Nos chers clients . . .

Gopnik says that it is not the yeses, but instead the noes of Paris that make it "romantic."

Gopnik is more obsessed with the rules-and-regulations culture, particularly at the parks (He writes that if you are jogging in the Jardin de Luxembourg, and you hear the French police jogging behind you, "you worry that you have violated some ordinance, stepped on some forbidden grass."). But you can feel these noes throughout Parisian life. In addition to the reservation culture, for restaurants that do not require reservations--and for many boulangeries, fromageries, or even supermarchés--one must negotiate a web of fermetures (closures), most of which are discovered after you have hopefully and hungrily made your way across the city, probably with an out-of-town friend in tow. When you find the door shut, the lights off, and maybe metal shutters rolled down, you can spend the walk home contemplating whether the fermeture is because it's Tuesday, because it's lunch, because it's Tuesday-lunch, because it's between 2:00 and 5:00, because it's a Sabbath or holiday, because "c'est août" (it's August--a good time for "fermeture annuelle"), or perhaps a fermeture permanente, or merely a fermeture impromptue on a slow business day or allowing a last-minute trip for the proprietors. There's no firm pattern: some places are closed Sundays, some Mondays, some Tuesdays, some in a patchwork throughout the week; and closures for a few hours during the day are so common that "service continu" (throughout open hours) is advertised.

But if you're lucky, in a darkened window you will encounter a crumpled quarter-sheet note, perhaps hand-written, that begins "Nos chers clients . . ." and explains what the closure is. Your heart imagines sometime in the future a whispered "yes," and you're in an on-again, off-again entanglement with an entire city that is hard-to-get.

So you toughen up, you assume you will not have your first choice, you grab that poulet fermier rôti at the boucherie, you call (as a back up) the café next door to the popular spot that never answers the phone, you attentez.

And when you finally have that cocotte, or find a "Nos chers clients . . ." note on the door assuring you that your favorite cocktail spot *is* open for the month of August, you can really taste the romance.



PS Mes chers clients, désole for the brief fermeture for the past week and a half. I promise such lapses will only happen intermittently and unpredictably.