I will try to connect two things that don’t make much sense together: ABBA and Les Miserables.

“I Can Still Recall Our Last Summer” is one of my favorite of ABBA’s (many) bangers. “The summer air was soft and warm, the feeling bright, the Paris night.” Like a summer night, sound is nostalgic sticky sweet, and a little clubby and dreamy. In the song, the speaker reminisces on “our last summer”, the last one she spent long ago with “Harry” either before they parted ways or married, it’s left ambiguous, but he remaines “and now you’re working in a bank, a family man, a football fan… how dull it seems, yet you’re the hero of my dreams.” Either way, it’s what seems like the last summer of youth.

In one of my more melodramatic tendencies, I’ve been listening to this song on repeat, taking breaks from Bookpacking to “songpacking” as I take “walks along the Seine” or enjoy “Paris restaurants, morning croissants, in the tourist jam round the Notre Dame.” Yes, it’s a profoundly touristy song.

It’s also a song about nostalgia for being young, and about Paris. Specifically, what people project onto Paris. It’s about idealism and associating this city with youth and optimism. One of the reasons why I like this song, aside from its silly Eurovision flair and association with Mamma Mia, is that I feel like in some ways this trip is the end of my last summer.

At least of my youth. I’ll still be young next summer, and for quite a few summers after that. But I’m a senior in college with no plans for continuing my education. This is my last summer before I’m a “real adult.” My last summer break in between school terms. This is the last time I’ll be on a school trip. This is the last summer I’ll be able to call myself a student. So, this trip in Europe, aside from Bookpacking, to me feels like a farewell to being a student and organizing my life as in between jobs and big responsibilities.

The young foreigner “finding themselves” in Paris is an excruciatingly cliched plot premise. But I think even for the French, Paris, like any big city, is a place to seek out for adventure. When discussing Parisian youth and idealism, it’s impossible not to bring up the ABC’s. The ABC’s are a student group in Les Miserables, a ragtag bunch of university kids hanging around the Cafe Musain in the Latin Quarter, drinking to the Revolution.

For them, it really is their last summer, as every one of them are (spoiler alert) massacred at the barricades in the July 1832 revolution. I wondered, as I listened to the song, what they would have thought of it. And who in the group would like ABBA and who wouldn’t. Perhaps not the song itself, but the idea of Paris representing youth.

In my gamin piece, I mentioned that Victor Hugo chooses to personify the city of Paris as a young person. I said it’s young because everything seems in front of Paris, it feels endless, boundless, and like things are just getting started. But in the case of the ABC’s, and this silly song, I’d also like to add that something about Paris feels dreamy, idealistic.

Radical movements are fueled by idealism, and often led by young people. In class, we studied student protests in 1968 that caused the famed barricades to go right back up. We also learned about Paris being a “theatre” for displays of protest and movements across history.

I think what makes Paris the center for radical and idealism is the same thing that makes it a center for dreamy foreigners to skip around and have fun. It’s that sense that anything is possible, that there are plenty of corners to hide in, and plenty of open cafes to sit in community with others and discuss the state of the world.

Even old people here act “young,” dancing in the street, walking their dogs late at night, dressing in the latest fashion. Maybe the sense of youth is just some sense of Parisian spirit and savoring of life. I felt a lot of connection with the ABC’s. I’m not one to throw myself at the barricades. But both the ABC’s and our class are, essentially, young people trying to find our way in the same city.

As our class wandered around the place where the Cafe Musain might have been, I wondered what they all thought Paris represented, and whether, like many young people, it was a place to find purpose.