I was having breakfast at a café on a short visit to Paris one morning recently when I was overcome by the dreadful feeling that something was very, very wrong. Was it — I wondered as I dragged on my cigarette, a vice I permit myself only in this city that knows better than to desiccate our pleasures and decimate each one with the clinician’s cold stare — something I ate? It was not: The Œufs brouillés were exquisite, suggesting that whoever translated the name of this dish to “scrambled eggs” never really tasted it to begin with. Was it the weather? No. The day was an autumnal delight, which you could tell merely by looking at the elderly couple — he in light auburn jacket, she in red-and-white checkered dress — holding hands while trading each other sections of the morning paper at the nearby Place des Vosges. And then, surveying my fellow diners while sipping on my chocolat chaut, it hit me: No one at any other table was burying his or her face in a screen. In fact, there wasn’t even a smartphone to behold resting on any of the tables or peeking from any of the coat pockets or the bags. Table by table, they were talking to each other, touching each other lightly as they made poignant comments, laughing, making eye contact. They were, in other words, behaving like perfectly normal, embodied human beings, present in the here and the now.