Parisistible

Content Warning: Brief mention of catching Coronavirus at the end of the article

Olivia Dean

Column I

Three and a half weeks in Paris slip by unsurprisingly smoothly in the right conditions. The latent warmth of an early autumn heatwave, an unsustainable lack of responsibility and the discovery of a bar that sells pints for 3 euros (Le Nouvel Institut on Bld. Saint-Germain for those thus inclined) creates a heady montage of second-a-day clips on new friends’ phones that makes you feel like part of the cast of a mid-2000s coming of age film. 

This feeling that everything is coming to a close is bittersweet, glowing the milky gold of late afternoon sunshine in my mind with the nostalgia it will surely go on to engender. My self-conscious externalisation of my identity for the past almost month filled the time for introspection, replacing it with vignettes of myself drinking by the Seine, flipping my hair on cafés terrasses and, on one tragically glorious occasion, being told I didn’t sound English. I was acting a part, knowing that this ritual of conscious memory-making would provide the fuel to get me through 9-hour days of copy editing and translating once I started work. I was blissfully unaware of my hubris in thinking that everyone was watching me spiralling away days through the city, patchworking together main-character moments to ensure I felt I was ‘completing’ my year abroad. 

Credit: Inga Dziewiatkowska, Eiffel Tower, Paris

And I enjoyed it! To call it delusional puts an unfairly negative taste on my appreciation of this lifestyle I am so lucky to have. I’ve gone through my life up to this point believing that everyone is watching me at all times: call me narcissistic, but it’s never been a deal-breaker. Yet I was so wrong in thinking that I was a romantic vision; the young Donna from Mamma Mia floating around with bohemian abandon, the muse of a thousand Baudelairean poems and a good handful of artist’s sketches to boot. Surprise surprise, Paris is crawling with Erasmus students from the UK and beyond who, I hope I’m not offending in saying, all had similar aspirations/ delusions (delete as appropriate) of their year here. The rueful privilege of being part of an institutionally elitist university is that everyone knows people from other, equally elitist establishments, so it would be more difficult to sit alone in your apartment, evening after evening, as was my greatest fear before coming here, than it would to make friends. 

In a place like this where you are irrelevant, disposable and forgettable in this way, it becomes an active daily effort to rupture the leather bubble of lethargy on another hungover morning and feel like an active participant in your own narrative. Without an established purpose or place in the social fabric of the city, it is all too easy to slip into the underbelly of quotidian monotony, never escaping the sequence of apartment, metro, office. The comfort of a routine and a safe, known space is enticing when you’re struggling to build a life in your second or third language and, for some, it is a considered and, I’d like to stress, totally valid choice. Literally just existing in another language can be exhausting, and if I’ve learnt anything in my very sheltered time here so far, it’s that you have to give yourself a day off every so often. Characteristically, I don’t follow my own advice and am out almost every day, but, as has probably become clear, I need the externalising validation of seeing friends pretty much constantly to feel like I’m really living. 

Credit: Liv Bonsall, Le Louvre

In the pauce time I’ve forced myself to spend on my own, I’ve concluded that my need to be consistently externalising my existence in Paris comes from the folkloric reputation of the French capital as the city of love, light and dreams. The cultural production that the city has propagated (to its fiscal advantage) makes its visitors feel as though there is always more to be seen, done, experienced and photographed. Famously, the Japanese government established a support hotline for the country’s tourists who are so disappointed by the reality of Paris when they visit, that they experience genuine crippling distress. Don’t misunderstand me, I already never want to leave Paris, but one’s expectations must be sagely managed. Small cultural quirks detract somewhat from the Instagrammable perfection of quotidian life here. I mentioned drinking by the Seine with friends earlier: idyllic, but look below the lens of the camera and you’ll see the dog-sized rats that infest the riverbank and, inevitably, the resident eccentric that talks to them. If you aren’t caffein-ally inclined, certain cafés will inexplicably have you paying 5 or 6 euros for a Coke. A bottle of wine in the supermarket can set you back less than 2 euros, but if you’re drinking outside of your apartment, invest in a keyring corkscrew as, in some charade of class, almost every bottle is a cork here. And as for the rumoured ‘lighter trick’, it doesn’t work. It never will. 

In the spirit of full disclosure, my period of reflection was enforced by a perhaps well-judged decision from the universe to sprinkle a healthy dose of coronavirus germs into the path of my flânerie. The saying goes that one doesn’t understand a language until one falls in love in it, but I would argue that one’s linguistic capabilities are more tightly stretched in organising a private PCR test in the midst of a pandemic over a typically poor French phone connection and justifying your lack of social security to multiple doctors. Fortunately, I was too ill to actually formulate the desire to leave the apartment, the same of which could not be said for my flatmate, who was forced in perfect health to quarantine alongside me. I suspect that this is my narcissism rearing its head once again, but as mindless hour dripped into numb hour, I realised that the brakes this illness had put on my careering joyride through life in Paris were exactly what I needed to make me profit entirely from the freedom that I now have daily, and that perhaps this happened to me for a reason. Or, a more likely scenario, somebody just coughed on my drink in a bar. I’ll romanticise and self-focalise, and opt for the former.

Credit: Olivia Bonsall, Versailles, Paris