Chain-smoking in Paris
With a Baudelaire quote for respectability
Nav and I once did a winery tour in Napa Valley (acutely mediocre imitation Italian wine, by the by). One of the women on our tour had brought her own plastic straw for the samples; each to their own, of course, but this was at least remarkable to the guy showing us around. “Where you from?” he asks pointedly. The woman’s husband, in what at first struck me as an awesome coup de bantère, responds “Paris”. I laughed thinking: they don’t drink wine through straws in the French capital. But, no, he meant it sincerely: Paris, Texas. And of course everyone else knew this. All of this to say: things work differently in different places.
I only smoke cigarettes on the European continent. Obviously it’s gross anywhere else, but it’s cool west of the Danube, east of Finisterre: things work differently in different places. (I should add that my own view is that cigar smoking is cool wherever, but especially in New York or Tokyo).
One of the two upsides to living in London (the other being going to the BBC Proms in the summer) is the ease with which one can go to Paris: you can even do an aller-retour within the day. Since my old mucker Hervé lives in Luxembourg but had clients to see in Paris last week, we decided to do a three-meal special, bookended in my case by the 06.01 from St. Pancras and the 21.16 from Gare du Nord. You will note the time I was present in my shattered person at the venerable North London train station.
In our days living in Paris as students, he and I were the best customers of the CROUS restaurants (in essence, pan-France canteens) where we were apt to eat at least two meals a day. It was only fitting, then, that we should have had both breakfast and dinner in the same place for old time’s sake; this time it was the Terminus Nord, an old-school brasserie by the station, since they don’t let us into uni canteens anymore.
Breakfast was coffee and croissant: no cigarettes yet. There then followed a quixotic meander down streets we had never seen before but were confident we knew where they led; we had thought we might go and see the St. Chappelle by the Palais de Justice but, shouldering our way through the patrols of heavily armed CRS, we saw we had been beaten by hordes of pious schoolchildren even more desperate than us to see the Crown of Thorns; thus we ended up in the chess shops of the Left Bank discussing Dungeons and Dragons and which notebooks we like for work. All of this high-jinx meant that, in time-honoured tradition, we were late for lunch.
We needed the breathless walk across to the place de la Madeleine since, as you can see, the meal we had arranged was seriously calorific: if filet de boeuf is not French enough for you, add a trowelsworth of foie gras. If even that does not sate your epicurean sensibilities, a heap of truffle ought to do the trick. Thankfully France has cardiologists on every street corner.
All of that schlepping and chomping but me in need of some invigoration. Baudelaire said
Always be drunk. Therein lies everything: it’s all that matters.
So as not to feel the dread burden of Time breaking your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, never stop drinking.
But what? Whether wine, poetry or virtue, the choice is yours. Whatever: get drunk.
There might be some deeper-than-literal meaning to all this but, at a surface level, I am no one to argue; so, thus injuncted but alone, I set off in search of an adequate terrace or two to chain-smoke (Gauloises because it feels idiomatic) and drink the odd pression, seeing if I could still get away with my francophone routine: of course the smoking is a central part of that particular ruse.
Here are some pictures of that afternoon:
Suitably invigorated I made it to a few second hand book shops, encountered a couple of out-of-it homeless guys shouting at each other on either side of the Boulevard St. Michel and hot-footed it to the Ile St. Louis for sweeties. Regaining Hervé there, he and I legged it a good quarter of the City’s circumference up from Bastille to the Gare de l’Est for his train, but not before meeting our divine friend Mikaël for our last meal at the Terminus Nord – steak for the former vegetarian; choucroute garni for me.
There was a horribly drunk Scot on the train home to London who decided that the Eurostar was the place for football chanting: what was lacking in diction was made up for in volume. Where was a guillotine when it was needed. The French were rightly scornful of the whole affair but, as they might rightly have quipped, things work differently in different places.