The Weekly Screed (#759)

Pain in the morning
by David Benjamin

“Paris is always a good idea.”
                                    — Audrey Hepburn

PARIS — Paris is not the city that never sleeps. It not only sleeps, hitting the sack by 5 a.m. at the very latest, but it has a hard time getting up. Paris is the city that rolls over and heaves the alarm clock against the wall.

At least that's how it seemed to me on a recent Saturday morning at 7:30. I was up this early, on a dank morning in February, because Hotlips (my own true love) and I were catching the morning train to Spain (where the rain… well, you know the rest).

Paris is called the City of Light for its long summer nights. But winter here is a dark ride. Even at noon, the slanted light bestowed grudgingly by a low-hung sun — the grainy glow that inspired Monet’s impressionism and Sartre’s existentialism — wounds the February tourist’s heart with a monotonous languor.

At this hour in this gray month, in a Cole Porter drizzle, the sky is a cast-iron skillet and no bird sings. Except for a sleepless clochard who shuffles by, giving me as wide a berth as I give him, no one stirs. I’m looking for croissants and hoping for a copy of this morning’s Times, more hopeful of the former than the latter.

To my surprise, my news vendor, in his kiosk on boulevard St. Michel, is up and at ‘em, a sure sign that he’s no native Parisian. He’s Tunisian, actually, one of those amiable North African Muslims who’ve lived quietly and abundantly in Paris — although never counted as anything but “French” in any census — since the end of the Algerian war in ’62. He’s the rare reliable news vendor, always open before dawn, greeting me with a sad smile and wishing me a “bonne journee.”

Times in hand, I begin the quest for pain. Across the boulevard, the local outlet of the Francewide bakery chain, Paul, is still shuttered, although the time is creeping toward 8 a.m. The new bread joint, right next door to Paul, is equally inhospitable. Up the street, on the corner of boulevards St. Michel and St. Germain, there’s a Brioche Dorée, where anyone who cherishes good bread turns only in desperation. I see a girl inside, stocking the display case. I try the door. Locked. Relieved, I turn away.

We have a Starbucks now, adjacent to my newsstand. It’s open, but I’ve been ignoring it for three years. This continues. Even in the U.S., Starbucks has a poor grasp of the concept of breakfast bread. My objective is the place Maubert, our market square, which began its history in the 14th century as a garbage dump so foul that the merchants of Les Halles refused to bring their refuse there, because of the stench. It’s also where they executed printers, including one named Etienne Dolet, who was tortured there, hanged and burned with his banned books on a hot day in 1546.

At Maubert, I have hopes for a few early risers. It’s an oasis of Paris as it was, a single block where each shop, in a neat row, dispenses one of the staples of a decent French kitchen. From the greengrocer on the corner to the butcher, sausage-maker and baker, the cheese shop that won the latest national prize as the best in all of France and the wine merchant where we don’t go because Loic, from Brittany, has opened a new shop called Le Vin Qui Parle (“the wine that speaks’) just across the boulevard. We don’t patronize the Maubert baker, either, because Eric Kayser’s peerless, fragrant boulangerie is just around the corner on rue Monge.

There used to be a horse butcher, which fell out of fashion and closed. But there are three traiteurs (delicatessen), two Greek, one Italian, and also on rue Monge, a stone’s throw from the marché a brulerie where they’ll grind your coffee and remind you of the way it used to smell at the checkout counter of the A&P.

Yes, of course, they have tea, too.

The café on the far corner, Le Village Ronsard, is frequented by Parisians. Across the street, Le Metro — where the waiters speak better English and the prices are higher — handles the tourist trade.

Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, place Maubert fills with stalls and awnings, where vendors hawk all the produce available daily in the shops, but also sell scarves and knives, rillettes, paté and peonies, leather goods, dry goods, jewelry, hats, kitchen tools and, for some reason, fake African masks and carvings.

It’s a three-block stroll to Maubert. As I approach, I see an electric glow that tells me the marché is mobilizing. The cafés have opened early to serve the groggy vendors. The fruitsellers and fishmongers had to rise at 3 or 4 to get here and set up. They rushed to Paris from all around, but now they’ve geared down.

There’s no hurry. I’m the only “shopper” in sight. No self-respecting Parisian would get up before dawn on Saturday to buy beets and beefsteaks that will still be there at 10 or 11. So, the vendors loiter, hang together, smoke and shmooze — and glance at me, torpidly curious.

I was heading to Kayser for a baguette Monge — the quintessence of pain ancien — but I’m barely awake, haven’t had my coffee and the boulangerie in place Maubert, in front of me now, is respectable. And their croissants are still warm. So, I go in, splurge. A croissant, an escargot with raisins. And a pain au chocolat (my favorite).

The salesgirl, whom I interrupted as she filled the racks with fragrant pastries, takes my money, makes change, and eyes me with a flash of resentment. What was I doing, prowling Paris before sunup, breaking her rhythm? Was that the tang of early worm she smelled on my breath?

I head back home, successful. But it wasn’t easy. Paris doesn’t gladly suffer early risers and go-getters. Nor do I… usually.

As I retreat, I turn and peer into the far yonder and up above, thinking I might, by now, spy a glimmer of the dawn through the clouds on the east horizon. But there is no horizon. This is Paris. It’s the city. There are buildings.

Here, in the Latin Quarter, they’re old and cream-colored, graceful stacks of limestone quarried from a vast man-made cavern that sprawls for labyrinthine miles beneath the Left Bank, now packed and stacked, ossified and mortared, consecrated by monks and priests two centuries dead, with the remains of six million forgotten denizens of this morning-dark City of Light. The limestone came up and they went down, in scattered bones and bodiless skulls, Edith Piaf's “poor people of Paris,” into the Catacombs.

On a winter morning, their spirits feel close and neighborly, keeping me company, humming the soft Latin chant that accompanied them from grave to grave, as I bring home our daily bread.