The soul of Paris lies on a dark street, just past an old rail bridge in the 19th “arrondissement.” A stone path leads to the building that holds it, an abandoned and now repurposed train station dressed with the painted face of a woman. Chatter is abundant along the path, tables full of old friends and new acquaintances drinking. It’s unassuming when you push open the front door, a beige room covered in colorful graffiti from lives past and a series of closed doors leading to who knows where. Around the corner is the start of the evening.
Jazz plays every night of the year from 9 p.m. to midnight. Or 10 p.m. because that’s when they feel like starting. On a large portion of those nights the music is terrible. On the few nights when it’s not, the city’s soul reveals itself. The crowd sways to whatever sort of experimental jazz the club chose for the night. Sometimes it’s Congolese, other times just Parisian. Sometimes the drummer takes over. Other times the pianist. But the soul extends into the crowd and absorbs them for the night. At midnight, the air shifts again. The crowd slowly moves downstairs, deep into the cave that holds the station up. Be it Detroit techno or deep house, EDM carries the rest of the night.
The crowd piles in from around the world. They dance quietly to the music below and scatter to talk and smoke out back in the gravel yard below the old rails. In the cave and on the gravel is where the night tends to unfold.
I’m barely 19 years old the first time I visit. I’m in Paris for spring break, volunteering for a food distribution group near Gare de l’Est. On one of the distributions, I meet a 30–year–old woman. She’s French and English—we wander the city for two hours after walking uselessly behind the people with sandwiches to distribute. We decide to meet at the station the upcoming Friday.
I wait for her on a bench for 20 minutes, men in dark clothes passing by. I’ve never been this far north in the city before and I twiddle my thumbs nervously. It’s my first solo trip after all.
When she arrives, we go in and the soul of the space moves through us for the two hours of time we’ve allotted to feel it. Eventually, we make our way downstairs, €15 tonight. It’s quiet for now.
It’s about an hour later when we meet him. Communication fails us the first couple of minutes where we don’t realize that he doesn’t speak French. He’s wearing stupid sunglasses and his hair is lightly combed up.
He tells us he’s Indian and from Thailand. He says he’s a filmmaker and that he’s here for a month to film, whatever that entails. He asks how old I am, I tell him. I don’t ask back. Eventually, she moves to the side as he and I dance closer and closer together. About as fast as we join hips, he’s kissing me. He pushes his sunglasses up and me against one of the stone arches. An unknown amount of time passes as we make out—all I can think about is how I’ve never done this before. All sorts of friends of mine have made out on the sticky floors of fraternity basements. But I’ve never been approached or stuck around long enough to be into it.
After we make out, he asks for my Instagram, a follow request I never accept. I walk back over to my new friend immediately after. “You were looking at him like you were in love with him,” she says. “Il baise bien,” I reply. She laughs, “Babe, that means he fucks good, not kisses good.” It’s been a while since I’ve had to use French so colloquially. Whoops.
It’s early July when I visit again, this time with my best friend in tow. I’ve promised her a fun night, although the two hours getting ready lead us to miss the jazz.
Like every visit, we eventually make our pilgrimage down into the cave. The techno is okay tonight, but she’s a great dance partner—always has been. I find myself far too invested in finding someone here. She’s just finished up a month studying in Spain, and I’m frankly jealous of how much action she got. Outside of my last visit to the tracks, I don’t go out clubbing much. I don’t really know people here.
She tells me to focus on myself, it’s not all that important to find someone. “We’ve got each other,” she says. I’m reminded of our ongoing bit where we agree it would be exponentially easier if we were attracted to each other, but we most definitely aren’t.
We tire of the cave after about an hour of dancing. At some point, sitting down and sharing a CBD cigarette, a group of Italian boys approach us. We chat for a bit, about nothing interesting, and go back inside. On our second round out, we see them again. They ask her where she’s from, she responds that she’s Ukrainian. “Zelensky’s more of a fascist than Putin,” they taunt. We tell them to go fuck themselves and go home for the night, too upset to stay.
It’s a bitter end to an alright night.
It’s our last date tonight, one of three. The first time we met, she invited me to a costume party two blocks away from my apartment. We spend the night trading touches among people she knew, or knew of, from high school. We kiss in the doorway to my apartment complex before she takes her Uber home.
Our second date involved cheap pre–poured plastic glasses of wine and Japanese crackers along the Seine. She kisses me in the Invalides station before I leave.
Tonight we’re at the station. I had dreamed of coming here with a partner months prior when I thought my then–boyfriend and I would be living together this summer. I broke up with him over the distance. I learned two weeks later he came to Paris anyway, much to my distaste. Europe is big enough for the two of us.
With her, things are easier. I’m leaving soon and these days I like girls more. We go inside before the jazz starts, grabbing a Red Bull vodka and a Monaco to go drink outside. Sitting on the steps, a man asks us if we’re American. He’s from Brooklyn, N.Y.—she was born there, and I’m from Philly. We chat long enough that we miss a good portion of the jazz.
After the jazz, we go out back to wait for the techno to get good, running into a boy from England and another from Australia. After sharing another one of my CBD cigs, my hand around her waist, we convince them to go back in with us. I ask her, “They probably aren’t smart enough to realize we’re here together, you think they’ll buy us drinks?” She laughs, and we convince them to buy us shots. Even on a date, we have no interest in paying for our own drinks.
An hour later, we’re dancing up against one of the stone pillars. Some hot bisexual guy asks if we’re dating, and we say no but keep dancing together. She’s smoother than I am, asking if I can just kiss her instead when I offer her my chapstick. “Dark back corner, over there, come on,” I tell her. It’s the first time I’ve kissed a girl and really liked it—not because I don’t like them, but the others were abominably bad kissers.
We end the night in a cab home, holding each other in the backseat, slipping in and out of French and English on the way back. Maybe I like girls more than I thought, at least more than men. The club can do that to a girl.
The soul of Paris is most easily reached through these dimly lit nights, with the sound of the city’s artists drumming through your chest. I don’t do well alone on those nights, too focused on my solitude to fully enjoy myself. The smoke out back fills my nostrils, a million languages running through my ears as I gaze off towards the brick offices across the street. Most of these nights end this way. Quiet, alone, and realizing I can’t put up with it anymore. On the nights spent with others, be it friends or lovers, the feeling is invigorating. The music and the bodies around me leave me with a feeling of awe. The soul carries me through.
