The Judgment of Paris

He spoke to her in a gentle French. The woman with curly brown hair and a pretty disposition smiled around her cigarette and responded with a few short words. He leaned back and threw out his hands in question. She returned to her wine and looked across the boulevard where a crowd had gathered around a little man in a crumpled suit standing inside a fountain and singing at the top of his voice.

I sat a few tables down, drinking my coffee and attempting to jot down a few thoughts but I stopped midway. My words were worthless. My books could hold nothing to this city. I began watching the people around me: the graduate student reading a book (that I suppose roughly translates to The Illusion of Economics) and his inability to silence his chirping phone; the large man watching while his infant son plays on the cobblestone and his dog barks violently at strangers; the American family, a man, a woman and who I suspected to be the woman's father by the way he and she spoke to one another, all drinking red wine; the waitress running about but never seeming harried; this couple, dressed lazily but obviously enjoying the tug and pull of erotic attraction.

(Is it possible that the language one speaks shapes the mind and ultimately the culture, and not the other way around? The man at the table down the way from me was not effeminate but neither was he playing machismo. In fact, I've yet to see a man who plays machismo. They wear scarves; they are put together; they are not afraid to show affection to anyone, but especially the opposite sex. French is language that can't be bothered with practical things--it dips and bows like a dancer in the wings.)

I saw the game working itself out into the present, into the historical, into this moment before me while they ate steak tartar and I sipped on my espresso. The lovers were forever replaying the judgment that Paris the man made, and from the looks of it, Paris the city has forever followed his example. Paris has always chosen love.

It felt as if I were lacking something as I dashed a few more sentences off into my notebook, like I'd seen the picture of a man I thought I'd recognized, only to realize I'd known his children. Is it enough, I wrote, to choose love? It felt a ridiculous question.

I finished my espresso and left a few euros on the table. The sun slipped from behind the clouds as I walked up the stairs, ascending Montmartre, the light falling on the man in the fountain, on those gathering around him and taking photos and laughing, on the couple--the man waving his arms around, the woman lazily watching him.

I crest the hill and enter Sacre Coeur as one enters into a story told in a foreign tongue. I light a candle and pray.