The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (10 page)

In the old days, merchants on the street tended to live in modest apartments above their shops. The Chataigners are among the few who still do. Annick became a mother at eighteen. Their grandchildren are already in their twenties. Without day-to-day family responsibilities, they play as hard as they work. Yves has a weekly tennis game. Annick goes to the Club Med gym down the street four times a week. Every winter they take long vacations to warm, exotic places like the Dominican Republic and Mauritius.

They keep the business that bears their name, at No. 3 rue des Martyrs, simple. They do not use a cash register or even a calculator. They add up purchases by hand on tiny slips of paper.

Yves is not happy about the tourists who visit his shop. He talked of his frustrations with foreigners who don’t know the rules.

“They come in here and they don’t say
bonjour,
” he said. “The Italians are the worst. They touch the cheese with their fingers! One Italian guy who came in insisted, because he said that in
Italy you have the right to touch the cheese. We need to educate them in our ways.”

I said, “Do you know that in the United States you don’t usually say hello when you enter a shop? It might be considered an interruption of workers doing their job.”

“Ah, bon?”
Yves asked.
Oh, really?
He couldn’t believe it.

I told him I wanted to learn about French cheese.

“If you want to get serious, you have to go to school,” he said. “I spent three years in a cheese school. You can’t just spend an hour or two.”

“Well, I have to start somewhere.”

I made an appointment for a private cheese lesson the following week. When I arrived, accompanied by a young researcher, Marie Missioux, Yves was ready. He said he had been brushing up on cheese factoids from a guide he had found in a closet.

“How many kilos of milk do you need to make a kilo of Parmesan?” he asked.

“Three?” guessed Marie.

“More!” said Yves.

“Ten?” I asked.

“More!”

“Fifteen?”

“Right, just like a Comté!”

He said that
l’affinage
—the ripening process—requires three constants: humidity, a temperature of eight degrees Celsius (about forty-six degrees Fahrenheit), and good ventilation. He explained the four categories of cow-milk cheeses:
pâte
dure,
or hard cheeses, like Comté, Beaufort, and Gruyère;
pâte fleurie,
or soft-ripened cheeses, like Camembert and Brie;
pâte persillée
, or blue-veined cheeses shot with penicillin spores,
like bleu d’Auvergne, and
pâte lavée,
or washed-rind cheeses, like Maroilles and Munster.

Roquefort, the “cheese of kings and popes,” is made with sheep’s milk, he said.

“I once spent a day with Jacques Carles, who makes the best Roquefort in France,” I said.

“Not a night, too?” Yves asked. “There’s a song that goes like that,” and he started singing, “A day, a night . . .”

He said we’d begin with Camembert. He took a round from the shelf and removed its white plastic wrapping. “First, there is how the Camembert looks,” he said. “The cheese must have aged. When there is white in the middle like this one, it is too young.

“Then there is the feel; you have to make contact with the Camembert. I first squeeze the sides of its outer crust. Then there is the way your thumb feels when you press on the center. There can be no resistance. Resistance means the Camembert has no heart. For the Camembert to have a heart, your thumb has to feel softness. There must be a
partage
.”

That word pops up so often in just about any conversation about food:
partage.
It signals that you’re not alone, especially when you’re communing with Camembert as if it were a living thing. Yves pulled a bright white Camembert from another shelf. When he pushed on it, the cheese pushed back. He said it needed fifteen more days. Now I got it—making physical contact with a Camembert is essential, but only he could do it.

“After this lesson, Elaine will not need us to choose her cheese,” said Annick.

“So how long will it take to become a Camembert expert?” I asked.

“To be really at ease with a Camembert—maybe a year and a
half, and even then, our clients might not want to be served by a newcomer,” said Yves. Apparently, the hierarchy of cheese was once so rigid that only the highest-ranking cheesemonger could serve the finest cheeses, followed by the lower-level cheesemonger, who served bargain cheeses outdoors, followed by the egg lady, who was allowed to sell eggs but not cheese.

“Even now, some customers will only be served by Yves, not me!” said Annick.

Yves wanted to end our lesson and do his bookkeeping. But I realized I knew little about his background. I began to probe.

“We lived in the country,” he said. “My parents had a great deal of misfortune. My father was a carpenter. He started his own business, and borrowed money. In the end he couldn’t pay his debts, and everything was taken away. He was a beaten man. He went to work in a granite quarry. But working in a quarry, it is an alien place. You drink to survive, but it makes things worse.

“Back then, we used to say, ‘When there is no money in the wallet, there is the devil in the house.’ We lived in a hole, in the middle of nowhere. Everyone was miserable.”

Yves was the eighth of nine children; his father died of tuberculosis soon after the last child was born. Yves said he became sick with tuberculosis as well and spent two years in a sanatorium.

I wanted to know more, but Yves fell silent.

Annick stepped in. “You’re going to make him cry, Elaine.” She gave her husband an order: “Go, talk about cheese. Go!” she said.

Yves turned away and stared down at a shelf of Camembert rounds. He couldn’t stop his tears. The French aren’t huggers, but I couldn’t help myself. I hugged him.

“Americans do this,” I said. “It’s a gesture of friendship.”

Yves managed to go on. He described a life of hardship, of having to leave home at thirteen to work as a field hand. He had no more formal schooling and slept in an unheated barn with the cows. But he learned accounting during his military service, then apprenticed in a cheese shop, and eventually got a job as assistant to a cheesemonger on the rue des Martyrs.

When it came time for the boss to retire, he lent Yves money to buy the shop.

“I became like his son,” he said. “Everyone knew it.”

Yves did not want to end with gushy sentiment. So he selected a smelly yellowish-brown cheese, a six-month-old Corsican
brebis
. “Attack it!” he said. “It’s the strongest cheese in the shop. After a taste of this, a glass of red goes down very well. I love to eat it—but only once a year!”

It smelled like socks that had been worn for three days, then left in a damp clothes hamper to ripen even more.

“Ha! You’ll remember this cheese lesson,” said Yves.

He was right. The taste of
brebis
lingered for days.

TO CATCH A MOUSE

. . .

“You’re right, Dad. Who am I kidding?
We are what we are, and we’re rats.”

—R
EMY, THE
F
RENCH RODENT,
IN THE ANIMATED FILM
Ratatouille

“He’s not a regular rat, or even a super rat.
He’s just a scared little mouse.”

—H
OLLY
G
OLIGHTLY IN
Breakfast at Tiffany’s

T
HE MERCHANTS ON THE RUE DES MARTYRS OFFER
advice about everything. I figured I could get to know them better by discussing my mouse problem.

One August, we returned from vacation to find that a slim, four-inch-long gray mouse had settled comfortably into our apartment. It made brief appearances in the evening. First it ran into the hallway from the storage closet. Then it jumped from a narrow space under the oven onto the kitchen floor. We last saw it scurrying diagonally across the dining room.

Andy and I had dealt with a rodent before, when we lived in
New York City. Late one Saturday night, we heard something digging through the garbage in the main room of our Soho loft. When Andy investigated, he came eyeball-to-eyeball with a rat—a very large, fat rat, at least a foot long. They froze, stared each other down, then retreated.

I called a twenty-four-hour extermination service but got a recording. I called around to hotels, but the cheapest room I could find was $200. That seemed like a raw deal since it was already one a.m.

My husband remains calm in a storm, and his inclination was to wait it out until morning. I, however, went into action mode. I called the local fire department. The firefighter on duty thought the story was funny. So I called the police. Andy, sensing that I was out of control, didn’t waste time trying to stop me.

“My husband is a homicide prosecutor in Brooklyn, so I like the police,” I said.

Two young police officers arrived, guns drawn. They trapped the rat in a big garbage pail (or so we thought), threw away the garbage, and said good night. Andy and I went back to bed. Two hours later, the rat was back. Days would pass before it left us for good.

Until the mouse came calling, I had had only one close sighting of a Paris rodent. And it wasn’t even real. One evening in the late 1970s, I was sitting at an outdoor table at the Deux Magots café on the place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. There, on one of the most tourist-trodden corners of Paris, I saw the legendary Rat Man in action. He had a reputation for accosting strangers on the street and flashing a fake rodent. He flashed; the strangers cringed (and sometimes threw money at him to make him go away); the café sitters enjoyed the show. It was said that at one point he used live rats.

This time was different. This was not street theater. Our new rodent was real. I stopped by Pyro Folie’s, the fireworks and special effects store on the ground floor below our apartment, to ask the manager if the shop had mice. “No, they don’t like the taste of cellulose or explosives,” said Marie-Ange Roidor, a woman of about fifty with a smoky Jeanne Moreau voice. “I never see them. But I hear them.”

Hear them?

“Sometimes I hear scratching, gnawing, running,” she said. She imitated a rodent, biting the air with her teeth and scratching it with curled fingers.

“When was the last time you heard one?” I asked.

“Oh, about three weeks ago.”

It turns out that for several years, Paris has been besieged by mice. CS3D, France’s official disinfection, de-insectization, de-ratization trade association, estimates that the city is home to six million mice, many of which live well in the city’s best restaurants, the Élysée Palace, and the prime minister’s residence. At one point, a video allegedly showing mice scurrying around the kitchen and the staff canteen of the Galeries Lafayette department store surfaced on YouTube.

The problem in my neighborhood was especially serious around this time because of ongoing construction work. There were so many mice that late one night one of my neighbors was peering through the lit-up window of a bakery on the rue des Martyrs and spotted two of them frolicking in the flour. The Pyro Folie’s manager suggested that I borrow our building’s unofficial cat, which belongs to Ilda, the concierge.

So I asked Ilda about her cat, silky black with the lean and hungry look of a killer. “Pompom? My fourteen-year-old Pom
pom? No use,” she said. “He thinks he’s a cat of luxury. When he sees a mouse, he just doesn’t care.”

I called Jean-Pierre, our upstairs neighbor, who has lived in the building forever. I described our mouse. He was impressed by its size. “Hmm, that’s a beautiful mouse,” he said. “Either a beautiful mouse or a petite rat!”

Calling a mouse beautiful is an example of what the French call
second degré
.
Second degré
requires irony, and at its best makes you seem intelligent, clever, and funny. Jean-Pierre thought he was being funny.

I asked him about Hygiène 75, the extermination shop in the neighborhood. A sign on the window says it specializes in “de-insectization,” “de-ratization,” and “de-pigeoning.” One window display includes a small gray mouse struggling helplessly in a trap while two other mice flee. A variety of poisons, including rat pasta, complete the decor. Estimates are free.