eye – Au vieux cruller – 12.05.02 An entry in The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French explains how the now- legendary and sometimes theme-parked caf�s of Paris were, during the Enlightenment, “places where new or subversive ideas could be fairly openly discussed (though police spies haunted them).” Later, they became home to the bohemians, some of whom called themselves “the water drinkers” because that was all they could afford. Later still, the Caf� de Flore in St.-Germain-des-Pr�s became the hangout for Sartre and Beauvoir and the world headquarters for existentialist thought chiefly because, according to a history of …