The Architecture of Happiness

by Alain de Botton

Everyone, it seemed, dropped by Chez Antoine at some point in the day. Elegant women would have coffee and a cigarette at the counter in the morning. Policemen lunched there, students whiled away the afternoons on the covered terrace, and by evening there’d be a mixture of scholars, politicians, prostitutes, divorcees and tourists, flirting, arguing, having dinner, smoking and playing pinball. As a result, although I was alone in Paris, and went for days hardly speaking to anyone, I felt none of the alienation with which I was familiar in other cities – in Los Angeles, for example, where I had once lived for a few weeks in a block between freeways. That summer, like many people before and since, I imagined no greater happiness than to be able to live in Paris for ever, pursuing a routine of going to the library, ambling the streets and watching the world from a corner table at Chez Antoine.