The Weekly Screed (#784)

Out to dejeuner
by David Benjamin

“A good photograph is like a good hound dog, dumb, but eloquent.”
                                                                 — Eugene Atget

PARIS — I follow, meekly, the footsteps of Eugene Atget.

Atget was the original, essential Parisian, unable to get his fill of the City of Light. In the early days of photography, Atget fed off the Light, trudging every inch of the city, taking pictures of every magnificent view and every mundane cranny. I emulate Atget only in my efforts to roam Paris with camp and camera, whenever I’m here, creating an “album” that’s a fraction as large as the vast, tireless oeuvre of Atget.

Atget took thousands of photos, carrying a huge telescoping box camera and its ungainly tripod, plus a trunk full of fragile glass plates. All I haul is a camera bag, my Pentax, two lenses and a memory chip that holds more shots than Atget could shlep in a month. But Atget was a walking encyclopedia. I — despite my superior technology — am a mere brochure.

My latest expedition took me to a cobbled alleyway called the rue Berton. Atget beat me there by 116 years. Rue Berton is mildly famous for Honoré de Balzac’s backdoor, where he escaped when the bill collectors came around the front. It’s also, coincidentally, the back wall of a little urban chateau that housed Marie-Therese Louise, Princess of Lamballe. She was Marie Antoinette’s BFF. In the Revolution, Marie Antoinette was ceremoniously beheaded. The Princesse de Lamballe was simply hacked to death.

Despite the cloudy day and lousy light, I got my photos of the moodily evocative, but unspectacular alley, picked up a few fallen buckeyes as mementos and wandered then toward the Parc de la Muette. On the fashionable rue de Passy, I foraged — in the impecunious spirit of Balzac — for a cheap lunch.

I dodged two obviously chic joints — already speckled with early-eating American tourists — and opted for the humbler Tabac de la Muette, where the waiter guided me to a little nook that afforded a few of both the interior and the street. Nearby were two expat American women, conversing volubly in English. I ignored them strenuously, concentrating on my book (I’m re-reading Invisible Man) until they were supplanted, felicitously, by an elderly Parisienne who ate like a cat and uttered not a mew.

The impeccably efficient waiter returned and took roughly 15 seconds to record my order and shimmer off. ‘Til my omelette arrived, I read. But I also noted that, beside me, the waiter seated a beautiful girl (dark hair, pale skin, Claudia Cardinale’s eyes). She was my sixth of the day.

I count beautiful girls in Paris. Everyone should.

The omelette (barely garnished: two leaves of iceberg lettuce and one wedge of underripe tomato) was perfect, light brown on its surface and runny in the middle. As I partook, I scanned the room. I belatedly grasped that I’d stumbled into an old-style Paris café/restaurant that had yet to be remodeled into yuppified sterility. It probably will be soon.

The light here is appealingly dim, in case I’m lunching (billing, cooing, holding hands) with a woman not my wife. This subtle gloom echoes off old maple woodwork dark enough to match my souvenir chestnut, each wall panel centered by an oval mirror. The light we get is gold, from Belle Epoque fixtures, sconces and a chandelier whose dusty-orange glass shades are tulip-shaped. But around the chandelier on the ceiling, a circle of paisley-shaped, dark-stained Art Nouveau laths. Café decorators in Paris mix periods shamelessly, and nobody complains.

The place is called a “tabac,” because it’s licensed to sell tobacco products. Typically, the tobacco counter is up front to the right of the doorway, and it’s expansive. They sell a lot of smokes here and probably have a wide array of allumettes, wooden matches in decorative boxes that serve as excellent, cheap, packable souvenirs to take back home to the family in Topeka (if only tourists knew).

Beyond the tobacco stand, the bar — oak blackened by a thousand hands, marble panels, marble bar — crowded with drinkers too thrifty to pay the extra fare for a table. The steps down to the W.C. are also marble, a touch of cool elegance (or mock opulence) from a different time.

Mopping up egg (the bread is good, not sublime), I see, behind the stairwell railing, a fellow diner. I sigh in admiration. He’s about 75, eating alone in a linen suit, conservative tie, light-blue Oxford shirt, dance-ready loafers. He’s Paris after the war — Maurice Chevalier, Charles Boyer, Yves Montand. Have you ever, in an American restaurant at lunch, ever seen a man in a linen suit, tie and polished shoes, using his fork properly? Or even one who has the sheer chutzpah to wear linen?

I suppress the urge to go over and hug the guy.

(Me? Fuggedaboudit! Photographer’s vest, cargo pants, sandals, and a “Here Come the Beatles” t-shirt.)

Suddenly, my gorgeous banquette-mate is paid up and motoring. She has miles to go before she sleeps (with Delon, Belmondo, Gainsbourg, nobody like me or you). That’s how it is. The old bags linger and then shuffle off, gradually, leaning on canes. The young beauties are quicksilver. I watch as she hurries. Methinks (with Herrick) how sweetly, sweetly flows the liquefaction of her clothes.

Drinking my coffee, I have a good view of the street. The sun is struggling to appear, which decides my afternoon. I’ll keep walking with my camera. I’ve already shot the Métro sign at Muette, a red rectangle framed in cast-iron filigree. These signs — in a dozen different styles from Hector Guimard’s turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau triffids that to the Fifties-style Mobilgas “M” — are a favorite motif. Alas, most of them post-date Atget. He would have shot every station.

Outside, I steer a course toward rue de la Pompe. One building’s facade is bright with mosaic panels and a pre-Raphaelite woman’s face is etched in limestone. I don’t count her, though. She’s not alive and she’s only a head.

Final tally for the day: Ten.