Café Society

In Paris, I discover, people-watching is raised to an art form.

- Tara Isabella Burton

“Une place, madame?” Seated at the café La Bourse et la Vie (“the money and the life”), his yellow braces holding in a roll of flesh, my interrogator peers at me through round-rimmed spectacles, waves me past, and turns back toward his companions.

He is telling a story, ostensibly to them, but he clearly wants me to hear it too. It’s a folktale, from the 17th-century fabulist Jean de La Fontaine, about a heron that refuses to eat anything but the finest food. The man spreads his arms in imitation of the bird—nearly knocking one hapless diner off his feet—and begins to chirp wildly. Then he stops. He has spotted someone he knows, driving down Rue Vivienne.

On this balmy June afternoon, the doors are wide open. He calls to his friend, who brakes in front of the café. They chat, oblivious to the motorists honking around them. At last he waves his hand. The friend drives on, and the raconteur resumes his storytelling.

It is only when I glimpse the painting on a nearby wall—of an almost naked man posing, pinup style, in round-rimmed spectacles—that I realize he is Patrice Tartard, the owner.*

Someone else now catches Tartard’s eye, a motorcyclist riding by, chatting on his cellphone. This Tartard dislikes. He lets loose a stream of epithets—colorful to profane—until the rider has passed. He returns at last to his tale, winking my way as he again poses like a heron. His companions look at me helplessly.

“Typical French,” one sighs.

FEW THINGS are more French than the artful interplay of voyeurism and performance that takes place at a Parisian café. People-watching is, after all, among the most entrenched of Parisian pastimes. In the 1800s, as industrialization transformed Paris into one of the world’s great metropolises,