by Baxter, John
In France, the same applies to what goes in your mouth. You don’t fuck with the food. Not even the unassuming sardine.
After a Matisse and a lunch at Lipp, there wasn’t much hope of improving the day, so we didn’t try. At four, as the waiters cleaned up the tables from lunch and began to set them for the dinner trade, Tim and I were still dawdling over our third coffee and fourth (or was it fifth?) Calvados.
Of course I should have been working. But whenever a remaining scrap of Puritanism whispers that there’s something disreputable about taking pleasure in flanerie, I think of Catherine Deneuve.
For many years, she was our neighbor, living in a glass-walled apartment high above Place Saint-Sulpice. Occasionally we’d meet—standing in line at Poilane when Paris’s best baker had only one small shop, on rue du Four, or in one of the brocantes we both love to haunt. I’d interviewed her a few times, once in the salon of Yves Saint Laurent, where she arrived in a blue linen suit as crisp and unwrinkled as new money.
Deneuve was twenty-five and at the height of her blond beauty when she filmed Françoise Sagan’s novel La Chamade (Heartbeat) in 1968. Her character, Lucile, is the pampered mistress of wealthy fortyish Charles, played by Michel Piccoli. Seeing she’s attracted to a young journalist, he lets her leave him to live in his cramped apartment, gambling, sensibly, that it won’t last. Having to sell her jewels and travel by bus sours Lucile from living on, as the French say, “love and fresh water,” but, this being France, the real revelation comes from literature, William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms—the story, as it happens, of a man who abandons city comfort to run off to the wilderness with his lover.
During one lunch hour, she’s reading it at the counter of a café as she nibbles her baguette jambon fromage. One passage so strikes her that she calls for attention and, as the whole café falls silent, she reads it aloud.
It’s idleness breeds all our virtues, our most bearable qualities—contemplation, equableness, laziness, letting other people alone; good digestion mental and physical: the wisdom to concentrate on fleshly pleasures—eating and evacuating and fornication and sitting in the sun—than which there is nothing better, nothing to match, nothing else in all this world but to live for the short time you are loaned breath, to be alive and know it. It is one of what we call the prime virtues—thrift, industry, independence—that breeds all the vices—fanaticism, smugness, meddling, fear, and worst of all, respectability.
The whole café breaks into spontaneous applause. We see what these wage slaves are thinking: If only I dared. . .
Lucile does dare. She abandons her lover and returns to the good life. The last shot of the film, appropriately, shows her heading back to an existence of champagne, Mozart, Saint-Tropez and Saint Laurent. And being a true Parisienne, she is, of course, striding out in confidence, defiantly in the middle of the road, and—how else, in this most wonderful city for walkers?—on foot.
Chapter 22
The Great La Coupole Roundup
Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY, advice to young writers
Gelenter, operating as always on the principle that if a spoonful was good, the whole bottle had to be better, allocated me an entire subsite on Paris Through Expatriate Eyes, with photographs, an interview, praise for my books, and a hard-sell ad for my services as a guide. Because the site linked to numerous travel agencies, publishers, restaurants, and airlines, my name was soon popping up whenever anyone Googled “Paris tourism.”
“You took my advice,” said Dorothy, next time we met for coffee. “About the tours.”
“Oh . . . yes . . .”
I blushed like a vicar caught emerging from a motel with the church organist. But she dismissed my scruples.
“All sorts of people are making a fortune out of literary Paris. Why not you?”
I found out why not when Gelenter produced my first clients.
Billie Jean, Bobby Jane, and Mary Beth (or was it Mary Jane, Billie Bob, and Jeanie Beth?) all came from Amarillo, Texas. Though none wore Stetsons or high-heeled riding boots, the way they stood, heads tilted back, as if looking out from under a brim, and rocked back slightly on the heels, feeling for a support that wasn’t there, told me this was their habitual attire.
“Have you been to Paris before?” I asked hopefully. If they had, it wouldn’t be necessary for me to explain everything from scratch.
“Nope,” one replied.
“Never,” said her friend.
“First time away from the ol’ U. S. of A.,” added the third.
More striking than their names was their size. Had Rubens, with his taste for massive pink ladies, needed to depict the Three Graces, this trio would have served as perfect models.
“Speak any French?”
“No,” said Billie Jean, or perhaps it was Bobby Jane.
“Not a word,” said the second.
The third tilted her head back even farther, and stared. “You funnin’?”
Increasingly alarmed, I asked, “Um, is there some aspect of Paris that particularly interests you?”
“How do ya mean?”
“Well, have you read any of the writers who lived here? Scott Fitzgerald? Henry Miller? Hemingway?”
A collective frown gathered above them, like a cartoon balloon enclosing a huge question mark.
“Maybe if we just set off?” I muttered.
For the next hour, I led them through the alleys of Saint-Germain des Près, pointing out features that didn’t involve literature, history, or art: 20 rue Jacob where Nathalie Clifford Barney, doyenne of Paris lesbians, held court and built her Temple to Friendship into which she lured her prettier guests. The quiet gem of Place von Furstemberg, where five tall chestnuts cast dappled light across the golden stone façades. That day, a Vogue photographer was shooting, and we watched a while as the impossibly slim models, supple as lizards, lounged and posed against the belle époque street lamp.
But as we crossed rue Vaugirard into the Luxembourg Gardens, it was clear my clients were losing interest. Whatever they had hoped to discover in Paris, it was eluding them, and I was to blame.
Foolishly hoping they might have heard of Gertrude Stein, I led them into rue de Fleurus, heading for her apartment. At the intersection with rue d’Assas, inspiration struck.
There, on the opposite corner, was one of Paris’s temples to overindulgence; a Notre Dame of excess. From its doors, invitingly open on this warm morning, drifted odors no sensualist could resist.
“Do any of you happen to like chocolate?” I asked.
Three hours later, the waiters at La Coupole had mostly gone home, leaving us to a pair of stagiaires—trainees. They did their best to remain good-humored while responding to demands for just one more pot of coffee and “a few more of those li’l bitty sugar cookie things,” but it was obvious they desperately wanted us to pay l’addition and leave.
The café La Coupole, Montparnasse, early 1930s
My three Texas graces had no intention of doing so. After a slow start, they were at last having a wonderful time.
It began with hot chocolate at the little café next to Christian Constant’s boutique in rue de Fleurus.
Constant, I explained, claimed to have rediscovered the ancient Mayan idea of adding red pepper to hot chocolate, as popularized in the novel and film Chocolat, in which Juliette Binoche revitalizes a village with its delicious, addictive products.
“You mean they invented it right here?”
“So he says.” I pointed to the Mayan hot chocolate listed on the menu.
“Chocolate with chili?” She slapped the tabletop hard. “Bring it on!”
After that, there was no doubt which aspect of Paris interested them.
They’d n
ever heard of Gertrude Stein but liked my story of Alice B. Toklas’s recipe for hashish fudge and what happened when I whipped up a batch for a reception at the staid American Library.
We detoured to browse the open-air food market that straggled down boulevard Raspail. The merchants’ habit of offering a goutée—a sliver of cheese or sausage on the tip of their carving knives—sent the trio into rhapsodies.
“Shee-it!” said Mary Jane. “This is like a bar lunch—and it’s free!”
With food inside them, they blossomed. How could I ever have had difficulty tellling them apart? They were as different as the three bears.
“It’d be more like a bar lunch if there was sumthin’ to drink,” Billie Joe interjected.
“No problem!”
Within ten minutes, we were entering La Coupole.
The last of the great cafés, it opened in 1927—the first to combine café, bar, and restaurant under the same roof. The café ran along the boulevard. The main room, under the coupole, or cupola, was a restaurant, with the American bar to its left. And in the basement, a dance hall. At the time, old Paris hands disapproved of this “new, flaunting, German-looking café,” as one put it, but the tourists flocked there.
I tried to explain its cultural importance, but only one aspect interested these ladies.
“You suppose that bar has bourbon?”
It did: three brands. They organized a taste test so that I could savor the differences. Then Jules the barman—we were all on first-name terms by then—inquired whether they had ever tried bourbon with absinthe.
“Absinthe,” said Betty. “Now, ain’t that poison?”
“And illegal?”
Jules’s shrug implied that such things, even if true, signified nothing between old friends.
“Je propose,” Jules murmured, “un Tremblement de Terre.”
“An Earthquake?” I said. “What’s in that exactly?”
“Oh, pas grand chose,” he said. “Le gin, le bourbon, et l’absinthe—et du glaçon, évidemment.”
“Evidemment. Rafraîchissant, sans doute.” One could hardly have a cocktail without glaçon—ice.
The Earthquake lived up to its name, to the extent that another round was needed to steady ourselves. After that, a compassionate maître d’ led us to our table.
For the next two hours, we stampeded through the menu like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Confit de canard, boeuf bourguignon, poulet rôti, navarin d’agneau, blanquette . . . little went untasted, providing its primary ingredient was meat. Even classic French tartare—minced raw filet steak, seasoned with chives, black pepper, Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco—met with their approval.
“Just like chili,” said Mary Beth, shoveling down a forkful. “Only ya don’ cook it! I’m gonna serve this sucker first barbecue I do back home.”
She was just as enthusiastic about the Belgian beer that washed it down. (“Wine’s for fags and bums,” she confided in a whisper loud enough to be heard at every nearby table; fortunately, none of our neighbors knew English.)
“What am I eatin’ here exactly?” Mary Beth inquired about one dish. “I’m not sayin’ I don’t like it. I just wonder what it is.”
“Sweetbreads,” I said, “with walnuts.”
“Ain’t that testicules?” demanded Billie Jean from the other end of the table. Heads lifted all around, and I felt dozens of eyes.
“No, it’s . . . something else,” I said hurriedly. “From the neck, I think.”
“Oh, shit,” Billie Jean said, “don’t matter to me if it’s balls, brains, or assholes. I et ’em all some time or other. Cooked and raw.”
Before I needed to think too much about Billie Jean biting into a raw bull’s testicle like a Jonathan apple, she looked round the restaurant in satisfaction.
“Hell, I love Paris.”
I saw with clarity what my Literary Seminar group had shown me and the Texas Trio had reinforced.
Visitors didn’t want their Paris.
They wanted mine.
Plenty of time when they got home to read Flaubert or a history of the French Revolution. What they wanted now was to reach out and touch the living flesh—to devour and be devoured.
Chapter 23
Liver Lover
My idea of heaven is eating pâtés de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.
SYDNEY SMITH (1771–1845)
It was an idyllic time to be in France. The euro was strong, the country calm, the wine harvest satisfactory, the sun warm. Staying out of the Iraq War and shrugging off gibes about “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and the sneer of General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf that “going to war without France was like going deer hunting without your accordion” had proved the smart move. Nationals and expats alike gloated as the administration of George W. Bush came unglued.
Nobody anticipated the financial crash lurking behind the war news, but had the French done so, they would not have behaved differently. Europe has a tradition of enjoying the failure of others—the Germans, of course, invented a word for it, schadenfreude—and, capturing this spirit, de Rochefoucauld said, more or less, “It is not enough to succeed. Your best friend must fail.”
The Austrians in particular relish despair. They’re masters of masochistic melancholy—characteristics I valued in the music of Mahler and Strauss and the art of Schiele and Klimt long before I first visited Vienna. On later visits, a friend at the Österreichisches Filmmuseum, the Austrian film archive, would greet me with weary cordiality, then launch into a recitation of recent disasters, political and personal.
After half an hour of misery, he’d shrug and say, “But we always have Demel.” Then we’d walk across to Michaelerplatz and the great Café Demel. Dating to 1786, its crystal chandeliers and huge mirrors exuded luxury and appetite. A waitress would trundle up its multilevel pastry trolley, each glass shelf loaded with greater invitations to gorging. The prize for sheer excess went to an object shaped like a large cabbage: a shell of white chocolate, filled with whipped cream, flavored with kirsch cherry liqueur. Demel and its Konditorei embodied what Vienna implicitly believed—that joy and misery are faces of the same coin. The bitter chocolate in a Sachertorte’s outer shell only made more piercing the acid sweetness of the underlying raspberry glaze.
Of Vienna’s artistic heroes, my favorite was Max Reinhardt, Europe’s most innovative theater producer between the wars. In the late 1930s, as Germany eyed its neighbors and Hitler made speeches about lebensraum, Max continued to direct the annual Salzburg Festival, concluding each night with a midnight supper for the glitterati at his castle, Leopoldskron.
As the last horse-drawn carriages pulled away at two or three in the morning, Reinhardt whispered to a few close friends “Stay for an hour.” The playwright Carl Zuckmayer wrote: “It was somewhat like Versailles in the days of the Bastille, only more alert, more aware, intellectually more lucid. Once, at a late hour, I heard Reinhardt say, almost with satisfaction, ‘The nicest part of these festival summers is that each one may be the last.’ After a pause, he added. ‘You can feel the taste of transitoriness on your tongue.’ ”
It takes imagination to see food from the point of view of an oppressed people who, for generations, were often forced to eat things that more pampered eaters find unpalatable. Only the rich can afford to discard the entrails, skin, beaks, and claws of the birds they eat; the intestines, blood, ears, and tail of the pig; the tongue and stomach of the cow. It’s no coincidence that Jewish cooking is among the richest in dishes using those parts of the animal others throw away. Similarly, the dispossessed and impoverished people of the American South, both black and white, created a cuisine from the poorest cuts of pork and the bitter greens nobody else would eat.
Such dishes become emblems of national pride, reminders of a harsh heritage. If their production or consumption involves pain and even danger, then all the better. The Japanese eat fugu, a fish largely without flavor, not so much despite the fact that it contains a p
otentially fatal toxin but because it does. In Holland, at certain times of year, the new herring are so delectable that fish lovers gorge them raw, ignoring the warning that the fish can contain a deadly parasite. For the French, to smoke unfiltered cigarettes, eat cheese made from unpasteurized milk, and enjoy foie gras are affirmations of their culture, a tip of the hat to times when caution and compassion were luxuries they could not afford.
My own introduction to foie gras was, in a way, my introduction to France, and to the rigor that sustained its apparent self-indulgence. On a visit to Paris in the 1970s, when Marie-Dominique was my girlfriend and not my wife, we lunched at one of the big brasseries near the Gare du Nord, where, she suggested I might enjoy foie gras as a starter.
Well, try anything once. And I didn’t want to appear gauche by admitting it was my first time.
The thin slices of liver, gleaming gold and beige with the slickness of fat, arrived, garnished with the gelée that gathers when it’s cooked. A metal dish contained slices of thin dry toast folded in a napkin.
“There’s no butter,” I said, scanning the table.
“Why do you need butter?”
“For the toast.”
“For foie gras, you don’t butter the toast.”
“Dry toast isn’t very inviting,” I protested. “Couldn’t we ask the waiter?”
“Non!”
Her vehemence was startling. I shut up and ate my toast dry—to find, of course, that she was perfectly right. Foie gras is as fatty as butter and to combine the two would have been absurd. Even worse, from the French point of view, it would have transgressed the spirit of commeil faut—the way things should be. In doing so, it would have also, which was worse, invited the derision of the waiting staff (“Can you believe, this plouc of a tourist wanted butter with foie gras!”) and thus made us look foolish. This had already happened on an earlier trip to Paris for the BBC. After a hard day of interviews, the producer and I returned to our hotel and, not realizing the French never drink cognac before dinner, ordered a reviving Courvoisier while we waited for Marie-Do, whom we were taking to dinner. As she sat down, the waiter asked superciliously, “Mademoiselle also desires a digestif?”