But I do remember the bistro we ate in was smoke-filled and dark-paneled and along the zinc bar there were a couple of locals huddled morosely over ballons of wine. I recall that the place smelled of rotten wood and spilled pastis, and we took the table in the back, under a mottled mirror. A bored young man, a Gitane hanging from his lips, came over and took our order, as an aged woman in a soiled housedress shuffled in and out of the back kitchen.
Paul and I both ordered the day’s special, tripe, which was served in chipped bowls and plonked unceremoniously down in front of us. We ate in silence, dunking crusty cuts of country bread into the stew and washing it all down with a local Pinot Gris, slurped noisily from the glass tumblers standing like squat peasants at our elbows.
Paul pushed back his empty bowl and sighed with contentment. A bit of tripe sauce dotted his chin like a culinary beauty mark, and I noticed immediately the pressures that had been leaving deep creases across his face had miraculously disappeared for the moment.
“Never, in all the three-star restaurants of France, will you taste anything finer,” he said. “We toil and toil, until we are exhausted, and nothing we do, if we are honest, will ever be as good as this, a simple bowl of tripe. Am I right, Hassan?”
“You are right, Paul.”
It was only when I recalled this memory, on the sad day of his car crash, that I finally had the decency to let in the enormity of my friend’s death, to really feel the loss of this incredible tragedy.
Paul was no more.
And so it was, halfway up the Rue Valette, that my palate independently demanded its own homage to Chef Verdun, and I found myself tasting on the broad back of my tongue the rich flavors and textures of his crayfish, a masterpiece of paper-thin slivers of grilled goose liver layered delicately between the pudenda-pink meat of freshwater crustaceans.
Starlings chattering near my window woke me the next morning, but when I swung my legs over to the floor, it felt as if I had been hit with a hammer. All the recent departures, the collapse of the old economic order that we were seeing in the news every day, it was as if all this death and destruction had physically settled in the marrow of my bones. I was profoundly exhausted, dragging my feet, and when I left my flat I found I had to stop off at my local watering hole, La Contrescarpe, on the Rue Lacépède, for a second cup of coffee, before I could continue on to the restaurant.
Marc Bressier, an acquaintance who was the front-room manager at the three-star Arpège, was already at our regular table under the brasserie’s green awning, eating an omelet, and he nodded when I pulled out a chair.
At that time in the morning, Place de la Contrescarpe was free of tourists, and when the waiter came by, I ordered a double and a brioche. A street sweeper was driving his whirring green truck around the square’s fountain, hosing down the cobblestones with pressurized water and sending dog shit and cigarette butts rolling into the gutter. A clochard was asleep on the far pavement under a bush, his grizzled gray head resting on his extended arm, totally oblivious to the spray steadily heading his way.
André Piquot, chef-patron at Montparnasse, pulled up a chair as shutters above the bar on the other side of the square suddenly clattered open, the noise sending a flock of pigeons soaring over the houses.
“Salut, Hassan. Ça va, Marc?”
“Salut, André.”
Paul was all we could talk about, and André expertly jabbed at his cell phone applications with his stubby fingers to read us the latest press accounts. There were unresolved questions about Paul’s accident. The absence of tire tread marks on the road suggested there had been no braking of the car before it sailed over the ledge, and the car itself had just been serviced at a garage, so no technical malfunction could have explained the loss of control on a road that Paul knew like the back of his hand. Furthermore, a witness, a farmer across the road, said the car appeared to be accelerating, not braking, as it headed straight for the cliff and disappeared over its edge. Investigations were continuing.
“I still can’t believe it. He seemed so full of life.”
“What do you think, Hassan? He was your friend.”
I shrugged, the French way. “He was as much a mystery to me as he was to you.”
We moved on to the upcoming demonstration against the restaurant industry’s special value-added tax, a subject then much consuming our world.
“You will be there, Hassan,” Piquot said. “Please. As a director of the Syndicat Commerce de l’épicerie et gastronomie, I must deliver bodies for the protest. Please. Bring your staff.”
“We must stand together,” added Bressier.
“All right. I will be there. Promise.”
It was time to go. I shook their hands, crossed the square, and noticed another two shops, a parfumerie and a sandwich shop, had permanently closed their doors. But as I descended the raked Rue Descartes, I had to negotiate around a delivery of tarp-covered paintings to the Rive Gauche Gallery, all conducted with much yelling and theater, and it made me recall the time when Paul and I had spent an afternoon at the Musée D’Orsay, to hunt, as he said, “pour la source d’inspiration.”
He was in good shape that day, at his charming best, and it was a very agreeable afternoon we spent together, even though we moved through the museum at vastly different tempos. I would regularly turn the corner of a room only to see the back of Paul’s silver head rushing ahead into yet another of the museum’s chambers.
At one point, I sat alone before Gauguin’s The Meal, painted shortly after the great painter arrived in Tahiti. Not one of his best, according to the experts, but I recall the painting’s extreme simplicity—the three locals, the bananas, the bowls on the table. The painting stunned me, for it made me realize only a true master could strip away all obvious artistry and drama, to leave only the simplest and purest ingredients on the plate.
Paul inevitably came back to find me, full of enthusiasm, like a child, to say “you must see” the painting by so-and-so in the next room, and he left again only once I had promised to do so. There was a period, however, when Paul disappeared entirely and there was no sign of him until I finally reached the third floor of the museum.
He was standing stock-still before a painting stuck in the far left-hand corner of the grand parlor. I am not sure how long he had been standing there, but he did not move as I came to stand by his side, but continued to stare blank-faced at the image that seemed to have a fierce hold on his imagination.
The painting wasn’t particularly good, I thought then, but now, looking back, the image does come back to me quite vividly. The painting was of a bearded king, sitting on his throne, his wife clinging to his side. They were both deep in shock, each separately wondering what would become of them. A huge and empty gray wall stretched seemingly forever behind them, a ceremonial church candle bluntly extinguished and abandoned on the floor in front of the distraught couple. The painting, by Jean-Paul Laurens, was titled, simply, The Excommunication of Robert the Pious.
When after several minutes he never acknowledged me in any way, not even when I shifted my weight and cleared my throat, I said, “Paul?”
He blinked twice and turned in my direction.
“Ready? My God, it’s like touring with an old lady, you are so slow. Now, how about we have a drink at a little bar I know not too far from here?”
When I slipped through the front door of Le Chien Méchant, I found my maître d’hôtel, Jacques, at the table in the foyer, busy stacking the silver peaches that had just arrived from Seville. The spotlit table was the first thing guests saw when entering the restaurant’s darkened hall, and every day we seductively set it anew with fresh figs, pineapples, and mangoes, colorful pots filled with berries. Among the heaps of lush fruit, we frequently placed a plate of smoke-blackened sausages, or delicate and flaky pastries of the day stacked under a smooth glass dome, all to create a mouth-watering contrast of hues and textures. The only permanent fixtures were a preserved and mounted pheasant—with two glittering glass eyes and a long tail that majestically swept across the table’s polished pear-wood planks—and two strategically placed antique copper pots with lids of hammered silver.