, the big news out of Paris this week is the return of the voluminous, billowy trouser. While not every designer sent models down the runway in knickers roomy enough to hide a bone-in ham, most offered their own take on the more generous trouser silhouette: high-waisted, baggy at the midriff and tight at the ankle.

"From Paris With Love" doesn't do much for Paris or love, or your brain cells, but it flies like a crazed eagle on uppers and comes from the talented, propulsive Pierre Morel. A former cinematographer who learned under the tutelage of international violence impresario Luc Besson, Morel turns his kinetic eye to a tale (story by Besson, script by Adi Hasak) of a low-level spy and Paris embassy functionary, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. He lives a fine life in Paris with his fiancee (Kasia Smutniak)

PARIS - When a city can credibly make claim to being the epicenter of culture, when the grandeur of its architecture is as striking as it is here in the French capital and its museums are second to none, you have a city that shouldn't be a tough sell. And Paris isn't. More people visit this city than any other in the world, drawn by an easy sophistication, an elegance unforced, a charm enhanced by its effortlessness. Which raises this question: Why have Paris officials suddenly decided to decorate the city up like a whorehouse?

Paris is a daily feast, a city of pleasant prospects. Notice the tree-shaded streets and the creamy, sun-warmed building facades. There are shops and brasseries on the ground floor -- butchers, bakers, florists, cafes. Above, six floors of apartments, each with ironwork railings or grilles fronting the windows and balconies. Geraniums, petunias and lobelias spill from flower boxes. This is the Paris that Parisians live in. One hopes that they are not blase about the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower and the Hemingway haunts and the boat rides on the Seine.

PARIS -- This is a city for lovers, yes? Well, I came prepared with a checklist for my romantic dates in love-soaked Paris. Butter? Check. Small silver knife? Check. Napkins. Check. Plan de Paris (that indispensable book of street maps)? Check. Next, I purchased a carnet, that nifty bundle of 10 train tickets for the Paris Metro, and off I went. Off to consummate my love affair with that most quintessential of all French things -- the baguette. Some people go to Paris to traipse through gardens; to take in magnificent paintings, ancient textiles and other gleaming bits of antiquity; to marvel at cathedrals boasting magnificent windows of colored light.

The champagne was flowing in Paris yesterday as McCormick & Co.'s chief executive toasted his company's largest acquisition ever - the purchase of Ducros, Europe's top spice producer. The Sparks-based spice maker paid $379 million in cash for Paris-based Ducros, which had net sales last year of about $250 million. It's the world's second-largest spice company, behind only McCormick itself, which had $2 billion in sales last year. The deal was signed in Paris at the headquarters of Eridania Beghin-Say, Ducros parent, which outbid McCormick in 1991 when both companies were trying to acquire Ducros.