The tortured trees and scary waiters of blvd. St. Germain

The tortured trees and scary waiters of blvd. St. Germain
by David Benjamin

PARIS — The Ville de Paris is destroying the evidence.

For decades on the boulevard St. Germain, its plucky trees would welcome the spring by putting out new shoots, slender green tendrils reaching hopefully toward the fickle sun. And then, in the fall, just after each of these infant branches had raised its first proud little crop of leaves, municipal workmen would come along with bucket trucks and hedge trimmers. They slashed every new growth back to the nub, like black-site torture artists snipping off fingers and ears in a Turkish dungeon.

What they left behind, in winter, was a long row of leafless cripples, their trunks and limbs grotesquely bent and foreshortened, like skeletal hands thrust from the graves of tormented polio victims buried alive.

Now, the city is tearing up the trees, replacing them with unsuspecting sycamore saplings, still too young to be trimmed. The old trees? There are only three left now between the blvd. St. Michel and place de l’Odeon. I picture a mass grave somewhere beyond the banlieues, where sado-arborists with chainsaws reduce the uprooted shade-trees of St. Germain into three-meter lengths and hurriedly cover them with quicklime.

As I strolled the boulevard, I bade the last three survivors adieu, wondering how quickly the city’s shame will reduce them to stumps and sawdust.

On the other hand, the new sycamores look nice. Their shade will be denser, their display prettier. They will better adorn one of the great avenues of the world, the Fifth Avenue of the Left Bank.

The blvd. St. Germain begins and ends on the Seine, curving southward while the river bends north. A walk from one end of the boulevard, at the Assemblée Nationale, to the other, where the pont de Sully crosses the Seine, is a pleasure both familiar and changeable. It’s a long, prosperous street rarely crowded, but there’s always a parade, featuring some of Paris’ suavest swells and silliest tourists.

On the morning I lamented the boulevard’s tortured trees, I was bound westward, slowly. My first landmark was an urban oasis named for its ancient church, St. Germain des Prés. Its most famous restaurant, Les Deux Magots, facing the church, is where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvioir — according to legend — occupied a corner table, billing, cooing and occasionally ripping each other’s hearts out. But I passed Les Deux Magots, preferring to have my third coffee at the Café de Flore, which The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik — in defiance of his forebear, Janet Flanner — once declared more hip than the stodgy old Magots.

As I claim a table on the chilly terrasse, I don’t see Gopnik’s distinction. Both joints cost too much and they’re packed, in the daytime, with goggle-eyed Chinese tourists, a few furtive honeymooners from Japan, a scattering of checklist travelers from the U.S. drinking the cheapest fluids on the menu, and the inevitable flock of Italians who — for some reason — never travel in groups smaller than twelve. The clientele on a Tuesday forenoon are little more chic and cosmopolitan than I — who have all the slick savoir faire of a drunk doughboy on the town in a set of ill-fitting civvies.

Real Parisians sometimes outnumber the rubberneckers at lunch hereabouts, but they don’t really claim their turf at the Flore and Magots ’til ‘round midnight. And then, well, maybe Gopnik can tell which crowd is cooler, but I’m oblivious to such patrician nuances and just glad that both joints have a bottle of Glenmorangie.

The waiters of St. Germain have a reputation for snootiness. Tourists — especially Americans — live in mortal fear of Parisian waiters, some of whom actually cultivate their scarinesss. But Hotlips and I learned early that they can be subdued with a measure of chutzpah and a little bit of comical French.

At the Magots and Flore, the servers are prompt, polite, multilingual and exquisitely correct. Not cuddly, but not scary. Scarier, for example, is the fact that the Flore is one of the few remaining Paris venues with a W.C. concierge. From a comfortable chair at the entrance, she directs men to the Hommes and women to the Femmes. In return, she expects a few coins in her spotless little saucer. She either curses her visitors softly but audibly if they don’t know what the saucer’s for, or she beams at them with loving irony when they have no idea of the going rate (no more than 40 cents) and blow a couple of euros on the privilege of peeing at the Flore.

Hotlips and I used to know the scariest waiter on the blvd. St Germain, personally. He’s retired now. He held dominion over a wonderful place on the east end of the avenue, called Chez René, where the specialty is the boeuf bourgignon in an ink-black wine gravy that’s been simmering in the same pot for 100 years. When we first faced him, he loomed like a headmaster out of Charles Dickens, stern, icy and expectant. What were we doing in his section? Had we read the menu? Did we understand — or, more important, did we appreciate — the menu? Were we ready? Did we belong?

The blvd. St Germain is the birthplace of existential doubt. This waiter was its apotheosis. If he walked away and never took our order, would we still exist?

The Scary Waiter exerted no pressure, of course. That would be improper. He simply stood, gray and magisterial, posture-perfect, and witheringly patient. We managed to order, in French, and had the good sense to stick to the specialités de la maison and drink the sublime house beaujolais. We hoped this pleased him. We wanted to please him. The waiter — we never learned his name — performed impeccably, and understood everything we needed by eye contact alone. But he was not warm.

Not ’til we’d been back to Chez René about four more times.

Then, one chilly autumn night, perfect for hot hearty meat dishes, we reserved a table in the Scary Waiter’s section. I was surprised that the owner, on the phone, recognized my name. When we arrived, around 8:30, there was the Scary Waiter, greeting us at the door, smiling and shaking my hand, kissing Hotlips on both cheeks and guiding us to our table. The owner patted me on the back. His wife hailed us from behind a small mountain of charcuterie.

Somehow, that evening, we crossed the invisible threshold and became regulars. There’s nothing better in Paris. You are as effusively welcome as, before, you felt congenitally alien and secretly scrutinized. Your table is prime, your favorites are known. The menu is superfluous. You’re family. The Scary Waiter is suddenly Santa Claus.

Chez René was our first Paris experience as regulars. We have a few other spots now, too. But cracking the scariest waiter on the blvd. St. Germain? Nothing will ever top that.

Then we lost him. A few years ago, we returned. He was there, but not the owners. They had retired. New — younger, less rumpled — people were in charge. The tables were slightly rearranged. The menu had been tweaked. And the Scary Waiter, who hurried to our table to welcome us home, told us that he, too, would soon be gone.

He was anxious that night to assure us that the new owners hadn’t screwed it up. Chez René would be the same as it was. We thanked him and enjoyed his service all through our dinner, and tipped him excessively and said reluctant goodbye. But we knew he was wrong.

Without him, yes, it’s still comfort food on a cold night in Paris. But it’s not the same.