The Perfect Meal Read Online Free Page A

only the heart, which ran through the broth in crunchy shreds. The combination was delicious.
    By the time I was mopping up the last drops of the soup, the chess game had advanced. A white and a black pawn faced each other on K4.
    “Do you recommend a dessert?” I asked.
    “The Gâteau Normand au Calvados isn’t bad.”
    I looked at the menu. “I don’t see it.”
    “Oh, they don’t do it here. But they make a good one at the Café Croissant.”
    Feeling the ground slipping away ever so slightly beneath my feet, I asked, “In the second? Where Jean Juarès was assassinated?”
    He looked up. Was there a little respect in his expression? I probably imagined it.
    “That’s one distinction of the place, I suppose,” he said. “Personally, I go there for the gâteau. They bake on Thursdays.”
    Taking this for an invitation, I turned up the following Thursday just before lunch. In 1914, a fanatic with the theatrically appropriate name of Raoul Villain shot socialist politician Jean Juarès here. In those days, the Café Croissant had special police permission to stay open all night for the benefit of journalists who had to keep late hours. Juarès and his friends were celebrating having stopped the government from introducing a compulsory three-year military service. Villain, a right-wing militarist, leaned through a window from the street and killed Jaurès with a single shot. A wall plaque commemorates the fact, and Boris was sitting below it. This time he wasn’t playing chess with himself but doing a crossword puzzle. Or at least thinking about it, since, though he held a sharpened pencil, he hadn’t filled in a single square. I couldn’t read a word of the paper. It appeared to be in Cyrillic.
    The plate in front of him held a slice of moist-looking cake.
    “That will be the Gâteau Normand au Calvados ?” I asked as I reached for the menu.
    “Don’t bother,” he said. “This was the last piece.” He pushed his plate toward me. “I saved it for you.”
    It was moist, crusted with coarse sugar, wedges of apple baked in, the whole thing fragrant with apple brandy.
    As I ate, he studied the crossword. “‘Vampiric member of the family Petromyzontid,’” he said. “Seven letters.”
    “Lamprey?”
    “I believe you’re right. Thank you.” But he didn’t write it down.
    There is a book to be written about my assignations with Boris, always at cafés that had a claim on immortality or notoriety. Usually some writer had worked there, or an artist had made it his favorite subject. Occasionally a building of historical importance, since demolished, once occupied the site.
    Visitors to Paris assume cafés are places to drink coffee and perhaps to eat, but to Parisians that’s only a small part of their significance. Herbert Lottman, who analyzed Parisian expatriate life more acutely than almost anyone else, knew their importance.
One could not only meet friends in a café but conduct business there, spend half a day writing letters, or even a book. One needed no invitation to strike up a conversation with a stranger at a neighboring table, and an appointment in a café often replaced an invitation home. It kept home inviolate, and if home was a garret, all the more reason.

    A traditional café of the 1890s. The waiter carries the day’s newspaper, provided free to clients but attached to a wooden rod to prevent stealing.
    Boris never invited me to his home. For all I knew, it could be a seventh-floor chambre de bonne in the funky nineteenth arrondissement or a maison particulière in snobbish Neuilly. If he had a family, he never spoke of them. In the same way, even though we met in dozens of cafés, I almost never saw him eat, except, occasionally, a slice of pain Poilâne , the wholemeal sourdough bread that was one of the few modern products for which he had any respect.
    As well as being chapels to his love of food, restaurants were also classrooms. Boris would order poulet chasseur on my behalf,