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Writing in My Paris Cafe
by Renate Stendhal
I used to wonder, during the many years I spent in Paris, why I could not sit at my desk and gather my thoughts. There was nothing wrong with my desk. My window looked out on the Parisian sky, grey slate roofs and terra cotta chimney pots. A desk with a view. But whenever I started writing, a restlessness forced me down into the streets. My café was across from the Luxembourg Gardens, its big windows an arm´s length away from the huge old sycamores and chestnut trees of the garden. Le tout Paris – everybody, would come strolling through the cast-iron gates cross the street and settle in the café – mothers and kids, tourists, groups of well made-up old ladies, students from the nearby Sorbonne, publishers from their headquarters at St. Germain.
I would choose a table right behind the windows that were open on hot days and feel at the crossroads between nature and culture. France has always prided itself for being the “country of the center,” where the extremes of life are balanced by style, elegance, and raffiné food. Where men have permission to be feminine, and women to be masculine. Where a woman of a certain age is forever attractive to anyone younger than herself. “Paris France,” as Gertrude Stein wrote, “is peaceful and exciting.”
Whenever I return to Paris I am still drawn to this café with the lazy greenery outside and the high-strung pace inside. Waiters in black tailor-made vests and long white aprons flit about like swallows. They serve coffee in white porcelain pitchers, a small one for the espresso, a bigger one for the steamed milk, so that everyone can find the perfect balance of tastes in their cup. I watch the curls of cigarette smoke rise from every table. My thoughts begin to stretch.
I sense the connection to the expatriate writers, artists and thinkers before me, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes or Meret Oppenheim, who had their Pernod and their best ideas in a Paris café. I can´t be lonely here, the way I am at my desk. I can banter with the waiter or begin a dialogue of glances with some woman I am curious about. It´s in this very café that I met my life companion, years ago, because this American in Paris had also picked Le Rostand as her writing café whenever she passed through Paris.
I feel the centuries of French café culture – a tradition, an atmosphere, a way of life that has been honed and refined to take care of me – body and mind. In my Paris café I have entered a cultural space. I am in the middle of a thought or just drifting. A noise, a word, a sudden movement enters my mind and subtly shakes it. As in a kaleidoscope another picture appears. An idea. I start writing.
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