The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (15 page)

“People opened their windows and signaled me to come in,” he recalled. And on the spot, using only a glass cutter, a
ruler, a small hammer, and putty, he replaced their broken windowpanes.

Pierino was among the last of the family to sell replacement glass on the street. “The craft no longer exists,” he said. He has a black-and-white photo of his uncle on a street in his hometown of Turin, with his glass carrier on his back. His shop, Miroiterie Vitrerie de la Victoire, is still a family business: Pierino works with his niece, Sophie Anselmo, who manages the shop. They have two trucks and five employees, who travel around Paris working on construction projects and for private companies. “I want to be known as the most beautiful glazier of Paris,” said Pierino.

A neighbor in my building, Jean-Claude Lalou, came by with a handful of knives. That gave Ilda the push she needed. She brought a small knife from her kitchen and joined the conversation. “This will last how long, what you are doing to my knife?” she asked.

“More than a year,” Henri said proudly. “
Ah bah oui
. Otherwise it’s not worth it.”

She was skeptical.

“More than a year, my little woman,” Henri said again. “It’s the same whether you use it once or you cut with it every day.”

Ilda wanted to know why knives don’t stay sharp for a whole year after you buy them. “It’s mass production,” he said. “Industrialization.”

I announced that I knew a thing or two about knife sharpening, that I had two whetstones and two sharpening steels my father had given me when I was just starting out in life.

Henri called them worthless. He said there are rules governing stones: you need to know when to oil them and which side to
start on; as for steels, they help to maintain, but not improve, the sharpness of the blade.

Finally, it was time for me to pay Henri: “Two hundred euros,” he announced. Two hundred euros? The price of a pair of decent leather boots? To sharpen a few knives? He explained that each knife costs twelve euros, each pair of scissors seven, and that he was giving me a big discount. I looked at my antique knives. I had paid twelve euros for the whole set. Still, in sharpening them to perfection, Henri had removed their black stain. They shone bright silver in the sun.

GUESS WHO’S COMING TO PASSOVER?

. . .

To know people, to gain their confidence, to know their private lives, even their vices and their villainous stories.
To write everything.

—P
AUL
L
éAUTAUD,
WRITER WHO LIVED AS A CHILD
ON THE RUE DES
M
ARTYRS

F
OR GUY LELLOUCHE, THE GOAL IS LESS ABOUT MAKING
money and more about appreciating lovely objects. Guy usually wears a gray felt fedora, velvet pants, dark glasses, and, when it’s cold, two pashmina scarves. He has been an antiques dealer for decades, accumulating both the eccentric and the rare: an eighteenth-century silver Russian box, nineteenth-century rose-cut diamond earrings, mid-twentieth-century metal chairs.

His shop is halfway between my apartment, on the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, and the base of the rue des Martyrs. He keeps it lit all night. The warm yellow glow exposes the curves and
angles of furniture and sculptures, so that details lost by day suddenly proclaim themselves in the darkness.

He is about sixty but can look older or younger, depending on the day. His wife died several years ago, so he now shows off photos of his only child, a daughter, and his young granddaughter. On one level, he is provincial. He speaks no English and has never been to the United States. He longs to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York but knows he will never go.

Guy is the product of two cultures, Europe and the Middle East. His grandparents hailed from Egypt, the Netherlands, Tunisia, and Italy. He embraces the identity he brought to France from his native Djerba, in Tunisia. But he is as straight-talking as an American, and he fills his stories with dramatic flourishes worthy of the stage.

He is so knowledgeable about art and antiques that he would fit right in with the high-class dealers on the rue du Dragon or the rue de Seine in Saint-Germain, across the river. In his shop I once saw a marble-topped table with an elaborate bronze base that was wrapped for delivery to the residence of Princess Caroline of Monaco; her decorator is one of Guy’s longtime clients.

In good weather, Guy leaves his front door open to entice customers to enter. Or he moves the shop outdoors. One day he lined up, on the sidewalk, six Art Deco walnut dining room chairs upholstered in leopard-print velour. He sat on one, as if to say, “Please join me.” Another day he put out a metal crate of heavy white cups and saucers marked with the name “Cafés Richard,” for the giant French coffee-roasting company. He was selling them for fifteen euros apiece and planned to throw out the leftovers at the end of the day. Instead, he gave them all to me.

I don’t know if Guy makes a living; I know he has fun. At
four p.m. most days, Guy invites clients and neighbors to join him at his shop for tea and conversation. One day as I passed by, he held up an empty gilt picture frame, as if to frame his smiling face. I cannot walk by without saying hello.

Guy is Jewish and wants everyone to know it. Even though he is only occasionally observant, he seasons his exclamations with Hebrew. The French have a reverence for the secular republican state that makes them keep religion to themselves. But as soon as we met, Guy revealed himself. Maybe it’s because I’m American, and we Americans tend to be more straight-to-the-point than the French. Or maybe it’s because my husband is Jewish and that makes me an extended member of Guy’s tribe.

The conversation started the day I spotted a silkscreen in the window of his shop. It looked like a jubilant Miró with two flying menorahs. I walked in, introduced myself, and said I had a question.

“Are those menorahs?” I asked.

“Ah,” he replied. “You must be Jewish!”

“Actually, I’m not,” I said. “My husband’s Jewish; I’m Catholic.”

That didn’t sound right to Guy. If you’re not Jewish enough to marry a Jew and not Catholic enough to marry a Catholic, how can you be attached to your religious identity, he wanted to know.

Suddenly, I was telling my story: how Andy and I met by chance early one Saturday morning on the Long Island Rail Road en route to New York’s Hamptons, how we had been at different stages of our lives and in different worlds and never would have met otherwise, how we fell in love but were believers in our own religions so conversion was out of the question, how
we were married in a joint religious ceremony by a rabbi and a Jesuit priest.

“Nothing happens by chance,” he said.

“You mean it was
bashert
?” I asked. I was using what I thought was a Hebrew word (one of the few I know) meaning fated or “meant to be.”

Except the word isn’t Hebrew, it’s Yiddish, and Guy is not an Eastern European Ashkenazi but a Tunisian-born Sephardi. He had no idea what the word meant, so I told him. He said he liked my spirit. And even though he had not met my husband, my loose connection to Judaism through him was all it took for Guy and me to start an ongoing conversation about life, love, family, religion—and the exquisite objects in his shop.

Our relationship involved the oddest things. One day we began an exchange of goods, what the French call
le troc
. Guy was delighted when I gave him a large, ornate, silver menorah of unknown origin that I had found in a cupboard while cleaning out my office at the
New York Times
; I was delighted when he gave me a bottle of old wine he had rescued from a client’s wine cellar. It leaked around the cork and smelled of vinegar. But what vinegar!

When I bought a lithograph of an abstract landscape by Nicolas de Staël from him, he slashed the price without my even asking. I thanked him with a gift of four English bone china stands trimmed in gold; long ago, menus were handwritten on them for each formal dinner, then rubbed off for the next time. He scribbled useful information about the shop on them and put them in the window.

One day I complimented him on the Hermès scarf he was wearing.

“What Hermès scarf?” he asked.

“Your scarf,” I said. “It’s an Hermès.”

Guy was wearing a scarf of the softest of silk in shades of peach and gray. It was knotted loosely. The ends were tucked into his striped shirt.

“It’s not an Hermès,” he said.

“Bet it is,” I replied.

He whipped it off, and sure enough, there was the word
Hermès
written in script. The edges were hand-hemmed with the hem rolled on the outside—a dead giveaway.

“Maybe I should give it to you,” he said.

“Great,” I said. “And why not take mine?”

I happened to be wearing my least favorite Hermès. I had bought it about twenty-five years before, late one night at the airport in Shannon, Ireland. Those were the days when I was covering Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who was struggling to inch the Middle East peace process forward. The 1960s-era 727 in which we traveled couldn’t fly nonstop from the Middle East to Washington, so we refueled at Shannon. The duty-free shop was opened especially for us, and after ten days of too much work, too little sleep, and the haze of two Irish coffees, I couldn’t resist an Hermès, not even one patterned in shocking pink, lime green, violet, and lavender. It was much newer than Guy’s, and the silk was thicker and less supple. It belonged on a country club golf course in Connecticut. I hardly ever wore it.

I took it off and gave it to Guy.

“I love it!” he said. “This is my shade of purple. It goes great with my blue eyes.”

“It’s yours,” I said.

So I took his Hermès, and he took mine. We double-knotted them around our necks. We were happy.

When I slipped off my new scarf that night, I noticed the artist’s signature along the border: Henri d’Origny.

Henri d’Origny! I know him. He has been a designer for Hermès for decades. He and his American-born wife, Sybil, are friends of mine.

I looked up the scarf on the Internet. Sure enough, Henri designed it in 1963, one of his more than one hundred Hermès scarves. It was issued in eight colors: two shades of blue, two shades of red, turquoise, ivory, and mauve, as well as the one that was now mine, in peach.

The next time I saw Guy, I was wearing the scarf. I told him about Henri and his designs for Hermès. “What a coincidence!” I said.

“There’s no such thing as coincidence in life, my dear Elaine.” There it was again—the power of destiny.

Now whenever I wear that square of peach silk, I think of two of the most important Frenchmen in my life: Guy and Henri.

OVER TIME, GUY AND
I peeled back the outer layers of our lives. Our leaps into intimacy were episodic. Like the time he almost lost the Miró (yes, it was a Miró) silkscreen I loved. One day, he closed the shop at lunchtime and left it outside.

For a brief moment, I was tempted, very tempted, to take it home. Not to steal it, but to hold on to it for safekeeping—and also teach Guy a lesson. Of course, I’d eventually tell him about it. Maybe he’d be so grateful that he’d give it to me for free.
Instead, I took the Miró into the sandwich shop next door. The manager kept it safe until Guy returned.

The next time I saw Guy, he told me, “Alas, a friend is sometimes like a
fiacre
. You can never find one when it rains. You’re not like a
fiacre
.”

I had no idea what a
fiacre
was or what he was talking about.

He explained that a
fiacre
was a kind of carriage. I still didn’t get it.

“Okay, a friend is sometimes like a taxi,” he said. “You can never find one when it rains. You’re not like a taxi. You’re a faithful friend.”

Guy would tell me stories about growing up in Tunisia. Once he found a file of random family photos and, one after another, showed them to me: a studio photo of his grandfather as a teenager in Tunis, dressed in a suit and tie and leaning against a formal armchair, a Jewish temple as the backdrop; Guy at age forty posing in front of the bright blue gate of what had been his kindergarten in Tunis; a barefoot belly dancer wearing a beehive on her head and boredom on her face as she danced at Guy’s bar mitzvah; Guy and his daughter about fifteen years before, surrounded by pink peonies on a terrace of their country house in Normandy before his wife died and grief drove him to sell it.