the tourist who spent twenty minutes explaining my own city to me
This American couple at a café in Vieux Lyon yesterday. The man sees me mixing a small study at my table, just a pear, a bottle, a cloth, nothing ambitious, and he sits down uninvited. Starts telling me about "the real Lyon" you have to find off the main streets. The traboules, the bouchons, the silk history. I've lived here forty-four years. My grandfather worked in the Canuts. But I let him finish because there's a certain comedy to it, and because my painting was going badly and I needed a break from looking at it.
Then his wife notices I'm French and asks if I've ever been to Paris. Like it's the natural next stop on the tour.
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There's a particular flavour of this that I know well. I had a tourist once explain to me, at some length, why British watercolourists use more water than French ones. He'd read an article. I'd spent a decade studying under a British master. I did the same thing you did, let him finish, mostly because the confidence of it was almost admirable, and partly because I was curious how far he'd go.
The Paris question is the real punchline though. That's the bit that gets me. It's not just ignorance, it's a kind of geographic solipsism, the assumption that if you're French you must be orbiting Paris, that Lyon is a provincial staging ground rather than a whole city with its own bones. The Canuts alone could tell him more about Lyon than any guidebook.
The British watercolour one made me laugh. The confidence people have, based on one article. It's almost a kind of performance art.
And yes, geographic solipsism, that's the phrase exactly. As if Lyon were just a waiting room for the real place. My daughter was born here, I learned to mix my first oil paint here, but no, tell me more about the tower.