The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris (8 page)

“Handmade is how we do things,” Frédéric said patiently. He'd lost his flirtatious edge, I noticed. Perhaps he only liked girls who knew how to hand-make chocolate. That must cut his prospective pool down quite substantially.

Frédéric nodded toward a spare hammer. I took it and tentatively hit a bean. Nothing. I hit it harder. Splat. It went flat on the ground. Benoît wordlessly took it and threw it in the bin. I gulped. I wasn't entirely sure how much help I was going to be here.

“Perhaps you just watch for now,” said Frédéric. And I did and noticed a quick little flick of the wrists they made as they assaulted the beans. It was a bit like a very, very good game of Whack-a-Mole.

Then Frédéric took out a surprisingly dainty minivac and blew away all the husks. I finished up my scalding little coffee, which tasted less like coffee and more like a very strong cleaning solution. There was absolutely no way I could drink the filthy stuff. I would never get used to it.

“Now, we feed the beans,” he said, indicating a large industrial grinder.

“So you do use a machine,” I said, as if I'd scored a point. I got a look.

Benoît came back in, lugging in huge crates of milk, butter, and cream from outside. It was all in rough, reused glass. I hadn't seen milk delivered in a glass bottle for a long time. Benoît was calling a farewell to someone out of the back door. It still wasn't light, but the sky wasn't as pitch-black as it had been.

“We use only one dairy,” said Frédéric. “The Oise. It delivers every morning. Swiss would be better, alas, but time is of the urgency to us.”

He started up the grinding machine. The noise was incredible. Then, little by little, he fed in the precious beans, gently and carefully. Gradually, at the bottom, a thick, dark liquid started to gather, strained through a net in the collection bottle. Frédéric stared at it happily. When it finally stopped, I straightened up carefully.

“Now what?” I said.

We just started with the liquid and hurled stuff at it at Braders, but I didn't want to admit that.

“You conch,” said Frédéric.

The word was the same in English. To conch was to mix up the different ingredients, the levels, to make the chocolate dark, light, milk, flavored. A tiny mistake one way or the other would make it disgusting, too sweet, grainy, or crystalline. Our machines were calibrated to make everything the same every time; they used cheap milk powder and life prolongers and additives.

“Of course, that is for Thierry,” said Frédéric, lowering his head. “It is the most important, the most sacred part.”

To conch by hand was very difficult. And then it would need refining and tempering so it held together. I raised an eyebrow.

“This is for tomorrow,” explained Frédéric, and indeed, Benoît had now moved on to pouring a thick gooey mass from a pot and working it back and forth with a spatula while he stirred another pot on the stove gently. Normally people would use a thermometer for this, but Benoît had been practically raised in the shop, I learned later. He knew it as instinctively as a top musician knows when his instrument is out of tune. If he was happy, he would hum tunelessly. If he was not, he would dump everything back in the huge pot and start all over again until it was perfect.

Finally, he was ready.

“
Rien
plus
,” shouted Frédéric, only just audible above the din of the grinder. “No more. Nothing but the finest of dark beans from Costa Rica, the finest of fresh cream milk from the best fed cows this side of Normandy, the finest cane sugar from Jamaica, all churned to perfection in the traditional way, not by huge machines full of fat and preservative and old bits of
truc
and the Band-Aids of the
paisants
,
non
?”

The colors blending together and being poured into molds looked absolutely beautiful; in fact, looking at them, you'd be hard pressed to disagree with Thierry's philosophy, that chocolate was something meant to be made fresh and consumed fresh, no less than coffee or a croissant. And the smell was warmer, richer, purer than anything back in the UK, where we'd used a hefty dose of vegetable fats to bolster up the mix (which was why so many people who loved British chocolate found the posh stuff so hard to take to—it was the comforting fats they really liked).

“Do not dip the fingers,” ordered Frédéric, but I would never, ever touch food being prepared; I'd had enough tedious health and safety courses to have gotten that one through my head. I wasn't an idiot. Frédéric was, however, passing me up a long ladle, which looked to be one solid piece of curved metal with a tiny tasting spoon at the end. Benoît stood out of my way.

“Attention,” he warned. “Be careful.”

Frédéric shook his head but declined to say any more, simply watching my face curiously and intently. He was staring very closely at my lips. I found it oddly off-putting, but in a nice way. I carefully let down the ladle and scooped up a mouthful of the pale brown liquid.

Blowing on it to let it cool, Frédéric staring at me all the while, I raised it to my lips.

Heroin addicts often say that all they are ever doing is chasing that first hit, the first time they felt wrapped in cotton wool, all the worries of the world behind them. I wouldn't say I was quite as dramatic as that. Nonetheless, the moment the still-warm, gently thickening substance hit my tongue, I really did think, for an instant, that I was going to fall onto the table—no, worse, that I was going to DIVE in, to shovel every morsel of that sweet (but not too sweet), creamy, (but not sickly), dense, deeply flavored, rich, smooth, all-enveloping, chocolatey goodness. It felt like someone giving you a warm hug. As soon as I had swallowed it, I wanted the taste back in my mouth again, wanted to cram myself full of it. I found myself embarrassed suddenly, blushing, as I noticed Frédéric's eyes still on my lips, intently watching me. My hand went automatically to dip the spoon again, then at the last minute, I realized this would look desperate, unprofessional, greedy, hungry, or risky. Instead, I lifted it out, empty. Frédéric raised an eyebrow.

“It's…” What could I say? That it pissed on almost anything else I'd ever eaten anywhere? That it was so good I felt like I wanted to almost cry? That I would never eat anything else as long as I lived? And it was still not even set.

“It's very good,” I said finally. Frédéric glanced at Benoît, who shrugged. Just as the roaster in the corner was heating up the room uncomfortably, the air conditioner clicked on and a cooling hum began. Everything here was rickety, antiquated, and held together with tape. But there was absolutely no doubt that it worked. It worked beyond the wildest dreams of Braders, beyond the wildest dreams of every chocolate I'd ever eaten in my entire life.

“Eet ees better than very good,
non
?” Frédéric asked. He seemed insulted.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “It's…
le
style
anglais
.”

He seemed happier about this. Typical British stiff upper lip couldn't be passionate about anything, I suspected, as far as he was concerned. In truth, I didn't want to tell him how impressed I was. It would make me sound like a rube, like I knew nothing about chocolate when in fact I'd been sent there to help. The gap between what I'd been making and what they were doing here was like the difference between a liquid dish soap bottle rocket and the NASA Mars mission. So I decided it was best to keep my mouth shut. At least, until I could fill it with more of that unbelievable chocolate. In secret.

So I stayed quiet as Frédéric, with some relish, showed me where the cleaning equipment was kept and what my duties were, got me to hammer pounds of cocoa beans until I stopped ruining their stock, showed me how to winnow for husks, and took me through the schedule of the shop. By the time we were finished, it was nearly 10:00 a.m. and the sun was shining strongly through the long planters of herbs, making it look more like a greenhouse than ever. I wondered if we were about to open, as Frédéric and Benoît glanced nervously at their watches, but as it turned out five minutes later, they were not. The door was unlocked, then thrown open with a spectacular clang. Benoît suddenly made himself completely invisible. The jolly puckish look on Frédéric's features was replaced with a kind of servile watchfulness. I looked around behind me as the swing doors into the little factory swung heavily.

“
ALLONS-Y
!” LET'S GO! came a huge, booming voice.

Of all the surprises Claire had vouchsafed me, of all the confusions, this was by far the weirdest.

The way she had spoken, the way she had gone pink when she spoke of him, it was clear to me that this had been someone serious in her life, whereas whenever she mentioned her ex-husband, Richard, it was with pained courtesy.

You could still see in her the traces of the younger woman she had been; she'd been beautiful. She still was, in a certain light, when the years of pain weren't so strongly etched on her brow.

I had fantasized, perhaps, of a suave, gray-haired type, perhaps with jet black eyebrows, wearing chef's whites or maybe a very well-cut suit. Smart and stylish, just like her—chic and a little bit distant. Perhaps we would smile wryly when Claire's name came up, or, perhaps sadly, he would barely remember her at all, just a girl from very long ago who had had a wild crush on him, a summer of his youth, but nothing to do with his real life at all. Romantic and handsome, obviously, perhaps a little sad…

None of these described Thierry Girard.

I don't know if Thierry spoke any English. I couldn't imagine how he made his trips to Australia and America, where he was feted and famous, if he couldn't. But I never heard him speak a single word. He was huge; he never spent any time in the shop without making it look as if there wasn't any room for anybody else. His belly, normally enswathed in a huge white apron, seemed to be a separate entity from himself, as it entered rooms before he did.

“Who is this?” he boomed as he entered the kitchen. “Frédéric, have you been bringing night girls home with you again?”

At this stage, my French was a beat behind what was actually being said, so it was too late to realize I was being horribly insulted till a moment or so later. Which was a relief because if I'd have shot my mouth off, I'd have been out of a job about two milliseconds later.

“This is AnNA Tron,” said Frédéric. “The new kitchen assistant.”

Thierry lowered his enormous face toward mine. He had a little beard, which was lucky as his face was so sunk in fat that without it, it would have been borderline featureless. His little black eyes were like raisins stuck in a huge muffin. His skin was doughy, and hair came out of his flat nostrils. He gazed at me.

“Women in among my chocolate,” he said. “I'm not sure.”

I was taken aback. You would never hear this type of thing in the UK. Just as I was about to get annoyed about it, his enormous meaty shoulders shook with a huge belly laugh.

“I am joking! I joke! I joke!”

He looked at me, then suddenly snapped his fingers.

“I know who you are!”

I wasn't at all sure he would.

“You are Claire's friend.”

I nodded.

“Ha! She spoke French like a dog eats salad.”

I bristled. “She was a wonderful teacher.”

His eyes blinked rapidly, twice. “Ah yes. I'm sure she was. I can imagine she was. Mind you, she was a terrible nanny…although,
alors
, perhaps that was my fault…”

He drifted off then and I shifted uncomfortably. I wasn't at all sure how much he knew about Claire's illness, nor how serious it was.

“And you were ill?”

“I'm fine,” I said stoutly. I wasn't really in the mood for volunteering exactly what was wrong with me unless somebody absolutely had to ask.

“You are fine for working hard, yes?”

“Without a doubt,” I said, smiling as hard as I could.

“
Bon
.
Bon
.”

His face looked far away again.

“And Claire…she is also ill.”

I nodded, not quite trusting myself to speak. He looked as if he were about to ask more, then stopped himself.

“
Alors
. Welcome, welcome. Do you know your chocolate?”

I looked into his big friendly giant's face sincerely. This I could answer.

“I do, sir. I've worked in chocolate for ten years.”

He looked at me expectantly.

“Yours is the best,” I said simply, not sure I could trust my French to elaborate. He paused, then the huge laugh was back.

“Listen to her!” he yelled. “Alice! ALICE! Come, you must hear this. A countryman of yours.”

A languid, incredibly scrawny woman who must have been about fifty—but a really, really well-preserved fifty, her lipstick red on her wide mouth, her hair a perfect black helmet with an elegant swoop of pure white at the front—emerged into the back room. She was wearing cigarette pant trousers and a man's jacket and looked—there was no two ways about it—absolutely amazing. She was originally English but, I would discover, kept insisting that she had lived in Paris for so long, she had forgotten it all, when what she actually meant was she didn't want to waste time speaking to a guttersnipe like me or any of the English press–reading expat clusters who gathered together by the Shakespeare bookshop or the Frog or the Smiths on the rue de Rivoli. The best way to annoy Alice was to guess she was British before she opened her mouth, something I often prompted people to do. Which was childish, but she really was very rude to me.

She raised an eyebrow at Thierry.

“Cheri?”

“We have an English girl!”

Alice looked at me and I was suddenly very conscious of my plain skirt, my flat shoes, my Gap bag, my morning hair.