Troyes / Andouillette
I had everything under control until I saw the ceramic Buddha. It appeared in the window on a gray and humid August morning, two burly movers sagging under its weight. “On va le mettre où, madame?” asked one, pointing with his chin at the rooms already stacked high with cartons.
My parents had thrust the statue upon me the last time they’d cleaned out their attic. It was about the size and weight of a Great Dane. I’d shoved it into storage hoping it might disappear, and it did—from my memory at least. Now—surprise!—it was in Paris, delivered along with the rest of our boxes and furniture, hoisted by crane up two stories and hauled through our dining room’s French windows.
It had been five years since I’d seen most of our personal effects, which had been packed hastily during the panicked month that separated our wedding and our move to China. While we lived in a furnished apartment in Beijing and then a cramped one-bedroom rental in Washington, the cartons had done hard time in a storage unit in northern Virginia. But our apartment in Paris was unfurnished, and so now we were reunited with everything—for better or worse.
Sorting through the array of dusty boxes was like viewing my past life, the one I’d led before I met Calvin, back when I was just another New York editorial assistant slaving over a hot photocopier. As I tried to find room in the bookshelves for my waist-high stacks of paperbacks, I thought about my last day of work in publishing, when my colleagues toasted me with coffee and doughnuts and I surprised everyone, including myself, by bursting into tears. I didn’t feel too different from that girl in her mid-twenties, the one who’d dreamed of running her own publishing imprint and who’d survived on grilled cheese sandwiches toasted on the waffle iron. Still, it felt as if a lot of time had passed since I’d gotten married and left New York.
I like to tell people that my husband and I met at a party, but the truth is we were set up. A mutual friend, John, introduced us, inviting me to accompany him to Calvin’s holiday party so he could play matchmaker. The first thing I noticed when I walked into Calvin’s apartment was the view—the dazzling drape of the East River, the red lights of the Pepsi-Cola sign reflecting in the water. The second thing I noticed was that no one was speaking English, not even my host. While I chatted with young diplomats from the United Nations and ate chunks of aged Gruyère cheese, I snuck occasional glances at Calvin’s boyish face as he mingled with his guests in Russian, English, and . . . French?
“He speaks French?” I whispered to John. My Francophilia was on high alert.
“Didn’t I tell you? He taught kindergarten in Paris for a couple of years, before he joined the foreign service.”
A French-speaking diplomat who had lived in Paris and liked Gruyère and kids? What can I say? It was love at first sight.
Six months later we were engaged—so quickly that we felt a little shy about telling people—and a year after that we got married. And then, a month after that, we moved to Beijing. I quit my job in book publishing, the only work I’d ever known, a career I’d adored for six years, and leaped—into nothing.
Beijing sprawled in front of me, an enormous, vibrant, uncompromising metropolis. After an initial flush of sightseeing, reality set in. How could I fill the days? Shopping for knockoffs and cheap pearls held little appeal. I started taking Mandarin classes again, but they raised complicated memories of childhood coercion, when my mother had dragged me to Chinese school every Saturday. I considered working at the embassy, but the only jobs available for spouses were secretarial, and I had no patience for administrative work. My limited Chinese prevented me from finding a job locally. In any case our host government strongly discouraged diplomatic spouses from working or even volunteering.
I missed my friends and family, of course, but more than anything I missed my job. For more than half my life, I’d dreamed of working in publishing, ever since I discovered at the age of ten that creating books was a profession and that people called editors actually got paid to read. I’d spent the years since college on the humble path to editor, answering phones and sending packages, acquiring a few projects of my own, dreaming of one day shepherding a string of authors onto the New York Times bestseller list. Now, I was unemployed in Beijing, and my former ambition seemed like the pollution that smudged the sky, a great green cloud composed of a billion different particles of fear and uncertainty. Without a career I hardly knew who I was anymore.
I was terrified my friends and family would think I’d made a mistake in marrying so hastily, that I’d been immature and foolish for allowing my heart to carry me more than six thousand miles away. My weekends and evenings had never been happier, filled with late-night strolls through twisting Beijing alleys, Sunday afternoons spent basking in the rare calm of a Confucian temple, and feasts of pork-and-chive dumplings with new Dutch diplomat friends. But I dreaded Monday mornings when Calvin left for the office. The workweek spooled to infinity, my days an exercise in killing time. I dawdled over the weight machines at the gym, spent hours comparison-shopping at the grocery store. I cooked elaborate meals for dinner and wondered how the hell I—a self-proclaimed feminist—had become a housewife.
I tried to stay positive, writing to friends back home about China’s vitality, picnics on the Great Wall, excursions to eat fried scorpions at the night market. In reality I struggled daily with identity issues—not only job-related but also cultural: I thought of myself as an American, but everyone else viewed me as Chinese. My Asian features were like a mask. Sometimes I felt grateful for the way I could slip into a crowded Beijing subway car, unnoticed as long as I remained silent. But most of the time, I elicited hostile disappointment, expressed in the double take when a taxi driver saw my face and heard my accent, the questions, always the same: “Where are you from?” The refusal to accept my response: “America? You don’t look American. Americans have yellow hair and big noses.” In a culture as ancient and proud, as trampled and reborn as China’s, a little ethnic chauvinism was natural. But what shocked me were the privileges granted automatically to my Caucasian friends and husband, the respect offered because of their foreign features alone, the praise of their Chinese judged by a single “Ni hao.” In contrast, there was hardly anyone lower on the totem pole than a woman who looked young and Chinese. And even though I wasn’t that young, or that Chinese, when Calvin and I went out together, people took one look at us and thought I was his translator. Sometimes they assumed worse.
At least I had lunch to punctuate my days. For an hour or two each afternoon, I plunged into street markets to slurp up noodles and dumplings. I watched with fascination as a jianbing vendor swirled crêpe batter on a hot griddle and delicately cracked an egg on top. I scalded my tongue on soup dumplings and stuffed my cheeks with snow-white hunks of puffy mantou (steamed bread). At Calvin’s suggestion I started a food journal, a dog-eared notebook where I recorded recent meals and other culinary adventures.
Salvation came one day in the form of a magazine rack in our apartment building’s mail room. I can still picture it, a shoulder-high structure in dark wood, right next to the window where I dropped off the dry cleaning. I can still feel the filmy cling of the plastic-bagged laundry draped over my arm as I stopped to glance at the garish covers. They were expat magazines that existed primarily to sell advertising, the articles in hastily copyedited English. For months I’d ignored them, but that day I picked up a copy of each, took them upstairs, and examined them. By the end of the afternoon, I had chosen one—That’s Beijing—as the best of the bunch.
And so I thought up some story ideas and e-mailed them to the address listed for the editor in chief. I hoped to write about food, but he wanted stories for the House and Home section, so I wrote an article about orchid care. I reviewed books that I’d purchased on vacation and pestered so many cabdrivers for their opinions that I feared they might issue an all-points bulletin banning me from the city’s taxis. After I’d freelanced for several months at one RMB per word (the equivalent of eight cents), the dining editor left. When they offered me the job, I jumped into the seat. Yes, That’s Beijing was a far cry from Manhattan book publishing—the magazine’s typos, which seemed to multiply as fast as we could correct them, made that abundantly clear. But I loved reviewing Beijing’s restaurants and writing about Chinese regional cuisine, experiences that would eventually inspire me to write a novel. Every day for lunch, my colleagues and I would try a new restaurant, often delicious and always dirt cheap, and slowly, over shared plates of stir-fried bitter melon and cumin lamb, these co-workers evolved into friends. They had chosen to build a new life in Beijing, and their enthusiasm for the city’s relentless energy and hustle, its sense of possibility and quirky charm, was infectious. I started writing pieces for American magazines, just short, front-of-the-book articles—barely longer than three sentences but each one a step forward, tiny but sure. Food had become a bridge to a foreign culture and, maybe, a new career.
The thing about diplomatic life is that just as you’ve gotten settled, made a few friends, and grown confident at navigating a new country, your assignment is over and it’s time to move on. After almost a year and a half at That’s Beijing, cleaning out my desk proved harder than I’d thought. I sifted through the detritus—receipts and business cards, broken pencils and coffee-stained notebooks—separating it into piles to keep and piles to throw away. In the end I swept everything into a huge garbage bin. I would have to start afresh in our next assignment in Washington, D.C. New contacts, new article ideas—I would need to build everything from scratch. Now, a year later, in Paris, I found myself starting over once again.
The day before the shipment of our belongings arrived at our apartment in Paris, I walked through the empty rooms, mentally unfurling a carpet here, hanging a favorite photograph there, selecting a cupboard for wineglasses near the refrigerator and one for pots and pans next to the stove. Three overseas transfers in five years had made me savvy. The next morning I asked the movers to empty all the boxes and take away the bulky packing materials. Calvin and I gently unwrapped our wedding china and made a trip to IKEA to buy a new bookcase. As for the Buddha, I shoved it into the cave, the basement storage room that was supposed to hold our precious wine collection. There it remained, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for our next move.
* * *
With the apartment unpacked and the Buddha stored, we settled into a routine of métro-boulot-dodo, as the French call the daily grind: subway, work, sleep. Calvin immersed himself in his new job at the American embassy, and I worked on revisions to my first novel, which I’d sold a few months before our move.
I’d written a first draft of the manuscript in Beijing, weaving together descriptions of the city’s vibrant cuisine with the story of a young American woman in China who happens to be Chinese. My agent called over the summer to tell me she had found a publisher for the book, reaching me in the midst of my French-immersion program. There I was, tucked into a jewel-box New England college campus, sworn to speak only French, sneaking off to an empty field so I could talk to her in English on my cell phone and shriek at the top of my lungs. Even now, several months later, the double happiness of publishing a book and moving to Paris made me shaky with joy and a little fearful that I didn’t deserve my good fortune.
As I soon discovered, however, the only thing better than working on a novel in Paris was not working on a novel in Paris. The streets beckoned, their morning markets bursting with late-summer produce—fruits I’d never seen before, like tiny golden plums called mirabelles and vine peaches with dusty skin and scarlet flesh. There were fromageries to visit, bakeries to discover, baguettes to sample. I wanted to shop like une vraie femme au foyer, a market basket over my arm, buying only enough groceries for one day or sometimes, it seemed, a single meal.
“Ah, non, monsieur! C’est trop! C’est trop!” cried the little old ladies at the market. They liked to nudge in front of me with an adroit maneuver of the wheeled shopping cart and bat their eyelashes at the vegetable vendor. “Juste un TOUT petit peu!” Just a LITTLE bit! “Une POIGNÉE!” A handful! “Pas TROP!” Not TOO much! “S’il vous plaît!”
I couldn’t help but wonder, what were they cooking at home? What did real French people eat? I tried to peer into their market baskets, but the contents offered few clues. Out to dinner with Didier at a local café, I sat up in my straight-backed chair when he ordered off the ardoise chalkboard menu an unfamiliar plate, something called andouillette. Five spiky letters followed the word: AAAAA.
“What is it?” I asked.
“C’est un plat typiquement français,” Didier told me as a television in the corner flashed soccer. “Une charcuterie faite d’intestins de porc.”
A traditional French sausage made from pork guts? My curiosity faded.
“Les français adorent ça!” he said with a grin. The French adore it? I was pretty sure he was teasing me.
When the food arrived, Didier’s meal looked innocent enough, a pale sausage in a creamy, mustard-grain-flecked sauce. But when he cut off a slice, I smelled it, a deep whiff that was reminiscent of the barnyard. Or a cow pasture. Or a baby’s unchanged diaper. Or one of Paris’s narrow, dog-friendly sidewalks. You catch my drift, right?
“Tu veux goûter?” Didier asked me, his fork and knife poised to offer me a chunk.
“Ça a l’air délicieux . . . Mais non, merci,” I said. He shot me a look, as if I’d shown him my inner core and it was soft like a coward’s.
Thus I was spared the hard lesson of the difference between andouillette, andouille, and the latter’s smoky, spicy Cajun cousin of the same name. I didn’t know what the letters AAAAA meant, but when I saw them on menus, I knew to steer clear. I wasn’t proud of my timid palate. I didn’t advertise it. But I wouldn’t have tucked into a big, steaming plate of offal even if threatened by a gang of knife-wielding butchers.
I could have gone on avoiding tripe sausage forever. But one day I found myself preparing dinner for a group of friends—nine omnivores and one vegan. As I devised a series of special animal-free courses, I couldn’t help but feel a little aggravated, I admit it.
“Have you ever noticed that picky eaters never think they’re especially picky?” I asked Calvin. “Cate doesn’t eat meat, fish, dairy, or soy. And yet the first words out of her mouth are always, ‘I’m not that fussy, am I?’” I thrust a tray of red peppers under the broiler. “I’m tired of people who don’t eat everything.”
“You don’t eat everything.”
“Yes I do!”
“Offal? Sweetbreads? Brains?” He raised an eyebrow. “Andouillette?”
I swallowed hard. He had me there. I started thinking. And feeling a little hypocritical. How could I describe myself as an open-minded food enthusiast—not to mention a food writer—if I refused to sample andouillette, one of France’s oldest, most traditional forms of charcuterie? After all, would Julia Child have turned her nose up at pork intestines?
“Why don’t you find out more about andouillette?” Calvin suggested. “You could take a trip.”
“By myself?” I dropped a clove of garlic, and it skittered under the stove. “I don’t think so.”
“Just a day trip? Why not?” He reached into a grocery bag and handed me a fresh head of garlic. “Who knows? You might even like the stuff.”
That is how I found myself in Troyes, a city about a hundred miles southeast of Paris, in the southern part of the Champagne region. The capital of andouillette.
* * *
Do you know what tripe is? I didn’t before I went to Troyes. It turns out it’s stomach lining, a pale, wrinkly membrane used in digestion (hence the smell). Most of the world eats tripe. It’s boiled up in spicy Chinese hot pots, chopped and stuffed into tacos, stewed with tomatoes and Pecorino Romano cheese—to name just a few of its global incarnations. If not cooked gently, it becomes tough and rubbery.
Though beef tripe is most commonly eaten—with four stomachs, cows have a lot of it to offer—tripe sausages in France are made of pork. There is andouille de Vire, smoky and chunky, which hails from Normandy. There is andouille de Guéméné, from Brittany, made of rolled sheets of tripe that form a swirling pattern when cut across the bias. But the most famous of all tripe sausage, andouillette, comes from Troyes—a twist of tripe and stomach, mixed with onions, spices, and lots of salt and stuffed into la robe, another part of the pig’s intestine.
The first thing I noticed when I entered the spotless laboratoire workroom of the charcutier, Patrick Maury, was the smell. It was muffled but persistent, an unclean whiff that pervaded the winter cold of the unheated space. The culprit sat near the large windows, a plastic bucket filled with pale pink intestines soaking in water. Other corners of the room hid gruesome surprises like sagging sacks of blood—used in the boudin noir, a type of black sausage—and bags filled to bursting with unidentifiable animal bits.
The second thing I noticed was the half a pig lying splayed on the counter like an anatomy model or a butcher’s diagram. There was the hind leg, ready to be carved off and cured into ham. There were the ribs, racked as if on the barbecue. There was the belly, soft and striped with fat just like the bacon it would become. A scooped cavity in the center indicated the spot where the intestines used to coil. “I wanted to show you where the tripe comes from in the pig,” Maury told me.
But the pig hadn’t taken up residence for my personal edification alone. It was destined to become the array of prizewinning charcuterie that Maury sells in his store: jambon, boudin blanc, boudin noir, pâté de campagne, and terrine. Like his father before him, he makes 90 percent of his own merchandise, purchasing and preparing a whole pig every Wednesday. (During my visit he changed to Tuesday to accommodate my schedule.)
A visit to Maury’s workroom was not for the faint of heart, yet being there felt also quite magical, like paying homage to an ancient and respected métier, one that is rapidly disappearing in France. I admired the accoutrements of the trade squeezed into a small space—a smoker in the corner, the commercial oven next to it, a large vat to boil andouillette, the basement’s walk-in refrigerator where sausages were hung to age. The room was a paean to frugality, with every last edible morsel found, seasoned, and sold.
To make the andouillette, first Maury plunged the tripe and stomach into scalding water to clean them. He cut each organ by hand into zigzagging strips, interconnected so that they formed one long, narrow chain. Deftly twisting the intestines together, he sprinkled them with diced onions, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and a dash of his secret blend of spices. He finished with a drizzle of Champagne, which is produced in the region, and white vinegar—both unique to his recipe. “Usually we’d leave it now to marinate for two to three hours,” he told me. But with an eye on the clock, he proceeded directly to the enrobement, grasping a piece of intestine casing and expertly sliding the twist of tripe and stomach inside. In the final step, he would simmer the sausages gently—they’re very delicate—for at least five hours in a vegetable bouillon. “They lose about a third of their mass,” he told me. “The best part is, they’re cooked for so long that all the fat just disappears.”
“What’s your favorite way to eat andouillette?” I asked.
“Grilled on the barbecue. Or with a creamy mustard sauce, topped with a slice of Chaource”—a soft cheese, similar to Brie. “Stick it under the broiler for a few minutes to melt the cheese . . . eat it with a few steamed potatoes, maybe a little choucroute . . . Et voilà. C’est très fin dans la bouche.” He looked as if he might like to polish off a plate at that very moment. “Voulez-vous en goûter un morceau maintenant?” he asked me suddenly. “I could pop an andouillette in the oven. It would be done in a second.”
I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty in the morning. I hadn’t yet drunk a sip of tea or eaten a crumb of baguette. “C’est très gentil de votre part.” My voice squeaked a little. “But maybe next time. It’s a bit early for me.”
“C’est vrai,” said Maury. Still, I thought he looked a little disappointed.
* * *
Andouillette has a pedigreed history. Louis II, known as “the Stammerer,” served it at his 878 coronation banquet, held in Troyes. Centuries later Louis XIV also declared himself an admirer, stopping at Troyes after a battle in neighboring Burgundy to stock up for the victory feast. The sausage even had the power to seduce, as discovered by the French royal army in 1560. Attempting to conquer Troyes, royal soldiers breached the city walls and spread through the narrow cobblestone streets of the Saint-Denis neighborhood, where they suddenly halted en masse, drawn to the allegedly tantalizing aroma rising from the quartier’s tripe shops. They lingered, stuffing themselves with andouillette, which gave the town’s troops time to assemble and swoop to victory in a surprise attack.
As I strolled the same narrow cobblestone streets, I couldn’t help but wonder, why Troyes? How did this charming town give birth to such a divisive delicacy? With its magnificent, flamboyant Gothic cathedral, its rows of medieval timber-frame houses decked in Easter-egg pastels, Troyes gives off an air of wealthy respectability. During the Middle Ages, the town was an important post of the Champagne fairs (named after the region, not the wine), graced by the rushing river Seine, which flows through its center. As Troyes’s market attracted people from all over Europe—with, for example, the Flemish exchanging linens for Mediterranean silks and spices—the town dished up its specialty, andouillette, to thousands of hungry travelers.
The Lemelle andouillette factory is located on the city limits, a family business started in 1973, housed in a gleaming white building in the zone industrielle. Through a window onto the factory floor, I saw enormous blue vats of boyau, pork tripe, enough raw ingredients to produce eighty thousand andouillettes a day. Workers clad in caps, rubber boots, and gloves hefted enormous trays of sausages to the boiler room, where they would simmer the links in stock for hours. The factory has 160 employees working around the clock in shifts, stopping only from Saturday afternoon to Sunday night.
In his sunny office, I asked Dominique Lemelle, who together with his brother, Benoît, owns the factory, if he could explain the letters AAAAA, which I’d often seen used to describe andouillette. An American friend had told me never to eat any with fewer than five A’s. “What do they stand for?”
“C’est l’Association Amicale des Amateurs d’Andouillette Authentique,” he said. Loosely translated, it means “the Friendly Association of Authentic Andouillette Connoisseurs,” nicknamed “5A” (pronounced cinq ah). The group, a sort of fan club, was started in the 1970s by five andouillette lovers and food critics—among them the celebrated French food writer Robert Courtine, who wrote under the pseudonym “La Reynière”—with the goal of protecting the standards of tripe sausage. Since then the club has doubled in size, meeting two or three times a year to sample andouillette from around France and award certificates of exceptional quality. “I once went to one of the tastings,” said Dominique. “It started at noon and didn’t finish until eight o’clock at night. We ate at least seven whole andouillettes, with a poached chicken in between each one to clean our palate.”
Dominique showed me his framed AAAAA certificates, illustrated with five cavorting cartoon pigs, each representing one of the association’s five founding members. “Every two to three years, the panel reviews our product,” he said. A certificate is good for two years, as long as the charcutier doesn’t change the recipe or method of production. (If necessary, a special written authorization can extend the award’s validity until the next tasting.) “The 5A defends the valor of andouillette,” said Dominique.
Though generally prized by charcutiers, the AAAAA award is not an official government mark of quality, and there are some who choose not to participate in the association’s tastings. The independent charcutier Patrick Maury is among them.
“I don’t want to be a part of that,” he told me.
“Why?” I asked, surprised. He didn’t seem shy of competition. I glanced at the shelves of his boutique, lined with dozens of trophies and medals—over seventy prizes—that Maury has won since taking over from his father in 1995. For four years in a row, the Compagnons de la Gastronomie Porcine, another gourmet appreciation society, has named his andouillette the Champion of France and Europe.
“Ninety percent of AAAAA andouillette is industrial,” he explained. “If you participate, people think your products are made in a factory. I want to stay artisanal, personal, familial. I’m protecting the authenticity of the veritable andouillette of Troyes.”
For a minute I wondered if his objections had the tinge of sour grapes. But I didn’t detect any bitterness in his voice. In fact, his argument seemed to illustrate the current state of French cuisine, which teeters between factories producing food in gross quantity and tiny, family-owned boutiques and restaurants passed from generation to generation. Being in Maury’s shop was like stepping back thirty years, to a time when supermarkets hadn’t yet spread to every French village and housewives made the daily rounds at the butcher, baker, and greengrocer. During my morning visit, Maury was doing a brisk business—on average he sells between thirteen hundred to fifteen hundred pounds of andouillette a week. Given his long hours, however, not to mention the intense amount of physical labor, and the economic reality created by cost-cutting superstores, I couldn’t help but speculate how his boutique and, indeed, the art of artisanal charcuterie, could endure another generation.
* * *
Every andouillette enthusiast I met in Troyes—and I met many—wanted to be the person who convinced me that andouillette is delicious. “A lot of people don’t want to try it because of the smell,” Dominique said to me. “The secret is in the quality of the products. If they’re fresh, there’s no smell at all.”
I definitely smelled something, though. We were in the factory’s laboratoire, and Dominique and an employee, Pascal, had just shown me their method for cutting tripe and stomach. My time had come. When Dominique offered to slice up some rounds of chilled andouillette, I knew I couldn’t avoid it any longer. “It’s easier to taste it cold,” he said. “When it’s hot, the flavor is much stronger.”
Cut horizontally, the andouillette had a marbled effect, rosy with swirls of white and dark pink. Dominique offered me the plate, and I tried to summon the enthusiasm of my andouillette-loving friends in Paris. “Eating it makes me feel connected to France,” said Guillaume, a Frenchman I met at a dinner party who had spent most of his childhood in the United States. “Like I’m part of the history and the terroir.”
“Chunky goodness—comme il faut,” said another friend, Sylvain.
With the eyes of Dominique and Pascal upon me, I bit into a slice. It tasted salty, highly spiced with pepper and nutmeg, similar to bologna. I started chewing, and the sausage squished between my teeth, at once soft yet cartilaginous, like a stretched-out rubber band. Dominique looked at me expectantly.
“C’est pas mal!” I said. And, really, the flavor was quite inoffensive. The slippery, ropy, chewy texture, however, seemed to encapsulate the very essence of tripe. I thought of the vat of intestines soaking on the factory floor and forced myself to swallow. The second bite was harder.
Dominique proffered the plate again. “Another piece?”
“Non, merci,” I said, feeling a little sheepish.
That night I met a local blogger, Céline Camoun, for dinner at Au Jardin Gourmand, a small restaurant in the town’s historic center. A friend of a friend had introduced us. “Oh, you’re going to Troyes? My sister’s best friend’s friend lives there. I’m sure she would be delighted to show you around.” And she was. Fier d’être français, et puis fier de ma région—this was a sentence I heard over and over again while traveling in France. Proud to be French, and then proud of my region.
As a Troyes local, Céline would be an andouillette enthusiast, I figured. Not so. “Je déteste ça,” she told me after we’d exchanged cheek kisses. “My mother and my cousins love it, but I can’t stand the smell.”
We installed ourselves at a table in the cozy, book-lined room. Céline had selected the restaurant because it specialized in andouillette, and indeed the menu read like an encyclopedia of the stuff, with eleven preparations, some simply grilled or panfried, others with complex cream and cheese sauces, one with a crown of foie gras.
“I think I’ll have the steak,” said Céline.
Jacques Lebois, the restaurant’s owner, approached our table. “My friend is an American. She’s researching andouillette,” Céline told him.
“Oh, I love introducing foreigners to andouillette,” said Lebois, clasping his hands and practically rubbing them together with glee. “Do you know the story of andouillette de Troyes?”
“Hmm, I don’t think so, no.” Anyway, I didn’t know his version of the story.
“During the Middle Ages,” he began, “the town was under siege and surrounded by soldiers camped outside the city walls. Eventually, when there was nothing left to eat except tripe, people started making andouillette. The soldiers were so enchanted by the smell that they declared, ‘We’ll let you out as long as we can have some of what you’re eating!’”
The three of us laughed. Behind Lebois a waiter passed carrying an armful of plates, all of them laden with fat andouillettes in a creamy sauce. The whiff was unmistakable.
“Are you ready to order?” Lebois produced a pen.
Céline ordered a steak, and then Lebois turned to me with a gleam in his eye. “May I suggest the andouillette with fromage de Chaource perhaps?” he said. “Or poached in white wine? That’s also excellent.”
“I think I’ll have . . .” They both looked at me expectantly. “The grilled salmon,” I said eventually.
“Pas d’andouillette?” cried Lebois. He turned to Céline. “She doesn’t want to order andouillette?”
“Well, she’s been tasting it all day,” Céline said kindly. “She probably doesn’t want to overdo it.”
I could tell he was thinking, Is that even possible? Nonetheless, he brought me the grilled salmon. I have to admit, I enjoyed every bite.
* * *
With andouillette conquered—or, at least tasted—what was next? Back in Paris I luxuriated in the three years that stretched before us, contemplating the feasts that still lay ahead. We would roast a poulet de Bresse, and stack Brie de Meaux against Brie de Melun, and eat a perfect omelette aux fines herbes after the cinema, and taste an array of Burgundies from young to complex, and, and, and . . .
My running list of places for us to try—restaurants, pâtisseries, chocolatiers, charcuteries, fromageries, boulangeries, cavistes—was so long that I was afraid it would crash my hard drive. And then Calvin got the call.
Chief of staff at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. It was a big assignment at an important embassy, the type of job that could make a diplomatic career. Calvin tried to remain neutral when he told me about it, but I could feel the excitement bursting from him, even despite the drawbacks, of which there were many. Danger, for one. Danger. He shrugged it off, but when I imagined my husband in a war zone, my heartbeat shot into arrhythmia. Though the embassy was in the Green Zone, encircled like a prison, it was still bombed regularly by mortar fire. Separation. Baghdad was an unaccompanied post—meaning no spouses, no children, no family. If he took the job, we would be apart from each other for a year.
Calvin, however, listed the advantages. During his year away, I would be able to stay in Paris, in our Belle Époque apartment with its white marble fireplaces and antique parquet floors and flutters of crown molding circling the ceilings. He would take three vacations from Iraq, each lasting three weeks. And after a year away, he would return to Paris. Our three-year assignment would become four.
“But didn’t we move to Paris to be together?” I crossed my arms. “After all the traveling you did last year?” During our year in Washington, Calvin had traveled for work almost two weeks a month.
“I have to be ready for service anywhere in the world. Anywhere. Even places where my family can’t go. It’s kind of like the military.” He’d repeated the words so many times I scarcely heard them anymore.
“And I’d be here alone?” Anxiety rose in my chest—for Calvin’s safety, for my own potential isolation.
“I know, it’s not ideal. But at least you’ll be in Paris.”
“It won’t be the same without you.” The words tasted bitter in my mouth.
During the day, while Calvin was at work, I wept. I understood his ambition because I had it, too, burning inside me, at times as gently warming as a nursery fire, at others as acrid as an ulcer. We both had our own career goals and dreams, but—in my mind at least—we also had an unspoken agreement that marriage and family life came first. A year apart seemed to break that agreement.
One afternoon I found myself alone in the kitchen, snipping the stems of a bunch of tulips. I reached above my head to pull a vase off a high shelf, edging it past a row of wineglasses. But the shelf was narrower than I thought, and one of the cheap glasses fell and broke with a sharp pop and tinkle of jagged shards. I pulled again at the vase, and another glass broke, shattered by my careless gesture.
According to the American Foreign Service Association (the closest thing the diplomatic corps has to a union) the foreign service’s divorce rate mirrors that of the general American population. What they don’t add is that it’s 50 percent. I mention this not because Calvin and I ever considered divorce—we didn’t—but to illustrate how naïve I was about the institution of marriage. We had been so happy, so conscientious about making big decisions together—we fought so rarely—that I thought our marriage was indestructible. Sweeping up the shards of glass, I realized that it was as delicate as anyone’s, which is to say, very.
Six months after our arrival in Paris together, my husband began to prepare for his departure. Neither of us wanted to spend a year without the other, but Calvin’s dedication to public service and—yes—his ambition helped him shoulder the hardship. As for me, I finally agreed because . . . well, because I love him. And part of that love is admiration of his civic responsibility and his ambition and his belief in diplomacy.
In the two months before he left, the light-starved days of winter grew longer and milder, artichokes and asparagus replaced leeks and chard in the market, and our moods grew darker and darker. We didn’t talk much about Calvin’s departure because talking made it too real; on the contrary, we tried hard to ignore the dwindling time, the days, then hours. But the imminence of it loomed in the shadows of every evening, in a glass of white wine poured at cocktail hour, in the golden glow of the streetlamps when we exited an afternoon movie to streets already dark and wet. Calvin bought me tulips on his way home from work; I cooked a last batch of his favorite dinner, spaghetti and meatballs, and we clung to these thoughtful gestures, to our familiar routine.
I wanted time to slow down, to stop. But suddenly it was April and we were celebrating my birthday at one of my favorite restaurants, a sleek fish bistro called Les Fables de la Fontaine, where I gazed at my plate of perfect, firm-fleshed, brown-buttery sole meunière and wondered how I’d force the food past the lump in my throat. The next morning Calvin left. And then I wept for the rest of the day.
I tried to stop—I wanted to stop—the tears were embarrassing, not to mention messy. But my eyes kept betraying me, releasing a slow leak that increased with every human interaction. Already minimally weepy as I ordered a grand crème at our local café, my tears overflowed when the kind owner, Amar, patted me on the shoulder and whispered, “Bon courage!” I cried at the doctor’s office, where the Australian receptionist urged me to keep my chin up. I cried in the stairwell of my apartment building when I ran into my downstairs neighbor, the male half of a tiny elderly couple. He paused in the middle of complaining about the water stains on his ceiling and asked if I would share a glass of wine with him and his wife from time to time.
I was making a spectacle of myself. Worse, I was confirming French stereotypes of Americans: that we’re overemotional and indecorous, indiscreet about our personal lives. I had never seen a Frenchwoman crying on the métro. Heck, I had never even seen a Frenchwoman eating on the métro. Yet there I was on the platform at École Militaire with tears cascading down my cheeks. I longed to blow my nose, but my only tissue was already sodden.
When I got home, I found our apartment empty and forlorn, echoing every sound in the building. The neighbor’s TV upstairs sounded like a furious mob; the métro below was like the deep-throated rumble of an earthquake. Though our windows shone with clear spring light, I went to every room and switched on all the lamps. The light reflected off the walls, making the voluminous, high-ceilinged rooms feel a little cozier. But the hours until dinner and bedtime stretched before me dry and uncompromising and lonely. Now that Calvin was gone, I had switched from willing the time to slow down to hoping it would race by until his return.
Desperate for distraction, I ransacked the fridge, where I saw the carcass of Sunday’s roasted bird. It went into a big pot for stock, and I found some vegetables to accompany it, taking a long time to peel and chop the carrots, onions, and celery into a careful dice. I put them in the pot with the chicken bones, added cold water, and brought everything to a boil.
Standing over the stove, I skimmed the broth and then lowered the heat so that bubbles flickered across the surface. The stock perfumed the apartment with cozy, chicken-y warmth, a scent I remembered from my childhood, when my father used to simmer a giant soup pot late into the night. It was the smell of comfort and safety, of hugs and love and classic children’s books—of home. At least for a few hours, I had managed to replace the clean, soapy smell of my husband with something almost as comforting.
Calvin and I had moved so often that I’d grown used to thinking of home as the place in the world where we lived together. But even without him, this was still my home, still a place of retreat, and I had never considered leaving it. Besides, where would I have gone? Calvin and I didn’t have a permanent address; we didn’t own any property. And though I loved my parents, I couldn’t imagine moving in with them for a year.
“Try to take advantage of being in Paris,” Calvin told me before he left. He’d said it partly, I knew, to comfort me, because he felt rotten seeing me so sad. But as I thought of him on the airplane, buckled into an aisle seat, hurtling across the sky to a country where he’d never been, I realized that his words were also the advice of someone who loved Paris and had left it many times, someone who knew the city and understood what it meant to live without it.
I stood at the window, peering through the swirled design of the wrought-iron balcony, at the cars whisking by on the boulevard Raspail. I reached out and plucked a cluster of dried petals from the bright geraniums in my window box. Sunshine flooded suddenly into the apartment, bleaching the carpets and the couch, shining on the parquet floor. Paris was still there, in all its elegant, decadent, luxurious beauty. And I was still in Paris, the city I’d dreamed about for so long.