Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (43 page)

As I sipped my fine Italian coffee upstairs and listened to the pens and fingernails scratching away or tap-dancing across touch screens, I reflected on the fact that most of the working writers I know in Paris, whether French, Italian, British, or American, are café habitués. Each has his own list of favorite cafés. Few—precisely three, including my English friend—would ever do serious work in a public venue. I suspect that most of those handsome ink pens, leather-bound pads, laptops, and hand-held devices are used for e-mailing; online banking; writing letters home to Peoria, Sorbonne course outlines, shopping lists—and tragically unpublishable masterpieces.

I said good-bye to my English friend and rode the 96 bus across town. My aim was to get some serious work done. En route I attempted to count the cafés we passed. There were about a thousand, I reckoned, between Odéon and Boulevard Beaumarchais, at which point a pierced belly button and an open
Le Monde
closed off my view.

Any student of life will tell you that gluttony takes many forms, including the occasional desire for self-punishment. With that in mind I chose to get off the bus and have yet another coffee, albeit this one a
déca
(decaffeinated). Across the street from the bus stop nearest Rue d’Oberkampf and Rue Saint-Maur is Café Charbon. To fully appreciate this establishment it’s essential to know several Parisian slang words.
Branché
means hip, cool, hot, trendy, and so forth, though in the 2010s
branché
is no longer
branché
, having been replaced by
tendance, trendy, cool
, and
underground
. In fact
branché
is
démodé
and is just as often used nowadays as a pejorative, because it suggests a lack of authenticity and an excess of
frime
, as in
frimeur
, another highly pertinent term. A
frimeur
is a poseur of a peculiarly pernicious variety, the kind who stars in the very worst of current French cinema, or builds architectural nightmares favored by state-subsidized latte liberals, known here as the
gauche caviar. Frimeurs
are the stock in trade of Café Charbon.

The place has had several incarnations over the last 130 years or so, including a pocket theater and an industrial workshop. But it was never an authentic Auvergnat café selling coal (
charbon
) and wood, as the name suggests. Everything in and about it is strangely marvelous, bona fide 100 percent
frime
. There are War of the Worlds praying mantis–style lamps. The counter is zinc (or, more likely, tin). The floors are covered in broken tiles, just like those of an authentic Auvergnat café circa 1950. It is, in short, a retro decorator’s dream. The faux element is so well done that most regulars actually think the place was once powdered with coal dust and filled with blue-collar Potato Eaters in funny hats.

Happily the Café Charbon’s hardcore
frimeurs
don’t show up until after their office jobs, mostly at architectural firms, so a mid-morning or mid-afternoon visit is a treat. I sat in the dark recesses of the place and observed the sneaker-shod, un-uniformed waiters groove with the hipsters perched in booths or poised in front of huge mirrors. Several watched themselves billow smoke from mouth and nostrils, like Stalin-era coal plants. This particular
frimeur
activity is now pursued exclusively on sidewalk terraces which, as is the case at Café Charbon, usually open directly onto indoor nonsmoking areas. It’s a
branché
way of subverting the smoking ban and is therefore widely considered
cool, tendence, trendy
, and
très underground
.

Jazz played on the radio. The waiter did not pester me to consume or move on. I had a table all to myself, with plenty of room, and enough of a draft to keep me from choking on the blowby from the terrace. Strangest of all, the coffee was good. Needless to say it was imported Italian coffee, and had no more to do with Auvergnats and their daily grinds than did the faux-everything décor.

Perhaps I was experiencing the future of French cafés, I told myself. I hoped not.

Having ingested enough stimulants to keep me awake until the next day’s chair-and-table ritual, I was too jittery to get anything done at my office. Besides, by the time I got there it was aperitif hour. Dispensing
l’apéro
, as my French friends call it, is another important function of the café. How could I have overlooked it?

Alison agreed to meet me back in the Latin Quarter on the glassed-in terrace of Brasserie Balzar, an old favorite of ours and about a million other locals and visitors. Every table was taken. We couldn’t get in for dinner.

“It must be the atmosphere,” said Alison, indicating the brasserie’s Art Déco interior, the mirrors and cozy tables pushed up to moleskin banquets. “The food certainly has never been great, but who cares?”

We quaffed several ruinous rounds of beer, eavesdropped on an adulterous couple, and decided it would be all right to continue toward dinner at another of our troughs, Les Fontaines, near the Panthéon.

Les Fontaines is the antithesis of Balzar and happily has so far been overlooked by most paratrooper-correspondents and bona fide reviewers. It has tacky décor but good food. The view of other portly, savvy, ecstatic regular diners obscures the sagging, scarlet vinyl banquettes and jaundice-hued lighting. Les Fontaines is less uncomfortable now than it used to be twenty years ago, but is still noisy, a favorite of French provincials resident in Paris. Its menu features the kind of devastatingly caloric, premodern delicacies that make squeamish eaters squirm. On its wine list are more quaffables by the carafe or the glass than many upscale restaurants offer.

My liver needed a crutch after the chicken heart salad, the pâté, the rabbit kidneys with mustard sauce, the tender sweetbreads and creamy wild mushrooms, the strawberry pie, and all that chilled Brouilly. There just wasn’t room left for a coffee. So, we decided, what the heck, let’s finish the evening at what used to be Madame Renée’s, now known with a growl as “That café underneath our windows.” But by the time we got there it was after midnight and the owners were locking up early. “Shucks,” I exclaimed to one of them, “you won’t be waking us up tonight.” Alison and I yawned in tandem, said good night, and woke up as always to the table-and-chair dance the next morning. In Paris, life’s a café.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their encouragement, enthusiasm, generosity and wise counsel, we would like to express our deep gratitude to Diane Johnson, Steven Barclay, Mark Eversman, and Donald George, with a special thanks to our skilled and cordial editor, Charles Conrad at Broadway Books, and to Barrie Kerper, for placing
PARIS,
PARIS
in his hands.

We warmly thank our friends, relatives, and colleagues Susan Aurinko, John Baxter, Jenna Ciongoli, Lauren Dong, Diane Downie and Paul Shelley, Daniel Eastman, Marie-Pierre Emery, Penelope Fletcher of the Red Wheelbarrow bookstore, Laura Furman, Anton Gill and Marji Campi, Anne Harris, Erica Heller, Odile Hellier of the Village Voice bookshop, Paul and Mimi Horne, Elizabeth and Nevin Kuhl, Janet McDonald, David Malone, Julie Mancini, our wonderful agent Alice Martell, Nicolas Mengin, Kimmo Pasanen, Elaine and Bill Petrocelli of Book Passage, Russ Schleipmann, Rick Simonson of Elliott Bay Books, Jay Smith, Gloria Spivak, Paul Taylor, Becky and David Tepfer, Robert Tolmach, and Barbara Torgoff.

Mille mercis
to Jane Roberts, Bernard Metais, Elvira Schwartz, Melissa Kling, Nora Delanay, Elaine Uzan Leary, Jennie Luening Malloy, Barbara Bouquegneau, Marie Teixeira, Misa Bourdoiseau, Margaret L. Baldwin, Nicolas Cardou, Joe Rivlin, and the many other members and employees of the Federation of Alliances Françaises, USA, who so kindly helped us early on.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

An American journalist based in Paris since 1986, David Downie has written about European culture, food, and travel for magazines and newspapers worldwide. He was a Paris correspondent for
Salon.com
, Departures, Appellation, and Art & Antiques, and has contributed to
epicurious.com
,
concierge.com
, and many other websites. Currently he is a European correspondent for
Gadling.com
, the popular literary travel site.

The author of a dozen works of nonfiction and fiction, Downie has also been published in many anthologies, among them
Paris
and
Southwest France
and
Central Italy
in the
Collected Traveler
series;
Salon.com
’s Wanderlust;
Travelers’ Tales: Adventures in Wine Country; By The Seat of My Pants;
and Lonely Planet’s
Moveable Feast
. Please visit David Downie’s author website,
www.davidddownie.com
, and his custom walking tours website,
www.parisparistours.com
.

A
BOUT THE
P
HOTOGRAPHER

Alison Harris lives in Paris and travels extensively taking photos for travel books, cookbooks, advertising campaigns, and magazines. A selection of Harris’s black-and-white photographs of Paris is in the collection of the Musée Carnavalet (Paris Historical Museum) and the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (Paris Historical Library). Her work is also in numerous private collections in Europe and the United States. It has been exhibited in solo and group shows in New York, Chicago and Houston, as well as in Rome, Genoa, and Paris. Her photography website is
www.alisonharris.com
.

Table of Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Photographs

Foreword

By Way of Introduction

Paris Places

It’s the Water: The Seine

A Day in the Park: The Luxembourg Gardens

A Lively City of the Dead: Père-Lachaise Cemetery

François’s Follies: Building Afresh in a Museum City

Island in the Seine: Île Saint-Louis

Montsouris and Buttes-Chaumont: The Art of the Faux

Going Underground

Place des Vosges

Belly Ache: Les Halles Redux (Again)

Hit the Road Jacques

Paris People

Coco Chanel

Les Bouquinistes

Midnight, Montmartre, and Modigliani

The Boat People of the Seine

Meeting Moreau

The Perils of Pompidou

Keepers of the Craft: Paris Artisans

Dear Dead Vincent van Gogh

Beaumarchais’s Marais

Madame X’s Seduction School

Paris Phenomena

In the Spring

La Ville Lumière: Paris, City of Light

Of Cobbles, Bikes, and Bobos

Philosophy au Lait

Sidewalk Sundae: What Makes Paris Paris

Vie de Chien: A Dog’s Life

Why the Marais Changed Its Spots