French Letter: Cafés are back
I am a huge fan of French cafés, which next week will throw open their doors for the first time in months. To me, there is nothing more French than sitting at a corner table in one of these rapidly disappearing establishments sipping coffee while wrestling with a densely argued opinion piece in Le Monde or Figaro. Half the pleasure consists in being distracted by the comings and goings of the waiters and other customers, who frequently look as if they could have been drawn by Toulouse Lautrec. With any luck, there will also be the small but satisfying drama of a delivery van on the street outside holding up the traffic with sublime insouciance or a motorist aggressively manoeuvring into an impossibly tight parking space.
It doesn’t have to be Paris – though it was there, surely, that the idea was born. It could equally be Nantes or Bordeaux, or Strasbourg. It could be a market town, like Morlaix in Brittany, with its outlook onto a fabulous nineteenth-century viaduct, or St Jean de Luz, in the Pays Basque, where everything, including the view, is 20 per cent more expensive. The point is that café society has a meaning in France that is different from the way in which it is understood in the UK.
Big city cafés can be busy places, especially if they are near a railway station or an obvious tourist attraction. The ones I prefer exist in the less fashionable side streets or in quiet corners hidden from view, filling up only at lunchtime or in the evenings when commuters briefly take stock of the day before heading home.
Village café’s share obvious characteristics with their city equivalents: waiter service, glasses of white wine at nine o’clock in the morning, unexplained moments of sepulchral hush. But they are also, like English pubs, community hubs, where deals are struck, friends are rubbished and gossip ripples around the counter.
It was in our local café just the other day that a friend of ours – let us call him Pascal – who keeps a menagerie of animals in his backyard, including goats, a cockatoo and a rather splendid, vainglorious peacock, and who plays the Highland bagpipes, informed me sadly that he and his American partner, a Chicagoan déraciné, had split up after 15 years together. Pascal, now retired from whatever it was he used to do, had previously been married, with a son and daughter. But one morning (or one decade, more likely), he woke up to realise he was gay and, in what was surely a first for our neck of the woods, took up with a man twenty years his junior whom he had encountered on the internet.
The new man used to work in Paris, where he was proudly employed by the luxury goods manufacturer Louis Vuitton. When he was “let go” by the company during a purge around the turn of the millennium, he was outraged and decided to leave Paris for the country in search of a new life.
That new life turned out to be Pascal, who couldn’t have been more different. It was as if Will from Will & Grace had moved in with Phil Mitchell out of Eastenders. But now, after 15 years, the American had moved on again, leaving his former partner to play a lonely pibroch on his pipes. Insofar as there was anything encouraging to be plucked from this tale of late-life abandonment, beyond its victim’s sorrowful acceptance, it was that his fellow Bretons, all now in their seventies, all wearing flat caps, were full of sympathy as if gay breakups in this most traditional corner of rural France were the most natural thing in the world.
Our local café, in which this tale unfolded, is run by a couple in their forties who returned to Brittany two years ago after working for twenty years in Pontoise, a prosperous suburb in the north of Paris. They are professionals, who know what they are about and have done much to revive the spirit of a village that has seen too many commercial closures in recent years. Lockdown hit them hard, but at each stage, as France gradually lifted its restrictions, they immediately threw themselves back into the fray and are now getting ready for the grande réouverture set for next Thursday.
I wish them luck. But as it happens, my wife and I will miss the big day. We are getting ready to head south, to Cannes, where we will stay with an old friend for a week or so, pausing in the Auvergne on the way down and in Avignon on the way back. Next, up early in July, we plan to visit Paris for the first time since November 2019. Incroyable! Normal life beckons. First, though, with the prodigal Sun returning, at last, our grass and hedges must be tackled. There is a price to be paid for everything.