Spring Things

Bonnes addresses, true carpentry crime, and an important ham

*Sorry to subscribers who are getting this twice! I keep selecting the wrong delivery option and had to send it out again.

I’ve been looking forward to this moment—homeward bound from a week’s work in Tokyo, when I knew I’d have time to sit down and write a newsletter with a pristine white sand plage of fifteen hours’ writing time stretching out ahead. “Plage,” used this way, to mean “period” or “interval,” is one of the French language’s perfect words; one of the ones I reach for, even when I’m speaking English, even at the risk of being that annoying Franglish lady, because I don’t know another delivery method for idea that there is a certain pleasure or beauty or just necessity in being able to focus on something for a long stretch. This second sense of “plage” is a brilliant metaphor, saddling up the word’s dominant meaning and taking it for a sunset horseback ride. “My job—it’s just beach,” Ken told Barbie. Is Ken French?

Serviteurs muets et plateaux en fruits déguisés, Bernard Vaussion, via BnF Gallica.

Another question: who’s your favorite amateur photographer of baroque reception food from the 1970s? Mine’s Bernard Vaussion, a longtime Élysée chef who donated sixty Ektachromes of creations such as langouste en Bellevue and a basket made out of noodle dough and stuffed with bricks of foie gras to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Speaking of la table du temps jadis: mostly for logistical reasons, we recently took my mom to La Rotonde. Don’t sleep on it—mirrored ceiling, conspiratorial red velvet booths (every table is a good table), an expert if very expensive sole meunière. It’s not Paname Boom Boom, exactly, but it’s still got pizzazz.

My untrendy restaurant club recently visited Restaurant Josephine "Chez Dumonet” (quotes restaurant’s own), where we were delighted by an after-dinner mignardise of chocolate-dipped frozen grapes. After the after-dinner we proceeded to Le Rosebud, an Existentialist hangout that was recently taken over by a consortium of actors and artists. Michèle Lamy was there, drinking a cocktail. I went home and Googled her and learned that she is eighty-one, which: 🎩🎩🎩, Madame. The other day, I had occasion to visit Maison Schmid, Paris’s Alsatian traiteur de référence. It’s on rue Strasbourg, just outside the Gare de l’Est. (Logique.) HOT TIP: THEY SELL SOFT PRETZELS, WHICH YOU CAN SERVE FOR DINNER WITH HAM¹.

You might think all we do here is eat. That’s not true. We read. I just finished Angela Flournoy’s “The Wilderness,” and, wow, does it nail female friendships and technofascism—yeah, in one novel. While I gobbled down Graydon Carter’s “When The Going Was Good,” I was left feeling that we, the hungry public, had only entered maybe the fourth room² of succulent anecdotes. Give us another volume! The unexpurgated diaries! (Very looking forward to Michael Grynbaum’s “Empire of the Elite,” and Keith McNally’s “I Regret Almost Everything.”)

For the retour, I have a highly coveted copy of Bryan Washington’s “Palaver”—my prize souvenir of Tokyo, along with a 45R buttondown (it was *a lot* cheaper there) and a pack of Shinkansen Band-Aids.³ I’m intrigued by “Paysannes,” a book of portraits of older French women living in rural parts of the country. My next novel in French will be Delphine Plisson’s “Laisse aller, c’est une valse.” FOLR and restaurant-recommender supreme

Lindsey Tramuta

has a new book out this month: “The Eater Guide to Paris.” And I’m so looking forward to “Mille milliards de rubans,” a history of fashion by Loïc Pringent, one of its most intelligent and lively theoreticians.

Torteaux et pointes d’asperges, Bernard Vaussion, via BnF Gallica.

What’s in the papers, you ask? I’ve been avidly following the trial of Bill Pallot, (“uncontested specialist of 19th century furniture”) and Bruno Desnoues (“cabinet-maker of genius”) for forging extremely expensive antique chairs. It’s got stakes: one pair of fakes, which had supposedly belonged to Marie-Antoinette, went to the Emir of Qatar for two million Euros. It’s got drama: “I licked the chair and voilà, I could taste the fraud,” Pallot’s former protégé said, explaining that Desnoues used melted licorice to give fresh wood an ancient patina. The story is endlessly entertaining, but I also find it weirdly sad. Desnoues was, by all accounts, a woodworking prodigy—Meilleur Ouvrier de France 1984, winner of the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for “intelligence of the hand.” He went so far as to speckle his fakes with little black dots that resembled fly excrement, leading the Advisory Committee on National Treasures to praise “the extreme quality and finesse of the sculpted décor.” Quel gâchis.