Episode 1. Two Cokes, Two Cafes

Paris is the artist’s home. An artist, arriving in Paris for the first time, instantly feels as if he’s returned to a place he has known and loved his whole life. The writer John Holmes explained: “So deeply embedded in the world’s dream of freedom, youth, art and pleasure has this city become that, when you arrive, you feel a strange pang evoked in you—a pang of nostalgia.”

The ordinary sights of the city are rendered extraordinary because of these associations. It is therefore the ordinary sights that visual artists endeavor to capture: the look of a bench, the façade of a building, the Seine at night, a flower market. These simple sights tug at an artist’s heart. He is compelled to grab his sketchbook, set down his easel, or pull out his camera and capture what he is feeling. An artist’s heart is set to beating by the simple sights of Paris.



Yesterday or the day before one such artist arrived: his name is David. So did another: her name is Genevieve. Will they meet, make love, and stay together for a few wild hours? Will they last longer than that? Or will the fates roll out a different story, leaving David to take up with a café singer and Genevieve with an Italian? Well, we can’t say yet. Each has just arrived—and is already completely immersed in the dream and the life of Paris.

An artist comes to Paris to be charmed. She is ready to smile, to nod at strangers, to let down her guard. Genevieve crosses Boulevard Montparnasse, her sketchbook and pens at the ready in her portfolio, and glances up: the café in front of her is called “The Dog Who Smokes.” Exactly right!

She has come for the cafes but she has also come for the café names. She has come a long way just for the sake of the cafés, for the legendary ones like Le Procope, Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore, and Brasserie Lipp, but even more for the sake of the ordinary ones like The Dog Who Smokes. She has come for the ordinary café that will become her personal spot, the place where she sits and sketches and watches the world. That is her real living room, her real Parisian home, the café on any corner.

Genevieve buys a Coke.

David is out walking at dawn, at midday, at dusk, and late at night. A student of light, a child of the Impressionists, he holds light as his subject, his very reason for being. Midday it is sunlight—at night it is moonlight and light cast by the lamps of Paris. His first look at the nighttime Seine took his breath away. He had seen it a million times in films, books, photographs, and even as genetic memory but nothing prepared him for how this first glimpse felt. He may have his own way of working and his own way of seeing that appear to owe nothing to any tradition but when he saw the Seine last night he felt like a living link to something very ancient.



In Paris the artist sees art everywhere. No matter where he has come from, he has never experienced an art environment like this. There are the great museums, the art galleries, the architecture, and the street art. Like every artist before him, David rummages through the bins of old prints at the stalls by the Seine, taking in images whose faded glory remind him that art has been made here for a thousand years.

Here a sixteenth-century map whose calligraphy is art, there a Belle Epoque print of princesses at the ball: the images may make him smile, so far has art moved in the ensuing centuries. He may paint in a way that would flabbergast these bygone artists but he is still their good friend. He handles this Seine-side art lovingly. Then he moves on, stopping after awhile to buy himself a Coke. But it is at another café, not at The Dog Who Smokes.



Will David and Genevieve meet soon? Check back and see!