Returning to Paris, the city
that made me the man I always wanted to become, I winced. We both winced, Bruno, my French partner, and
I.
Away for two nights, and the contrast between the imperial opulence and
glittering holiday decorations of the European city that had once been
the capital of a vast empire
, before it was shorn off by war
, and our darkened, empty hometown was just too painful.
Arriving
at our chilly apartment, we answered phone messages from friends around
the world, and then we ate some canned soup and went to bed. We ate
soup the next night, too, and then plain
omelets,
wilted salad and crackers, since there was no bread and neither of us
cared. The animal vitality and urgency of being hungry had registered
with both of us as being unseemly in a city, our city, that had just
been so badly harmed.
The
next night, though, I was moved when I noticed the fragile silver crescent of a new moon
as
I looked out the window of my home office, and on the fifth floor
opposite me across the street, the same once-a-week party of card
players — the lady with the cigarette holder, the man with the flowing
foulard with poppy polka dots, and the bosomy twin sisters, I think,
with steel gray chignons
— were at the table covered with green felt.
So I texted Bruno in his car on the way home from work. “Oysters?
Huîtrerie Régis?”
“Bonne idée
. Je te cherche a Sèvres-Babylone dans 45 minutes, et nous y irons ensemble.” (
“Good idea. I’ll pick you up at the S
èvres-Babylone Metro station in 45 minutes and we can go together
.”)
Waiting for the Metro, I got a gust of the burn
ed rubber and singed wool smell
(brake shoes?
) that
is for me a more potent scent of Paris than all of the fragrances in
fancy bottles in the city’s shop windows, and I realized I was hungry.
The tiny no-reservations
, white-painted shop-front oyster bar in the heart of St
.-Germain-des-Prés was nearly full when we arrived, and wry, theatrically grumpy Régis was deftly pr
ying open the lids of the barnacle-encrusted bivalves he
has
shipped in from the Marennes-Oléron in the Poitou-Charentes region on
France’s Atlantic coast and arranging them on individual beds of shaggy
brown seaweed.
The house rule is the only one I’ve found I’d never want to break:
Every
customer has to order at least a dozen oysters, which is more or less
all they serve here. With nothing more than some really good bread and
butter and a flinty bottle of Loire Valley white wine, maybe a Montlouis
or a Menetou-Salon, this simple meal of ancient pleasures was
profoundly French and primally invigorating.
There was also the
reciprocal pleasure of the persiflage, that excellent Gallic emollient
of banter, flirtation and playful teasing,
which often occurs between the staff
members
and clients during any good meal in Paris. Slurping our way through the
iodine-rich, green-etched shellfish, we talked about the weekend, and
because we’re Parisians, this began with the subject of what we would
eat, since the weekends are for cooking.
Our casual wish list of
what we hoped to find at the market included more of the season’s very
last tomatoes if we got up early enough; cep
es from Le Bar à Patates, the superb stall specializing in dozens of different types of potatoes and wild mushrooms in season
; scallops in their shells
; and a fresh ewe’s milk cheese from Sandy McKenna, the Irish farmer who comes into the city from his Norman farm.
Knowing that our favorite market, the long pageant of Gallic gastronomy that runs down the Avenue du Président Wilson in the 16
th Arrondissement on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, had been closed the Saturday
after the attacks, I
had
worried about our favorite vendors, hard-working people for whom losing
a busy Saturday was a major blow. They feed us, and we feed them, in an
exchange of trust and easy conviviality that explains why the markets
of Paris still awe, tempt and delight me after all these years.
I
can’t wait for Saturday morning this week, since the market will be a
celebration of the city itself, unvanquished, animated and always
hungry, and to celebrate, we decided we
would share another dozen oysters.
