We'll Always Have Paris (32 page)

This is a pilgrimage of sorts: we have been talking about Stohrer for months, each of us in front of our laptops in cities a long way from Paris.

‘What cake would you like most in the world?’ Madevi asks me idly one day. All our conversations come back to cake eventually.

‘Hmm. Coffee and walnut. Or a good
flan
.’

‘Boring. You always say a bloody
flan
. I want a Stohrer éclair.’

‘What’s Stohrer?’

‘You don’t know Stohrer?’

‘No. Should I?’

‘You’ve never been to Stohrer! God, I dream of Stohrer. Look it up, go on. Mmm, the “
religieuse à l’ancienne
”, it’s like a miniature
pièce montée
. The éclairs are pretty good too, small and bitter. Look.’

She sends me a link to a picture of the
religieuse
on the Stohrer website, which is an old-fashioned thing in curly, fussy script. The
religieuse
is a pyramid of stacked
alternating coffee and chocolate éclairs, topped with a miniature
croquembouche
of caramelized choux buns. It is ridiculous, nonsensical. How would you even cut into it? I want it,
badly.

‘That’s . . . I’m speechless. That’s a real thing?’

‘I can’t believe you’ve never been. Can you find a picture of the
macaron pistache framboise
? Oh god, I want one now. Juicy fat raspberries. We’ll go
together.’

So we do.

The Rue Montorgueil, in the 2nd arrondissement near Les Halles, is a verging-on-the-Disney perfect Paris street I don’t remember ever walking down: cobbled, pedestrian, lined with counters
of perfectly stacked fruit and vegetables, rotating roast chickens and glossy fresh fish, elderly ladies overdressed for the weather in camel hair coats and mufflers pulling wheeled trolleys, and
dark cafés. At one end, the Escargot Montorgueil restaurant announces its mission with an outsized gilt snail balanced on the wrought-iron door frame, antennae glinting in the sun and a busy
herd of smaller snails crawling along beneath it. At number 51, under a yellow awning, is
La Maison Stohrer
,
Pâtissier, maison fondé en 1730
, the oldest patisserie in
France. It is tiny, with a blown-glass chandelier, pastoral murals and mirrored walls crazy-paved with age. We don’t buy a
baba au rhum
, even though that is what you are supposed to
get because Nicolas Stohrer invented it, or a
puits d’amour
, the eighteenth-century deep-filled custard tart that is the house speciality. Instead, we both get a
macaron pistache
framboise
and take them to the café next door. We eat in reverent silence, pistachio cream, crisp shell and fat raspberries. How could I have never discovered this place? I am starting
to realize how warped my mental vision of Paris is. Like my France, it’s patchy and partial: there’s the tight web of streets in the 17th I know too well, then the rest of the city is
an adolescent’s fantasy, a collage of films and Cartier-Bresson postcards. With Madevi, it starts to take on real shape.

Madevi comes with me too, when my friend Trish throws a New Year’s party.

Trish is another Internet friend – we bond over a picture of Noirmoutier butter with salt crystals – but she is also someone I know of from my French
Elle
reading days. A
cookery writer, a long-time expat Parisian, glamorous and beautiful, she has until now been utterly distant from my life, a gorgeous image on a page. Now, thanks to the magic of the Internet,
we’ve traded confidences and expat horror stories and now she has invited us for New Year. Madevi and I look anxiously at false eyelashes and new lipsticks in Printemps and agonize about what
present we could possibly bring, but we need not have bothered, because Trish makes us instantly at ease and the party is wonderful: generous and funny and uproarious. I had always assumed
adulthood would be full of this kind of event, but until now, it never has been.

From the outside Trish’s Haussmann block on the Left Bank is as chilly and disapproving as ours was, but inside there is champagne and dancing, the unsanctioned throwing of ice cubes from
the balcony, The Bee Gees and haggis. At one point there is even a small fire, when a box of meringues gets too close to a candle. The neighbours come up to complain and are effortlessly
incorporated into the festivities. In the early hours, Trish, Madevi and I sit amidst the candlelit carnage of the evening eating
crème de marrons
straight from the tube and
speculate, laughing, about the year ahead, which just at that moment seems big and bright. (‘Icing sugar will be big this year,’ says Trish dreamily. ‘Stoats,’ says Madevi,
with conviction. ‘This will be the year of the stoat.’)

At dawn, when Madevi and I finally collapse into the tiny beds in Trish’s daughter’s bedroom, you can see the Eiffel Tower from the window, quiet now after its midnight paroxysm of
pyrotechnics. In the morning I wake to find Madevi has already left and after a quick coffee and whispered thanks I walk back across silent Paris in my creased party dress, head still spinning. The
gilt dome of Les Invalides is sparkling in the wintry sun and there are treacherous, glittering patches of frost on the ground. My phone has died so I have to guess my way back across the city
using maps in métro stations and half-remembered routes. Before we head off to our trains, Madevi and I share a box of tiny, beautiful treats from the Japanese pâtissier Sadaharu Aoki,
little green tea, dark chocolate and citrus morsels, and as I sit on my train home, I think to myself that this is how Paris is supposed to be: a beautiful adventure.

For a while after this, it is as if I have passed some kind of initiation ritual and Paris plays nice for me. I don’t exactly feel as if I belong, but I at least have the right stamp in my
visa; my name is on the guest list. I finally let go of my wounded perception of the city only as a chilly, disapproving sepulchre and Paris becomes the City of Light again: joyful. Every time I
get off the train at the Gare du Nord I forget my money worries, my domestic and emotional inadequacies and my fears for the children for a few hours of pure escapism. Leaving the station is the
start of a little escapade and even the dirtiest métro carriages seem redolent, not just with urine but with possibility, every warm body an invitation. I hold eye contact a little too long,
stand a little too close; I wear my nicest clothes, my highest heels and my brightest lipsticks. On one occasion I walk down the Rue de Sèvres and it feels as if every eye is upon me: I
think for a moment I have tapped into some hitherto unimagined reserve of sexual magnetism but then I realize my skirt is tucked into my knickers. Nevertheless, Paris is a holiday from myself at a
time when I need it urgently; when it’s hard to see myself as good or lovable, or even just OK.

I go to dinner at Trish’s often. These dinners are a source of wonder tome: if you had asked my teenage self to describe the perfect Parisian party, they are exactly what I would have
conjured up: sharp wit, beauty, humour and deliciousness. The food, unsurprisingly, is memorable: we have new season asparagus, strawberry soup with lemongrass and mint, chicory Caesar salad,
smoked butter, twenty types of goats cheese and elaborate Pierre Hermé desserts. But the company is just as good. Trish has a magical ability to take odd mixes of people and just make them
work
, somehow. I meet all sorts of people: photographers and theatre directors, loose cannon expats, fast food empire heirs and proper French establishment types. There is often an element
of uncertainty: a wildcard guest Trish doesn’t know and has invited on impulse, or someone who might or might not turn up. Every evening is an adventure and before the night kicks off, Trish
and I sit down and talk about who is coming and what might happen. One evening we babysit a handsome pâtissier’s sausage dog while he goes clubbing and another night, a photographer
friend of Trish’s sweeps me off in a taxi to meet a transsexual barmaid he needs to talk to at Les Bains Douches, the famous Marais nightclub. There are intrigues and disagreements,
flirtations, gossip and laughter, so much laughter.

One evening I arrive to find a defiant sign on the wall in the entrance hall of the building – ‘Tonight we are having a dinner party (5th floor left) and we will make a NOISE. We may
even LAUGH and WALK AROUND’ – and this fuck you to Parisian
froideur
delights me so much I laugh out loud: Trish has endured plenty of Parisian neighbour hostility but
she’s gloriously, exuberantly unbowed.

In high summer, I come back to Paris with Benjamin and his new boyfriend, Ian. The two of them are headily, demonstratively in love and while it could be strange or lonely, here in the hot,
sexy, narrow streets of the Marais (we travel with another single friend who can’t cope with the suffocating romance of it all and goes AWOL for the weekend, causing great confusion), it
isn’t: it feels festive and charged with possibility. It’s so hot, the backs of my knees are slicked with sweat when I sit down and I stick to the basketwork of café terrace
chairs where we drink too much cheap rosé. As Ian dozes back at the hotel, Benjamin and I walk slowly, languorously round the shops, cleaving to the odd patches of shade and chatting about
love and cardigans. In the evening, a man I met at one of Trish’s parties comes to take me out on his scooter and we weave through the Saturday night crowds who have spilled out of bars and
into the streets, then zoom along the Seine, faster and faster, the warm air on my face, the city lights reflected on the water, the sky deep blue. It’s magical and, just for a few minutes, I
feel like one of my teen cinema idols.

Back in Paris for another party in the autumn, I bring the dog. The train is delayed and circuitous and we end up chugging in on a tiny suburban shuttle, but he’s perfectly behaved,
sitting sphinx-like under my seat, and when we finally arrive in the Gare du Nord he bounces out with me into the early evening, where a soft yellow sun is warming the sandstone. It’s
unseasonably warm for the time of year and I am wearing a silk dress and bare legs again, enjoying the stolen autumn warmth of the sun on my back. Oscar trots beside me as I head west along the Rue
de Maubeuge, enjoying the simple pleasure of knowing where I am going, past corner shops and opticians and small gravelled squares where the leaves on the horse chestnut trees are just on the turn
and onto the Rue des Martyrs. Rue des Martyrs is one of those cartoonishly perfect Paris streets, like the opening sequence of a romantic comedy: the rakish dark-eyed chap with the beautifully
knotted scarf salutes the wizened Algerian greengrocer perfectly piling his clementines, Cartier-Bresson schoolchildren gawp in exaggerated wonder at huge meringues or
baguettes à
l’ancienne
perfectly dusted with flour in the baker’s. There is a shop that sells nothing but beautifully coloured choux buns, plump and pretty. The dog and I sashay through the
middle of it all, like Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in
An American in Paris
, all lightness and romance, and people
smile
. I have never seen anything like it. Is this all it would
take to fit in here? A whippet and a nice dress? If only I had given birth to puppies instead of children, perhaps everything would have been different, I think, a little sourly.

The next morning I head home and stop off at a café on the Rue du Bac, sitting outside with a cup of coffee, Oscar at my feet. It occurs to me suddenly that this is it: this is my teenage
dream, give or take a few details. Here I am, alone in Paris with a dog, sitting outside a café and drinking coffee, writing for a living. I acknowledge the moment, but it doesn’t feel
quite how I expected it to.

That fantasy of myself as solitary, self-contained and independent, stalking through the streets of Paris, is so powerful it has endured undimmed since my teenage years, but it doesn’t
hold up to real scrutiny. Even Simone de Beauvoir, whom I idolize for her resolve and her rigour and her willingness to do brave things alone, was avidly hungry for connection (by her own account,
life only starts to make sense with Sartre). All those actresses that fuelled my Paris visions aren’t truly solitary either: that would make for a terribly dull film. They are all waiting for
someone, thinking of someone, trying to forget someone. I have wanted the confidence to be alone, but it just shows up what is missing and I have learned by now that the wrong warm body is no
comfort at all, not really.

With all the time I spend in trains and on platforms, my feeling of dislocation intensifies. There’s often a moment when I get off the train and scan the crowds at arrivals and feel a tiny
pang that no one is waiting for me. ‘
Je voudrais que quelqu’un m’attende quelque part
’ (‘I wish someone were waiting for me somewhere’) keeps running
through my head – it’s the title of a book I see over and over again in station newsagents and bookshops. I buy it on one trip: it’s a book of short stories by Anna Gavalda, a
slight, wistful mix of longing, dreams and disappointments. The story the phrase comes from doesn’t really resonate when I finally read it (it’s a melancholy account of a young man
permanently upstaged by his older brother, though he gets the girl in the end) but that phrase stays with me. It’s a ridiculous feeling (the story says that too: ‘
c’est
con
’) because no one has
ever
waited for me like that, not since my mum met me off my flight back from Casablanca, but it represents something, some kind of absence. If no one
is waiting for me, does it really matter where I go, or what I do?

After my year of making up with Paris, I don’t go as often. I can’t keep trying to run away from myself, much as I might like the idea, and I certainly don’t
want to run away from my two lovely boys, waiting back in Brussels. The city’s sparkle hasn’t faded, but I feel as if I have to let go and accept that it’s not mine; I am just an
occasional visitor. My Paris experiences are the tiniest strand – a Wikipedia stub (
une ébauche
, a sketch, the French version calls it, which I like) – in my life.
‘
Méfiez-vous de Paris
’ sang Juliette Greco and I
am
wary now, it’s so beguiling, but it’s not for me, or at least it’s not for now.