Old Man Louis the 14th of France stained European royalty green with envy when he built his palace of Versailles. You question me. You ask about the Brits and their Buckingham Palace. Shmuckingham Palace. That place wasn’t even built for a king but for some silly old Duke of Buckingham. Have they done a few add-ons? A remodel or two? Sure. But so has my neighbor. The Austrian palace of Schönbrunn? More like the Austrian palace of some bum. What of the castles of Italy? Those city-state as@holes? That’s like asking about the palaces of the kingdom of Minneapolis. But Versailles. Built for a Sun King. Lived in by a Sun King. No elected, figurehead here. I am France, King Louis said. I am the state. "L'État, c'est moi!" *
King Louis thought he had everything, but he didn’t have coffee until a Turkish delegation enamored the king with delicacies that included the almighty coffee bean. Trickledown cafénomics spilled from the Sun King’s table onto the lap of the nobility and then down the streets of Paris when in 1686 an Italian born dude named Procopio said I've got a clean and well-lighted place and hung some mirrors and chandeliers and served coffee and alcohol and he called it Café Procope and bingo. Café DNA.
Coffee’s travel to France from Ethiopia began in 850 AD, when a lonely goat-hearder observed an extra "Lay hee hoo!" from his goats when they chewed on the coffee beans, and by the year 1723, no less than 323 cafés adorned the sidewalks of Paris. At century’s end, Parisians enjoyed some 1,800 different café options.
Unluckily for the French royal family, that café flood occurred during the time the play Les Miserables was set and revolutionaries invigorated by coffee and poverty sang Red and Black and turned song into action like can happen only in the cafés of Paris and then it was “To the barricades!” It’s ironic that the Sun King loved coffee beans so much that he grew them in his own green houses in Versailles, because what he was growing was the demise of his great-grandson and heir. I mean I’m not sure what ol’ Louis expected.
You build a palace while the passing elite shout to peasants to eat grass like in A Tale of Two Cities and those people might have been eating grass but they were drinking coffee in the cafes and discussing the fact that they were were eating grass while overloading on caffeine and injustice. Marie Antionette married the Sun King’s great-grandson, but her life-size English hamlet, which she had built on the palace grounds so that she and her friends could play Shakespeare on a life-size set and no silly little stage, was not as charming to starving Parisians as it is to us visitors today.
My café in all of this is L'éclair. There are many like it but this one is mine. It’s my first stop in Paris after I land because I never sleep on planes and I don’t really want to do anything and this city does nothing better than other cities do their best somethings and that’s because of the cafés. I come to this café and do nothing and remember this is why I came to Paris.
To find your very own café is simple. If it’s close to where you’re staying, it’s qualified. It needs to be the first stop of your day and the last. It’s supposed to be easy. That’s it. Don’t overthink it. Some cafés serve better coffee. Some better food. Some fancier cocktails. Forget that nonsense. You’ll be out and about in Paris all day. F&^king Paris. I’m talking about your café. Your café is nothing except utilitarian. Read. Or don’t. Get your bearings, plan your tomorrow, or don’t. Don’t do anything. It’s just your first and last stop for the day. That’s it. Done.
In terms of taste of coffee, you no more need great coffee at the café s than you need to find a great tasting jacket on a wintry day. It’s the warmth you are after. Look, in the early 1800s, during the Napoleonic wars, the French were embargoing British goods, which meant no coffee, and they got used to the taste of chicory because they went DIY on coffee beans. Paris still is not the coffee destination of the world. It doesn’t matter. The taste isn't the point. The temperature is. It is not a coffee shop. It’s a café. The songs the students sang in Les Mis were about red, a world about to dawn, and black, the night that ends at last. Not red, the color of the tufted seats, or black, the arabica single origin beans. The café will be what you need it to be. Use it.
The only hesitation I would offer concerns placemats. Basically, if there are placemats on the tables then you are basically expected to wait for the waiter to seat you and then order food. If no placemats, feel free to just sit and drink only coffee or ginger beer or sparkling water.
But you do need to begin and end your day at your café and sit and ponder and relax and breathe. I mean just under a quick, fifteen-minute walk from my café is musee Rodin. Here stands one of my favorite art works of all time: The Gates of Hell. Based on Dante’s Inferno, Rodin said this of his work: “The artist must celebrate the poignant struggle which is the basis of our existence, and which brings to grips the body and the soul. Nothing is more moving than the maddening beast, perishing in lust and begging vainly for mercy from an insatiable passion.”
The Gates of Hell is just one sculpture at one museum of Paris, so take a few minutes at a café and do a bit of pondering on your day. Just step outside. It’s right there. Find yours.
*This is actually what one would call artistic license. As in it’s not true. King Louis never actually said, “I am the state.” A historian said that he said that a hundred years after he died. That’s a long time to play the telephone game. But the king’s great-granddaughter-in-law, Marie Antoinette, also never said, “Let them eat cake.” So it plays. It’s the idea. Whether it happened or not is irrelevant.
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