TS Eliot, The Wasteland, a fragment

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Generally, business travel is one of those things that sounds a lot better on paper (somebody else pays for you to visit interesting places!) than in reality (you are stuck in hermetically sealed offices or conference rooms, inevitably located in the dullest area of wherever it is you are, and the food is usually vile), in this particular instance, business took me to Paris, but left me with a weekend to enjoy.

Incidentally, anyone who has suggestions for how to get a T-Mobile phone to work, or recommendations for good Alsatian restaurants should post them in the comments.

A delayed flight and an extended nap left me with just the afternoon to wander around Paris. Unfortunately, I managed to leave both my Paris map and my outdated but heavily annotated Zagat in New York. The map was easily replaced, and fortunately, after four years I still remembered the location of the Mariage Freres in the Marais. I also remembered the location of what is perhaps my favorite street for shopping in Paris, the Rue de Francs Bourgeois (I always found the name somewhat ironic). Unfortunately, even though I now have a real salary, the fall in the value of the dollar left everything in the area approximately as affordable as it was when I was in college, which is to say, not very.

The Mariage Freres, which is both a tea store and a tea salon, was an absolutely critical stop. They serve an afternoon tea of a selection of goodies - scones, muffins, financiers, madelaines - with their tea jelly, which is surprisingly addictive. After finishing my pot of Yunan d'or, I stopped at the tea counter and bought what could probably be a two year's supply of tea, much to the amusement of the gentleman assisting me.

When I left the Mariage Freres, the sun was setting and I decided to head vaguely in the direction of the Louvre, in hopes of taking a walk in the Jardin de Tuileries before dark. Instead, I ended up by the Seine, which I figured was a reasonable substitute, and wandered along the banks of the Ile Saint-Louis, and the Ile de la Cite, unfortunately missing my opportunity to tour Saint-Chapelle by about ten mintes.

The areas where I was wandering (the Marais, the Ile de la Cite) are some of the oldest of Paris, and are nothing like the wide boulevards, wrought-iron decorations, and graceful mansard roofs of the typical postcard or Impressionist painting. Instead they're an odd jumble of buildings - a medieval cathedral surrounded by a nineteenth-century mess, a renaissance palace smack up against a block of modern apartment buildings - and I think the more interesting for it.

This is slightly belated, but I'd like to take issue a bit with Will's comments on the question of the motives and beliefs of supporters of restrictions on abortion. The basic point of the comments, it seems to me, is that while many pro-life people morally equate abortion with murder, that doesn't mean that they are then obliged to treat abortion as murder in the legal context.

I have problems with this argument. Pro-lifers agree that abortion is morally abhorrent, and that this moral abhorrence should be taken into account by the legal system when it comes to people who carry out abortions. Why, then, should that abhorrence not be taken into account when it comes to the people who procure abortions? This is the central leap that I'm not following. If abortion is murder, or at any rate is a crime, saying that someone who "aids and abets" that crime as an accessory before the fact but should not receive any punishment at all, seems to me to be a view that that, when it comes to abortion, women are not full moral actors. If they are full moral actors who are suborning crime, then they need to be punished in some way, right? It's not as though the crime can be justified on grounds of self-defense against the fetus, after all.

To put it slightly differently: Will characterizes pro-lifers as saying that women should be punished because they're "in desperate straits", they have "understandable but misguided reasons", because it's not their fault. But if they do have full moral agency, then it is precisely their fault.

I don't think that Ampersand is fully correct: one can certainly believe that abortion is murder without wanting women who have abortions to be punished. I just don't see how you can believe that and still think of those women as equal adults and citizens.