Every time when you arrive in a new city you have a mental model of that city that you didn’t even know you had. A model informed - consciously or not - by layer upon layer of media that you’ve absorbed. Photos, videos, movies, stories, art works, jokes, plays, video games, novels, all contributing to a model of a place that you’ve never been to, never seen, never known.
These models are, of course, wrong. New York isn’t what you imagine it to be. Neither is Berlin, or Istanbul, or Shanghai. Cities are always more complicated than their shadow in the popular imagination. And from the moment you arrive in a new place, you begin slowly replacing this mental model of second hand memories with the first hand ones.
But sometimes, the map is the territory. Sometimes you have that moment of disjointedness when a gaggle of American tourists have a loud conversation that sounds like it could be straight out of a sitcom you’ve watched - subject matter, accent, the works, or a when a Berlin university student walks past dressed the exact way that popular culture had told you that a 20 something in Berlin would be dressed.
From the moment we touched down at Charles De Gaulle Airport, my time in Paris was one long moment of model confirmation. I had never been to Paris. But Paris was familiar in a surreal way. I had never seen Paris, but I had known pieces of paris my entire life.
The City of Light burns so brightly in the collective imagination of global culture that visiting it is a homecoming, a medley of small epiphanies where you trace dozens of conventions to their source.
Imagine a Parisian cafe, on the street corner of an intersection of two major street line boulevards. Its a summer evening, or perhaps early autumn or late spring. You’re sitting under brightly coloured awnings as greying waiters with bowties and waistcoates swoop between the small tables. One table over a trio of young french uni students order a round of cocktails between drags on cigarettes. Over from them, an older gentlemen nurses an expresso while reading a book. Next to him a group of midwestern american tourists in early retirement are ordering dinner (unfashionably early) while shedding bum bags and the rest of their mighty panoply.
Well it happened! I saw it! Again and again. Imagine the Eiffel tower and the Champ de Mars. You can probably not only imagine the tower itself - and how it would be lit up at night, but also a huge amount of meta information. Of course the Champ de Mars is going to be unbearably touristy, swarmed with people posing for photos, and hawkers pushing cheap souvenirs and alcohol.
Well I can tell you, your instincts are correct! it’s an extraordinary feeling to be in a city that you’ve never been to, and be so immersed in the cultural imprint of a place that you can immediately say “let’s not go there, too touristy” as a tourist yourself.
Even the streets felt familiar, the portions of the Haussmann style 19th century midrises known, the way that the Boulevards intersected with the grid at diagonals almost natural. I may be an outlier here, having spent some of my childhood in DC (whose street layout is explicitly modeled after Paris) and having spent an uncomfortable portion of my life arguing with people about zoning and urbanism (and the study of Paris that it entails).
However I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Paris’s urban form is incredibly iconic within the collective human subconscious. Earlier this year I ran a DND one-shot set in a city which I described to my players as “late 19th century fantasy Paris”,1 and Midjourney needed little prompting to chuck out some incredibly on point concept art.
And the Parisians!
At least a dozen times a day I had to stop what I was doing to witness the exact portrait of a french stereotype amble past. An old man carrying a bag of baguettes under arm, complete with beret and tricolour umbrella. An intense ageless woman with horn circular glasses, ballet flats, and a trench coat on the metro.
Imagine if you will, the very caricature of a Parisian university student. He’s maybe a bit shorter than average, thin, with an artful mop of dark hair, and intense eyebrows. He’s wearing a wool coat that seems too nice for him, jeans (in a classic cut, Levi 501s or the like), but then a pair of durable black brogues and prominently displayed white socks.
You know this character. You’ve met him in countless novels and movies about an American protagonist that has gone on exchange to France or perhaps quit her job. He’s probably played by Timothée Chalamet.
And dear reader, we found him on the banks of the Sienne the other evening, on the Île de la Cité, intensely focused on a well worn Hume paperback, with a neat stack of other paperbacks next to him.
My model of Paris is of course, still wrong. The city of the Seine is ancient, and I can only see her shallows. But oh how her shallows shine.
As for what we actually did in Paris - well that involved a lot more rain than the above photos suggested, and will have to wait for another day. Until then.
The scenario was a form of magical zombie apocalypse playing upon themes of imperial decline, great power status anxiety, and scientific hubris and was of course, an absolute banger.