Paris on a Plate

by Stephen Downes

  I insert a CD of Brahms’s first piano concerto into my laptop. Oysters, muscadet and Brahms? Elitist? Pretentious? Believe it if you like, but I’d disagree. And I’m alone, what’s more, trying to impress nobody. I’d just say that life is short. Quality in all things is my chief concern. I once drank a bottle of calvados while watching, on a scratchy black-and-white television, Glenn Gould play Bach’s Goldberg variations. I count it among my greatest life-moments. It was his last shot at them, as it happened, a recital for Canadian TV. He died soon after. So it’s oysters and Brahms rather than a Big Mac and Kylie. Depth rather than the shallow end. A big hit rather than a little one. Complexity rather than simplicity. At bottom, value in return for my time and money. I’m mean, you see.

  But the CD has links to Paris, too. The pianist is Julius Katchen, the wonderful American artist who died of cancer here in the spring of 1969. He was forty-two. In my youth I collected pianists. Well, not their bodies and souls, of course, but their ‘live’ — as they say these days — performances. (It occurs to me, by the way, that so many ‘live’ rock performances are actually stone dead.) On one occasion, I collected Julius. He strode on to the platform of the Melbourne Town Hall in a white tuxedo with a scarlet buttonhole. Carnation, if I remember rightly. He was a great smiler at the audience, but when he got down to business his artistry was transcendental. And he played Brahms’s first piano concerto as only he could. It was magical; a perfect interpretation of the composer’s sad majesty. As it is on this recording. I once saw a documentary of Katchen’s life — how the New Jersey boy of northern European origins eventually adopted Paris as his home and was taught here by the legendary Nadia Boulanger. (Nadia the baker; now there was a piano teacher!) The film showed Julius and his wife walking in the Champs de Mars, near where I used to live, and my heart was warm and heavy. In the background he played the exquisite second Intermezzo from Brahms’s opus 118 piano pieces. Nobody has ever played it better.

  So, it’s a night of sweet sorrow, wonderful oysters, Brahms’s limping dignity and too many glasses of muscadet. I begin writing notes on my laptop, pondering why so many great pianists have died young — Glenn Gould, Geza Anda and Dinu Lipatti, to name a few that instantly come to mind. And Julius. A short intense life is better than a long vacuous one, I decide, and pianists — all solo musicians, in fact — must concentrate enormously if they are to succeed. They can’t afford to relax. Perhaps that has something to do with it? Perhaps they put more into a few years than most of us put into a lifetime? Perhaps they just wear out? Perhaps people who live so intensely also anticipate their deaths more keenly? I reread my notes. Perhaps I’ve had too much to drink? I’ve gone on about people who can play Beethoven’s Diabelli variations; they have premonitions. Of pianists who appreciate Bach and the late Beethoven sonatas having a kind of death-knowledge and therefore a death-wish.

  But what’s all this ‘kitchen’ stuff with a lower-case ‘k’? My computer is thinking for me. How dare it! It’s trying to help me, for God’s sake! Me, who spells to live. It’s changing my ‘Katchens’ to ‘kitchens’. How fucking dare it! I feel like smashing it on Monsieur Montebello’s lino. A laptop with intelligence! Give me a break! Ridiculous! Respelling my words! How dare it! What does it know about Julius Katchen? Fuck all!

  day three

  Sorry to disabuse you of a popular notion, but most French almost never eat croissants for breakfast. The Gauls I know eat fresh air, washing it down with strong black coffee. They rarely have time for anything else, time being the commodity in shortest supply in Paris. The popular image of the French sitting down to wicker baskets lined with red-checked gingham from which spill freshly baked croissants is somewhat misleading, then. They eat wonderful Parisian pastries at weekends, when they have more time. So I can’t really tell you who eats all those croissants — not to mention the other bakery items — in the windows of Paris’s hundreds of patisseries. Perhaps tourists or newcomers to France. I like breakfast, and I like croissants and especially pains au chocolat or pains aux raisins (sweet pastries filled with a slim inner cylinder of chocolate or plugged with raisins).

  Monsieur Da Costa is in his poky office in the corridor. I ask if he knows any good pastry shops nearby. The one up on the corner is said to be good, he says. ‘Who says?’ I ask. Madame Da Costa, he says with a broad grin. Mind you, he adds, he’s never tried anything from there… He doesn’t eat breakfast.

  I take a left and walk perhaps eighty metres. A tiny corner commerce, La Daube patisserie should be more about stews and wet dishes (being what daubes, the cooking pots and that which is ladled from them, are all about). But it’s a tiny pastry outlet all right, with floor-to-ceiling glass shone to a starshine, its floor tiled in glazed terracotta. A limited range of pastries sit on steel racks in glass display cases.

  I choose a croissant and a pain aux raisins. The latter are sometimes called escargots, because they swirl like a snail’s shell. Studding the helix and its stiff pastry-cream are the dried grapes, which look — if you let your imagine run away a little — a bit like dead blowflies. The croissant costs 70 cents (euro cents, of course) and the escargot 90 cents. I put down a five-euro bill.

  Serving me is a smiling young Frenchman of north African descent. He is as neat and tidy as any of the French nationals of umpteen generations (and many ethnic backgrounds) that you will find serving in the shops of Paris this morning. Ironically, his frizzy hair is as closely cropped as a Jewish — or Catholic, if you like — skullcap. He is polite to a fault. And he looks at my note, leaving it on the counter, and rummages in his till. I offer to try to find change, digging into my wallet. Don’t worry, he says, and, after several seconds, he renders 40 cents. The five-euro note remains on the glass top. And I say, ‘Sur cinq?’ (‘From five?’) Of course, he laughs, apologises, and corrects his mistake immediately, finding three more euros for me and putting the fiver in his till.

  Now you can perceive this little scene a couple of ways. First, that it was an honest mistake — as I’m convinced without a shadow of a doubt it was. But there are many long-term ethnic French who would gladly take it differently. The Arab — notice the word ‘Arab’, not ‘north African Frenchman’ — tried to cheat me, they would say.

  I am visiting France at an interesting time. In recent weeks, hundreds of cars have been set alight by young men, mainly of north African origin. Just a fortnight ago, night-rioting occurred in about 270 communes across the country, probably the peak of the disturbances. Thousands of police tried to maintain order, arresting hundreds, and a reported 1400 vehicles were torched. The streets of Paris, in particular, are still not calm. Where I’m living — north of the river and heading towards the notorious northern suburbs — the north African population is substantial.

  All of this is in reaction to a another reckless reaction. Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, a presidential candidate in 2007, is the main culprit, although prime minister Dominique de Villepin and other government members and officials are not without blame. Two teenage boys, Bouna Traoré and Ziad Benna, were electrocuted in Clichy-sur-Bois, north of Paris, while allegedly fleeing from police at the end of October. They had scaled the fence of a sub-station. Several of France’s most senior politicians said it was their own fault. They suggested that the boys or their friends were implicated in petty thievery that might have been occurring just before they were killed. But many commentators, including several representing the French Left and, most powerfully in English, The Economist and Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books, have argued that the rioting would not have spread so widely if Monsieur Sarkozy had refrained a few days earlier from describing troublemakers in another difficult Parisian suburb as ‘racailles’. Look it up, and you will discover, as Larousse puts it, that a racaille is a ‘vile person’. If we were seeking an English word, he would be a hoon, a lout, a hooligan, a rabble-rouser or a troublemaker. Naturally, French north-African youth took offence at this. They hurt for no fault of their own.


  At the heart of the matter are the housing estates in which they live — high-rise ghettoes in outer suburbs flung up after the war to accommodate immigrant workers and, in 1962, piednoirs (French born in Algeria). In an ideal world, immigration should correspond with work opportunities, but few French governments have tackled well the problem of blacks and north Africans obtaining the right to live in France on the grounds of family reunion. Mr Harding cited a 2003 statistic: 6000 people were given residency in France to work, but 80,000 went to join family members already there. In short, they need jobs as well as families. And respect, I might add.

  At the time of writing, 750 suburbs throughout France are classified as ‘sensitive urban areas’, and about one in three of the young people who live in them is unemployed. National unemployment in France is a little under ten per cent. But perhaps the most disturbing thing about the riots is Monsieur Sarkozy’s popularity: he mollified his tone, but his hardword approach to the north African problem has been immensely popular with many European French.

  I pick up my change. The croissant and the pain aux raisins are delicious. Both are very buttery, the pastry of the croissant so flaky and brittle that to eat it is almost like crushing unsalty salt flakes. It’s all right for the Inuits and their twenty words — or however many they have — for snow. I wish there were more for pastry. I rethink: the croissant’s crusty exterior is somewhere between sandy and flaky. Eating it is like eating a form of crunchy melting-butter sand. Pointless, isn’t it, to try to describe some things? An important distinction in types of croissants is made in pastry shops. There are plain croissants and croissants au beurre ’ with butter, if you like, or, more accurately, made with extra butter. I’ve been criticised in Australia for spreading butter on croissants (then following it up with my homemade plum jam) and I can see why. The pastry of the pain aux raisins is similar; the pastry cream stiff and sweet and the fruit swollen and juicy, not overcooked and dried out as it can sometimes be.

  Here, at the beginning of my adventure, I’m taking no chances. Get a few early runs on the gastronomic scoreboard. You won’t believe it, but eating in Paris is often just plain boring, and can even be dodgy. So Chartier is my lunch choice. I have eaten here many times and trust it with the French classics. More than likely, I shall have to queue to get in. You often do. Tourists and Parisians alike form an orderly cord outside its wide revolving door. Inside, more will be waiting for a free table.

  Chartier is an easy, relatively short walk from my studio (Monsieur Montebello’s studio — and I write that with a tinge of envy). I take the rue Richer, the continuation of the rue des Petites Ecuries, then turn left into the rue du Faubourg Montmartre. Chartier is fifty metres up a cobbled lane near the corner of the (grand) boulevard Montmartre. Its entrance is nondescript, basically an archaic revolving door with a many-paned window alongside boasting numerous accolades from value-for-money restaurant judges. Inside, two attractions dominate: its simple good food, which is amazingly cheap, and its ambience, which takes you back to the nineteenth century. Cheap? Chartier arguably offers the best value-for-money eating-out in all of Paris. I know of no better place. And once you’re seated at one of Chartier’s ranks of tables covered with butcher’s paper, you’ll feel very keenly that you are experiencing something authentically Parisian.

  In the nineteenth century, Parisian butchers with business acumen would brew up a hearty broth from offcuts and sell it to customers. Some of them expanded this sideline, offering simple dishes as well as their soups. Eventually, some gave away retailing meat altogether and concentrated on providing cheap, traditional menus in large dining rooms. These places came to be known as bouillons or ‘boil-ups’, a synonym for the broth that started it all. French middle-classes are the world’s champions at spotting and following trends, and bouillons soon became so popular that they eschewed all modesty and transmogrified into full-fledged restaurants in grand venues. Never were their origins forgotten, though, and simple orthodox French dishes continued to be served. And at cheap prices. Camille and Edouard Chartier had a chain of bouillons on both sides of the Seine in the 1890s. The Faubourg Montmartre flagship is the last.

  The place is packed. Every place at every table in this gorgeous high-ceilinged space seems taken. I’m led to a table for four — a couple are just leaving — and seated alongside a husband and wife from Bordeaux. (You learn these things quickly at Chartier because, even if your fellow diners don’t introduce themselves, everyone eavesdrops on everyone else’s conversations.) Out with the notebook.

  Under the butcher’s paper are pink-and-white tablecloths in a tea-towel fabric. The chairs are well-worn basic timber bistro jobs and the stainless steel cutlery and glassware are rudimentary (indeed, my knife is more bent than a Kings Cross cop). Paper napkins are standard, and the floor is in brown linoleum. Tables butt-join, and you share big baskets of baguettes cut up into generous slices, salt and pepper, oil, vinegar and mustard with anyone within arm’s reach. Above me is an ancient hat-and-pack rack of three brass tubes.

  But look beyond your table for the real joy of Chartier. Bevelled mirrors pattern the walls in a dazzling check. The massive columns supporting the high ceiling have been stained chocolate so many times now, it seems, that they appear encrusted. Chartier is an eating-out relic. A small earthquake might set it to tumbling down, but Paris is in little danger of that, geographically speaking.

  Small boxes on the walls were once for serviettes. They are numbered, and used to be coveted by Chartier’s regulars. At some time in the past, authorities quite rightly ruled them unhygienic and these days they are empty. The ceiling has a magnificent skylight surrounded by a border of ornate wrought iron, and the light here seems remarkably even, if slightly jaundiced.

  I’m settled in for less than five minutes before one of Chartier’s black-bowtied, black-waistcoated waiters of a certain age — as many of them are — seats a woman opposite me. She is, I’d guess, in her early thirties, has long dark hair and wears a heavy anorak. She carries a daypack with a koala attached to the zipper. She’s looking all around in awe and wonder, a nice smile of achievement at having discovered Chartier written all over her face. I smile back across the table. I notice pink pompoms protruding above the heels of her sneakers. Her lower calf is ringed with a tattoo of names in a fine cursive script. The chest of her coarse-knit pullover undulates with a promotion: ‘Fun-knee gril’, whatever that might mean.

  ‘Australian?’ I ask, because one of your obligations at Chartier is to talk to the others at your table.

  ‘Nooooo!’ she insists with an immense smile.

  ‘I noticed the koala,’ I say, pointing at the backpack.

  ‘I got it in Cairns,’ she says with the Midwest twang of a cheerfollower, if not leader. At least I’m Australian, I laugh. She’s Sioux, she says, offering her hand across the mustard pot and vinegar and oil bottles in their perforated sheet-metal holder. From Boise, Idaho. This is her first time in Paris, and she has read about the famous Chartier and how cheap — and good — it is and she’s finally here. She beams. Sue, I repeat, and she says, yes, but it’s spelled with an ‘ioux’ because she’s mostly Indian. Red. I strain to detect racial indicators. There is something of stolid serenity in her visage, a gently noble nose and longish brown face.

  ‘You’ll like Chartier,’ I say. Yes, she certainly will, she enthuses, but she’s really not used to French food and wants to order something she’ll find easy. She wants only an entrée. You mean a main-course size? Yes, she says, that’s our entrée. It’s a starter, I say, in France and lots of other countries. It’s the entry to the meal. With justification, she looks at me sideways, then scans skywards to take in Chartier’s filigreed iron.

  We peruse the list. It’s of almost A3 size and chronicles a plethora of offerings under the rubrics ‘poissons’, ‘plats’, ‘legumes’, ‘fromages’, ‘desserts’ and ‘glaces’. And that’s not counting starters (on any given day Chartier has twenty of them). Tu
rn over to find a limited, but cheap, list of French wines — a bottle of Chartier’s own ‘rouge de table’ costs 4.90 euros. Things like a boiled egg with house-made mayonnaise costs 2 euros, as do salads of tomato, cucumber and red cabbage. You’ll pay the same for grated carrot with a lemon vinaigrette, and a slice of what is known as Parisian ham — just excellent basic ham for us — with sour gherkins. Terrine and jellied pork dishes cost a little more, and I always have the dark maroon, dense and salty Bayonne ham.

  But none of that helps Sioux. She likes fish, she laughs, because Boise is a long way from the sea. It’s her lucky day, I suggest, because ‘raie’ (skate) with a caper sauce is on special for a mere 9.90 euros.

  ‘Ray?’ she says. ‘Is that like a fish with wings?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘In fact, they call it “wing of ray”.’

  ‘Like in stingray?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ I say. ‘Not at all what you think.’ She looks somewhat anxious.