On The Caverne du Pont Neuf

I mentioned the Pont Des Arts, but I think I got away with it…….

Friday 22nd May, Paris

There is a particular species of French attraction that exists chiefly to make you feel culturally deficient, and the Caverne du Pont Neuf is its current reigning champion. I had come, as one does, expecting a cave, or possibly a bridge, or — given the name's magnificent geographical confidence — some combination of the two. What I found instead was a car park roughly the size of Belgium, a ticket queue that moved with the urgency of continental drift, and a gift shop selling €14 fridge magnets shaped like stalactites, which is precisely the sort of thing that makes you question whether civilization was worth the trouble.

The word everyone kept using, in the reverent hush usually reserved for cathedrals or expensive cheese, was place. Not the cave, you understand — the sense of place. There were laminated panels about it. There was, I am fairly sure, a man in a fleece whose entire salaried existence was devoted to it. "You must let the place speak to you," a guide told our little cluster of shuffling anoraks, and I stood there dutifully for some moments, letting it speak, and the only thing it said was that I had paid forty euros to stand in a damp corridor next to a German family who were already asking about lunch.

Now, I am not immune to atmosphere. Show me a genuinely old thing and I will go weak at the knees like anyone else. But there is a difference between a place and a sense of place, and the difference is roughly the difference between a meal and a laminated photograph of a meal. The Caverne du Pont Neuf, I gradually understood, is not so much a location as a feeling that has been focus-grouped, brand-consulted, and fitted with an accessible ramp and a €9 audio guide narrated by a man who sounds permanently on the verge of tears. It is authenticity, but the industrial-grade, dishwasher-safe kind.

What nobody mentions, of course, is that the actual sense of place — the real, unfiltered, unmonetized article — is available for free approximately eleven metres beyond the perimeter fence, where an old man was leaning on a gate watching the whole enterprise with an expression of such profound, weathered contempt that I nearly wept with recognition. There was your sense of place. It smelled of gauloise and disapproval and it had not, so far as I could tell, ever once described itself as an "immersive heritage experience." I wanted to buy it a drink. I settled for photographing it, badly, and being glared at.

I left, as one always does from these places, tens of euros lighter and vaguely convinced I had done something educational, clutching a stalactite fridge magnet I did not want and a pamphlet informing me that I had just experienced "a dialogue between landscape and memory." What I had actually experienced was a queue, a corridor, and a man in a fleece, and honestly, for the money, I'd have preferred the old bloke at the gate. He, at least, had a genuine sense of place, and the good manners not to charge me for it.