Authors: John Baxter

B004MMEIOG EBOK (19 page)

Appendix
Paris, Mode d’Emploi (Paris, A User’s Guide)

“S
trewth!” said a friend from Australia, contemplating his serving of
noisettes d’agneau sautées aux petits légumes
at one of Paris’s more modest restaurants. “Fifty dollars for a lamb chop and veggies. Back home, you could have a whole sheep for less.”

I couldn’t argue with him. Paris
is
expensive—and more so every day as the pound and the dollar, U.S. and Australian, slip ever lower against the euro. On the face of it, a cheap Paris holiday seems a contradiction in terms.

Well, don’t give up yet. Like most people with rural roots, the French know the value of a euro. When out-of-towners visit Paris, they don’t waste a centime. Learn from them. With sensible spending and some judicious cost-cutting, you can enjoy Paris and not still be paying for it to the end of the decade.

• Rule 1 •

Spend your money where it does you the most good.

Is your idea of a Paris holiday lounging in a canopied bed while relays of servants deliver room-service snacks? No shame in that (if you can afford it), so by all means check into a centrally located five-star hotel, for example, the Crillon, overlooking Place de la Concorde, right next to the Champs-Elysées and the U.S. embassy—a mere $1,500 a night for a double room.

But if you’re in Paris for the art, music, food, shopping, or romance, choose a three-star or even two-star establishment. They’ll be off the tourist track and won’t have much in the way of staff or even, in some cases, an elevator. Forget room service, too (though most offer a coffee-and-croissant breakfast). Rooms, though small, will be modern and clean, and three-star establishments will have
en suite
bathroom and toilet, telephone and TV. And you’ll pay, on average, $200.

• Rule 2 •

Eat as the French eat.

Parisian cuisine is still the best in the world—and among the most expensive. Dinner for two at the Tour d’Argent with that thrilling view of the Seine by night, or at Arpège, Paris’s second-highest-rated restaurant (and one which, incredibly, uses no meat), costs, with wine, at least $1,000.

So think about breakfast and lunch.

A true French café breakfast remains one of the great pleasures of life in Paris. The coffee is fresh, the croissants, brioches, and baguettes still warm from the oven. You can eat in comfort, plan the day, and be first in line at the Musée d’Orsay or the Louvre.

Lunch is even more of a bargain. This is the “working meal” for the French, who traditionally close business deals “between the pear and the cheese.” Prices average 50 percent lower than for dinner, even at the most fashionable restaurants. At Arpège, chef Alain Passard tests new creations on his lunch crowd with a set menu for less than $100. You still need to book weeks ahead, but it’s worth it for his legendary
tomate aux douze saveurs
—a tomato poached in a syrup of twelve spices, served with anise ice cream.

For ordinary eating, browse the small restaurants around your hotel. Look for clients with napkins stuffed into collars, mopping their plates with pieces of baguette. The food there is almost certainly good, and cheap. Most offer a
formule
for a fixed price, with the option of either a starter or a dessert with your
plat,
or main dish. Don’t be surprised if the bill comes to a little more; 15 percent service is always included, as is TVA—value-added tax, at around 19 percent of the total bill. But you can still find a good lunch, with wine, for about $40.

• Some tips •

• Don’t be snobby about wine. House wines, sold by the
pichet
, or pitcher, of either 25 centiliters (two glasses) or 50 centiliters (two-thirds of a bottle), are better than you’d expect. In warm weather, try the Brouilly or other light reds, served
frais
—lightly chilled—or a Sancerre, red or white. And don’t order mineral water unless you absolutely feel you need to. Just order
une carafe
and you’ll get, free, what comes from the tap.

• If you’re really shaving the budget, take your morning café and croissant or evening
apéritif
standing at the bar or zinc. The law limits bar prices, which must be listed on a card near the cash register. Once you sit down, the café can charge what it likes—technically for “service.” And if you sit at a table outside, you’ll pay still more, because the café only rents the public sidewalk from the city and passes on that charge to clients. (Incidentally, buying
un express
at the bar is the traditional quid pro quo for using the café toilets.)

• Plenty of office workers grab a
baguette fromage jambon
for lunch, and eat it while window shopping. Why be different? Shop in a supermarket and picnic on a park bench. Choose “a slice of this and a bit of that” from the delicatessen and cheese counter—it’s okay to point:
vendeuses
are used to it—and a bottle from the supermarket wine section at a fraction of the price in specialist shops like Nicolas.

• Resist the inclination to tip. Every bill automatically has 15 percent service added. Even taxis. Tipping again not only wastes your money; it marks you as a
plouc
—a mug.

• Paris isn’t one of those fried-egg cities, with all the interesting stuff in the middle, ringed by boring dormitory suburbs. Instead, its twenty
arrondissements
spiral out from Notre Dame, with something interesting in each of them. Think of it not as a fried egg but a soufflé, equally delectable at its crusty edges and moist center. A good restaurant, a charming hotel, an interesting museum, or an important theater can just as easily be in the twentieth
arrondissement
as in the first. Peter Brook presents his productions at Les Bouffes du Nord, a once-derelict theater in the seedy tenth. Paris’s rare-book market takes place every weekend on rue Brancion in the fifteenth, in what used to be an old slaughterhouse. A little farther out is Porte de Vanves, one of Paris’s best
brocantes
, or antiques markets, both more friendly and accessible than Porte de Clignancourt and infinitely cheaper.

• Use public transport. The métro is safe, clean, reliable, and cheap. So are the buses. The same tickets work for both. Buy these in a
carnet
of twelve at any métro station and you get a discount. If you’re staying longer, a tourist card will cut your travel costs. Or, better still, follow the locals and get a
carte orange
at the métro station. It covers unlimited travel for a week. (PS: You’ll need a passport picture.)

• Take a bike. Paris’s latest way to get around is the
vélib’
—the free bike.

All over the city, you’ll see racks of identical gray bikes, locked into stands, with a computer terminal at the center. To use one for a day costs just €1, and for seven days €5. Shove your credit card into the slot, receive a PIN number, and take your bike, already fitted with a basket and a lamp. When you’re done, return it to any Vélib’ station where there’s a vacant slot.

So what’s the catch?

Well, each bike is free for only the first thirty minutes. After that, you have to find another station and switch bikes or pay an additional euro for every half hour, climbing to four euros after the third hour. It keeps bikes circulating, making sure every rack is filled and nobody keeps a bike all day. But it’s a bit awkward if you’re a visitor taking a leisurely ride through the Bois de Boulogne and stopping for a picnic. On the other hand, imagine what a taxi would cost. And don’t even
think
about renting a car.

• Plan your day, but not too much. Nothing wastes time and money more quickly than “What do you want to do today?” “I dunno; what do you want to do?” But it’s almost worse to set a tight schedule that leaves no room to rest. Choose one high point—dinner at Au Bon Saint Pourcain, an ascent of the Eiffel Tower, afternoon hot chocolate at Proust’s favorite café, Angelina—then improvise the rest. It’s while you’re walking from the métro toward the Eiffel Tower that you pass that wonderful art nouveau façade or spot the intriguing restaurant about which you’ll be inducing envy in your friends back home.

• Buy
Pariscope.
This little weekly is the real Parisian’s guidebook and, at less than a euro, the city’s best bargain. It lists everything: movie, theater, and museum times and schedules, walking tours, auction sales, even strip clubs.

• The French eat much later than do people in other countries. Peak hour in restaurants is 8:30 to 9:00 p.m., and kitchens close around 11:00 p.m. Try booking for 7:30 p.m. The place should be quieter, the chef less frazzled, the waiters more amiable (though don’t arrive too early, or you may find them eating their own dinner).

• Try going later. By day, you can queue for an hour outside I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre and even then only see the
Mona Lisa
or the
Venus de Milo
over the heads of tour parties. But at mid-afternoon, the crowds melt away. Also, at 3:00 p.m. the admission price drops from €7.50 to €5, while on Wednesdays the Louvre stays open until 9:45 p.m., and not a coach party in sight.

• Paris is the world capital of souvenir shopping. However, paying boutique prices for that seductive piece of lingerie or radical kitchen gadget is the quickest way to erode your budget and load down your luggage.

Of course browse Dior, St. Laurent, Feraud, Agnes B, and the other up-market shops in the chic quartiers around rue Bonaparte or avenue Montaigne. But then check out rue Saint-Placide, running down the side of the Bon Marché department store (the world’s first, incidentally), and you may see the same items in its funkier boutiques at half the price. Key words:
Soldes
—Sale.
Promotion
—Reduced Price.
Dégriffé
—Knock-off or overstock of a known brand.

For less conventional items, visit funky ethnic districts like the Goutte d’Or (the Drop of Gold) that lap the hill of Montmartre. Shops and markets bulge with African or West Indian items. Look particularly for Moroccan brass and pottery and vivid African tribal fabrics—Yoruba, Wolof, Hausa, Mandingo.

Montmartre is also the home of Tati, Paris’s favorite cheap department store for clothing, table linen, and lingerie. Madonna shopped here for those bizarre long-line bras and clunky shoes. It’s worth a visit just to stare at the stock and the locals jostling for bargains. (Tati has various branches, but start with the one at 4 boulevard de Rochechouart in the eighteenth—métro Barbès-Rochechouart.)

• Forget the rules. Paris is above all a city of revelation. As Gene Kelly says in
An American in Paris
, “It reaches in and opens you wide, and you stay that way.” If you want a genuinely memorable visit, embrace its extremes. For instance:

• The Eiffel Tower stays floodlit until midnight, lighting the huge park of the Champ de Mars almost as bright as day. If the weather is warm, take your dinner and picnic on the grass.

• Try absinthe. The modern variety lacks the alkaloid that used to rot your brain, but squint your eyes and you might even spot Modigliani or Toulouse-Lautrec. Worth a visit is Le Fée Verte—The Green Fairy, once the popular name for absinthe—at 108 rue de la Roquette, in the eleventh, near Bastille. Along with the correct art nouveau carafe to trickle water over the sugar lump into the absinthe, they also make absinthe cocktails and serve a decent late supper.

• Explore the red-light districts of Saint-Denis and Pigalle, and the hill of Montmartre above them.

• And don’t miss the Musée de l’Erotisme at 71 boulevard de Clichy (eighteenth arrondissement, métro Blanche). Open from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m., its seven floors of exhibitions will give you plenty to talk about when you get home.

• But if that’s too raunchy, book into Au Lapin Agile, the Frisky Rabbit, at 22 rue des Saules, in the eighteenth arrondissement. Paris’s oldest and strangest night spot, this tumbledown building on the untrendy north side of the Montmartre hill was the hangout of painters like Picasso, Vlaminck, and Maurice Utrillo, who sneaked out the window of his mother’s house to get drunk there. For €24 you can get a small glass of cherries preserved in brandy and a cabaret of street songs from the time of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, performed a capella by the house singers. Eerily memorable.

• Then, if you think you can stand the romantic rush, climb the famous stone staircases of Montmartre around 5:00 a.m. or take the little cable car, buy coffee and rolls, and eat breakfast on the terrace below the Cathedral of Sacré-Coeur. If the harpist is there, drop a euro into his hat and ask him to play “Jeux Interdits.”

C’est tellement simple, Paris.

About the Author

John Baxter
, who gives literary walking tours through Paris, is an acclaimed memoirist, film critic, and biographer. He has lived in Paris for twenty years and gained an intimate knowledge of the city and its history, particularly of the expatriate artists who lived there during the twentieth century. His books include the memoirs
Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas
and
We’ll Always Have Paris
, both available from Harper Perennial. A native of Australia, he lives with his wife and daughter in Paris, in the same building Sylvia Beach called home.

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Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas

We’ll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light

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The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg

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