Maybe to write about Paris I ought to leave, to distance myself from it, if it is true that all writing starts out from a lack or an absence. Or else be more inside it, but for that I would need to have lived there from when I was young, if it is true that it is the first years of our existence, not the places of our maturity, that shape the world of our imagination. Or rather: a place has to become an inner landscape for the imagination to start to inhabit that place, to turn it into its theatre. Now Paris has already been the inner landscape of such a huge part of world literature, of so many books that we have all read, and that have counted in our lives. Before being a city of the real world, Paris for me, as for millions of other people in every country, has been a city that I have imagined through books, a city that you appropriate when you read. You start in childhood, with The Three Musketeers, then Les Misérables; at the same time, or immediately afterwards, Paris becomes the city of History, of the French Revolution; later, as your youthful reading progresses, it becomes the city of Baudelaire, of that wonderful poetry of over a hundred years ago now, the city of painting, of the great novel cycles, Balzac, Zola, Proust …When I used to go to Paris as a tourist, it was still that Paris that I visited, it was an already known image that I recognized, an image to which I could add nothing.
