Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(67)
It had all been a kind of dream, the pregnancy, her tremendous happiness, deciding to go to Paris at the last minute, Belles Feuilles, everything. The baby’s cry was like the sound of an alarm clock. The nurse, a good-looking girl in black net stockings beneath her white smock, came out and said, “You have a little boy.” Almost at the same time, from the delivery room, I heard Bazin call, “Pull the cork!”
After wetting the little boy’s lips—he was already himself, slim, cocky, serene—we drank the rest of the bottle, Kay, Bazin, the nurse, the anesthetist, and I. Real wineglasses had been produced from somewhere. Bill arrived as we were finishing.
Kay was tired, of course, drenched with triumph, the sort there is nothing to compare to. She was soon taken to her room—it turned out to be a corner suite with a white leather couch and clouds painted on the vaulted blue ceiling. They had earlier gone over her choices on the menu for the next day with her. The hospital had a genuine if unpretentious restaurant, the food was very good. French law requires the mother to stay in the hospital or clinic for a full week, in order to completely regain her strength before returning home to face whatever duties. As a foreigner, Kay was exempt from this, though she did luxuriate for days.
Bill and I went to what might be called an after-theater supper at Au Pied de Cochon, which I had first known when Les Halles, the great market of Paris, was across the street. We drank champagne. I was tired and giddy. It had all been a dream and now it was a dream again. Fog had settled in over the city. I dropped Bill off at about four in the morning and got home myself at about five after having wandered around trying to read street signs for half an hour. Dawn was just breaking, the first watery light coming through the bedroom windows. You have a little boy. I may have mentioned that to the dog.
What followed was almost pure joy. We had a list of student nurses who were willing to come in the evening and sit while we went out to dinner. Often one would come for two or three hours at midday as well. I cannot say we danced every night but we came close to it. We named our son Theo. It was the second choice, but the first was even more exotic and sounded to his grandfather like the name of a foreign radio. The franc was ten to a dollar at the time. We took taxis everywhere. We dined at Chez René and the Jules Verne, the Balzar and La Coupole. I often thought of the photograph of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and their daughter, Scottie, dancing all three together like a chorus line in front of the Christmas tree in Paris of the 1920s. It was like that.
It’s too early to know if the application of wine to Theo’s lips did its job, but having been born in Paris means a lot to him. He somehow believes he was born in the Eiffel Tower, and who are we to correct a romantic notion like that?
The Washington Post Magazine
August 13, 1995
Eat, Memory
In a sense, the connection between France and food began for me at the World’s Fair in New York in 1939. The restaurant at the French Pavilion was one of the big hits of the fair. Everyone, including my parents, talked about it and the difficulty of getting a reservation. To the best of my knowledge, my father never tried.
When the fair closed in 1940, Henri Soulé, who had managed the restaurant, along with members of the staff, decided to stay in the United States and open a restaurant themselves. Le Pavillon, as it was predictably named, opened on Fifty-fifth Street, across from the St. Regis hotel, in October 1941, just before Pearl Harbor. Dedicated to perfection, it not only survived the war but also reigned as the jewel of the city for thirty-odd years. It was expensive, of course, though the prices seem laughable today. Chateau Margaux 1929 was, at the time, $4.50 a bottle.
I never ate at Le Pavillon either, it turned out. Too perfect, too expensive, too social. The first French restaurant, to stretch the term slightly, I ever ate at was Longchamps, part of a chain, now gone, that catered to a middle-class clientele. Creamed spinach, dinner rolls served with an adroit fork and spoon, white tablecloths, quiet conversation, an occasional laugh. I had become an officer in the Air Force, and as such, after the war, I found my way to Paris in 1950, but it was a more or less hasty visit without culinary revelations, except that the girls in the nightclubs, after a night of insisting on bad, overpriced champagne, liked to order pigeon, which was also overpriced, in the little restaurants familiar to them that, now famished, they took you to.
Four years afterward, I was stationed in Europe, and it is at this point that memories become more distinct. We went to Paris, my wife and I, a number of times and also to the South of France. There were incredible discoveries to be made. In Paris, on the Rue d’Amsterdam, there was Androu?t, where everything on the menu was made from, or if necessary with, cheese. There was Les Halles and gratinée, and someplace where the waitresses were dressed as serving wenches and you ate Rabelaisian fare. There was the first steak au poivre and quenelles de brochet, and we ate at the Méditerranée on the Place de l’Odéon, unaware of distinguished patrons like Picasso and Jean Cocteau. We assumed that lobster à l’armoricaine was simply a French misspelling.
Let me just say that once you have been exposed to French cooking and French life, and they take, there is a long and happy aftermath. It’s like knowing how to carve a turkey or sail a boat: it puts you a notch up. Of course, there is also Italy and all that. We cook from Marcella Hazan and Cucina Rustica, as well as others, but France is where Vatel, the ma?tre d’h?tel for the Prince de Condé, fell upon his sword, his honor destroyed, when the fish did not arrive on time; where Taillevent, the most famous cook of the Middle Ages, rose from humble beginnings to actual nobility in the kitchen of Charles VI; and where Talleyrand, upon departing for Vienna in 1814 to negotiate for a defeated France at a congress of victors, told the king that he had more need of saucepans than of instructions.