THIS IS ANOTHER Paris Postcard that Barbara Wilde shared on her great Web site, L’Atelier Vert, introduced previously (on this page). I, too, love the French quincaillerie, and I’ll repeat how I also love Wilde’s postcard missives. Each one is unique, containing some wonderfully written passages. Here’s a superb one from one of her earliest postcards, “What Am I Doing Here?”: “I love to think that after I am gone, Paris will remain the same, imperceptibly absorbing the drop of my life into the river of humanity that has flowed through it for so long. The permanence of Paris comforts me.”
“VOUS désirez, madame?” I felt like rubbing my eyes. I had just walked through the door of my local hardware store, and this most professional of shopkeeper greetings had just been uttered by a pixieish nine-year-old in long braids. She regarded me through the lenses of her glasses with every bit as much aplomb as the sixty-something matron who usually minded the store. Her serious demeanor bespoke the gravity and importance of the interaction we were about to embark upon, while her courteous phrasing implied the profound respect she held for me, her customer. In short, at age nine, she already had a perfect grasp on the quintessence of the complex socioprofessional skills that comprise the Parisian shopkeeper’s art.
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 extract one of her thousands of products, the one which has been designed to take care of just my problem. She will then explain to me in a most serious and authoritative manner precisely how to use the product, admonishing against common pitfalls along the way.
Meanwhile, I’m feeling comforted because 1) I thought I was the only person dumb enough to have this problem, and it turns out I’m not; and 2) I’ve just been presented with a clear solution. When the shopkeeper looks at me to see if I want to buy the product, of course I do! I absolutely love this process of knowing that when I walk into my hardware store, my problem will be solved—kindly and professionally.
The second reason I love this store is that it meets all my imaginable needs. My store is never out of a product. Whenever I occasionally summon the courage to venture into a “superstore” (grande surface), that dehumanizingly vast acreage of mostly useless junk imported from China, and have wandered the endless aisles in my demoralizing quest—all my senses bombarded with garishness—invariably the item I’m looking for is out of stock.
So how do these small, independent wonder-stores manage to persist in Paris? The answer is simple, and yet unthinkable in the United States: superstores are not allowed to exist within the city limits. This is a measure deliberately taken to protect the diversity of the thousands of small shops that make Paris the place we love, as well as the livelihoods of all those shopkeepers. In the provinces, the effects of the superstore metastasis have been just as devastating as in the United States. It’s becoming difficult to find an old-time quincaillerie in French country towns. Sadly, village squares are often marked by the vestige of a storefront, where once—before the appearance of the local Brico Dépôt—thrived a magnificent country hardware store densely stocked with all the accoutrements of daily country life, including a smiling, knowledgeable, and courteous shopkeeper familiar to all.
Do the products at my local hardware store cost more than the mass-market junk in the grande surface? Of course they do! But I can’t even find these products in the mass-market stores, let alone find someone who will explain to me how to use them. I’m oh so happy to know that, just a three-minute walk away, I’m sure to be able to solve my latest household catastrophe, in a calm, orderly, stressless atmosphere, surrounded by interesting, quality products, and administered to in a courteous and highly personalized way by a shopkeeper I know. In short, I happily pay more to preserve this intensely human and agreeable experience of my daily life. Call it the price of civilization.
