The charm of the unhealthy intellectual
The famous pose of Albert Camus
“The Good Parisian drinks all, devours all, swallows all.”
Louis-Sébastien Mercier
“Paris is the city of joy, where the naïve are taken by the neck and blackened on the scaffold, and where villains hold all sway. Get out of the thick city walls as quickly as you can! Purse-cutters and knifemen lurk in the dark. Beware of the rope!"
Paris is indeed the city of nostalgia, venture and romance. It is the city where the profound nature of human sentiment is emphatically expressed in all of life’s domains. It is a city where the sound of love making is anything but taboo and the notion of confiding in others is perceived as intellectually stimulating and personally enriching. Paris is a city where the weak are forced to find their feet and the strong never assume their position at the top of the podium.
From the founding days of the Sorbonne University, when academics used their gleaming social status to critique the nobility and students where fascinated not only by theology in traditional terms, but also of questions of thought and substance, Paris has acquired the role of a metaphysical wanderer always nourishing the concept of individualism.
French intellectualism basis its foundation on an argumentative dialect whose goal is to provide a calculated response to life’s toughest questions. The above has produced a mythical figure which I like to call the ‘charming malade’; a Parisian heart-throb who passes his days in a tragic bubble of reflection, whose underlying objective is to impress his peers while simultaneously seeking their compassion.
You see him everywhere, in the street, drinking a café, at the bus stop. He is seductively unshaven, somewhat aged looking despite his youthfulness and charmingly withered from an over consumption of coffee and cigarettes. The ‘charming malade’ is inquisitive, touching, humane looking, often egocentric and in many cases considered to be the most sensitive male counterpart to Parisian society.
This Wordsworthian try hard is guilty of a wild sexual appetite said to be confused with the emotions of love, romance and intrigue. There is a certain selfishness in this breed of Parisian which is an intrinsic element to his hysteria.
Evidently a product of urban temptation and an elevating intellectual history with the imagery of Albert Camus at its centre, the ‘charming malade’ is a shivering wreck of narcissistic malaise with an innate desire to share his passions and spread his intellectual seed as far as possible..
Like with any categorical description of a social type there are the good, the bad and the ugly. However it is worth being wary of the ‘charming malade’ and his soul destroying capacities. Romantic spirits are always accompanied with a certain amount of torturous pain; perhaps an integral part to the notion of romance. As described by Andrew Hussey, Parisian love is a story “in the vein of delicious cruelty.”
