Paris Journal 2013 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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Work
commitments kept us busy all day, but by about 5:30PM, we’d had enough. It was time to go out and play in the park. I can’t imagine
a more wonderful garden than the Luxembourg.
So this weekend’s Festival of Gardens is a little uninspiring for us;
we have the Luxembourg, what more do we need? When I lived in
Ohio, I had very nice flower gardens, but I gave up on that in southwest Florida. Now, I just let the natives take over and
we hire Ray to manage it for us. We’ll
be doing the same with the 3.6 acres we just bought as well (on Sanibel
Island). Now is the time
for me to enjoy this ultra-manicured, fabulous place called Le Jardin du Luxembourg. The late
afternoon/early evening light combined with all the rain from last week made
the lawns and flowerbeds seem to glow with color. We paused to
look at a couple statues that we hadn’t noticed so much in recent years. One features the novelist Ferdinand Fabre
(1827-1898). He was known for mixing
the Occitan language with French in his works of fiction. His mother had
pressured him to go to Seminary to become a cleric like his uncle. But it didn’t take; within two years, he
left the priesthood to study in Paris.
He became a library inspector, whatever that is, in Calais. Then, finally
devoting himself to his writing, he moved back to Paris and hung out with
other artistic types. From 1853 to
1897, he wrote and published prolifically. About five days before he was to
be elected to the Académie Française,
he died. The statue
(1880) featuring Ferdinand is appropriately romantic for this romancier. In addition to a bust of Ferdinand, it includes
a shepherd and a goat, in a very Occitane setting. The sculptor was Laurent Honoré
Marqueste. We admired it for a few
minutes, and then walked on. Yet we could
not simply walk through the gardens; we had to sit a couple of times, and
just soak it all in. The gardens are a
feast for the eye. The trees even
boasted a little Fall color, but Fall color on the trees is subtle in France
– at least, in Paris it is. We sat and
gazed for so long that soon the dinner hour was approaching. Yet we’d not been to the marché yet! We needed some fine Salers or Laguiole
cheese, and certainly some mild Paris ham.
We rose and
walked. At the market, we arrived just
about an hour before closing time – just early enough to buy what we needed,
walk back to stow the food in the apartment, and leave again, this time for
the restaurant. As if the
Luxembourg Gardens hadn’t been enough beauty for the day, we’d chosen that
Art Nouveau wonder, Vagenende, for dinner. This former bouillon still has the little brass plaques
with the table numbers engraved on them.
We were seated at Table Number 1, near the front.
Although we
like the dining areas at the back in this restaurant, we realized last night
that the tables in the front are a little larger, and not so crowded
together. I think the
first time we dined at Vagenende a year or two ago, we were unfortunately
seated too close to some embarrassingly noisy Americans, and we wrongly
associated the front of the resto with “bad location.” Not so.
We joked around
with the servers a little over our preference for the menu in French rather
than English. I just said it was better
in French, meaning the entire experience of dining there was better that
way. Tom went so far as to say that it
was more clear in French. One of the
servers said the prices are ten times higher on the French menu. I laughed.
Tom was telling the truth; the menu in French is clearer to us than
their English menu. This is partly
because the translation is not so good, but also because we just know French
cuisine in French. And face it, in
English, we use French words a lot, when it comes to food. Take escargots,
for example. We don’t put “snails” on
an American menu. We use the word
“escargots.” We ate some last
night; Vagenende is a fine place to have escargots because they serve the
largest ones, from Burgundy. The
escargots at Vagenende don’t ever seem to be overcooked. The daily
special for Saturday is a cheeseburger and fries. I’m not kidding. I went with that, even knowing that the
best French cheeseburgers are not as good as the best American ones. The only exception is Cantine California,
the food truck that is to be found at the marché
on the boulevard Raspail two days a week, and at the marché on rue Saint Honoré two days per week. The proprieter, a Californian who married a
French woman, figured out that to make a good hamburger in France, you must
add fat back into the ground meat.
That’s what he does, and the results are superb. I guess
Parisian chefs are not ready to follow Cantine California’s example; maybe it
would be a sacrilege to admit that the French have bred their beef cows too
much for lean musculature. The bun is the
other part that most French chefs cannot properly manage when it comes to
hamburgers. Many of them take a brioche-like
bun and try to make that work. That’s
what Vagenende does. It is too dry,
non-chewy, and just not the right texture. Cantine
California contracts with a North African/French bakery to have the buns made
just right. Brioche-like bread simply
will not do. So my burger
was good, but not great. That’s what I
expected. The fries were very good,
and hot. There weren’t many fries, and
that’s okay with me. However, I wish
I’d had more fries to give to Tom. His
veal medallion was great, and it came with a delicious sauce. But it was accompanied by a very uninspired
little dish of pasta shells, with nothing on them but a little olive
oil. Blah. Dessert,
however, was a really good baba au rhum. As nice as it was, though, I think we both
prefer the one at Vin et Marée, which has nicer cake, nicer rum, more
raisins, and more whipped cream. What I truly
adore about Vagenende is the décor, and the quenelles. The quenelles are fantastic – rich and
huge. Just don’t plan on eating
anything else for 24 hours or so.
After dinner,
we deliberated about whether or not to walk up to Café Laurent to hear a
couple sets of live jazz. But we
decided against it, because we are so wired when we get home after a concert
that it takes us a while to unwind and get to sleep. Then we sleep late the next day, and don’t
get enough work done. Yes, even on
weekends, work rules. But what a fine
place to work. What a fine place to
write. Ferdinand Fabre had figured it
out. |
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Sculpture featuring Ferdinand Fabre, a novelist. Below, a close-up of the metal plaque in
the side of the base.
Foliage
of a Western or Pacific cedar, a North American tree, in the Luxembourg
Gardens. Not a true cedar, but a
cypress, this is unlike the cypresses of South Florida. This one is native to the west coast of the
U.S. and Canada. Trees from all over
the world are found in Parisian parks.
As
soon as these people moved on, we took their ideally situated chairs and sat
for a while.
I’d
never trim bushes like this, but doesn’t it look good here?
This
is more my style: wild and wooley.
Vagenende, on the boulevard Saint Germain. |
