Steak Haché, Frites, Mayo
The bookshops in the Marais felt like they’d been exhaling the same air since the fifties—stacked to the ceiling, swaying under their own weight, whole centuries filed between two fingers. I was there on a study week with a group that covered the full range from endearing nerd to genuinely unhinged daredevil, plus one particular redhead who made concentrating on anything else unnecessarily difficult, and we wore our feet down to the bone in about three days. Past the palaces and the modern art schools and the markets with their noise and heat, past the Eiffel Tower where we drank too much and photographed ourselves pretending to hold it up. Standard Paris itinerary. Standard Paris magic. Don’t let anyone tell you it doesn’t work.
In one of those bookshops—the kind that looks structurally compromised from the outside and reveals itself to be a religion on the inside—I found a Japanese original edition of Richard Kern’s XxModels, a signed copy of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, and an ancient edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. I held all three against my chest and felt like someone who’d found exactly what they were looking for without knowing they were looking. The gay quarter, the Jewish quarter, the intellectual quarter—those streets smelled of life in the specific way that no tourist map can locate, something warm and old and slightly criminal.
None of it, though—none of the architecture, the art, the late wandering, the bookshops, the love affairs conducted in front of illuminated monuments—left a mark on me the way the steak haché did. Bloody ground beef patty. Golden fries. An unreasonable amount of mayonnaise. I can’t tell you the name of the place or the street or even the arrondissement. I know only that it arrived in front of me and I ate it and something in my chest rearranged itself permanently.
I wake up sometimes in the dark and lie there thinking about it. Every burger I’ve eaten since is a lesser object, a pale copy, a reminder that I once had access to the real thing and squandered it by finishing it. The fat, the salt, the specific temperature of the fries—there’s a precise configuration of happiness that existed only at that table, at that moment, and it’s gone now. I’ve been looking for it ever since with nothing to show for it.
What keeps me from full grief: the afternoon we found somewhere that did prawns tasting of actual ocean, and the long evenings hunting pixel monsters on a Game Boy with someone from the group who took it exactly as seriously as I did. And the places I discovered alone—pockets of the city where none of the others had wandered, corners that felt left there specifically for me. Those I haven’t talked about. I’ll go back for them.
Paris earns its mythology. The ghosts of everyone who ever mattered show up in the stone and the bookshops and the way light falls into a courtyard at four in the afternoon. The French can be proud of what they built. I mean that with total sincerity, and with an undercurrent of grief about the meat that will probably never fully resolve.