The news that Paris has been struck by a terror attack – the enormity of which was still being processed at the time of writing – has left the world reeling.
Having lived in the arrondissement under attack for almost decade, it’s also clearly an assault designed to cut short lives which were only just beginning.
The 10th and 11th arrondissements where the attacks were concentrated are known in Paris for being the centre of the city’s “bobo” sub-culture.
Short for “bohemian bourgeois”, it’s the part of the city renowned for its bars, restaurants, galleries and boutiques.
It’s the arrondissement which for the past twenty years has attracted artists, writers and creatives – and which, despite the slow creep of gentrification – continues to be the hub of many of the city’s coolest and most inventive cultural trends.
Think Newtown in Sydney, Fitzroy in Melbourne or the West End of Brisbane.
The focal point of the arrondissement is the Canal St Martin – a former working canal which on summer nights is lined with young Parisians, picnicking, drinking, socialising in that lazy way they have.
The area comes to life at night with its concentration of bars, clubs and restaurants.
It is above all, a young part of Paris.
On any given Friday night, the average age of the people who flock here in their thousands to decompress over drinks in a bar or a cheeky meal with friends, would be mid-20s.
When the names and ages of the victims comes to be known, the horror will be compounded by the overwhelming notion of lives cut short.
A friend, who was dining with her father in a restaurant opposite The Carillon bar in which one of the attacks took place, reports lying prostate on the floor, terrified as gunmen went coolly about the business of executing innocent Parisians.
The offices of Charlie Hebdo, where 11 employees of a satirical newspaper and a policemen were executed by gunman last year, is barely 500 metres down the road, towards the tourist hub, La Bastille.
Le Petit Cambodge, a Cambodian restaurant near the Canal St Martin, was one of the first restaurants in the arrondissement to offer real Thai/Cambodian food and is packed most nights.
The Bataclan, where at the time of writing some 50 people were believed to be being held hostage, is a popular concert venue. It’s the Enmore Theatre of Paris.
The Palais Theatre of the City of Light.
Live bands play most nights, dance parties and club nights take up residence in between.
Tonight in Paris, the Bataclan was hosting the American heavy metal band – Eagles of Death Metal.
It would have been packed with young Parisians from all over the city: teenagers and twenty-somethings gathering at a venue famous for its cheap beer and cutting edge bands.
It’s an area I know well having lived in it for a majority of the ten years I lived in Paris.
The apartment I shared with my now wife on Rue Oberkampf is barely 100 metres up the road from the Bataclan.
Le Petit Cambodge is where we would dine with expat friends whenever our collective tastebuds were in need of a hit of spice – an ingredient otherwise lacking in French cuisine. Whenever we craved a culinary reminder of home.
The owners were a lovely Cambodian family who had settled in Paris, set up a hole-in-the-wall restaurant cooking the home-style food they had grown up with, and who watched their little enterprise grow so rapidly that most nights there were queues out the door.
My wife and I – two Australians in the City of Light – got married at the Hotel du Nord – a wonderfully louche hotel-restaurant barely 50 metres further up the canal. A hotel made famous by the classic, eponymous French film by Marcel Carne.
And so I sit here this morning on a rainy day in Brisbane, watching the TV news, monitoring the Facebook check-in page for Paris-based friends to let loved ones know they are okay. It’s at 67 and counting.
On the TV news, reports indicate some 100 are feared dead in Bataclan alone.
And there’s the rising sense of certainty that my little corner of Paris will never be the same again.
