Lunch in Paris

Never in my life, not once, had anyone ever told there was something I couldn’t do, couldn’t be.

I have to keep my head about me as I place my order. First there is the gender issue; every French noun is assigned a sex, masculine or feminine. Personally, I think my croissant is a woman, as tender and fragile as a Brontë heroine. But apparently, the Académie Française, the guys who make the dictionary, have decided that “croissant” is masculine, un croissant. I have been outvoted.

It’s not that there’s no free spirit in me. But it’s a free spirit with a five-year plan.

We both felt something of our future in these walls. We went back to the B and B, spent a sleepless night in front of an Excel spreadsheet, and the next morning went back to ask if we could buy the house.
It took a year to get ourselves sorted. One of the oddest things about writing and launching Lunch in Paris has been reflecting about the past while simultaneously trying to construct our future.
We’ve only just arrived in Provence, and already we are seduced by the constant blue skies, tomatoes that taste like candy, and peaches that glow like solid sunshine. I know I’ll have some wonderful culinary mentors here. Our next-door neighbor keeps coming over with baskets of vegetables for the baby, and he just let slip that his grandmother was once the chef de cuisine for the American consulate in Nice.
So here we go. We are off on a new adventure. There’s so much to discover; I hope you’ll join us.

The year since the initial publication of Lunch in Paris has been as wild and wonderful as any I could have imagined. Gwendal and I now have a son, Augustin, who was born exactly one week after I finished editing the manuscript. He’s a beautiful, curious, clever blond boy who loves his hunk of fresh baguette in the morning—in other words, a true Frenchman!
In addition to leaping into parenthood, our family has recently made another big move—to Provence, to be exact. Our house, a turny, twisty (and for the moment, rather drafty) affair, was the wartime home of the famous French poet and Resistance leader René Char. He buried his most famous manuscript in the wine cellar, next to the preserved pork cutlets and the bottles of Bordeaux. You might say the house is haunted, in the best possible way.
My passion for Paris remains undiminished; it’s been my home for nearly a decade—the first real adult home I’ve ever had. But Gwendal and I had been looking to make some changes—refresh our personal and professional lives—and give Augustin a world of green to conquer.
We found the house by happy accident. My husband is a great admirer of René Char’s poetry, and in April 2009, when I was six months pregnant and unable to fly, we decided to take our Easter holidays in the south of France to explore the region where Char lived during the war, the landscapes and events described in his most famous poems.
When we arrived in Céreste, our English hosts were curious. They were accustomed to guests passing through for a day or two on a tour of the hilltop villages nearby—but here we were, a round and waddling woman and a frankly tired-looking man, staying for ten days. We know now, it was a date with destiny.
When our hostess learned about our special interest in René Char, she got very excited. Turns out, history was living just up the road. During the war, Char had a passionate relationship with a young woman from the village whose own husband was a prisoner of war of Germany. Char’s companion had a daughter, Mireille, who was eight years old in 1940. Now seventy-six, she had just written a book about her childhood with René Char. Would we care to meet her?
The next afternoon, we found ourselves invited for coffee in the meticulously renovated coaching inn that Mireille shared with her husband—and her mother. We looked at letters in Char’s hand, his pencil box, and his clandestine radio equipment, and we listened to Mireille’s tales of the Resistance, the Gestapo, and Char helping her with her homework by the fire. In true Provençal style, we lingered on through the afternoon: one coffee, a second, one cognac, and another. Before we left, Mireille asked Gwendal if he had any other questions. He did. Char adamantly refused to publish under the German occupation; instead, he buried his manuscripts in the cellar of Mireille’s family home. After the liberation in 1945, Char dug up the notebooks and sent them to his close friend, the author Albert Camus, in Paris. Published as Les Feuillets d’Hypnos, these poems remain Char’s masterpiece. “Where,” Gwendal asked, “was this famous hole in the floor?”
“That’s easy,” said Mireille. “We still own the house.”
The next morning, we found ourselves in the vaulted stone cellar of La Maison Pons, which had been Mireille’s family home for five generations. Gwendal and I ducked as we followed Mireille down the impossibly narrow steps at the far end of the room. She cleared away some empty wine bottles and pointed to a low wooden shelf, about a foot from the earthen floor. “That’s where Char buried his manuscript,” she said. “He came back for it after the war.”
Gwendal looked down. This is the man I love, I thought. A man who can be so visibly moved by a dent in the dirt.
“We used to store pigs down here,” continued Mireille. “In those days we ate everything. We sealed the cutlets in a layer of fat, and when you wanted one, you would dig it out.” As we were turning to leave, she stamped her foot on the packed earth floor. “My uncle René—he was Char’s driver during the war—before he died he said there might still be guns buried under here. But we never looked.”
Before we left, we went out to the garden, two large stone terraces overlooking the surrounding fields. “You can feel that your family was happy here,” I said.
“We were.” She smiled briefly. “But I am sad now. I gave this house to my daughter, thinking that she would come back to the village, but instead she wants to sell it.”

There’s a café, with chipped Art Deco mirrors and sugar cube wrappers on the floor. It serves scalding hot café crème with buttery, flaky croissants, and, on the first Sunday of the month, an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese. There is a museum to preserve the stories of the past, and a movie studio to create the dreams of the future.

Fernanda’s finely honed sweet tooth led her to a spot on the couch right next to Aunt Joyce’s chewy coconut macaroons.
When my mother walked into the kitchen with the empty coffeepot, she caught Gwendal and me smooching as I loaded the dishwasher. She smiled even as her eyes watered over. With central heating and closet space to spare, a project to keep me busy, and a family and circle of friends to keep me sane, maybe, just maybe, it would finally be OK for her to leave me here.

I felt the beginning of a new chapter. An idea for a book was taking shape in my head—the tale of an American who discovers Paris, one meal at a time. Gwendal’s small consulting company had merged with a larger firm; a few months earlier, he’d signed a deal for the first European cinema chain to go fully digital. At the far end of the table, my mother and Nicole had their heads bent together, inspecting the silver asparagus tongs, a cherished family heirloom brought over for the occasion. It had been three years since Yanig’s death; Nicole was looking to move her practice to Paris and start a new life. I’d recently thrown away my last packet of birth control pills; Gwendal and I felt ready to embark on our next adventure, a family of our own.
The Haggadah, the book used to lead the seder service during the meal, is the same one my family has used for twenty years. I held my grandfather’s leader’s book, following his neatly penciled notes in the margins (he liked to skip pages) and surprising myself as I translated easily into French as I went along. Each year my mother asked her guests to sign the inside cover. I followed her example. The names were different, but the feeling was the same: warmth, community, and a sense of home.
Everyone loved the soup

“I’ll have water,” she said, doing her best to sound casual. I raised my eyebrows in her direction as I stirred the soup. She put her finger to her lips. “It’s early days. We’re not saying anything yet.”
Fernanda, my friend the Argentinean beauty queen, walked in with a perfectly round bouquet of lilacs and roses, formally trussed and tied as only a French florist can do. She had just started dating our osteopath—only in Paris does your date get to see you naked before he asks you out. Ludovic was from a German Jewish family, and he was thrilled to have a place to go for the holiday. Axelle arrived with a snow-white orchid for our new mantelpiece. “C’est nouveau?” I said, admiring her soft gray tights, woven through with a pattern of silver threads. Oscar had called on Friday afternoon—he was in Paris for a trade show, what were we doing for dinner?—and brought the number up to lucky eighteen.

PASSOVER IS A symbolic meal; we eat parsley dipped in salt water to remember the tears of our ancestors, and charoset, a mixture of apples, nuts, and dried fruits, to remind us of the mortar that the slaves used to build Pharaoh’s cities. Meals can, and do, tell stories.

Katherine, my friend-date, arrived with her French husband in tow