I am always glad to be back in Paris for all the usual reasons; but there is one aspect of the City of Light and its citizens that I am especially charmed by. That is the belief by Parisians that they are the world’s most civilized people, who know better than anyone else about nearly everything, including jass and baisebol.
Needless to say, Parisians are particularly sure of their pre-eminence in the world of food. I tell the French waiter that I would like to start with snails—“Escargot, s’il vous plait.” (Admittedly, my interest in snails is mainly due to the butter and garlic they are bathed in.)
The waiter shakes his head firmly. “Pas pour les Americains. Pour les Americains, ‘ambeargaire.”
Yet I have not come to Paris to eat hamburger, which is made much better in places like Times Square and the San Francisco wharf. “S’il vous plait, escargots.”
“Oui, M’sieur,” he says agreeably. Twenty minutes later he returns with a gristly, under-cooked hamburger. I stare at the dead meat, and then at the waiter. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
“Une ‘ambeargaire. C’est parfait.”
I know I am beaten. I decide I can manage if I wash it down with a good deal of wine. “Un pichet de vin blanc,” I demand. I know this is asking for trouble, but I like white wine.
“Mais non, M’sieur. Avec ‘ambeargaire, vin rouge.” There is, I know, no use arguing. I will drink red wine with my under-cooked hamburger.
This insistence that Parisians know best about food extends to the woman in the boulangerie from whom I wrest my morning loaf. “S’il vous plait, Madame, un rustique.”
Again the firm head shake, which Parisians apparently learn at a very early age. “Vous desirez un baguette,” the long loaf which Americans think of as French bread.
“Non, Madame, je veux un rustique.”
“Mais non, M’sieu. Vous preferez un baguette, comme tous les Americains.” She snatches a long loaf from the basket, expertly slices it into pieces and bags the result. “Un euro vingt, s’il vous plait.”
However, dealing with a Parisian about food is a piece of cake—so to speak– compared to handling a concierge, the person, usually a woman, who sits in a little room near the building entrance suspiciously eying people going in and out for un-French behavior. On my arrival I offer a polite “Bonjour,” and climb to my room. Hoping against hope, I try the shower. The water is cold. I turn the other faucet: still cold. I trundle back downstairs. “Madame, there is pas de l’eau chaud.”
“Mais non, M’ieur. We ‘ave beaucoup de l’eau chaud.”
“Peut-etre vous ‘ave beaucoup o f l’eau chaud, but the l’eau which descends dans my chamber is stone cold.”
“Impossible,” she insists. “There are beaucoup de l’eau chaud.”
“ Vous are wrong. Je suis an Americain stupide, but je sais the difference between hot and cold.”
She shakes her head very firmly. “There are beaucoup de l’eau chaud.” The cold showers at least brought back memories of Camp Hiawatha when I was at the golden age of 10, and each dawn was filled with expectation.
One Parisian institution well-known to all visitors are the bouquinistes, the book-sellers on the sidewalks over-looking the Seine, who deal in second-hand books, along with posters, post-cards, and other litter, from their stalls. Killing time, I examine a highly-praised novel by a writer 20 years my junior, in hopes that it will prove tawdry or dull– preferably both. The bouquinist gives me a scornful look. “Peut-etre M’sieur prefer this one.” He hands me a large volume entitled “Six Guns and Broncos.”
I return a cold look. “I think not. Perhaps this Proust. I’ve never read the last volume of Remembrance.”
He shakes his head in decided fashion. “Trop difficile. M’sieu aime cowboys, comme tous les Americains.”
“Not all Americans.” I dip my hand into my pocket for some euros. Yet before my fingers touch the bills he has removed the Proust from my hand and replaced in in the rack. “Pas pour les Americains.”
It is hopeless. I turn away from the stall and head for Deux-Magots to refurbish my ego with a small glass. As most Americans of a literary bent understand, Deux- Magots, along with the neighboring Café des Flores, were in earlier decades hang-outs for scores artists and writers, French and otherwise, among them Pablo Picasso, Simone de Beauvior, Hart Crane, Andre Breton, Ernest Hemingway, Marc Chagall, Jean-Paul Sartre, and dozens of other worthies. I request a glass of something, and in order to keep up the general tone of the place take out a small notebook and scribble a random thought. As I do so, a passing waiter skims his eyes down my page. He has observed far more prominent scribblers than I also sitting with pen poised over paper, and fancies himself a critic. “Ah, M’sieu. Surely not ‘heart of gold.’ Le phrase est tres fatigue, n’est-ce pas?”
I gave him my by now well-practiced cold look. “I suppose you corrected M. Sartre’s prose as well?”
“Ah, but M. Sartre etait un genius.
The clear implication that I am not a genius was not new to me, having been told the same by several publishers. I continued the cold look. “Apportez moi des peanuts ,s’il vous plait.”
“M. Sartre prefer cheeps.”
“Potato chips?” I try to envision the hand that wrote Being and Nothing scrambling though a bowl of potato chips for an unbroken one. The vision fails to materialize. With what dignity remains I say frostily, “Des peanuts, s’il vous plait.”
The waiter shrugs as if to say that there is nothing to be done with these Americains and turns away. I know that the peanuts will not arrive for a half hour, if ever, but at least I have freed myself from the chains of yet one more Parisian tyrant.
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