2024 Olympic Games. “Can we imagine Anne Hidalgo happy?”

Philosopher friend asks. “Can we imagine Anne Hidalgo happy?” He has clearly read too much into the last lines of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. If at night, when we are standing in front of the city hall of Paris, it does not reach his head, among the thousands of people who have come to spend the evening there, at Club 24. From the abundance of noise, under the mayor’s windows. But who sleeps in the municipality? It seems that at night the last civil servants of the city of Paris dive into the Seine to swim home. Is Leon Marchand praying for them?

What to do in a few days after the Olympic Games? Tonight, anyway, we feel like we’ve passed through so many different worlds, but all of them, these days, happy. We started the evening with the Hennessy pop-up at the LVMH house. At first we were mistaken for an influencer and headed upstairs to the TikTok party. There is no longer any genre that sustains; What would Albert Camus do? Like us, he would no doubt dive into the house cocktails, including a very surprising ready-to-drink prepared by the Cravan bar, based on Hennessy and jasmine tea. It soothes heat, all heat, tongues become loose. So we learn that the Cravan we knew at the end of the nights in the 16th arrondissement, when it was just a pocket bar making the best cocktails in Paris, is now in the LVMH fold. It’s called the success story of the night, and it’s on display for several months on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in front of the Flor. A building, no less. The city is even more beautiful at night with a cocktail in hand. We also learned that Hennessy is so connected to sports outside of France that the brand has teamed up with the NBA to create a crystal and gold basketball filled with brandy. Who will dare to dribble?

A change of scenery and a transition into the Lafayette Waiting Swamp. Tonight is the night, and we take the opportunity to visit the current exhibition, The Gold Rush. It offers a crazy and wild amusement park, imagined by the children of the professional section of the Alfred Nobel High School in Clichy-sous-Bois with the curators of the Galeries Lafayette Foundation, for young and old, and which constitutes a journey in parallel. the olympic games. The starting point. The Olympic flame was stolen halfway through Clichy-Sous-Bois. The exhibit is a fun ride, littered with clues to find the flame and its thief. We walk there as if inside an extraterrestrial universe that would accept all the fun codes of our childhood. Sometimes we even have the impression that we have swallowed a giant work of modern art, sometimes we have also discovered the “Coney Island” of the mind, futuristic and fun. On the way out, we see the last tables at Pluto, the foundation’s café-restaurant, which has won one of the best rumors in Paris since it changed hands a few months ago. Which we readily confirm having dined there the day before the Olympics. We see families, couples, girlfriends. The wine looks too orange and the dishes too cheerful. The restaurant spills out onto the street and almost blends into the bar opposite, one of the hottest and rockiest bars in Paris, especially after 9pm, Elles Bar.

Tonight the people drinking there are all kinds of strolling between the sidewalks and they seem happy, happy to be in the Paris of the Olympics when night falls and everything seems quieter than ever. In front of the city hall, people come in bunches, they smile, they stand in line singing, they want to be inside the club, all together. Paris is a party. Anna Hidalgo should be imagined happy.