Tonight, for the first time since arriving in Paris, Ashley and I felt like outsiders. We were at a friend's apartment for a party, and all of the people there were very pleasant. But all of them spoke French -- all of them, that is, except us. (Je parle un peu, as I usually sheepishly explain before retreating back to the safety of English.) Some of the English-speaking party-goers would talk to us for a while, and then get pulled in to other conversations, leaving us stranded in our little corner of the kitchen; we were almost entirely reliant on the kindness of étrangers. We both want to learn French -- we know we have to to make our Paris experience as full as possible. But having survived our first few days with only basic interactions with the natives (many of whom, not surprisingly, speak English) at our hotel, the boulangerie and pharmacie, we had heretofore managed to deftly sidestep the language barrier. Tonight we ran squarely into it.
There's no need to feel sorry for ourselves or to make any more of this than it is. We must -- and we will -- learn French. It will take a little time, but it will happen. But at times one can be tricked into thinking that one has enough in common with the French that learning the native tongue is not necessary. David Brooks could probably express this more succinctly than I'm trying to now, but if one is educated, cultured and aware, as we are, one can almost feel equally at home in the West Village as, say the West End of London or West Paris. This was illustrated for me by the fact that on Thursday two people from back home sent me an article from that day's New York Times about a store in Paris called Merci. As it happens, it's a few blocks from our hotel, and it's as great and notable as the article makes it out to be. While browsing, Ashley and I heard a few college-age Americans exclaim over the store's selection of shoes. To borrow the phrase of one of David Brooks's colleagues, the world is flat. Though at times it may be a to-die-for Christian Laboutin.
Comforting and alluring though this Paris is, it is not the complete Paris. Another way to say this is that there is La Grenouille, and there is la grenouille. The former is a restaurant in New York -- "the last great French restaurant in New York," to be exact, as the Times proclaimed a few weeks ago. It sounds wonderful. But right now I am more interested in the latter: la grenouille -- the frog -- as Ashley and I experienced her at our first meal in Paris, three days ago. Ashley sang the dish's praise in her most recent post. It was indeed exquisite. It wasn't the frogs themselves but the sauce -- brown, rich and garlickly, but with a clean finish. Ashley shared with me willingly, but after the meat was gone I found myself reaching back across the table several times to sop up the sauce with pieces of baguette. The bread, in turn, was as fresh, firm and chewy as one could ever hope to find in Paris. The meal was exalted -- not in a $95, three-course, prix-fixe sort of way, like Grenouille, but in the around-the-corner-excellence sort of way that Paris does so well. We look forward many more such revelations.
If I can, only three days in, take stock of where we are in our in terms of our French-ification (or "French-frying," as Ashley sometimes likes to say), I would say that we are right where we should be. What we lack in knowledge of the language, city and culture -- and it is much -- we make up for in willingness to learn. Tomorrow we'll head out another exploratory walk of Paris. We'll cross the Seine, wind our way through Saint-Germain and, if Ashley's map-reading skills are correct, end up at Bon Marché. As a devotee of the store, Ashley jokes that she needs no map but only her shopper's intuition to guide us. What she may not realize, but which I must seriously note here, is how truly intuitive she is. Not just about Bon Marché, but about la vie française. What I am referring to are the little flourishes that mark her as one-at-heart with the French. The way she elegantly arranged our Thursday-night dessert of Haribo candies and Fig-Newton-like cookies. The way she ties her scarf (an art that I have yet to master). The way she took one look inside the restaurant as we walked past it that first night and knew that it was where we should eat. We may not know their language yet, but the French can't take that away from her. Or me.
UPDATE: I had meant to sign this post as "The Frog Prince," but by the time I finished writing it was late Friday night, and I forgot. Then on Saturday afternoon, when we visited Bon Marché, we saw this sign. C'est moi sur le droit.
-- MBB
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