Should I drive in Paris?

In and out is fine. Driving around to drop somebody off works too. Finding a place to park anywhere near where you want to go nixes the whole idea. If you're only going a mile away, by the time you found a new parking place you could easily have walked.

When you look at the entrance of the metro from this angle on Google Streetview it kinda does look like the entrance to a parking garage: http://g.co/maps/zt4w9 The article mentioned that it happened once before......

He obviously ignored the adjacent no parking sign.

If you look at the pole in the middle of the intersection there is a sign indicating a parking garage straight ahead...that's what he saw.

I saw that elsewhere and my immediate thought was that the GPS must have told him to go there.