The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris Read online

  “Take it,” said Thierry, and she opened her mouth a little wider as he tipped in a large mouthful of just melted chocolate, warmed to creaminess, the same temperature as her body, filling her mouth. It was absolutely extraordinarily sensual and good. She was conscious, even as she tasted it, that he was, for once, silent, his eyes on her, watching her.

  At last it was gone, and she felt her tongue round her lips, looking for more. Now his voice was lower, all mischief gone.

  “You like?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Sami had come over from Algeria, I learned, at the age of six on a scholarship from a kindly great-uncle who had done well in France. He was considered the most promising and the only boy in his family and had been sent to good schools—he had seen his parents only once a year from that time forward and expected to go on to a good university. Instead, he had spent all his time pouring over fashion magazines and choosing clothes. It had been, he said, with commendable understatement for someone so flamboyant, a difficult time for everyone.

  But he had finally worked his own way through fashion college and had made it alone ever since, poorer, he said, than Job, renting this tiny eyrie so he didn’t have to commute too far and taking all his exercise, he explained, getting up and down the seven flights of stairs, something I was to learn myself only too quickly. He worked late in the evenings, but I was not to worry, as he was very difficult to wake in the mornings, a fact I discovered to be true as he snored loud enough to shake the entire flat.

  That first morning was freezing. My alarm woke me in my little white cell, and I was completely disoriented at first. Although I was exhausted—I’d fallen asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow—I felt a sudden jolt of excitement. I was here! In Paris! Alone! From the other side of the sitting room came a deep and resonant snoring that wouldn’t have allowed me to fall asleep again even if I’d wanted to. I jumped up, had a bath (there wasn’t much hot water in the tiny half-tub; I hoped it would heat up again before Sami woke up), then looked at my map of Paris—I should be right around the corner and had been ordered to present myself there at 5:30 a.m., which was clearly ridiculous and possibly just a first-day test, I told myself. It was still dark outside. I didn’t know how to work the odd stovetop coffee pot Sami had left on top of the cooker and didn’t want to start making noise before I’d been there five minutes, so I cleaned my teeth quickly, added an extra sweater, and made my way down the pitch-black stairwell, trying to make it from light switch to light switch. To my utter horror, I accidentally pressed the first floor bell again, and ran out like a wet cat before the voice started up.

  - - -

  63 rue Chanoinesse, the address of the shop, was a large white building, similar to the one I was staying in, though not quite so scruffy. Within two streets, the boulevards had widened slightly. There was a beautiful square leading to a church and smart shops and cafés under striped awnings. The sun was just starting to creep over the horizon, and people were up and about; little trucks going to markets and restaurants full of leeks and flower bulbs and lobsters; bundled-up quiet people making their way to cleaning jobs; bus drivers, yawning and stretching in their warmly lit cabs. Silent bicycles squeaked past me. On every corner was a bakery, casting a pool of light forward; the smell of warm bread was intoxicating, but alas, even they weren’t open yet. I felt like a child with my nose pressed against the window, my stomach completely hollow. I hadn’t had the energy to sort out dinner the night before and had ended up foraging old sandwiches in my luggage.

  After a couple of wrong turns, suddenly there it was in front of me. I saw it right away, then smelled it a moment later. Le Chapeau Chocolat de Thierry Girard was written on the brown-painted walls in pale rose-colored script; it wasn’t blaring, shouting out about the shop. It was a gentle note that they were there, almost easy to overlook and more impressive for that in its confidence. Outside stood a young man smoking a cigarette. As I watched, another, larger man came up to him and gesticulated at him, and as if in response, the younger man threw his cigarette into the gutter. I wasn’t fluent enough to divine whether the older man was telling him off about his smoking or he just moved his arms a lot. They turned to go when I stepped onto the cobbles tentatively and caught their attention.

  “Uh, bonjour?” I said. I wondered which of them was the famous Thierry Girard. It couldn’t be the young one, surely.

  The two men stared at me. Then they looked at each other, and the younger one clasped his hand to his forehead. I didn’t need much French to know what that meant. That meant “I have completely forgotten that you were coming today” in every language in the world.

  “J’arrive…d’Angleterre”—I’ve come from England, I stuttered.

  “Oui oui oui oui,” said the little one, looking furious with himself. The larger one let loose a stream of invective at the younger one, which the younger one totally ignored. He had wild, romping, curly, black gypsy hair, a huge nose, and an intense expression and was looking longingly at his discarded cigarette.

  Finally, his expressive face seemed to decide something.

  “WELCOME,” he said loudly in English. “Benoît, voici…”

  He pointed his arm toward me, clearly without a clue as to what I was called. This was beginning to feel like something of a theme.

  “I’m Anna…Anna Trent,” I said.

  The larger man looked mutinous. He had the build of a rugby player, solid and wide.

  “AnNA Tron,” he said crossly. “Bonjour, madame.”

  And he turned and stomped into the shop. The younger one didn’t seem to see anything strange or rude about this at all. In fact, he smiled cheerfully.

  “He doesn’t say much,” he said. He glanced back toward the shop. “I believe that may be it for today.”

  “Vous êtes…Thierry?”—are you Thierry? I asked tentatively. At this he laughed, revealing very white teeth.

  “Non non non. Je ne suis pas Thierry. I am Frédéric. MUCH more handsome.” He looked at the pavement. “So, AnNA Tron, shall we see if we have some things for you to do?”

  “Did you forget I was coming?”

  “Non non non. Yes. Yes, I did do that.”

  He looked up at me with a charming smile. “You understand…many things happen…many nights…I cannot remember all lovely girls.”

  Even though it wasn’t even 6:00 a.m. and I knew for a fact I looked like death, and he looked a little peaky himself and had no clue what I was doing there, I was absolutely impressed by the fact that he still felt a bit duty-bound to chat me up. Not seriously or intently, just as if he was passing by. I wasn’t tempted but I was quite impressed.

  From the outside, the shop looked like nothing at all, a tiny, discreet storefront leading to a selling space the size of somebody’s front room. At the moment, it was empty, just glass display cases polished clear, standing to attention. The streetlights outside cast an orange glow from their wrought iron posts through the front windows, and I could make out an old polished wooden floor and shelving filled with boxes behind the cabinets. Over everything lay a layer of scent, a heavy deep smell of dark, dense chocolate, thick as tobacco smoke. It was as if it were rubbed into the wood, used as varnish on the floor, as if the whole building were steeped in it. I wondered how long I would notice it for; it was almost intoxicating, even in the empty room.

  Frédéric had already threaded past to a small door set in the back wall. It had a swing door and a half round window, like an old-fashioned restaurant kitchen. I tried not to let the door hit me on the rebound.

  “’Ere we are!” said Frédéric. “Willy Wonka existe!”

  I smiled at him, but it was true. I had never seen such an odd room in my entire life. It wasn’t a room at all, in fact. Back at Braders, everything was done in large industrial stainless steel vats, something that never failed to disappoint every child I had ever met. (Well, either that or th
ey refused to believe me.) But here, the tiny front room of the shop widened out considerably to form a large glassed-in back warehouse, not unlike a huge greenhouse. It was peeling and very old and must have been built in what at one time would have been a garden for the bâtiment, the building. It was wood-framed and rickety, but I could feel a humming in the air of an ionizer; the space was perfectly controlled for temperature and humidity. Frédéric nodded toward a large industrial sink by the door and I quickly washed my hands with antibacterial gel.

  The room was lit warmly with lamps, not fluorescent lights. At the back, window boxes of fresh herbs lined the sill: rosemary, lavender, mint, and a small chili pepper tree. It made the room feel even more like a greenhouse. Beans were ground in the large brass machines that looked like coffee grinders. Three large copper pots—dark, milk, and white, I assumed—stood in the middle of the room, but there were a whole load of burners, test tubes, ovens, pipes, and utensils that I had simply never seen before in my life. It smelled like heaven but looked like a mad gardener’s shed.

  There was no chocolate to be seen. Not a drop anywhere. The copper pots were empty, the arms not turning. The smell hung heavy in the air, but apart from that, the place could have been a museum. Frédéric approached, holding a tiny cup filled with sticky black coffee which I accepted gratefully, choking it down.

  “The elves come,” he said, smiling at my obvious shock. “Oh yes. For Thierry Girard, we start anew every day.”

  An unpleasant thought struck me suddenly.

  “You scrub everything out? Every day?”

  Frédéric nodded solemnly.

  “…and now I’m here.”

  Frédéric’s impish face turned solemn all of a sudden. He nodded. I realized then that I hadn’t thought too much about the actual “work” part, just the “getting away” part. In my old job, I’d advised on flavorings, worked on quality control, carried a clipboard. And I supposed I had allowed myself a little fantasy—of aiding and perhaps even inspiring the greatest chocolatier of his generation, of fluently swapping tips and ideas with his customers, of perhaps even coming up with my own brilliant new recipes, capturing the heart of the famous store…

  I wondered gloomily what the French was for “rubber gloves.”

  “Eet is a great experience and privilege,” said Frédéric gravely.

  “Is that what they told you when you started?” I said.

  “Oui,” said Frédéric, clearly not in the least sorry. He looked like a freed sprite. He looked at my hands. “I would not spend too much money on le mani, non?”

  It was true; I had gotten my hands done specially for coming. In a French polish, on purpose. Seeing it now made me want to bite them off.

  “But that is just one of many, many interesting things you will be doing through the day,” said Frédéric, raising his eyebrows. “Come, I will show you.”

  And I couldn’t deny it; it was interesting. It had never even occurred to me that chocolate was something that needed to be eaten fresh. Indeed, one of its great benefits was that it could be stored, could travel. It wasn’t like milk or eggs.

  “Thierry would describe it to you,” said Frédéric, “but he does not like to talk to us leetle people so much. He likes everybody to think he is a genius inventor like the Wizard of Oz who does not need us leetle ants who scurry in his house. So I, Frédéric, shall tell you.”

  He took me to the back of the workshop and started grinding the first of the large green cocoa beans.

  “Fresh chocolate is of the utmost importance,” he said, as if reciting from a script. “For with the freshness, you get lightness, and churn, and a delicacy that does not come from a huge slab that sits on the shelf for three months, getting heavier and heavier and sinking into itself. NON! This is not good. Chocolate should be treated as a delicacy, something to be plucked fresh from the trees.”

  Benoît had laid down a large box of raw cocoa beans and fired up a huge industrial oven.

  “From first principles,” said Frédéric. The cocoa beans smelled dark and wonderful. Benoît poured them into a huge rotating drum that looked like the inside of a washing machine. The noise was phenomenal.

  “Okay now,” said Frédéric after about fifteen minutes, after I had wandered around smelling the delicious herbs, lined up on rows along the back of the greenhouse. Then he said something I didn’t understand and motioned me to copy him as he, ferociously quick, started cracking the tiny beans with a hammer and unleashing their warm chocolaty insides. Every fourth one, he threw away.

  “I thought you made chocolate,” he said, puzzled as I stared at him in disbelief.

  “A machine made chocolate,” I said. “I kind of switched it on and off.”

  He made a very Gallic pouting face at me. Benoît barely glanced up before continuing on with his hammer. This seemed extraordinary, like we were making chocolate in the Middle Ages.

  “Handmade is how we do things,” Frédéric said patiently. He’d lost his flirtatious edge, I noticed. Perhaps he only liked girls who knew how to hand-make chocolate. That must cut his prospective pool down quite substantially.

  Frédéric nodded toward a spare hammer. I took it and tentatively hit a bean. Nothing. I hit it harder. Splat. It went flat on the ground. Benoît wordlessly took it and threw it in the bin. I gulped. I wasn’t entirely sure how much help I was going to be here.

  “Perhaps you just watch for now,” said Frédéric. And I did and noticed a quick little flick of the wrists they made as they assaulted the beans. It was a bit like a very, very good game of Whack-a-Mole.

  Then Frédéric took out a surprisingly dainty minivac and blew away all the husks. I finished up my scalding little coffee, which tasted less like coffee and more like a very strong cleaning solution. There was absolutely no way I could drink the filthy stuff. I would never get used to it.

  “Now, we feed the beans,” he said, indicating a large industrial grinder.

  “So you do use a machine,” I said, as if I’d scored a point. I got a look.

  Benoît came back in, lugging in huge crates of milk, butter, and cream from outside. It was all in rough, reused glass. I hadn’t seen milk delivered in a glass bottle for a long time. Benoît was calling a farewell to someone out of the back door. It still wasn’t light, but the sky wasn’t as pitch-black as it had been.

  “We use only one dairy,” said Frédéric. “The Oise. It delivers every morning. Swiss would be better, alas, but time is of the urgency to us.”

  He started up the grinding machine. The noise was incredible. Then, little by little, he fed in the precious beans, gently and carefully. Gradually, at the bottom, a thick, dark liquid started to gather, strained through a net in the collection bottle. Frédéric stared at it happily. When it finally stopped, I straightened up carefully.

  “Now what?” I said.

  We just started with the liquid and hurled stuff at it at Braders, but I didn’t want to admit that.

  “You conch,” said Frédéric.

  The word was the same in English. To conch was to mix up the different ingredients, the levels, to make the chocolate dark, light, milk, flavored. A tiny mistake one way or the other would make it disgusting, too sweet, grainy, or crystalline. Our machines were calibrated to make everything the same every time; they used cheap milk powder and life prolongers and additives.

  “Of course, that is for Thierry,” said Frédéric, lowering his head. “It is the most important, the most sacred part.”

  To conch by hand was very difficult. And then it would need refining and tempering so it held together. I raised an eyebrow.

  “This is for tomorrow,” explained Frédéric, and indeed, Benoît had now moved on to pouring a thick gooey mass from a pot and working it back and forth with a spatula while he stirred another pot on the stove gently. Normally people would use a thermometer for this, but Benoît had been
practically raised in the shop, I learned later. He knew it as instinctively as a top musician knows when his instrument is out of tune. If he was happy, he would hum tunelessly. If he was not, he would dump everything back in the huge pot and start all over again until it was perfect.

  Finally, he was ready.

  “Rien plus,” shouted Frédéric, only just audible above the din of the grinder. “No more. Nothing but the finest of dark beans from Costa Rica, the finest of fresh cream milk from the best fed cows this side of Normandy, the finest cane sugar from Jamaica, all churned to perfection in the traditional way, not by huge machines full of fat and preservative and old bits of truc and the Band-Aids of the paisants, non?”

  The colors blending together and being poured into molds looked absolutely beautiful; in fact, looking at them, you’d be hard pressed to disagree with Thierry’s philosophy, that chocolate was something meant to be made fresh and consumed fresh, no less than coffee or a croissant. And the smell was warmer, richer, purer than anything back in the UK, where we’d used a hefty dose of vegetable fats to bolster up the mix (which was why so many people who loved British chocolate found the posh stuff so hard to take to—it was the comforting fats they really liked).

  “Do not dip the fingers,” ordered Frédéric, but I would never, ever touch food being prepared; I’d had enough tedious health and safety courses to have gotten that one through my head. I wasn’t an idiot. Frédéric was, however, passing me up a long ladle, which looked to be one solid piece of curved metal with a tiny tasting spoon at the end. Benoît stood out of my way.

  “Attention,” he warned. “Be careful.”

  Frédéric shook his head but declined to say any more, simply watching my face curiously and intently. He was staring very closely at my lips. I found it oddly off-putting, but in a nice way. I carefully let down the ladle and scooped up a mouthful of the pale brown liquid.

  Blowing on it to let it cool, Frédéric staring at me all the while, I raised it to my lips.