We will be renting a car at CDG and immediately leaving Paris for Burgundy, Loire and Normandy for a week and then spending a week in Paris. I was thinking it would be less stressful to return the car back to CDG and take the metro to our Paris lodging in St. Germain. Does it make any sense to return the car closer to our hotel in central Paris instead? I don't know how the driving would be inside Paris. What do you think?

We usually try drop a rental at Orly instead of CDG. It is closer to Paris and an easy taxi ride to our hotel or apartment.
Consider it if approaching from the south (if Burgundy is your last stop.)

Either airport is just as stressful as driving into Paris. In any case, once you have been driving in France for a week, your jitters about Paris traffic should have dissipated. Leaving the car at Gare Montparnasse is easy.

If you are coming from Normandy, you might want to see if your rental agency has an office at the Porte Maillot on the west side of Paris. In general I agree with Kerouac, but I would add that it is not always easy to find the actual rental office or the garage where to park the car. Close is not good enough, especially with non-parallel one-way streets. Make sure you have a Mappy or Michelin neighborhood map printed out, and maybe have the directions printed out too.

I posted this a month ago:

http://fodors.com/forums/threadselec...p;tid=34866860

I don't find driving into Paris that difficult. However, please ask specifically where the car should be return to. In my case, the Europcar lot is in a shopping mall's parking garage across the street from the actual office. And nobody mentioned this to me.