Ophelia de Vere

  There is probably not a single day on which one has even the faintest chance of encountering La Parisienne in the French capital. Not in a trench coat outside Café de Flore, not with Jean Seberg’s pixie cut on the Champs-Élysées, and not wearing red lipstick, a black turtleneck, and holding a half-read copy of Duras’s The Lover on one of the green chairs in the Jardin du Luxembourg. In fact, the real-life Parisiennes Caroline de Maigret, Anne Berest, Sophie Mas, and Audrey Diwan would not recommend Duras at all in their self-mocking style manual,  How to Be Parisian, as the key to cultivating one’s allure. No, the surprisingly manageable reading list for aspiring Parisiennes — regardless of actual postcode — tends to feature Camus, Sagan, Flaubert, and Proust. Anyone who has ever patiently worked their way through seven volumes of Proustian subordinate clauses, however, knows that the literary masterpiece has only limited relevance to the “quintessential Parisian art ...