Paris
A great city
regurgitated
Jeffrey Bernard
Paris doesn't exactly spring to my mind during the winter months, when I look to see what the temperatures abroad are in my paper every day and dream about Bar- bados and Bangkok, but it certainly isn't any more uncomfortable than the freeze in London. What I missed most last week in Paris was the business of sitting outside a café and watching Madame counting money behind the bar. I was pushed, wheeled and helped on this trip by a young woman, Kate Hatch, whom the editor had landed with the task of accompanying me. I presumed that she had probably been warned against me by other journalists. She said she hadn't and I didn't know whether to believe her or not. She was and is quite lovely: quite skinny from her days as a model and rather posh, meaning not so much classy, but rather that she seems to have been very well-cared for, protected and looked after. I could be wrong. She has, after all, she told me, just written a novel she is going to call Flesh. Before we set out from Waterloo, I asked somebody who had a French accent what time the train arrived at the Gare du Nord and was told 18.26. `Ah,' I said, '11 years after Waterloo.' No one got that, so I didn't try any more jokes for the next couple of days. We travelled first class. I got onto the train via a ramp and, would you believe it, the carriage was too narrow for me to get in the wheelchair to the lavatory, although I was told there was a wheelchair access lava- tory in second class. I suspect that that bit of bungled design was a British contribu- tion to Eurostar. There may also be some- thing wrong with the English bit of the track, since the train jogs through Kent at an infuriatingly slow speed. But they did provide some free food and a vodka for me, while Kate drank champagne, of course.
I hardly noticed the tunnel, which is just a tunnel, and France was dark too when we emerged from it. The Hotel du Crillon had laid on a limo for us, in case my wheelchair wouldn't fit into an ordinary taxi, and I made the mistake of congratulating the driver on his good English. After that the man wouldn't .stop demonstrating it. Changes of geography don't improve taxi- drivers.
Kate looked to be immediately at home when we entered the Crillon, whereas I usually feel a little bit foreign in up-market establishments, especially as an Englishman being judged by the French. When the manager showed me to my room a very strange thing happened, which I have never experienced before in the two years I have been in my wheelchair. He pushed me to the bathroom to show it to me and the doorway was too narrow for me to get in. Quite crazily, in a way, I very nearly burst into tears. I can hardly explain it. It wasn't anything as daft as instant self-pity, but a very sudden and inexplicable feeling of humiliation that I have never felt since my leg took a walk in the Middlesex Hospital.
They took me to another bigger room which was all right, but I was strangely speechless for five minutes before I went downstairs to the bar to meet Suzanne Lowry, an old friend who lives and works in Paris for the Daily Telegraph. It was marvel- lous to see her again after about ten years, and she is one of the few female journalists I know without an axe to grind. She drank champagne, as did Kate, and I wondered if it went hand-in-hand for ladies when in Paris. Sadly, for I hardly ever see Suzanne these days, she had to go off to Aix something to do with Cezanne — and she left us, having recommended a restaurant for our lunch the next day.
I'd rather set my heart on a bit of French simplicity that evening, but Kate insisted we have dinner in a favourite restaurant of hers called the Arpege, another suitably posh restaurant, another limousine's drive away. A glance at the menu showed me what Nigella Lawson's reading matter must be like, even her bedside reading. Kate had another glass of champagne and I was reminded that some of the British cavalry, pursuing Napoleon from the field of Waterloo, stopped at Epernay to water their horses on champagne. I began with what seemed to be poached lobster and I followed that with some pigeon so heavily covered in sea salt that it caked in the oven. I realised how much I loathe waiters hover- ing and pouring my wine. I suppose they must have a reason, but I like to do the pouring myself.
Apart from the overdose of salt on the pigeon, it was an excellent and pleasant meal and to my relief Kate didn't seem ner- vous of me at all, but then I'd failed to live up to my reputation and so far had failed to get drunk, had not sexually harassed her, started a fight or set fire to the Crillon. When the bill came I nearly choked, but I saved it for the hotel later, where I think it was the salt and not the bill that made me throw up my share of £150-worth of dinner.
In the middle of the night, I woke up cold enough to ask room service to give me more heat and send up some tea and hot buttered toast — a snip at probably about D.O. In the morning, I realised I wasn't doing much of anything that I wanted to do. There are hard- ly any cafés or bars in that part of Paris and the equivalent in London would be some- thing like confining yourself to Grosvenor Square. Anyway, it was far too cold to be pushed along bumpy pavements by Kate. I was hardly drinking at all — I have been sick for nearly three months — and I was begin- ning to rely on the one-tea-bag pots of tea provided by room service. How odd that a nation of chefs haven't a clue how to make a decent cup of tea, but then they invented the bidet and they don't use that enough, espe- cially the women.
The best idea of the trip was Suzanne Lowry's — for us to go to the restaurant she most uses, La Sourdiere, in the rue Sour- diere just off Saint Honore. The treat there for me and, as it turned out, for Kate, was to meet up again after ten years with Patrick Marnham. We once worked together on The Spectator and also on Private Eye, and he is at once charming, witty and clever, if a trifle cagy. We had some excellent duck and Madame, the owner, was the French at their very best. After that the cold drove us back again to the Crillon and the room-service tea bag, and I was despairing of ever seeing an ordinary bar or café as I had always known them and of sampling that good old café and brasserie standby — steak, chips, green salad, wine and cheese. Although Marnham very kindly took us to lunch, for the rest of it I should simply have flushed my expenses away, for the excellent duck confit ended up joining the pigeon.
That evening we went over to Montpar- nasse and had a drink in the Café Select. I struggled to keep a glass of red wine down with the help of yet another Zantac pill, while Kate sipped a coupe de champagne. We didn't stay long, for she felt extremely uncomfortable at being ogled by an old man opposite. Not me, you understand, but a really nasty old thing; although I couldn't agree with her that he was ogling her, but just staring fixedly at her with his watery old eyes. So then we went off to La Coupole, where I had a good onion soup spoilt by a little too much bread. Back in the Crillon I asked for three tea bags in the pot, but even they were only half- infused by tepid water. It was amazing for a place that is rated an equal of two other of the best hotels in Paris. It was amazing to think that I was staying in a room that might have been called the Nigella Law- son Room. Even without seeing the bill the following morning, I still somehow managed to throw up the onion soup. The last morning, Friday, was a complete and utter waste of a quarter of the time that I spent in Paris. Kate went shopping and I was left stranded and almost screaming with frustration in my wheelchair in my room with just the Times, some tea bags and my ineffective Zantac to keep me going until midday. It was only then that Kate took me to a proper old-fashioned bar — La Tartine in the rue de Rivoli. She said that it was one of the oldest bars in Paris, and it was certainly unspoiled, with just two American couples reading the Paris equivalent of Time Out. Even in the summer, American tourists seem mad enough to spend most of their time there in the cinema.
We lingered there until it was time for lunch and our last meal. So far I had had three proper meals and been sick three times and upped the room-service tea bags to three. After all that, it seemed odd that our best meal was in the restaurant oppo- site the Gare du Nord called Terminus Nord. Any budding restaurateur in London with £1 million to spare should simply pho- tograph the interior of that restaurant dating back about 100 years, I should think — and reproduce it exactly as it is in Lon- don. At the same time he or she would do well to steal the chef, whoever he is.
Then back to the Eurostar train and its ever-so polite staff. There was a little more champagne for Kate, who I believe was warming to it by now. I managed at last to keep a drink and a snack down as we crawled again through Kent, though one man in our almost empty carriage did, how- ever, nearly manage to make me sick again by talking loudly on his wretched mobile telephone to someone in his office.
Kate kindly took me home and tucked me up, so to speak, on my sofa with a prop- erly made cup of tea, something which I never thought I'd miss so much. That was a week ago now and at last I can look at the bill from the Arpege without feeling ill. I don't know why I made all that fuss anyway. It wasn't even my money.
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