Matthew Mercer

The Challenge

It had been difficult to imagine, given my own struggles, that the city of Paris was once the geographical axis around which all of world literature had revolved. In some cafés, the locals (usually the café owners themselves) liked to claim that if one sat in the right spots in the Café de Flore or wherever else, they could practically feel the presence of the great writers and, I suppose, absorb the remaining dregs of their artistic residue. I once joked to Amelia, my wife, if the authors of canon themselves had heard the same tired pitches about the mystical properties of old places, that if they spent enough money in some dreary timeworn club they would begin to hear the scratching of Robespierre’s pen and be infected with the revolutionary spirit. No, for throughout the entirety of my Amelia and I’s month-long novelist’s getaway in Paris, no cafés ever managed to do me better than an excellent cup of coffee, though I’ll admit they provided me with those in spades.