As much as I hate to affirm clichès, I confess I fell in love in Paris. It happened on my second day there, on a still, sun-flooded morning, about half an hour after I passed by the crowds at Notre Dame. It was something I hadn't expected, something I didn't even believe I was capable of. Not anymore. Yet there it was, that chest-hollowing rush, as intense, as vivid, as all-consuming as any teenage feeling. Though experienced enough to be cautious, I did not try to fight it; I let it carry me on its furious current, without a thought or care for where it would take me. And why not? I had quit my job, ended my lease, crammed my every possession inside a wooden container, and I was in a foreign city—the foreign city for love.
I hadn't been in Paris long—half a morning and an afternoon—but it was long enough to recognise the extent to which it is lifted by love. Without love, Paris would surely exhaust you with its splendour, its riches of art and architecture and discount supermarket wine. Without love it might even register that the Seine smells like piss and everyone is an arsehole. But add that finishing spark of romance and the rudeness washes off, and a syrup glow pours from the sky. Suddenly you're in your own mediocre summer movie and Paris is little more than the pretty backdrop of your dull fling.
I'm not sure I would have fallen in love had I only seen the ground floor. It has a creditable collection, certainly, and a charming enough ambience, but many a bookshop could promise the same. What did it were the elements upstairs: the antique volumes, the alcoves for reading and writing, the piano, the resident cat. Combined, these treats were absorbing enough to offset the passage of club-footed tourists, most of whom spent far more time disobeying the instruction not to take photographs than they did browsing the books. When not strolling aimlessly by the canal in the 19th, I could be found nestled beside the placid old cat in the poetry section, fancifully imagining I could learn French from Verlaine and Rimbaud. If that weren't contemptible enough—it is contemptible enough, but stay with me—some days I would transfer to the alcove with the typewriter and hammer out the kind of execrable nonsense you couldn't even rescue a comma from. I thought about taking this to the extreme and becoming a tumbleweed—one of those aspiring writers who, in exchange for some odd jobs and a one-page profile, sleep free of charge in the bookshop—but I felt enough of a fraud as it was.
A couple of doors down, beside Shakespeare and Sons' rare book outlet, there is an affiliated café. Having marinated myself in snatches of books I'd never finish, I would slip into a free spot overlooking the Seine—or rather, the road beside it—and enjoy a filter coffee and a slice of lemon pie, like the irredeemable beacon of privilege I am.
"Did you go to that bookshop again today?" my French friend would ask, returning to the apartment to find, as always, an Australian redolent of hummus and €2 sauvignon blanc at his table. Was it a note of resentment I could detect? Resentment, perhaps, at my overstaying my welcome in France and spending all my time in an English-language bookshop? It was difficult to tell with those erotic French voices. Maybe he was simply trying to warn me that my love affair would not last, that it could not last. He would have been right, too. It didn't last.
One day, having cleared my afternoon of any canal-strolling, I climbed the narrow winding stairs to the first floor and discovered that all the alcoves were occupied. I had expected this would happen sooner or later—it would have been controlling of me to demand otherwise—but it was still painful to see it. Even the cat appeared to be missing. I sought recovery in the cafè, repeating my favourite order, but the lemon pie turned up pale and waxy and the coffee had an acrid bite.
I stepped outside and the world was restored to grey.