From a former Vancouver writer now living in Paris:

Last week on the metro, a group of young black boys in their early teens poured into my car in high spirits. One of them, a gangly kid resplendent in his Adidas track suit who’d been staring out the window at nothing in particular, interrupted their chatter with a sudden chant: “Obama! Obama! Obama!”

His friends turned to him, confused. “Barack Obama!” he yelled. “Obama!” They yelled back. That’s a great little moment, I thought. If he wins. If he loses, it’ll be heartbreaking.

I live in Belleville, on a hill in the northeast part of Paris. It’s a gritty, working-class neighbourhood. Edith Piaf was born –- so the legend goes –- under a streetlamp a few blocks from my house.

This is where the French Commune made its last bloody stand, where the bomb-throwing anarchists of the 19th century plotted in cafés and beer halls. It’s slowly being gentrified these days by pram-pushing bobos, young actors and artists, drawn by a cost of living that’s about 20 percent cheaper than the more chic parts of Paris. But it is above all an immigrant quarter, full of shifting groups of North Africans, Arabs, Algerian Jews, and in the last few decades, Chinese and Vietnamese.

It’s a functional, many-coloured neighbourhood with remarkably little conflict. The streets are full of African women, like ships at sea in their flowing robes and elaborate headdresses, and mixed packs of kids from every background –- Tunisian, French, Cameroonian, Cambodian.

Hipsters drink at Aux Folies, bobos line up for cheap noodles at Rouleau de Printemps, while the neighbourhood’s oldtimers sit and debate over their terrible coffee in the decrepit workingmen’s cafes.

This is modern, mutating Paris, I tell visitors. The monuments and tourist attractions of the central city are all wondrous and beautiful places to visit, and I make sure to spend time there as well, but if you want to see Paris in the 21st century, see Belleville, see Menilmontant, see Bagnolet. They’re not always pretty –- though the view from atop Parc Belleville is one of the best in Paris –- but they’re the real thing.

On the morning of November 4, my home internet connection has suddenly gone on the blink. A conspiracy! I’ve been obsessing over this election for months, haunting U.S. political websites for the latest scrap of news, devising cruel torments for Palin and McCain –- but especially Palin! –- suffering from the same neuroses as all of my friends. The better the news gets the more I refuse to believe it. History has been too cruel.

Desperate, I go to the internet café downstairs from my apartment. The U.S. polls won’t even open for hours, but I’m still expecting some last-minute shocker. The café is full of a gang of loud yoots just out of the local school, playing Counter-Strike, a bloody first-person shooter game. They chat to each other in a mix of backwards slang and street argot so I can’t understand most of what they’re saying, other than the boy next to me –- his name, I gather, is Moomoo –- who keeps breathily murmuring “mothairfuckair” as he plays.

Then I notice they’ve all stopped and are momentarily gathered around Moomoo’s computer. “Barack Obama,” I hear, and I look over. They, like me, need to know what’s happening over in America right now.

Later that afternoon I head down to Rue Belleville for some Chinese food, and stop off at my local warren of a magazine store. It’s the only place nearby that stocks The Guardian –- though the mole-like owner seems to move it around every day amid his heaping piles of month-old German girlie mags; it’s a game he enjoys playing with me, seeing if I can find it unaided. I never can.

The place is full of his usual cronies, a group of older neighbourhood types who stand around in the cramped aisles debating. One tweedy old man orates as I enter: “He will win, of course, he will win. But he cannot change the system. It is the system, the system, the system. He cannot change that. He has no magic stick – ” he likes this turn of phrase – baguette magique – and repeats it, waving an imaginary baton in the air.

He’s like most of the white French people I overhear talking about Obama. It would be ridiculous if he lost. They coronated him months ago. But even when discussing the possibilty that Obama could be undone by some nefarious GOP plot, there is a certain -- the French have a word for it –- insouciance.

France itself, though less rocked by the international economic crisis than some of its neighbours, has been having a rough decade or so, to put it mildly. Stagnant, in a word. But Sarkozy – L’Americain they call him, because of his alien, unsettling approach to leadership – is recovering in the polls after a disastrous, embarrassing year. A French author just won the Nobel. Maybe there’s a tiny bit of light on the horizon?

Were Obama to lose, no matter how much they have taken him to their hearts and plastered him on every magazine cover, it would give them a little thrill of superiority. The papers could be full of philosophical discussions of The American Problem, a welcome distraction to The French Problem.

The first returns will be coming in at 2 a.m. local time. I am still without the internet. There are several options. The Democrats and Republicans Abroad are co-hosting a gala all-night event – a hundred euros a head. Harry’s Bar, Breakfast in America and The Great Canadian are all staying open all night.

But I decide to go to the 3rd Arrondissement’s town hall, which is hosting an open-door Nuit Americaine, with lecturers, a big-screen TV and movies, and walk down Rue Oberkampf to the Marais, just as the bars and restaurants are closing up. It’s a quiet Tuesday night in November, with no sign of election fervor. As I pass by Rue St-Maur, where all the cool kids hang out, a young man is vomiting copiously. Obama fever?

The courtyard of the town hall is full. Older French couples, teens, a smattering of expats, and, overwhelmingly, excited young black men and women. Inside, people wander around restlessly.

The first results have just come in. The Salle du Mariage, where most of the action is, is jammed, impossible to get into. The crowd spills out the door. As the evening goes on I realize I was lucky to arrive when I did. At the town hall gates, a growing crowd is held back by a lone security guard.

I find a corner in which to perch and take out my laptop, using the town hall’s free wifi to check results myself. A small crowd of young men gather around me out of curiosity. One, with tiny pointed dreadlocks, is clutching an American flag. He poses for photographs with a friend wearing a Barack sweatshirt, who gives a black power salute. Older black men recline in the halls, quietly happy.

The results come in, slowly, inexorably. Every time there’s good news, the fellow with the American flag screams “Obama!” and does a victory lap around the hall.

When they call Pennsylvania for Obama, I decide to go home. The good news cannot be denied. I’m exhausted, feeling oddly numb, yet on the verge of bursting into tears.

As I look around the hall, at all the excited, emotional faces of the French-Africans that dominate the crowd, I realize that for me, a white Canadian expat, this election has made history -- but for them, for Africans and the vast African diaspora, this night, in which a man of African parentage became the most powerful human being in the world, has changed the meaning of history.