Travelers' Tales Paris (40 page)

It was time to go. We stood and walked up the aisle. But as we approached the door, she was waiting...and making unmistakable eyes at Dave! I took a deep breath. Her lips puckered. His eyes bulged.

“
Un baiser
!” she demanded and pointed repeatedly at her mouth.

While I gaped ecstatically, Dave happily complied. Or tried to. At the last second, her head swiveled ninety degrees and he got a mouthful of cheek again.

Then she pressed a little lead frog into his palm. “
J'étais aussi ici en mille neuf cent cinquante et un et je me rappelle très bien de vous
,” she smiled coquettishly.

I simply couldn't believe it. Had any time elapsed at all since 1951?

“Ohhhhh
mademoiselle
,” Dave gushed. He kissed her hand and told her in his best French how very much he also remembered her.

Like Frank and Tony before me, I stepped outside to wait for my friend and to blissfully savor the fact that not a single second had passed in 27 years.

We have returned to Roger's twice since then. During our last visit in 1992, we sadly discovered that he had passed away. However, “Madame Roger” was holding down the fort nicely. No longer were they handing out lead frogs, but mademoiselle was still doling out kisses.

It is said that the world's first café opened in Istanbul (the Turks were great popularizers of coffee) in 1550. Paris got its first one in 1686, when a Sicilian named Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli opened an establishment called Le Procope on the Left Bank, on what is now the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie. It is still in existence on the same site, having closed and opened several times—reviving most recently in 1952 as a restaurant now mainly patronized by tourists, who may or may not be impressed by the fact that Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau drank on the premises.

In the 19th century, the focus of Parisian café life shifted from the Left to the Right Bank, to the gilded and chandelier-hung establishments of the Grands Boulevards—that once-elegant series of broad thoroughfares that leads from the Opéra to the Place de la République. At the same time, painters, writers, and all-purpose bohemians began to haunt the steamy cabarets of Montmartre.

The everyday corner café, or c
afé du coin
, now so emblematic of Paris, began to flourish in the city around the turn of the century, when hardy rural types from the Auvergne in central France began to set up shop in the capital to sell coal and charcoal for heating and cooking. They offered wine and strong drink to their customers along with other kinds of fuel, thus providing meeting places for ordinary Parisians who weren't interested in gilt or bohemian pursuits. The descendants of these establishments are everywhere in Paris today—scruffy generic places that supply such basic components of Parisian life as jolts of thick black
café serré
, darkly aromatic French cigarettes, stamps and lottery tickets, telephones and lavatories of dubious sanitation.

—Angela Mason, “Café Society,”
Los Angeles Times Magazine

MARCEL F. LAVENTURIER

B
EFORE REACHING
P
ARIS
, I
ESCAPED FROM
S
T
-Q
UENTIN.

The town of St-Quentin, the capital of Picardie in northern France.

The year was 1940. The German army had invaded Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. The only remaining obstacle to Hitler's total domination of Western Europe was Great Britain, a few tantalizing miles across the Channel. In the fall, the German High Command implemented the first phase of Operation Sea Lion: saturation bombing of the British seaports and the London Blitz. South of the Belgian border, north of Paris, the invasion force was readying an attack for the spring of 1941.

At the time, I was nineteen, an American student living with an uncle in Belgium. The German authorities in our small town had paid scant attention to me until September 10 when it was announced that President Roosevelt had transferred 50 American destroyers to the Royal Navy. The local commandant considered this an overt act of war for which he held me personally responsible. I was ordered to report to the Kreiskommandatur in Brussels to justify my status as a non-combatant neutral alien. There was a
complication—I carried a valid American passport and was U.S. born, but the fact that both my mother and father had been born in France made me a French citizen according to French and German laws. My other problem was that I had failed to report for conscription in the French army when I reached eighteen; this made me a deserter as well. Rather than report to the Germans to face jail or deportation, I joined the Belgian Underground.

My best friend was the leader of a small group of resisters who helped escaped allied prisoners evade the Gestapo. He controlled black market and smuggling rings which he used to finance his clandestine operations. He signed me on as a courier. For a couple of months I lived in safe houses and smuggled uncut diamonds from Antwerp across the border into France; occasionally, I served as an English interpreter. That November, the Germans changed the currency laws for the occupied countries, and our group was able to steal one million newly printed Occupation Reichmarks. The money had to be spread around to our operatives in a way that it could not be traced. As my final job for the Underground, I was given the opportunity to earn my passage back to the U.S. by smuggling part of the loot to our safe house in Paris. Up to that time the border was fairly porous, our couriers carrying false papers moved people and money back and forth regularly. What we didn't realize was that this red zone, as it came to be known, had
been placed on high alert by the Germans to prevent spying on the troop movements. Special passes from the Kreiskommandatur in Brussels were required for civilian travel. All I had was my American passport. To hide my share of the swag, 150,000 Reichmarks, I divided the bills into two bundles which I wrapped in brown paper then baked in two large loaves of peasant bread. Bread was rationed and I would not attract attention by carrying some in my luggage. When I boarded the Brussels-Paris express, I carefully selected a seat in a second class compartment closest to an exit.

The train had been chugging along for some time through the wintry countryside when it slowed down and finally stopped. I stepped out of the compartment and saw two German military policemen wearing the insignia of the “Feldengendarmerie” enter at the opposite end of the carriage. As the train started slowly, I reached for the handle on the exit door, ready to jump, but there were sentries posted every few feet along the track. The door to the rest room was at my back, I opened it and locked myself in, trapped like an animal. In a cold sweat with my pulse racing, I prayed that the police would overlook my hiding place. Soon, I heard a rap on the door. I didn't respond at first but when it persisted, louder and louder, I opened the door and two of the largest German soldiers that I had ever seen walked in; one stood in front and one in back of me.

“
Papiers
?”

I showed them my passport, they compared me to my photo then the largest one said, “
Zu schen sein passierschein?
”

“
Nicht Verstehen
,” I answered.

He smiled, “
Mitkommen
.”

They frisked me for weapons and took me back to my seat where one of them guarded me until we reached the next stop—St-Quentin. A six-man squad of soldiers waited on the platform. The policeman handed my passport to a corporal; three other prisoners joined us, then we were marched double file across the tracks, over a bridge, then right in the center of the street going uptown. Curious civilians stopped to stare at us, traffic went
around us. Soon, we stopped at a building over which flew a huge swastika flag. The troopers herded us into a room filled with frightened men and women; some were crying. They didn't make room for me so I sat on my fancy yellow leather suitcase. The corporal of the guard handed our papers to two Gestapo men who sat at the opposite end of the room. One of them came to me, motioned me off my suitcase and took it away. The smell of my terror was added to that of the other prisoners. A Gestapo seated at the table piled high with papers pointed and shouted questions at us in German. An interpreter translated his questions. I understood most of what the Gestapo was saying, but when my turn came, he pointed at me and shouted, “
Sprechen Sie Deutsch
?”

I looked blankly at him and kept silent.

The translator said, “Do you understand German?”

“Unfortunately, no. Only English and French.”

My answer sent the Gestapo into a rage, he got red in the face, started shouting louder and banging his fist on the table. He threw some papers in a folder but kept on raving and making menacing gestures.

The translator said, “He is turning you over to the judge for immediate sentencing. He says that you are a Frenchman with a fake American passport sent here to spy for the British. If it was up to him, he'd call out the firing squad and shoot you without a trial, this minute.”

The other prisoners moved away from me as if I were a leper. I began to perspire, my hands shook and my mouth and throat went dry. One of the Gestapo soldiers pushed me into the next room, past the raving maniac who was still screaming.

It served as a court room. On an elevated dais a small baldheaded, sour-faced man dressed in a black uniform sat at a large desk. He picked through my papers, looked at me with disgust and speaking in French said, “This court is tired of adjudicating cases that are not in our jurisdiction. You will be tried in a military court in Brussels. You are remanded back to Belgium.”