The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris (9 page)

“Evidently,” she said. I couldn't believe this snotty cow was English. Well, I could, but she couldn't have looked more French had she been wearing a beret, a small twirled mustache, and a Breton shirt and been carrying a chain of onions around her neck while riding a bicycle and surrendering a war.

“Hello,” I said in English.

“
Bonjour
,” she replied, then immediately glanced elsewhere in the room as if bored to death. I don't know exactly what had made Thierry go from lovely Claire to this, but no wonder he ate all the time.

Thierry beckoned me over. First, he turned his attention to the fresh cocoa. Frédéric added it to a large vat, and Thierry, with a deftness unexpected in such a large man, flicked the tap so the vat filled up with warm, gently steaming, thick chocolate liquid, followed by the milk, and he added a fresh powder snowfall of sugar, stopping, tasting, stopping, tasting, so quickly he looked like a blur. “Yes, no, yes, no, more, quick!” he yelled as the men rushed to follow his bidding. Finally he declared himself satisfied.

“Now we really start,” he pronounced.

“
Lavendre
!” he barked, and Frédéric rushed to chop some off the box at the end of the room. Thierry chopped it incredibly fine with a knife so quickly I thought he would lose a finger, then popped it, along with a tiny crystal bottle of lavender essence so potent that, as soon as he opened the little flacon, the entire room was overcome with the scent, like a spring meadow. Delicately, his little finger tilted upward, he let two…three drops into the basin, whisking all the time with his other hand. The tiny purple flecks of the plant were almost completely hidden, and he paced across the room one, two, three times, his left hand working furiously, his right holding the basin close. Occasionally he would stop, dip in a finger, lick, and resume, possibly adding a tiny drop more cream or a little of the dark chocolate from the other vat. Finally he announced himself satisfied and stepped away from the vat. Benoît carried it over to the side of the oven, where it would be shaped and melted and tempered, ready for tomorrow.

Then Thierry hollered “molds,” and immediately, Frédéric was there with the fresh batch. He poured the chocolate expertly into the molds without spilling a drop, then inserted the tray into the large industrial fridge. Without pausing, he turned around; Benoît had already silently placed a large box of small jellies in front of him. Thierry chopped them into the tiniest of diamond shapes, each exactly alike and perfect. By the time he had finished, the chocolate had hardened and he removed them briskly from the fridge, turning the mold upside down so thirty-two perfect chocolates popped out onto the workshop top. He pressed the diamonds of jellied fruit into the tops of the whirls, then, with a mere glance, sent one down to me.

“Tell me what you think,” he said.

I bit into it. The soft sweet edge of citrus—it must have been cut from the lime plant—mellowed the perfectly balanced chocolate; the entire thing tasted so light it could have been good for you. The chocolate flavor didn't fade away in the mouth; its richness intensified, grew stronger. The tiny tart jelly on the top perfectly stopped the sweetness from overpowering the rest of the bonbon. It was perfect, exquisite. I smiled in pure happiness.

“That is what I like to see, heh?” Thierry indicated to the rest of the room. “That is the face I like. Always the face I like. Today we will make lavender four hundred piece, rosemary and
confiture
, mint…”

He turned to Alice. “You want to try?”

She gave him a stony look.

“I joke,” he said to me. “She does not eat. Like a robot.”

“I do eat,” said Alice frostily. “I just eat food, not poison.”

The wonderful aftertaste of the chocolate suddenly turned ashy in my mouth and I wanted to cough. Thierry looked at me mischievously and winked broadly, and I smiled back, but I wasn't sure I liked that either, being lumped in with the massive fatties.

“It passes?” said Thierry.

“It is sublime,” I said honestly. Frédéric smiled at me, which gave me the impression that I wasn't doing so badly so far. Thierry snapped his fingers and Benoît gave him an espresso into which he poured copious amounts of sugar, then necked it. There was a silence in the room for one hanging half-second, then he announced, “Finish!”

He and Alice swept out of the workroom, and the men immediately started to move. Frédéric gave me my mop and instructed me to basically wash and polish anything that wasn't tied down. Once they'd gotten going, they moved with awesome speed, turning out Thierry's creation exactly over and over again with huge molds; the lime, then the rosemary and jam, which sounded very peculiar to me until they let me taste it. As soon as I had tried it, I couldn't imagine why anyone would ever eat anything else.

At 11:00 a.m., Frédéric took off his dirty apron, swapped it for a smarter, more formal clean one with the name of the shop and his own name embroidered on the pocket, and went to open up. The shutters made a loud rattling noise, echoing throughout the street as the other shops, cafés, and emporiums started opening up for business. Even though I'd seen the sun was up through the hazy workroom windows, seeing it beam in through the front of the shop made me blink.

It was a ravishing day. Even though my back was already sore from stooping to clean so many nooks and crannies in the workshop, and Benoît had indicated he wanted me to start on the copper vats, which had a complicated-looking box of harsh-smelling cleaning products attached to it. Claire hadn't been wrong about the hard work.

But Frédéric beckoned me out for a cigarette break at the front. I didn't smoke, but I kept him company as he waved and bantered with the other shop holders setting out their stalls; the little bookshop was putting racks of paperbacks outside, some of them, I noticed, looking a bit dog-eared; there was a little print shop with maps of vintage Paris in careful plastic pockets, framed in card, and some larger touristy work—Monets, Klimts—on the walls for sale. One shop seemed to sell nothing but hundreds of different types of tea, all in little metal boxes, brightly colored, lining the walls in a hundred flavors: mint, cardamom, grapefruit, caramel. That shop smelled dry and refined, of leaves, not the earthy deep flavors of Thierry's. But from the friendly way Frédéric hailed the proprietor, a tall, thin older man who looked as desiccated as the leaves he sold, as if a stiff breeze would blow him away, I imagined they must get on all right, the two things complementing each other. Next door to us directly was a shop selling bits and bobs, new brooms and dustpans and mop heads and nails.

Above street level, windows were being opened; the little roads were so narrow here, you could see everybody living cheek by jowl. Coffee was being drunk, papers unfurled—
Le
Matin
,
France
Soir
—and everywhere the smooth rattle and chatter of French, background chatter reduced to a mélange, to a pleasant background on the radio. I couldn't quite believe it; here I was, hanging out with a true French person, in a road full of professional French people, working in a French place, drinking sticky coffee, and watching the world go by. I was slightly delirious with the lack of sleep and on a bit of a sugar rush if I was being perfectly honest, but I couldn't help the huge bubble of excitement boiling up inside me, even though I was, when you got down to it, about to spend the rest of the day scrubbing a gigantic metal vat. (Only two flavors of chocolate were made each day, so one vat could rotate its cleaning. You had to be, I was assured, very, very careful not to infect the vat with cleaning products, nor disturb its patina, which gave the mixing depth. Frédéric had gone on about it till I was cross-eyed.) Well, I would deal with that problem in a moment. For now, I was happy just standing outside, smelling Frédéric's heavy Gauloises smoke, watching a perky-looking dog with a newspaper in its mouth prance up the street, seeing a trio of pigeons spiral up among the high roofs, and hearing the chime of different bells from across the river and down the whole wind of the Seine. I liked the sound.

“He likes you,” said Frédéric. “Be careful. Alice will not like you.”

“I can handle Alice,” I said, which was sheer bravado and actually a bare-faced lie. People confident enough to be rude always rather impressed me.

“Anyway, isn't she just his girlfriend?”

Frédéric snorted.

“Without Alice, Thierry would stay in bed all day every day, eating his own work. She is the one who pushes him, who made him famous. She is always worried that someone will steal him.”

But he looks like a gigantic pig, I didn't say. And also surely unbelievably glamorous and worldly Alice was hardly going to bother with me.

The first tourists of the day were already heading down the cobbled street, cooing and remarking on the quaintness of everything. One or two were following guides, and when they saw our sign, their faces lit up.

“The hordes descend,” said Frédéric, flicking his cigarette quickly into the gutter and returning quickly to the shop with a large smile pasted on his face. “
Bonjour
,
messieurs
,
dames
!”

From inside the workshop where I was scrubbing, very slowly, the gigantic pan with a toothbrush, like some kind of sadistic punishment, I could see the heads of people in the shop bobbing around through the window in the swinging doors; sometimes Frédéric would put his head through and bellow at Benoît, who continued, utterly methodically, setting out tray after tray of the fresh chocolates, which sold as quickly, it appeared, as he could set them in the fridge, even though the prices were absolutely startling. I couldn't believe how much they cost. Frédéric explained to me later that yes, it was expensive to make chocolate the way Thierry did it, with the utter best of everything, but even the very best of herbs didn't cost that much money. Alice had decided that unless customers found things unwaveringly costly, they didn't appreciate it so much, and they'd also found that every time they increased prices, the shop got busier and they got profiled in more up-market magazines. And so it went on, till people came from across the world to visit the famous, the one and only fresh chocolate shop on the rue Chanoinesse, and Thierry kept on doing what he did, and they were paid, Frédéric remarked crossly, very little, while Alice salted it away and bought Chanel handbags. I wondered how much of this was true and how much just anti-Alice speculation.

At midday promptly, Frédéric shut the door and brought the shutters down. Benoît turned off all the machines and vanished on a wobbly bicycle that looked too small for his big frame.

“Where's he gone?” I asked.

“For a siesta, of course,” said Frédéric. “And lunch.”

“How long do we get for lunch?” I asked. In the factory, we got forty-five minutes—it had been brought down from an hour in a concession round to let us leave a bit earlier—but that was annoying as it wasn't long enough to go into town or shop or meet anyone or anything like that. Frédéric shrugged. “We shall open again at three o'clock.”

I looked at him, not sure if he was joking or not. Surely he was.

“Three hours?”

Frédéric didn't seem to see this as the least bit surprising.

“Well, yes, you have lunch to do and perhaps a little nap…”

Now he mentioned it, a nap didn't seem like a bad idea. I'd been up since the crack of dawn. He smiled gaily and sauntered off, leaving me standing alone. Alice marched off without a good-bye into a van laden with fresh boxes. Thierry turned around after waving them off and fixed me with a surprisingly humorous eye.

“Lunch?” he said.

A
part from the chocolates, I'd had nothing to eat all morning and I'd been up for such a long time. Thierry offered me his arm—he wasn't a very fast walker—and we crossed the Pont Louis-Philippe and vanished through a maze of streets, mostly filled with tourists, with the occasional local who recognized and nodded a head to Thierry. We passed wide roads with long chains of cafés and restaurants with picture menus outside and optimistic tables set in the street. He ignored these completely, and when we got to the far end of the Marais, he twisted quickly into a tiny alleyway between two large blocks of apartments with white shutters and washing hanging from the top windows. It was cobbled, and you wouldn't have noticed it was there if you didn't know exactly where you were headed. At the end of the tiny lane was a little wooden sign swaying in the breeze with a large pot on it. It looked like something out of Diagon Alley, and I looked at Thierry questioningly. He said nothing but winked at me.

It was, in fact, a restaurant, and when we opened the old brown door, a gust of noise and smells and warm air flooded out. Inside everything was brown and wooden; there were coppers on the wall and it was ferociously hot. Tiny brown wooden tables and benches, built for earlier, thinner generations I would have said, were crammed together higgledy-piggledy on different levels. Everyone appeared to be shouting, and I couldn't see a vacant table anywhere. A large woman in a dirty white apron and glasses appeared and kissed Thierry rapidly on both cheeks, gabbling something I couldn't recognize, then led us both to the back of the room, from where I could see, behind the bar, a huge brick oven roaring away.

We were jammed into two seats cheek by jowl with two men who appeared to be having a furious argument about something but who would abruptly stop every so often and burst out laughing. I had just squeezed in when the old lady returned, cocking an eyebrow. Thierry leaned over to me. “I will order you the duck,” he said, and then, when I agreed, simply nodded to the woman, who vanished and sent over a very small whippet-thin boy with water, bread, napkins, utensils, and a small carafe of deep, fruity-looking wine and two very small glasses, all of which he unfolded onto the table at lightning speed. Thierry poured a tiny glass of wine for me—I thought it was to taste it—and a rather larger one for himself. Then he dipped a piece of bread into a bowl of olive oil, started chewing it contemplatively, and sat back, happy. He seemed fairly content not to ask me too much about my life or even what I was doing there. I felt very nervous suddenly.

“So,” I said, “you've always had the shop?”

He shook his head. “Not always. I was a soldier too.”

“Really?” I couldn't imagine Thierry as a lean, mean fighting machine.

“Well, I was an army cook. Yes.”

“What was that like?”

He shrugged. “Horrible. But then I came back to my shop. Then I was much happier.”

“Why is it called Le Chapeau Chocolat?”

He smiled at that, but before he could answer, our food appeared.

I had never eaten duck before, I hadn't wanted to say, except with pancakes at the Chinese when Cath and I were flush. But I had thought duck was a small thing. This was a huge breast, like a monster Christmas turkey. On the top was a thick crispy skin, like crackling. There was a green salad and small roast potatoes on the side and a yellow sauce. I watched Thierry as he chopped into his duck right across the middle and dunked it in the sauce. I immediately did the same thing.

The juicy, crunchy skin of the duck exploded in my mouth. The taste was just incredible, hot and salty and tender all at once. I looked up at Thierry. “This is amazing,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh yes, it is good.”

I looked around at the other tables. Almost everyone else was also eating duck. This was what the place sold: oven-roasted duck. Amazing. I smiled, then wiped away some grease that wanted to run down my chin. The potatoes were hot and salty, and the salad was peppery arugula. Everything complemented everything else. It was one of the best meals I had ever had. Everyone else was taking it completely in their stride, chatting, carrying on, pretending this was normal. Perhaps if you lived in Paris, I supposed, this was normal.

Thierry launched excitedly into explaining to me how they made sure the oven was exactly the right temperature and how they balanced out the flavors. He was fascinating on where they sourced the animals (who had to live happy lives—a stressed duck was a bad duck apparently). He was genuinely interesting and animated, completely and utterly obsessed with his food, and I stopped noticing his bulk and breathlessness and caught only his hearty laugh and obsession. Maybe I could see what Claire had seen, just a glimpse.

Finally, after waving his knife in the air claiming he thought he could smell his neighbor's wine was corked, he caught himself and laughed.

“Ah, always I talk too much,” he said. “I get carried away, you know.”

“It's good, I like it,” I said. He raised his eyebrows ruefully.

“No, no, I don't pay enough attention…So tell me, you leave your boyfriend in England?”

“I don't have a boyfriend,” I said shortly.

Thierry raised his eyes. “But a woman like you…”

I couldn't work out what he meant, whether “a woman as nice as you” or “a woman as old as you.”

“Uh huh?” I said.

“You look like you should have a boyfriend,” he said.

“Well,” I said. Maybe he meant dumpy, as if I'd settled down and given up. “Well, I don't.”

Thierry returned to his plate and, on finding it empty, looked sad.

“Well. Do not fall in love with Frédéric. He has nine girlfriends.”

Given that I could probably squash Frédéric in a strong breeze, I felt this to be unlikely. I finished off my meal and did as Thierry did, running bread around the plate to mop up the juices. Oh, it was so good.

“And what about our friend Claire?”

I realized I hadn't been able to check my email since I'd gotten here and let her know how we were getting on. Surely Sami would know, although he seemed a bit too exotic for email, as if he would actually get everything delivered by carrier pigeons wearing bow ties.

I shrugged. “Was it glamorous, Paris in the '70s?”

“Paris is always glamorous, no?”

I nodded.

He looked distracted for a moment. “We were good friends, her and I,” he said, then stared at my bread and grinned broadly.

“It is very sexy, a woman who eats,” said Thierry. “You will find a boyfriend in less than five minutes, I am sure. Stay away from the Bourse; they are all bad, bad men.”

The Bourse, it turned out, was the stock exchange, and he launched into a very funny attack railing against privileged bankers, and then lunch was over.

Thierry sat back in contentment after his meal, ordering us both another coffee, which came accompanied by a tiny flute of clear spirit.

“
Eau
de
vie
,” said Thierry. “Essential.”

He swigged it down and I did likewise, only to find out it was a ludicrously hard spirit that made my eyes water, and I started to cough. Thierry laughed.

“Nice to make acquaintance,” he said in stilted English, then reverted back to French.

“Likewise,” I said.

“And now, a nap!”

I had a tiny moment of wondering if this wasn't some kind of ridiculous seduction technique—surely not—but no. Thierry headed back to the shop, and I clambered up the many steps to the tiny apartment (half crawling the last flight), tumbled into bed, and fell fast asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.

Thank goodness for Sami. At about three o'clock, he emerged from his bedroom where he'd only just gotten up, loudly singing an operatic song that was far too high for him (he rather bounced about) and making coffee hiss on the stove. When I came around, still a little drunk on food and
eau
de
vie
, I hadn't the faintest idea where I was.

“
Cherie
!” said Sami as I emerged, blinking, into the warm afternoon light in the apartment. He glanced at his watch. “I thought you had a job.”

My heart leapt in my mouth.

“I do!” I said, panicking. “I did. Shit.”

“
Arrête
!” Stop, said Sami. He came over and deliberately smoothed down my hair and wiped under my eyes where, presumably, I was all streaked with mascara. “Do not worry about it,
cherie
. You may be a little late.”

“It's my first day!” I moaned. In the factory, you had to clock in and clock out; otherwise, you got your money docked. Not to mention the fact that it was ridiculously rude, and I was an idiot not to set my alarm.

Sami eyed me up carefully. “It is a siesta,” he declared. “Not an invitation to become completely unconscious.”

A slender slip of a person hurried out of Sami's room to the little bathroom. I smiled at Sami, who completely ignored me.

“
Allons
, go,” he said. “Rush. And do not say you are sorry. British people say they are sorry one thousand times a day. Why? You do not mean it. You are not really sorry. You should save it for when you are actually sorry. Otherwise, it is meaningless.”

“Sorry,” I said without thinking. He gave me a stern look.

“Now. Go. Do not get drunk.”

“I'm not drunk,” I said, offended.

“No, but you're English. So it can happen at any time without warning. Come home later. I might have some friends here.”

I catapulted down the stairs, deciding to save time by not switching on the lights, which turned out to be a terrible plan as I jarred my ankles on the bottom steps, then hared out of the block. I heard the first floor door open and close quickly. Ugh, nosey old woman.

As I turned into the rue Chanoinesse, my heart sank. The shop was opened up once again, its striped awning rolled out, its subtle gray frontage glinting in the afternoon sun, a line of happy punters queuing up outside. But worse—Thierry, I saw, was already there, with Alice. Her lip curled when she saw me. Why was she being so snooty?

“Ah, it's you,” she said, not even bothering to search for my name. “We thought you'd found the work too hard and gone home.”

“I fell asleep,” I said, feeling my cheeks flare up bright red. With the others, I might have managed to laugh it off, but this woman was like a scary headmistress. She looked disapproving.

“Well, I don't think the most successful artisan business in Paris runs particularly well on people being asleep,” she said icily. “I'm not sure this is going to work out.”

I bit my lip. She couldn't mean to fire me, could she? Not when I'd just started. “I'm really sorry,” I said. “It won't happen again.”

Thierry turned around with a huge grin as I scampered in under Alice's gimlet gaze.

“We thought you had escaped! And taken all my secrets to Patrick Roger, huh? He would love to get his eyes on my workshop.”

I shook my head vigorously, tears stinging behind the lids.

Thierry turned to Alice. “I took her to Le Brulot,” he said, looking mock-sad, like a little boy. “So you see, it is all my fault.”

“Who paid?” asked Alice immediately and neither of us answered—I'd never even seen the bill.

“She is a new girl in Paris,” said Thierry. “She should understand lunch, yes?”

Alice still looked mutinous. His voice softened. “You were a new girl in Paris once,
non
?”

“I don't eat lunch,” said Alice. But the aggression had gone out of her and she tutted and shook her head at Thierry, not me, who shot me a glance of secret triumph. I couldn't help but smile.

- - -

The afternoon showed the other side of Thierry, away from his quick perfectionist bent in the workshop at the back. As I tidied, fetched, and scrubbed, I watched him with the customers, flirting, cajoling, letting them taste a little bit, giving tiny sips of the hot chocolate to children. He was as much a master out here as he was through the back of the shop, and when the enormous bills arrived, he would stare them out manfully so they handed over their credit cards without a murmur. It was a class act, I decided. He believed in his product so thoroughly he couldn't help but transmit his enthusiasm, and the queues outside onto the cobbles were there to see him as much as anything.

At seven promptly, the shutters were pulled down and I looked around. The shop was almost entirely empty, like a baker's at the end of the day. Anything not sold was immediately thrown out, and I cleaned like a demon. Eventually Thierry came into the back of the shop, smiling to see me polishing the brass.

“
Ça va
?” he said. “All right?”

I nodded frantically, desperate to make it up to him. He glanced behind him. For the first time, I didn't see Alice there.