B004MMEIOG EBOK (20 page)

Credits

Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover photographs: top © by Alan Becker/Getty Images;
bottom © by Panoramic Images/Getty Images

First Catch Your Pansy

I’ve taken to cooking and listening to Wagner, both of which frighten me to death.

-Noël Coward, diary entry, Sunday, February 19, 1956

It all began with the pansy in my soup.

Rick Gekoski was in town, so we went out to dinner. Rick deals in rare books, but only the rarest. He’s sold first editions of
Lolita
to rock stars, bought J. R. R. Tolkien’s bathrobe, and so charmed Graham Greene that the great writer let him buy the library in his Antibes apartment. In between, he’s written a few books and chaired the panel presenting the Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award.

After the Greene deal, the two shared an aperitif in the café below.

“Y’know,” said Greene, “If I hadn’t been a writer, I’d have liked to do what you do—be a bookseller.”

For a man who could excite the envy of a literary giant, no ordinary meal would suffice.

“Have you eaten at the Grand Palais?” I asked.

“You mean that block-long example of Belle époque bad taste just off the Champs-élysées? I’ve attended art fairs and book fairs there. It also hosts automobile shows, horse shows, and I believe once accommodated a trade show for manufacturers of farm machinery. But eaten there? Never.”

“A new experience, then.”

In 1993 the Grand Palais shut down for renovations. Fragments of the 8,500-ton glass-and-steel roof had shown a tendency to fall on unsuspecting heads. To keep the building at least
partly alive, the terrace along one side became the Minipalais restaurant, with triple-Michelin-star chef Eric Frechon in charge. I’d enjoyed some pleasant meals there, as much for the setting as the food. I hoped Rick might be impressed.

The following evening, we mounted the wide steps at the corner of avenue Winston Churchill.

The Grand Palais is the kind of building that takes the eye. More vast than an aircraft hangar, it soared above our heads. Along one side, the 65-foot-high columns of the terrace dwindled into the dusk. The marble-floored foyer would have done credit to an imperial embassy. Even Rick conceded a respectful “Humph.”

While we waited to be seated, I looked across the avenue at the statue of Britain’s wartime prime minister after whom the avenue was named. Churchill leaned on his stick and glared, as if remembering his problems with Charles de Gaulle when the Free French government in exile fled to London in 1940.

Anyone who knew the eating habits of the two men could have foreseen they would never get on. Churchill was a drinker, de Gaulle an eater, or at least someone who embraced the philosophy of “Devour, or be devoured.” Metaphors about food pepper his writings. Dismissing the idea of a Communist France, he enquired, “How can any one party govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” (In fact, there are more like 350.) Asked about his literary “influences,” de Gaulle dismissed the very idea that any other mind might affect his thinking. “A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested.” But in Churchill, as gifted a writer, orator, and statesman as he, he’d met another lion, and the two men snarled over the future of Europe like two males over the same kill.

The waitress led us into the dining room, quarried from the Palais’s mezzanine, and tried to seat us at one of its tables.

“I asked for a table on the terrace,” I said.

She gave one of the
moues
for which the French mouth is uniquely constructed.

“
Mes excuses, monsieur.
Were you actually
guaranteed
a table on the terrace?”

“Well . . . no . . .”

Her shoulders started to rise in that other French specialty, the shrug that indicates powerlessness in the face of overwhelming contrary circumstances. (Interestingly, there is no single French word for “shrug.” Asked to define it, a French person will just . . . well, shrug.)

“After dinner,” Rick interjected, “I intend to enjoy a cigar.”

Dipping into an inside pocket, he extracted an aluminum tube the length of a torpedo. The family that would have been seated next to us leaned away collectively. They knew the smoke generated by a weed that size could entirely obscure their dessert.

“I will see what I can do,” the waitress said hurriedly.

Two minutes later we were seated on the terrace, under those soaring columns, looking out on the gathering darkness and the Seine flowing in stately complacency beneath the Pont Alexandre III. In 1919 a triumphant General Pershing, on horseback, led American troops on a victory parade along the avenue below us while cheering Parisians crowded the space where we sat, and flung flowers. We were in the presence of history.

“So . . .” Rick pocketed his cigar and reached for the carte. “How’s the food here?”

Twenty minutes later, my first course arrived.

Marooned in the middle of an otherwise empty soup plate was a small mound of something green and granular—peas mashed with mint, I later discovered. It supported two tiny
slices of white asparagus, so thin I could have read
Le Monde
through them, and the small print at that.

“I ordered the cold asparagus soup.”

“This
will be
the asparagus soup, m’sieur,” said the waiter.

He returned with an aluminum CO
₂
bottle, from which he squirted white froth around the peas. A few seconds later, he was back with a jug from which he poured a milky liquid—the first thing to resemble soup.

“
Voilà, m’sieur. Votre Soupe d’asperge Blanche, Mousseline de Petit Pois à la Menthe Fraîche. Bon appétit.
”

Belatedly, I noticed the finishing touch on top of the peas and asparagus.

It was a tiny pansy.

Close to midnight, we strolled across the bridge in the soft Paris night. I thought I could still smell Rick’s cigar, which, when he did fire it up over coffee and calvados, was only one of many being enjoyed on the terrace. Their smoke rose into the shadows at the top of the treelike columns. Statues looked down in approval. For a moment, surrounded by the architecture of a heroic age, we had felt ourselves, if not gods, then at least priests of some hallowed rite, celebrating the joys of food and drink.

If it hadn’t been for that pansy.

“A place like that . . .” Rick said as we walked.

He looked back over his shoulder at the line of columns marching in majesty toward the Champs-élysées.

“Not that the food wasn’t good . . .”

And it had been good. Just a bit . . . well, precious.

The ingredients and dishes were, on paper at least, traditional: pork belly, snails, even a burger. But the pork, instead of arriving rich and fat, sizzling from the barbecue, proved to be a severe oblong, glossy and sharp-edged. Posed on a heap of boiled potatoes lightly crushed with grain mustard, it resembled Noah’s ark aground on Mount Ararat. For
Escargots dansLeurTomate Cerise Gratinés au Beurred’Amande
, a dozen snails were embedded, for no very good reason, in individual cherry tomatoes, and the whole dish covered in a gratin of butter and powdered almonds. Least likely of all, the “burger” was a nugget of duck breast in a tiny bun, topped with foiegras and drizzled with truffle juice. At the sight of it, Ronald McDonald would have fainted dead away .

“I know what you mean,” I said. “With that décor, you expect something . . . imperial.”

A vision rose of a meal appropriate to such architecture. It was straight out of a Hollywood epic such as
Ben-Hur
or
Gladiator
. Dressed in togas, we and the other customers reclined on couches, nibbling bunches of grapes. Lightly dressed concubines danced among us. And in the background, a team of sweating slaves turned a spit on which roasted an entire ox.

But who cooked on that scale anymore? What had happened to the robust country dishes of fifty years ago, before the advent of nouvelle cuisineand food designed not to satisfy hunger but to show off the imagination of the chef? Did it still exist?

Specifically, did anyone still really roast an ox?

Copyright

All photos courtesy of the author, except where noted.

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WALK IN THE WORLD
. Copyright © 2011 by John Baxter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baxter, John
    The most beautiful walk in the world : a pedestrian in Paris /
John Baxter. — 1st ed.
        p. cm.
    ISBN 978-0-06-199854-6 (pbk.)
    1. Paris (France)—Description and travel. 2. Walking—France—Paris. 3. Baxter, John, 1939—Travel—France—Paris. 4. Paris (France)—Social life and customs. I. Title.

DC707.B39 2011
914.404'84—dc22

2010046259

EPub Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 9780062092052

11  12  13  14  15    
OV/RRD
    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

About the Publisher

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

http://www.harpercollins.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Canada

2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada

http://www.harpercollins.ca

New Zealand

HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited

P.O. Box 1

Auckland, New Zealand

http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

77-85 Fulham Palace Road

London, W6 8JB, UK

http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

10 East 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022

http://www.harpercollins.com