Paris Cafes

France is the land where dalliance is so passionately understood.
- Arnold Bennett

The primary requisite for writing about the literary life of the cafes of Paris is not a taste for wine per se but a love of literary history and a history of cafe-sitting. I was smitten by Paris twenty years ago when in my mind the city was the bohemian myth of living in a cold garret and writing on a cafe terrace facing a blazing brazier­flushed in the forehead, where lie the memory and the imagina­tion, freezing on the backside, where mere physical support rests. During the intervening years I have explored the reality of Parisian artistic life-focusing, because I am a foreigner here, on the foreign artists in this city, and falling in love with a man who
might well be French, though he was born in Berlin and reared in Manhattan. We have a pied-a.-terre on the street that divides the 6th and 7th arrondissements in this city of our estival choice. Like Waverley Root (The Food of France), that American food lover from my mother's home state of Rhode Island, we feast on the bounty of France. My brother-in-law writes from Idaho to ask if I do anything but eat. I walk between meals or sit in cafes waiting for mealtime.

! Cafe Life in Paris !

F THE FRENCH, as Henry James believed, have excelled in the art of living-in what they call1'entente de la vie-one of the most visible manifestations of this art is the cafe. Here one can sit in peace for hours, not hassled by impatient waiters or waiting customers. Here one can read and write in the morning, conduct business in the afternoon, and laugh and argue with friends at night.
Part of the pleasure and excitement of cafe life lies in the bright colors, the play of life, and the fusion of odors. Thomas Wolfe, in Of Time and the River, describes the "corrupt and sensual, subtle and obscene" intoxication of odors in Parisian cafes. He thought the melange could be described as a compact of "the smells of costly perfumes, of wine, beer, brandy, and of the acrid and nostalgic fumes of French tobacco, of roasted chestnuts, black French coffee, mysterious liquors of a hundred brilliant and intoxicating colors, and the luxurious flesh of scented women."
But the poetry and odors, the Gauloises and expresso, are not the only explanation for the centrality of the cafe in the texture of French life. Cafes provide some of the basic necessities of life: coffee, cigarettes, toilets, newspapers and telephones. Add stamps and postcards, which you find in a cafe tabac, a convenient sidewalk seat and, most essential, a comfortable environment where you will not be reminded of the hour. Contrast this to the United States, where thirst is quenched at a public drinking fountain or bustling coffee shop and where flights of fancy are brought to earth by a clock, perhaps chiming every quarter hour.

10 Literary Cafes of Paris
The cafe is closely related to, and sometimes difficult to distinguish from, the coffee house of Austria, the taverna of Greece, the club and pub of England, the bar or coffee shop of America. But it is neither a bar nor a restaurant. It is a lounging place, where one meets friends and exchanges news while having a drink or a bite of food. Cafes first appeared in Paris after tea, chocolate and coffee were introduced to the cabarets in the second half of the 17th century. The cabarets subsequently opened their windows and doors to the street, added crystal chandeliers, introduced the habit of smoking with coffee and provided leading journals to read. The first Paris cafe was probably Le Procope, opened about 1675 (it moved to its present location in 1686) by a Sicilian, who helped turn France into a coffee-drinking society.

The handful of cafes in 1675 had grown in number to 1100 by the beginning of the Revolution. In the 19th century the numbers continued to climb: 3,000 in 1825, 4,000 in 1869, until they reached a peak between the two World Wars. The great cafes of the 19th century were on the Grands Boulevards-handsome establish­ments with plate glass, gilded ceilings, blazing lights: Cafe de la Regence, Cafe de la Paix, Cafe Anglais. At the beginning of the 20th century there were many artists' cafes in Montmartre, but the trail soon led to Montparnasse and after the Second World War to St-Germain-des-Pres. By that time the numbers had begun to diminish. Although many Parisians still found restaurants afford­able, television and improved living quarters changed their eating habits. Even today, when far more Parisians eat at home, they often have their coffee at a cafe.

Cafe-sitting has a daily rhythm. Coffee and croissant at the Dome charges the batteries for a morning of writing, attending art classes, museum visiting or banking. One may meet a friend at Brasserie Lipp for lunch at 1 p. m. An afternoon of work and then the writer is at the Deux-Magots nursing an aperitif. During the early evening of bustling social activity around the St-Gerrnain­des-Pres Square, groups come and go from the table. Waverley Root called the reshuffling "intramural movement." Sometime between 8 and 9 a dinner group forms to eat at a small restaurant. Coffee ends the evening at the Closerie des Lilas. New groups form and break up all evening long; the nightcap can last for hours.

Wasted time? Certainly not. Idle time? In part. There is time to sit and contemplate, to dream and observe life. Time to plan the next story or the word order of a poem. Time to overhear a conversation or capture the rhythm of dialogue for a play. Even the noisy, crowded moments nourish art and literature, because cafes bring together artists for companionship, inspiration, influence and business. No wonder that from Rabelais to Verlaine, to Sartre and Beauvoir, writers have thrived on cafe life.

Cafes have one mask for summer, another for winter. They turn outward in summer, inward in winter. In the months of cold rain, the cafes are a warm haven. The writers gather inside or on the terraces behind glass partitions that protect them from rain and sleet and are heated by braziers. These once burned a fuel that crackled like firecrackers, glowed red hot and emitted a rather pleasant odor. Today's electric braziers still glow hot near the coats and galoshes huddled by the entrance. Cigarette smoke in a crowded cafe in winter can make you asthmatic, but everyone is far warmer than in their badly heated apartments and cold hotel rooms. Summer is heralded by the unfolding of the cafes, which spill their tables into the sidewalk. Now outdoor life begins. Faces and extended legs rotate with the sun. For Henry [ames, summer boulevards became "a long chain of cafes, each one with its little promontory of chairs and tables projecting into the sea of asphalt. These promontories are doubtless not exactly islands of the blessed, peopled though some of them may be with sirens addicted to beer, but they may help you pass a hot evening. "

In a city of apartment dwellers, the cafe has traditionally served as an extension of the apartment, as its living and family room. "As I was a teacher and hadn't much money I lived in a hotel," wrote jean-Paul Sartre, "and like all people who live in hotels I spent most of the day in cafes." French apartments are small; the social system has historically allotted 45 percent of the income for food and only 10 to 20 percent for rent. With small living areas and high heating costs, it is not surprising that the French have customarily invited guests out to eat in a restaurant and have finished the meal with coffee in a cafe.

In the same way, cafes have served as studies or offices for writers, who can eat, drink, receive friends and work all in one place. And for the price of one coffee the writer has a heated room for the day. The cafe becomes an extension of home and family, a place where one is known and welcomed. "I have the sense of being part of a family, and that protects one against depression," Simone de Beauvoir says of cafe life during the war.

Almost every French or expatriate writer and artist serves an apprenticeship in one Paris cafe or another. Simone de Beauvoir wrote upstairs in the Select. Ernest Hemingway wrote short stories in the Closerie des Lilas. Leon-Paul Fargue spent early evening and late night of every day in the cafe of his choice, first Cafe de Flore and, in the last years of his life, Cafe Francois Coppee.

An open-air cafe gives a writer a sense of the world and clears his head of library mothballs and the "smell of literature," says Anatole Broyard in the New York Times. Gertrude Stein shunned cafes, he explains with amusement, and "that may be the trouble with her work; nobody in a cafe, even for free drinks, would have sat still for all those repetitions."

One of the most memorable scenes in Ernest Hemingway's account of his Parisian years, A Moveable Feast, occurs in the first pages when he stops in a cafe in the Place St-Michel, hangs up his wet raincoat, puts his worn hat on the rack, orders a cafe au lair, takes out his notebook and pencil and writes a story set in upper Michigan. He captures the warm and friendly atmosphere (warmed further by a Martinique rum) and the inspiration of a pretty girl sitting alone by the window. She excites him and he writes on to the finish. When he looks up, she is gone. Feeling empty-as after making love, he notes-and both sad and happy to have the story finished, he orders oysters and cold white wine. He soon looses the empty feeling.