Le Cynique D'Amour

Spring had arrived in Montmartre: the gypsies on the steps of Sacré Coeur grew bolder as the temperature raised, carriages heading into the heart of Paris featured prominently in the streets, and everyone’s lips buzzed with fresh gossip. The dancers in the Moulin Rouge were even doing the Can-Can again as a regular number.

Love - amour - was the most popular subject for the playwrights to immortalize on stage, and the musicians to visualize through song.

Love – real love, anyways – did not feature prominently in Robert Blythe’s mind, however. As Montmartre warmed up around him, the young Englishman’s heart remained cold.

Today, he did as he often did: people-watched from the outdoor tables of some café, picked something from the lot of them to examine, and consequently sought out to prove it wrong or false.

On this crisp April afternoon, he directed his cynicism at love, as he usually did. He watched a young couple, around a decade younger than his eight-and-twenty years, sit down in front of him at the café, and hold hands across the table. After ordering coffee, they proceeded to tell each other, “Je t’aime” with sappy looks in their wide eyes.

Robert resisted the urge to spit out his tea, and instead brought out his notebook and a pencil. His ring finger itched as he wielded the pencil in his left hand, which he tried to ignore.

He quickly sketched the scene before him, and then tore the picture out of the book and flipped it over, dropping it down on the table and staining it with orange pekoe. He didn’t care; he scribbled on the back of it in loose, scrawling handwriting, much too messy to be legible by anyone but himself.

By the end of it, satisfaction filled him at his judgement of their motives, and, glancing at them again, he knew their love was a ruse. It had to be.

Soon after, he left enough francs on the table to cover his tea and the croissant he’d eaten earlier, then wiped his face with his napkin and set it down. He picked up the sketch and stuffed it in his pocket.

As he walked away, a young woman around his age sat down in his now vacant seat. He didn’t see her.

She, however, saw him leave. She also saw a piece of paper stained with tea left on the table, and picked it up. One side bore writing, and the other, a sketch of a beautiful couple so clearly in love she could cry. She smiled at the gem she had found, and looked up just in time to see Robert’s tall figure turn a corner, his steps brusque.

The couple he had drawn sat directly in front of her. She held up the sketch and compared: the facial expressions he had drawn were flawless matches.

She wished he would have looked this way as he’d left; she would have loved to meet the artist of such a piece. She hugged it to her chest, and decided to keep it.

When Robert returned to his hotel, he took the sketch out of his pocket and went to place it in the book with the others: his collection of cynicism. He looked down at what he held in his hand so he could slip it into the book. He didn’t hold a sketch, but a napkin instead.

He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders; he had too many sketches and dissections of couples, anyway.

***

The next morning, rain poured down on the city. If rain did anything for Paris, especially for Montmartre, it effectively drowned the smell of piss to a sort of dull tang in the air that mixed with the scent of wet stone to create a unique, slightly more pleasant parfum.

Yesterday, no one had sat inside at the café; instead the tables outside, where Robert had been sitting, had been packed. Today, in the dreary weather, the opposite was true.