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In Outer Mongolia I had plenty of time to think about Paris. In nomads’ tents, over yet another bowl of sheep entrails, it is remarkable how often one’s thoughts turn to the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Café de Flore. In these wild regions, Paris stood for Civilisation, and more crucially, for Love. I think I must have been lonely. To lessen the monotony of long hours in the saddle we took turns telling stories. My translator came up with the idea of ‘Describing A Romantic Evening.’ She conjured a hot date in Ulan Bator, the capital, that included a white limousine, a bouquet of roses, a boy friend in a dinner jacket, and a visit to the ballet. Anyone familiar with the grim realities of Ulan Batur will admire the vigour of her imagination. The horseman was more of a realist. A swarthy chap with a cauliflower nose, he didn’t even bother with a date. His romantic evening was a bunch of his mates, a bottle of hooch and a moonlit night in a wood. The latter was his only concession to romantic flight of fancy. Mongolia is largely treeless.

My evening was in Paris, indulging all the city’s romantic clichés. Sunset would be enjoyed from the steps of Sacré-Coeur with all Paris spread beneath our feet. There would be champagne cocktails at Harry’s Bar, a performance of Madam Butterfly at the Opera Garnier, dinner at La Coupole, a late night tango bar off the Boulevard de Sebastopol, an even later night dance hall in Bastille, and finally a walk along the banks of the Seine at dawn beneath the Pont des Arts and the Pont Neuf. My jacket would be thrown over my shoulder. My date, carrying a rose bought from an itinerant flower seller, would have taken off her shoes. An accordion would be playing somewhere. Dawn would be seeping into the sky beyond the spires of Notre Dame. We would say foolish things that would change our lives.

Back home, I couldn’t wait to get to Paris. Rather conveniently, my own Love Interest happened to be there. It was a dangerous moment, time to turn fantasy into reality. I caught the 12:55 from Waterloo.

The literary tradition is daunting, and not exactly strong on happy endings. The romantic failures in the City of Love would fill a library: Héloise and Abélard, Flaubert, de Laclos, Stendhal, Proust, Victor Hugo, Henry Miller, Scott Fitzgerald. Good-time guy Samuel Becket spent his life in Paris; his plays are hardly an advertisement for healthy human relationships.
I stepped down from the train with some trepidation.

She was waiting at the gate in the Gare du Nord, and all seemed right with the world. I hadn’t seen her for six months. She looked fabulous in a beret and a leather jacket. For a romantic weekend in Paris, the Mermaid was appropriately inappropriate: beautiful, flighty, inconstant, in a word, a bombshell. I was always waiting for her to explode.

We booked into a charming little hotel opposite Notre Dame full of engravings of Victor Hugo’s Esmeralda in bed with a goat. In the back office sat a remarkable Parisian apparition, La Madam, a grand dame complete with pet poodle, cigarette holder, and something dead around her shoulders. A rapid turnover of strikingly handsome young men worked her front desk. What Madam didn’t know about amour was not worth knowing. She gave us a room with a view of the cathedral, an outside key to allow for late revelries, and a word of advice: the Moroccan cleaners tended to ignore the Do Not Disturb sign.

Things got off to a rocky start. The steps of Sacré-Coeur, swarming coach loads of day-trippers and battalions of tacky souvenir sellers, are more like the Tourist Experience from Hell than a romantic interlude. At the opera it turned out it would have been easier to have been taken on as the leading tenor than to get a ticket. The tango bar was closed, Harry’s was full of solid American businessmen, long on loud conversations about the futures market, short on whispered endearments, and the weather seemed a trifle chilly for bare feet.

But love is about improvisation and I was not to be put off. It was early autumn. The days were clear and bright and in the Jardin du Luxembourg the leaves were gathering round the feet of young lovers from the Sorbonne, who shared benches and secrets. Outside the cafes down the rue Saint Michel, people were sitting in the sun watching the procession of cruising flâneurs.

For the English Eurostar has meant that Paris has replaced Brighton as the rendezvous of infidelity. British life is immeasurably improved by this fact; prim Georgian terraces overlooking a grey sea is hardly a setting for passion. In Paris infidelity is part of the fabric of life. There is even a time of day devoted to it - cinq a sept - the hours of the mistress, neatly slotted in between the work day and the return to evening domesticity. In France politicians are not pilloried in the tabloids for having affairs; it is expected of them. No sensible French voter would want to trust the running of the country to a man without a mistress.

In Paris even intellectuals are great lovers. Jean Paul Sartre, not exactly leading man material, went through lovers like a packet of Gauloises in spite of a lifelong relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. For her part she threw herself into serial passions with men and women alike without anyone thinking the worse of her.

We started our romantic weekend with a couple of breakfasts. We both loved Parisian breakfasts so much that we generally tried to fit two of them into a morning. From there it was a short run to lunch at the Café de l’Industrie. The name may not inspire but le Café de l’Industrie on the edge of Bastille is one of those illusive French cafes that feature in 1930’s photographs of Paris: couples on the verge of embrace, caught reflected in mirrors advertising pastis. There were plants and plain wooden tables and old photographs of French actors with handlebar moustaches and waitresses who looked like they moonlighted as artists’ models. You felt, if they took their kit off, you might recognise them from the Musee d’Orsay. All around us bohemian couples were engaged in discreet tête a tête’s. We shared a pitcher of claret and plates of charcuterie and salad.
It was the kind of Parisian lunch I had dreamed about in Mongolia while gnawing on marmot bones.

Paris is a city for walking, for diving into the maze of back streets, and for the sweet illusion of lovers that what you find and do is found and done for the first time. In the Place Lépine we bought great bunches of lilies and tiny cactus plants, one of the Mermaid’s odder passions, to fill our room. We went to see films on wet afternoons in empty cinemas, French films with lots of rather tortured people agonising about love and smoking too much. We shopped for antiques in the Place des Vosges, the finest square in Europe where 17th century husbands fought murderous duels with their wives’ lovers. Near Palais Royal, a den of debauchery in the 18th century, we found a wonderful salon de thé, A Priori Thé, in the marble arcades of the Galerie Vivienne which we happily believed was unknown to anyone but ourselves and a handful of very thin French women. We bought lingerie we couldn’t afford in the tiny boutiques off Place des Victories and cheese and fruit and chocolate macaroons in the markets of rue Moufftard where Hemingway enjoyed the sweet innocence of his first years in a garret with his wife. We went to an exhibition of the 18th century romantic painter Prud’hon in the Petit Palais, a series of love allegories, soft-focus theatricality full of bosomy young women and mischievous cupids, in which Love and Reason were seen as mortal enemies. We savoured the bedroom scenes and ignored the message.

When we emerged the Eiffel Tower seemed to be holding up the draperies of the descending dusk. Whichever way you look at it, the phallic Tower is a monument to Love. It is a little known fact that the designer, Georges Eiffel, was also the designer of the garter belt. Turn the Tower upside down and the connection is obvious.

One afternoon we went to the racetrack on the grounds there is something sexy about horses and throwing money away. It was a quiet meeting at Longchamps with small groups of serious men in caps drifting about the grandstands. We watched the horses in the parade ring, leggy and smooth-flanked and snorting hot breath into the chill afternoon, and chose out bets on the basis of their names. In the four o’clock Heart’s Delight romped home at seven to one with our hundred francs riding on him, and we treated ourselves to a bottle of champagne in the China Club, a sophisticated joint in the Bastille that is a cross between a colonial club and an opium den.

On Sunday afternoon we took the train to Joinville. Before the First War middle-class Parisians came to Joinville to dance in the riverside cafes to the sweet sounds of the accordion. Chez Gégène, an old fashioned dance hall specialising in the bal musette, is the one of the only survivors of this Parisian tradition. We ate mussels and salad overlooking the banks of the Marne then went through to the dance hall where a band of accordions and violins were starting an energetic tango. The dancers had dyed hair, pale complexions, and gold necklaces, and that was only the men. The women wore full skirts and frilly blouses and hairdos that were a serious threat to the ozone layer. Everyone was in post-lunch high spirits. The Mermaid taught me to waltz, leading me gingerly through the immaculate couples. We laughed too much and bumped into people and I can’t remember how we got home.

On the last evening we went to La Coupole. It was the Mermaid’s birthday. The oysters came on trays of crushed ice borne by waiters in waistcoats and long aprons. I had secretly ordered a birthday cake and it made a grand theatrical entrance. The lights in the whole restaurant were dimmed and the cake, gleaming with candles, floated above the dark tables, between the fat columns, past the fountain, to arrive in front of her as the whole restaurant broke into Happy Birthday. Her eyes shone. She closed them to make a wish. I watched her eyelids fluttering as if she was dreaming. She seemed blissfully happy. Then she opened her eyes and blew out the candles in one go.

But I was wrong; she wasn’t happy. On the banks of the Seine, when all Paris seemed to have gone to sleep and the great boulevards were ghostly silent, she informed me that she felt it would be better if we parted. It was one of those moments when everything seems to stand still. The clochard urinating underneath the Pont des Arts seemed to pause in midstream and the dog on the quay stopped scratching his fleas and stared. My heart was pounding. I don’t remember her reasons - something about my long absence in Mongolia and another man. Next morning I went back to the Gare du Nord, a changed man.

Three days later, she telephoned me in London. Her call was tearful. She had made a mistake. She could not live without me. In the background I could hear the bustle of a cafe, the hiss of a coffee machine. I felt I could smell our breakfast croissants.

I wasn’t convinced. Perhaps the break was for the best.

“We’ll always have Paris,” I heard myself saying.

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