Drawing on James Clifford's theoretical essay “On Ethnographic Allegory” (1986), the author weaves a ten-day trip to Paris taken with her husband in August 2025 together with Clifford's text in a spiraling structure, shaping the result into a reflexive ethnographic essay. The theoretical framework of the article rests on Clifford's conceptualization of ethnographic writing as allegorical narrative and his positioning of travel as a legitimate ethnographic practice in Routes (1997). The first section explores how Paris had already been mentally constructed through postcards, newspaper stories, films, and songs long before the author set foot in the field, examining this “pre-Paris” image in relation to Clifford's notion of the always-already-written field. The second section uses the experience of a museum ticket scam to discuss the disenchantment of ethnographic writing and the permeable boundary between representation and reality. The third section foregrounds class privilege, migrant labor, and the ethical dilemmas of fieldwork, taking up Clifford's claim that difference seeps into the text. The fourth section interrogates the relationship between the salvage impulse and the narrative of loss within Clifford's framework of "ethnographic pastoral," bringing it into dialogue with the author's unsettling encounter with the seventy-two male names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower. In the fifth and final section, the passport theft the author experienced in Paris and the temporary passports she and her husband obtained are treated as allegory, serving to rethink ethnographic writing as a practice that carries both loss and the inevitability of loss. The article argues that every ethnographic text is allegorical, since the factual and the allegorical cannot be separated.