Alone Time Read online

  A Picnic for One in the Luxembourg Gardens

  Alternatives to the Table

  Even the simplest of picnics can be a delight. All it takes is the right state of mind and a place to settle.

  —James Beard, The Armchair James Beard

  The Marché Raspail arrives each week under the trees on an island on Boulevard Raspail.

  Colorful tarps shield long tables of olives, onions, and fish from the sun. A woman shows off straw totes from Madagascar while girls with bouquets of spring flowers call out to passersby. A seller greeted me “bonjour” and extended an arm over tubs of dates, pistachios, and macadamia nuts. In his hand, an aluminum scoop held a toasted almond from Greece on its tip. I plucked it up and placed it in my mouth. It was covered in a fine, flavorful dust of salt.

  A meal alone doesn’t have to take place at a restaurant table. Rather, it can be enjoyed while wandering a weekly market like the Raspail. It can be taken while strolling a street like rue des Martyrs in the 9th arrondissement, where sex shops have given way to cheesemongers and you can still gawk, though not at peep shows, but at pâtisserie windows with baba au rhum and Framboisine. And when it’s spring in Paris, a solitary meal can—and should—be taken in the Luxembourg Gardens.

  But first: provisions.

  To my novice eye, nearly all of the fruit stalls at the Marché Raspail looked the same. Rule #1 of market shopping: When in doubt, follow the nearest Frenchwoman. I trailed a pair in loose white blouses as they snaked through the crowd with their totes, passing stall after stall of perfectly attractive produce, all the way to the bespectacled man in the many-pocketed vest.

  His head was shorn. His sleeves were rolled. He flitted from makeshift troughs of pears, peaches, and grapes to a scale and back again, pulling bills out of his vest, jamming coins into his pockets, scooping fraises des bois and dark Starking cherries into paper sacks. It was a brisk business. I waited my turn, listening intently to the women ahead of me so as to correctly pronounce cerise and fraise.

  As the customer in front of me left, the man in the vest leaned over the bin of cherries, combing through them with bare hands and the precision and speed of a machine, snapping up the bruised berries and tossing them over his shoulder. When at last he looked at me, I opened my mouth—and became Marcel Marceau. I pointed at the cherries and little strawberries. (Rule #2 of market shopping: Learn how to say “this one”—celui-ci—and “that one”—celui-là—which allows for communication in a variety of situations.) He was unfazed and filled to the brim a couple of squat paper sacks decorated with simple drawings of fruit and the words “Passion” and “Santé,” Passion and Health.

  I paid, took the bags, and shadowed another Frenchwoman to a nearby cheese stall where she was buying glass jars of yogurt from Normandy. Each one had little stars on top arranged in the shape a green leaf, which I subsequently found out is the “Euro-leaf” symbol, used in the European Union to identify products where at least 95 percent of the agricultural ingredients are organic.

  Rule #3: Be curious. Curiosity—about a salty almond or a jar of yogurt—can turn eating into an investigation, transforming the experience of doing it alone. It then becomes about more than just satisfying an appetite. It’s an opportunity to practice a foreign language, discover where and how something is made, or simply appreciate an artful display. It’s a chance to try something new—for instance, at the chocolatier Jacques Genin you can learn that caramels aren’t necessarily plasticky cubes; they can be soft treats in flavors like blackcurrant and rhubarb—and to find out about local customs and honors like the M.O.F., Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, a title awarded by the French government to the country’s best craftsmen. Winners, like the fromager Laurent Dubois, often advertise the distinction in their windows or on their awnings, which can be handy guideposts for hungry travelers.

  Opportunities to learn about the art of eating, the art of living, are all around, like at the cheesemonger Marie-Anne Cantin on rue du Champ de Mars, where wheels of Coulommiers, Époisses, and Olivet cendré—some as big as birthday cakes—are piled on wooden blocks and risers amid bowls of wine bottles on ice, and jars of black cherry and apple jelly. I once spent a morning boulangerie-hopping, visiting previous winners of the city’s annual best baguette contest—Grand Prix de la Baguette—to find out what victory tastes like. As with a lavish meal in nineteenth-century France, the experience wasn’t strictly about eating, or stirring the senses. It was also a matter of edification, “a sincere desire to learn, to taste, to appreciate,” as Aron put it.

  I stepped up to the counter at the Marché Raspail and asked for a glass of citron (lemon) yogurt, to which the young man working there said something in French that I didn’t catch. Figuring he might be asking if I wanted a spoon, I answered oui.

  I guessed right. Rule #4: Enjoy petites victoires.

  About a seven-minute walk later, I arrived at the tall black gates of the Luxembourg Gardens. I carried Passion and Santé to the edge of a leafy promenade dappled with midmorning sun. Green metal chairs were facing every which way, like cows in a pasture. I pulled two together: one for me; one for my parcels.

  Berries peeked over the tops of each sack. They looked so beautiful in the sunlight, I thought it a kind of pity to eat them.

  The thought passed. I widened the mouth of the bags in the quiet company of strangers on their own garden chairs, some in the sun, some in the shade, reading or taking in the view on the outskirts of the action, away from the Medici fountain with its garlands of ivy, and the sunbathers ringing the pond. I tried not to eat the cherries as if they were M&Ms. I considered where they might have been before the man in the vest scooped them into the crinkly bag, what the farm they came from looked like, how the sun must have warmed them on the trees. They were so deep in color that had I posted them to Instagram, people would have assumed I used a filter.

  The Luxembourg Gardens were built for Marie de’ Medici, wife of Henri IV, to recall the Boboli Gardens of her native Florence. And there I was, inviting myself for breakfast, dragging a tiny spoon over the top of my yogurt, skimming each white layer, down into the glass jar. It was tart, tasting of a real lemon. Across the dusty lane, a man in a low-slung chair was minding a public toilet, collecting euros in a cupped hand between drags of a cigarette. The wind blew the leaves, and the sun moved this way and that. Before long I was scraping the last of the yogurt from its jar. I reached for the lid to see the name of the maker so I’d be able to find it again, and there, in pale orange letters, was my own name: Les Fromages de Stéphanie.

  Laws of probability can account for this coincidence; I hardly have an unusual name. Any delight at seeing it was likely what psychologists call implicit egotism: the tendency to prefer things—like names—associated with ourselves. Even so, it felt like a wink from the universe, a small sign in the absence of familiar touchstones that I was in the right place, that everything was as it should be.

  A friend once remarked that it’s through serendipitous encounters with objects and strangers that the world speaks to us. But we have to be listening. In fact, research by Sanda Erdelez, an information scientist at the University of Missouri, suggests that serendipity isn’t necessarily a fluke—we can create situations that are conducive to it.

  While some people look at the world through a narrow lens, others are what she calls “super-encounterers.” They describe themselves as curious, with a desire for exploration and an interest in different hobbies and subjects, qualities that Erdelez found may have helped make them prone to serendipity. Certainly, many scientists have described the role chance has played in their discoveries. The classic yellow Post-it note, for example, was born of attempts to create a strong adhesive that fell short. And its original yellow color was not part of some grand design: It was the only scrap paper that happened to be on hand.

  Super-encounterers not only get excited about encountering information, Erdelez wrote
, they may also be more sensitive than others to noticing information in their environment. Think of them as good detectives. In fact, the origins of the word “serendipity” are tied to the detective story. In 1754, when Horace Walpole, a British politician, was writing to his friend and distant cousin about his tendency to find whatever he wanted “wherever I dip for it,” he called it “Serendipity.” It was a word he said he coined after a fairy tale called “The Travels and Adventures of Three Princes of Serendip.”

  “As their Highnesses travelled,” Walpole wrote, “they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” (This was not really how the fairy tale went, but it was nonetheless Walpole’s recounting of it.) Thus the origins of the word “serendipity” lie in clues, “keen observations,” and “Sherlock Holmesian insights,” as the sociologist Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, a research associate, put it in The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, a deep dive into the word’s etymology.

  Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that my own serendipitous moments tend to happen when I’m alone, with time to indulge my curiosity. When I booked a room at the Hôtel Parc Saint Séverin, I had no idea it was on a street that was once known as the street of writers, or that there had been a solitary hermit who lived nearby and was possibly buried next door. And I might never have known had I not taken the time to go down the proverbial rabbit hole.

  Or consider the day, back when I was in Paris on the assignment for the Times, that I got turned around and wound up beside the gardens of the Musée de Cluny. It was a chilly, wet afternoon, not the sort you care to spend outdoors. But I was feeling tired and figured I’d make the most of being lost by having a look around. Along the perimeter, posters in wood shadowboxes described the garden’s features. I made my way down the path, reading each one until I reached the last and noticed something in the right-hand corner.

  It was a French detective novel, wrapped in plastic. I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching. There weren’t many people around, and the few who were there were reading, spaced out on a long wooden bench, like birds on a wire. I turned my attention back to the mysterious book. Taped to its front was a sticker, about the size of a postage stamp, of a yellow book with spindly arms and legs, speed-walking above a web address: BookCrossing.com.

  Years earlier, I had read a blurb about BookCrossing, a community of bibliophiles whose mission is to hide (“release” in BookCrosser parlance) books in “the wild” for others to find and enjoy. I thought the likelihood of ever finding one of their books was infinitesimal. But chance brought us together in a garden more than 3,600 miles from home, in a place I found by being lost.

  I looked again to my right and left, reluctant to even touch the book as I was vaguely concerned that I was being poetically framed for petty theft. But the BookCrossing sticker offered reassurance. On second thought, it was more than that: It was an invitation. I picked the book up and exited the garden down a sunken lane between low stone walls, amid ferns and gillyflowers, rejoining the strangers on the sidewalk, each going his own way.

  As I walked I occasionally glanced down appreciatively at the novel in my hands, as if I had just made off with a museum artifact. And I felt a gentle tether to the universe which, in that moment, seemed benevolent and maybe not so chaotic after all.

  The book was titled L’affaire est close, The Case Is Closed, a French translation of the British writer Patricia Wentworth’s 1937 novel. I would later learn that the heroine, Miss Maud Silver, was a single female sleuth. Like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, she was one of the first ever written. Had I been in the garden with someone, I might never have spied the book in the corner. Even if I had, a companion might have quashed my romantic ideas about serendipity. Alone, I was the narrator of my own detective story. By learning to be alert for clues in “ordinary outer life,” as the psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz put it in her section of Jung’s Man and His Symbols, “one is suddenly caught up in an exciting inner adventure.”

  Whatever the adventure, I always seemed to somehow end up in the Luxembourg Gardens, as if it exerted a gravitational pull. I would be in the neighborhood looking for a place to get coffee and find myself walking through its gates to discover a string orchestra under a canopy of trees, spectators gathered around the bandstand, lost in private thoughts, the music providing cover for their daydreams. Or I would be walking along rue Bonaparte, past the statue of a woman under the big hat, Sous le Chapeau, and realize I was only a block from the Gardens. Had I my own hat, I would have tipped it in her direction, one solo traveler to another.

  Walking alone in a city that’s not my own, I think of what Virginia Woolf wished for the women in Cambridge who came to hear her speak in 1928. “By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle,” she said, “to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep in the stream.”

  Of Oysters and Chablis

  Servings of Delight and Disappointment

  Perfectionism never quite works out.

  —Julia Child

  On warm spring evenings the sidewalks of Odéon brim with people at tables under awnings and café lights, around a grassy triangle formed by three streets that share a name: Carrefour de l’Odéon. Over here are the pink and black awnings of Le Comptoir du Relais Saint-Germain. Over there, the red café tables of Les Éditeurs. Black umbrellas sprout from the shortest street, outside Le Hibou, where diners can order sardines from Spain and grilled bread with Bordier butter.

  Almost all the rattan chairs face the grassy island, like seats at a theater in the round. Everyone can see and be seen, and the flâneur can watch “the river of life flow past him in all its splendour and majesty,” as Baudelaire put it.

  I dashed across the island to an empty chair outside Les Éditeurs beside a man with an espresso and an ashtray filled with cigarette butts. Les Éditeurs isn’t known for its food, which was just fine. I was planning to have a light dinner at Le Comptoir, or at the newer spot next door serving small plates at a stand-up bar. But first, some Chablis. And for that, Les Éditeurs was a delightful spot to roost.

  The waiter brought over little bowls of peanuts and green and black olives that I speared with a toothpick as bicycles and motorcycles whizzed by. Across the island at Le Comptoir, people were already elbow-to-elbow at round black tables; eating, gesticulating, clinking glasses, tilting their heads back in laughter. A silent movie. I fingered the throat of my wineglass, and the night descended, gentle and mild.

  When I was on the assignment for the New York Times, I had a salmon and wasabi dish at Le Comptoir that was so good I considered breaking a personal travel rule about never eating in the same place twice. From my chair across the street, I relived that meal, this time with omniscience, knowing all that would come to pass: that I would return to Paris, that I would begin dating the man who is now my husband, that I would see the tulips again.

  Before I left for that assignment, I had gone around to various friends and colleagues and assembled a makeshift guide to the city based on the places, bistros, and brasseries they enjoyed most. More than one had said to stop by Le Comptoir. Those conversations didn’t just offer ideas and boost my anticipation—they were so warm and wide-ranging that it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d never ended up boarding a plane. As my friends spoke, I could see in their eyes that they were doing their own time-traveling, returning to Paris—walking some street, standing on the doorstep of some café, Oh now, what was the name?

  Later, thousands of miles away in some brasserie where they had once dined, I thought of them. And thus they were, despite appearances to the contrary, at the table with me.

  Among the friends who have shared tables and advice are David and Susan Liederman. For them, eating alone was never fraught. David, a chef, restaurateur,
and the founder of David’s Cookies, frequently dined by himself in France in the 1960s, the golden age of three-star Michelin dining. “I decided I was going to go to every three-star restaurant I could go to, with or without companionship,” he explained. “I didn’t care. Most of the time it was without anybody. When I used to tell people I did this stuff, they didn’t believe it, because who would go to France by themselves, eat by themselves in three-star restaurants?”

  But he knew that fine dining with others could get in the way of the experience. You had to listen and talk instead of watch what was going on in the dining room, which he described as nothing short of a finely tuned theatrical production. He would sit at Troisgros in Roanne, France, observing as other customers paid no attention to the scene unfolding in front of them, from the choreography of serving the food, to what was on the plate itself. They would take a bite and then light a cigarette.

  “It made me insane,” Liederman said. “I wanted to say, ‘Open your eyes!’”

  For him, eating at Troisgros was, as he once put it, “a sort of spiritual revolution.” He recalled a meal there in 1969 after which the waiters brought around trays of pastries, cookies, puddings, and an ice cream cart. “My eyeballs were just spinning in my head watching this whole scene,” he said. When the waiters reached his table, he told the captain that he wanted to try a little bit of everything. The captain smiled, moved another table next to Liederman’s, and proceeded to set out some thirty desserts.

  “To this day,” Liederman said, “that’s one of the high points of my life.” He was in his twenties at the time but had, as the New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne wrote of him, “a notably keen sense of perception,” and went from being an appreciator to an apprentice to chef de partie at Troisgros.