That Wednesday I appeared in Quelin’s column in Le Monde, as a brave joyeusement americain who had introduced him to the bistro where they still know how to master the difficult art of the navarin, etc. Later on that year I even made a second appearance, at Quelin’s invitation, and under my own byline, explaining my theory about civilization and culture in France and even making a terrible French pun on the words moss and mass.
Quelin never again made fun of the friends of the Balzar, so I feel that this diplomatic negotiation had, at least, been well conducted. At the end of the lunch, though, I wasn’t just muzzy but absolutely knocked cold by the Madiran. I went back upstairs and slept for two hours.
And then it was over, all over by Christmas. One by one, the garcons each decided to take the “fat envelope” Bucher was offering them, and retire. They had to. There was nothing we could do. We walked into the Balzar one December evening, and everyone—Jean-Michel, Claude, Robert—was gone, gone for good. They had decided to take the fat envelope—just how fat it was I’m not sure, though it was said to be about a year’s salary, in addition, of course, to their pensions—and go. Only two of the old garcons remained. We had lost.
Guy, who remained, spoke to me under his breath, sadly, as we shook hands, defeated. “A handful of cherries,” he said softly. “They gave them a handful of cherries for a lifetime of work. What can I do? I want to work for a while longer.”
I felt blue. Without the regular guys it was not the same place. They had an English menu now, and they forced it on me when they heard me speak in English to Luke. I told them to take it away and bring me the proper menu. The new garcon looked haughty and insulted.
I spoke to Lorenzo and Claude on the phone that week, and everyone agreed that this was the best thing for everyone: There was no sense in allowing the personnel to hang on waiting for some quixotic scheme for a new Balzar to hatch—though, they both added quickly, hatch it might, hatch it might. We rung off.
I stopped going to the Balzar. The food was fine, I was told, and I would still send visiting Americans there. But I no longer loved it, and without Jean-Pierre welcoming us, it was not the same place. Fortunately a good cookbook had appeared—by the American Daniel Young—with a couple of Balzar recipes that I liked, and I would stay home and make them for my family on Sundays: gigot d’agneau avec flageolets and profiteroles.
Then, one night at the beginning of May, I got a call from Claude. How was Madame and the heritier? Fine, fine, how was he? Oh, it was going for him. Listen, he said, the old guys had decided to come together for a night and give a dinner of their own for the people who had helped them in their fight. They would love to have us. Could we join them? Yes, of course, I said. We wouldn’t miss it for the world. He gave me the date a couple of weeks off, at the end of May, and the address of a restaurant up in the Ninth, the Relais Beaujolais. The owner was a friend and was glad to be hosting the dinner.
By then Martha was already five months pregnant and very big, and it was a hot and humid night. It was a nice place, though, and we arrived at eight-thirty. There were two or three big tables set up, with familiar faces all around them. Everyone was there:
Claude and Guy and Lorenzo…. All the garcons of course were in plain clothes, jeans and short-sleeve shirts mostly. There was a lot of chilled Beaujolais and a dinner of piece de boeuf chasseur, roast beef in a mushroom-wine sauce.
The startling and instructive thing was that the garcons seemed, on the whole, happy, free, and content. They were genuinely philosophical, in the old-fashioned sense, about what had happened—meaning stoic but articulate. They could see their own situation against a broader background.
I sat across from Robert, one of the oldest of the old garcons, a small, mustached man in his late fifties. “A handful of cherries?” he said when I repeated, a little dolefully, Guy’s comment. “Perhaps. But a handful of cherries is better than an empty hand.” He was in a rust-colored short-sleeve shirt, and his mustache was turning white. “Anyway, it is only in moments of crisis that we find lucidity about ourselves—though only after the crisis is over. Still, that’s enough lucidity for anyone. Anyway, it is all the lucidity that life will give you. The crucial thing is that it was our choice. We made it. We chose to leave. I’m rather old to do this. The younger fellows… but it’s over, we made a good choice. And it was our choice.”
We talked about more general subjects: Corsica, the Clinton affair. “We can’t understand your society,” he said, shaking his head, “at once so violent and so puritanical, so authoritarian and so anarchist.” But of course, it turned out that he had someone, a son, in America, who was always inviting him over. He had been once and was going to go again. He liked it there.
“I love to study the problem of being,” he added abruptly, and he told a long and tragic story about one of the other personnel, a maitre d’ who had worked at the Balzar once, whose daughter, the light of his life, had committed suicide. Her father could not stop thinking of it and talking about it, all the time, his grief so deep, while he gave orders and cleaned tables. Though I knew him, in my callowness I had never sensed the tragedy of this man.
“His problem,” Robert went on gravely, “was that he could not arrive at an abstraction of himself, only at a version of me, a me in some other form. He could not see himself as he was, see himself from outside himself. He was trapped in himself from the failure to make himself into an abstraction.”
I looked up. Lorenzo was shaking hands and I could see was being urged to make a speech, a toast, but he was politely declining, smiling and shaking his head. La guerre est finie.
“That’s a formidable guy,” Robert said, nodding at Lorenzo. “Once he is wound up, ah, he can go on brilliantly, passionately. And Claude too. We were lucky to have them.”
I thought the most irritating thing about life in France, as I had described it so sapiently to the readers of Le Monde—the insistence on the primacy of the unspecific, on turning things into abstractions of themselves at every turn—was a gift. The civilization I had praised, and the culture exasperated me, and by civilization, I had meant small shops, and by culture, big buildings. In the end, though, the small shops were special in Paris because they were always in the shadow of the big buildings. Take the small shops away (and the streets the shops sit on and the quartiers that the streets sit in) and you would have nothing—not Rene Clair or Trenet and Lartigue or the whole of this great and beautiful bourgeois civilization. But take away the big buildings, with their abstract ideas and grand manner, and the special quality of the Parisian shops—of the brasseries and cafés, of the glass houses and glass domes—their quality of being the stage sets of a modern drama, something more than just shops, would go too. The lucidity of Parisian empiricism was bought at the price of the grandiosity of Parisian abstraction, and you couldn’t have one without the other, no matter how much you wanted to or how hard you tried.
We finished dinner, and I asked the owner—who had been up on a ladder most of the night, fussing with the single unworking fan that was supposed to cool off the entire salle—to call us a cab. My wife was large and easily tired. But just as the owner came to tell us that the cab had arrived, Claude at last rose and began to make a presentation to Lorenzo of a single immense, earthenware tray “A gift of friendship,” he said, “of simple friendship.”