Anyway, we all clasped hands and swore to be at the Balzar on October 7 to reoccupy the place. Everybody had bought some food to the meeting—I recall that Claude had brought a particularly beautiful and fragrant Cantal, a wonderful cheese—and we soon broke for some wine. I buttonholed Guy after the meeting and asked him what we could really do, what the guys, the garcons, really wanted. Did they really want us to try to buy the place? He said, We want it to stay the same. To continue doing what we’ve always done. And to serve good food—the food isn’t good enough. The food should be excellent.
This was curious, I thought. We radicals had decided that it was a red herring, so to speak, to make too much of an issue of the quality of the cooking—that wasn’t the point, we insisted grandly—yet the garcons made much of it, made more of it than anything else. Some fundamental part of their metierhood is offended by the knowledge that the cuisine is being degraded. There is a real decent impulse on their part to put down a plat on the table with real enthusiasm: You’ll enjoy this.
As I thought it over on my way home, it occurred to me that this is after all the deepest altruistic impulse that we have, food sharing being the most fundamental gesture of selflessness. I thought I was at last beginning to see the deeper motives, the real human basis of their indignation, beyond the few pennies here and there that they were losing. In the old regime they had been the tribal chieftains, the ones doing the sharing, and this more than compensated for their otherwise servile-seeming role. If they served good food, then they were practicing, if only by proxy, the primal role of the provider; if they served bad food, then they were just waiters in a restaurant. Beneath the “French” aspect of the Balzar wars—the mistrust of change that is not merely, or not merely foolishly and emptily, “nostalgic”—there was a deeper impulse, almost an instinctive one. Of course they wanted to protect their share of the service, and they wanted to keep their old working conditions. But they also were terrified of a loss of status, of being publicly shamed. To be a server at all is to dance on the edge of shame all the time. “Sale metier,” Bemelmans’s waiters famously mutter to themselves as they go in and out of the kitchen, “filthy profession,” and it is easy to understand why. Bucher was reducing them to food bearers, rather than food sharers, and it made them feel as if they were being eaten alive.
October came, and we occupied the Balzar again. The second reunion had a different feeling from the first, both gayer and angrier and more hysterical. At the first meeting the near absurdity of what we were doing had given everything an edge of comedy. Can we really be doing this? Well, -yes, we are. We are! At the second reunion things seemed tougher, rockier. There were far more of us, for one thing, and not everyone could find a seat. People were waiting outside, thronged outside, trying to come in. The Balzar wars had been mediatise as something amusing—a fronde parisienne, one of the papers had called it, a Parisian civil war. Those of us on the inside knew that the real action would take place the following day, when the gargons walked out, and we felt both anxious not to tip their hand and eager to let them know that we were with them.
Lorenzo was sublime. At the appointed hour he rose again from his seat, “We are here tonight not to make demands, not to protest, but to inquire,” he began. “We are here to inquire of M. Bucher if, though he owns the name Balzar, if anyone can purchase its spirit. Is that spirit truly for sale? Can it be bought and sold? Or can it only be protected? We are not here to criticize the cuisine or to give M. Bucher lessons in the management of his affairs. We claim no expertise in that.” Lorenzo gave a just so slightly sardonic inflection to these last words, implying that this was an expertise that one would hardly want. “But we do claim to understand the spirit of this place, the thousand tiny interchanges between the personnel and the place that have made it something more than a place where one exchanges money for food, and from which one would go elsewhere if more food could be had for less money. We are here to inquire about the nature of possession, about what it means to possess something and about who truly possesses a place: the man who owns the chairs and tables or the people who sit at those tables or those who have devoted their working lives to those tables. We want to ask: To whom belongs the Balzar? Does it belong to those who own it or to those who love it? Above all, we are here to inquire if any of us can feel at home in this place if the personnel of the Balzar do not feel at home in it. For they are the carriers of the spirit of this place. I say to the personneclass="underline" We are with you, right to the end.” The room exploded in applause.
People began to rise and make seconding speeches themselves. Many of them, I am bound to report, had a slight edge of anti-Americanism, although no American was involved in this struggle, one way or another. (Apart from me, I mean, and I was there strictly as an honorary Parisian, or Quisling.)
For instance, a man rose from one of the banquettes at the end and cried, “You must let Bucher know that this is not a small war!” Applause. “Not a little brushfire that can be put out.” More applause. “Let them know that this will not be the Gulf War!” Wild applause. “It will be Vietnam!” Madly enthused applause.
But after the meeting I went over to talk to this Danton, and he turned out to be a French-American businessman who lives in San Francisco. He gave me his card. Finally, and one by one, the waiters came out to bow, and we rose to our feet to applaud them. They looked genuinely touched, and we swore that we would not let them be betrayed.
The next day at lunch the waiters walked out. I went over to the rue des Ecoles to see what was going on and found all of them on the street, in mufti, carrying placards. Their union had put out a table, and there was a petition that you could sign to show your support for the Balzaristes. The garcons looked happy, and Jacques, a friend of Lorenzo’s, was there with a video camera, documenting the event.
Our next meeting, in late November, was the strange one. Bucher had invited a little group of us to have breakfast with him once again, and on the eve of that meeting, we decided to have a serious meeting—an assemblee generale of Les Amis du Balzar. We held it, now, as serious meetings should be held, not at the Balzar or in Mme. de Lavigne’s apartment, but in the classroom in a film school in the Twelfth Arrondissement, at nine o’clock at night. There was a pretty good turnout, considering, but now the alacrity and lightness had been lost, and the meeting had the air of, well, of a meeting. We all sat on school chairs, uncomfortably, and Claude, looking surprisingly uncomfortable too, droned on about the position of the waiter’s grievance in front of the labor court.
Then Lorenzo took over and talked about the three plans that were open to us: We could continue to mediatiser and agitate about the Balzar, but that did not seem like a promising strategy, since in the meantime Bucher could simply wear us (and the waiters) down. We could attempt to buy the Balzar from Bucher—but he would almost certainly not sell. (I do not know to this day why Lorenzo had become pessimistic about this possibility, though I am sure that he was right. Perhaps he had another conversation with Bucher when they arranged the breakfast meeting.) The third possibility was to raise enough money to, in effect, start our own Balzar—a Balzar des refuses, a real Balzar, under some other name, while Bucher’s Balzar continued its impersonation. We all looked cheerful at this possibility, though it obviously demanded an infusion of capital. But a possible site had already been located farther down the rue des Ecoles, and one of our members had long experience in the restauration… it might be done.