On a lovely fall day, I set out from my 17th-arrondissement apartment and headed north. It’s a walk I’ve done many times before. This is where Paris ends and another world begins—of low-income housing mixed in with glass office buildings, of covered markets and discount shopping, of parks and painters and houseboats. At the end: French impressionist painters.

I continued across the esplanade that covers the Périphérique ring road. As in many edges of Paris, it’s covered with sports facilities, in this case tennis courts with a kind of AstroTurf surface.

Skirting the So Ouest shopping center and its huge supermarket, I passed through the Parc Eiffel, where the famous builder assembled the pieces for the Statue of Liberty and his eponymous tower, among other works.

I was soon in the heart of Levallois, a prosperous suburb. It’s getting more prosperous by the day as office buildings multiply to the north along the Seine. The Levallois web site describes it as a “young” commune; that is, 160 or so years old. You can turn the link into English by clicking on site adaptation and choosing the language; I highly recommend the history section there.

Levallois, population 68,000, boasts a city hall on a par, size- and elegance-wise, with the district city halls in various Paris arrondissements. It’s surrounded by a well-tended garden.

Even though the building is in the style of Louis XIV, it was built much later and inaugurated in 1898. Speaking of grand style, Levallois can also offer former mayor, Patrick Balkany, who served with one break between 1983 and 2020. In addition, he was, in typical French political style, a national legislator and a regional legislator, all at once.

What got him in trouble, though, was tax evasion, money laundering and other financial shenanigans. He even had to step down and, briefly, go to prison, which is unusual among sleazy French politicians (though his friend and ally, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, this week began a prison sentence after multiple yearslong legal battles over corruption, campaign finance and influence-peddling charges.)

But I digress.

I continued north through the 100-year-old Parc de la Planchette, where parents and children were playing on the equipment and on the fields.

Just after the park was one of the biggest open-air yard sales I have ever seen. In France they are called vide-grenier, which means empty your attic. It went on for blocks and blocks.

Not long after that was a footbridge over the highway running next to the Seine, the part of the river northwest of the city after looping out of the center.

From there it took only a few minutes to get to the bridge that led to the Ile de la Jatte. A flight of stairs took me to the famous island. People were enjoying every bit of it, including by fishing.

On the bank I had just left were parked a smattering of houseboats. People really live on those things.

The island also includes a dog park, where I used to take Louise’s dog, Hester, when we babysat her. And a beehive, or rather, multiple beehives, all fenced in and labeled in that adorable way with which French civil servants exercise their duties.

The pièces de résistance, though, are the tributes to the Impressionist painters who made the island famous (Jatte is a kind of bowl). Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Alfred Sisley are among those who depicted the island.

Most famous, of course, is “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece. You can stand right where he did, look at a depiction of the work and gaze over the river.

There are many guides to walks you can take to revisit other artists’ sites on the island and the riverbanks.

I was done, though. I crossed over a footbridge situated just where apartment buildings were starting to sprout up and headed back along the bank toward the Métro, past the modern office buildings that are Levallois’ latest contribution to progress.