Pleasure is Paris's Raison d'Être. And who among us couldn't use a dose of that? Cristina Nehring learns to savor the little things in a city where temptation is a way of life.

The hall is sumptuous, the audience in stitches. The actor on the stage—octogenarian Michel Bouquet—is a national celebrity. Yet Molière's Imaginary Invalid is absurdly dated. * I shift restlessly in my red-velvet loge at Paris's Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin and gaze at my neighbors—two svelte young lesbians with a preschool-age boy between them, and a gorgeously clad fiftysomething lady with a gold-and-silver coiled-serpent necklace descending suggestively into her bodice. "You can curl and uncurl it," she tells me during intermission. "Here, try!" She places my hand on her bare bosom. * What could these all-too-contemporary persons find in this story of a seventeenth-century hypochondriac in a pointy white nightcap who hires doctor after doctor to administer oversized enemas? They roar with laughter. They stand up and demand another round of bows from Monsieur Bouquet. And they whisper to me that they will return the following weekend. (The play's run has been extended several times.) Moreover, this is not the only work of Molière's on show in Paris. Flipping through the city's culture calender, Pariscope, I see that there are no fewer than seventeen Molièreproductions being performed this day, including a second and third Imaginary Invalid.

"What's the story?" I ask a French friend over a plate of shaved foie gras drizzled with caramel after the show. It's 1 a.m. and my favorite local restaurant is jammed. "The Paris art scene is tame!" he tells me, looking up and down the candlelit tables at Comptoir de la Gastronomie. "Parisians are too busy dining and drinking and trying to seduce each other to pay serious attention to it."

A cliché, but a cliché with a scrap of truth to it. The French I see around me are not home funneling their vital energy into some artistic pursuit. Much as they may hope that their nation excels at such endeavors, what they reserve their real attention, ingenuity, and passion for is not the art of writing or composing, painting or philosophizing, but—quite simply—the art of living.

You need only pick up a French newspaper to discover that, while other papers in the West offer book reviews, the French offer book raves. Parisian reviewers have mistaken promotion for reflection, commerce for analysis, Serge Halimi, editor of the political journal Le Monde diplomatique, tells me as we wander down a bustling boulevard near his home. The art of criticism is defunct. So, too, is the art of philosophy. Where once the Left Bank intelligentsia rallied around ugly little Jean-Paul Sartre, with his big and disturbing ideas, today it idolizes the tousle-headed millionaire Bernard-Henri Lévy—beautiful to look at but distinctly vapid and unchallenging: a cheerleader for power in all its motley manifestations.

Where has all the French genius gone? Into café life, I decide, as I peer over my paper at the swiftly maneuvering tuxedoed waiters at Le Buci, near my hotel in St-Germain-des-Prés. It has gone into conversation and seduction, into bistro witticisms and strenuous vacationing. It has gone into the French people's zealous pursuit of "quality of life," their almost unseemly savoir-vivre.