Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [133]
“I think one thing that I appreciate the most when I go to Paris is renting an apartment. You look it up on the Internet and you see pictures of rooms and make all the arrangements, and it’s like walking into a novel—an Anne Tyler novel: What would happen if …?—and suddenly you become Madame Jones on rue Hachette or something like that—you just take on the French life. I like it particularly, of course, because you can do some of your own cooking, and it’s such fun to go to the markets and buy things—it’s not enough just to go and look. You live kind of an enchanted life, and for me it takes me back to the years I lived in Paris, from 1948 to 1951. I had my first job at Doubleday as an assistant editor and I went to Europe for a three-week vacation, to Italy and the Côte d’Azur and then to Paris. After three weeks I just couldn’t bear to come back home, so I got my vacation extended for another three or four weeks. Then literally the day before I was to go home I was sitting in the Tuileries Gardens and I was watching the sun set over the city and it was so beautiful and I thought, ‘What am I doing going home? This is where I belong!’ And then I got up and walked away, leaving my purse hanging on the bench. I’m sure Freud would say this was not an accident. When I got around the corner, I realized that my passport, my passage home, my whole identity was in that purse. And it was all gone. When I went back to my hotel I decided it was an act of fate and I’m supposed to be here. So instead of crying to my mama begging for a ticket home, I stayed in Paris and tried to get a job.
“Eventually I picked various things up—that’s a long story that I tell in my book—and then I met Evan, my future husband, who was there because he started a weekend magazine with Stars and Stripes after the war. These were wonderful years, particularly in the beginning, when the French loved us so. We were their saviors, after all. It was so touching to watch this country still recovering from the war and the occupation … some of the shame, some of the pride, and all of these things. One example I think of was the time I was in a boulangerie and we were all standing in line to get a fresh baguette and a man up front cracked open a baguette and cried out, then passed the loaf all around and people started shouting and clapping. I asked someone what this was all about and he exclaimed, “The flour is white!” To me that just tells you multitudes about the French people, their love of food, their pride in it, the time they will take to make a meal. I’ve seen people wearing carpet slippers buying three times the amount of pâté that I could afford! It just was such a priority in their lives. I must have some French genes hidden in me because I always respond to that. And it’s sensible eating, you know. You eat at least three courses and they’re small amounts, you linger and you spend at least an hour and a half at the table instead of this grab-a-bite-and-run that is the American philosophy.
“So, I sort of feel that my soul, or my tummy, needs that refreshment every year. I try to go to Paris almost every year for a few weeks. I find a little apartment and live a totally different life. A few times I will change the arrondissement I rent in, particularly if someone like Claudia Roden is staying at her apartment in the rue Saint-Dominique and I want to be close by there. Recently I’ve found that the old Saint-Germain district—fun as it is to go and have a drink there—is so touristy. You don’t find the wonderful little shops—the little fromagerie and the little boulangerie—that you do in the more family-oriented neighborhoods, particularly around the area of the rue Cler, where there’s a market on the weekends that I love.