It was a ravishing day. Even though my back was already sore from stooping to clean so many nooks and crannies in the workshop, and Benoît had indicated he wanted me to start on the copper vats, which had a complicated-looking box of harsh-smelling cleaning products attached to it. Claire hadn’t been wrong about the hard work.
But Frédéric beckoned me out for a cigarette break at the front. I didn’t smoke, but I kept him company as he waved and bantered with the other shop holders setting out their stalls; the little bookshop was putting racks of paperbacks outside, some of them, I noticed, looking a bit dog-eared; there was a little print shop with maps of vintage Paris in careful plastic pockets, framed in card, and some larger touristy work—Monets, Klimts—on the walls for sale. One shop seemed to sell nothing but hundreds of different types of tea, all in little metal boxes, brightly colored, lining the walls in a hundred flavors: mint, cardamom, grapefruit, caramel. That shop smelled dry and refined, of leaves, not the earthy deep flavors of Thierry’s. But from the friendly way Frédéric hailed the proprietor, a tall, thin older man who looked as desiccated as the leaves he sold, as if a stiff breeze would blow him away, I imagined they must get on all right, the two things complementing each other. Next door to us directly was a shop selling bits and bobs, new brooms and dustpans and mop heads and nails.
Above street level, windows were being opened; the little roads were so narrow here, you could see everybody living cheek by jowl. Coffee was being drunk, papers unfurled—Le Matin, France Soir—and everywhere the smooth rattle and chatter of French, background chatter reduced to a mélange, to a pleasant background on the radio. I couldn’t quite believe it; here I was, hanging out with a true French person, in a road full of professional French people, working in a French place, drinking sticky coffee, and watching the world go by. I was slightly delirious with the lack of sleep and on a bit of a sugar rush if I was being perfectly honest, but I couldn’t help the huge bubble of excitement boiling up inside me, even though I was, when you got down to it, about to spend the rest of the day scrubbing a gigantic metal vat. (Only two flavors of chocolate were made each day, so one vat could rotate its cleaning. You had to be, I was assured, very, very careful not to infect the vat with cleaning products, nor disturb its patina, which gave the mixing depth. Frédéric had gone on about it till I was cross-eyed.) Well, I would deal with that problem in a moment. For now, I was happy just standing outside, smelling Frédéric’s heavy Gauloises smoke, watching a perky-looking dog with a newspaper in its mouth prance up the street, seeing a trio of pigeons spiral up among the high roofs, and hearing the chime of different bells from across the river and down the whole wind of the Seine. I liked the sound.
“He likes you,” said Frédéric. “Be careful. Alice will not like you.”
“I can handle Alice,” I said, which was sheer bravado and actually a bare-faced lie. People confident enough to be rude always rather impressed me.
“Anyway, isn’t she just his girlfriend?”
Frédéric snorted.
“Without Alice, Thierry would stay in bed all day every day, eating his own work. She is the one who pushes him, who made him famous. She is always worried that someone will steal him.”
But he looks like a gigantic pig, I didn’t say. And also surely unbelievably glamorous and worldly Alice was hardly going to bother with me.
The first tourists of the day were already heading down the cobbled street, cooing and remarking on the quaintness of everything. One or two were following guides, and when they saw our sign, their faces lit up.
“The hordes descend,” said Frédéric, flicking his cigarette quickly into the gutter and returning quickly to the shop with a large smile pasted on his face. “Bonjour, messieurs, dames!”
From inside the workshop where I was scrubbing, very slowly, the gigantic pan with a toothbrush, like some kind of sadistic punishment, I could see the heads of people in the shop bobbing around through the window in the swinging doors; sometimes Frédéric would put his head through and bellow at Benoît, who continued, utterly methodically, setting out tray after tray of the fresh chocolates, which sold as quickly, it appeared, as he could set them in the fridge, even though the prices were absolutely startling. I couldn’t believe how much they cost. Frédéric explained to me later that yes, it was expensive to make chocolate the way Thierry did it, with the utter best of everything, but even the very best of herbs didn’t cost that much money. Alice had decided that unless customers found things unwaveringly costly, they didn’t appreciate it so much, and they’d also found that every time they increased prices, the shop got busier and they got profiled in more up-market magazines. And so it went on, till people came from across the world to visit the famous, the one and only fresh chocolate shop on the rue Chanoinesse, and Thierry kept on doing what he did, and they were paid, Frédéric remarked crossly, very little, while Alice salted it away and bought Chanel handbags. I wondered how much of this was true and how much just anti-Alice speculation.
At midday promptly, Frédéric shut the door and brought the shutters down. Benoît turned off all the machines and vanished on a wobbly bicycle that looked too small for his big frame.
“Where’s he gone?” I asked.
“For a siesta, of course,” said Frédéric. “And lunch.”
“How long do we get for lunch?” I asked. In the factory, we got forty-five minutes—it had been brought down from an hour in a concession round to let us leave a bit earlier—but that was annoying as it wasn’t long enough to go into town or shop or meet anyone or anything like that. Frédéric shrugged. “We shall open again at three o’clock.”
I looked at him, not sure if he was joking or not. Surely he was.
“Three hours?”
Frédéric didn’t seem to see this as the least bit surprising.
“Well, yes, you have lunch to do and perhaps a little nap…”
Now he mentioned it, a nap didn’t seem like a bad idea. I’d been up since the crack of dawn. He smiled gaily and sauntered off, leaving me standing alone. Alice marched off without a good-bye into a van laden with fresh boxes. Thierry turned around after waving them off and fixed me with a surprisingly humorous eye.