Paris match
“If you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity,” V.S. Naipaul once said, “go to Paris.” After two years of pandemic-induced shutdowns and travel bans — some of them instituted, it seemed at times, with the sole purpose of harrying visitors from Britain — it was oddly satisfying, rather than irritating, to be assailed once again by the sciolistic outpourings of aspiring novelists. On mild spring evenings, the Left Bank echoed with the chatter of students and veterans of the creative writing mills of North America. Paris, finally, was emerging from the thickets of depression and terror occasioned by disease, ennui and patrols of gendarmes hunting for delinquents out for a walk.
