There's never any shortage of formal street theatre in Paris, says Frank McNally. But for sheer entertainment, it can be hard to improve on the real thing.
Take the show I witnessed the other night while strolling through the city's Left Bank.
Although I missed the very start of the performance, it was quickly clear that the plot involved what is popularly known as a "dine and dash". Two young men had just enjoyed a meal, I deduced, and then did a runner, hotly pursued by two waiters. By the time it passed me on the opposite footpath, however, the pursuit was already descending into farce.
First came one of the diners, sprinting along the pavement of the Rue de Buci, swerving to avoid parked scooters and other obstructions. Then came one of the waiters, his apron flapping furiously as he gave chase, shouting at people ahead to apprehend the escapee.
Impeded by his uniform, the waiter had to run even harder than the diner. And with his leather-soled shoes, on a greasy pavement, I feared for him. Twice I thought he would crash into street furniture, but somehow he held his feet.
Running after him, bizarrely, was the second diner; while the second waiter - also handicapped by his apron - brought up the rear of the group. This made no sense. The logical thing, surely, was for the first waiter to abandon his pursuit and just turn around, at which point the second diner would be caught in a pincer movement.
But it's easy to be logical when you're a bystander. In any case the race rounded the corner into Boulevard St Germain, with the first waiter still in silver-medal position and the second diner clinging to the bronze.
Cancelling my plans to attend a concert in one of the city's old churches - I was late anyway - I followed the group out on to the boulevard to see how the second act went. Unfortunately, by the time I got there, all the protagonists had disappeared. In the expanse of St Germain, there were numerous possible escape routes, including the Metro. My money was on the diners completing their getaway.
But perhaps they had eaten too well. A few minutes later I passed the original crime scene, now identified by a police car and by the customers dining outside, still giddy with the excitement. A pair of American tourists filled me in on the bits I had missed, including the denouement. It turned out that the waiters had got their men - or one of them anyway. He was now helping the gendarmerie with their inquiries.
I walked on, making a mental note never to forget to pay my bill in a Paris restaurant.
The Right Bank/Left Bank divide is as old as Paris itself. The city's first landing point for goods ferried up the Seine is thought to have been where the Hotel de Ville now stands, establishing the Right Bank as the business district from earliest times.
By contrast, the churches, monasteries, and eventually the University of Paris pitched up on the other side of the river, ensuring that the Left Bank would ever afterwards be responsible for the city's spiritual well-being.
Lately there have been worries that Paris is losing its soul - traditionally believed to reside in the 5th and 6th arrondissements. The famous cafes of St Germain-des-Prés are now surrounded by Cartier, Dior and Armani, while bookshops and other independents retreat to the suburbs. Meanwhile, the forces of Starbucks and McDonalds advance from all sides.
City councillors recently established a fund to try to reverse the trend. Their intention is that, in future, commercial properties coming up for sale in the 5th and 6th will be retained for uses associated with "books, art, or highbrow cinema".
But Paris has a long history of losing its soul. The "Haussmannisation" of the 1850s and 1860s, which created the boulevards now so admired, was widely lamented at the time for destroying the old city's maze of unhealthy but charming streets. A character in a contemporary play (quoted in Edmund White's Paris memoir The Flâneur) even predicted the extinction of the Parisian stroller, now that everything was so uniform and so vast: "An eternal sidewalk going on and on forever! A tree, a bench, a kiosk! . .A tree, a bench, a kiosk! This is not Athens any longer, it is Babylon! It is not the capital of France, but of Europe."
Elliot Paul, in his classic 1942 account of life in one Left Bank street - The Last Times I Saw Paris- claimed the worst thing the Nazis had done to the city was ruin the famous old food market at Les Halles. "The belly of Paris," as it was called, was on the Right Bank. But Paul went into raptures as he recalled it - especially its acres of wild strawberries, stored overnight in the open, and perfuming the streets around.
In fact it was the French themselves who finished Les Halles off in the 1970s, replacing it with a modern shopping complex for which the word "soulless", still frequently invoked by visitors, is inadequate.
So the Left Bank's predicament is not new. And anyway, a big part of the area's problem is that it is just too expensive these days to support Bohemian life, which has fled to the outskirts or further afield. But this is happening in other cities once famous for artists' colonies, including New York. It's not so much that Paris has become a "cultural backwater", as White claims. It's that in the internet age, nowhere is a cultural backwater, so who needs Paris? Artists can live anywhere.
I wish the city councillors well in their attempts to preserve what remains of the Latin Quarter's identity. But it will be hard for them to stop the march of commerce. Money matters, even on the Left Bank. As any Parisian waiter will tell you, when he catches up, there's no such thing as a free dinner.