Tonight Émile asked me to accompany him to Le Select. Outside the café, it was a warm night, so there were hordes of people sitting on cane chairs. Inside, patrons were packed like in a crowded cafeteria. This is not the romantic notion of Montparnasse anymore. I heard the American and German accents and saw that what they said is true: There are more tourists than artists here now.

For dinner, we were meeting with Man Ray and his girlfriend, Kiki, but the photographer’s French was as terrible as my English, so we talked at each other, gesturing and requiring Émile to translate, until we both nearly fell over in our chairs with laughter at our wild arm movements. Man Ray had a hook to his nose and the most intense eyes I have ever seen on a man, yet I found him handsome. When you spoke, he focused intently on your voice—even if he could not understand a word of my French. It’s a heady, sensual thing, as though I am the only person in the restaurant. I think Émile’s gaze has opened something up in my soul, like the breeze that flows from the window after a stuffy summer night. While Man has made a living as a portrait photographer, he longs to be a painter. There was something about Émile’s work that inspired him. At first, I was intimidated by both Man and Kiki, but to my surprise, they’d had a ticket to Le Cirque Secret recently and were in awe of me?

While they don’t know it and would completely disagree about it for hours, Émile and his friends were not unlike circus performers—each night they displayed their works and read their poems to the growing crowd of admirers outside places like Le Dôme Café or Café de la Rotonde, never seeing that they, too, were contained under their own big top. They are too close to observe that there is change coming to Montparnasse, subtle for now, but I fear it will soon loom large. The artists and intellects have become the attractions. The tourists go back to their Right Bank hotel, then back home to America, Germany, or England to regale their friends with their proximity to the writer Hemingway or the photographer Man Ray like they bought tickets to see them. As an outsider to this world, I’ve observed that the sea of expats with extra pocket money don’t care about Dada versus cubism nor understand the art of the unconscious mind as dear Salvador Dalí does. Émile’s friends, so wrapped up in their own conversations, haven’t seen the shift that has occurred around them, but I fear this special place is coming to an end. I can almost smell it around me, like that most fragrant scent of the ripest fruit just before it begins to rot.