Meet me at Wagram...

I arranged to meet Vanessa at Wagram.

I said it without thinking, the way you'd say "meet me at the chemist" or on the corner, or by the tree. What I actually meant, more precisely, was "Meet me at L'Étoile 1903" - which is an old café-brasserie at the bottom of the Avenue de Wagram, almost in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe. We both know it well, and the coffee is excellent.

"OK, I'll see you at Wagram"...

It was only an hour later, sitting, waiting with my excellent coffee, that I thought more about our chosen rendezvous. Because Wagram is neither a chemist, nor a corner, and certainly not a tree. Wagram is a place in the fields outside Vienna where, over two days in July 1809, Napoléon and the Austrians threw a third of a million men at each other and left tens of thousands of them dead, wounded or ruined in the wheat.

And I had used it to arrange a coffee.

This, I have come to realise, is simply how Paris works. You do not walk through Paris so much as walk through a very long, very selective list of the dead and severely wounded.

Stand at the Arc de Triomphe and twelve avenues fan out from your feet in the great star of what was, prior to being renamed in 1970, La Place de l'Étoile. The names of these grand boulevards are a real Who's Who and a What's What of French history: Foch, Wagram, Hoche, Iéna, Kléber, MacMahon, Carnot, Friedland and Marceau... Marshals and battles, battles and marshals, radiating outwards like the spokes of a great wheel of conflict, parading as glory.

Cross the river on the Pont d'Iéna or the Pont d'Austerlitz. Both solid victories. Shop along the Rue de Rivoli. Another victory, this time in Italy. There is an Avenue d'Eylau, a Rue de Castiglione and a whole ring of boulevards given over to Napoléon's loyal little Marshals.

Through this lens, central Paris sometimes seems more like a giant War Memorial where you can buy a sandwich.

Every errand to everywhere becomes a small act of remembrance, conducted largely by people who don't remember a thing.

And that's what got its hooks into me. Not the remembering. The forgetting.

Because I mean, what is a street name, really, but a word that has been asked to do an impossible job: to punch totally above its length and hold a memory in place for all eternity, on a small blue and white enamel plate, while the entire river of the living flows past it every day, without so much as an ooh-là-là...

It's a big ask. The names of the Marshals and Captains and Generals and all their greatest hits still survive; but the meaning has long since left the field.

Wagram, to almost everyone in Paris, no longer means innocent men pushing up daisies in an Austrian wheat field. It means a Métro stop. It means near where the good cheese shop is, or the place just before you turn left for the dentist.

The name outlives the thing so completely that eventually it becomes almost its opposite: the site of unimaginable slaughter, smoothed over with the sandpaper of time, so that two centuries later, it is now just a perfectly pleasant place to meet for a chat.

Memory doesn't fade in Paris. It gets repurposed. Time is not really a healer, it has become more of a decorator.

I used to think there was something rather sad about that. The great forgetting. The death of curiosity. The way we step over the last shouts of the long-dead, on our way to buy the daily bread.

But sitting there, at Wagram, I sort of came around a bit. It may be the most merciful thing a city can do. You can't possibly maintain grief at full volume for two hundred years. If you could, Paris would be unliveable. Every street an anguished scream. Instead the city does the humane thing and allows the names of the great and the good, and the killing fields on which they stood, to go gently soft, until Austerlitz is simply where you get on a south-bound train and nobody needs to sniffle into their mouchoir.

But there is still an oddity in all this. Something that was bothering me enough to fire up my Google Maps. For all the avenues, bridges, marshals and victories carved into the map of Paris, Napoléon himself is largely absent from its street signs.

His name has appeared and disappeared over the years as governments and regimes changed. He is still mentioned in reference to architectural stylings and antique furniture, but it seems, gentle reader, that yesterday's hero became today's political inconvenience.

Paris seems to have kept the fights and quietly lost the bloke that started them.

Which tells you the second secret of a street name. It's not so much of a record, as it is a verdict. And verdicts often get appealed...

Paris has been appealing them for centuries. When King Charles X was overthrown in the July Revolution of 1830, the Rue Charles X promptly became Rue La Fayette, replacing the deposed king with one of the heroes of the New Order. When Napoléon III's fragile little Empire collapsed in 1870, the Avenue de l'Impératrice - named after Eugénie, his Imperial Mrs - rather quickly lost its Empress too, beginning a journey through a few different identities before eventually becoming the present-day Avenue Foch.

And in 1914, when the First World War broke out, the Rue de Berlin suddenly found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. It became the Rue de Liège, honouring the Belgian city that briefly and bravely resisted the first German invasion.

There is something wonderfully Parisian about the speed of it all. The buildings stay where they are. The pavements remain. The boulangerie opens in the morning as usual. But somebody climbs a ladder with a can of paint, and history changes above your head.

Yesterday you lived beneath a king; today you live beneath the man who helped overthrow him. An Empress becomes a General. Berlin becomes Liège. History hasn't changed. Paris just likes changing the guest list.

Kings, revolutions, empires and republics have all arrived in Paris wanting the city to remember slightly different things. Heroes are installed, villains removed, victories preserved and inconvenient predecessors quietly unscrewed from the wall. Oh... and by the way - there are definitely no streets named after any of France's numerous, big losses...

Street signs, of course, have no opinions of their own. They simply tell you where you are. It is the people putting them up who can't resist blowing the trumpet. There is a nice example of this just across the Channel.

While Napoléon's "great victory" at Austerlitz gave Paris the name of a bridge across the Seine, and, eventually, a nice new railway station bearing its name - Paris Austerlitz -

London, also gave one of its great stations and a lovely bridge across the Thames. The name Waterloo: the day on which Napoléon's story came spectacularly undone.

Two capitals. One man. Each carving into its map the moment it most wanted remembered. And, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the moment the other might rather forget.

So we walk these streets with names like Wagram, Austerlitz, Iéna and Friedland, giving little thought to the carnage, the forgotten dead or the settled scores. Mostly, we just need to know whether the cheese shop is before or after the pharmacy.

But we can still be curious.

A quiet street, with a grand name. Excellent coffee.

Vanessa arrived.

"Sorry I'm late. Those girls at Restoration Hardware could talk for France..."

"That's all right."

"What are you thinking about?"

I pointed up at the little street sign.

"Wagram."

She looked at me.

"Of course you are."

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.