Paris Under Duress — The City You Must Learn to See
There are two cities wearing the same name. One is the postcard — the Paris of the wide shot, the accordion, the lovers on the Pont des Arts, the city you can love without ever having set foot in it. The other is the lived Paris: the sixth-floor chambre de bonne with the toilet on the landing, the radiator that dies in January, the prefecture queue at dawn, the particular loneliness of being a stranger in a city that was built to be admired rather than entered. I have not lived in the second city. I have only seen Paris through movies, songs, and books — Victor Hugo, Sartre, Dumas, Piaf, Aznavour — and through works that refused the postcard. But here is what I have learned: the works set in the postcard Paris are nearly illegible to anyone willing to look beyond them. The works set in the second Paris become clear to anyone who has learned, through art and attention, to see that way. You don’t have to suffer in Paris to read it. But you do have to be taught by someone who understands what it means to be there without glamour. …