Everyone in Paris has at least two living rooms: the first chez soi and then a second in the form of an adopted and cherished local café.

In Paris, a café is far more than just the vendor of a tasty croque monsieur: they have come to function as an indispensable extension of the home, and an integral part of daily life.

And nestled within the potent, literary landscape of the illustrious Latin Quarter, surrounded by its plethora of unassuming yet inviting cafés, I find myself vacillating between the equally indulgent acts of rambling dans la rue and returning famished au café. Just what the Fac had in mind for an industrious year abroad. 

It’s not my fault: blame history. Out of these seemingly arbitrary acts of rambling and observing, philosophers and poets have established an enduring conception of this part of the city. The French even have a word for it: flâner. 

From Baudelaire to Sartre, great literary figures have regarded such pastimes as moments of creative opportunity. The café has made its mark.

Yet it was from just such a café in 1976 that the experimental novelist Georges Perec decided to revolt against this well-established culture of observation. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris sees the pedantic, almost scientific recording of three days’ worth of observation: “It is noon. Gust of Wind. A 63 goes by. A 96 goes by” he writes. And so on and so on and so on…Whilst this soullessly empirical attempt to confine and classify time and space was always doomed to fail, his questioning and re-evaluation of a classical Parisian pastime perhaps goes to show that traditions aside, there’s always more than one way of viewing a city. 

It is, however, still pretty hard to contest the fact that thanks to Paris’ booming café culture, the quotidian has become a sort of theatrical spectacle. Heck, I was at the laverie yesterday when a tour guide ushered in his camera-clad clan and began an animated explanation of our laundry chores. Perec makes a valid point, though: laundry, after all, only gets so exciting. There’s nothing quite like an afternoon coffee (read: glass of red) in a side-street café hideaway to sooth preliminary year abroad nerves. And following a close encounter with a cockroach infestation and a first night spent in a (surprisingly comfortable) bathtub, trust me, it’s been needed. But as the weeks go by, maybe I should try not only to embrace these customary aspects of Parisian life, but to also reconsider some aspects of the traditional vie parisienne.

Balzac called Paris “a city where great ideas perish, done to death by a witticism”. I hope to find assurance that this need not be the case. Let’s call the daft headshot a conciliatory gesture to satire and a reminder of the various prosaicisms to unravel in the upcoming weeks. À suivre …