Our Dream Apartment
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“It’s now or never,” I said to my friend Patsy. “We’ve sold the house
in Vermont and we have a little extra cash: it’s time to stop
fantasizing about that apartment in Paris and take the plunge.
Are you up for this?” Patsy wasn’t so sure. We did have some cash
from the house in Vermont, but Paris is far from our home in
Provence and a Paris apartment would probably gobble up our minuscule
profit from Vermont before we could say “le living room.”
Besides, we already had one house in France. Taking on a second piece
of French real estate might complicate our lives horrendously.
Patsy’s arguments were entirely reasonable, but for me Paris is not a subject for reason.
OK, I get it,” she said. “We’re talking about a love affair, not a
rational decision. And that Vermont money is burning a hole in
your pocket.”
“Maybe we could find an apartment that we could
rent out to tourists,” I said, making a tepid stab at
rationality. “Maybe we could make money.”
Patsy was
dubious. “I don’t think so. Tourists stay in hotels, not
apartments. And I don’t want to run a hotel.”
But if I
learned one lesson in my former career as a lawyer it is that “no” is
not an answer. “We could just go and look,” I argued. Then I added,
“Think April in Paris. Even if we don’t find an apartment, we’ll have a
wonderful time. And if we look at a bunch of apartments we’ll get to
know the city from the inside out. And don’t forget,” I concluded,
pulling out my trump card, “We could have dinner at Le Grand
Colbert!” (Le Grand Colbert is a smashingly beautiful, recently
restored Belle Epoque brasserie that serves excellent food in a
bustling, highly sophisticated Parisian setting. Patsy and I get
a high just from walking in the front door.)
Le Grand Colbert
did the trick. She began to weaken, and I pressed my advantage.
“We’ll just go to look,” I said. “We need to get a feel for the
market.”
“Well,” she said, “Maybe an exploratory trip.” Then
she frowned darkly. “But we’re not writing any checks! You’ve got
to promise!” And so, with a firm commitment to remain
non-committal, we made our plans to spend a week in Paris in early
April.
Buying real estate in France is very different from
buying real estate in America. Contrary to what many people
think, there are no restrictions against Americans acquiring property
here in France, but the laws relating to taxes and inheritance are not
at all the same in the two countries. Being reasonably sober
and responsible, we made our decision to buy an apartment after
consulting with a French notaire. We asked him a battery of
questions about taxes and inheritance (including the taxes we would
have to pay if we sell the property) and asked him about possible forms
of ownership. Then we checked his answers with a second
notaire.
It goes without saying that any
American who buys property in France needs to make decisions that are
individually designed for the buyer’s specific circumstances and even
then only after a careful consultation with a French notaire. But let
us not discuss about French Real Estate and Tax Law as Applied to
Americans. We’ll talk about what we did and why we did it and why
the first thing we did when we got Paris was purchase a copy of a
publication called “Particulier à Particulier,” which means
“Private Party to Private Party.”
Particulier à
Particulier (P/P) is the principal tool used by Parisians to buy and
sell residential real estate. P/P has a web site that is updated
daily, a weekly print edition that appears on the newsstands every
Thursday, and a huge following among local people. According to
Le Monde Economique more than half of all residential property in Paris
is sold through P/P, and P/P quickly introduced us to Paris
prices.
We discovered that an apartment with two
bedrooms in one of the lively neighborhoods in the center of town could
easily cost $500,000. The price would be almost as high in an
“interesting” (seedy) or “elegant,” (far away, boring, bourgeois)
neighborhood outside of the center. Apartments in the really choice
neighborhoods in the center of town, for example around
St.-Germain-des-Près, could go for multiples of that
figure.
In
the middle of our search we decided to call our Boston friends Joan and
Jean-François. Jean- François is a Belgian who, like me, has
always dreamed of owning a place in Paris; Joan is American and
open-minded. “Maybe we’ll go in with you,” said Jean-François.
“I’ll be in Paris next month; why don’t we look together?” Joan and
Jean-François have been our close friends for years, and the
decision to join forces with them was not difficult. We happily
curtailed our adventures in the apartment trade, and a few weeks later
we began our second round of apartment visits, this time with the help
of Jean-François.
P/P once again provided us with a
shopping list. On our first day we saw a two-bedroom apartment at the
bottom of the 15th arrondisement (almost at the Péréphérique–the ring
road that surrounds Paris, from which one heads off into the
hinterland–miles from the center of town) with a living room that
stared blankly out at a faceless, modern apartment building and a
kitchen that looked down upon rows of dazzling white crosses in a
military cemetery. (Imagine breakfast croissants accompanied by
visions of death?) The apartment had low ceilings, cramped spaces and
ancient fixtures; it would need a complete rehab and would cost
$430,000.
We visited a two-bedroom apartment at the west end
of the Blvd. St.-Germain. By craning our necks we could see the
Seine, but the tiny rooms had low ceilings, the apartment needed
renovation from top to bottom (it had an avocado-green bathtub and a
flesh-pink bidet), the building’s public spaces were dark and
depressing, and the neighborhood was filled with wholesale hardware
stores. The owner wanted $450,000.
“Are the prices
negotiable?” I asked a friend after seeing a few of these
horrors. “These people have got to be smoking dope!”
Our
friend shrugged her shoulders. “You can try to negotiate,” she
said. “But if you watch P/P you’ll see that things don’t
last long. People seem to think they can get their price, and if
the place is nice, they’re probably right.”
Finally we did
visit a serious possibility: a handsome apartment with large
French windows that opened out over a small private park. It was on the
second floor of a clean and respectable building on the Avenue de
Ségur, just across the street from the Ecole Militaire in the
fashionable 7th Arrondissement. The owner was selling it because his
son, for whom he had splendidly redone it, had suddenly taken a job
outside of Paris. It was obvious that it had never been lived in and
was as fresh as a spring day. It had a modern kitchen and bath,
re-finished hardwood floors, commodious closets and a sunny southern
exposure. The price was a reasonable $405,000.
True, the
neighborhood was a little dull. (There is hardly any street life in
that part of Paris.) But the building was clean and well cared for, the
view was pleasant and the place needed zero work, a serious
consideration for people who live too far away to supervise an
elaborate construction project. (We had already done a fair
amount of work on our house in Provence and were hesitant to begin
again. From an American point of view, work here seems to be taken
rather casually, and personal relationships govern almost everything,
including the price of nails and paint.)
right: the Vermont money was burning a hole in my pocket. “Let’s just
do it,” I said. “It’s in move-in condition, the price is right,
the neighborhood is respectable and there’s an excellent Saturday
market right around the corner. This is as good as we’re likely
to find.”
Patsy and Jean-François were not so sure.
“I
had hoped for two bedrooms,” said Jean-François. “This place has
a double living room that might be converted into a second bedroom, but
if we were all here together, who would get the second, smaller
bedroom? I’d just as soon keep looking.”
Patsy was less
specific but equally unenthusiastic. “We haven’t really seen too
many places. I’d like to look some more. It seems expensive
and it’s kind of far away from everything. . . I just don’t know.”
“It’s
a classy neighborhood,” I answered. “UNESCO is right across the
street and we’ll be able to get diplomats for tenants. Think of
that pretty little park!”
were greeted by a stony silence. Patsy and Jean-François were not
unpleasant, but ultimately and unequivocally, they were not
interested. That was the end of the Avenue de Ségur.
The
next possibility was in the 14th Arrondissement, just around the corner
from the church at Alésia. On the fifth (top) floor of a nice
building with an elevator, facing south, it had two full bedrooms, had
recently been renovated, and was on the market for $425,000. The
owner was a likeable young guy with an American wife and already had a
full-price bid. He hated to ask people to bid above the asking
price, but how else could he decide? We shilly-shallied. I liked
the 2 bedrooms and the convenient layout, and I loved the idea of
being close to the Alésia market, which has a terrific cheese shop, a
wonderful butcher and a first-rate fish store, plus flowers and a
bakery and a green grocer with rows of glistening, perky
vegetables. “Plus it’s bright and sunny,” said Patsy
encouragingly.
But I remained hesitant. “Isn’t it a bit far away
from the center of things?” I wondered. “It’s a 20-minute walk from
Montparnasse, and even then you’re only at the edge of the kind of
places we enjoy. Plus $425,000 seems expensive for what it is and
of course we don’t know what we’d actually have to pay to get it,
because he’s already been offered the full price. It could end up
costing $435,000, and maybe even more. And with the dollar going
down every day… maybe we should keep on looking?”
“Maybe we should keep on looking.”
So
we saw some that were perfectly reasonable but that had no more charm
than a Wal-Mart. We saw several mouse-cages; we saw several that
might do under the right circumstances, if only the street were not so
noisy, or the price so outlandish, or if there was an elevator, or .…
final blow to our confidence was an apartment on the rue Echiquier in
the 9th Arondissement. The apartment was a five-minute walk from
the rue Montorgueil, one of Paris’ most famous (and charming) market
streets. The apartment was owned by a young professor who had just
broken up with his girlfriend. It had exposed beams, beautiful
hardwood floors, handsomely proportioned rooms, two bedrooms, tons of
bookcases, many windows, little nooks and crannies, and a
harpsichord. The price was $350,000: a terrific buy for an
apartment that size, that close to the center of town. We
loved the apartment on the rue Echiquier. It was a little off the
beaten path but not too far off the beaten path. It was a little seedy
but not too seedy. It felt cozy and home-like.
It
would have been perfect for Patsy and me. Indeed we liked it so
much that the young professor practically had to shove us out the door
to make way for the next potential buyers. But when we found ourselves
out on the street, the cold realities of our situation began to
dawn on us. The existence of this charming apartment, which was
actually for sale and which we might possibly even be able to afford,
meant that we had to end for once and all our fantasies about having an
apartment in Paris.
If we were serious about this project,
we had to face the concrete reality of a real apartment, with real
rooms, a real address–and a huge expenditure of real cash. For the
first time, we began to talk seriously about what we might be doing
with a Paris apartment. As we contemplated these questions that evening
over a bottle of burgundy and an excellent lapin à la moutarde, our
thoughts began to come into focus.
But for a million reasons, we had no desire whatsoever to live there
full time. And we knew that Joan and Jean-François felt the same
way. Our apartment would therefore be a pied-à-terre for all four
of us. Unfortunately, our apartment would have to work as an
investment as well, because none of could afford to sink our modest
resources into a charming, non-productive Parisian résidence
secondaire.
that residential real estate in Paris was quite reasonably priced in
relation to the international market. We thought, and still
think, that Paris prices will rise dramatically in the next few years.
But a possible long-term capital gain was not enough to justify such a
significant investment. We needed to invest in something that at
least offered the possibility of a more immediate return.
When I
had first tried to persuade Patsy that we might use our apartment for
occasional rentals to tourists, I had pretty much been inventing an
idea out of whole cloth. But during the course of our Parisian
wanderings, we had become increasingly persuaded that many visitors to
Paris in fact do prefer to stay in apartments. Jean-François
showed us ads for Paris apartments on the Internet with heavy bookings,
our Paris friends reported no trouble in keeping their apartments
rented, and various publications and internet sites demonstrated an
apparently lively market in short-term rentals for apartments in or
near the center of the city.
As we thought about it, it became
clear that an apartment has many advantages over a hotel room for a
visiting tourist. Because apartments have kitchens, visitors are
not required to eat three meals a day in restaurants. Visitors can
therefore save a little money and a fair amount of wear and tear on
their palates. Apartments almost by definition have vastly more
living space than even the most generous hotel room. Perhaps most
importantly, a visitor staying in an apartment has the experience of
actually living in Paris. Living in Paris feels very different
from and much better than staying in a hotel.
These thoughts
brought us face to face with the critical question of the day.
Would the apartment on the rue Echiquier be as appealing to short-term
visitors as it was to Patsy and me? The Ninth Arrondissement, in Paris
terms, is beyond the pale. Even though the rue Echiquier is only
a five- or ten-minute walk from the trendy rue Montorgeuil and the rue
Tiquetonne, Parisians still feel that the Ninth is on the dark
side of the moon. Our reading of the tourist trade was that a
central location is even more important to short-term visitors than it
is to long-term residents. In short, we feared that Patsy and I might
love the rue Echiquier, but that other people might not share our views.
The
decisive moment came when we asked a Parisian friend for her opinion.
“I’ve got a friend in the Ninth,” she said. “She has a beautiful
apartment that she’d like to rent out, but she’s had a devil of a
time. Tourists just don’t want to go there!”
Patsy and I
spent a long evening and most of the next day coming to these
conclusions. We even called Jean-François to get his opinion,
which in fact was the same as our own. Finally, therefore, in
spite of the bookcases and the harpsichord and the sympathique
young professor, we made our decision. I told the professor that we
would not be making a bid.
That was the best decision
we have ever made. On the very next day we saw the apartment of our
dreams. And both Patsy and I knew it the instant we walked in the
front door.
in fourth grade. When I came home from school the first day and told my
mother that I had learned to say “La mere prepare le diner dans la
cuisine” (“The mother prepares dinner in the kitchen”), she gasped with
admiration and gave me a big hug. I learned at an early age that
French, unlike geometry and the other dumb subjects I could never
figure out, was something I could do well. French even provided
me with a certain cachet. Both the teachers and the other kids were
impressed by my ability to imitate the strange sounds that left my
fellow fourth graders choked and gurgling.
finished college I was quite fluent. Indeed, my way of escaping
from the miseries of a Midwestern adolescence had been to lock myself
in my room and play Edith Piaf records. I played them again and
again, struggling to understand the words. I knew that if I could only
be there, drinking my aperitif on the terrace of Les Deux-Magots and
talking about existentialism, my life would be transformed.
first arrived in Paris on an exquisite June morning just before my 21st
birthday. I fell instantly in love: first, with the girl who had
been my French pen-pal since 7th grade (a feeling most unequivocally
not reciprocated) and then, more constructively, with the city of
Paris. I spent my days wandering the streets, drunk with
excitement. At one point, sitting on the terrace of an outdoor cafe, I
was so staggered to hear everyone speaking French–a language I had
come to think of as my secret, that I wrote a postcard to an
American friend saying “It is not possible to die of happiness,
because I am at this very moment experiencing happiness that
is perfect, total and absolute.”
should have moved to Paris earlier. I considered it many times
and even made a few desultory efforts, but the complications of
job and family always seemed overwhelming. Instead, I went out
with French girls, had French friends, read French books and generally
pestered the people around me with camembert and francophilia.
When I eventually had kids, I made them learn French and bored them and
their friends with French children’s records.
And always, when
my life was either intensely happy or intensely unhappy, I went to
Paris. In one particularly turbulent year I went four times. Patsy
and I moved to France five years ago. We thought about settling in
Paris, but our Parisian friends were strongly discouraging. “The
weather is foul and the air is polluted and the métro is noisy, if it’s
not on strike. Why live in Paris when you could live in Provence?”
We made our decision in favor of Provence and had no regrets. But
Paris was always gleaming in the background, and on our frequent visits
we invariably had a smashing time.
Our search for an apartment
in Paris had covered the city. Then one day we answered an ad for
an apartment on rue du Grenier St.-Lazare, a one-block-long street
directly behind the Pompidou Center. (Grenier St.-Lazare, which runs
perpendicular to the rue Beaubourg, the busy street alongside the
Pompidou, is well known to Parisians because it is home to a fine,
old-fashioned restaurant called L’Ambassade d’Auvergne.) The owner of
the apartment was honest and straightforward from the very
start. “Are you very tall?” he asked in our first telephone call.
“Not particularly,” I answered. “What’s the difference?”
“The apartment does not have high ceilings. If you were very tall, you would not be comfortable here.”
“No problem,” I answered. “None of us is particularly tall.”
“Do you have children?”
“Yes,” I answered, “But they are grown and don’t live with us. Why do you ask?”
“The
apartment is large, but it’s really a one-bedroom apartment
and would not be suitable for a couple with children. I don’t want
to mislead you and waste your time or mine.”
taken aback by his bluntness, but it’s hard to fault honesty and
candor. “We’d like to see it,” I said. “When would be a good
time?”
The apartment we were visiting was two doors east of
L’Ambassade d’Auvergne, at No. 16. We liked it even before seeing
it, because it has a modern, comfortable elevator–a rarity in Paris,
and a significant asset for an apartment that would regularly be used
by people with suitcases.
advertised in Particulier à Particulier, there was no
broker. The owner himself showed us around, and he explained that
he had inherited the apartment from his recently deceased
mother. He added that the entire building, including this
apartment, had been completely renovated in 1996.
The
apartment looked immaculately clean and well kept. Had we needed
to, we could have moved in without doing a thing. As he had said on the
telephone, the ceilings were not high. But what the apartment
lacked in height it made up for with space. It was a full 750
square feet, windows in every one of its three different rooms: the
living room, the hallway/corridor and the bedroom. It had a
modern kitchen, 1-1/2 baths, new parquet flooring, and exposed beams in
the living room. It felt sunny and bright.
The price was
what the French refer to as correct, that is, a fair price for an
apartment that size, in that condition, at that location. The apartment
had many advantages, but it also had one serious disadvantage. It
had only one bedroom, and our previous searching had been strictly
limited to two-bedroom apartments. That night we called Jean-François,
the friend in Boston who was going to be our partner in this project.
“Here’s the problem,” I said. “The location is incredible, it
needs no work, and the price is OK. But, and this is a big
BUT, it has only one bedroom. The four of us most definitely
could not stay there together. Patsy and I have talked a lot, and our
sense of the market is that a full two bedroom apartment in a location
like this could end up costing us well over 500, 000 euros and even at
that price we would probably have to do some work. In other words,
a second bedroom in the heart of Paris would cost us more than 100,000
euros, or, at the present rate of exchange, almost
$120.000. That’s a lot of money to pay for a second bedroom. My
vote is, let’s forget about the second bedroom. If we all decide
to come to Paris at the same time, one couple can stay in the apartment
and one couple can stay in a hotel down the street that costs $50 a
night. A friend of ours says it’s as clean and quiet as a church
pew.”
Jean-François did not hesitate. “I agree,” he
said. “If you and Patsy think that it’s right, we’ll go along
with your judgment.”
The next day we began our negotiations,
which were not complicated. Like many Paris sellers, the owner
already had received a full-price offer; but like the young man near
Alésia whose apartment we had previously seen and rejected, he hated
the idea of an auction. At his suggestion, we made a bid that was just
slightly above the asking price and by the end of the day he had made
his decision. Without asking or allowing the other couple to bid
higher, he told them that the apartment had been sold. The apartment,
miracle of miracles, was ours.
People in real estate say that
the three most important elements in buying property are location,
location and location. In Paris, that means neighborhood,
neighborhood and neighborhood, and our new apartment was in the Marais,
one of the liveliest and most interesting neighborhoods in the
city. It was, moreover, in the very heart of Tourist Paris: a
10-minute walk from Nôtre Dame and across the street from the Pompidou.
I enjoy Tourist Paris, but I had seen most of it many, many years ago.
The Paris I wanted to experience now was the Paris I perceived as the
real Paris: the little restaurants, the bakeries and cheese shops,
the wine sellers, hardware stores and little bookstores where real
Parisians did their shopping and eating and relaxing. I wanted to see
Paris through the eyes of the person I had waited my entire life to
become: a Parisian.
My first foray was fortuitous. A
friend had recently told us about a hotel at the corner of the rue
St-Martin, half a block from our apartment. Knowing that we would
need a key-drop and a reliable neighborhood connection, I stopped by to
see if it lived up to his recommendation.
Duséjour is a mom-and-pop operation run by Joao and Maria Goncales,
Portuguese immigrants who have been welcoming tourists here for 35
years. They live on the top floor. Maria does the cleaning and Joao
does the maintenance. They both speak a little English, a little
Spanish, a little German and even, Joao told me with a happy grin, a
little Japanese, because the hotel is listed in all the tourist guides
(such as Let’s Go) that tell young people how to do Paris cleanly and
comfortably on a limited budget.
clean and shiny as the most expensive four-star hotel in Paris, but its
facilities, like its owners, are considerably more modest and
sympatique. Joao and I were instantly on a first-name
basis. With a laugh and a wave of the hand he agreed to handle
our keys for us, and before the end of the day he had introduced us to
a Portugese lady who could clean and sew, and who even had a husband
who was “handy” with plumbing and electricity. Thus problems No. 1 and
2 were solved with the snap of a finger: we had a place to keep the
keys and a cleaning lady.
It did not take much little longer to
solve problem No. 3. We had decided to re-paint the apartment,
and Patsy had made a list of approximately 85 cleaning products that
would be absolutely essential to complete the task. (My protestations
as to the flawless cleanliness of the apartment fell on deaf ears.)
Across the street from the Pompidou, right next to my favorite movie
theater in Paris (the Beaubourg, Paris’ best art theater), is a local
branch of Leroy Merlin, a kind of French Home Depot. And at less
than a ten-minute walk from the apartment, we re-discovered the
legendary BHV, a six-story Paris institution that sells everything from
light bulbs to computers, dishes to portable telephones, paint to
perfume at prices that attract people from the distant edges of the
metropolitan area.
brushes and mops, we went for a walk. Our plan had been to see
the Place des Vosges at twilight, but we soon happened upon a tiny
movie theater called La Latina that in only 30 minutes was showing the
Frida Kahlo movie. We had missed it in both Vermont and Aix-en-Provence
and so we jumped at our unexpected good fortune. When we came out
of the movie several hours later, we discovered that the theater also
served as a kind of Latino disco that was packed solid with salsa-ing
couples of all ages, sizes and races, dripping sweat, flailing their
arms frenetically all the while grinning from ear to ear. “What a great
city!” I said to Patsy as we happily ambled up the rue du Temple
towards home. “Where else could you find such an incredible
diversity of people all boogying to the same music! Paris is the
greatest!”
A five-minute walk west of our apartment takes us to
the rue St.-Denis, a street famous for its whores and porn shops.
Two blocks beyond the rue St-Denis is the rue Montorgeuil, a shopping
street that, like many similar streets in Paris, is reserved for
pedestrians. The rue Montorgueil boasts two excellent cheese
shops, two or three places to buy fruit and vegetables, several
butchers, a fishmonger, an excellent small hardware store and four or
five bakeries. (The big shopping day is Sunday.) Montorgueil also
has batches of cafés from which to enjoy the most interesting street
scene in Paris. Sitting in one of the cafés of our choice (we now
tend to change cafés depending on the sun, the weather, or just on our
mood) we have observed old ladies in elegant tenue parisiènne, bra-less
young babes with spiky purple hair who are wearing construction boots
and filthy t-shirts, bikers, flawlessly groomed young professionals,
fat people and thin, derelicts and society matrons, streetwalkers and
street people. Everyone mixes and matches on the rue Montorgueil,
and everyone wants to see and be seen.
Intersecting Montorgueil
is the tiny, trendy rue Tiquetonne. On the west of Montorgueil,
Tiquetonne is almost wholly paved with cafés almost wholly filled with
the young and the beautiful. Perhaps it is not a Paris rule that
you have to be under 25 and elegantly dressed to get a table on the rue
Tiquetonne, but to us a high percentage of the crowd looks like models
and movie stars.Patsy and I gape as we hurry by; then we head for one
of the cafés on the rue Montorgueil where a couple of
not-very-glamorous Americans can have a glass of wine without looking
like refugees from a homeless shelter.
As we were returning home
one day after lunch on the rue Montorgueil, we saw a clipping
scotch-taped to the window of a café on the rue Etienne Marcel. The
clipping praised the café’s food and the vibes and so we decided to
check it out. The St. Amour is perhaps the only combination
bar-tabac-bistro in Paris. When waiter/boss/owner Eric Lenoir is
not waiting tables or joking around with the customers, he is selling
Gauloises and Marlborlos across the counter next to the front
door. Whatever he is doing, Eric keeps up a steady line of
chatter. He teases the lady who doesn’t want wine with lunch, flirts
with the pretty girl, tells me that his salade composé is really tiny
and that we should not share one but order two, agrees with a cigarette
customer that the government’s taxes are scandalous and urges a group
of businessmen to have another bottle of
Burgundy. “Really first rate,” he says. “And I’ve got
one perfectly chilled; I promise you’ll love it.”
I have
a weakness for little places where the owner is sympathique and the
food is uncomplicated. I quickly joined in with the friendly
joking, and one day after the luncheon crowd had thinned out, Eric
brought us his scrapbook. I saw from his clippings that he had
formerly run a huge and highly popular restaurant “far away from here,”
but he told us that the stress was killing him. He eventually gave it
all up and bought this tiny place in the middle of Paris where he can
serve a maximum of about 40 people and he closes at 8:00, “because I
want to.” He told us that he loves his new restaurant because he is
able to cook precisely what he wants: he takes no orders from anyone
and works exclusively for his own pleasure. “Money is not the point,”
he said, echoing a message Patsy and I have heard a thousand times
in France. “I made three times as much in the Loire, but I was on
the verge of a heart attack.”
The St. Amour is in the heart of
Paris’s fashion district and most of the luncheon regulars seem to come
from the world of couture. One well-dressed woman is the technical
director of a major fashion house; a younger, heavy-set woman is a
secretary; and one of the larger tables is occupied every day by a
group who could be ordinary working-class guys talking about their
jobs, except that one of them is an extraordinary young black man who
is, at least to our unsophisticated eyes, obviously a model.
If
we leave the apartment and walk one short block towards the Seine, the
next block parallel to rue du Grenier St.-Lazare is the rue
Rambuteau. Like Montorgueil, Rambuteau is mostly devoted to food,
but unlike Montorgueil, Rambuteau is not closed to pedestrians and it
is resolutely non-trendy. Rambuteau is quite different from
Montorgueil, but it is similarly bursting with personality. It has
at least a dozen food shops (some quite fancy), it has a dozen cafés,
several excellent bakeries and a terrific Chinese
take-out. Indeed, the first two blocks of Rambuteau are so filled
with interesting-looking cafés and little restaurants that it’s
difficult to choose one over another.Le Bouldogue, for example, at No.
21 Rambuteau is run by two men in their 50s who have been partners for
many years. The food they serve is unpretentious and
straightforward: steak au poivre, saumon tartare, pommes
dauphinois. But the dishes are always carefully and excellently
prepared, and the prices are correct.
On a recent June
evening, feeling hot and sticky after a day with the paint pots, we
stopped in at Le Bouledogue to try the day’s special. That night
they were serving a pot au feu en Gelée, beef and
vegetables cooked together. Because a proper pot au feu has to
simmer for several hours, it is much too complicated to cook at home,
especially in the heat of the summer. But our new apartment made it
possible for us to step outside, walk into a friendly restaurant and
enjoy a delicious, interesting meal, for a modest price.
Le
Bouldogue is another of those Paris restaurants where the ambiance is
sympathique and clientele is distinctly local. The restaurant is
frequented by an eclectic mixture of respectable bourgeois couples, a
few gays (the Marais is the center of Paris’ gay culture) and young
couples out for an evening–tourists are few and far between. When we
left, having spent much of the evening talking to the family at the
next table (we agreed on French and American politics and disagreed on
cigarettes) the owner cordially shook our hands and gave Patsy a bise:
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” he said with a grin. We felt
once again embraced by the warmth of France.
Across the
street from Le Bouledogue is a minuscule bookstore called “CK.”
Collette K, the owner of the bookstore, sits at her tiny desk near
the front door and holds court in a place she has established as one of
the temples of Literary Paris. Local authors come by to conduct
readings or to greet Colette, political or theatrical luminaries pay a
call to comment on the events of the day or the latest literary
scandal, and ordinary readers come by for advice on the latest books.
I
stopped in on a recent afternoon with the modest goal of finding a book
for the evening. By the time I left (an hour and a half later) I
had bought five books and spoken with a novelist about his views on
American politics, French literature, local restaurants and beautiful
women. I had conducted a scandalous flirtation with Colette, whose
encyclopedic knowledge of French literature is combined with a lively
personality and an irresistible charm; and I ratcheted up
French/American relations an entire notch by declaring my appreciation
for two local authors who, it turned out, were neighborhood residents
and regular visitors of the bookstore.
Patsy and I
have now spent a total of five or six weeks in out Parisian
pied-à-terre. We know half a dozen local restaurants where we can
almost qualify as “regulars.” We are friends with the lady who
owns the cleaners on the corner of the rue St-Martin, the man who owns
the wine store on the rue aux Ours, with Collette K at the
bookstore, with Jose and Maria at the Hôtel Duséjour, with the
cheese mongers on the rue Montorgueil (both of them and several of
their employees as well), with the lady who sells charcuterie from the
Auvergne, and with a dozen other people who live or work in our
neighborhood. All of these people burst into huge grins when we
enter their shops or restaurants. All of them are “good business
people,” which in France means that they go out of their way to be
cordial to the customers. Or, as the headwaiter in one local restaurant
recently said, “Yes sir, of course we remember you from last
year. You ate at that table over there,” he nodded correctly
towards a table to our left, “And you were very sympathique. We
hope you enjoyed yourself this evening and will come back again soon.”
Americans believe that Parisians are not friendly and that the French
do not like Americans. Many Americans ask me if I am not fearful and
apprehensive in France, and specifically in Paris, because “they are so
rude. And of course they all hate us because of. …” My experience
is that French people love Americans and that Parisians love us most of
all. They do not love us because we bring money, although they do miss
American tourists now that so many fewer are coming. They love us
because we liberated them in 1944 and that they have never forgotten.
They love us because we are open and democratic and easy going, in a
way that most French people are not. Most of all, they love us because
we are Americans and French people have always loved Americans.
Patsy
and I reciprocate this feeling, and we love our apartment in Paris. I
lied when I said it would make us rich. In fact, if all goes well, it
may provide us with a modest income from time to time but it will not
make us rich. However, I told the truth when I said it will allow
us to live happily ever after. I have learned from the French that
happiness does not come from making lots of money but from doing what
you love. For me, the happy ever after began on the day we signed the
papers for the rue du Grenier St.-Lazare. It hasn’t stopped yet.
Restaurants mentioned in this article and a few others:
Le Bouledogue
20, rue Rambuteau
01 40 27 90 90
Closed Sunday
Le St. Amour
19, rue Etienne Marcel
01 42 33 15 95
Closed Sunday and every day at 8:00 (!); great for lunch
Le Grand Colbert
4, rue de Vivienne
01 42 86 87 88
FAX 01 42 86 82 65
Open 7 days week, most days until midnight. Reservations advised for evenings.
Le Hangar
12, impasse Bethaud
01 42 74 55 44
Sunday and Monday. A secret little place, hidden away on a
dead-end street off the rue Beaubourg, directly across from the
Pompidou. Good food at “correct” prices; a local favorite and
with good reason. Reservations advised for evenings.
Le Soleil en Cave
21, rue Rambuteau
01 42 72 26 25
Closed Sunday
This
is really a wine bar with a few tables. The menu is limited, with
usually one or two main courses per evening–but if one of the specials
happens to appeal to you, the cooking is excellent, the prices are
modest, the wines are well selected and the welcome is more than
cordial. There are two or three tables outside on the narrow little
sidewalk; très sympathique.
Michael Padnos, who in
an earlier life practiced law in Massachusetts, Washington DC and
Atlanta, GA, grows olives in Provence and writes on France for various
publications. He is working on a book entitled Sunshine and Fresh
Garlic: A Tour of the Markets and Food Festivals of Provence. He
lives near Aix-en-Provence and eats extremely well.