Lost Paris: Barry Humphries finds that the enchanting city of his youth now makes him chunder
I sympathise with Oscar Wilde, ill in his room at the Hôtel d’Alsace in Paris, when he complained that he was fighting a duel to the death with his wallpaper. ‘One of us has to go,’ he decided. Left Bank wallpapers have not improved, as I discovered last weekend, confined for three days with food poisoning. It began on the Eurostar, where the food is execrable, especially in first class. They say that the restaurants in Paris, with only a few exceptions, have ‘gone off’, and the Eurostar is only politely preparing us for the gastronomic disappointments that lie ahead. But perhaps Paris itself has ‘gone off’. However, it wasn’t with Oscar that I identified in my distress, but with Gustav von Aschenbach, hapless hero of Thomas Mann’s love story: ‘Some time passed before anyone noticed the man slumped sideways in his chair...’ – and Aschenbach hadn’t even travelled to...
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