That is a wonderful story! “Lafayette, Revolution, merci, thank you!” ... what a wonderful way to thank her back.
You know, it’s funny, I had always heard that Parisians were very rude to tourists-and yet my experience was just the opposite. Everyone, every where was great-they gave me directions, showed me how to use the automated metro/rail pass kiosks, helped me with my bad French and made sure they got help with their bad English!
I did find the BEST people to ask for directions were teenagers-most of them speak pretty decent English. The hardest thing about that, though, was that they were pretty hard to distinguish from American teenagers, ie., they all had a cellphone in one hand and an i-pod-type thing in the other!