13

CODA À LA FRANÇAISE

Once in a while, a pas de deux. It is a Sunday morning in early fall when the air is crisp but Paris is gray, and Edward and I are walking up our street to the Luxembourg Gardens. It is our most common walk. Today we will pass through the Gardens, then head to a rendezvous on rue Vavin, still in the sixth arrondissement, but a fifteen-minute walk. We pass a stylish middle-aged couple—if forty still passes as middle-aged in our aging world—and hear a snippet of their conversation. “Let’s go to Régis for lunch.” It strikes me as a perfectly normal neighborhood exchange among Parisians. In that neighborhood if they had said Marco Polo, the Italian restaurant destination for Parisians rather than tourists, I would have also smiled inwardly. The remark also made me think about whether we should go to Régis for lunch.

Régis, meanwhile, was no doubt up and putting in or taking out of the oven one of his trays of apple tarts. He’d be at home somewhere on the outskirts of Paris, perhaps a little bleary-eyed after a Saturday night when he tends to stay open a little later and consume a glass or two or three with friends. No matter, in a couple of hours the entire world knows where he will be: 3 rue Montfaucon in the sixth arrondissement. And on a Sunday, he will probably arrive a bit past the opening, and the regulars—probably half of the people on a Sunday—will be awaiting his entrance and that of the tarte aux pommes.

Alain, the oyster shucker, would already be there. Where he lives and what he does outside of standing behind the bar at Régis is something of a mystery. It is just a French thing not to get into a personal conversation with the staff in shops and restaurants or almost anywhere. Even with someone like Régis, who, when he warms up, is funny, talkative, a great storyteller, and plays maître d’, the conversations are rarely directly personal, even among the most regular of regulars. When one learns something about Régis it is always gained obliquely. And of course the waitress-du-jour will be there, though she will be so busy it is not possible or appropriate to have a conversation with her beyond “trois fines de claires no. 2.” It was literally years after one of the waitresses, who was a regular for years, left that I found out she is the previously mentioned daughter of Régis’s good friend Christiane.

So, the picture and performance on that Sunday are seemingly perpetual. Sunday in Paris in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

TAKE TWO: It is a late November morning, and the sky is an unusually beautiful blue. I am walking back from the Boulevard Raspail market and take the relatively quiet rue Servandoni and come across a not-so-unusual French scene. An attractive and youngish-looking woman, probably in her early thirties, is running down the street toward me. Not quite to me, but to the man walking just ahead of me. In a free and typically Parisian fashion, she gives the man a seductive look and smile and a big kiss on each cheek and says, “I have decided we’ll have lunch at Régis.” “Super, ma biche,” the man says, using the French word for a female deer commonly used as an endearment.

Then he pulls her closer to him and initiates the longest French kiss I’ve ever seen in the streets of Paris, and I have seen people kissing on Parisian streets my entire adult life. Clearly they were éperdument amoureux (madly in love), even before heading to eat the aphrodisiac oysters. If the oysters are not an aphrodisiac, they certainly are an extremely nutritious food, and it appeared this couple would need some oysters to keep up their health and energy. The encounter also reminded me of how food and love are often integrated in a Frenchwoman’s life. This woman certainly did not give a hoot about people looking at her or what they thought. She was living in the moment.

Huîtrerie Régis lives on in a steady present tense. The oysters are the same. Will there be Belons today? The wines are the same, though mysteriously the vintages change. Will the apple tart arrive? It always does. Huîtrerie Régis is not about becoming but about being.

In one of the most famous of lines in the movie Casablanca, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) says to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman): “We’ll always have Paris.” Well, Huîtrerie Régis is Paris. Past, present, and future. It is comforting to know it exists in the moment. When I am in New York or in a far-off location, I know I can mentally slip into a seat at Régis and feel deeply, emotionally there. The culture, the people, the traditions, the oysters. Oh, the oysters! I can eat them like Hemingway and Proust. I think I’ll take a dozen spéciales de claires no. 3.

Délicieuses.