There were many reasons why I'd never been to Paris. Firstly, if you were young and rich in the London of the 1980s, you just instinctively knew that Paris was this old-hat, gilt-chair type of joint that was good for driving American matrons wild with glee but for very little else. As Gertrude Stein said, "Paris is where all good Americans go when they die" while the far smarter F Scott Fitzgerald dismissed it as "a postgraduate Broadway". Then there's the Sex Thing. In my experience, weekends in Paris have, like role-playing games and saucy underwear, more than a touch of what is known sexually as The Corpse-Reviver about them; something you do when your relationship is basically all over bar the (faked) shouting to try and wring a few more half-hearted shags out of the wretched thing.

Then there's the Taste Thing. I'd be the first to admit I don't have much of it myself - my maxim being the great Sir Clough Williams-Ellis', "I would rather be vulgar than boring, especially to myself" - but then again I certainly don't understand where the French in general and the Parisians in particular got their reputation for it. Don't forget, this is a country which still idolises Jerry Lewis and where Geri Halliwell is buying a house because It's Raining Men was number one here for a month, and where you can apparently always find a Mickey Rourke film playing somewhere in the capital city. Then there's the War Thing, and the stubbornly held belief in the redneck country I'm proud to come from that the French allowed the Germans to take Paris rather than risk damaging its good looks. Then there's the Great Cities Of Europe Thing, and the fact that I actually preferred the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas to Venice itself. So all in all, I wasn't much up for it.

But then again, my big thing is hotels. I would rather spend two nights in a brilliant hotel than have two weeks in an average one, and the Four Seasons George V Paris being the first ever non-Asian hotel to make it to the top of the Forbes magazine list of the most desirable place for your average bloated plutocrat to stop at, frankly I was gagging for it. Like Reid's Palace in Madeira and Pink Sands in the Bahamas, this was obviously going to be one of those establishments that was an attraction in itself rather than simply a cushy billet in which to lay one's head between dizzying rounds of sightseeing.

"Four Seasons, 50 hotels, 22 countries, one philosophy" goes the credo, and though I'm dead leftwing you've got to admire these capitalist running dogs when they really pull it off. This is a place where the maids don't just fold your clothes, but find out where you've turned the corner down in the book you've been reading and put a proper bookmark in instead! Talk about from the ridiculous to the sublime, the night before we went to Paris we stayed at the Marriott County Hall in London and it really sucked.

So I was well-disposed, for once, towards France anyway, when we arrived on the Eurostar. But still I wasn't prepared for the immediate impact the first sight of Paris had on me. My first thought was, "But they got it all wrong!" as I thought of the twee weasel words which are usually used to describe the city - "stylish" and "romantic", which also happen to be two of my least favourite words ever, standing as they both do for conformity's eroticisation of its own powerlessness. Paris isn't a bit romantic, not a bit stylish; it's splendid, which is the opposite of both. It is a big, brutal, beautiful monster with no thought or care for anything but its own glorification.

So the George V - the subject of a $150m renovation carried out over the last five years - was a more than suitable base. We were decanted into the vast and glorious English Suite, which featured prints of horses and 17th- century English beauties (pleasingly well-nourished, I noted) as well as 64 channels, a PlayStation (that played games straight off the TV!), fax and internet. With a walk-in closet only marginally smaller than our room at the Marriott and three assorted bathrooms and toilets, the shower attachment alone was one of those top of the range ones which makes rinsing one's hair quite like driving a speedboat. And it all opened out on to a huge wraparound balcony; none of that lily-livered American fear of some silly ass falling off and the hotel being sued here, refreshingly.

A worldly woman once advised me that one knew one was finally sophisticated when one had no desire to take home the mini-unguents from the bathroom. I thought I was getting there, but had not reckoned with the George V's predilection for scattering masses of huge Bulgari soaps throughout their hotel, which my mercantile eye summed up as costing around £30 a pop. I was on the verge of instructing my boyfriend, "Nip down the corner pharmacy and get a bar of Lux, baby - we won't be buying any presents for the ladies this year!" when I finally got a hold of myself.

But such opulence was typical of this hotel. It is a truly gorgeous place, trad yet surprising; for instance, every grand hotel has masses of flowers in its lobby, but the George V approached flower arrangement as though they were from another planet. A hundred swooning purple tulips lined up along the back overlooking a hundred orange roses which in turn gave way to a hundred orange tulips rising from a carpet of orange rose petals and a hundred orange tea lights. What can you do to make flowers new - they're just so wussy however you slice them. But here they looked as though Busby Berkeley had choreographed them, as though they'd been beautiful showgirls until trans formed into their flowery state. Trust me, you've never seen anything like it.

The only bad thing about a great hotel is that you wonder what the point in going out is, but we tore ourselves away. It was about eight at night; I wanted to see the Crazy Horse dancers, the Pont de l'Alma where Diana died and the Eiffel Tower - sex, death and cliché all in one easy half-hour walk. But gabbing insensibly, as usual, we went the wrong way up the Avenue George V and into the Champs-Elysées. I couldn't get over how BIG everything was - surely the French are smaller than us? Then we stopped, right in front of the Arc de Triomphe, with our mouths open.

For once, I wasn't the mocker: "What triumph was that, then?" muttered my boyfriend. "Napoleon, I suppose, like everything." Then I got it; the whole city has a Napoleon complex. It's like the Academie Française thinking Canute-like that they can keep English at bay; the whole of Paris is a monumental denial of shrunken French influence in the world. Somehow, it works, proving the theory that if you're going to tell a lie you might as well make it a big one.

Because Paris has SO much belief in itself, it isn't dragged down and cheapened by its tourist clichés in the way London is. We were accosted by a man who tried to sell us a manky red rose for €2; when we refused, he began to swat at us with it! We ran into the first restaurant to hand; "Chez Clement - your charming restaurant". A souped-up Café Rouge, it was soon filling up with real French people. The bread was stale and the petit chablis was shockingly bad, but my scallops with sweet mash and vanilla sauce were dreamy, and somehow the whole experience was deeply edifying. Though even here in a chain restaurant, I noted, the French had to make everything sound sexy - "fine and hot apple pie", "warm and tender chocolate cake". And we hadn't even been to the Crazy Horse yet!

But then Paris is a floorshow in itself and unlike Venice, in which the native culture and people seem hopelessly disenfranchised and dessicated under the ceaseless demands of day-trippers and culture-vultures alike, it wears its tourist-trap frills and furbelows with such sardonic elan that it would be churlish not to dive right in and do one's darnedest to out-cliché even the American sightseers. Buy a two-day ticket for a big red hop-on hop-off bus and sit on the top deck in the spring sunshine, shunting from the Eiffel Tower to the Louvre to Notre Dame, and forget that you ever heard the word "traveller" - being a tourist is so much more fun.

It is probably London's sense of continuity that makes it so much less dramatic than Paris; there's an overall feeling in our capital of a city muddling through whatever life throws at it. We had sensible revolutionaries (Cromwell) and kept invaders at bay with our sensible sea. Whereas France had Napoleon, the Nazis and a totally over-the-top Revolution, and seems to be in a permanently punch-drunk state of self-congratulation at having weathered them all so elegantly. Sweeping up the breathtaking Place de la Concorde, the recorded city-guide informs you cheerfully that this was the place where all the aristos had their heads chopped off; everything, from imperial conquest to violent revolution, simply seems mere grist to the mill of the endless living theatre of Paris.

In the Louvre, I saw Egyptian death masks resembling, among others, Peter Tatchell, Eleanor Bron and my friend Colin; the sculpture collection turned me into Brilliant Boy off The Fast Show, as I gaped at the seven-foot satyrs (worriedly clutching at genitals as though they'd just been told about feminism) and assorted animals. I had a really good cry in the religious section, which was something I've wanted to do all my life: to burst into tears because of a painting - I've read about people doing it, and it is always struck me as about the most soulful thing a person could do. Well, there were 200 that made me cry here. I can't say I went a bundle on the Mona Lisa, though; she really isn't all that, and in my opinion she's grinning because she knows what a monkey she's going to make of art-lovers down through the centuries.

The perfect steak frîtes and a bottle or two of Entre Deux Mers then back to bed at the George V; the most amazing dinner at the hotel's Le Cinq restaurant that evening, then out to the Crazy Horse at last to see the most beautiful girls in the world with their kit off; then up the next morning to queue for two solid hours at the Pompidou Centre for the Surrealism exhibition - and every second being totally worth it. And then home on Eurostar. "It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it" has never rung such a bell.

So there you go - I found nothing so sad as stylishness or romance in Paris but instead I found a hyper-city which more than makes up for its lack of likeability with its sheer splendour. Forget those seat-sniffing clichés such as "Paris is a woman" - there's nothing soft or submissive about this magnificently and unapologetically malest of cities. In its great open spaces, which in London would be let's-all-get-along public parks, there is relentless concrete and statuary, churches built like Roman temples and military schools complete with canons and moats; there is iron and steel and an over-riding sense of KEEP OFF. Paris is by no means a caring, sharing city. But in an age when too much touchy-feeliness can cloy the senses rather, its chill can be both a sharpener and a blessed relief. In small doses, naturellement.

Way to go

Getting there: Eurostar (08705 186186, eurostar.com) has return tickets available for £79 in standard and £135 in first class, if booked 14 days in advance. Minimum stay Saturday night or two other nights.

Getting there: A two-night stay at the Four Seasons Hotel George V, 31 avenue George V, (00 800 6488 6488, fourseasons.com/paris) starts from €1,320 per room based on two people sharing a superior room. This price includes daily American breakfast for two and all tax and service charges.

Further information: Maison de la France, 178 Piccadilly, London W1V 0AL, tel: 09068 244123, francetourism.com, franceguide.com. Time difference: GMT +2hr. Area code: 00 331. Journey time Waterloo-Paris: 3 hrs. £1 = 1.57 euros.