We popped out of the metro and landed in a singularly un-picturesque place. It looked like a shoddily built, extremely run down mall from the early 1980s.
“This is Les Halles,” Madame Beaupre explained. “This whole area used to be a huge market. It was the heart of Paris. They tore it all down to build this monstrosity.”
People of every description, color, and race swarmed on and off the escalators that came up out of the metro station.
“Still,” she said, “there are pockets of the old neighborhood and I’m going to take you to one. This was a restaurant my parents often brought me to as a girl. My father brought me himself after my mother passed away. They serve a delicacy that I’m sure you haven’t tasted yet. ”
I hadn’t yet tried a delicacy that I didn’t enjoy, so I followed with confidence.
We passed by a towering church that could have been built in either the gothic or renaissance style—I wasn’t sure—maybe a mix of both.
Madame Beaupre followed my gaze. “That is Saint-Eustache. It was built in the fifteenth or sixteenth century I believe. Did you know that Louis XIV was crowned there?”
“Vraiment?” I breathed, reverent. How I would love to come back and live in Paris—where centuries and centuries of history were all jumbled together like a huge treasure trove.
Madame Beaupre pushed open the door to a noisy brasserie. I looked up at the sign with red writing. Au Pied de Cochon it read. Pied…cochon…that was an odd name, but then again British pubs were named all sorts of outlandish things.
The chairs and booths were kitted out in red leather. Touches of yellow made the place cheery. Most of the tables were already full, and the traditionally dressed waiters, in their black jackets and long white aprons, whizzed around the restaurant balancing round serving trays.
“This looks wonderful,” I said. The smells coming from the kitchens and from people’s plates were welcoming. Madame Beaupre, with her habitual charm, not to mention her stunning eyes, secured us a table for two beside a window looking onto Saint Eustache.
I felt perfectly Parisian—light-years away from the unworldly Canadian girl I had been a mere three months before.
Madame Beaupre looked around the restaurant and smiled. She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I am so pleased to be sharing this place with you. Shall I order for both of us? I know the menu by heart.”
“Oh yes.” The Beaupres had never steered me wrong as far as food was concerned.
When we lay the menus down on the table, a rotund, elderly gentleman—contrary to the reputation that Parisian waiters had—was at our table in an instant. He acted as though it was an honor to be waiting on us.
We started with a coupe de champagne each and sipped on it as we soaked in the bustling atmosphere of the restaurant.
“I cannot believe you have to leave us next week,” Madame Beaupre said, her eyes glistening again. “These few months have gone by far too fast. I actually asked if we could keep you longer, but the Girards and the other families are intent on having their turn.”
I would never admit it, but I had also been holding on to a secret hope that perhaps the three other host families would bow out, and I would get to stay with the Beaupres for the rest of the year. I loved them already and couldn’t imagine having any other French family.
“I don’t want to go,” I said. “I will miss you all so much.”
“I wanted us to have these few days in Paris,” Madame Beaupre continued. “And for us to have this lunch together in this place. I cannot tell you how much it helped me to have you after Sophie left. I’m not sure how I would have survived those first few weeks if it hadn’t been for you. You’ve come so far already with your French and your education. I’m proud of you.”
“I’m so grateful that you were my first family,” I said, tearing up too. “You all were so kind and gentle with me in those first few weeks when I was so confused and didn’t understand anything.”
We both started crying a bit but we were quickly distracted by the arrival of a dozen piping-hot escargots for each of us.
I laughed as the waiter set them down and gave me a pair of tongs. I gestured to Madame Beaupre with them. “Thanks to you, I know how to use these now. Also, I know that I love escargots.”
“I will never forget that night,” she said. “Were you scared to try them?”
“A bit,” I said. “But it didn’t take me long to realize how good they are.”
“You are an adventurous eater,” she said, picking up her first one. “I had heard so many horror stories about North American children who only wanted to eat hamburgers and frites. It was such a relief to find that you love food as our family does.” She popped an escargot into her mouth. “Well, actually like everyone in Burgundy…and everyone in France,” she said, correcting herself.
“Everything that I’ve tasted since staying with you is so delicious.” It was the truth; so much so that I wondered how I was going to cope with the dearth of good French food when I returned to Canada at the end of the year. I felt almost more French than Canadian already. Maybe I had been born in the wrong country?
“I’m so glad” she said. “I wouldn’t have dared bring you here otherwise.”
I wondered a bit at that last sentence, but was too absorbed in the heavenly garlic, butter, parsley, and snail-y tastes in my mouth.
The first course was washed down by a perfectly delicious house red. Warmth and well-being seeped through every cell of my body. What was it about French food and French eating that seemed to feed the soul as well as the stomach?
Around us were men in sharp business suits and brightly colored shirts and ties, and bourgeois women who were already making the most of the cold snap and wearing their furs, and who all seemed to have tiny dogs in bags near their feet. Everyone in the country stopped to enjoy this kind of lunch—high school students, stonemasons, François Mitterand… That was knowing how to live. I had no desire to go back to the North American custom of bolting a sandwich in less than four minutes.
The escargots dishes were whisked away a few minutes after we were done, and our basket of fresh baguette slices, as well as our wine and water, were refreshed. The restaurant ran with military precision.
“Next is my favorite dish in the world!” Madame Beaupre’s aqua eyes sparkled. “I just know you will love it. This restaurant is not just something I share with anyone, you know.”
“What is it?” I asked, my mouth salivating already.
“Can’t you guess?” she asked. Guess? How would I be able to guess?
“Is it something I’ve eaten before?” I asked.
“Non. They are not very common in Burgundy. It is more of a Parisian specialty. Actually, a specialty of the Les Halles neighborhood.”
Parisian specialty. Well, that sounded promising.
“You haven’t guessed?”
“I have no idea.”
“The name of the restaurant is a clue, bien sûr!”
Au Pied de Cochon. At the Pig’s Foot. My mind whirled with an awful possibility. Surely one didn’t actually eat pigs’ feet, even in France…
To answer my unspoken question, the waiter whirled back to us and placed plates proudly in front of us. “Our famous grilled pied de cochon with sauce Béarnaise and french fries.”
The thing lying in front of me looked like it was too big to be a pig’s foot unless it was the foot of an extremely large pig. It was breaded and piping hot. Maybe pied de cochon was a name for another delicacy that actually wasn’t a pig’s foot at all, but something else entirely, like how a hot dog wasn’t actually a dog that was hot, but a wiener made of mystery meat.
“Pied de cochon?” I asked Madame Beaupre, trying to show enthusiasm that I definitely did not feel. “Is it really a—”
“A pig’s foot. Yes. They have been my favorite ever since I was a little girl. This is where they make the best, in my opinion. Why else did you think the brasserie was named that?”
&
nbsp; I shrugged, trying to press down the tide of panic rising inside me. “I guess I just thought it was a funny name.”
There was a pile of golden french fries beside my pig’s foot, so I thought I would start with that. I picked one off the pile and chewed it. That, at least, was delicious and entirely unthreatening. Was I actually going to have to eat a pig’s foot? And, if I did, how did one eat a pig’s foot exactly? Did I pick it up like a chicken leg and gnaw it?
Madame Beaupre dug into hers immediately with her fork, impaling some of the breaded crust and the gelatinous-looking meat underneath. She chewed and a beatific smile lit up her already stunning face. “Try it,” she said. “I know you’ll love it as much as I do.”
There was no escape without hurting Madame Beaupre. Apparently I was going to eat a pig’s foot.
The breaded stuff…that couldn’t be too bad, right? I took a forkful of that and quickly put it in my mouth before I could think much more about what it had been in contact with. I chewed, but unfortunately underneath the breading were tiny bones that left me in no doubt about what I was eating. Toe knuckles. I hazarded another glance. Small bits of pink meat surrounded by lots of an opaque, gelatinous substance.
“Do you like it?” Madame Beaupre asked me. I shoved another french fry in my mouth to get the breading down.
I hated it, but I loved Madame Beaupre and couldn’t bear disappointing her.
“Delicious!”
Her eyes filled up with tears again. “I knew you would,” she said. “I just knew it.”
I tried to extract the pink meat from the gelatinous stuff and the tiny bones, but that proved impossible. I just shoved a whole forkful into my mouth and, with the help of several french fry chasers, managed to swallow the mouthful.
“Do you like how it tastes?” Madame Beaupre asked me eagerly.
I couldn’t really consider the taste, because every one of my senses was overwhelmed with disgust at the texture, which resembled those huge mouthfuls of mucous one coughs up at the tail end of a bad cold.
I steeled myself. I would have to eat enough to make it look like I had enjoyed it. Every cell in my body was pleading with me to admit that I simply couldn’t eat this thing, but I just couldn’t find the resolution to say it. As far as I was concerned, Madame Beaupre’s feelings trumped mine.
She was polishing off her pig’s foot with alarming speed, spitting out the tiny pig toe bones into her napkin and then lining them up along the edge of her plate. It was an image that I didn’t think I would easily be able to exorcise from my mind.
I plowed through mine, with each forkful sending up a prayer that the gelatinous mass would not make the return trip up from my stomach. I had finally encountered a French food that I knew, deep in my heart, I would never grow to love, or even like. Pigs’ feet were something, I concluded, that you had to be born French to love.
Maybe I hadn’t banished all the Canadian-ness from me after all. Especially not the disinclination to wound the people I loved.
CHAPTER 17
Three weeks before Christmas, I packed my suitcases again, took a tearful farewell of the Beaupres and Biscotte, and moved to the Girards. I had to hide my heartbreak so as not to distress the Girards.
They didn’t actually live beside the family wine domaine in Premeaux-Prissey as I had believed. Instead, they made the wine there, but actually sold it and lived in a little village called Noiron in what the Beaupres called La Plaine, or The Plain. Although it was no Saskatchewan it was indeed a flat landscape. When we drove into the village, which consisted only of about twenty or so houses, I also realized it was located more or less in the middle of nowhere.
Within seconds of walking through the door, I was introduced to the Girard’s three children. Their eldest was a boy of twenty named Bruno. I remembered him as the tractor driver during the harvest. He had huge dark eyes, ridiculously long lashes, and curly black hair that was a shame to waste on a boy. He was more beautiful than handsome. I was informed that he was being groomed to take over the winemaking side of the family business, and was indeed a graduate of the winemaking school in Beaune Sandrine had told me about. He also had a girlfriend in Southern France who was still at university.
He seemed friendly, whereas the other two children, Yves, a weedy boy who was one year younger than I and who suffered from a very severe case of acne, and Élise, a girl three years younger than I and who kept giving me the evil eye, barely spoke a word. They were called forth by their parents to give me perfunctory bises, during which they didn’t deign to make any skin contact but rather performed the fastest air kisses I had ever received. They retreated to the back of the living room, which was decorated in a gloomy mix of dark wood and crimson leather.
Madame Girard was a tiny, bird-like woman who hadn’t inherited the commanding presence of her mother—who, I was still mortified to recall, had been the one to find Florian and I in the cupboard at the grape harvest. Madame Girard called Élise and Yves back to the couches to chat and make me feel welcome, but her orders, unconvincingly delivered, were ignored by her two youngest children.
“Would you like to have a kir?” Monsieur Girard asked me.
“Yes. Merci,” I said. I had a difficult time believing I would be staying there and not going back later on that night to the cheery familiarity of the Beaupres.
Madame Girard went somewhere and then returned a few minutes later with a bowlful of cut-up cubes of Comté cheese.
“No cheese puffs?” Monsieur Girard asked in what I thought was a pleasant tone.
“I wasn’t sure.” Madame Girard’s wrung her hands. “I wasn’t sure what Laura would like best so I brought these. I can take them back though—”
“I love Comté,” I said. “Merci.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Monsieur Girard tried to assure his wife. “I was merely joking. Come…sit.”
Bruno sat beside me and began asking me questions about Canada. He said that he and his girlfriend were planning on taking a year off and traveling around the world after she completed her business degree in Avignon.
“I need you to start working in the vines,” Monsieur Girard said, narrowing his eyes at his son.
Bruno rolled his eyes at me and I smiled back. “I’ll be working in the vines the rest of my life, papa. Surely it can wait for a year. I did my two years at Viti, like you ordered. Surely I am allowed a little freedom before I chain myself to those bloody vineyards until I die.”
My eyes widened. He didn’t sound too thrilled about the whole “oldest son inherits the vineyards” tradition that I had protested about to Sandrine. That was a side that I had never considered. I thought cutting out the female and younger siblings unfair, but maybe the custom was also unfair on the eldest sons too, especially the ones like Bruno who were given no choice in the matter.
“Let’s not argue about that in front of Laura,” Monsieur Girard said repressively.
Yes. Let’s not. My Canadian upbringing made me want to crawl under the coffee table.
“Has coming to France been a good experience for you Laura?” Bruno offered me a charming smile.
“Wonderful!” I said. “I’ve already learned a new language and experienced so many things that I could have only dreamed about before coming here. It’s the best thing I have done so far in my life—”
“You see?” Bruno turned to his parents who, I noticed belatedly, were looking strained. “Did you hear what Laura just said? Travel is essential for us young people these days. Why do you believe it for her and not for me?”
God. I had walked right into that trap.
“I’m not inheriting a vineyard though,” I said, attempting to play peacemaker. “And I’ve already been accepted to a university in Montréal when I return home, so I know what I’ll be doing when I get back. Our situations might not be exactly parallel.”
“They are identical,” Bruno insisted with a petulant set to his mouth. Monsieur Girard’s pleasant round face was now an interestin
g shade of scarlet. Madame Girard just became more and more hunched over, as if she was trying to shrink into herself.
Had I entered a war zone? All I wanted to do was lock myself in a room and weep. No, more than that, I wanted to pick up my bags and move back in with the Beaupres.
“That’s enough, Bruno,” Monsieur Girard barked. “Go to the cellar and wash the glasses for our six o’clock tasting.”
Bruno got up with an exasperated sigh and shot his parents a parting dirty look.
“Tasting?” I asked.
“The building where you were during the harvest is my wife’s family home. Her mother still lives there alone. Bruno will move in there eventually, of course, but for the time being we have a nice cellar here where we conduct our tastings and store most of our vintages. We have some clients coming by in fifteen minutes for a tasting.”
“How interesting,” I said.
“I don’t want you to think we are being harsh with Bruno,” Monsieur Girard continued. “But we’re worried that if he leaves he will never come back. He has a bit too much impulsiveness in his personality—always has.”
“Couldn’t Yves take over?” I asked.
Madame Girard wordlessly shook her head.
“No,” Monsieur Girard said. “That could never happen. You see, we also have extensive farm holdings. Bruno, as the oldest, was groomed to take over the vineyards, and Yves has been groomed to take over the farming. He’s been attending the agricultural college for the last year. Everything has been set up this way—”
“What about Élise?” I couldn’t help asking.
“What do you mean?” Monsieur Girard asked, his features perplexed.
“Well…what is she being groomed to do? You know…what is she taking over?”
My Grape Year: (The Grape Series #1) Page 14