Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  Roger cooed at the compliment. “Merci beaucoup monsieur. Merci.” And with a devilish grin, he whispered conspiratorially, “Le périscope pour vous?”

  “Certainement! Et binoculars aussi s’il vous plaît!”

  Fantastic! Roger was going to perform his periscope trick. I glanced around at the other diners to see who might be the likely victim.

  He returned and handed the binoculars to me so I could see the chalk board menu on the wall at the end of the room. But I had eyes only for the periscope. It was handed to Dave upside down so the sight was focused under the table. While he looked through it, Roger walked up to a woman sitting facing us at an adjacent table and lifted her skirt. She obviously knew him because in mock anger, she slapped his hand and for our benefit, pronounced him “a naughty old man” in heavily accented English. The three of them howled with laughter. I beamed. Our time travel trip back to the old Roger’s was so far totally successful. Now it was up to the waitress to perform the grand finale. But it was ridiculous for me to even consider the possibility that she could be the same one. Then I quickly chastised myself for such negative thinking.

  I scrutinized her out of the corner of my eye when she brought our wine and grenouille and concluded that she was, after all, about the right age.

  “Don’t you remember her?” I asked.

  “No,” he answered very definitely, cruelly dashing my hopes.

  As we sipped wine and dug into succulent, tender little frogs legs dripping with garlic butter, Dave told me the story again.

  In 1951, Lt. David Brown, U.S. Army, was stationed in Paris during the Korean War. (He’s always been grateful for that roll of the dice.) Since he lived on the French economy instead of on an army base, the Hotel Bon St. Jour was home. (The rate was a dollar a day which included laundry service.) He usually ate his meals at the same neighborhood bistro but every Wednesday, the monotony was broken by dining out at various restaurants with his friends and superior officers, Major Frank Bayard and Captain Tony Biando. That is until one particular Wednesday when they took a friend up on his recommendation of an unpretentious and fun Left Bank place called Roger La Grenouille. It was fated to become The Wednesday Night Restaurant.

  The Left Bank called me and even now it does not cease to call me and to keep me. I cannot imagine that I could ever leave it, any more than an organ can leave the place that is assigned to it in the body.

  —Adrienne Monnier

  According to directions, they took the Métro to St. Michel, walked along Quai des Grands Augustins and turned left onto the rue des Grands Augustins. On that particular moonless night, the street lights weren’t operating. And not a ray of light escaped from the tightly shuttered windows. The street couldn’t have been darker. Or quieter. The three officers huddled together. As they approached number 28 the silence was broken only by the creaking of a frog sign swinging in the breeze above them. Since the entrance wasn’t on the street, they assumed it was off the courtyard on the other side of the door. The officer of lowest rank was sent to reconnoiter the territory. Lt. Brown bravely opened the door and tiptoed across the courtyard toward the only door which had a strip of light escaping from the bottom. He knocked softly and waited while listening to his thumping heart.

  The door squeaked and creaked as it was slowly opened by a very mysterious woman dressed in black. Dave tried to ignore the chill running down his back.

  “Oui?” She strung out the “oui” in a sexy, throaty voice.

  His jaw came unhinged when it finally registered that he was facing the madame of a brothel for the first time in his life. (Or so he told me.) Funny trick the friend had played sending them to a brothel! But then again he thought, what did it matter? Brothel or restaurant, they couldn’t lose.

  “Un moment s’il vous plaît madame,” and he turned to give his superiors, who were hiding in the shadows, the all-clear, come-ahead sign. As the three entered, Dave barely stifled a laugh. Were they ever going to get a shock! But the aroma of garlic butter told him the friend hadn’t tricked them after all.

  Roger, the “frog,” compensated for any disappointment Dave may have felt. He performed his bit with the trio from his “rosé” to his periscope. But the finale was performed by the waitress.

  After spending a leisurely three hours over a very enjoyable dinner, Frank and Tony rose from the table, leaving Dave to compute the tip. (Those were the days before service compris.) When he reached the door, the waitress blocked his way.

  After pressing something into his hand, she whispered, “Un baiser. Donnez un baiser à moi,” and she pointed to her puckered red lips.

  Dave’s eyes bulged. There was no mistaking this French! She wanted him to kiss her! Not the other guys who had been politely shoved out the door but him! He eagerly leaned forward and just as he was about to kiss her lips, she quickly turned her cheek to him.

  “À bientôt, monsieur. À bientôt,” and she ushered him out.

  Well, she was just being coy, Dave thought. Since she was going to see him soon, she had obviously slipped him her phone number along with something that felt cold and hard in his palm. A key to her apartment?

  Outside, he joined the others who were busy looking, with the aid of a cigarette lighter, at little lead frogs they’d been given as souvenirs. With anticipated dismay, Dave opened his hand. Yep. Another frog.

  “I suppose she kissed you guys too?”

  “Kissed?” Frank questioned. “I didn’t get a kiss. What about you Tony? Any kisses?”

  “Not a one. I guess she liked you best Dave.”

  And so the evening was salvaged for my husband by two good friends.

  We’d arrived at Roger’s at eight. Now it was almost midnight. We had devoured cuisses de grenouilles, cassoulet, coq au vin, salade de tomate, a generous portion of the huge cheese tray (passed from table to table by the diners themselves as it had always been) and finally strawberries with crème fraîche and coffee. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to postpone the disappointment I was sure would accompany our departure. But it was time to face reality: she wasn’t going to be the same waitress. I consoled myself with the fact that it had been a wonderful evening, full of surprises from the past and certainly no reason to feel disappointed.

  It was time to go. We stood and walked up the aisle. But as we approached the door, she was waiting...and making unmistakable eyes at Dave! I took a deep breath. Her lips puckered. His eyes bulged.

  “Un baiser!” she demanded and pointed repeatedly at her mouth.

  While I gaped ecstatically, Dave happily complied. Or tried to. At the last second, her head swiveled ninety degrees and he got a mouthful of cheek again.

  Then she pressed a little lead frog into his palm. “J’étais aussi ici en mille neuf cent cinquante et un et je me rappelle très bien de vous,” she smiled coquettishly.

  I simply couldn’t believe it. Had any time elapsed at all since 1951?

  “Ohhhhh mademoiselle,” Dave gushed. He kissed her hand and told her in his best French how very much he also remembered her.

  Like Frank and Tony before me, I stepped outside to wait for my friend and to blissfully savor the fact that not a single second had passed in 27 years.

  We have returned to Roger’s twice since then. During our last visit in 1992, we sadly discovered that he had passed away. However, “Madame Roger” was holding down the fort nicely. No longer were they handing out lead frogs, but mademoiselle was still doling out kisses.

  Tish Carnes Brown resides with Dave in Media, Pennsylvania. They take the time machine to Paris every chance they get. Her articles have appeared in France Today.

  It is said that the world’s first café opened in Istanbul (the Turks were great popularizers of coffee) in 1550. Paris got its first one in 1686, when a Sicilian named Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli opened an establishment called Le Procope on the Left Bank, on what is now the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. It is still in existence on the same site, having closed and opened several t
imes—reviving most recently in 1952 as a restaurant now mainly patronized by tourists, who may or may not be impressed by the fact that Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau drank on the premises.

  In the 19th century, the focus of Parisian café life shifted from the Left to the Right Bank, to the gilded and chandelier-hung establishments of the Grands Boulevards—that once-elegant series of broad thoroughfares that leads from the Opéra to the Place de la République. At the same time, painters, writers, and all-purpose bohemians began to haunt the steamy cabarets of Montmartre.

  The everyday corner café, or café du coin, now so emblematic of Paris, began to flourish in the city around the turn of the century, when hardy rural types from the Auvergne in central France began to set up shop in the capital to sell coal and charcoal for heating and cooking. They offered wine and strong drink to their customers along with other kinds of fuel, thus providing meeting places for ordinary Parisians who weren’t interested in gilt or bohemian pursuits. The descendants of these establishments are everywhere in Paris today—scruffy generic places that supply such basic components of Parisian life as jolts of thick black café serré, darkly aromatic French cigarettes, stamps and lottery tickets, telephones and lavatories of dubious sanitation.

  —Angela Mason, “Café Society,” Los Angeles Times Magazine

  PART FOUR

  IN THE SHADOWS

  MARCEL F. LAVENTURIER

  Destination Paris

  A young man meets his destiny.

  BEFORE REACHING PARIS, I ESCAPED FROM ST-QUENTIN.

  The town of St-Quentin, the capital of Picardie in northern France.

  The year was 1940. The German army had invaded Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. The only remaining obstacle to Hitler’s total domination of Western Europe was Great Britain, a few tantalizing miles across the Channel. In the fall, the German High Command implemented the first phase of Operation Sea Lion: saturation bombing of the British seaports and the London Blitz. South of the Belgian border, north of Paris, the invasion force was readying an attack for the spring of 1941.

  At the time, I was nineteen, an American student living with an uncle in Belgium. The German authorities in our small town had paid scant attention to me until September 10 when it was announced that President Roosevelt had transferred 50 American destroyers to the Royal Navy. The local commandant considered this an overt act of war for which he held me personally responsible. I was ordered to report to the Kreiskommandatur in Brussels to justify my status as a non-combatant neutral alien. There was a complication—I carried a valid American passport and was U.S. born, but the fact that both my mother and father had been born in France made me a French citizen according to French and German laws. My other problem was that I had failed to report for conscription in the French army when I reached eighteen; this made me a deserter as well. Rather than report to the Germans to face jail or deportation, I joined the Belgian Underground.

  “H as the last word been spoken? Must hope die now? Is our defeat decisive? No,” the voice thundered, “nothing is lost for France!”

  This was the “immortal message of June 18,” the radio appeal to Frenchmen to take heart, to resist the Germans, delivered by General Charles de Gaulle. It was the message that lived on in history in the oft-cited phrase, “France has lost a battle, not the war.”

  De Gaulle never pronounced that phrase in exactly those words. What he said was, “This war has not ended with the battle of France. This war is a world war,” but the shorter, more dramatic version that lived on was close enough to what de Gaulle actually had said to be valid.

  —David Schoenbrun, As France Goes

  My best friend was the leader of a small group of resisters who helped escaped allied prisoners evade the Gestapo. He controlled black market and smuggling rings which he used to finance his clandestine operations. He signed me on as a courier. For a couple of months I lived in safe houses and smuggled uncut diamonds from Antwerp across the border into France; occasionally, I served as an English interpreter. That November, the Germans changed the currency laws for the occupied countries, and our group was able to steal one million newly printed Occupation Reichmarks. The money had to be spread around to our operatives in a way that it could not be traced. As my final job for the Underground, I was given the opportunity to earn my passage back to the U.S. by smuggling part of the loot to our safe house in Paris. Up to that time the border was fairly porous, our couriers carrying false papers moved people and money back and forth regularly. What we didn’t realize was that this red zone, as it came to be known, had been placed on high alert by the Germans to prevent spying on the troop movements. Special passes from the Kreiskommandatur in Brussels were required for civilian travel. All I had was my American passport. To hide my share of the swag, 150,000 Reichmarks, I divided the bills into two bundles which I wrapped in brown paper then baked in two large loaves of peasant bread. Bread was rationed and I would not attract attention by carrying some in my luggage. When I boarded the Brussels-Paris express, I carefully selected a seat in a second class compartment closest to an exit.

  The train had been chugging along for some time through the wintry countryside when it slowed down and finally stopped. I stepped out of the compartment and saw two German military policemen wearing the insignia of the “Feldengendarmerie” enter at the opposite end of the carriage. As the train started slowly, I reached for the handle on the exit door, ready to jump, but there were sentries posted every few feet along the track. The door to the rest room was at my back, I opened it and locked myself in, trapped like an animal. In a cold sweat with my pulse racing, I prayed that the police would overlook my hiding place. Soon, I heard a rap on the door. I didn’t respond at first but when it persisted, louder and louder, I opened the door and two of the largest German soldiers that I had ever seen walked in; one stood in front and one in back of me.

  “Papiers?”

  I showed them my passport, they compared me to my photo then the largest one said, “Zu schen sein passierschein?”

  “Nicht Verstehen,” I answered.

  He smiled, “Mitkommen.”

  They frisked me for weapons and took me back to my seat where one of them guarded me until we reached the next stop—St-Quentin. A six-man squad of soldiers waited on the platform. The policeman handed my passport to a corporal; three other prisoners joined us, then we were marched double file across the tracks, over a bridge, then right in the center of the street going uptown. Curious civilians stopped to stare at us, traffic went around us. Soon, we stopped at a building over which flew a huge swastika flag. The troopers herded us into a room filled with frightened men and women; some were crying. They didn’t make room for me so I sat on my fancy yellow leather suitcase. The corporal of the guard handed our papers to two Gestapo men who sat at the opposite end of the room. One of them came to me, motioned me off my suitcase and took it away. The smell of my terror was added to that of the other prisoners. A Gestapo seated at the table piled high with papers pointed and shouted questions at us in German. An interpreter translated his questions. I understood most of what the Gestapo was saying, but when my turn came, he pointed at me and shouted, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

  I looked blankly at him and kept silent.

  The translator said, “Do you understand German?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Only English and French.”

  My answer sent the Gestapo into a rage, he got red in the face, started shouting louder and banging his fist on the table. He threw some papers in a folder but kept on raving and making menacing gestures.

  The translator said, “He is turning you over to the judge for immediate sentencing. He says that you are a Frenchman with a fake American passport sent here to spy for the British. If it was up to him, he’d call out the firing squad and shoot you without a trial, this minute.”

  The other prisoners moved away from me as if I were a leper. I began to perspire, my hands shook and my mouth and throat went dry. One of the Gest
apo soldiers pushed me into the next room, past the raving maniac who was still screaming.

  It served as a court room. On an elevated dais a small baldheaded, sour-faced man dressed in a black uniform sat at a large desk. He picked through my papers, looked at me with disgust and speaking in French said, “This court is tired of adjudicating cases that are not in our jurisdiction. You will be tried in a military court in Brussels. You are remanded back to Belgium.”

  In German, he ordered the Gestapo to take me away and to ship me back on the next train.

  I was taken to a small room where three French gendarmes sat at a small table playing cards. The guard propelled me towards them and in an accented French told them to push me across the red line as soon as possible. They interrupted their card game and looked at me with professional interest, trying to place me in some criminal category. What was this well-dressed young man up to?

  One of them, not unkindly said, “Sit down and relax. It will take some time for the Germans to fill out all their forms. They love paper work. There isn’t a train north until tomorrow anyway. You will sleep in our jail tonight.”

  Ever since my arrest I had lived in a state of disorganized terror as if I’d been thrown overboard in a vast ocean full of man-eaters. I was desperately paddling to stay afloat while dozens of other prisoners were clinging to the sides of a boat. They were torn away, one by one, by the attacking sharks. Sitting in the boat, which flew the swastika, drunken soldiers amused themselves, pushing men, women and children over the side. I was living a nightmare.

  At dawn on July 16, 1942, police across Paris arrested more than 16,000 Jews and bused them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an indoor cycling stadium.

  It was the first major roundup of Jews in Nazi-occupied France. The families were held inside without food or water for three days. Those who survived were transferred to concentration camps in France and, ultimately, to Auschwitz.