ABSTRACT
If you are lucky enough to find an empty table at Les Deux Magots on Boulevard St Germain you can join in the favoured pastime of people watching, a constant procession of elegant ‘dames’, toy dogs, eccentrics and badly dressed tourists. If you spend enough time at the Deux Magots (‘Magot’, not what you think – ‘a stocky figurine from the Far East’), you are bound to see someone you know or, as the website has it, ‘you are sure to come across a personality from the art world, literature, fashion, entertainment and politics’. You may be seated where James Joyce, Bertold Brecht, Stefan Sweig, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, and Hemingway once sat. You may of course choose to take your pastis next door at the Café Flore where Sartre, Camus and Picasso were regular clients. At either of your chosen venues you are a short stroll from the Luxembourg gardens, Saint Suplice (the unlikely site for the filming of Angels and Demons), the bookstores on Boulevard Saint Michel, the bouqinistes on the Quai, the Sorbonne and the Musee d’Orsay, home to a stunning collection of the impressionists. It is here, just in front of the museum on Rue Bellechasse, that you can catch the bus to a leafy residential area in which the OECD headquarters are located.
