Remembrance of Things Paris

by Gourmet Magazine Editors

  Now the atmosphere, shortly before lunch, was fittingly nostalgic for our depressed frame of mind. Raymond said he’d hoped that President Giscard d’Estaing might reconsider and save the France though it cost the French taxpayers millions of dollars. But the prestige! “They might have turned her into a floating showroom for our haute couture. Many industries might have helped. It could have been done…. I’ve hired a few youngsters who just finished the French Line’s hotel school in Le Havre. I hope the restaurant personnel and the kitchen people will find jobs. They are superbly trained. But there will be severe problems during the transition period.” Not everybody has the background of Raymond, who in 1969 was awarded the Diplôme d’Honneur of the Ordre de la Courtoisie Française, under the patronage of the President of the Republic. Another superstar who found a job was Henri Le Huédé, retired chef de cuisines of the France, who will take over Laurent in Paris after it is completely redecorated.

  Raymond said his landlocked bartenders don’t make his nautical specialties such as the “Bullshot” (consommé with lemon juice, a little vodka, a few drops of Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco, salt and pepper), which was the preferred breakfast for passengers who had gone to bed rather late. Instead we had another Raymond specialty, a Fernet Branca with a drop of crème de menthe. The chefs began to arrange the hors d’oeuvres on a large sideboard. The Café Français offers a meal of regional specialties, with “all the wine you can drink,” for sixty-five francs, everything included. This time it was the Quercy and Périgord, with vin de Cahors. The prix fixe menu is enormous. Half a dozen salads, among them salade de tomates à l’eau-de-vie (tomato salad with brandy) and a cucumber and green pepper salad. Cold things: rillettes de dinde (spiced turkey spread), pâté de foie de porc (pork liver pâté), and wonderful charcuterie. Hot hors d’oeuvres: fraise de veau ravigote (tripe ravigote) and saucisse et gésier confits aux lentilles (conserve of sausage and gizzards with lentils). At that point I would quit. But Raymond’s sturdy eaters (Germans and Belgians, but also quite a few Frenchmen) now start really going, with a heavy entrée—confit d’oie aux deux pommes (preserved goose with potatoes) or magret de canard (breast of force-fed duck) or aiguillette de boeuf lardé et braisé au vin (braised beef in wine)—and cheese (the fine goat cheese from Rocamadour), and dessert and coffee. Whereupon they continue their business meetings or go to look at the Mona Lisa. It seemed incredible, but perhaps I was like that when I was young.

  Raymond said the Rothschilds often come in to keep an eye on their culinary investment. “Monsieur Élie likes to prepare the salads himself. Monsieur Guy will come on Saturday with a small party, and I’ll see him this afternoon about the menu. All of them are exacting and gracious—a good mixture. After lunch I’ll go home to Le Havre. Usually I go home on Friday afternoons and return Monday mornings, in time to supervise lunch. I have only a tiny apartment here, but I am in Paris only five days, and my wife has become used to my being away. It used to be weeks or months. Now it’s only five days.” There was a wistful look in his eyes. I asked him whether he missed the France.

  “Of course I do. We’ll always be homesick for the beautiful ship. Some former passengers come here, and inevitably we talk about her. I worked very hard there at the Riviera Bar, but sometimes I wish I were back. Not that I have problems here. I was a steward and a chef de rang before I became barman; I learned the restaurant business quite thoroughly.”

  I said he had been a fine barman, never making a mistake when a dozen orders came at the same time. He would look at you while he mixed your drink, never glancing at his bottles, never spilling a drop. People were ecstatic about his Bloody Mary and his “Mimosa,” half a glass of orange juice filled to the brim with Champagne.

  “Yes,” Raymond said. “It was a wonderful time. And now it’s all over. Nothing remains but the memory of the France.”

  We drank to the memory, shook hands, and I walked out.

  January 1975

  PARISIAN POLICE

  Joseph Wechsberg

  The Paris police force was created on March 15, 1667, under Louis XIV. It was then called La Lieutenance de Police. In 1800 it was reorganized and has since been known as the Préfecture de Police. Even its bitter enemies in the best criminal circles consider it an exceptionally well-organized force. It publishes a monthly magazine, Liaisons (which is not what you think). The Préfecture’s formidable archives were often used by Victor Hugo and other novelists, by historians and mystery writers. The Musée de la Préfecture de Police occupies the top floor of the rather sinister building at 36, quai des Orfèvres, exhibiting documents about important crimes and weapons from prominent murder cases. Certain things are not shown because of their “immoral aspects.” One can draw one’s own conclusions.

  The museum is open on Thursday afternoons, and I was surprised to find so many visitors there in spite of the lack of elevator and the many stairs. Most visitors cared little for the historical exhibits and seemed morbidly attracted by the pistols, knives, hammers, pieces of rope, and other tools of murder used by celebrated killers who bumped off wives and lady friends, neighbors and enemies, rich people and politicians. Monsieur Roger Coutarel, the curator who took me through, said regretfully that la petite salle de criminologie was the most popular of all. In fact, he said, some visitors complain because the murder weapons have been cleaned and show no bloodstains. M. Coutarel, a slim, nonviolent specimen, seemed ill at ease in the presence of so much cruelty. “Everybody seems deeply interested nowadays in violence and aggression,” he said with a sigh.

  The museum is arranged chronologically. I found the first two rooms, devoted to the ancien régime and the Revolution, the most fascinating. I suppose I too am a nonviolent specimen. I wouldn’t mind spending some time in the archives, though. The oldest surviving police documents are dated 1584. They are written in Old French, and I couldn’t read them anyway. In the salle de l’ancien régime I saw documents about the assassination of “Roy Henry Quatrième” (Henri IV) by François Ravaillac, a fanatic, in 1610. Ravaillac was tortured and quartered, and for a while at least no one felt like assassinating another king. There is a picture of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who was executed in the Place de Grève. The nice woman had quietly poisoned her father and brothers. Papers document the “affair of the necklace,” involving Marie-Antoinette and Cardinal de Rohan. Did I hear, Oh la la!”? Correct. Some engravings show the sad life of the “daughters of joy.” One is entitled “La désolation des filles de joie” and dated 1760. The poor call girls never had it easy. The police were always after them.

  There is an interesting letter written by the Marquis de Sade on January 3, 1786, from the Bastille, as well as documents about the notorious Cartouche, who (according to M. Coutarel) “kept the police in check for almost ten years before he was caught.” Various papers signed by Louis XIV and countersigned by the unpopular Colbert are exhibited along with letters from the same king authorizing the Jesuits to hear confession if the prisoners at the Bastille wanted to go (1691). The displays include a view of the Opéra fire in 1763. There even is an ordinance dated 1725, fixing the prices of meat. Obviously, everything has happened before. The museum shows the history of France, seen through a somewhat darkened looking glass, and illuminates lots of long-forgotten affaires célèbres. Who remembers that the Maréchal de Biron was executed in 1602? So was the wife of the Maréchal d’Ancre. Now, what did she do? What was le massacre de Henri le Grand’? I didn’t want to profess my ignorance by asking M. Coutarel. He thought I knew.

  Room No. 2 gives a fine (police) insight into the French Revolution. M. Pierre Augustin Caron, better known as Beaumarchais, was arrested—not for the first time—on November 28, 1792. Earlier he had married a rich widow and bought himself a fancy title, Général des Chasses et la Capitainerie de la Varenne du Louvre. That had been in 1763, when a seven-year-old Wunderkind, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, happened to be in Paris with his father, performing on the harpsichord. Beaumarchais later acted as a doub
le or maybe triple agent for Louis XVI, got involved as corespondent in several adultery cases, and played a part in the American Revolution, but that is past history. We are happy that he wrote Le Mariage de Figaro, which Lorenzo Da Ponte and Mozart, no longer a Wunderkind but a perfect Wonder, turned into the masterpiece of masterpieces, Le Nozze di Figaro. Apropos the American Revolution, there is the decree naming Lafayette Commandant en chef des Gardes nationales de France.

  Much space is given to the arrest of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, who were taken to the Temple prison where the king, a super-gourmand, was served three soups, four entrées, three roasts, three compotes, a bottle of Champagne, a carafe of Bordeaux, one of Madeira, and four cups of coffee. That was lunch, and dinner was similar. Well, we all know what happened to him and his Queen; let us hope he enjoyed his last supper before going to the guillotine. There is also a picture of Docteur J. I. Guillotin, who introduced the lovely gadget named after him. He is perhaps considered by some a glorious member of the medical profession. The docteur was arrested though in 1792; serves him right. Jean-Paul Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday on July 13, 1793. She was guillotined four days later. A copy of Marat’s newspaper, L’Ami du Peuple, is exhibited under glass.

  Room No. 3, “La Préfecture,” shows portraits of all the Préfets, including the present one, and records of many crimes. A certain Louvel, the assassin of the duc de Berry, is seen walking to the scaffold in 1820. (Criminals seem to have no first names as far as the Paris police is concerned.) A list of jewels of the Queen of Westphalia, stolen by one Maubreuil in 1814, boggles the visitor. A report was written about “L’Affaire Maubreuil” for Talleyrand, who was going to attend the Congress of Vienna, taking along his celebrated chef, Carême, thereby introducing the diplomacy of the palate. How about reviving it, Dr. Kissinger?

  The cholera epidemic in Paris in 1832 is recalled, along with an early infernal machine designed by one Fieschi and a model of the bomb thrown by Orsini against the coach of Their Majesties. Napoleon III and his Empress were not hurt. After this attempt Napoleon commissioned Charles Garnier to build the grandest, most expensive opera house in the world. The Paris Opéra is still there, but no one remembers poor Orsini to whom—in some way—we owe it. Other exhibits include police reports about Messrs. Verlaine and Rimbaud in 1870 and 1873 and the “crise de jalousie” between the two poets. (I’m quoting M. Coutarel.) On February 10, 1894, “the poet Verlaine had drunk so many apéritifs at a banquet littéraire de la plume, that he had to be taken forcibly back to his domicile,” according to the police. Forcibly. The thought of poor Verlaine, a sensitive poet, in the hands of the flics is not pleasant.

  Some of the most interesting exhibits are the uniforms displayed on mannequins in the various rooms. They show the development of police uniforms, from riches to rags, getting more simple (and comfortable) as the years went by. Of the oldest uniforms only engravings exist: the seventeenth-century Arbalétriers de la Ville, the early Garde de Paris, the Gardes Françaises. After the establishment of the Préfecture a succession of regular uniforms was designed, the latest in 1950. Originally the police wore black. During the nineteenth century their uniforms seemed to reflect the earlier black clothes of the Inquisition. Few uniforms were worn during sieges and revolutions. Prudent people didn’t know which way the tide might turn. (After the sadly mishandled Revolution of 1848 in Vienna, many ex-revolutionaries put on top hats to appear solidly bourgeois.) Even the police were careful: Many agents wore dark gray outfits that blended into the dark house walls. Gradually, the official uniforms switched from black to dark blue and finally to the shade of blue that is worn today. The modern uniforms were introduced in 1930 and later made more comfortable. Today the agents de police wear blue shirts in summertime. Some wear white jackets, but basically blue remains the color of the police.

  Historically, the development of uniforms began with the Gendarmerie Impériale (Napoleon was still around) in 1813, the Garde de Paris in 1814, the Garde Impériale in 1815 (the return of Napoleon), the Gendarmerie Royale in 1816, the Garde Municipale in 1830, and the Garde Civique Parisienne, an auxiliary citizens’ force, in 1848. The fateful year 1848 also saw a change in the uniforms of the Garde Républicaine. Apparently one of the first things every new regime in France did—and that goes for monarchists and republicans, reactionaries and revolutionaries—was to call in designers and tailors and order new uniforms for the Paris police. During the siege of 1870 there was the Garde Républicaine, and three years later, with the Third Republic firmly established, there was the Légion de la Garde Républicaine.

  Time marches on at the police museum. One sees the pistol that Gorgulov used to fatally shoot President Paul Doumer, who had edited the magazine Rapide, as well as a picture of Raoul Villain (nomen est omen), who murdered Jean Jaurès on the eve of World War I. A plan of the district, with the rue Montmartre marked by a cross indicating where the assassination occurred, is displayed. (As early as 1895 some fellows tried to blow up the Banque Rothschild.) One is reminded of the terrible fire down in the métro in 1902, two years after it began operating, that killed seventy people. Many people said, “I knew it wouldn’t work; I told you so.” Well, it does work and is a great subway. There is also a model of the oven where Monsieur Bluebeard, alias Landru, burned his ladies—or what remained of them.

  And, toward the end, there is a photograph of General von Choltitz as he arrived at the Préfecture de Police on August 25, 1944, after surrendering, ignoring Hitler’s paranoiac orders to “burn Paris.” No doubt a visit to the museum is instructive and entertaining. It proves, among other things, that human nature never really changes.

  April 1974

  A NOSE

  Joseph Wechsberg

  Among the two-thousand-odd French perfumes that were created during the past hundred and fifty years, less than two dozen have been lastingly successful. A great perfume is created only once every ten years or so, and there are fewer than ten men in the world who have the extraordinary sense of smell, as well as the imagination, taste, and olfactory memory, needed to create a good perfume. The French call such an expert un nez (a nose). The world’s three best-selling perfumes—Chanel’s No. 5, Lanvin’s Arpège, and Guerlain’s Shalimar—are all half a century old. These and other fascinating facts of the fragrant life were given to me by M. Robert Guerlain, the fifth-generation member of the celebrated perfume firm that was founded in 1828 by Pierre François Pascal Guerlain. His picture hangs in the beautiful boardroom of the Guerlain building at 68, avenue des Champs-Élysées. He looks like a twin brother of Giuseppe Verdi, and he was also a genius, in his own way. He came to Paris from Picardy, built a small factory near the Arc de Triomphe (which was then “almost in the countryside”), and opened a small shop in the rue de Rivoli. In 1844 the shop was moved to the rue de la Paix and in 1914 to the Champs-Élysées. The factory is now in Courbevoie. To this day the firm is completely family owned. Fortunately, the Guerlains always produced “a nose.” Jacques Guerlain (1874–1963) created Mitsouko (1919) and Shalimar (1925), two great successes. The oldest perfume on the list is Jicky, which was created in 1889. The youngest “nose” is Jean-Paul, thirty-six, who created Chamade (1970), the firm’s best seller in France.

  I first discovered Guerlain in the summer of 1944, shortly after the Liberation of Paris, when I was on the staff of Stars and Stripes in the nearby rue de Berri. (Then some tricky generals sent me for penal servitude to Radio Luxembourg.) Actually it wasn’t the perfumes that interested me but the attractive, aromatic young women who sold them. The policy seems to have been changed; today know-how is considered more important than feminine charm. Maybe too many men escorting the women customers looked at the salesladies before paying for the perfumes. This time I went back mainly to look at the beautiful Guerlain building—one of the three or four houses left in the Champs-Élysées that are considered national monuments. Years ago, when the Guerlains wanted to have the façade of their building repainted in a darker
color, a high official from the ministry of cultural affairs called them. Nothing must be changed, he said; the same shade of green must be preserved.

  Charles Mewès designed the building in 1913 in art nouveau, much ridiculed then and much admired today. The façade of the Guerlain building is very beautiful, with its stucco ornaments, wrought-iron balconies, and brass fixtures; there is a sense of overall harmony in the design, and at night, lighted up, this elegant building is a lovely sight. Unfortunately, the building is flanked by nondescript modern structures; next to it are textile shops, a cinema, a television showroom. That’s progress for you. Inside, the building was tastefully decorated by Christian Bérard with white marble and stucco walls, wood paneling, and furniture in the Directoire style. The framed diploma appointing Guerlain Fournisseur de I’Impératrice Eugénie hangs in the corridor of the Beauty Institute. Napoleon III signed it after the firm created Eau de Cologne Impériale, which is still popular. The boardroom below is wood paneled and has a Napoleon III desk. There is a lovely Monet on the premises and not a wrong note in the whole building.

  Great perfumes are complicated blends of flower essences, animal matter (taken from the glands), and synthetic (chemical) products. The ingredients are imported from everywhere: jasmine from Morocco, musk from India, cloves from Madagascar, wildflowers from the Ivory Coast, and coriander from Russia. The scents of lilies of the valley, lilacs, and violets are now produced synthetically, but roses, thank goodness, are still roses, although they are very expensive. One kilo of rose essence costs over six hundred dollars, and seventy women are needed to make it. No wonder good perfumes are expensive. Guerlain’s Chamade has some fifty ingredients and was perfected after two thousand experiments. The top-secret formulas are known to only two or three members of the family. A great perfume (like a great Champagne) cannot be imitated, even with the help of chemical analysis, because the phenomenon of scent is inexplicable; a scent cannot be “measured.” Reproducing a successful perfume year after year is a great problem because the ingredients are never exactly the same. At Guerlain the perfumers are proud of the “roundness” of their finest products—no rough edges—but there is nothing they can do about the changing quality of jasmine from the Atlas Mountains. There are no “vintages” in perfumes, but some are more perishable than others. They should be kept out of light, away from heat, well closed, and preferably in the box. The Guerlain firm still takes the founder’s advice: “Make good products, have simple ideas and apply them scrupulously.”