by James Salter
The next thing I knew, they were wheeling Kay out. I went back in to see Bazin. There were a few complications, he explained. The baby was not facing the right way and had the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck. Also there was some dark matter in the amniotic fluid which emphasized we should not delay. I was not to worry, however, he told me.
“Dr. Bazin,” I said, “I am not worried. We have all the confidence in the world in you.”
He nodded in modest acknowledgment and started to leave, but I went on.
“We came to France especially to have this child, in this hospital, and to have you deliver it. It’s exactly as we wanted and planned. There’s just one thing,” I continued.
“Yes?” he said uncertainly.
“When the baby is born, we would like to wet its lips with good French wine so that it will remember the taste all its life.”
This was the romantic climax. In ages past the custom was a birth ritual of French kings. Bazin looked at me for a moment or two with what seemed incomprehension. Then, glancing around, his eye fell on the bottle of Château Latour standing on the glass shelf above the sink. He went over and picked it up.
“Is this the wine?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“This is not entirely a bad wine,” he remarked, reading the label.
I declined his invitation to be in the delivery room and went to telephone Bill. It was surely near H-hour and the Metro closed at about this time. Then I stood in the hall, not far from the delivery room door, and listened to the groans and cries that were Kay’s, the unexcited French voices belonging to Bazin, a nurse and an anesthetist, Bazin’s counsel and instructions in English, the vague sound of instruments and the rest. Then I heard, and it caused a chill to go through me, the sudden, unmistakable wail of a newborn infant.
It had all been a kind of dream, the pregnancy, her tremendous happiness, deciding to go to Paris at the last minute, Belles Feuilles, everything. The baby’s cry was like the sound of an alarm clock. The nurse, a good-looking girl in black net stockings beneath her white smock, came out and said, “You have a little boy.” Almost at the same time, from the delivery room, I heard Bazin call, “Pull the cork!”
After wetting the little boy’s lips—he was already himself, slim, cocky, serene—we drank the rest of the bottle, Kay, Bazin, the nurse, the anesthetist, and I. Real wineglasses had been produced from somewhere. Bill arrived as we were finishing.
Kay was tired, of course, drenched with triumph, the sort there is nothing to compare to. She was soon taken to her room—it turned out to be a corner suite with a white leather couch and clouds painted on the vaulted blue ceiling. They had earlier gone over her choices on the menu for the next day with her. The hospital had a genuine if unpretentious restaurant, the food was very good. French law requires the mother to stay in the hospital or clinic for a full week, in order to completely regain her strength before returning home to face whatever duties. As a foreigner, Kay was exempt from this, though she did luxuriate for days.
Bill and I went to what might be called an after-theater supper at Au Pied de Cochon, which I had first known when Les Halles, the great market of Paris, was across the street. We drank champagne. I was tired and giddy. It had all been a dream and now it was a dream again. Fog had settled in over the city. I dropped Bill off at about four in the morning and got home myself at about five after having wandered around trying to read street signs for half an hour. Dawn was just breaking, the first watery light coming through the bedroom windows. You have a little boy. I may have mentioned that to the dog.
What followed was almost pure joy. We had a list of student nurses who were willing to come in the evening and sit while we went out to dinner. Often one would come for two or three hours at midday as well. I cannot say we danced every night but we came close to it. We named our son Theo. It was the second choice, but the first was even more exotic and sounded to his grandfather like the name of a foreign radio. The franc was ten to a dollar at the time. We took taxis everywhere. We dined at Chez René and the Jules Verne, the Balzar and La Coupole. I often thought of the photograph of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and their daughter, Scottie, dancing all three together like a chorus line in front of the Christmas tree in Paris of the 1920s. It was like that.
It’s too early to know if the application of wine to Theo’s lips did its job, but having been born in Paris means a lot to him. He somehow believes he was born in the Eiffel Tower, and who are we to correct a romantic notion like that?
The Washington Post Magazine
August 13, 1995
Eat, Memory
In a sense, the connection between France and food began for me at the World’s Fair in New York in 1939. The restaurant at the French Pavilion was one of the big hits of the fair. Everyone, including my parents, talked about it and the difficulty of getting a reservation. To the best of my knowledge, my father never tried.
When the fair closed in 1940, Henri Soulé, who had managed the restaurant, along with members of the staff, decided to stay in the United States and open a restaurant themselves. Le Pavillon, as it was predictably named, opened on Fifty-fifth Street, across from the St. Regis hotel, in October 1941, just before Pearl Harbor. Dedicated to perfection, it not only survived the war but also reigned as the jewel of the city for thirty-odd years. It was expensive, of course, though the prices seem laughable today. Château Margaux 1929 was, at the time, $4.50 a bottle.
I never ate at Le Pavillon either, it turned out. Too perfect, too expensive, too social. The first French restaurant, to stretch the term slightly, I ever ate at was Longchamps, part of a chain, now gone, that catered to a middle-class clientele. Creamed spinach, dinner rolls served with an adroit fork and spoon, white tablecloths, quiet conversation, an occasional laugh. I had become an officer in the Air Force, and as such, after the war, I found my way to Paris in 1950, but it was a more or less hasty visit without culinary revelations, except that the girls in the nightclubs, after a night of insisting on bad, overpriced champagne, liked to order pigeon, which was also overpriced, in the little restaurants familiar to them that, now famished, they took you to.
Four years afterward, I was stationed in Europe, and it is at this point that memories become more distinct. We went to Paris, my wife and I, a number of times and also to the South of France. There were incredible discoveries to be made. In Paris, on the Rue d’Amsterdam, there was Androuët, where everything on the menu was made from, or if necessary with, cheese. There was Les Halles and gratinée, and someplace where the waitresses were dressed as serving wenches and you ate Rabelaisian fare. There was the first steak au poivre and quenelles de brochet, and we ate at the Méditerranée on the Place de l’Odéon, unaware of distinguished patrons like Picasso and Jean Cocteau. We assumed that lobster à l’armoricaine was simply a French misspelling.
Let me just say that once you have been exposed to French cooking and French life, and they take, there is a long and happy aftermath. It’s like knowing how to carve a turkey or sail a boat: it puts you a notch up. Of course, there is also Italy and all that. We cook from Marcella Hazan and Cucina Rustica, as well as others, but France is where Vatel, the maître d’hôtel for the Prince de Condé, fell upon his sword, his honor destroyed, when the fish did not arrive on time; where Taillevent, the most famous cook of the Middle Ages, rose from humble beginnings to actual nobility in the kitchen of Charles VI; and where Talleyrand, upon departing for Vienna in 1814 to negotiate for a defeated France at a congress of victors, told the king that he had more need of saucepans than of instructions.
Cuisine is regarded by the French as their rightful possession. Madame de Maintenon, mistress of Louis XIV, established the Cordon Bleu as a cooking school, to become over the centuries the most famous in the world. Julia Child was among its alumni. Madame de Pompadour, also a king’s mistress, was taught in her youth that food was one of the essential ways to hold a ma
n, and she is renowned for having made good use of both. It was at Paris restaurants like Le Grand Véfour and La Coupole (well, Coupole is technically a brasserie) that the great names of France were to be found. Governments were made at Lipp, it was said, but they fell at La Coupole.
Chinon, Chaumont, a small village near Grasse called Magagnosc, Villeréal, sometimes Paris—these are some of the places we, or I, have lived in France, usually in rented houses, sometimes borrowed ones. Borrowed apartments in Paris are the best, and the best guidebook, old and familiar as it may be, for me is the red Michelin. Others have their points, but the Michelin is solid, thick, and reliable. When it was first published by the Michelin tire company in 1900 to identify gas stations, hotels, and repair shops along the road, it had only twenty pages. Over the years it has become a veritable encyclopedia covering all the towns and cities in France with a hotel or restaurant worthy of any notice—name, address, telephone and fax numbers, category, price, specialties, dates open, and on and on, even whether or not you can bring your dog. Dogs are usually allowed in restaurants in France and are almost always well behaved.
It was in the Guide Michelin that we found a restaurant, La Ripa Alta, in Plaisance, in southwestern France, one summer. It had been given a Michelin star, and the ranking was deserved. We had an excellent meal, and for dessert, figs, marvelously plump and tender, bathed in a smooth, faintly alcoholic liquid. When the owner and chef, Maurice Coscuella, came around to the tables afterward, we asked about the figs, how he had done them. The recipe was his own, he said, would we like it? I gave him a pair of drugstore eyeglasses I was reading the bill with in exchange.
Figs in Whiskey
1 package dried figs, Turkish or Greek seem best
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups Scotch whiskey
Boil the figs for twenty minutes in about a quart of water in which the sugar has been dissolved. Allow to cool until tepid. Drain half the remaining water or a bit more and add the Scotch. Allow to steep a good while in a covered bowl before serving.
The restaurant in Plaisance is not listed in the current Michelin. I cannot imagine Monsieur Coscuella having fallen from one star to oblivion. I prefer to think he retired after years of honest work in the kitchen, but the guide does not give forwarding addresses.
The New York Times Magazine
January 2, 2005
Paris Nights
The 1920s were the great years in Paris, the vintage of the century. The war was over, the franc was cheap, the city was at its zenith. The painters and writers were there, amid names that have lasted: Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, Gertrude Stein. A. J. Liebling, who became a celebrated New Yorker journalist, was more or less attending the Sorbonne, and although he was too young and unaccomplished to mingle with the gods, he summons up much of the period in Between Meals, his wonderful recollection of that era.
There was a restaurant called Maillabuau on Rue Ste-Anne, unimpressive, even shabby in appearance, known for superb food and staggering prices. Liebling had never so much as crossed the threshold of Maillabuau and certainly never would have had it not been for a visit from his parents and sister. When they turned to him for a suggestion of where to have their first dinner together, Liebling, as if he dined there regularly, proposed Maillabuau. He had read its description in a guidebook. The menu that night was simple: a delicious soup—a garbure—followed by trout grenobloise, poulet Henri IV, and, for dessert, an omelette au kirsch. The food was incomparable, the wines splendid, and the check, Liebling recalled, “one of the most stupendous . . . in history.”
Not long ago, I was walking down Rue Ste-Anne, past Japanese restaurants, nightclubs, and travel agencies. Of Maillabuau there was not a trace. Like the legendary Le Chabanais, the most luxurious brothel in Paris, and the Hotel Louvois, where Liebling used to stay, Maillabuau had disappeared, devoured by modern times.
Of course, I knew this beforehand. I was merely strolling after lunch on Rue Vivienne, a couple of streets away, thinking of the 1920s and times past.
I came to Paris too late, not in my own life, but in the life of the city. I missed its years of glory. In the 1950s, the period of my first acquaintance, I was never in Paris long enough to have more than a vague impression of it, but eventually—I forget how—one night I walked into a restaurant that would become the restaurant in Paris for me. If I were asked to name my favorite restaurant in London, I might unconvincingly mention a place or two. The same for Rome. For Paris, however, there is no question. Not a moment of hesitation. The answer is La Coupole.
Is it because of the food? Not really. The food is good and so is the service. But it isn’t just for these things that one embraces a restaurant. The crucial elements, though they don’t last forever, are style and, for want of a better word, character. And in the case of La Coupole, something more: whatever the hour, but especially at night, there was the expectation of finding there le tout Paris—that is to say, everybody, from top to bottom: actors, intellectuals, journalists, musicians, along with many others whose occupation it would be difficult to judge.
Night. You cross the wide avenue, the Boulevard Montparnasse. There is the wide glass front, the garish neon letters above. People are sitting on the enclosed terrace, lingering over coffee, talking. Passing through the doors you are struck by the full sound: conversation, laughter, knives and forks clattering, bottles being opened, plates stacked. The long aisles running front to back with tables and banquettes on either side, the flood of faces. Each section has a maître, implacable as a croupier, in a dinner jacket. You know them by sight, polite but reserved. This is a profession, a life. If men like this are running the lines for the boat across the Styx, you’re in luck. “You wish a table? For four?” He casts an appraising eye over his domain. “Dix minutes, monsieur.” You can rely on the estimate. He’ll call you in the bar.
Countless nights. I was having dinner at La Coupole once while thieves were stealing my car a few blocks away. In the police station there was a line of at least a dozen people waiting impatiently while the particulars were carefully being typed. “Ne vous inquietez pas,” I was told, when I asked if this was just for the files or if patrol cars were being advised. He said 95 percent of all stolen cars were found Monday morning abandoned outside the gates of Paris—portes was the word he used—though it turned out that my car was in the minority and was never seen again.
La Coupole was open late. I often saw Polanski there and Gérard Brach, his screenwriter, who returned from living in England for two years, saying with pride that he had not learned a single word of the language during that time. You found Styron there, and Claude Berri. Of course, Paris is small, at least compared to New York.
These were the years when I was passing through the world of film. One unforgettable night I sat talking with an actor I had just met who was in Paris making a movie. Rip Torn. You know his face. There is a hint of the diabolic in it—this was years ago, but even then. I was fascinated as, later in the evening, he began to tell me the story of his life, but gradually a strange sensation, of being tricked somehow, being made a fool of, came over me. The details of Torn’s boyhood—his years at military school, his idealism, hopes—they were all mine! How did he know all of this? No one did. How could he have known? I was watching him closely, trying to find the deceit, the slight lip quiver of falseness. He betrayed nothing. Finally, almost frightened, I said to him, “This isn’t your story.”
“What do you mean?”
“The one you’re telling. It’s not your life,” I said.
But it was. Every word. I don’t remember what I said, my thoughts were too confused. I was staying at a hotel not far away on the Boulevard Raspail, and I walked back to it like a ruined man. I felt weak. I could not believe what I had heard, but I could not figure out how not to believe it. There was someone almost exactly like the secret me. I felt exposed, undone.
The odd thing is that La C
oupole itself is not the original La Coupole. It is a copy, refurbished after having been sold. The new La Coupole has everything the earlier one had—appearance, location—everything except one small detail, the soul. Somehow that got painted over. The timeworn quality of the restaurant, the bar that was isolated and a kind of afterthought, the feeling of being aboard an aging ship, launched in the 1920s but still holding the record—these are the things that were not passed on. Still, I cannot break the habit or resist the pull. Favorite Paris restaurant? The answer is immediate and unthinking: La Coupole. I always go back. The oysters, served on the great mounds of shaved ice, are the same, the neon sign, the front window, the crowd and the noise. For all we know, the singular lean face over there, the high forehead, is Cocteau’s, and that attractive woman, face among faces further down, is definitely Djuna Barnes.
Food & Wine
October 1998
Chez Nous
A friend of mine married a Frenchwoman—something I had always had it vaguely in mind to do—and felt he had to prepare her for life in the States. There were certain things, for instance, that were never discussed at the dinner table, he told her; they were taboo—politics, religion, and sex.
“But that’s impossible!” she replied. “In France those are the only things you talk about!”
You can sit in Taillevent or Lucas Carton, or maybe even on the ground floor at Lipp, something I’ve been able to achieve only once or twice in my life, but there’s no point in eavesdropping to hear racy French conversation in these places. For one thing, they’ll probably be talking English at the next table. Chez nous—at our place, as they say—is where you want to be, but the trouble is, you never get to their place. The French, and especially the Parisians, are notoriously private and probably have good reason to be: if sex is discussed at the dinner table, who knows what goes on elsewhere? In any case, an invitation to dinner is hard to come by. Despite this, there is an understandable curiosity and eagerness for any opportunity to breathe in a legendary frankness about the essential things of life.