Phone Service when traveling to France

[silly.ol.ryan]

I'm planning a trip from the USA to France for a week (Disneyland Paris is included on the itinerary, of course!), and I'd like to have a cell phone that can call or text within France. My US carrier says they do not connect to European cell towers. What has worked well for you?

[silly.ol.ryan]

The trip has concluded, and here is what I did:
I ordered from Amazon the “Orange Holiday Europe” sim card package.
This offered 20GB of internet data in 4G/LTE mode, plus 120 minutes and a thousand texts in 30 countries in Europe. It would have worked for 30 days from the first moment it connected to a European cell tower (my trip was 9 days, so plenty of data and time for my needs). But if I needed more, I could have logged in and created an account to buy more.
I took an old iPhone 7 that was no longer being used. Most importantly, this phone was not locked to any carrier. The kit came with a pin to eject the SIM card tray, which I thought was a nice touch (any small safety pin or push pin would have worked too, but when traveling those things are not always convenient). The instructions were to turn on “roaming” settings, power off your phone, insert the SIM card, and turn on the phone when you arrive in Europe. I also made a point to update apps, disable email, and turn off automatic app updates before I left - I tried to think of all the things that might try to automatically and unnecessarily eat my data.
One thing I didn’t realize (but probably should have) was that right in the package was my European phone number printed with the sim card. If I had realized that (or read and paid attention to the materials), I could have given it to others before I left. Not a big deal, I was able to determine my phone number when I got there in the phone’s settings.
Getting off of the plane, I powered on the phone and it connected right away. Nothing extra required – it just fired up and worked.
I was surprised that I could not send a text or make a call back home to the US – or at least I never figured out how to do it. I included a “1” in front of the number for international calling, and I double-checked the phone settings against their website’s FAQ, but I couldn’t get a text out. That wasn’t a major problem – I just messaged my family back home with Facebook Messenger. I tried to do that when I was at the hotel connected to WIFI anyway so I could save the data on the card anyway (which worked out fine - they knew not to bother me unless I called them first!).
It did exactly what I most urgently needed it to do - connected to the Metro App, Google maps, the Disneyland Paris app, airlines app, and websites so that I could get around, check-in, purchase and view tickets to all the places, tours, etc.
I hope this helps someone else in the future.
My plan B would have been to stop at one of the cell phone stores in the airport to buy a burner phone or a sim card there, but I was much more comfortable being able to get it all arranged ahead of time as it worked out.