PARIS — I have just read another piece about French decline and malaise. My first reaction is: Enough already! As I’ve said before, malaise is to France as the Royal family is to Britain: a perennial condition that each people lives off.
 

巴黎——我刚刚又读到一篇以法国的衰落和不安情绪为题的文章。我的第一反应是：够了！正如我以前所说，不安情绪之于法国，就如同王室之于英国：是每个人早就习以为常的东西。

谁说法国衰落，她只是魅力独特

 
It was 18 years ago that, as a correspondent in Paris, I wrote: “France today is racked by doubt and introspection. There is a pervasive sense that not only jobs — but also power, wealth, ideas and national identity itself — are migrating, permanently and at disarming speed, to leave a vapid grandeur on the banks of the Seine.”

 
18年前在巴黎当通讯记者的时候，我曾经写道：“怀疑和自省的氛围让今天的法国备受煎熬。人们普遍感觉，正以惊人的速度永远离法国而去的不只是工作机会，还有权力、财富乃至国家认同感本身，遗留在塞纳河岸的唯有空洞乏味的的伟大。”

Well, almost two decades on France is still here, as are the jeremiads that accompany it. One should not mistake grumbling, in its French iteration, for unhappiness. That would be far too literal-minded, almost Anglo-Saxon!

可是，过了将近20年，法国依然伫立在这里，与此同时，关于法国的种种哀叹依然没有消散。别以为法国人翻来覆去地发牢骚，就表示他们不幸福。那样的话就太死脑筋了，简直堪称盎格鲁-撒克逊式的死脑筋。

France is stubborn. It is an idea, after all. Ideas must be defined against something. France has little choice but to define itself against the English-speaking world, rushing after money when other consolations abound. It was the French epicure Brillat-Savarin who noted: “I have drawn the following inference, that the limits of pleasure are as yet neither known nor fixed.”

法国很固执。说到底，它是一种理念。理念总得靠点什么来衬托和突显。法国别无选择，只能用放着那么多别的慰藉不要、偏去追逐金钱的英语世界来衬托和突显自己。法国美食家布里亚-萨瓦亨(Brillat-Savarin)曾经说过：“我得出的结论是，到目前为止，快感的界限既不为人所知，也非固定不变。”

Perhaps it’s the perfection of Paris in these early spring days that makes all the chat about moroseness seem facile — the sweet breeze, the wide bright sky on the banks of the Seine, the low-slung bridges with their subtle fulcrums, the early-morning silence (enveloping enough for the sound of a woman’s heels on the sidewalk to be audible), the city’s gentle awakening, the curve of a zinc roof, the flat-topped pollarded trees along the gravel pathways of the Tuileries, the etched shadows on limestone, the streets that beckon and the boulevards that summon.

或许是这早春巴黎的完美无缺让一切与郁闷有关的话题都显得没了意义——习习的清风，塞纳河岸上方广阔明亮的天空，有着精巧支点的低矮桥梁，清晨的寂静（寂静到可以听见一个女人穿着高跟鞋走在人行道上），缓缓苏醒的城市，锌皮屋顶的曲线，杜乐丽花园(Tuileries)里的碎石小径两旁顶部修剪得平平整整的树木，映在石灰石上的影子，摆手致意的小街巷，高声招呼的林荫大道。

If this is the vapid grandeur of a fading power, I’ll take it!

如果这就是一个衰落大国的“空洞乏味的伟大”，那我愿意接受！

It is April, “mixing memory and desire,” as T.S. Eliot put it. Cruel would be an overstatement. There are places you come to at an impressionable age that will never leave you. Forty years ago, I lived as a student in a tiny apartment at the bottom of the Rue Mouffetard. I was studying French and giving English lessons three times a week in a lycée in a southern suburb famous principally for its prison. I would return in the early evening and wander around the market — the mackerel glistening on their bed of ice, the barded chickens, the plump endives, the serried ranks of eggplant, the bawdy invitations to buy the last of the silvery sardines for a song, acrid Gauloise smoke in the wintry air. Paris was release from a crimped Britain. A single window on the city was enough.