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In a picture taken in 1954 in front of the Café Tournon in Paris's chic sixth arrondissement, the writers and editors of the recently founded Paris Review are arranged in a human pyramid, with a row of casually dressed women sitting in chairs at the bottom and George Plimpton, the editor and co-founder, standing at the top with a slightly bemused, self-satisfied smile and a cigarette and what looks to be a glass of wine in his hand. The photograph feels emblematic of what Parisian expatriate life must have been like in those heady postwar years: young, liberating and full of an intellectual vigor that was embodied in café life and the host of literary reviews that were springing up all across the Left Bank. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were holding their already famous philosophical debates at a table at the nearby Café de Flore. Richard Wright had arrived a few years earlier, as had Saul Bellow and a young, and relatively unknown and impoverished James Baldwin, who was living at the Hotel Verneuil, a cheap, slightly run-down hotel nearby. For the past six months, I've been living roughly five minutes away from the Café Tournon, and the even more famous Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots -- the former epicenters of Parisian and American expatriate intellectual life. I went to the Tournon for lunch recently, with James Campbell's eloquent and aptly titled book 'Exiled in Paris' tucked under my arm, curious to see if there was anything left of the café as it must have looked more than 50 years earlier when that picture was taken: when it was still possible to buy drugs in the little nook near the restrooms or have a chance encounter with one of the dozens of African-American writers and artists that had made Paris home following the end of World War II. It seems to almost go without saying now that I was the only American around. Things have changed drastically in the last 55 years; the Café Tournon, along with the rest of St. Germain, has cleaned up its act, with a proper, well-appointed façade, an elegant but casual hardwood décor and a roundtable of leather chairs in the back. The former bohemian quarters of the Left Bank that were once home to even the poorest of writers have become the center of Paris's starry-eyed tourist trade, and the dollar has plummeted so far against the euro that what once seemed to be a semipermanent settlement of Americans, particularly writers and artists, has all but vanished. Recently while sitting outside of a café just off the Boulevard St. Germain I overheard an American woman remark to her two friends, 'Eight dollars for a bottle of still water. Eight dollars,' her voice not so much angry as baffled. It's hard if not inevitable now to think of that previous generation of writers and not romanticize them and their lives here a bit: to think of yourself sitting under a bright light at a table in the back of the elegant Café de Flore, in shouting distance of Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, or to have been on the terrace at the neighboring Les Deux Magots when James Baldwin and Richard Wright reportedly had a heated argument about an essay Baldwin had written excoriating Wright's 'Native Son.' Such events and conversations seem to belong exclusively to another era, one that was measured in francs instead of euros, when there wasn't an American Apparel store to be found just on the other side of the Boulevard St. Germain. What's really missing these days isn't just café literary life, but a palpable and vibrant American cultural life. As a friend who works for one of France's largest publishers pointed out to me, French writers, editors, publishers and journalists are still there at the major cafés and brasseries that have now become famous, and they're still talking about books and philosophy, perhaps with even the same degree of heady, intellectual rigor that Sartre would have done. And as if to prove the point even further, the major cafés of St. Germain -- Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots and Brasserie Lipp -- all have literary prizes, which come with money and their own individual perks ranging from complimentary Champagne to a large tab that can be used at the writer's discretion. In other words, books and literature in general are all still discussed and debated; there just happen to be no Americans around when they are. The absence of Americans is not a matter of sheer numbers. There are still almost as many Americans passing through Paris these days as in previous years. With the exception of a brief dip following the start of the war in Iraq and the branding of 'freedom fries' in the nation's Capitol building, Americans have continued to arrive in droves. (The decline in fact was so notable that the French tourist industry launched a campaign targeted towards American tourists titled, 'Let's Fall in Love Again.') You can still hear and see them standing outside of the famous cafés on the weekend, and for the average Parisian, the American tourist trade marches on unchecked. When I asked a group of friends over dinner whether they noticed that there were fewer Americans in Paris, the collective response from the table could be summed up as: Are you crazy? There are so many Americans here. And while they may have been right about the numbers, or the obvious presence which all tourists bring with them, it's hard not to believe that a certain type of long-standing love affair between Americans and the city hasn't in fact come to an end, that there's been a permanent departure that no advertisement campaign, however charming, can reverse. Odile Hellier, the slightly petite, appropriately bespectacled, and at times effusively generous French owner of the English-language Village Voice bookstore in St. Germain des Prés remembers fondly her own version of the good old days in the early 1980s, when a strong American expatriate community created literary journals and reviews in Paris, the types of which hadn't really existed since the 1950s. In her cramped, white-walled and yet neatly ordered office at the back of the bookstore, whose selection can best be described as almost excessively literary in scope, she still keeps a bundle of notebooks with the names of writers and some of the journals they created in those days. The nostalgia in her voice, which is filled with a rarely heard type of passionate earnestness, almost goes without saying. 'So many,' she says once, and then again two more times for emphasis, referring to both the Americans and the writers who once flocked here. 'France still looked like a country where it was easy to live. The Village Voice took off because of that.' The bookstore, like the Americans that initially helped sustain it, has been on the decline ever since, with a notable dip in sales that has continued unabated. 'For me, the community has exploded,' and by exploded she means disintegrated. Obviously a large part of that disintegration can be traced back to the dollar's rapid decline against the euro. If Baldwin and Wright were to sit down today to two cups of coffee on the terrace of Les Deux Magots to argue about an essay, their bill, without tip, would be almost $15. The decline in American life in Paris, however, can't be all about the dollar and its rise and fall. When Baldwin arrived in Paris in 1947, he arguably had less here in terms of financial and material support than he would have had he stayed in New York. He came regardless, following on the heels of Richard Wright. Both men, along with dozens of other African-American writers and artists, were fleeing America's divisive and often violent racism, and France, or Paris in particular, was in the midst of its long-running love affair with African-American culture, and jazz in particular, and seemed openly freer and more inviting than any place in America could ever be. A decade later, Allen Gins