“There is always one hobbling boy left behind, to describe the song the children followed. He is the poet.”

Sabrina Orah Mark, It’s Time to Pay the Piper

Four cafés face each other at the intersection of boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse in the quatorzième arrondissement. I once lived not far away, a five-minute walk I would take just to stand at that intersection and look at those cafés.

Le Dôme, Le Sélect, La Coupole, and La Rotonde. In them, a well-dressed clientele sipped overpriced coffee that would, as the blue-grey Paris sky veered lilac, then indigo, turn into freewheeling red wine in carafes.

Few tourists; this is not the Paris of postcards and souvenirs made in cheap plastic and China. This is Montparnasse. It is ugly. But the interiors of those cafés were magnificent. La Rotonde, lush in red banquettes and tassels. Le Dôme, a dream in Tiffany lamps, green and tan leather. Belle Epoque. La Coupole, Art déco delight, with pillars painted by Matisse and Léger. And Le Sélect, all mirrors, a cat, and fifty whiskies.

Cancale oysters on crushed ice, Welsh rarebit, bouillabaisse and croques-monsieur, escargots, brie de Meaux, Kirs and Pernods and champagne and … but that is not why I used to spend hours walking around that intersection.

There was something about that place. Something great, in the air, the water, on the walls, on the tables of those cafés, ineffable. Something the diners, well-polished shoes and lives firmly planted on the ground, did not seem to notice, or if they did, were immune to. It happens.

I wasn’t. Neither were the bathroom attendants who tapped fingers on the sinks to the jazz overhead, playing to an invisible audience in rapture. The napkin folders who doodled dreamily on the polyester squares. The grumpy waiters who, on the back of receipts, furtively, scribbled poems.

Something, a feeling like a recurring Christmas morning, like a song played by a pied piper that only children can hear. Children, and star-gazing fools who don’t look before crossing streets; grownups who grew up but did not learn the difference between living and dreaming.

Once upon a time, these cafés were cheap and full of such clientele. They came in from all over the world, all hungry and cold and in debt. And in love, hopelessly, with words, music, colours, living. Hopeful, hopelessly. On these tables, from dreams, they carved out plots and statues, painted characters they had glimpsed on the métro, scribbled melodies they had caught, like fireflies, walking to their damp rented rooms sometime after dusk.

Once, at La Rotonde, “‘I was sitting opposite Modigliani. Hashish and cognac. Totally unimpressed. No idea who he was.” Picasso sat there too, and Braque, and Rivera, Gris, Soutine, Zadkine. Fools who believed they could transform the way the world sees.

At Le Dôme, Lenin and Trotsky also met, to transform the way it thinks. And Hemingway, Miller and Nin, Stein, the Fitzgeralds, how it feels. Fools: “Bohemians, priests, students, mystics and ladies of easy virtue,” who wrote and loved and drank and believed and, at closing time, crossed the street – not looking – to Le Sélect, where they continued dreaming.

Through the night and one carafe after the next, “a seething madhouse of drunks, semi-drunks, quarter-drunks and sober maniacs” read Ulysses, debated Freud – Isadora Duncan danced into the street to start a riot – and wrote until the sun rose on a world they believed could be…

different. Better. Fools who dreamt of truth and beauty and that the two could coexist. At La Coupole, Colette, de Beauvoir, Sartre, for whom existence had “its own reason for being.” Piaf, Gainsbourg, and Baker. Camus, who, on one of those tables, one night, celebrated winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

There are other cafés in Montparnasse that were once infested with fools: Le Rougeot, long gone,that served the only lunch Satie could afford. Rilke too, and Cocteau. La Closerie des Lilas, still there and that still calls its steak Hemingway, but, like the others, it has grown up and outgrown fools poor, cold, and hungry.

Maybe the world has.

No.

Not yet. Happy almost New Year. Tomorrow morning, meet me at the intersection of Raspail and Montparnasse. If it is cold, I will wait in one of the cafés. You know which one. On the table – you know which one too – there will be coffee and bread, and we will dream like the fools we are, as long as the waiters let us.