Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, is a trope that now trips so easily off the tongue that we have almost forgotten both its nature and origins as trope. Although it is commonly attributed to Walter Benjamin, he himself did not invent the label but found it almost everywhere, along with a multitude of cognates (‘capital of Europe’, ‘capital of the world’, ‘capital of the universe’, in ascending order of grandiloquence), during his excavations of the vast archive of nineteenth-century representations and descriptions of the city. They belong in the stock of what, from the 1830s, came to be called parisianismes. The latter are almost endless and are to be found routinely in that subgenre of Paris-writing, the physiologie, storehouse of a whole urban doxology (Curmer's Les Français peints par eux-mêmes was the most widely known). But the doxa also travelled to the major literary genres, both popular and highbrow, on a spectrum from the unselfconscious to the ironic. At one end of this spectrum stands Balzac, his exuberant creative genius able to forge single-handedly from a cornucopia of clichés a whole myth of the city, as at once mysterious yet masterable. One such from the ample reservoir of lapidary Balzacian apothegms is the unfathomable utterance, in Le Père Goriot, by the policeman at the moment of arresting the grandest criminal of nineteenth-century fiction (Vautrin): ‘Paris est Paris, voyez-vous’ (‘Paris is Paris’), articulating an ‘insider's’ knowledge that can take only the impenetrable form of a tautology.