He looked at me expectantly.
“Yours is the best,” I said simply, not sure I could trust my French to elaborate. He paused, then the huge laugh was back.
“Listen to her!” he yelled. “Alice! ALICE! Come, you must hear this. A countryman of yours.”
A languid, incredibly scrawny woman who must have been about fifty—but a really, really well-preserved fifty, her lipstick red on her wide mouth, her hair a perfect black helmet with an elegant swoop of pure white at the front—emerged into the back room. She was wearing cigarette pant trousers and a man’s jacket and looked—there was no two ways about it—absolutely amazing. She was originally English but, I would discover, kept insisting that she had lived in Paris for so long, she had forgotten it all, when what she actually meant was she didn’t want to waste time speaking to a guttersnipe like me or any of the English press–reading expat clusters who gathered together by the Shakespeare bookshop or the Frog or the Smiths on the rue de Rivoli. The best way to annoy Alice was to guess she was British before she opened her mouth, something I often prompted people to do. Which was childish, but she really was very rude to me.
She raised an eyebrow at Thierry.
“Cheri?”
“We have an English girl!”
Alice looked at me and I was suddenly very conscious of my plain skirt, my flat shoes, my Gap bag, my morning hair.
“Evidently,” she said. I couldn’t believe this snotty cow was English. Well, I could, but she couldn’t have looked more French had she been wearing a beret, a small twirled mustache, and a Breton shirt and been carrying a chain of onions around her neck while riding a bicycle and surrendering a war.
“Hello,” I said in English.
“Bonjour,” she replied, then immediately glanced elsewhere in the room as if bored to death. I don’t know exactly what had made Thierry go from lovely Claire to this, but no wonder he ate all the time.
Thierry beckoned me over. First, he turned his attention to the fresh cocoa. Frédéric added it to a large vat, and Thierry, with a deftness unexpected in such a large man, flicked the tap so the vat filled up with warm, gently steaming, thick chocolate liquid, followed by the milk, and he added a fresh powder snowfall of sugar, stopping, tasting, stopping, tasting, so quickly he looked like a blur. “Yes, no, yes, no, more, quick!” he yelled as the men rushed to follow his bidding. Finally he declared himself satisfied.
“Now we really start,” he pronounced.
“Lavendre!” he barked, and Frédéric rushed to chop some off the box at the end of the room. Thierry chopped it incredibly fine with a knife so quickly I thought he would lose a finger, then popped it, along with a tiny crystal bottle of lavender essence so potent that, as soon as he opened the little flacon, the entire room was overcome with the scent, like a spring meadow. Delicately, his little finger tilted upward, he let two…three drops into the basin, whisking all the time with his other hand. The tiny purple flecks of the plant were almost completely hidden, and he paced across the room one, two, three times, his left hand working furiously, his right holding the basin close. Occasionally he would stop, dip in a finger, lick, and resume, possibly adding a tiny drop more cream or a little of the dark chocolate from the other vat. Finally he announced himself satisfied and stepped away from the vat. Benoît carried it over to the side of the oven, where it would be shaped and melted and tempered, ready for tomorrow.
Then Thierry hollered “molds,” and immediately, Frédéric was there with the fresh batch. He poured the chocolate expertly into the molds without spilling a drop, then inserted the tray into the large industrial fridge. Without pausing, he turned around; Benoît had already silently placed a large box of small jellies in front of him. Thierry chopped them into the tiniest of diamond shapes, each exactly alike and perfect. By the time he had finished, the chocolate had hardened and he removed them briskly from the fridge, turning the mold upside down so thirty-two perfect chocolates popped out onto the workshop top. He pressed the diamonds of jellied fruit into the tops of the whirls, then, with a mere glance, sent one down to me.
“Tell me what you think,” he said.
I bit into it. The soft sweet edge of citrus—it must have been cut from the lime plant—mellowed the perfectly balanced chocolate; the entire thing tasted so light it could have been good for you. The chocolate flavor didn’t fade away in the mouth; its richness intensified, grew stronger. The tiny tart jelly on the top perfectly stopped the sweetness from overpowering the rest of the bonbon. It was perfect, exquisite. I smiled in pure happiness.
“That is what I like to see, heh?” Thierry indicated to the rest of the room. “That is the face I like. Always the face I like. Today we will make lavender four hundred piece, rosemary and confiture, mint…”
He turned to Alice. “You want to try?”
She gave him a stony look.
“I joke,” he said to me. “She does not eat. Like a robot.”
“I do eat,” said Alice frostily. “I just eat food, not poison.”
The wonderful aftertaste of the chocolate suddenly turned ashy in my mouth and I wanted to cough. Thierry looked at me mischievously and winked broadly, and I smiled back, but I wasn’t sure I liked that either, being lumped in with the massive fatties.
“It passes?” said Thierry.
“It is sublime,” I said honestly. Frédéric smiled at me, which gave me the impression that I wasn’t doing so badly so far. Thierry snapped his fingers and Benoît gave him an espresso into which he poured copious amounts of sugar, then necked it. There was a silence in the room for one hanging half-second, then he announced, “Finish!”
He and Alice swept out of the workroom, and the men immediately started to move. Frédéric gave me my mop and instructed me to basically wash and polish anything that wasn’t tied down. Once they’d gotten going, they moved with awesome speed, turning out Thierry’s creation exactly over and over again with huge molds; the lime, then the rosemary and jam, which sounded very peculiar to me until they let me taste it. As soon as I had tried it, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever eat anything else.
At 11:00 a.m., Frédéric took off his dirty apron, swapped it for a smarter, more formal clean one with the name of the shop and his own name embroidered on the pocket, and went to open up. The shutters made a loud rattling noise, echoing throughout the street as the other shops, cafés, and emporiums started opening up for business. Even though I’d seen the sun was up through the hazy workroom windows, seeing it beam in through the front of the shop made me blink.