So compelling was the newspaper review of the exhibition of paintings by Edouard Manet at the Musee d’Orsay, Paris, that I hurriedly booked a weekend in May for two.

Eleven years ago, I flew to the French capital with Bradford writer and publisher David Tipton, in part to visit David Hockney’s Grand Canyon exhibition at the ugly Pompidou Centre. This time, the journey from Shipley and back was overland and underwater by train – East Coast and Eurostar.

In 1999, travel arrangements were made over the counter with a tourist company; this time it was all done over the telephone and via computerised ticket machines at Leeds and St Pancras railway stations. I was impressed.

After checking in at the Hotel Regina in the Opera district, not far from the Folies Bergere, we walked in hot evening sunshine down to the Seine, crossed it and got on a sight-seeing boat.

In exchange for 26 euros, about £24, we had an hour’s guided tour of historic Paris, from the Eiffel Tower in the west to Notre Dame in the east. We went under more than 15 bridges including those linking the two islands of Ile de la Cite and Ile St Louis.

In neither of my previous two trips to Paris had I been on the water, so this was a first. The Concorde bridge, the student guide announced in French and then English, contained stones from the Bastille, the prison attacked and destroyed in July 1789, the first big event of the French Revolution.

Further on, the sun glistened on four great golden statues flanking the Alexander III bridge, symbolising amity between Imperial France and Imperial Russia, before the Russian Revolution in October 1917.

This bridge, which links the French National Assembly on the south bank of Seine with the buildings of the Louvre on the north bank, features memorably in Fred Zinnemann’s film of Frederick Forsyth’s political thriller The Day Of The Jackal.

The Louvre, which used to be a fortress, took more than seven centuries to complete, said our guide. It contains 45,000 art objects. It would take the most assiduous art groupie tourist three months – 24 hours a day – to view them all.

That stuck in my mind the following morning, walking in hot sunlight through the tree-dappled Tuileries Gardens to cross the Pont Alexandre III for the Orsay museum.

Unlike the Louvre, the handsomely-proportioned former railway station, built in 1889 along with the Eiffel Tower, did not take 700 years to build. Lesley and I had pre-booked tickets, about £10 each. They got us past hundreds of people outside queuing for tickets to get in; but once inside, there was yet another queue of ticket-holders, waiting to be allowed admission to the rooms showing Manet’s various styles of painting.

Perhaps the heat of the day and the extensive walking we had been doing tired me more than I realised, but the exhibition did not live up to the newspaper account of it – not for me, at any rate: quality was mitigated by quantity.

It suits the French to claim one of their own as the inventor of modern painting; but arguably that’s an accolade that could be given also to Caravaggio, El Greco, Rembrandt and Goya.

Elsewhere in the Orsay, we came across at least two items from the National Media Museum, loaned for an exhibition of mid-19th century English photographs by the likes of W H Nicholl and Roger Fenton.

A modest midday or evening meal for two in central Paris is going to cost £30 or more. The price of a Diet Coke varies from £3 to £4, although on a menu, three euros eighty or four euros looks deceptively economical.

Paris is being greened, hence the prevalence of grey-framed bicycles that can be hired. Modern mopeds and motorcycles are also popular; the young daringly roar along streets and roads, polluting the air not with noxious fumes, but a roaring, whining racket. Earplugs may prove necessary for light sleepers.

We left Paris early Sunday afternoon and, without a travel problem, got back to Shipley just before 7pm, only to find there were no trains to Saltaire. The toecaps of both my shoes were filmed with pale dust from the Tuileries Gardens. Within minutes a brief shower washed it away. Welcome home.

FACTFILE:

Jim’s trip was arranged with Shortbreaks Ltd. Tel. 0844 482 2940.

The total cost of £530 included pre-booked standard class tickets from Leeds to Kings Cross and back, and pre-booked standard class tickets on Eurostar from St Pancras to Paris and back.

The cost included two nights bed and breakfast at the three-star Hotel Regina Opera, Rue Mazagran, less than a mile from the Eurostar terminus at Gare Du Nord railway station, and two tickets to the Manet exhibition at the Musee D’Orsay.