citinotes
The café
“To go to Paris without seeing the café would be like going to Egypt without seeing the Pyramids”, wrote John Sanderson, an American traveler, in 1847. The café is a major Parisian institution whose temples are able to gather more zealots than a church. In stark opposition to the coffee culture of the Anglo-Saxon world, in Paris, people don’t like to take their coffee to the street. In fact, no habit is more Parisian than hanging around one of these round tables, as tiny as their espressos, with a pocketbook in their hands.
If you have visited the City of Lights, you may already know: The Parisian café is not a coffee shop. You may order coffee there, but what you will most enjoy is the place, the moment, and, at the end of the day, the experience of being part of the city. There is no other place that embraces diversity, ignites discussions and measures the pulse of the city more than the grounds of a café. Since the opening of the first cafés, such as the Café Procope in 1686, Parisians have found a place to host their much-needed debates, political or literary, philosophical or gossipy. Donald Grant Mitchell (1822 – 1908) was one of the first American novelists to write about the ambiance of a “first-class” Parisian café; in his spicy notes below, dating back to 1847, he explains the behavioral protocol that the bourgeois were found happily obliged to respect when sitting at a Parisian café.
Besides their role as a modern “agora”, cafés have helped stimulating artistic creation. In the roaring ‘20s, hundreds of writers and artists flocked to Paris, imposing the French capital as the center of avant-garde creation. The cafés of Montmartre and Montparnasse immediately became their headquarters: destitute artists found a refuge there to warm up, while the wealthy ones discovered a place to socialize and find inspiration.
Later in the swinging ‘60s, cafés even became a research topic for philosophers: As we will see in an extract below, celebrity couple Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 -1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986) spent hours at the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots deciphering the behavior of waiters in how they walked, how they spoke, or served a table. Their analysis was meant to establish an existentialist theory on the being of things as opposed to the existence of people.
If you are in Paris, take a morning off your museum visits and walk down to the Vavin crossroads at Montparnasse. Pick one of the four legendary cafés from the ‘30s: Le Dôme, La Rotonde, La Coupole, and Le Select. Take a nice sip of a café-crème and flip-through your favorite pocketbook: Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s Parisian novels can immediately recreate the ambiance of these cafés. Now close your eyes and you might still be able to overhear Fujita asking for a sake drink in vain: this talented Japanese painter and crazy party animal of the ‘30s spent his most creative years in Paris. If a man starts speaking loud with a deep, daunting voice, maybe it’s the Irish writer James Joyce. He just finished the last pages of his Ulysses and reads verses to his editor, Sylvia Beach. Their common friend, the American surrealist photographer Man Ray, must be at the back of the room, trying to capture the best hangover expression on the face of his muse, Kiki de Montparnasse. So, if the waiters happen to be a bit slow with your order, go easy on them: chances are that they all had one-drink-too-many the night before.
Citinotes
chapter 1
First Class Café
In first-class cafés, the dining rooms are arranged with great elegance, even splendor. Pilasters of marble, arranged to produce an effect, and other ornaments are reflected by large mirrors arranged tastefully around the room.
On one side there is a high seat, with an elegant desk or counter in front of it, frequently adorned with a hanging canopy. Normally a woman sits there, wisely chosen for her good looks. She is the genius who presides over the shop, repressing any irregularity or indecency of her hosts with the soft -but effective- power of her presence. She controls the waiters in the accomplishments of their tasks; she also receives the change from the patrons with extraordinary grace and responds to any observation they might make with accomplished politeness.
Donald Grant Mitchell,
Fresh Gleanings, University of Michigan Library, 1847.
Les Deux Magots, an iconic Parisian café, took its name by two chinese figurines that once adorned the sign of a novelty store located on the site of the current café. Source: Sortir à Paris.
The waiters are traditionally dressed in a black log and a white apron, and the pastry service is done on a tray. Hot chocolate, their signature beverage, is made from chocolate bars. Source: Sortir à Paris.
The café became a pole of attraction for artists and intellectuals, such as André Breton and his fellow Surrealists, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre. Source: Sortir à Paris.
chapter 2
Café around the clock
(The café) is the arena of the public life of Paris: what Wall Street is to strictly commercial people, the café is for the Frenchman. There, the politics and the amusements of the day are put in discussion. Each table has its group, and the conversations are held so discreetly that the nearest neighbors are not disturbed […]
Donald Grant Mitchell,
Fresh Gleanings, University of Michigan Library, 1847.
(In the café,) the Parisian takes his chocolate and his newspaper, his half-cup and his cigar, his mistress and his ice cream. The provincial takes his lunch and National (note:a French journal), his absinth drink and his wife. Even the Englishman takes his Galignani (note: some book from a famous English language bookstore) and his eggs, the German his beer and his pipe.
After midday, the little half-cup tends to prevail over the breakfast bowl, and during the next three hours there is a noticeable decrease of visitors. […] Then appear the old unhappy singles and the married men in quarrel with their wives.
As the hours pass, the after-dinner idlers arrive; old ladies with little white dogs prance around as they are looking for a table and take their coffee dice. The seats outside fill up; we laugh, we put ourselves at ease, we sip, and we talk. The lamps are turned on. Young men order ice creams, old men order punch. One can hear the clinking of dominoes at half of the tables.
The clock strikes nine, ten, eleven and twelve o’clock in the Parisian world. Buses have stopped running; waiters put the shutters down. People start to leave, going back, not to their homes -there is no such word in their vocabulary-, but chez eux.
Donald Grant Mitchell,
Fresh Gleanings, University of Michigan Library, 1847.
chapter 3
How to behave at a Parisian café
When you enter one of these cafés you will see, here or there, a person standing around in a white apron; he has a mustache and in his left hand he holds a coffee pot; leaning gracefully to his right, he is reading his favorite newspaper; he is the waiter. When you scream waiter! three times, the lady of the office will ring a small doorbell and immediately remove this server from his post. If you have a very distinguished appearance, she will let you scream only two times; if you have an embroidered cardigan and sideburns and look like a lord, she won’t even let you scream at all. […]
The waiter, while bringing you the change, is always waiting for a tip. If you leave a penny, he will just tilt his head; if you leave two, he will add a thank you; finally, if you generously leave three, not only will he bow deeply, muttering thanks, but he will also open the door for you. As you leave, you will look at the lady and raise your hat: the calm serenity of her response to your civility informs you that she has greeted half of the coffee drinkers in Europe.
Donald Grant Mitchell,
Fresh Gleanings, University of Michigan Library, 1847.
chapter 4
The waiter
Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick, he bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.
Finally, there he returns, trying to imitate the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker […]. His whole behavior looks like an act.
He applies himself to chaining his movements as they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he instills the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things in himself. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing?
He is playing a waiter in a café. There is nothing here that should surprise us. This is a game of detection and investigation. The child plays with his body to explore it, to study it meticulously; the waiter in the café plays with his condition in order to materialize it.
Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick, he bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.
This obligation is not different from what all tradesmen must deliver. Their social status is one of ceremony, the public demands that they deliver that status as a ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they try to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not only a grocer. Society demands that he limits himself to his function as a grocer […]. Indeed many precautions are taken in order to imprison a man in what he is, as if we live in a state of perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly escape from his condition.
Jean-Paul Sartre,
L’Être et le Néant, NRF – Gallimard, 1943.
Paris for café lovers
Our favorite café patios to watch the city parade.
