Twenty Years and Counting
On the things we set in motion.
Since 1784, Le Grand Véfour has occupied the northwest corner of the Jardins du Palais Royal in Paris. The restaurant seems forever married to the phrase “venerable institution,” because if only for the roster of French luminaries—from Napoleon to Victor Hugo to Jean-Paul Sartre—who have warmed its velvet banquettes over the years. And then there’s me. One fall afternoon twenty years ago, I had my wedding dinner there.
Just weeks later, a young Savoyard chef named Guy Martin was plucked from the Hotel Château de Divonne in the tiny Lake Geneva spa town of Divonne-les-Bains to lead Le Grand Véfour into the twenty-first century. I had never met Guy Martin, but this year, at both of our two-decade marks, I wondered if there might be parallels between the life of a restaurant and the course of a marriage. So I returned to Le Grand Véfour to raise a glass to history—France’s, the restaurant’s, and my own.
I first ate at Le Grand Véfour in the summer of 1983 with a sporty count named Nicolas who squired me around Paris in a Fiat Spider, but whose diminished circumstances became obvious when the bill arrived. He was a couple hundred francs short. But what did I care who paid the check? Champagne was coursing through our veins, and the restaurant’s gilded opulence gave us the sensation that we were tucked inside a fancy chocolate box. Despite its age, Le Grand Véfour had the order and polish of something new and, for me, uncharted. Glass panels lined the dining room, along with portraits of fleshy, bare-breasted goddesses bearing peaches or colored ices—paintings 200 years old, but with hues and sentiments as fresh as that July morning. All around me, the thrill of seduction mingled with the tranquility of permanence.
The scent of tarragon wafted up from my lamb chops, and cassis ice cream added another layer of pleasure, which— along with Nicolas’s hand intermittently grazing my thigh under the table—heightened the anticipation in all my senses. The bubbly, his lips on my bare shoulder, a warm summer night—Le Grand Véfour was promise itself and the pure essence of Paris. I never forgot it.
Eight years later I was back, living in Paris and working as a journalist, traveling for stories in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. When I got engaged to Mark, an American sculptor, there seemed no question that we would forego the big to-do stateside and get married in the city we now called home. He had bought my engagement ring—a gorgeous and well-worn platinum, diamond, and sapphire band—at an upscale pawnshop on the rue de Turenne for 1,200 francs, or about $200 at the time. Our rented apartment had a fancy Marais address, but I’d spent the better part of the previous year steaming off the stained brown wallpaper that covered every inch of the place, substituting the bare light bulbs on the ceiling with fixtures from the market at Clignancourt, and hiding the prewar linoleum under carpets I bought at souks from Istanbul to Fez.
In France, no one cared where we had gone to college or what our fathers did back home. We worked hard, scraped by, consorted with journalists and artists, and weren’t on any regular family dole that propped up our lifestyle. Still, I was the youngest of four unmarried daughters, so my parents were eager to foot the bill for whatever I chose for the fifty people we planned to invite—family, a few good friends from the States and, mostly, those who comprised our life in France.
I had already lived in Paris long enough to dress the part, but some other things remained difficult for a young American woman. Like finding a wedding venue. I aimed high, but Paris was shutting me out. I inquired at what seemed like the city’s entire varsity restaurant line-up: L’Orangerie and l’Amboiserie, Taillevent and Maison Blanche. In each dining room, the gatekeeper shook his head, topped it off with a puckered expression of Gallic scorn, and sent me packing. They seemed to be telling me what I suspected: we had no business getting married in such a place. Yankee, go home.
I hadn’t dared approach Le Grand Véfour; it was considered a sanctum, impenetrable and holy, despite a perceived decline I’d read about following the recent death of its chef of thirty-six years. But one day, while getting a haircut at a salon in the Galerie Vivienne, I realized I was a stone’s throw from the restaurant.
“Your hair looks very sad,” my coiffeuse, Monique, told me flatly, referring to my brunette locks.
“Really?” I asked. Two hours later I walked out a blonde—and not a classy-looking one.
Maybe it was the hair that made me lose my guile, because something marched me straight over to Le Grand Véfour. I stopped to read the placard in memory of Colette, who had lived upstairs and who, at the end of her life, was carried down each day for lunch at her lavish personal canteen. I turned the corner on the rue de Beaujolais and walked inside, where I was greeted by an imposing woman with a spray of silk ruffles at her neck.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m getting married on September 7th at the mairie of the 3rd arrondissement, and afterwards, I would like to have my dinner here.”
To my astonishment, her face lit up.
“I’m Madame Ruggieri,” she said. “Congratulations. We would be delighted to host your celebration.”
When our wedding party arrived at Le Grand Véfour on an unusually sultry Saturday in September, waiters greeted us beneath the colonnade with flutes of pink Champagne on silver trays. At the time, the wine giant Taittinger owned the restaurant, and it had been closed for a month—officially, this was the final day of its summer hiatus, during which it had been buffed, shined, and spruced up. Tomorrow it would open to the public again, but today it was ours. With the sun pouring in and reflecting off its many mirrors, the room shimmered. A solo cellist played a Bach suite as we trickled inside.
Above the tables in Le Grand Véfour are small plaques in memoriam to those who occupied them. Mark and I sat side by side on Napoleon and Josephine’s banquette. Our lamb medallions were drizzled with basil sauce this time, and our wedding cake was topped with pulled sugar roses. The freesia and lilies that Madame Ruggieri and I had chosen for the tables were almost unnecessary, upstaged by the room itself.
“I’m your wife,” I whispered to Mark at some point during dinner. He reached around me on the banquette, grasped my hip and pulled me toward him, sensing my incredulity at the pronouncement. I wasn’t thinking about how long, or if, we’d last. I simply needed to name what I had become, as if saying the word meant I had simultaneously transformed into a more true and worthy soul. But I didn’t feel the least bit changed. Instead, I sensed I had boarded the finest and sturdiest of ships but was terrified of water, and furthermore, it was too late for me to disembark. Now, my destiny was choosing me.
“I guess that makes me your husband,” he whispered.
“Forever,” I said, and shrugged, punctuating the word with finality, rather than doubt.
“I’m sure of it,” he said, and we toasted each other, almost silently.
The dining room was brightly illuminated, but white curtains covered the lower half of the windows, blocking the view. Mark and I, my family, my friends—we were safely contained on an island in the middle of Paris. All that was visible from our table was the sky, the green tops of the linden trees, and the limestone columns that have framed the gardens for over two centuries.
Within a few weeks, after our honeymoon, I was back in Paris, sorting through gifts of crystal and china, and I read in the paper about Guy Martin, the thirty-three-year-old chef who had taken over at Le Grand Véfour. Such things made headlines in France.
Two decades later, while planning the trip to Paris to commemorate our anniversary, I remembered that news story and was stunned to learn that not only was Martin still there, but in 2010 he’d bought the restaurant outright. Whether it was fate or choice or some kind of compromise that had carried him to this point, Guy Martin—like Mark and I—had remained devoted to the decision he made all those years ago. I was intrigued. I wanted to meet him and hear what he might have to say on the subject.
As I left for Paris, I was uncertain what awaited me. I suppose I wanted to recall the promise of my wedding day, to experience anew the splendid room, and to peer back on my less-weary self with eyes that were now two decades older and two decades more married. It was a sensation I sought, an assurance that longevity, whether in a restaurant or a relationship, does not have to equal decrepitude. I wondered whether my marriage had measured up to the place where it began, or vice-versa.
I hadn’t expected to make it this far. Three years earlier, my relationship and all my beliefs had been shattered when I fell, briefly, for another man. Had the object of my obsession wished it, I would have walked across the ocean to Africa, where he lived, to start a new life with him. But he didn’t, and my heart splintered in the aftermath. Agonized, I broke down, unable to move from my bed for weeks and then months as I stared out the window and flooded my pillow with tears for another man.
I reached to Mark to rescue me, and incredibly, he did. My husband saw me as more deserving of pity—or at least compassion—than punishment and forgave me for what was certainly a betrayal, but also, in his eyes, a most human transgression. In retrospect, I chock it up to midlife and hormones and the insane need to try and stop the mirthless passage of years. We were quite roughed up by the episode, but once I emerged on the other side—alive, first of all, and stronger—there were no more doubts that we would stay together. Forget about people changing, moving apart, growing in opposite directions. For Mark, to fail would have been to acknowledge a twenty-year mistake, and he couldn’t brook such a waste of his time and judgment. Plus, we had never stopped loving each other.
But Mark and I would have to celebrate that victory—and our milestone—together, later, at home. He was stuck stateside with a pressing deadline, and besides, we were broke again and couldn’t justify two tickets to France. So I would be dining solo at Le Grand Véfour. It wasn’t at all what I’d hoped, but I was curious nonetheless and even excited, for both that transcendent realm of my six-course lunch and the fact-finding mission with Guy Martin that would accompany it.
The day before my reservation at Le Grand Véfour, I retraced the path I took on my wedding day. I visited the palatial mairie off the rue de Bretagne where, after the ceremony, the mayor of the 3rd arrondissement handed us our official livre de famille, with blank pages for up to eight kids. Had the playground across the street been there on our wedding day? If so, I never noticed. Before I had my children, now fourteen and seventeen, a sandbox and jungle gym were all but invisible to me. Now I stood near the playground trying to remember how Mark and I had traveled the meaningful distance from the mairie to Le Grand Véfour. Had a car taken us? How did my friends get there? I didn’t recall being a jittery bride, but I was surprised to have erased that detail as well.
This time I took the metro to Bourse and walked over to the gardens, where I lingered over an alfresco breakfast of café crème and a brioche. It was an April day erupting with color and heat, and I tried to imagine how the courtyard must have appeared long ago at this time of year, from up above in Colette’s salon. “The Palais-Royal stirs at once under the influence of humidity, of light filtered through soft clouds, of warmth,” she wrote. “The green mist hanging over the elms is no longer a mist, it is tomorrow’s foliage.”
After my coffee and stroll, I took the long ride back to my old neighborhood near Père Lachaise, where I was staying in a hotel. At the front desk I felt the ions shift in a blast of sensory memory; to my disbelief, standing beside me was one of my husband’s dear friends who had been a witness at our wedding. We were utterly stunned into silence and then, laughter. An Australian artist, he was living in Arles and had done the paintings in the hotel. I hadn’t seen him in eight years, and his wife had recently passed away. Mark and I weren’t able to attend her funeral service, and I still felt awful about it. We hugged, caught up on all our children, had a drink, and wondered where the time had gone.
The following day, upstairs at Le Grand Véfour, I met Guy Martin and told him about the strange coincidence and how pleased I was that my friend would be joining me for lunch. He wasn’t surprised.
“This is a magical place in a magical setting,” Martin told me. “There’s nowhere else in the world like it. When you do an important celebration here—no matter what happens down the line—it will always lead to exceptional things.”
When I walked into the restaurant, it enveloped me in the familiar. Twenty years seemed utterly insignificant—both the vestibule and dining room appeared untouched by the passing decades. But incredibly, nothing felt stale or neglected. It was there still, that gleaming lightness that made me feel like I was swimming in soda and that heady sensation of being instantly transformed into someone of consequence. As I stood on the carpet in a pool of sunlight, I nearly ached with life. The room was still shiny and alive and bursting with anticipation.
Although at first it seemed unchanged, upon closer inspection I noticed subtle nods to the present day—hidden fixtures brightened the female forms painted on the wall, and the lace curtains that once ran along the perimeter had been replaced by etched glass.
But the soul of Le Grand Véfour was still there, preserved not only in the décor but also in the traditional recipes, which Martin was constantly reinterpreting and updating. The point, he said, was to allow for the inevitability of change and to let history propel you forward rather than weigh you down. Nothing stays the same, he insisted, because nothing ever can.
“I’m growing every day,” he said. “The same goes for my cooking. It’s not a static thing. It is always in perpetual motion.”
I wondered out loud whether there was some wisdom to be gleaned here, and what I could extrapolate about life and marriage. Mark and I had survived, but I still sometimes wondered how I could wake up to the same man, every day, for the rest of my days here on earth. Martin said that in his case, the key was to remember the person he was back then and to trust the impressions that had brought him there in the first place.
“When I came here from Savoie, the Palais Royal gardens smelled like home. I couldn’t believe I was in Paris,” he said. “The first time I pushed in the door of the restaurant, I gasped. It was just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “It was a coup de coeur, like when you meet someone—you aren’t certain, but you know something happened. You just know. I knew I belonged here.”
In other words, I needed to envision the young man I’d fallen in love with and trust that I would feel the same way about him if we met today. I needed always to remind myself why it was Mark I’d chosen to marry. And I needed to recall the much younger woman I had been—the one who was never going to settle—and believe that even if I tended to be guided somewhat by passion, I also possessed a good dose of sense to harness the free will required for a sound decision.
I closed my eyes and saw Mark and me with our limbs entwined, never imagining that I could one day be middle- aged and scarred by an episode of doubt, looking to a Paris restaurateur to shine a light on my future while illuminating my past.
For twenty years, Martin had setbacks and dark times, and when Michelin took away his third star, it was his own version of the infidelity that nearly destroyed my marriage—and certainly my faith in the institution. But as guardian of Le Grand Véfour’s culinary legacy, he also led it into the twenty-first century with the same devotion that motivates those too optimistic, or hopeful, to entertain the idea of failure: hard work, flexibility, creativity, love.
“I never thought I’d be here for twenty years,” he says.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“Sometimes I’m still surprised.”
“Yes, me too,” I said.
“But as long as I feel good here, and as long as I have faith in what I do, I’ll stay,” he said. “Life is very short.”
That, I realized, could also mean, why bother? Other adventures and other paths constantly tempt every man and woman in this life, forever posing the question of whether it takes more courage to stay put or move on. After all, in marriage—and in food—twenty years is already no small achievement.
This time I sat in Jean Cocteau’s chair with my old friend, who had been here with us two decades ago. It was a strange thrill to now feel my own history in this room. The chilled bottle of pink Champagne we drank was the same kind Mark and I had served at our wedding, probably the same kind I’d shared with Nicolas, and the same I’ll drink with my husband on our fortieth anniversary. Even the food managed to be revelatory: Martin’s modern turn on Le Grand Véfour’s classic ravioli, now prepared with the finest foie gras in the land, seemed to prove that the best use of the past is to chart the course for the path ahead.
Still, I missed Mark. He had alluded to his tenacity all those years ago, and because of it, I had something to celebrate. We had weathered what for many couples would have been insurmountable. And if I could learn anything from a restaurant that had withstood centuries and wars and misfortune—and a chef who taught me that fidelity does not have to mean compromise—then we too would last forever.
I knew that just outside in the gardens, lovers kissed, babies tumbled, and a work crew trimmed the lawn, leaving the smell of cut grass. We could see none of it above the newly etched windows, just the sky over Paris—eternal, faithful, delicious.
Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist and writer whose work has appeared in many publications, including Vogue, Departures, The New York Times Magazine, Recce, Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011, Best Travel Writing 2011 and Town & Country. Her story Masha won the Solas Grand Prize Silver Award for Travel Writing in 2011. Formerly, she was a network news producer for ABC, NBC, CBS and Dow Jones. You can visit her at www.marciadesanctis.com.