98 | August• 2017
CAFÉSOCIETY
dislikes. He lets loose a stream of epi-
thets – colourful to profane – until the
rider has passed. He returns at last to
his tale, winking my way as he again
poses like a heron. His companions
look at me helplessly.
“Typical French,” one sighs.FEW THINGSare more French than
the artful interplay of voyeurism and
performance that takes place at a Pa-
risian café. People-watching is, after
all, among the most entrenched of
Parisian pastimes.
In the 1800s, as industrialisation
transformed Paris into one of the
world’s great metropolises,flânerie–
a word meaning to stroll around aim-
lessly but implying an attention to
passersby – was raised to an art form.
Flâneurssuch as novelist Honoré de
Balzac and the poet Charles Baude-
laire would promenade down the
newly constructedgrands boulevards
of Paris’s Right Bank, where broad
pavements and proliferating cafés
provided a perfect vantage point.
As a child growing up on Paris’s
Left Bank, I dreamed of living in the
19th-century Paris of flâneur writers
such as Balzac, Baudelaire and Émile
Zola. I rode my bicycle through the
warren-like streets of the city’s ninth
arrondissement, home of Zola’s cour-
tesans and Baudelaire’s degenerates,
in love with the Paris of the novels I
hadread.Thatledmetomydoctoral
studies in 19th-century French litera-
ture – and, now, back to Paris, where“U
ne place,madame?”
Seated at the café
La Bourse et la Vie
(‘your money and
your life’), his yellow braces holding
in a roll of flesh, my interrogator peers
at me through round-rimmed spec-
tacles, waves me past and turns back
towards his companions.
He is telling a story, ostensibly to
them, but he clearly wants me to hear
it, too. It’s a folktale, from the 17th-
century fabulist Jean de La Fontaine,
about a heron that refuses to eat any-
thing but the finest food. The man
spreads his arms in imitation of the
bird – nearly knocking one hapless
diner off his feet – and begins to chirp
wildly. Then he stops. He has spotted
someone he knows, driving down Rue
Vivienne.
On this balmy June afternoon, the
doors are wide open. He calls to his
friend, who brakes in front of the café.
They chat, obliviousto the motor-
ists honking around them. At last he
waves his hand. The friend drives on,
and the raconteur resumes his story-
telling.
It is only when I glimpse the paint-
ing on a nearby wall – of an almost
naked man posing, pin-up style, in
round-rimmed spectacles – that I re-
alise he is Patrice Tartard, the owner.*
Someone else now catches Tartard’s
eye, a motorcyclist riding by, chatting
on his mobile phone. This Tartard
*The current owner is Daniel Rose.