Eating cake while the banlieus are burning

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After our weeks in London, we're now back in the Montmartre neighborhood, and our experience of the last couple of days has been - strange.
 
Montmartre is as gloriously romantic as always, with its quaint alleys and steep staircases, its small hidden squares, its busy sidewalk cafés. We enjoy it all.
 
We are also, just now, living inside a gated community a few streets from the Moulin Rouge, behind a door that closes on a different city entirely.
 
We read about the riots in the banlieues. Like the rest of the world, we see the footage - burning cars, burning buildings, protestors, looters, police lines. It is all happening a few kilometers from where we sleep. Here, in the center, there is not one single disturbance. All is tranquil.
 
Are we - behind our respective secured gates -  a little like Marie Antoinette at Versailles - eating cake, while the horizons are in flames?

The journalist in me feels the old pull to go and see it firsthand. Not long ago I probably would have gone.
 
But I don't think the reason is that I know better now, exactly. I just think I've run out of good reasons to go.
 
I have no real business walking around Nanterre or Neuilly-sur-Seine, flashing credentials at a police line for a story I have no place to publish. Whatever that impulse is - to witness, to bear it back as testimony - it curdles fast into something closer to rubbernecking, disaster tourism, and I'd rather notice that in myself before I act on it than later
 
So we turn off the TV.
 
It is a beautiful evening in Paris. We could walk to our local bistro, order a coffee, allow ourselves a couple of macarons. We probably will.
 
I'm not sure that's a comfortable thing to admit. I'm not sure it should be.
  




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