Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [45]
In fact, she turned out to be the daughter of the owner of this wonderful shop. Dad was behind a different counter, busy with another customer. Daughter was already on holiday break (it was just before Christmas) and was apparently in training to inherit the family business. The manager of the shop, the lady I was familiar with, was present but remained discreetly in the background of my interaction with the young lady.
I duly explained that I was looking for an oval Le Creuset casserole to give as a gift to a friend who had admired mine. The young miss led me over to a pyramid of these very casseroles stacked in diminishing sizes. Then she courteously stood aside to allow me to inspect them at close range. (I delicately refrained from asking her name for a host of complex French reasons. If I asked her name, I would be forced to tutoyer her, using the familiar form of address, as she is a child, and I didn’t want to spoil our roles with this familiarity. Also, one would never ask a shopkeeper one had just encountered for the first time for her name.)
When I’d made my choice, the junior shopkeeper expertly extracted it, took my credit card, and plugged it into the electronic transmitter, then, discreetly averting her eyes, handed me the gizmo so that I could enter my PIN. Meanwhile, the manager wrapped up my purchase. Before I departed, I congratulated the owner of the shop on the impeccable professionalism and courtesy of his daughter. And I left musing about how much I love this store, and why.
Paris has two types of hardware stores: the quincaillerie, specialized in actual hardware, and the droguerie, not a drugstore but a shop specialized in paints, cleaning products, glues, and other household potions. My neighborhood store combines both these product lines. Merchandise is densely stacked and hung floor to ceiling and must often be sought with a ladder. Overstock is housed in the cellar, which is accessed by a trapdoor and its attached steep steps.
So what’s so unusual and wonderful about these stores? The first thing is the incredibly diverse variety of products they stock. My store has everything from oilcloth to shopping caddies, picture-hanging supplies, cleaning supplies, myriads of lightbulbs (a nightmare in France because there are about twenty different noninterchangeable types), an excellent cookware line, candles, shoe-care products, trash cans … it just goes on and on. I’m sure they must stock thousands of different items, and all this in an area smaller than the average American master bedroom.
The diversity of cleaning supplies alone is mind-boggling. A product exists for every imaginable purpose—and for many purposes that you have never imagined. Did you have a laundry accident and now all your husband’s white T-shirts are pink Not to worry, the détacheur pour linge teint par accident will get them white again. Are lime deposits clogging your washing machine? Here’s just what you need.… You have a spot on a leather handbag? Well, what kind of leather is it? Ah, here’s the correct product to solve the problem.…
The French householder is by nature profoundly frugal. She prefers never to throw anything away, and considers it a serious responsibility to take excellent care of what she has. Doing this in the French manner—that is, with a mania for complication, specificity, and diversity—requires thousands and thousands of different products. Of course, no one but the shopkeeper could possibly know which of them to recommend for a particular situation.
This fact leads to the second thing I love about my quincaillerie/droguerie, an aspect that is part of the very definition of this type of store in Paris. I can walk in with the most bizarre problem—stain on clothing, spot on my wood parquet floors, whatever—and the shopkeeper will listen patiently and attentively to my plaint. Then she will climb her ladder and