In our final weeks in Paris in the summer and fall of 2020, I spent many hours wandering the city on foot. During those weeks, I wrote a number of vignettes in my notebooks so as not to forget the details of daily life in Paris. I’ll be sharing some of these on The Wandering Writer, along with audio.*
We were scheduled to leave Paris on Thursday. On Monday afternoon, K left work early and we walked to Batignolles, to the secret square. Should you find yourself in Paris and want to find this square, the name of it is Place du Docteur Felix Lobligeois, which is a mouthful, so you can perhaps understand why we referred to is as the secret square instead.
We chose a table at the cafe on the left of the circle, diagonal from L’Eglise St. Marie des Batignolles, a modest old church whose columns were adorned with festive, colorful banners. I ordered a Kir Blanc, he ordered a coke and fries. We sat and talked. It was pleasant. I was still thirsty so I ordered a Royal Batignolles, comprised of fruits rouge and prosecco. It was bright and sweet and tangy. I decided I would try to recreate it when we got home. More than a hundred times we had passed through this square. I wondered why we had never stopped for a drink here before.
Soon, however, K grew antsy and pulled out his credit card. “Why are you in such a hurry?” I said.
“The smoke.”
It was true. There were three women sitting a few feet behind us, smoking, another table of smokers to our right. This was why Paris often felt like a series of drinks not taken, restaurants not visited. K. was intensely allergic to the smoke, so sitting together in outside cafes wasn’t an option.
How can one feel nostalgia for a place or thing one never really loved? Even preemptive nostalgia, a sense that when this would be gone, I would miss it. So many days I had wanted to be somewhere else. I had wanted to be home. Now that we were leaving, I felt not remorse, but a late-onset affection, for the utter disaster of it, the chaotic sadness of this city.
On Tuesday morning I walked with K. to the Embassy, then circled back down the Champs and turned left on Avenue Winston Churchill, imagining one last visit to the Petit Palais. It wasn’t open yet, but would be soon, and a line had formed outside. I was trying to avoid people. The R-rate was up, and Paris was a red zone again.
I turned around and walked in the direction of home—back down to the Champs, right on Matignon, left on Faubourg, right on Boetie—it was the long way, for sure. I was always taking the long way because I couldn’t figure out the direct way. The streets of Paris conjoin at odd angles, you can never go as the crow flies. On an average day my fitbit easily registerd 30,000 steps or more, not out of any enthusiasm for exercise but because I was trying to get from here to there. Eventually I went left on Huassmann, finding myself once again at Pret, the big modern cafe where I’d spent so many hours writing before lockdown.
It was nearly empty. I ordered a flat white and went upstairs. Here, I promised myself, I would make progress on the final edit of the novel, the novel I’d promised to a publisher but couldn’t seem to get straight. I had one and a half hours before lunch, when I would need to leave as the workers arrived and the cafe became crowded. 173 pages to go. The Bureau de Poste sign that had been toppled by the gilets jaunes was still broken, pointing to the ground. A boy walked by in a Superdry shirt. A girl in a red summer dress. An empty bus lumbered by. For a moment I watched the passersby, masks tucked under their chins or dangling from one ear. The pandemic wasn’t over, but it seemed we were over it, or at least trying to be. Everyone was ready to get back to work and back to living. It felt so promising, to sit in a cafe with a cup of coffee and a manuscript, to do this normal thing again.
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