The Paris Season

I had the loveliest day today; I met Shana for lunch at a café bakery called “Bread and Roses”—it was more modern than your average Parisian café, but perfect in every detail. It’s one block from the Luxembourg Gardens; from the tables, looking toward the street, you can see the leaves of the magnolia trees growing over the top of the wrought iron garden gates. The café occupies the corner space of an elegant Haussmanian building, but the bakery owners have replaced the old windows with nearly floor to ceiling glass. The windows were impeccably clean, and the row of five small, square oak tables were lined up against it, one chair facing in toward the bakery case and the orderly wall of preserves and oils, the other chair facing the street. Because the windows were so large, immaculate and free of any beams or panes, I had the wonderful sensation of still being a part of the first spring day, a part of the quiet elegance of the street corner, though I was inside. The young women servers, black-clad, were extremely professional, polite and smiling. The café is non-smoking, serves organic juices and illy coffee. It is bright and quiet inside. Instead of being the kind of silence that stifles, it was meditative and delicious. So was the food.

The Cordon Bleu has taught me so much about culinary perfectionism, and has in that sense spoiled me. Where I would have been satisfied, even impressed, with most meals and pastries in Paris before I began my classes here, I am no longer. When I am served in a café, or I pass by the windows of bakeries and pastry shops, I hear the voices of the Cordon Bleu chefs in my head; “There’s too much sauce…and it’s too thick…and poured on so indelicately!…that choux pastry of that éclair is too brown—they overworked the dough…oh!…look how those strawberries are sliced! So thick! So uneven!”

That being said, I could find not a single fault with the presentation or the taste of my lunch; every delicate tendril of roquette, mâche and radicchio was fresh and crisp, were torn into small, even-sized morsels, and were all evenly coated with a thin layer of the most irreproachable lemon vinaigrette I’ve ever had. Delicious. Pictures will follow, though I don’t know when, because we took them with Shana’s camera. I will post them when she gives them to me.

Afterwards, once Shana was in class, I went strolling through the city for hours, just because I could. I stood on bridges and in the middle of streets and took pictures of monuments, and the sky, and was in such a meditative trance following my lovely lunch that I didn’t even mind looking so much like a tourist.

In the afternoon, in the 7th, I passed a man in a wheelchair. His pant legs hung down from the seat of the chair, both empty and pinned closed at the cuffs. Across his lap he had a cardboard box full of flowers. He was selling nosegays of violets for 2 euros. So I bought one from him. “You’ve made me very happy,” he said. “No, you’ve made me very happy,” I said. And I strolled down the street, a nosegay of violets in my hand, cheerfully imagining that I was a Victorian lady, in Paris for the season : )