Paris in Love: A Memoir Read online

  An interesting development in Florent’s life! During today’s conversation session, he apparently didn’t even mention the cruel-hearted Italian waitress, but talked the entire hour about a woman he has known for a year and a half, just as a friend. She teaches French language and literature in the same middle school as Florent. He always thought she was interesting but, obsessed by his waitress, had never really considered the possibility. Now he has.

  We found a furniture store in the Marais that features curlicues: lampshades with elaborate cutouts; a cabinet with wrought-iron overlay; a sofa whose arms spiral around and around, like a snail’s shell. I fell in love with an asymmetrical red velvet chair whose one arm forms a voluptuous curl, while the other flares into a sharp corner. Even so, I find it hard to imagine the person who would want to live with this furniture: she would have to live a life ruled by le chic.

  CHICKEN SOUP

  My mother’s trajectory was from riches to rags. She always said that she never learned to cook because she grew up in a household with a cook and several maids. Because these facts about my mother came as I was growing up in a dilapidated farmhouse in rural Minnesota, I was fascinated by the idea that she used to live like a princess.

  I badgered her to tell me details; my favorite story was about the time when she hid in the martini cart as it was being wheeled into the living room, tumbled out, and threw up at my grandfather’s feet. The highlight of the story for her was the moment my grandfather genially declared that his only daughter was free to vomit wherever she pleased. That detail never interested me—my siblings and I had taken for granted our right to vomit throughout the house. What I wanted to hear about was the martini cart: its rows of funnel-shaped glasses, the gently clinking bottles, the rustle of a starched apron as a maid tenderly served my grandparents their first cocktail of the evening.

  There was no getting around the fact that the family fortunes had fallen since those gilded days. Rather than marrying a scion of the banking universe, my mother had inexplicably married a farmer’s son; what’s more, her groom was a poet, and poetry is a lot harder to sell than corn. Back when my parents were first married, their house didn’t even have running water.

  As the story goes, my mother—thrown into the deep end and forced to cook or sink—taught herself by working her way right through The Joy of Cooking. I never really believed this. It was indisputable that she had mastered oatmeal, pot roast, and a cake she called Never-Fail Cake (the very label suggests the tail end of many a meal). But she spent most of her time cramming my brothers into white shirts for dinner, teaching us how to gently tap a soft-boiled egg perched in a porcelain eggcup, and instructing us in the mysteries of a table set with family silver, which she insisted on using at every meal. In truth, her uncanny ability to ruin a recipe—to give even a Never-Fail Cake a strange metallic taste, for example—cannot be blamed on Irma S. Rombauer. Mom resented giving it time and energy; inside, she felt cooking was someone else’s job. She wasn’t even terribly interested in the way food tasted.

  I, too, never got over our lost blue-blooded past; eventually that fascination became the hallmark of Eloisa James. If heroines in my romances are not born fantastically rich, they have become so by the final chapter, and—to a woman—they grow up with maids.

  Yet one thing I have learned from living in Paris is that even if I were surrounded by starched aprons, I would never trade the patrician life for the ability to cook. Parisians give kitchen work time. In the last six months, I, too, began giving cooking time and energy; I even read some cookbooks. One week I added cumin to everything from eggs to lamb. Some dishes worked; some didn’t. I added lavender beads to a chocolate cake (not so good), and vodka to beet soup (very good). I did not spend time learning how to cook applewood-smoked rabbit with truffle oil. I gave time to simple things: risotto, a good broth, comforting soup.

  Then we invited over new friends to dinner, including, on one notable night, a banker with an impressively Falstaffian stomach. He is the type of Frenchman who, at least in my imagination, drinks from martini carts and enjoys pigs’ feet with green lentils. I gave him chicken soup.

  He asked for seconds.

  So … for those of you who might want to dazzle the Frenchmen in your future, here’s my chicken soup recipe:

  Lemon Barley Chicken Soup: The first thing you have to do is make chicken broth. Over here in France, I can’t seem to find acceptable packaged chicken broth, so I make it from scratch; it’s really not tricky. Remove the skin from four or five chicken thighs. Put them in a big pot, along with a cut-up onion, a carrot or two, some celery, salt and pepper, and lots of water. Cook this mélange very, very slowly (bubbles just rising) for a few hours (at least three).

  When you’ve got the broth under way, cook the barley: take 1 cup of barley and simmer it slowly in 4 to 5 cups of water. When it’s soft, drain the barley, but reserve any remaining barley water so you can add it to the broth.

  When the broth is ready, skim off the froth. Then remove the chicken thighs and when they’re cool enough, strip the meat off the bones, saving it for the soup. Strain the broth and put it to the side.

  Now that you’ve got chicken broth, it’s time for the soup itself—the rest is even easier.

  Cut up some leeks, if you have them, though an onion works just fine, too. If you’ve got leeks, put some butter in your (now emptied) stockpot over low heat; use olive oil instead if you have onions. While the leeks/onions are softening, finely mince a knob of ginger and 2 or 3 garlic cloves. If you can get some, you can also crush some lemongrass and put it in at this point. I never seem to cook it right (it always stays tough), but it adds great flavor. Dump all that in with the softened leeks/onions. Cook until you can smell it, but take care to avoid browning. Then add the cut-up chicken and the barley, and pour in the broth. Simmer it over low heat for about half an hour. Add salt to taste.

  To get a great lemon kick, squeeze 2 lemons and beat the juice well with 2 egg yolks. With the pot removed from the heat source, briskly whisk this mixture into the soup, being careful that the eggs don’t separate and curdle. Then return the pot to the heat and stir vigorously for a bit, until the eggs are cooked.

  This soup is excellent for sick people (ginger, hot lemon, and chicken; need I say more?) and a tonic for sad people (total comfort). And it’s even better the next day.

  In Bon Marché: a display of gorgeous designer shoes in jewel tones. Above the shoes hang tiny, extremely fluffy tutus, rather as if snowy white dandelion puffs were floating from the sky.

  In France, the state provides free child care when schools are closed for holidays. So yesterday Alessandro brought Anna to our local centre de loisir—the center for leisure, or day camp. She clung to his hand, and said afterward that she could feel herself turning white from fear. But she came home joyful, having made three new friends. “When I had to speak French, I did,” she told me. “It just burst out of my mouth!”

  I was early to pick up Anna at day camp, and so I read all the notices and one plaque mounted outside “in memory of the students of this school deported from 1942 to 1944 because they were Jewish.” Apparently more than three hundred children from the 9th arrondissement were sent to the camps; the sign promised Ne les oublions jamais. They will never be forgotten. By the time Anna pranced out, I was tearful, though she didn’t notice. The air was warm and smelled like spring, so we sat down at a sidewalk café for a glass of wine (me) and Orangina (her). Anna put a little clay polar bear, made that day, on the table. “His arms and legs fell off,” she said, carefully arranging the little blobs next to the body, as in a sacramental funeral rite. “His nose, too,” she added, rather dismally.

  The berries have fallen from the homeless man’s bushes; perhaps this means spring is coming? Today he had his flap slightly unzipped, and we exchanged polite Bonjours. I gave him a coin directly, rather than put it in his bowl, which seemed daringly intimate. “Ça va?” I asked. “Everything okay?” “Oui,” he said. “
Ça va bien.” All is well.

  I’m working on an academic article about a 1607 play obsessed with silk taffeta, so I am reading cheap pamphlets from the era, trying to track down fashion trends. I came across this in a little book of English “witticisms”: “The owl and the swallow bring in winter and summer, but the nightingale and the cuckoo talk only of the merry time.” We should all be more nightingale-like, perhaps; I can do without the cuckoo.

  Anna came home from day camp yesterday with her eyes large and her hands on her hips. “Mama! You shouldn’t be sending me to such a place—the teachers are violent!” Upon further inquiry, it did seem that the teachers were lively—she reported that one had “thrown” a chair. Still, from long experience with Anna’s dramatic renditions, I suspected that the teacher’s chair toppled. “What did the other children think?” I asked. “They didn’t seem to notice,” Anna reported. Her life is all the more interesting for the things she sees, which no one else even notices.

  Paris restaurant alert! A new friend took us to a Lebanese restaurant with vinegary, delicious salad, smoky lamb, and glorious, not too sweet, desserts: gelatin squares colored hot pink and rolled in delicate coconut flakes, baklava that didn’t leave fingers sticky with honey. It’s called Assanabel, and as a bonus, the stores around it sell Chanel, Gaultier, and Sonia Rykiel.

  My great-uncle Claude had a servant named Eugénie who brought him hot water for shaving while he lazed in bed. He also describes her standing around holding a boutonniere while he adjusted his tie. I try to imagine a maid doing the same for Alessandro, and fail. He would hate the intrusion. I could probably tolerate it, myself.

  We have young guests coming in a few days, so Anna and I went to a wonderful Japanese grocery store called Kioko to buy her favorite drink, beloved of all children: pale blue soda with a marble in the cap. To open it, you shove the marble into the neck of the bottle, where it makes a huge fizz and by a miracle of engineering gets stuck, unable to go up or down, no matter how much a child shakes the bottle. Which she invariably does.

  Alessandro and I just took an interesting walk up toward Montmartre, the red-light district, home to the Moulin Rouge, the cabaret where dancers with impassive faces stand in a line to kick high over the heads of tourists. Passing a sixty-year-old couple arm in arm, I couldn’t help but think about how much more tiresome I find it to dress up than I did in my twenties. But how much harder would it be if you were a sixty-year-old transvestite? Carefully powdering a bony nose … foundation after shaving … the pure ennui of the whole project.

  Last night we went to the oldest oyster restaurant in Paris: Brasserie Wepler, established in 1892. It was packed with customers in family groups and on dates; an exquisite young lady who looked as if she’d stepped from a Pre-Raphaelite painting arrived with her poet-look-alike date. They were seated next to an elderly gentleman who dined alone, after shaking hands with all the waiters. Eating those oysters was like diving under the waves, tasting the ocean’s wild coolness, its salt, the faintly alien sense of deep water.… The food that followed was, alas, decidedly poor. But perhaps, just for those oysters, it was worth the trip.

  My college roommate Marion has arrived for a visit with her husband, Lou, and their children. At lunch in a snug little bistro, her two kids and Anna practiced their Harry Potter Quidditch signals. We paid no attention to them until a sudden swell of noise demanded it, and we looked up to see that a cops-and-robbers game had taken over. Appalled, Marion yelped, “No gun play—not in a French restaurant!” As if little French boys didn’t swagger about using their baguettes as pretend weapons.

  Anna’s grades in French have been miserably low (around 2 out of 10, on an average test). But that week in French camp made all the difference. She came out of school dancing with joy. Her teacher apparently took a look at her test and shrieked, “Oh, my goodness! What happened to you!” Anna got a 9 out of 10, better than anyone in her group. She sang all the way home, and we had steak and ice cream to celebrate.

  On rue du Faubourg-Montmartre I suddenly became transfixed in front of a vintage clothing store with the charming name of Asphodèle, which is French for “daffodil.” Hanging in the window was a pearly buttercream bag embossed all over with the YSL logo. I could see Jackie Kennedy’s gloved hand picking it up, or Catherine Deneuve placing it next to her chair while lunching at the Hôtel de Crillon.

  Luca returned from his skiing trip with a big grin. The only glitch was when he crashed his snowboard into a skier, after which he simultaneously apologized in French (to the skier), defended himself in English (to a critical bystander), and grumbled in Italian to his waiting friends. And just to boost his coolness … he hung out with sophomores.

  Last night Alessandro and I sent our visiting friends out for a romantic dinner alone while we had takeout with all the kids and put them to bed. A bit later six-year-old Sadie woke up, sobbing for her mother. So we talked about how beautiful her mommy looked in her spiffy black dress, all shiny and excited about being in Paris. I sang lullabies, and held her sweaty, sticky-with-tears face against my shoulder, and thought about the fact that in a blink of an eye, Sadie will be singing to her own children.

  As I walked down boulevard des Invalides, I could see the homeless man’s little bushes dotted with red—and yet I knew his berries had fallen off. I got closer to find that he has hung the bushes with small, bright red Christmas balls. He gestured toward his little trees and laughed: happy to find beauty discarded, or perhaps given to him.

  Marion and Lou took us out to dinner tonight. Marion was adamant that we try a restaurant with at least one Michelin star, so Lou and I surveyed the (many) possibilities and chose Stella Maris, which means “star of the sea.” The chef is Japanese, and yet the cuisine is French; we thought his star was probably very hard-won. Indeed, the meal was wonderful, though we came to the conclusion that the amuse-bouches, of which there were two or three, were better than the entrées. And that no one should spend that sort of money on food.

  Apparently the “distinguished professor” look is in high demand in Paris. In the last week alone, a young man leaning in a doorway winked at Alessandro and beckoned; a lonely lady snatched an opportune moment—when I was transfixed by a store specializing in “high heels, all sizes”—to approach him. “Perhaps they think I’m French,” he said, preening a little. “Perhaps they think you have a wallet,” I said cruelly. His face fell, and I remembered that husbands have tender egos, even if they garner their compliments from unlikely places.

  We rented our apartment in part because of its flowery moldings; we had no idea that among its attractions was the fact that it was precisely two blocks away from the oldest confiserie, or candy shop, in Paris: À la Mère de Famille, founded in 1761. This is a feast for the eyes as much as the palate: delicate crystallized violets, pastel sugar eggs, and darling marzipan apples, sized for a doll’s tea party—or a sweet nibble in the Garden of Eden.

  Yesterday I watched as Marion gave six-year-old Sadie the “runway look” that Sadie had picked out from a large eye-shadow palette. Marion’s finger brushed pale pink, and she stroked it over Sadie’s eyelid. “Now a little smoky blue at the corners,” she murmured, dipping her finger into the pink again. She peered down at the instruction card Sadie had chosen. “A little more blue …” She rubbed a little more pink at the corner of Sadie’s shining eyes. “There, you look gorgeous!” And she did, runway ready, without a touch of color on her eyelids. “You’re so good at this, Mama,” Sadie said—and I could scarcely disagree.

  The homeless man must have a florist admirer! Today he has two new bushes with red berries, like shiny kidney beans.

  A PARISIAN SPRING

  Spring has come to Paris! The sky before my study window is pale blue, with airplanes’ fleecy vapor trails patterning it like lace, and the building across the street is gleaming in the sunshine. The itinerant brass quartet that occasionally plays in our quartier for money is down on the corner tootling “Blue Moon” with great ve
rve but not such great timing.

  Anna came out of school with her mouth tight and miserable. Each day one student gets to ring the dismissal bell, and today was Anna’s turn. So she dashed downstairs, so excited that she didn’t think to ask for permission; she just rang that bell. It wasn’t time yet, so she was yelled at and thrown out of the office, and—worst of all—a boy named Tommaso laughed at her.

  Yesterday I saw a quintessentially French umbrella in a shop window: bright red polka dots with a ruffle. I could just imagine that cunning ruffle dancing down a rainy street. I bought it for Anna, only to be asked (with outrage): “Mama! Do you think I’m Minnie Mouse?” If on a wet day you see a quintessential Minnie walking down rue du Conservatoire, c’est moi.

  Today young men stood outside the Métro stations selling bundles of small narcissus, their stalks tied together very tightly so the heads burst into exuberant posies. Almost every woman handed over a couple of euros, so the street was filled with women holding bright yellow flowers to their noses, looking happy.

  At lunchtime Alessandro and I strolled over to a Hôtel Drouot auction preview featuring vintage haute couture, that is, designer clothing made completely by hand. I tried on a Chanel opera jacket that must have weighed fifteen pounds, thanks to the exquisite, heavy gold embroidery and beading—thousands and thousands of tiny hand stitches and shining bright beads. For just a moment, I felt like Grace Kelly.