Just how seriously Parisians take love emerges in the shows they attend and the museums they frequent. Ninety percent of theater in Paris is about the life of couples. This includes some very silly stuff. Ma Femme s'appelle Maurice ("My Wife's Name Is Maurice") is not an unusual title for a long-running French play. Ma Voisine ne suce pas que de la glace! ("The Girl Next Door Only Sucks Ice!") is playing in a fashionable theater in the nineteenth. Leery of this knee-jerk contemporary comedy and bored of the perennially revered Molière, I settle on a series of semi-classics: Stefan Zweig's 24 Heures de la vie d'une femme ("24 Hours in the Life of a Woman"); Victor Hugo, mon amour; Beethoven's Fidelio; Milan Kundera's dramatization of Diderot's Jacques le fataliste et son ma&ocorc;tre ("Jacques the Fatalist and His Master"); and—in honor of my daughter—Orphée et Eurydice, the opera by C. W. Gluck.

Every one of these works is about la vie à deux—the life of couples. 24 Heures de la vie d'une femme (which is playing in Paris's prestigious Théâtre Petit-Montparnasse and stars the admired French actress Catherine Rich) involves an English widow who saves a gambler from suicide, sleeps with him against her principles, and prepares to surrender her lifestyle and reputation in order to follow him—only to learn that he has returned to poker and curses her as a nuisance. From the looks on the faces of the audience members, one would think every woman here knows what it means to throw her lot in with a man she hardly knows, a man she has no reason whatsoever to count on.

The woman who loved Victor Hugo did just that, as I learn at Victor Hugo, mon amour. An aspiring actress and extraordinary beauty, Juliette Drouet became the mistress of the nineteenth-century novelist—and remained so for fifty years. She could count on him, it turns out, if not for fidelity—he had several affairs during their relationship, as well as a wife—then at least for love, support, and an electric correspondence that lasted until her death. The feminist Simone de Beauvoir pitied Drouet, thinking her a woman who did nothing in her life but wait for the Great Man. The author and star of Victor Hugo, mon amour, Anthéa Sogno, sees it differently. For her—as she told me after the performance—Drouet is the ultimate hero because she is the ultimate lover: creative, passionate, and intensely verbal, as well as intensely sexual. Who cares if she didn't succeed at her own career? She succeeded at life.

"If only you could be on the stage exactly what you are in life, the world would . . . marvel," Hugo once wrote Drouet. It is a sentiment that might be addressed to Paris itself.

I am standing on a narrow patio on the fourth floor of the Timhotel Montmartre. It is the only accommodation located on the side of the famed hill rather than at the bottom, among the strip joints and cancan clubs and the Musée de l'érotisme. I visited the museum earlier today, along with the Musée de la Vie Romantique—the former a dizzying collection of sex toys and Kama-sutra images, the latter a handsome villa devoted in part to the nineteenth-century love affair between the novelist George Sand and the poet Alfred de Musset. Not surprisingly, Sand and Musset are the subject of a long-running play in Paris (Tout à vous, George Sand), in much the same way that Hugo and Drouet have a museum that commemorates their relationship (Maison de Victor Hugo). The French love their lovers. They are as in love with love as they are in love with life. Museums of daily life like the Musée de l'érotisme and the Musée de la Vie Romantique—as well as that most Parisian of museums, the Carnavalet, which documents the life of the city itself—reward discerning visitors as much as the Louvre.