I went to the famous Shuangxu Cafe on the left bank of the Seine at noon on weekdays. There were not many people. I drank coffee quietly and ate the special lunch of the day. I watched the people coming and going. The Shuangxu Cafe was named after a pillar carved by two Chinese traders in the room. The 1950s intellectual Sartre and his lover Simon Beauvoir lived upstairs in the cafe, and Picasso and Hemingway were regular visitors to the cafe, which should now be mostly tourists.