“My colleagues would call my theory a specious correlation, but of course in sociology no one really knows what wags what.”
1 The Oxford café was opened in 1650 by a Middle Eastern Jew. London’s first was opened in 1652 by Pasqua Rosee, the namesake for the San Francisco chain Pasqua. His café is now a tavern called Jamaica Inn.
2 Interestingly, renowned cultural theorist Michel Foucault believes his famous “rationalization” of Western civilization started the same year that Europe’s first café opened.
Paris
I have tried to show the café as a place where one can go mad.
Vincent Van Gogh
MY FIRST STOP, IN PARIS, WAS the central post office to pick up my forged Rajasthani paintings. I was an idiot. That was obvious to me, now that I was surrounded by serious-faced Frenchmen and their gray buildings. Not only had the whole art-smuggling conspiracy been a scam, but the existence of India herself—her neon colors, her ape-gods—seemed suspect. What had I been thinking about? What kind of brain-dead dolt would give two underage hustlers twelve hundred dollars for a bunch of day-glo doodling? Before entering the post office, I popped over to a nearby café to brace myself with a shot of something decidedly uncaffeinated. It was your typical Parisian joint, all brass and fake marble and people idling. Now, most Americans find it marvelous that the people of Paris can sit for days over a thimbleful of rocket fuel and fear no waiterly wrath. They don’t realize that those people are not merely sitting in the chairs, they’re renting them. It’s not joie de vivre that keeps them there until cobwebs hang off their noses, it’s miserliness. The entirety of twentieth-century philosophy is simply the result of penny-pinching Parisians falling prey to a dementia born of boredom, caffeine, and pomposity, the main symptoms of which are cubism, surrealism, and existentialism. All those earthshaking theories were nothing more than a desperate attempt to rationalize that extra ten-franc expenditure. You may, of course, stand at the comptoir for free, although then you must be willing to wallow in piles of discarded cigarette butts (it is against the law to have an ashtray at a Parisian comptoir—no one knows why).
I downed a quick calvados, standing, and headed over to the post office.
“No, monsieur, there is nothing.” The man at the poste restante window was certain.
“But I don’t understand why not,” I said. “I even have insurance.”
I waved my receipt at the clerk. It had never looked terribly official, even when I’d bought it in Jaipur. After three months in my money belt, it resembled a wisp of toilet paper.
“And what, may I ask, is this, Monsieur?”
“It’s a receipt for the insurance,” I said.
He peered at the slip.
“And what language, may I again ask, is this, monsieur?”
“It’s a Hindu language. Urdu, I believe.”
“I see.” He handed it back. “You are now in France, monsieur. In France, we speak Freeench. And when, may I inquire, did you send the package?”
“Two months ago,” I said. “You would think it would have arrived by now.”
“Two months? Ahh, yes, it has undoubtedly arrived. However, you see, we only keep packages for three weeks. If they are not claimed by then, we send them back.”
“Ahhh! But of course!” I was beginning to get into the swing of this fellow’s repartee. “However, may I say, there was no return address on it. You could not, I think, therefore have sent it back, no? So it must, I would think, still be here, yes?”
“Not at all, monsieur,” he smirked. “If there is no return address, the package is burned.”
“Burned?” I was having trouble understanding his meaning. “With fire?”
“Exactly, monsieur.”
I began to get excited. “Why, it was worth millions of…I don’t know, certainly millions in some currency, somewhere. I must speak to a superior.”
“You sent a package worth millions to poste restante? What, may I ask, was in the package?”
“Paintings. It was a big parcel with the market value and instructions to hold for three months. Are you sure there’s no record?”
“May I ask what language the instructions were written in?”
“French.”
“I see.” He examined an enormous computer printout. “Well, apparently something from India arrived some time ago…” He hesitated. “Here, you must write your name and information.”
It turned out there was a warehouse where they kept all the misaddressed, undeliverable, indecipherable, and unclaimed packets that the post office was too lazy to burn. If only I could get inside, I thought as I filled out the form. Who knew what I might find lying about. Van Gogh’s ear. The bra of the lady on the twenty-franc note.
“Why don’t you just give me the address and I’ll go there myself,” I suggested.
He shrugged. “As you like, monsieur. But it is four hundred kilometers from Paris.”
IT’S ONE OF THE TRAVESTIES OF THE CAFFEINATED AGE THAT Europe’s most celebrated cafés should serve some of the worst coffee. If Italian espresso is witty and rich, the French cup is bitter and oily. The Viennese like their cafés comfortable, spacious, replete with overstuffed chairs; Parisians prefer them crammed with doll-sized tables and chairs suitable for an interrogation chamber. Not to say that one is better than the other—the world is full of masochists—but it’s fair to say they indicate different cultural priorities.
The Parisian café, for instance, is a clear manifestation of that nation’s obsession with style. I do not say this lightly, and, indeed, I can prove it by returning to that pivotal decade of the 1670s. It was then, 1672 to be precise, that an Armenian named Pascal (said by some to be the same Pasqua who manned London’s premier café twenty years earlier) opened the first Parisian establishment. Near St. Germain. It was a simple, honest café, utterly lacking in pretension and so, of course, of no interest to the French. It soon went out of business. Coffee remained “medicinal,” and there it might have ended except that in this same decade the Turkish Ottomans were preparing their invasion of Vienna. One of their concerns was the possibility of French interference, so they sent an ambassador named Solimon Aga to seduce Louis XIV into signing a nonaggression treaty.
Aga went to Paris and began his wooing. For six months he invited Paris’s crème de la crème, one by one, up to his apartments to chat and, in the Turkish tradition, share coffee. The drink, as I’ve said, had been seen in Paris. But not like this. Guests were received in chambers hung with priceless Turkish carpets. Before taking coffee, they were washed with rosewater. Then their heads were enclosed in a silk tent under which myrrh was burned to perfume their faces. Finally an African kahvedjibachi in gorgeous costume would roast, pound, and brew the mysterious “black wine” and, according to Isaac D’Israeli, “on bended knee serve the choicest mocha…poured out in saucers of gold and silver, placed on embroidered silk dollies fringed with gold bouillon.”
It was too exotic to resist, and invitations to Soliman’s little tête-à-têtes were soon the most desirable in town. Louis, who had refused to see the ambassador, finally invited Soliman to drop by the palace. The meeting quickly became a fashion showdown, French Rococo against Turkish mystique. Louis had a robe worth fourteen million livres (approximately thirty million dollars) made for the occasion. He had a reception hall decorated with massive silver furniture and surrounded himself with hundreds of courtiers. Soliman appeared almost alone, wearing simple robes. The only thing truly precious was his coffee service—solid gold ibriks, diamond studded zarfs, rarely seen Chinese porcelain.
Soliman won, and anybody who was anybody soon had a room decorated a la Turk where, dressed in Arabic duds and served by a Nubian slave, they would sit and sip mocha, a fad that Molière would immortalize in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme:
MSSR. JOURDAIN: (Entering with a huge turban on his head)
Mamamouchi, I tell you. I am a Mamamouchi!
MME. JOURDAIN: What beast is that?
&nb
sp; MSSR. JOURDAIN: In your language, a Turk.
MME. JOURDAIN: A Turk? Are you of an age to be a Moorish dancer?
Louis signed the treaty, and within a decade Vienna was surrounded by three-hundred thousand Turks. The Turks lost, and the Paris coffee fad began to fade. Then, three years after the siege of Vienna, a Sicilian named Francesco Procopio dei Coltel-li opened a place called Café Procope. Procope, however, had learned a lesson from the Turkish ambassador’s success. He had realized that it was not coffee the drink that interested the French, but coffee the fashion statement. Where the earlier Parisian cafés had been down to earth, Café Procope was royal. It had marble tables and mirrors and chandeliers. There were waiters in powdered wigs. There were Turkish sherbets and liqueurs. The Sicilian had created a Disneyfied version of a nobleman’s coffee salon, right down to the condescending footmen. The French melted like butter. Voltaire became a regular, as did Napoleon, Rousseau, D’Alembert and, today, any number of tourists wearing short pants and Mickey Mouse caps. The success of Café Procope (on and off for three hundred years) ensured that it became the archetype of Parisian cafés, where the emphasis remains on being seen in grand surroundings.
The reason was that the French did not actually like the taste of the Turks’ “bitter wine,” an aversion that supposedly led to the introduction of sugar by the Turkish ambassador. “There are two things Frenchmen will never swallow,” wrote Madame de Sevigné in the 1670s, “coffee and Racine’s poetry.” The Duchess of Orleans compared coffee to soot. Louis XIV thought it vile. That being said, no matter how much the royals disliked the stuff they were doubtless deeply moved by its unique ability, in the words of sixteenth-century coffee scholar Paludanus, to “breaketh wind and openeth any stopping.” This was coffee’s first claim to fame in Europe,1 most poignantly as an electuary of melted butter, salt, honey, and coffee, which one took after inserting a provang (a three-foot-long whale bone) down one’s throat and into the stomach. The French did not provang but they were obsessed with the issue of “stoppings.” Voltaire himself dedicated a whole section of his Dictionnaire philosophique (supposedly conceived in a café) to the topic, and the king was so gravely afflicted that his dining chair was modified to double as a toilet to ensure no opportunity passed unexploited. One of Versailles’ most prestigious positions was Gentilhomme porte Coton, a man who, armed with little more than a cotton ball and a silver platter, would receive the Sun King’s tragically infrequent droppings and hurry them to the appropriate authority.
This ancient tradition explains not only the French use of espresso as an after-dinner digestive but also sheds some light on the inexplicably awful nature of the national cup. First the bean itself. The French drink about 50 percent of the Robusta beans in Europe. Robustas, while lower in quality, are particularly caffeinated. Caffeine causes the muscle spasms associated with “unblockings.” This natural attribute is amplified by the “French roast,” in which the bean is burnt beyond recognition, thus enhancing carbon and oil content. Carbon absorbs gastric gases, facilitating traffic flow; fats and oils are known laxatives.
SINCE IT WOULD TAKE THE POSTAL SERVICE AT LEAST TWO WEEKS to figure out where they’d put my paintings, and since Paris is so obscenely expensive, I decided to try to find some casual work. I’d worked in Paris during the late 1980s, typing novels and washing dishes, but this time I wanted to work as a café garçon, a waiter. In the days of Procope, waiters doubled as in-house encyclopedias who, having personally heard Voltaire’s latest pronouncement, could be counted on to authoritatively settle any dispute. It’s still a prestigious position, in a way The city’s finest compete every year to see who can run the fastest hundred meters while balancing a tray of café crèmes. At the very least you get to wear tight pants and sneer at tourists, two pastimes no Frenchman can long resist.
I thought my best chance would be among the Greek cafés in the Latin Quarter, and after a day of wandering its cobblestone alleys, I actually received an offer of sorts. It was a little café-restaurant with that look of dusty contentment that comes only to places unmolested by customers. The manager, a nattily dressed Syrian, greeted me like an old friend. As he led me back to his office, I noticed that the kitchen was stacked with unwashed dishes. There seemed to be no other employees. We chatted about my experience (limited) and working papers (forged). Then he asked me if I was a member of the dishwashers’ union.
“Well, hmm,” I said. I wasn’t sure I’d understood him. A dishwashers’ union? Was there really such a thing? “Actually, I was looking for a position as a waiter.”
He shrugged. “There is no difference.”
“No difference?”
“It is the same.”
I was getting it. The piles of unwashed dishes, the lack of visible staff. “I would be doing both, yes?”
“Of course,” he said. “You mentioned you had experience as a cook.”
“Yes, but—”
“But you are not a member of the dishwashers’ union? I’m afraid I can’t let you work unless you are in the union. They are very strict.”
“The strictest,” I agreed, standing up. “I will go see my friend immediately. He can help, I am sure.”
The friend I referred to was Moussa, a gentleman from Mali with whom I’d worked during the eighties. Those were the Roaring Eighties, when Ronald Reagan’s rape of the American economy sent the dollar sky high and made Paris almost affordable for Yank expats like myself. Bless his soul! For fifty cents I’d been able to feign profundity at the Parisian café of my choice. A glass of red had cost under a dollar. Rent on my river barge just opposite the Louvre was less than seventy-five dollars a month. The fact that I woke up with icicles over my head and “flushed” my toilet by tossing it overboard, or that my job paid $2.50 an hour, was irrelevant at those prices. Moussa was a dishwasher (now chef), and I felt sure that if anybody could get me into the dishwashers’ union, he could. He’s a wonderful man—kind, bawdy, an old-fashioned country gentleman from the sub-Sahara with a little girl’s giggle and a Pinocchio nose. Fond of holding hands. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to expound at length about Moussa. A rare and wonderful person. Unfortunately, he was useless.
“A dishwashers’ union?” he said. “That’s ridiculous! He must have been drunk.”
I next looked up Monsieur François Bailtrand, a retired union judge who lives in the ground-floor chambre of his family’s hotel. A small man, perhaps eighty, with a stutter and lilac-tinted teeth.
“Ah, Monsieur, you know it is not so easy, even for most Frenchmen,” he said, when I found him. “To work in the cafés you really need to be an Auvergnat. I believe they still are the dominant tribe of the cafés.”
“There’s a café tribe?” I said. “You mean a caste, like in India?”
“What, you mean you do not know the story of the Auvergnats? They are the fathers of the Parisian café.” He pulled down some books from the shelves lining the walls of his bed/dining room. “They are, you know, a tribe or a very large family. Not a caste. But my family, too, is from Auvergne.”
“Your family ran a café?”
“This was a café, here where you sit. Back then—hotel, café—it was all the same.”
Auvergne is a mountainous region five hundred miles or so south of Paris. Today it’s popular for horseback riding. Back in the 1700s, it was a poverty-stricken backwater peopled by peasants who scratched out a living as coal miners. Auvergnats, as the people from the region are called, were and are famous for their stubborn independence and are supposed to be descended from the Ukrainians. According to Monsieur Balitrand, they appeared in Paris selling their villages coal as charbonniers (hence the nickname Charbougnats). They then started peddling water and lemonade, then hot water, which they boiled using the coal they also sold. When coffee came into vogue they brewed it to order on people’s doorsteps, a Parisian tradition that goes back to a crippled boy called Le Candiot who sold coffee door-to-door in the late 1600s.
Drag
ging all this stuff about the muddy streets of Paris became a nuisance. So one by one the Auvergnats picked a spot and set up shop. Walls grew around their carts. They stuck a chair or two outside. Occasionally someone even washed a dish. And so Deux Magot, Café Flore, Lipp, and a zillion other famous Parisian cafés came into being. By the late 1800s about half a million Auvergnats had moved to the city. To this day they remain a tribe apart, with special newspapers and soirées that reunite entire villages.
Among the early arrivals had been Monsieur Balitrand’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather from the village of St. Come d’Olt in northern Auvergne.
“We chose this spot in the late 1800s,” said Monsieur Balitrand of his Hotel Henry IV, an ancient maze of a place on L’Ile de la Cité. “I would say that maybe fifty percent of the people in my family’s village opened cafés or hotels here.”
By the mid-1700s, these establishments (Auvergne and pre-Auvergne) had turned Paris into “one vast café,” according to Jules Michelet. Like their British brethren, French cafés were heavily involved in the political reforms of the time. What’s absolutely fascinating is the different ways the two institutions approached the situation. English coffeehouses featured sober, serious discussion and debate. The cafés of Paris turned political reform into a theatrical experience. The infamous Café des Aveugles featured a blind orchestra led by a deaf singer as a parody of the incompetent royal government. Its neighbor, Café Vert, boasted a monkey trained to leap at the throat of any customer denounced as an aristocrat. Frivolous, cruel, sarcastic: terribly Parisian.
By the 1780s, however, things started getting serious. “The coffeehouses of Palais Royal,” wrote English traveler Arthur Young in 1789, “present the most astonishing spectacle, crowded within and without by crowds listening to [impromptu] speeches….The thunder of applause [with which] they receive every sentiment of violence against the present government cannot be easily imagined.”
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