Coup de foudre

I am in love, I am in love: I have drunk a good dizzying gulp. I with an analytical mind and a shortsighted soul now feel completely solemn… And I walk along the streets. The Luxembourg Gardens are flooded with a great gaiety of bells. If she doesn’t love me, if she can’t be wholly mine, what difference will it make? I am in love, that’s enough; I feel generous, holy, human, trembling, so filled with things that I dare not look myself in the eye… No joking, I really mean all that I say.

-Jules Laforgue (trans. William Jay Smith)

Behold the Laforgue beauty. Go ahead and bathe in that indulgence. We walking clichés won’t tell anybody. Who are we to talk, we USC Trojans who fled the States to live out the romanticized lives of starving Parisian poets for one precious, post-semester month? NOBODY, that’s who.

Query: When M. Laforgue writes of this “she,” whose reciprocated affection he doesn’t necessarily require, is he referring to (a) a lady friend, or (b) Paris herself?

Let’s be honest here. Can’t anyone walking these stable, narrow cobblestone streets of Paris fall in love with every goddamn footstep? When we “remember to look up”—as our excessively lovely tour guide and poet friend, Heather Hartley, suggested—doesn’t every living being swoon a bit at each Parisian windowsill’s intricate little grate guarding its lower half? Mustn’t we catch our breath when we realize that the restaurant we’re idling next to has been standing since 1686 (1687, depending on who you talk to, says Heather)?

You drink in this beauty far too quickly—shoot the friggin’ thing back—and now think, Ah yes, this is the width that a street is meant to be, of course, with these buildings hugging me so close at either side! How have I lived otherwise?

Who even remembers the idea of Laforgue’s human lover anymore? Paris has swallowed her up. Sister didn’t stand a chance.

Shit, friends. I am in love. I am in love! So filled with things that I dare not look myself in the eye! No joking, children. No joking.

So let’s do this, and let’s do this the right way, shall we? Let’s raise our glasses of kir (cassis? pȇche?) and look each other in the eye with every clink. If your waiter asks if you speak French, always answer, un peu, un peu. He will likely speak to you in English anyway.

And what difference will it make. You are in love.