The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris Read online

  Heroin addicts often say that all they are ever doing is chasing that first hit, the first time they felt wrapped in cotton wool, all the worries of the world behind them. I wouldn’t say I was quite as dramatic as that. Nonetheless, the moment the still-warm, gently thickening substance hit my tongue, I really did think, for an instant, that I was going to fall onto the table—no, worse, that I was going to DIVE in, to shovel every morsel of that sweet (but not too sweet), creamy, (but not sickly), dense, deeply flavored, rich, smooth, all-enveloping, chocolatey goodness. It felt like someone giving you a warm hug. As soon as I had swallowed it, I wanted the taste back in my mouth again, wanted to cram myself full of it. I found myself embarrassed suddenly, blushing, as I noticed Frédéric’s eyes still on my lips, intently watching me. My hand went automatically to dip the spoon again, then at the last minute, I realized this would look desperate, unprofessional, greedy, hungry, or risky. Instead, I lifted it out, empty. Frédéric raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s…” What could I say? That it pissed on almost anything else I’d ever eaten anywhere? That it was so good I felt like I wanted to almost cry? That I would never eat anything else as long as I lived? And it was still not even set.

  “It’s very good,” I said finally. Frédéric glanced at Benoît, who shrugged. Just as the roaster in the corner was heating up the room uncomfortably, the air conditioner clicked on and a cooling hum began. Everything here was rickety, antiquated, and held together with tape. But there was absolutely no doubt that it worked. It worked beyond the wildest dreams of Braders, beyond the wildest dreams of every chocolate I’d ever eaten in my entire life.

  “Eet ees better than very good, non?” Frédéric asked. He seemed insulted.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s…le style anglais.”

  He seemed happier about this. Typical British stiff upper lip couldn’t be passionate about anything, I suspected, as far as he was concerned. In truth, I didn’t want to tell him how impressed I was. It would make me sound like a rube, like I knew nothing about chocolate when in fact I’d been sent there to help. The gap between what I’d been making and what they were doing here was like the difference between a liquid dish soap bottle rocket and the NASA Mars mission. So I decided it was best to keep my mouth shut. At least, until I could fill it with more of that unbelievable chocolate. In secret.

  So I stayed quiet as Frédéric, with some relish, showed me where the cleaning equipment was kept and what my duties were, got me to hammer pounds of cocoa beans until I stopped ruining their stock, showed me how to winnow for husks, and took me through the schedule of the shop. By the time we were finished, it was nearly 10:00 a.m. and the sun was shining strongly through the long planters of herbs, making it look more like a greenhouse than ever. I wondered if we were about to open, as Frédéric and Benoît glanced nervously at their watches, but as it turned out five minutes later, they were not. The door was unlocked, then thrown open with a spectacular clang. Benoît suddenly made himself completely invisible. The jolly puckish look on Frédéric’s features was replaced with a kind of servile watchfulness. I looked around behind me as the swing doors into the little factory swung heavily.

  “ALLONS-Y!” LET’S GO! came a huge, booming voice.

  Of all the surprises Claire had vouchsafed me, of all the confusions, this was by far the weirdest.

  The way she had spoken, the way she had gone pink when she spoke of him, it was clear to me that this had been someone serious in her life, whereas whenever she mentioned her ex-husband, Richard, it was with pained courtesy.

  You could still see in her the traces of the younger woman she had been; she’d been beautiful. She still was, in a certain light, when the years of pain weren’t so strongly etched on her brow.

  I had fantasized, perhaps, of a suave, gray-haired type, perhaps with jet black eyebrows, wearing chef’s whites or maybe a very well-cut suit. Smart and stylish, just like her—chic and a little bit distant. Perhaps we would smile wryly when Claire’s name came up, or, perhaps sadly, he would barely remember her at all, just a girl from very long ago who had had a wild crush on him, a summer of his youth, but nothing to do with his real life at all. Romantic and handsome, obviously, perhaps a little sad…

  None of these described Thierry Girard.

  I don’t know if Thierry spoke any English. I couldn’t imagine how he made his trips to Australia and America, where he was feted and famous, if he couldn’t. But I never heard him speak a single word. He was huge; he never spent any time in the shop without making it look as if there wasn’t any room for anybody else. His belly, normally enswathed in a huge white apron, seemed to be a separate entity from himself, as it entered rooms before he did.

  “Who is this?” he boomed as he entered the kitchen. “Frédéric, have you been bringing night girls home with you again?”

  At this stage, my French was a beat behind what was actually being said, so it was too late to realize I was being horribly insulted till a moment or so later. Which was a relief because if I’d have shot my mouth off, I’d have been out of a job about two milliseconds later.

  “This is AnNA Tron,” said Frédéric. “The new kitchen assistant.”

  Thierry lowered his enormous face toward mine. He had a little beard, which was lucky as his face was so sunk in fat that without it, it would have been borderline featureless. His little black eyes were like raisins stuck in a huge muffin. His skin was doughy, and hair came out of his flat nostrils. He gazed at me.

  “Women in among my chocolate,” he said. “I’m not sure.”

  I was taken aback. You would never hear this type of thing in the UK. Just as I was about to get annoyed about it, his enormous meaty shoulders shook with a huge belly laugh.

  “I am joking! I joke! I joke!”

  He looked at me, then suddenly snapped his fingers.

  “I know who you are!”

  I wasn’t at all sure he would.

  “You are Claire’s friend.”

  I nodded.

  “Ha! She spoke French like a dog eats salad.”

  I bristled. “She was a wonderful teacher.”

  His eyes blinked rapidly, twice. “Ah yes. I’m sure she was. I can imagine she was. Mind you, she was a terrible nanny…although, alors, perhaps that was my fault…”

  He drifted off then and I shifted uncomfortably. I wasn’t at all sure how much he knew about Claire’s illness, nor how serious it was.

  “And you were ill?”

  “I’m fine,” I said stoutly. I wasn’t really in the mood for volunteering exactly what was wrong with me unless somebody absolutely had to ask.

  “You are fine for working hard, yes?”

  “Without a doubt,” I said, smiling as hard as I could.

  “Bon. Bon.”

  His face looked far away again.

  “And Claire…she is also ill.”

  I nodded, not quite trusting myself to speak. He looked as if he were about to ask more, then stopped himself.

  “Alors. Welcome, welcome. Do you know your chocolate?”

  I looked into his big friendly giant’s face sincerely. This I could answer.

  “I do, sir. I’ve worked in chocolate for ten years.”

  He looked at me expectantly.

  “Yours is the best,” I said simply, not sure I could trust my French to elaborate. He paused, then the huge laugh was back.

  “Listen to her!” he yelled. “Alice! ALICE! Come, you must hear this. A countryman of yours.”

  A languid, incredibly scrawny woman who must have been about fifty—but a really, really well-preserved fifty, her lipstick red on her wide mouth, her hair a perfect black helmet with an elegant swoop of pure white at the front—emerged into the back room. She was wearing cigarette pant trousers and a man’s jacket and looked—there was no two ways about it—absolutely amazing. She was originally E
nglish but, I would discover, kept insisting that she had lived in Paris for so long, she had forgotten it all, when what she actually meant was she didn’t want to waste time speaking to a guttersnipe like me or any of the English press–reading expat clusters who gathered together by the Shakespeare bookshop or the Frog or the Smiths on the rue de Rivoli. The best way to annoy Alice was to guess she was British before she opened her mouth, something I often prompted people to do. Which was childish, but she really was very rude to me.

  She raised an eyebrow at Thierry.

  “Cheri?”

  “We have an English girl!”

  Alice looked at me and I was suddenly very conscious of my plain skirt, my flat shoes, my Gap bag, my morning hair.

  “Evidently,” she said. I couldn’t believe this snotty cow was English. Well, I could, but she couldn’t have looked more French had she been wearing a beret, a small twirled mustache, and a Breton shirt and been carrying a chain of onions around her neck while riding a bicycle and surrendering a war.

  “Hello,” I said in English.

  “Bonjour,” she replied, then immediately glanced elsewhere in the room as if bored to death. I don’t know exactly what had made Thierry go from lovely Claire to this, but no wonder he ate all the time.

  Thierry beckoned me over. First, he turned his attention to the fresh cocoa. Frédéric added it to a large vat, and Thierry, with a deftness unexpected in such a large man, flicked the tap so the vat filled up with warm, gently steaming, thick chocolate liquid, followed by the milk, and he added a fresh powder snowfall of sugar, stopping, tasting, stopping, tasting, so quickly he looked like a blur. “Yes, no, yes, no, more, quick!” he yelled as the men rushed to follow his bidding. Finally he declared himself satisfied.

  “Now we really start,” he pronounced.

  “Lavendre!” he barked, and Frédéric rushed to chop some off the box at the end of the room. Thierry chopped it incredibly fine with a knife so quickly I thought he would lose a finger, then popped it, along with a tiny crystal bottle of lavender essence so potent that, as soon as he opened the little flacon, the entire room was overcome with the scent, like a spring meadow. Delicately, his little finger tilted upward, he let two…three drops into the basin, whisking all the time with his other hand. The tiny purple flecks of the plant were almost completely hidden, and he paced across the room one, two, three times, his left hand working furiously, his right holding the basin close. Occasionally he would stop, dip in a finger, lick, and resume, possibly adding a tiny drop more cream or a little of the dark chocolate from the other vat. Finally he announced himself satisfied and stepped away from the vat. Benoît carried it over to the side of the oven, where it would be shaped and melted and tempered, ready for tomorrow.

  Then Thierry hollered “molds,” and immediately, Frédéric was there with the fresh batch. He poured the chocolate expertly into the molds without spilling a drop, then inserted the tray into the large industrial fridge. Without pausing, he turned around; Benoît had already silently placed a large box of small jellies in front of him. Thierry chopped them into the tiniest of diamond shapes, each exactly alike and perfect. By the time he had finished, the chocolate had hardened and he removed them briskly from the fridge, turning the mold upside down so thirty-two perfect chocolates popped out onto the workshop top. He pressed the diamonds of jellied fruit into the tops of the whirls, then, with a mere glance, sent one down to me.

  “Tell me what you think,” he said.

  I bit into it. The soft sweet edge of citrus—it must have been cut from the lime plant—mellowed the perfectly balanced chocolate; the entire thing tasted so light it could have been good for you. The chocolate flavor didn’t fade away in the mouth; its richness intensified, grew stronger. The tiny tart jelly on the top perfectly stopped the sweetness from overpowering the rest of the bonbon. It was perfect, exquisite. I smiled in pure happiness.

  “That is what I like to see, heh?” Thierry indicated to the rest of the room. “That is the face I like. Always the face I like. Today we will make lavender four hundred piece, rosemary and confiture, mint…”

  He turned to Alice. “You want to try?”

  She gave him a stony look.

  “I joke,” he said to me. “She does not eat. Like a robot.”

  “I do eat,” said Alice frostily. “I just eat food, not poison.”

  The wonderful aftertaste of the chocolate suddenly turned ashy in my mouth and I wanted to cough. Thierry looked at me mischievously and winked broadly, and I smiled back, but I wasn’t sure I liked that either, being lumped in with the massive fatties.

  “It passes?” said Thierry.

  “It is sublime,” I said honestly. Frédéric smiled at me, which gave me the impression that I wasn’t doing so badly so far. Thierry snapped his fingers and Benoît gave him an espresso into which he poured copious amounts of sugar, then necked it. There was a silence in the room for one hanging half-second, then he announced, “Finish!”

  He and Alice swept out of the workroom, and the men immediately started to move. Frédéric gave me my mop and instructed me to basically wash and polish anything that wasn’t tied down. Once they’d gotten going, they moved with awesome speed, turning out Thierry’s creation exactly over and over again with huge molds; the lime, then the rosemary and jam, which sounded very peculiar to me until they let me taste it. As soon as I had tried it, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever eat anything else.

  At 11:00 a.m., Frédéric took off his dirty apron, swapped it for a smarter, more formal clean one with the name of the shop and his own name embroidered on the pocket, and went to open up. The shutters made a loud rattling noise, echoing throughout the street as the other shops, cafés, and emporiums started opening up for business. Even though I’d seen the sun was up through the hazy workroom windows, seeing it beam in through the front of the shop made me blink.

  It was a ravishing day. Even though my back was already sore from stooping to clean so many nooks and crannies in the workshop, and Benoît had indicated he wanted me to start on the copper vats, which had a complicated-looking box of harsh-smelling cleaning products attached to it. Claire hadn’t been wrong about the hard work.

  But Frédéric beckoned me out for a cigarette break at the front. I didn’t smoke, but I kept him company as he waved and bantered with the other shop holders setting out their stalls; the little bookshop was putting racks of paperbacks outside, some of them, I noticed, looking a bit dog-eared; there was a little print shop with maps of vintage Paris in careful plastic pockets, framed in card, and some larger touristy work—Monets, Klimts—on the walls for sale. One shop seemed to sell nothing but hundreds of different types of tea, all in little metal boxes, brightly colored, lining the walls in a hundred flavors: mint, cardamom, grapefruit, caramel. That shop smelled dry and refined, of leaves, not the earthy deep flavors of Thierry’s. But from the friendly way Frédéric hailed the proprietor, a tall, thin older man who looked as desiccated as the leaves he sold, as if a stiff breeze would blow him away, I imagined they must get on all right, the two things complementing each other. Next door to us directly was a shop selling bits and bobs, new brooms and dustpans and mop heads and nails.

  Above street level, windows were being opened; the little roads were so narrow here, you could see everybody living cheek by jowl. Coffee was being drunk, papers unfurled—Le Matin, France Soir—and everywhere the smooth rattle and chatter of French, background chatter reduced to a mélange, to a pleasant background on the radio. I couldn’t quite believe it; here I was, hanging out with a true French person, in a road full of professional French people, working in a French place, drinking sticky coffee, and watching the world go by. I was slightly delirious with the lack of sleep and on a bit of a sugar rush if I was being perfectly honest, but I couldn’t help the huge bubble of excitement boiling up inside me, even though I was, when you got down to it, about to spend the
rest of the day scrubbing a gigantic metal vat. (Only two flavors of chocolate were made each day, so one vat could rotate its cleaning. You had to be, I was assured, very, very careful not to infect the vat with cleaning products, nor disturb its patina, which gave the mixing depth. Frédéric had gone on about it till I was cross-eyed.) Well, I would deal with that problem in a moment. For now, I was happy just standing outside, smelling Frédéric’s heavy Gauloises smoke, watching a perky-looking dog with a newspaper in its mouth prance up the street, seeing a trio of pigeons spiral up among the high roofs, and hearing the chime of different bells from across the river and down the whole wind of the Seine. I liked the sound.

  “He likes you,” said Frédéric. “Be careful. Alice will not like you.”

  “I can handle Alice,” I said, which was sheer bravado and actually a bare-faced lie. People confident enough to be rude always rather impressed me.

  “Anyway, isn’t she just his girlfriend?”

  Frédéric snorted.

  “Without Alice, Thierry would stay in bed all day every day, eating his own work. She is the one who pushes him, who made him famous. She is always worried that someone will steal him.”

  But he looks like a gigantic pig, I didn’t say. And also surely unbelievably glamorous and worldly Alice was hardly going to bother with me.

  The first tourists of the day were already heading down the cobbled street, cooing and remarking on the quaintness of everything. One or two were following guides, and when they saw our sign, their faces lit up.

  “The hordes descend,” said Frédéric, flicking his cigarette quickly into the gutter and returning quickly to the shop with a large smile pasted on his face. “Bonjour, messieurs, dames!”

  From inside the workshop where I was scrubbing, very slowly, the gigantic pan with a toothbrush, like some kind of sadistic punishment, I could see the heads of people in the shop bobbing around through the window in the swinging doors; sometimes Frédéric would put his head through and bellow at Benoît, who continued, utterly methodically, setting out tray after tray of the fresh chocolates, which sold as quickly, it appeared, as he could set them in the fridge, even though the prices were absolutely startling. I couldn’t believe how much they cost. Frédéric explained to me later that yes, it was expensive to make chocolate the way Thierry did it, with the utter best of everything, but even the very best of herbs didn’t cost that much money. Alice had decided that unless customers found things unwaveringly costly, they didn’t appreciate it so much, and they’d also found that every time they increased prices, the shop got busier and they got profiled in more up-market magazines. And so it went on, till people came from across the world to visit the famous, the one and only fresh chocolate shop on the rue Chanoinesse, and Thierry kept on doing what he did, and they were paid, Frédéric remarked crossly, very little, while Alice salted it away and bought Chanel handbags. I wondered how much of this was true and how much just anti-Alice speculation.