Notre pain de ce jour

Warning: a long essay on bread ahead

Breakfast, according to the French.

I have recently discovered Meudon’s sixth artisan boulanger.  Hidden away though it may be in the rue des Marais, and small though be its size, the baguettes I bought there were better than any bread sold anywhere in Britain.  By their piping heat, I judged that they had still been in the oven when I left the house, where, on my return, I subjected them immediately to an appropriately rigorous examination which largely took the form of lunch.  With jubilation I found the quality of this new boulanger’s handiwork entirely consistent with that of the other five’s: the radiance with warm earthy gold, the dying glowings of the oven, the perfection of the patterns sculpted by the craftsman’s hand, the structural poise of the whole, the pale underbelly below, the copper-crowned ridge above, and the crust, delicate enough to crumble exquisitely under pressure, but robust enough to protect the rich mellifluous dough (la mie) within!  And the smell (the smell, dear reader!), the scent of the French field!  The scope of the written word is transcended, almost even in French.  And this is only a baguette – I have not even mentioned the other loaves, nor the croissant, nor indeed the pâtisseries, stacked on high shelves and glittering along luminous counters.

Another gratuitous croissant photo.

Kneading my bread in my bakehouse...

If you feel, as you read this, that I have become a ‘bread snob’ (well-picked words used to describe me recently!), or alternatively very hungry all of a sudden, you do either with good reason.  The purple prose above is only slightly hyperbolic (see the view from Reims here), and bread-wise I shall be at a loss on my return to G.B.  On the other hand, it must be realised that such an attitude towards bread is entirely natural by French standards.  The Englishman becomes like a child in a sweet-shop (in a bakery), but the Frenchman expects nothing less than what I have just described.  He expects several panary establishments in a single town; he expects to find them (in Paris at least) with the official website (whose existence I have discovered far too late); he expects it even to be subsidised by the state.  One of the boulangeries has recently had its entrance refurbished jointly by the town council and by the FISAC, (the Fonds d’intervention pour les services, l’artisanat et les commerces), that is, a body which offers grants to maintain the institution of the artisan.  Now of course, he must pay for this in his taxes, but the situation reflects an element of government which is peculiarly French.

Never enough gratuitous croissant photos!.

And also a gratuitous photo of a pépito

'The front of this shop has been modernised thanks to the financial support of Meudon's Town Council and the FISAC, the Service, Artisan and Business Fund.'

 St Honorius, not perhaps at his saintliest

 Those of us in Britain who eat impatiently and without thought, who deliberately pare the meal down to its essential function, who discard anything lacking immediate material reward, and who seldom eat as families, have much to learn from the French, in this and in other things, who (far from being snobbish) express their appreciation of their daily bread by making of it an art, and by merging it with culture (The poet Francis Ponge disagrees, or does he?).  The paper bags which cradle the commonplace manna prove this: they draw the client’s attention to the baker’s adherence to tradition and to craftsmanship: ‘je pétris mon pain dans mon fournil’ (‘kneading my bread in the bakehouse’), assure him that  ‘le pain, c’est la santé!’ (Bread is health!), or regale him with the tale of St Honoré’s announcement, as a boy, of his vocation to the priesthood, of the scoffing of his nurse and of her assertion that her dough-spatula would be just as likely to burst into leaf – which of course it duly did.  Sometimes they instruct him simply, ‘À déguster sans modération!’ to enjoy without moderation, an entirely superfluous suggestion.  It is all beauty, thriving miraculously even in this age, and springing not from snobbery, but from the recognition that, once given our daily bread, we are to treat it with respect.

'Did you know?  St Honorius (Honoré) is the patron saint of bakers.  When the unruly young fellow announced to his nurse that he wanted to become a priest, she was in the middle of baking her bread.  The good woman scoffed.  "You'll be a bishop when my spatula grows leaves!"  Before her astonished eyes, the spatula began to bud with greenery.'

Bonjour / bonsoir

I am surely not the only Anglophone to have agonised over this gravely important question: when does evening begin in France? In our eagerness to dispense with formalities in ordinary conversation, we English speakers have allowed 'Good evening' or the constabulary 'Evenin' all' to decline in favour of the temporally neutral 'Hello', 'Can I help?' or 'Yo wassup?'.

The French remain refined in this matter, as is to be expected. The first choice to be made upon greeting somebody is to distinguish between day bonjour and evening bonsoir (I acknowledge the exception of the informal salut). I, the hapless anglais, have watched the advent of eventide with trepidation. What if, I ask myself, in this grey area between four and seven, I have to converse with someone? What if I am obliged to begin the exchange? What if, after the exertion of making this decision, all my French vocabulary evaporates again?

It's that time of day / evening again...

I have set off with bonjour at five and received bonsoir in reply. My consequently supremely confident bonsoir at six has been met with a bemused bonjour. I wondered whether evening was determined by the illumination of the Tour Eiffel. A bonsoir in broad daylight put paid to that theory. What difficult waters grey areas are.

Then, as I sought my daily bread one day / evening, the answer was revealed. The boulangère - whose vocation is so noble that she must be right - greeted me with bonjour, and then the gentleman after me with bonsoir. This, I understood at once, thunderstruck, was the moment of truth. The time! What was the time‽ (not easy to check when laden with bread). Dear reader, I can disclose the French nation's second most closely guarded secret, after the supernatural secret ingredient of the baguette: the official time at which bonsoir replaces bonjour is fifty-seven minutes and twenty-three seconds past five o'clock. I shall go forth with a greater spring in my step.

À nous deux maintenant!

It is already the end of my first week in Paris.  Probably I ought to have known that I would not have time, nor be calm enough, to produce any prose pretentious enough for this blog's pretentious title before now! 

 It is exhausting to arrive in an unfamiliar city: bus tickets and pedestrian crossings hurl the newcomer into consternation.  He wonders what use it was looking up the French for 'anvil' when he can't ask for a filled sandwich on the top shelf.*  He makes a public nuisance of himself trying to see what everyone else does as they glide through ticket barriers, without going through himself.  He (literally) cannot get his head around looking in the right direction as he crosses the road.  However, the question mark hovering above my head is at last beginning to fade and I think I have recovered enough to record my first and raw impressions...

1. This is real! Here am I, not merely staying but living and (soon) studying in Paris!  The great slabs of parchment-coloured apartment blocks with their cast-iron balconies are real;  the broad straight corridors of the avenues penetrating through the city are real; and, outside the classroom and lecture theatre, the French language is real.                                
2. Some of what the British imagine about the French is actually true!  They really do carry baguettes down the street, for instance  (and who can blame them: heavenly manna or some other celestial panary essence falls daily from Heaven onto the shelves of a million boulangeries).  Another example is the proliferation of paperwork involved in the opening of a bank account (just in case any worldly riches come my way – one never knows!) which testifies to the famous French bureaucracy.  Motorists give the impression of making up the rules as they go along,  though I feel that Parisian driving is no more aggressive than London's for the greater reliance upon motorists’ discretion.
3. There is more graffiti in Paris than in London: a warning which drivers of pristine white vans should heed.
4. The French are not slaves to their mobile phones.  There are plenty around and in use, but in public they are no more evident than books or newspapers.
5. More people – and certainly more young people – smoke in Paris than in London. 
6. Plenty of time is taken over meals.  The sort of food which, in Britain, is beyond the powers of the average wallet and palate, is in France expected, duly received and savoured in the company of one's beloved, one's friend or one's newspaper.
7. The French language is supremely beautiful (and therefore deserves its own blog-post!).
8. There are moments of euphoria when I feel that France is better than Britain.  No!  No!  I didn’t mean that!  I think this the general effect of arriving in a foreign culture: that certain particularly noticeable novelties make the whole seem better or worse, even though it is always composed of the currents of goodness and corruption.  In the same way that turning a kaleidoscope produces a new pattern (that might be called better or worse) but does not alter its nature, the human condition is borne here in slightly different ways, in some ways better, in some ways worse, even though the human condition is invariable.

I shall write soon about Meudon, the town to the south-west of the city where I am living.  Here is a panorama of Paris from the Observatoire at the top of the town: visible are the Tour Eiffel, the Tour Montparnasse, les Invalides, the Seine and La Défense.  Eugène de Rastignac had a view like this (from the north-east) at the end of Le Père Goriot.  He too was a student unfamiliar with Parisian society (though he was also fictional): so like him I can say, ‘À nous deux maintenant!’

Click to enlarge... I Spy 20 points for each landmark.

*enclume (f).  One of these days it will come in useful, mark my words!