Chapter 11

All Roads Lead to the Connétable

PARIS HAS LONG BEEN a magnet for poets, writers, and musicians. La vie bohème had its origins in the narrow, cobbled streets of Saint Germain and the licentious laneways of La Butte de Montmartre. Celebrated writers including Hemingway, Joyce, Beckett, and Pound have all called Paris home at one stage or another, drawn by the city’s healthy respect for all things intellectual.

The literary heritage of Paris is so rich, it has spawned a cottage industry. Establishments all over modern-day Paris shamelessly trade on whatever tenuous link to an influential philosopher, musician, or writer they can muster. The result is a city crammed with plaques announcing that a writer once scribbled a few paragraphs in an attic here or a painter died of consumption in a garret there. Iconic places like the Café de Flore, where Jean-Paul Sartre and his missus, Simone de Beauvoir, used to smoke and think themselves to death, are able to charge seven euros for a coffee off the backs of a couple of long-dead philosophers. And the tourist hordes just cannot get enough.

And while it has a lot of competition, the grand pooh-bah of Paris’s Great Literary Heritage Cash-In is Shakespeare and Co., a tumbledown bookstore on the bank of the Seine opposite Notre Dame. Trading on a tenuous historical connection to Hemingway’s publisher, Sylvia Beach, the shop is a river-hugging, oversize dust collector in which it is nearly impossible to actually find a book, much less purchase one. So dilapidated is the interior, it probably would have been condemned years ago were it not for the legions of impressionable American teens who continue to flock there on their “big European trip” to spend a few nights sleeping for free on foam mattresses in the attic in exchange for helping out around the shop.

On the ground floor a maze of precariously piled books are arranged in a system that seems to defy all logic. The one good thing about the store, as far as I could see, is that it serves to keep the legions of tortured artists and barely postpubescent Beat poets concentrated in one tiny pocket of Paris, away from the rest of us.

I discovered that were you to stroll along the stretch of the Seine in front of the bookstore on any given Friday night during summer, you were guaranteed to be confronted by a phalanx of aspiring poets and philosophers, emoting all over the riverbank. Filling the night air with their artlessly rendered poetry and polluting the otherwise stunning scene with their bad complexions, they regularly stage riverside poetry readings, always involving bottles of cheap red wine, lots of candles, and at least one guitar for a tuneless rendition later in the evening of “No Woman, No Cry.” I learned from bitter experience that the only thing worse than listening to a preppy nineteen-year-old from Connecticut singing Bob Marley songs is listening to a preppy nineteen-year-old from Connecticut reciting his angst-ridden poetry. And it was an ordeal made all the more nauseating by the distinct impression you got from their designer bohemian wardrobes that the only real angst they had experienced in their short lives was that caused by the late arrival of Daddy’s weekly check.

Shakespeare and Co. had become more of a memorial to Paris’s famed la vie bohème than any living embodiment of it. Whatever artistic or literary credibility it might once have enjoyed had long since been replaced by the distinct aroma of upper-middle-class America—a mixture of Snapple Ice Tea, sweaty Teva sandals, and Tommy Hilfiger cologne. Indeed, the entire Left Bank long ago lost its bohemian credentials. Except for a few pockets around the Sorbonne, it has been years since anyone even resembling a bohemian has been able to afford the astronomical rents of the fifth and sixth arrondissements. La vie bohème long ago packed its tatty cardboard suitcase and moved across the river. Its new home, as I was about to happily discover, was a place called Le Connétable.

Perched as it unobtrusively was on a nondescript corner behind the Archive National in the Marais, you could easily walk past the Connétable without guessing that its front door was in fact the secret portal to the seedy underbelly of modern-day Paris. From the outside there was nothing particularly remarkable about the bar-restaurant at all. The paint was peeling, the menu in the window was faded yellow and curling at the edges, and the sign above the door was missing the C, announcing the establishment to the world as the ONNÉTABLE.

Food was served in a second-floor restaurant area. The low-slung roof featured dark rows of seriously bowed rafters, and the walls were hung with faded tapestries. The basement had been cleared out and fashioned into a performance space of sorts. Musty black curtains hung over dank stone walls. A few battered stage lights were trained on a wilting microphone stand. The ground floor played host to the main bar area, a poky space crammed with odd bits of furniture, including an upright piano and a tattered sofa. The bar, which was squashed into one corner of the tiny room, seemed to be permanently propped up by a bedraggled cast of aging regulars.

The most unspectacular of bars, the place was so unobtrusive as to be instantly forgettable. But unobtrusive was exactly what its regular patrons wanted Le Connétable to be. To them, it was a haven. They were themselves refugees from a more idealistic time, when the ubiquitous French battle cry of Liberté, egalité, fraternité actually meant something. A ragtag bunch of sixty-something artistes, they considered Le Connétable their last refuge. A welcome, reliable respite from a Paris they found too busy, too materialistic, and far too full of loud, disrespectful foreigners for their liking.

So it was much to their collective chagrin that James and I stumbled across Le Connétable. We were introduced to the place by a mutual Dutch friend, Roebyem, who, by virtue of the fact she lived above it, had come to use the restaurant as something of a canteen. James, while out on a random midweek bender with Roebyem, or “the Dutchie,” as we affectionately called her, had summoned me to Le Connétable, where they were busy polishing off a bottle of wine. I joined them, and over a few more bottles of wine, our love affair with the place was born.

The bar had been bought some ten years previously by a small blond French woman called Françoise. Now in her late fifties, Françoise had once been quite the woman about Paris, a celebrated beauty and the love interest of the late French folksinger Maurice Fanon. Fanon had been a child of the sixties, a social-protest folksinger. After hurling paving stones during the French student riots of May ’68, he had gone on to forge a mildly successful career as a singer-songwriter. At the height of his popularity Fanon was a poor man’s Serge Gainsbourg. Bob Dylan without the album sales.

Françoise had turned Le Connétable into a shrine to her late paramour. Posters of the brooding artist, his face barely discernible through the curl of smoke from an artfully poised Gitane, hung in the bar, and each night toward midnight his music would be played as a homage. Helping her run the good ship Connétable and responsible for waiting tables and tending bar were the oddest couple ever to wield a beer tap. Daniel, a hulking mass of brackishness, had jowls you could swing off, doubtless the product of too many years spent with his face in that default French hangdog expression that personifies disdain. His shoulders seemed to be constantly slouched, and his face was contorted into a perma-scowl. He seemed to detest every moment he was forced to serve at Le Connétable, resenting every customer for the inconvenience they caused him of actually having to work. His partner in service-industry crime was Marie. Preternaturally disinclined to prepare or serve drinks, Marie spent the better part of most nights leaning against the bar, smoking with an air of carefully cultivated indifference, and pointedly ignoring any requests for service. We called her Marlene, after Marlene Dietrich, because she had all of the Blue Angel’s haughty attitude but none of her warmth.

There was talk that they were a married couple, but it was scuttle-butt that owed itself to nothing more than the fact that they treated each other with barely disguised contempt. Chief among Marie and Daniel’s myriad talents was their ability to make up drink prices as they went along. The pricing structure never had any consistency, swinging from extremely reasonable to vastly overpriced according to the amount of alcohol Daniel himself had imbibed. A demi of beer that cost two euros fifty at eleven p.m. might mysteriously cost five euros eighty at three a.m. A bottle of bad red wine, whose only reliable quality was its surefire ability to cause a stinking hangover the next day, might cost fifteen euros at midnight and twenty-eight euros at five a.m.

The Posse became so enamored of Le Connétable that we adopted it as a second home, its wildly fluctuating pricing structure notwithstanding. Before long, it became the default venue where every night on the town would end. Our infiltration of the place was gradual. It was also met with a complete lack of enthusiasm by the regular patrons who had been coming to the bar for so long the barstools featured dents that perfectly matched their buttocks. Marie and Daniel—who, behind their gruff exteriors, had been revealed to be a pair of big old softies—were far more pleased to have us there. But whether that was because we brought in waves of young urban professionals who livened up the proceedings, or because each of those young urban professionals had a fat wallet whose contents they became less attached to as the night wore on, was hard to say.

Joining us most nights on this magical mystery tour to the depths of depravity was an ever-changing cast of actors, poets, singers, and musicians. The musical heritage of Le Connétable, plus the fact that in its basement it regularly hosted concerts of obscure traveling minstrels, ensured that the establishment was deeply credible among the younger Parisian thespian set.

On weekends, when the clock struck two a.m. and its license to serve alcohol technically expired, the Connétable would go into lock-down mode, drawing the curtains and lowering the shutters so as to appear closed to the outside world. It was only then, and with the bar packed to its low-slung rafters, that the real action would begin. Guitars would be pulled from cavities in the wall, violins would mysteriously appear, and the piano stool would be dragged out, signaling that the festivities were about to commence. While Daniel and Marie made little or no attempt to keep up with the steady demand for drinks, songs were sung, impromptu bouts of Beat poetry were performed, and the piano’s ivories were furiously tinkled. Smoke hung heavy in the air as mournful odes to love lost and rambunctious jigs bounced off the claustrophobic walls. Strangers made drunken eye contact before falling onto the sofa in a mad snogging frenzy. A night at the Connétable was always louche and always late.

After six months of faithful patronage, we became grudgingly accepted as locals. It became our bar of choice when all others had closed. As a mark of our respect for the place, Will finished one drunken evening at the eclectically decorated Favela Chic bar-restaurant by stealing a stuffed toy camel and offering it up to Daniel as Le Connétable mascot. Daniel immediately called it “mon chien” and gave it pride of place atop the sofa. Taking a cue from the French film Amélie, we took to kidnapping the camel whenever we went on an overseas work trip. We would then photograph it in far-flung international locations, either in front of a recognizable landmark or somewhere otherwise expanding its cultural experience. The photos were mailed back to Daniel, whereupon he would stick them on a bulletin board titled “Les Voyages de Mon Chien.”

For years afterward the wall behind the bar in Le Connétable was decorated with photos of a toy camel atop the Empire State Building, on horseback at a Denver rodeo, on a beach towel in Biarritz, dancing tango in Buenos Aires, and surfing in Bali.

But the fact that we were slotting our Connétable all-nighters in between international jaunts did little to enhance our already shaky credibility as bona-fide bohemians. We came to be known as faux bos, slumming it as bohemians into the wee small hours of a seedy Parisian night, but only insofar as it didn’t interfere with our conference call the next morning.

In subsequent years Le Connétable would find its way into the Time Out guide, and, disastrously, not long thereafter, into Eurostar magazine. Almost overnight it would be transformed from a hidden gem into an oversubscribed tourist trap.

But for the time being the Posse had found its unofficial clubhouse. And as long as the variously priced beer flowed and the bar stayed open until six a.m., our custom was assured.