Paris on a Plate

by Stephen Downes

  So, at times like these it appears to be the same wherever you are in the world. The buck is volleyed from person to person, and to discover the truth of an incident might occupy the term of an examining magistrate’s natural life. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. Nothing has been stolen, and I’m in the apartment. What’s more, I’m going to enjoy being here, even if it is without the full-sized bath that starred in Monsieur Montebello’s.

  I’m anticipating a wallow in a glorious bog of nostalgia at Vaudeville, which we always called ‘the’ Vaudeville in the 1970s. (Michelin, actually, drops the definite article; Group Flo, which owns it, calls it Le Vaudeville.) I’m dining there tonight for old time’s sake. But also in memory of Rolly Pullen, my favourite journalist.

  For many years from the 1950s, Rolly was Paris correspondent for Melbourne’s Herald & Weekly Times. He also strung for the Beaverbrook papers in London. He died quite a while ago, but to know him in the 1970s was never to forget him. He held court in the Vaudeville, decades-younger anglophone journalists from Agence France-Presse worshipping at his feet, as it were. I was one of them.

  I descend into the light-sparkled blackness of the boulevard de Rochechouart and head towards the Métro. Fifty metres along the road, a stationary car is on fire near the corner of the rue de Clignancourt. It’s in the oncoming slow lane. A ball of flame burns sulphurously, licking out from its engine bay and around the bonnet. A few onlookers — including young French Africans — watch from a distance, some of them mightily amused. There is nobody within thirty metres of the car, and I notice a sole police officer on the wide median strip, keeping back a few spectators. Within a minute, flames have grown to engulf the front half of the car. Small explosions and muted phuts burst from the inferno. Flames drip onto the bitumen and set it alight.

  I’m one of only two people taking photographs, and I wonder if I should try to break through the flic’s imaginary perimeter to get a better picture. I’m getting OK shots, but they’re from too far away. They’re images the whole world knows, anyway — clichés after the events of recent weeks. The blackness. Fireball in the night. Reflected light off the door pillars and shattered windows of the car that’s been torched. I’m reminded of a classic on the cover of The Economist in recent weeks, a real top Press shot: legs braced wide apart, a fireman arcs a hose over his back. His right hand holds the nozzle, directing it at the flames leaping from the rear of a hatchback.

  Amid a cacophony of klaxoning, pompiers (firemen) and more police arrive. I snap away. By now the car is completely engulfed. Flames light up the rollerdoors of the shops on the footpath. They leap three metres into the night. The car explodes noisily, small pieces of shrapnel shooting several metres in all directions. Three firemen roll out a slim hose in seconds. One grabs the nozzle and gives me the snap I want. He’s between me and the car, the reflective strips on his black suit a dazzling silver, his metal helmet brilliant. He arcs the hose around his waist, points the nozzle and lets fly. The jet is fine and wide — just like you’d use on a flower bed — and in a dervish of energy, he crushes the flames. In twenty seconds, a mushroom cloud of steam the size of a hot-air balloon rises above the boulevard, filtering the night. So close to home, I think, but it’s happening everywhere. And for reasons the perpetrators believe to be sound.

  As Fats Waller said, the joint is jumping. Vaudeville is hugely popular — full, in fact. I’ve eaten here a couple of times in recent years, but in the 1970s, when it was independently owned and prices were lower, it was something of a canteen for the journalists of Agence France-Presse, the French newsagency. AFP’s headquarters were handily placed on an adjacent side of the place de la Bourse.

  I recall exquisite cold salmon with a superb house-made mayonnaise costing about 11 francs. You won’t get a glass of water in today’s Vaudeville for 11 francs (say, 2 euros). Some years ago, Groupe Flo bought it. Paris’s dominant restaurant group is named after the capital’s famous Brasserie Flo and counts 160 restaurants (some are franchises) in several countries in its stable. In the firm’s Flo Brasseries division alone there are 23 restaurants, including the well-known Bofinger, Julien, Terminus nord and La Coupole, where I shall dine tomorrow night. And let’s just say that the incorporation of brasseries results in variable experiences. Economies of scale are no doubt made, and I suspect that some food preparation is done in central commissary kitchens. Nonetheless, in recent years I’ve eaten a couple of quite acceptable meals at Vaudeville.

  Groupe Flo also owns the Hippopotamus chain of steak restaurants. But rapid expansion from its base, which began with eating places but soon included high-class catering, has caused big financial problems — what one commentator understatedly described as a ‘delicate financial situation’. In short, the group has a huge debt, but Jean-Paul Bucher, the big man who founded the firm, is apparently sanguine. He believes in diversity.

  Vaudeville is an exquisite art-deco construction. Most of its interior is faced with veined stone in a shimmering honeycomb colour. Huge vases hold enormous bouquets of the brightest flowers, and there are mirrors, bevelled edges and elegant etchings. Thin black-lacquered steel columns support the lot.

  I’m shown to a bench seat against a wall — always more to see looking out — between a Benelux family and three young male American executives (Americans sustain many of Paris’s restaurants). To my left, the couple is in early middle age, their son and daughter teenagers. They’re all big-boned people with dark tans and jolly demeanours. They volley comments across the table in an explosive gutteral language and laugh a lot. Flemish, I guess. Nearest me is the girl, who has bright yellow hair coiffed into a glittering bob. Her eyes are sapphires. Despite the frigid air outside, her tight little top and pubic-low jeans expose a vast expanse of flesh the colour of dark chocolate. A tattoo of a broadsword points down over her coccyx and disappears between her cheeks. She is so tanned the blade is black ’ I can’t imagine it was originally that colour. Her skin is uniformly smooth, the grain so fine that I want to touch it. But I also don’t want a panier à salade (divisional van) to take me away.

  The American blokes are just plain boring. Indeed, what they say is like killer radiation — so exclusive and from such a different world that inoculations might be advised before going near them. They’re carriers of PV: pretentious virus. Next week one has to go to New York. The week after the second must be in Washington. The third can’t make a date any time this month or next, he says. He’s in Frankfurt, London, Beijing, then LA. He’s trying to avoid a Sydney trip, he sniffs. His mates are trumped.

  Vaudeville’s list is an inventory of standard fare. No surprises here. You’ll find something you like, though — bound to — among hot and cold starters, five specialities, fish and meat dishes, and grills. Wild-pig terrine with a red-wine jelly, fresh and smoked salmon rillettes, six burgundy snails (in garlic butter) and onion soup cost from 7 to 10 euros. Among five specials are a beef entrecôte with bearnaise or bordelaise sauce for 28 euros and tête de veau for 17.50 euros.

  My Scottish salmon à la graine de moutarde (16.90 euros) sounds grand, but it’s actually disappointing. A chunk of fish is cut in half like a sandwich, its filling grain mustard and a couple of sprigs of tarragon. Another sprig sits on top, and a lacklustre brown sauce pools on the plate. Small cubes of tomato punctuate the sauce. It would be unusual to be served underdone fish in France, and my salmon is cooked through and on the point of fraying. Included in the order is a small dish of baby leeks au gratin ’ browned off in the oven. Their sauce is watery. A tiramisu (7.50 euros) is equally unexciting. Arriving in a glass tumbler, it lacks creaminess, alcohol and coffee, the bases of a good tiramisu.

  As one of the guys next to me abjures ‘half-assed business plans’ and the girl with the dark-chocolate tan flirts with a waiter in English, my eyes inevitably settle on Rolly’s table at the back of the room. People are sitting at it, of course, which affronts me more than somewhat, as another knockabout journalist of considerable talent, Damon R
unyon, would have said. They have no idea what it means. Its history.

  The years rewind, and I see Rolly trudging between Vaudeville’s tables, grim as usual. Across the mosaic floor tiles in yellow and black and blue he arrives at that table. He greets the AFP boys, removes his stylish grey fedora and plain maroon scarf, unbuttons his gabardine raincoat and astonishes us with the happenings of the day. (He used to file his copy from the telegraph office beside the agency.)

  Rolly was not a handsome man — his eyes were the size of nailheads, his hooked nose was small and his face shone — but his physiognomy took on rapt animation when he told a story. And his stories were always fabulous but true. He was the first reporter to reveal that the Duke of Windsor was dangerously ill: Rolly was himself in the American Hospital getting a skin lesion removed in 1972 when he saw Edward shuffling along its corridors. A couple of days later Rolly was out and telling us that he’d just filed a piece saying the former King of England appeared to be near death.

  Brigitte Bardot asked him to jump into bed with her after an interview in the south of France. (I don’t think that that was unusual at Brigitte’s house, by the way.) But as I understood his complex psyche, Rolly had largely given away women following a tragic love affair. In grief, he had sought reclusion in Paris in the early 1950s to become a professional organist. (Another reason why he appealed to me so much; I wanted to be a pianist.) There were great instruments in so many of the city’s churches, he used to say. He was obsessed with listening to them, and some he had played. But he had never been a professional musician, becoming, somehow or other, a superlative reporter instead.

  He got a scoop when Nobel prizewinner Albert Schweitzer made a rare excursion to the world beyond his mission hospital at Lambarené in equatorial Gabon. Rolly, of course, knew all about Schweitzer’s Bach scholarship. His story went that he had heard part of the great man’s journey out of Africa was to be by train. He got into Schweitzer’s carriage at some remote location, found the doctor’s compartment and sat opposite him. Then he began practising the pedal part — the line of music you play with your feet — of a well-known Bach fugue. Schweitzer was all eyes. Rolly told the old man not to mind him, leant over confidentially and said he was practising a piece of music for organ. You know, with the pipes, he said, gesturing. Churches? Concert coming up. Scweitzer smiled and told him who he was. The great Albert Schweitzer — doctor, theologian, missionary and musicologist. And he wagged a finger at Rolly and told him the name of the piece he was pretending to play. Rolly feigned astonishment. They talked for hours. Rolly got his scoop.

  But the Rolly story that made the most impact on me concerned the terrible Mercedes crash at Le Mans in 1955. Rolly had been sent to cover the famous 24-hour race by Express newspapers. But motoring editor Robert Glenton, whom I recall as a fairly stout and ebullient man by the time I was briefly his colleague in 1970, wanted Rolly in particular to monitor the Jaguar team’s performance. The English firm had only got back into motor sport the previous year with its D-type, which was designed to win at Le Mans.

  Rolly had no interest in motor cars, let alone racing them. In no time the Press tent bored him and he wandered off among the spectators lining the main straight, more lonely than a crowd. He walked right into the world’s worst motor-racing accident, witnessing it at close range. A Mercedes hit an embankment and cartwheeled into spectators. Magnesium in its body burned white-hot. The engine, bonnet and front axle scythed through men, women and children. (Eighty-two were killed and seventy-six injured.) Uninjured himself, Rolly took in the carnage, and began running... away from the Press tent (his instincts for an exclusive story were always perfect).

  The very long Le Mans circuit in those days passed through several small villages. Rolly ran for a kilometre or so until he found a village and a phone. He got through to Robert Glenton. The Sunday Express’s Saturday afternoon deadline was fast approaching — as I recall it was about 6 pm — and Rolly gabbled the news. He had seen the fireball and the cartwheeling Mercedes. Bodies everywhere. Carnage. War zone. Absolutely awful. Dozens killed. He could file, he told Robert, a front-page lead off the top of his head, as the saying goes.

  ‘That’s all well and good, old boy,’ said Robert, according to Rolly, ‘but how are Jaguar doing?’

  day nine

  I’m off to the Louvre to see what’s on the menu. There’ll be a range of eating outlets, from posh to simple, I’m sure. Something for everyone, and I hope that what I eventually consume will be as satisfying as lunch at the Eiffel Tower. The same company will be providing it.

  When I first came to Paris, as you might remember, I thought the French capital smelt of upmarket biscuits. Perhaps I was a little overawed at the time. I can see what I meant (and it still has a strong compelling sweetness) but, as I negotiate the streets and passageways nowadays, I wonder if there’s an inordinate contribution of waste to Paris’s perfume. Two sorts come to mind: beyond the tourist precincts, Parisian footpaths remain dog lavatories. Several determined bids have been mounted over many years to solve the problem. I seem to recall specialist vacuumers on motor scooters, and, lately, three-wheeled machines that were supposed to do the job. Stiff fines apply to owners who don’t clean up after their hounds, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Just the other day near the grandiose entrance of the Banque de France I squashed a pile of dog excrement the size of an elephant’s dropping. In short, keep your head down around town. Get your bearings, then drop your gaze.

  And the other overwhelming waste smell in Paris is stale urine. You notice it in corridors and sometimes in the streets, in lanes, alleys and doorways. Much of it is contributed by clochards ’ tramps — who live out here amid the traffic and pedestrians. They are clochards, by the way, because at the old Les Halles markets in the centre of the city a bell (une cloche) was rung early in the mornings to give away perishable food. The clochards came running.

  The Louvre and its surrounds are suitably sanitised. Dog doodles are distanced. I take the down escalators beneath the glass pyramid in this huge palace’s forecourt. Down is the way in, even if you have to ascend to first and second levels to see the gallery’s best-known works. Shaped like an enormous U, the Louvre has thousands of works on display and many more thousands vaulted. I often think a person of wide average interests could spend at least a week investigating it, just to get an idea of its scope, the breadth of the collection. A specialist could equally spend a week, say, studying Etruscan antiquities, the art of Pharaonic Egypt, or nineteenth century French painters.

  The whole of the second floor is closed today — it’s winter almost — which means I won’t be able to glance at a couple of my favourites: Watteau’s Pierrot and Ingres’s wonderful Turkish Bath. But that leaves untold numbers of other statues, canvases, inscriptions, bronzes, pieces of jewellery, silverware, ceramics, icons, furniture and so on. I love the vastness of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. And in David’s painting of Napoleon’s coronation, palace intrigue is cunningly revealed through the inadequately disguised expressions on several faces. I always find the people looking at the Mona Lisa more interesting than the painting itself. I wish I understood why, they’re saying, this is supposed to be so good. How did it inspire that mega-seller? (Actually, they’re not putting it like that, but they should be.) Today, a group of Koreans puzzle over da Vinci’s deftness. An Italian couple — bluster in metres of well-cut waterproofing — congratulate themselves on their nationality.

  But I’m here to see what there is to eat, and the time it takes to track down the various cafés and restaurants surprises me. Le Grand Louvre on the entrance level is officially described as a ‘gastronomical restaurant’. Through the glass, it certainly looks the part, tables set luxuriously. You’ll eat six oysters here for 14 euros, a crayfish salad with lentil and eel aspic for 12 euros, and a duck foie gras terrine (cold slices) for 18 euros. A fillet of bass on a bisque sauce with rice is 28 euros, leg of lamb with haricot-bean purée costs 26 euros, a
nd roasted saddle of rabbit with a morel sauce is 29 euros. A fixed menu with some choice costs 29 euros for two courses, 37 euros for three. Three cafés distributed widely through the Louvre offer far less interesting fare — a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich for 8 euros and a plate of club sandwiches for 13 euros, for instance.

  Frankly, I’m about to go home in despair when I notice the fairly constant stream of gallery-goers heading for La Cafétéria de la Pyramide on the mezzanine level. I discover a gem. Choice is comprehensive, beginning with a plate of charcuterie comprising three thin slices of a large-diameter salami, four much thicker ones of a smaller sausage, a slice of country terrine and a slice of paté in a crust with a thick layer of jelly on top. Gherkins, salad, two small tomatoes and a bread roll share this generous dish. And it’s for sale at 6.95 euros, or 8 euros with nearly two (Australian standard) glasses of new beaujolais. You can compose your own salad and pay between 3.30 euros and 8 euros depending on the size of the bowl you put it in. There are tabouli and corn, olives and hard-boiled eggs, big cubes of cold parsleyed pork, hosts of salad greens of several sorts, tomatoes, radishes, cucumber, broccoli and, no doubt, several other things that I fail to note. You can buy portions of fresh apple tart, raspberry torte and strawberry flan. And there are individual lemon meringue pies with swirly browned-off tops. Blocks of rich chocolate slices are stamped with gold leaf. Hot main dishes served from bains marie are a steal: lasagne costs 7.70 euros, braised ham 8.70 and salmon 9 euros.