The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris

by Jenny Colgan

  At midday promptly, Frédéric shut the door and brought the shutters down. Benoît turned off all the machines and vanished on a wobbly bicycle that looked too small for his big frame.

  “Where’s he gone?” I asked.

  “For a siesta, of course,” said Frédéric. “And lunch.”

  “How long do we get for lunch?” I asked. In the factory, we got forty-five minutes—it had been brought down from an hour in a concession round to let us leave a bit earlier—but that was annoying as it wasn’t long enough to go into town or shop or meet anyone or anything like that. Frédéric shrugged. “We shall open again at three o’clock.”

  I looked at him, not sure if he was joking or not. Surely he was.

  “Three hours?”

  Frédéric didn’t seem to see this as the least bit surprising.

  “Well, yes, you have lunch to do and perhaps a little nap…”

  Now he mentioned it, a nap didn’t seem like a bad idea. I’d been up since the crack of dawn. He smiled gaily and sauntered off, leaving me standing alone. Alice marched off without a good-bye into a van laden with fresh boxes. Thierry turned around after waving them off and fixed me with a surprisingly humorous eye.

  “Lunch?” he said.

  Apart from the chocolates, I’d had nothing to eat all morning and I’d been up for such a long time. Thierry offered me his arm—he wasn’t a very fast walker—and we crossed the Pont Louis-Philippe and vanished through a maze of streets, mostly filled with tourists, with the occasional local who recognized and nodded a head to Thierry. We passed wide roads with long chains of cafés and restaurants with picture menus outside and optimistic tables set in the street. He ignored these completely, and when we got to the far end of the Marais, he twisted quickly into a tiny alleyway between two large blocks of apartments with white shutters and washing hanging from the top windows. It was cobbled, and you wouldn’t have noticed it was there if you didn’t know exactly where you were headed. At the end of the tiny lane was a little wooden sign swaying in the breeze with a large pot on it. It looked like something out of Diagon Alley, and I looked at Thierry questioningly. He said nothing but winked at me.

  It was, in fact, a restaurant, and when we opened the old brown door, a gust of noise and smells and warm air flooded out. Inside everything was brown and wooden; there were coppers on the wall and it was ferociously hot. Tiny brown wooden tables and benches, built for earlier, thinner generations I would have said, were crammed together higgledy-piggledy on different levels. Everyone appeared to be shouting, and I couldn’t see a vacant table anywhere. A large woman in a dirty white apron and glasses appeared and kissed Thierry rapidly on both cheeks, gabbling something I couldn’t recognize, then led us both to the back of the room, from where I could see, behind the bar, a huge brick oven roaring away.

  We were jammed into two seats cheek by jowl with two men who appeared to be having a furious argument about something but who would abruptly stop every so often and burst out laughing. I had just squeezed in when the old lady returned, cocking an eyebrow. Thierry leaned over to me. “I will order you the duck,” he said, and then, when I agreed, simply nodded to the woman, who vanished and sent over a very small whippet-thin boy with water, bread, napkins, utensils, and a small carafe of deep, fruity-looking wine and two very small glasses, all of which he unfolded onto the table at lightning speed. Thierry poured a tiny glass of wine for me—I thought it was to taste it—and a rather larger one for himself. Then he dipped a piece of bread into a bowl of olive oil, started chewing it contemplatively, and sat back, happy. He seemed fairly content not to ask me too much about my life or even what I was doing there. I felt very nervous suddenly.

  “So,” I said, “you’ve always had the shop?”

  He shook his head. “Not always. I was a soldier too.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t imagine Thierry as a lean, mean fighting machine.

  “Well, I was an army cook. Yes.”

  “What was that like?”

  He shrugged. “Horrible. But then I came back to my shop. Then I was much happier.”

  “Why is it called Le Chapeau Chocolat?”

  He smiled at that, but before he could answer, our food appeared.

  I had never eaten duck before, I hadn’t wanted to say, except with pancakes at the Chinese when Cath and I were flush. But I had thought duck was a small thing. This was a huge breast, like a monster Christmas turkey. On the top was a thick crispy skin, like crackling. There was a green salad and small roast potatoes on the side and a yellow sauce. I watched Thierry as he chopped into his duck right across the middle and dunked it in the sauce. I immediately did the same thing.

  The juicy, crunchy skin of the duck exploded in my mouth. The taste was just incredible, hot and salty and tender all at once. I looked up at Thierry. “This is amazing,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Oh yes, it is good.”

  I looked around at the other tables. Almost everyone else was also eating duck. This was what the place sold: oven-roasted duck. Amazing. I smiled, then wiped away some grease that wanted to run down my chin. The potatoes were hot and salty, and the salad was peppery arugula. Everything complemented everything else. It was one of the best meals I had ever had. Everyone else was taking it completely in their stride, chatting, carrying on, pretending this was normal. Perhaps if you lived in Paris, I supposed, this was normal.

  Thierry launched excitedly into explaining to me how they made sure the oven was exactly the right temperature and how they balanced out the flavors. He was fascinating on where they sourced the animals (who had to live happy lives—a stressed duck was a bad duck apparently). He was genuinely interesting and animated, completely and utterly obsessed with his food, and I stopped noticing his bulk and breathlessness and caught only his hearty laugh and obsession. Maybe I could see what Claire had seen, just a glimpse.

  Finally, after waving his knife in the air claiming he thought he could smell his neighbor’s wine was corked, he caught himself and laughed.

  “Ah, always I talk too much,” he said. “I get carried away, you know.”

  “It’s good, I like it,” I said. He raised his eyebrows ruefully.

  “No, no, I don’t pay enough attention…So tell me, you leave your boyfriend in England?”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said shortly.

  Thierry raised his eyes. “But a woman like you…”

  I couldn’t work out what he meant, whether “a woman as nice as you” or “a woman as old as you.”

  “Uh huh?” I said.

  “You look like you should have a boyfriend,” he said.

  “Well,” I said. Maybe he meant dumpy, as if I’d settled down and given up. “Well, I don’t.”

  Thierry returned to his plate and, on finding it empty, looked sad.

  “Well. Do not fall in love with Frédéric. He has nine girlfriends.”

  Given that I could probably squash Frédéric in a strong breeze, I felt this to be unlikely. I finished off my meal and did as Thierry did, running bread around the plate to mop up the juices. Oh, it was so good.

  “And what about our friend Claire?”

  I realized I hadn’t been able to check my email since I’d gotten here and let her know how we were getting on. Surely Sami would know, although he seemed a bit too exotic for email, as if he would actually get everything delivered by carrier pigeons wearing bow ties.

  I shrugged. “Was it glamorous, Paris in the ’70s?”

  “Paris is always glamorous, no?”

  I nodded.

  He looked distracted for a moment. “We were good friends, her and I,” he said, then stared at my bread and grinned broadly.

  “It is very sexy, a woman who eats,” said Thierry. “You will find a boyfriend in less than five minutes, I am sure. Stay away from the Bourse; they are all bad, bad men.”<
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  The Bourse, it turned out, was the stock exchange, and he launched into a very funny attack railing against privileged bankers, and then lunch was over.

  Thierry sat back in contentment after his meal, ordering us both another coffee, which came accompanied by a tiny flute of clear spirit.

  “Eau de vie,” said Thierry. “Essential.”

  He swigged it down and I did likewise, only to find out it was a ludicrously hard spirit that made my eyes water, and I started to cough. Thierry laughed.

  “Nice to make acquaintance,” he said in stilted English, then reverted back to French.

  “Likewise,” I said.

  “And now, a nap!”

  I had a tiny moment of wondering if this wasn’t some kind of ridiculous seduction technique—surely not—but no. Thierry headed back to the shop, and I clambered up the many steps to the tiny apartment (half crawling the last flight), tumbled into bed, and fell fast asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.

  Thank goodness for Sami. At about three o’clock, he emerged from his bedroom where he’d only just gotten up, loudly singing an operatic song that was far too high for him (he rather bounced about) and making coffee hiss on the stove. When I came around, still a little drunk on food and eau de vie, I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was.

  “Cherie!” said Sami as I emerged, blinking, into the warm afternoon light in the apartment. He glanced at his watch. “I thought you had a job.”

  My heart leapt in my mouth.

  “I do!” I said, panicking. “I did. Shit.”

  “Arrête!” Stop, said Sami. He came over and deliberately smoothed down my hair and wiped under my eyes where, presumably, I was all streaked with mascara. “Do not worry about it, cherie. You may be a little late.”

  “It’s my first day!” I moaned. In the factory, you had to clock in and clock out; otherwise, you got your money docked. Not to mention the fact that it was ridiculously rude, and I was an idiot not to set my alarm.

  Sami eyed me up carefully. “It is a siesta,” he declared. “Not an invitation to become completely unconscious.”

  A slender slip of a person hurried out of Sami’s room to the little bathroom. I smiled at Sami, who completely ignored me.

  “Allons, go,” he said. “Rush. And do not say you are sorry. British people say they are sorry one thousand times a day. Why? You do not mean it. You are not really sorry. You should save it for when you are actually sorry. Otherwise, it is meaningless.”

  “Sorry,” I said without thinking. He gave me a stern look.

  “Now. Go. Do not get drunk.”

  “I’m not drunk,” I said, offended.

  “No, but you’re English. So it can happen at any time without warning. Come home later. I might have some friends here.”

  I catapulted down the stairs, deciding to save time by not switching on the lights, which turned out to be a terrible plan as I jarred my ankles on the bottom steps, then hared out of the block. I heard the first floor door open and close quickly. Ugh, nosey old woman.

  As I turned into the rue Chanoinesse, my heart sank. The shop was opened up once again, its striped awning rolled out, its subtle gray frontage glinting in the afternoon sun, a line of happy punters queuing up outside. But worse—Thierry, I saw, was already there, with Alice. Her lip curled when she saw me. Why was she being so snooty?

  “Ah, it’s you,” she said, not even bothering to search for my name. “We thought you’d found the work too hard and gone home.”

  “I fell asleep,” I said, feeling my cheeks flare up bright red. With the others, I might have managed to laugh it off, but this woman was like a scary headmistress. She looked disapproving.

  “Well, I don’t think the most successful artisan business in Paris runs particularly well on people being asleep,” she said icily. “I’m not sure this is going to work out.”

  I bit my lip. She couldn’t mean to fire me, could she? Not when I’d just started. “I’m really sorry,” I said. “It won’t happen again.”

  Thierry turned around with a huge grin as I scampered in under Alice’s gimlet gaze.

  “We thought you had escaped! And taken all my secrets to Patrick Roger, huh? He would love to get his eyes on my workshop.”

  I shook my head vigorously, tears stinging behind the lids.

  Thierry turned to Alice. “I took her to Le Brulot,” he said, looking mock-sad, like a little boy. “So you see, it is all my fault.”

  “Who paid?” asked Alice immediately and neither of us answered—I’d never even seen the bill.

  “She is a new girl in Paris,” said Thierry. “She should understand lunch, yes?”

  Alice still looked mutinous. His voice softened. “You were a new girl in Paris once, non?”

  “I don’t eat lunch,” said Alice. But the aggression had gone out of her and she tutted and shook her head at Thierry, not me, who shot me a glance of secret triumph. I couldn’t help but smile.

  - - -

  The afternoon showed the other side of Thierry, away from his quick perfectionist bent in the workshop at the back. As I tidied, fetched, and scrubbed, I watched him with the customers, flirting, cajoling, letting them taste a little bit, giving tiny sips of the hot chocolate to children. He was as much a master out here as he was through the back of the shop, and when the enormous bills arrived, he would stare them out manfully so they handed over their credit cards without a murmur. It was a class act, I decided. He believed in his product so thoroughly he couldn’t help but transmit his enthusiasm, and the queues outside onto the cobbles were there to see him as much as anything.

  At seven promptly, the shutters were pulled down and I looked around. The shop was almost entirely empty, like a baker’s at the end of the day. Anything not sold was immediately thrown out, and I cleaned like a demon. Eventually Thierry came into the back of the shop, smiling to see me polishing the brass.

  “Ça va?” he said. “All right?”

  I nodded frantically, desperate to make it up to him. He glanced behind him. For the first time, I didn’t see Alice there.

  “How is…” He went quiet, his natural exuberance suddenly seeming a little stifled. “How is Claire?”

  I carried on polishing so he didn’t have to see my face. I knew it would betray the worst. When I had been at home, the recipient of the best physio and rehab the National Health Service had to offer, Claire had had an argument with her oncologist. She had told him she wanted an end point for chemo, after which she didn’t want to do it anymore. He had gotten very cross with her and reminded her she wasn’t that old. She had been very sharp with him, then so crotchety when I saw her that I had suggested immediately I shouldn’t go to Paris, and it’s the only time I saw her get even a little cross with me. She had said what was the point of anything if I couldn’t even do that, and she was going to be absolutely fine, if only to spite her bloody oncologist.

  I shrugged.

  “She’s…she’s been better,” I said.

  “And she is, what…your aunt?”

  “No, no. She was my teacher.”

  “Your teacher?” He beamed suddenly, surprise on his face. “What did she teach?”

  “Well, French, of course,” I said.

  He snorted. “Ha. Well, you can tell her from me you have the accent. Terrible, terrible accent.”

  He laughed at my expression. “I’m teasing you. It’s a joke. Your French is very good.”

  I sniffed. I’d thought I had done very well actually, considering I’d never visited the bloody country before.

  “Very well,” he said again, obviously sorry he’d hurt my feelings. “Tell me more about Claire. All I got was her letter.”

  “Well, we were in the hospital together,” I said. “So we kind of became friends. She’s the one who told me to get away. Well, forced me actually,” I said,
remembering. “She made me do it.”

  “Good for her,” said Thierry. “And is she…she has a husband, a family?”

  I shook my head. “No. She’s divorced.”

  Instantly I saw in his eyes a sadness—and something else too, perhaps.

  “Truly? Oh, but she was a beautiful girl. A beautiful, beautiful girl.”

  I agreed; in our little town, before she got ill, she had shined like a star.

  Thierry shook his head. “But she will recover, non? She is not old. Oh, well, we are all old,” he grumbled to himself. “But she…she was so beautiful.”

  “Who was so beautiful?” came Alice’s perfect vowels, her accent retaining a tiny hint of the aristocratic English it must have been once.

  “No one, no one, darling,” said Thierry, turning around and pasting his beaming jolly grin back on his face. “Let us leave. Do we have a quiet evening?”

  Alice looked at me with her eyes narrowed. Then said, “Yes, darling. We must drop in to the François’s cocktail party; they are expecting you. And the ambassador’s. It is all business.”

  “It is all ridiculously tedious,” said Thierry, grumbling. “People are no fun anymore. In the old days, it was all wonderful and we could dance and smoke, and now it is just everyone standing and looking worried and muttering about money, money, money.”