AFTER-DINNER COFFEE
A visitor once asked me how it was possible for Paris to maintain so
many cafés, and said how distressing it was to see so many women in them
and there was more drinking than in New York or London--question and
inferences all in one breath, just like my sentence. My friend was
bewildered because he did not understand the _raison d'être_ of the café
in French life. He thought that a café was a place to drink according to
the American notion of drinking. The women were bad women in his eyes
and the men on the downward path. To one who holds this curious notion
the number of cafés in Paris and the crowds in them and at the little
tables in front of them are inexplicable and alarming. Cafés,
restaurants, _brasseries_ and _zincs_ line the boulevards, and there are
at least two or three to a block in every street. Owing to the intensive
apartment house life shops of all kinds are more frequent in Paris than
elsewhere, but you may have to walk to get anything you want. To drink
or eat, no. The place is right under your nose.
All restaurants serve drinks. I know of only one non-alcoholic
restaurant in Paris: that is the vegetarian place on the Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs! If you did not eat in a "drinking-place," you'd
pretty soon starve. Many of the big cafés do not serve food. Some have
one dish, called the _plat du jour_, with cheese and fruit afterwards.
Others have oysters and snails and their own _specialités_. Others,
while not advertising meals, serve a _table d'hôte_ or a very limited _à
la carte_. In all, however, hot coffee is to be had at all hours and
every kind of a drink is on tap. The _zincs_ are little bits of places
where you get hot coffee, beer or a _petit verre_. Coal and wood
merchants also serve alcohol. In the more humble streets (which are to
be found in every quarter), cafés are dirty stuffy places, known as
_débits_. Rare is the "drinking-place" that has not its _terrasse_. This
may be only a chair or two and a single table on the side-walk.
The _terrasses_ of restaurants as well as of cafés are maintained
throughout the winter. It is a familiar sight to see a table-cloth
flapping in the wind, held down by a salt-cellar and a mustard-pot. The
days are few that you cannot sit out. It does not get very cold in Paris
and an awning protects you from the rain. In some of the boulevard cafés
the _terrasses_ are actually heated by stoves!
The Paris café is wholly different from the American saloon. None thinks
it is wrong to drink in France. Total abstinence is a funny American
idea to our friends overseas. Taking a drink in public is as natural as
putting your arm around your girl in public. Everybody does it. You
rarely see a drunken man or woman just as you rarely see poverty.
Alcoholism (by which is meant poisoning the system and breaking down the
health by excessive use of alcohol) is an evil France has to combat as
much as any other country. But the French have never had it preached to
them that the evil can be overcome by prohibiting the use of wines and
liquors or by the example of a part of the community voluntarily
abstaining for the sake of weaker brothers. The anti-alcohol movement in
France does exist. As the maintenance of war legislation against
absinthe and kindred spirits proves, it has public opinion behind it.
But the connotation of _alcoholic_ is limited in France. The Gallic
sense of proportion prevents the French from extremes in anything. Since
they do not drink to excess, they have no reason for regarding beer and
wines as alcohol. Often your French friends tell you that they never
touch alcohol. In the same breath they offer you delicious wine.
Scruples understood and appreciated in America are often meaningless
when you live in another country. Stick to your white ribbon principles
if you will, but do not persist in your notion that cafés are places
where it is not respectable to be seen. Why cut yourself off from an
indispensable feature of Paris life?
[Illustration: The Panthéon from the Rue Soufflot]
The hour of the _apéritif_ finds the _terrasses_ of the cafés crowded.
You may have difficulty in getting a place outside. Having worked all
day and perhaps having walked home, the Parisian saves a half hour
before dinner for his appetizer. He sits at the little table in front of
his favorite café and watches the passing crowd. It is no hastily
swallowed cocktail, leaning against a bar and shut off from eyes like
mine by a swinging screen door. It is no prerogative of man. Sometimes
on week days and always on Sundays, his wife and children are with him.
When we were living in the Rue Servandoni, we got into the habit of
going out for our after-dinner coffee. The reason was probably the same
as that of most Parisians. Living quarters were small. The baby was
asleep in the front room. Toward the end of the month especially we were
not always in a position to keep the tiny dining-room fire replenished
all evening. We thought of the gas bill. We liked to get a little air.
We were fond of music. Arm in arm we would walk along the Rue Vaugirard
to the Boul' Miche. From the Closerie des Lilas near the Observatoire to
the river you had plenty of choice for your after-dinner coffee. At the
foot of the Rue Soufflot is the Café du Panthéon. On the corner of the
Rue de la Sorbonne is the Café d'Harcourt. Just off the boulevard, on
the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine, is the Taverne Pascal. These were our
favorites. Pascal has no _terrasse_. We went there when it rained or
when we thought of Munich beer. Harcourt used to have a red-coated
orchestra, and was the gayest place on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. At
the Panthéon you paid two sous more, but the coffee was better. We never
had to spend more than a franc for the two of us. A checker-board or
cards could be had of the waiter. If you wanted to write letters, you
asked for a blotter and pen and ink.
Just around the corner from us, on the Rue de Tournon, was the
Concerts-Rouges, the blessed institution to make unnecessary the tragedy
of would-be musician and singer failing to get a hearing. Pianists,
violinists, cellists and future opera stars had a place to put on their
own concerts at little cost. We were the audience. Of course it was not
all amateurs: the management had to promise an audience. A good
orchestra gathered around the stove in the middle of the room. You sat
in a chair such as they have in school rooms, whose right arm spread out
generously to give space for your notebook. There was room, too, for
coffee-cup or stein. The only rule of the Concerts-Rouges was silence.
You could move your chair away from the music. When you were not
interested in the number, you read or wrote. Many theses and dramas and
poems have been worked out in the Concerts-Rouges.
The Boulevard du Montparnasse, which has since become our home, was not
too far from the Rue Servandoni to be frequented for after-dinner
coffee. The Dôme, on the corner of the Boulevard Raspail, and
Versailles and Lavenue, opposite the Gare Montparnasse, were
after-dinner coffee haunts where friendships that have lasted through
the years were formed. We still sit there. Lavenue, after five years of
silence, again offers music. But we miss Schumacker, beloved of the
Quarter, who fell, they say, in the ranks of the enemy. His face is one
of those I cannot forget. I see him now, blue eyes and bright smile and
bushy hair, bending over his violin on the little platform by the piano.
He seemed to play his heart out and never tired. I always like to write
my letters at Lavenue. When I called for "_de quoi écrire_," the waiter
brought a tiny bottle of ink, spillable and square, sheets of ruled
writing paper and the cheapest quality of manila envelopes in a black
oilcloth folder, whose blotter never blotted. But you did not care. You
listened to the music after each page until it dried.