Paris Revealed

by Stephen Clarke

  The entrance to the hotel didn’t look furtive or sordid at all—the reception area was in a corner of the ground-floor brasserie, where hip Parisians (the men unshaven, in jeans and dark pullovers over a white T-shirt; the women sporting ponytails and equally dark pullovers) were having laid-back business lunches. No huddling couples waiting for a room to be free. The waitresses, too, looked very normal—young girls in everyday streetwear.

  The hotel’s PR man, an equally hip, equally unshaven young Parisian, greeted me cordially and offered to show me some rooms. He’d specified that most of them would be unoccupied at that time of day. Lovers, I presumed, catered for their food appetites before their sexual ones.

  As we went up the narrow stairs, he explained that the building used to be a hôtel de passe, one of the places where streetwalkers would bring their clients. Almost all of these had since lost that trade, he said, and settled down into a seedy existence of just being a cheap, badly decorated hotel, which was what this was before the Amour people refurbished it.

  And refurbish it they certainly have, with classy, knowing eroticism. Most of the bathtubs seem to be right in the bedrooms. From bath to bed and back again (with, presumably a quick towel rub in between) could be a dance of the seven oils. Large, strategically placed mirrors add to the effect. Several of the rooms have erotic photos—featuring no pornography, but plenty of nudity. One also has a glass bookshelf of vintage French photography magazines and racy novels—lots of oiled and pouting women on show there.

  The crème de la crème of eroticism, though, had to be the room with 200 disco balls on the ceiling. Close the black curtains, turn on the lights, set the balls revolving (the disco balls that is) and you’re in your very own sexy cabaret show. The bath is, of course, at the foot of the bed, which stands on a raised plinth like a stage on which guests can play out their very own sex film.

  So, I ask, how much an hour is this room? I resist the temptation to add ‘with and without the S&M waitresses’.

  At which point the modern reality of Paris catches up with me.

  ‘Oh, the rooms aren’t rented out by the hour any more, or for the afternoon,’ I’m told. ‘We got raided a couple of times by the Brigade des Moeurs [Paris’s vice squad].’

  ‘Why? Surely the Parisian police weren’t cracking down on adultery and premarital sex?’

  ‘Prostitution. They were afraid it would turn back into a hôtel de passe. And anyway, we’re doing so well now that we don’t need the hassle of renting out rooms just for an afternoon.’

  For a few moments, I feel as if my fantasy world has collapsed. But then I realize that this doesn’t really matter at all.

  ‘Your customers are still mainly lovers, though?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. Lots of Parisians book it for their wedding anniversaries, or just for a romantic night alone without the kids. There are no TVs and no phones, so people can be together with no outside disturbances.’

  So, in fact, it is still a love hotel, and a love hotel in the true sense of the word, a place more geared to amoureux than amants—the French, typically, have two words for lovers. Amants are people who have sex together, amoureux are those who are (also) in love. And in the Hôtel Amour’s rooms, you’re more likely to find amoureux enjoying some sexy romantic seclusion, secure in the knowledge that they don’t have to get dressed and back to the office an hour later. How much more romantic can you get?

  Where to go for a verre

  Pretty well any half-decent café or bar in Paris will be a great venue for a romantic drink. But if you want to make it very special, there’s only one place to go—the Ritz. A bit of a cliché, but like so many clichés, it is one because it’s so irresistibly true.

  Even if you don’t care that this is the hotel where poor Princess Diana had her last drink before falling victim to a piece of spectacularly bad Parisian driving, the Ritz has just that level of effortless chic to make anyone feel a little bit royal. And anyone can go there. All you need to do is dress up a little (though a tie is not de rigueur) and wander in, saying a friendly bonsoir to the doorman and any staff you might meet, as if you have every right to be there. Which, of course, you do—all the bars in Paris’s posh hotels are public places where it is perfectly acceptable to drop in for a glass of wine or even a simple espresso if you just want to check out the décor and use the ultra-classy loos.

  And surprisingly, a glass of the house Champagne at the bar du Ritz is actually pretty good value. It will be about double the price of a coupe in a normal restaurant, but you get so many bowls of excellent snacks—the most delicious roasted-nut mix in Paris, for example—that if you’re a light eater like me, afterwards you’ll hardly be able to manage dinner (not that you need to explain the economics of all this to your loved one, of course).

  The bar itself is very snug, but as soon as the weather is warm enough, I like to sit outside in the garden amongst the kitsch sculptures and the parasols. The only problem is that this is a rich person’s hotel, and some rich people have to show how comfortably off they are by trying to asphyxiate everyone with a cigar-shaped tube of donkey droppings. But that is just a personal whinge, and even I am capable of pretending that I can breathe normally if it means preserving the romantic atmosphere that seems to come naturally when you combine luxurious surroundings with your loved one and a glass of chilled Champagne.

  Oh, and one final thing. If you want to look as though you belong, it’s best to know where you’re going. The Ritz has several bars, but the one I’m talking about is very close to the entrance, almost immediately on the left as you go in. If in doubt, just ask, Où est le jardin?—preceded by a friendly bonsoir, of course.

  The perfect Parisian dinner date

  Paris is very good at serving up romantic restaurants, even if it doesn’t always realize it. Practically any decent restaurant has most of the necessary ingredients, although it probably won’t bill itself as a lovers’ retreat. Below are a couple of my favourites.

  Braque’s brasserie

  My first suggestion is a classic but, like the Ritz, no worse for that, because it is a quintessentially Parisian experience.

  La Coupole, for me, is the best of the big Parisian brasseries. Not because the food is spectacular (except for the high-rise shellfish platters, which are a spectacle in themselves), but because Paris wouldn’t be the same without it. When it was announced that the building, in the heart of Montparnasse, might be pulled down, an old friend of mine was in a panic—‘Where will I go for my birthday dinner?’ he kept saying. ‘And where will I eat oysters at Christmas?’ He probably wasn’t the only Parisian saying that kind of thing, because people like Picasso, Braque and Édith Piaf used to be just as addicted to the place.

  In the end, though, as mentioned in Chapter 5, the brasserie wasn’t demolished—it was simply covered over with a sort of concrete marquee—a few floors of apartments were built on top, leaving the restaurant intact, so that today it must look pretty well exactly as it did back in the 1920s. Except, of course, for the lack of smoke.

  It’s a huge place, a football pitch of old brasserie benches, with racks behind your head to store your jacket and bag, saving space to cram more people in. But for some reason, the immensity of the salle de restaurant and the fact that you’re likely to dine elbow-to-elbow with strangers doesn’t detract from the romanticism. For a start, there’s no music and the high ceiling provides excellent acoustics, so you can actually hear what your conversation partner is saying without yelling or lip-reading. And the atmosphere is always cosy rather than cramped, with diners eyeing their neighbours’ plates as they decide what to order. The Art Deco murals on the thirty-odd columns help, too—they were painted by pupils of Matisse and Fernand Léger, and some of them depict rather suggestive scenes of semi-naked dancing.

  Watching what’s going on around you is always entertaining—the waiting staff are brisk but friendly, and as professional as they come. They’re divided into ranks, like an orchestra. At the bottom
of the prestigious heap you have the guys in long white aprons and waistcoats—these are the violinists who carry the weight of the melody, and they sway between the tables holding giant trays of food at shoulder level. Above them are the people in black suits and bow ties—soloists who take orders and banter with the customers.*********** And conducting the whole symphony (and a place this size needs several conductors) are the maître d’s in their shiny suits, chic and commanding, forever flitting about checking that everyone is getting what they came for.

  As a place for a romantic dinner, it’s not an intimate venue, but couples seem to go there to get a loving buzz. It’s like a short trip on a classic ocean liner—it’s a communal experience, but you have your own snug cabin. And, of course, it’s best known for its seafood, so it’s the perfect place to order the ultimate, stripped-down romantic menu—a couple of dozen oysters and a bottle of Champagne. And if that doesn’t get your Parisian hormones going, nothing will.

  Love in the maquis

  Perhaps you prefer your romantic rendez-vous with a little less of an open-space feel, and you may also be looking for somewhere less conventional, which is where my next address comes in.

  First, though, a couple of warnings …

  The restaurant in question is located near the second least romantically named square in Paris—République.************ And not only is it near an unromantic square, it also has a rather banal name—the Café Restaurant Le Temple. It’s right opposite Temple métro station, and should not be confused with the Tabac of the same name a few yards nearer République.

  To make things worse, this Temple was the prison mentioned earlier, the place where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were held before they were taken to Concorde to have their heads cut off. Pas très romantique.

  Luckily, the restaurant has not opted for a dungeon theme—it’s a Corsican place. If you’re meeting a Parisien or Parisienne (and a hearty slap on the back to you if that’s the case) the Corsican theme could be another potential risk to the romantic ambiance—to Parisians, Corsica is less a rugged green jewel in the Mediterranean than the home of people who like to amuse themselves in the winter by blowing up holiday homes. Best to check first whether your date, or one of his or her relatives, has recently lost a beach house to high explosives.

  The décor might at first sight be a little off-putting, too. One of the collages on the wall features a pair of gun-toting Corsican hunters apparently lying in wait for Parisians, and the rest is a riot of kitsch. Almost every surface is covered in fake panther skin—seats, lamps, the ceiling, the walls, everything. I even happen to know that down in the loos, the soap dispenser, hand dryer and toilet-brush holder are painted in panther camouflage, as if they had been designed by someone with a synthetic-fur fetish.

  Those surfaces of the restaurant that aren’t devoted to the worship of the nylon panther are covered in zebra skin or pictures of Marilyn Monroe. She is on posters and photos pinned to the wall, as well as featuring on all the coffee cups.

  All of this might sound a bit gaudy to people who think of Paris as a place where everyone wears dark-blue Chanel suits and eats croissants with their fingertips, but most Parisians much prefer kitsch to chic. The real Paris is colourful and over the top, like the Art Nouveau interior of the Galeries Lafayette, the older métro stations with their lurid green vegetable-matter entrances, or the Centre Pompidou.

  The tables at the Café Restaurant Le Temple are very close together, and to squeeze the woman on to the banquette,************* you virtually have to redecorate the place, pulling out the chair and table and making sure the neighbours don’t have glasses or condiments too close to the edge of their table, so that you avoid a messy sweeping-off accident.

  In this place, though, the density of tables is compensated for by the fact that they’re divided off into small panther-skin booths. You are sitting very close to your neighbours, but you’re separated from them by a small partition. It’s as close to intimacy as you’ll get in most Parisian restaurants.

  The food here is simple French, but with a little something extra from the islands (and not only Corsica)—salmon in a coconut sauce, for example, or scallops served in a cassolette (a sort of fish stew). They also do an excellent version of an old favourite of mine, the salade de chèvre chaud, or goat’s-cheese toasts with a green salad.

  So if you’re sure your partner will not be put off thoughts of love by fake zebra skin, Marilyn Monroe, Corsican cowboys and quirky food, this is an offbeat place to try. And quite frankly, worse things can happen than ending a romantic evening with a little game of ‘I’ll be Marilyn, you be the Corsican cowboy’ (or vice-versa, of course).

  Say it with fleurs

  And there we have it. For romance, Paris is a city that can’t fail. You just have to let it do its magic. And to press the point home, I will finish with a single telling statistic—in the Paris Pages Jaunes, there are 641 florists listed. In the London Yellow Pages, there are 707. But London is approximately seventeen times bigger than Paris (1,706 square kilometres as opposed to only 105 square kilometres). What’s more, sit in any restaurant in Paris and your dinner will almost certainly be interrupted by a man trying to sell you a rose. Frankly, if you can’t get the romantic mood right, you don’t deserve to be in Paris.

  But if you do press the right buttons, and the ambiance does end up amoureuse, it is only natural that your thoughts might turn to another subject, which will be discussed at length in the following chapter …

  * Advice, perhaps, for couples planning a romantic candlelit dinner in Paris.

  ** Official perfect temperature for a Champagne toast—about 8 degrees centigrade, for those who are prepared to be unromantic enough to poke a thermometer in the bottle.

  *** On the hour, every hour from dusk till 1 a.m., and 2 a.m. in summer.

  **** Not that this would be a good idea—one thing to bear in mind, even on the most love-crazy of evening walks, is that this is urban canal water and, as such, is seriously dirty. The poor fools who strip off and dive in on hot summer nights are risking a highly romantic bout of turista, skin disease or worse.

  ***** Here, the King was inadvertently showing how out of touch with everyday life he was—French shopkeepers traditionally close on Sunday afternoons and Mondays. No wonder the Parisians cut his aloof head off.

  ****** This was more than a decade before he legalized French brothels.

  ******* For more on Edward’s amorous outings to Paris, and their far-reaching geopolitical implications, see my book 1,000 Years of Annoying the French.

  ******** For more on the bordels, see the next chapter.

  ********* I’m sure Dirty Dick is just a language problem—they thought it sounded like an American saloon. It reminds me of a Parisian friend who wanted to teach pâtisserie baking in Miami and planned to call her website French Tarts in Florida. I must admit that I now regret warning her not to.

  ********** This banter includes trying to explain what all the dishes are to anyone who can’t read French. There may be plenty of tourists here, but there’s no English menu—it’s French through and through.

  *********** The first, for those who didn’t read the earlier part of this chapter, being Stalingrad.

  ************ In France, the rule is: les femmes sur la banquette—that is, women on the bench, referring to brasseries with bench-like seating along the walls. Even if there is no banquette, the ladies must face into the restaurant. This is so that the woman will be the sole centre of the man’s attentions, or to put it more bluntly, so that the man will be gazing only at his lady love and not at every other woman in the restaurant.

  The Crazy Horse, or ‘crezzee orrsse’ as the French call it, is the most Parisian of the cabarets. Its dancers are all the same height and have the same distance between their … but you’ll just have to read the next chapter to find out.

  7

  SEX

  After dinner, he [James Bond] generally went to the Place Pigalle to see wha
t would happen to him. When, as usual, nothing did, he would walk home across Paris to the Gare du Nord and go to bed.

  IAN FLEMING, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

  THERE’S AN old Parisian joke about the shutting-down of French brothels in 1946. When the fancy bordels closed, their furniture and fittings were all sold off at auction, and according to the joke, the parrot at one of the fanciest establishments, Le Chabanais, went up for sale along with the mirrors, beds and bathtubs.

  The bird is bought by a pet-shop owner, who puts it on display with a warning that it is an excellent speaker, but prone to use bad language because of all the shady people it was associating with in its previous home.

  No one wants to buy the foul-mouthed creature until one day a housewife, Madame Dupont, comes into the shop and says she’s looking for a talking parrot to keep her company. The shopkeeper says he only has the one, and he’s selling it at a discount because it swears so much. Madame Dupont decides to buy it all the same, and puts it on a perch in her living room.

  ‘What a shitty dump,’ the parrot squawks. ‘The Chabanais was much smarter.’

  Things get even worse when Madame Dupont’s teenage daughters come in from school.

  ‘Cheap whores,’ the parrot squawks. ‘The tarts at the Chabanais were much classier.’

  And then Madame Dupont’s husband arrives home.

  ‘Merde alors,’ the parrot squawks, ‘you here, Monsieur Dupont?’

  Yes, Parisians like to think of their city as a ville chaude, a horny town, the kind of place where even a respectable family man has a secret sex life. Sex is meant to be everywhere—not just in massage parlours and swingers’ clubs, but just a smile away if you happen to meet the eye of the right person in the street.

  When I first came to Paris, I took this erotic omnipresence for granted. I was living in an apartment that looked out into a narrow courtyard, and the place just opposite was shared by three girls who used to wander from bathroom to bedrooms completely naked. What’s more, they were allergic to curtains. I thought that this was a completely normal part of Parisian life, and after a while, I hardly even paid attention when a freshly showered demoiselle went flitting across my eyeline. Whenever friends came over from the UK to visit, they’d gasp and ask me if I’d seen the nudie show opposite, and I would nonchalantly tell them, of course, this is Paris.