The Café de la Nouvelle Mairie is set on a picturesque square, just around the corner from the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. Its clients and staff are so epically French that I’m struck with the thought that maybe they are really actors.
Slowly coming-to over my second coffee, the morning after taking part in a discussion at the centre on the testy relationship between Britain and Ireland (and how it might be reimagined), I start to think that perhaps, as soon as I've left, they will go off duty, cease their eloquent shrugging, stub out their Gitanes, put away their philosophical novels to order greasy plates of fried food, and become considerably less all-round chic.
There is something about the French that enables the men to wear scarves in a way that manages to be both stylish and manly, and which makes urban poodles seem acceptable rather than an affectation. It’s an aura that elevates quite uniform dressing, so that ensembles are put together just so, and design is always tasteful with just enough wit to show that what may otherwise appear to be trying hard is actually really quite effortless. Taken together, it makes me feel untidy, and I wonder how long I might have to stay before any of it would rub off.
French style is timeless rather than faddish, and Paris is possibly not the place to be if you are given to sartorial experimentation or quirky design indiscretions. Amsterdam is the city of choice if you want to grow old disgracefully. It’s not unusual to see elderly women in miniskirts with bright purple hair and bicycles covered with flowers. Lovers of even more uniformity should consider spending time in any of the great Italian cities.
It's interesting to realise, given the immediacy and ubiquity of everything via the internet, that places can ultimately resist becoming homogenous. Despite the influx of Starbucks, McDonald's and other chains, at their core, most cities remain themselves. And so, back in my lovely caff, the all-consuming Frenchness of it is becoming a little overwhelming.
I’m not the first to have felt this. Paris Syndrome is the name given to a condition that is said mainly to afflict Japanese visitors to the French capital. Coined in the 1980s, it describes the delusions, dizziness, hallucinations and anxiety caused by the intense expectations of tourists, coupled with the fact that the reality of their experiences may not quite come up to their imaginings, even while they may find themselves swathed in a sense of unreality.
It's that unreality that comes strongly to mind later on, when we are trying to find our way to a nice spot for dinner. We have walked along the picturesque Seine and once again as Notre Dame cathedral rises into view ahead, I'm struck by how I feel I'd almost need to touch it to be assured it wasn't just a projection, or a plywood version, a trompe l'oeil for a stage set.
We stop for a coffee and a beer at one of the sunny tables outside Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore made famous as the haunt of James Joyce, and as the publisher of his Ulysses.
Except it isn’t. That Shakespeare and Company closed in 1940; this incarnation opened more than a decade later on a different site. Nevertheless, so great is my desire to be in the actual place that published a novel so brilliant that I’m still struggling to finish it, I let the myth slide over the reality in my mind.
My friend has an app for finding restaurants on his iPad, so he takes the lead in ferreting out where to go next. As we walk through the atmospheric quarter of the Left Bank, Google Maps adds its own layer to the city, as digital versions of the streets, lanes, historic monuments, and cafes of varying degrees of attractiveness unfold on top of the real ones around us. This makes it like being in a video game and in reality at the same time.
Given where we are, it's only fitting that a French philosopher got to this idea first. Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation describes how copies and symbols of things can come to so overlay the reality, that in the end the simulation replaces the real altogether.
His analogy takes the form of a fable in which an empire creates so exact and detailed a map that it completely overlays the territories it describes. As the lands themselves rot underneath it, people come to take the map for the truth: mistaking the brand or label for the thing itself, the description for the genuine experience.
First published in English in 1994, Baudrillard’s prescient work predated Google Maps by about 10 years. And yes, we end up in a restaurant that appears so authentic that once again I suspect the presence of actors. How can I tell what is really French, and what the clichés of movies and posters have led me to believe is French? It’s a conundrum that seems solvable only with a Gallic shrug and another glass of wine.
