Taha Toros Arşivi, Dosya Adı: Taha Torosİstanbul Kalkınma Ajansı (TR10/14/YEN/0033) İstanbul Development Agency (TR10/14/YEN/0033

Gopnik, Adam

Istanbul Sehir University Repository

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A  TALE OF TWO CAFÉ5
What's the difference between the Flore and the 
Deux Magots? The essence offashionability.
BY ADAM  GOPNIK
I HAVE been brooding a lot lately on what I have come to think of as the I wo-Cafe Problem. The 
form is borrowed from the old Three- 
Body Problem, which perplexed math­
ematicians late into the nineteenth cen-
I began to brood not long ago, on a 
beautiful Saturday in October, when I 
arranged to meet my friend Nicole Wis- 
niak at the Café de Flore, on the Bou­
levard Saint-Germain, for lunch. Nicole 
is the editor, publisher, advertising-
The Café de Flore: History keeps w ip in g  the table dean.
tuiy, and which, as I vaguely understand 
it, involved calculating the weird swerves 
and dodges that three planets worked on 
each other when the force of gravity was 
working on them all. M y problem looks 
simpler, because all it involves is the in­
teraction of a couple of places in Paris 
where you can eat omelettes and drink 
coffee. It’s still pretty tricky, though, 
because what fills in for gravity is the 
force of fashion—arbitrary, or arbitrary- 
seeming, taste—which in Paris is pow­
erful enough to turn planets from their 
orbits and make every apple fall upward.
account manager, and art director of the 
magazine Égoiste, and is a woman of 
such original chic that in her presence I 
feel even more ingenuous and American 
than I usually do, as though pinned to 
the back of my jacket were a particularly 
embarrassing American license plate: 
“Pennsylvania: The Keystone State” or 
“Explore Minnesota: 10,000 Lakes.” 
W hen we got to the Flore and 
looked around, upstairs and down, we 
couldn’t find an empty table—that kind 
of Saturday—so we went outside and 
thought about where to go. I looked, a
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2,1996
little longingly, at the Café aux Deux 
Magots, just down the street, on the 
Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The two 
cafés are separated only by the tiny, nar­
row Rue Saint-Benoît. I turned to Nicole. 
“W hy don’t we just go in there?” I said.
A smile passed across Nicole’s face— 
one of slight squeamishness mixed with 
incapacity. “I don’t know,” she said, at a 
loss for the usual epigrammatic sum­
mary of the situation. “We used to go 
there, I think . . . twenty years ago . . .” 
Her voice trailed off, and again she 
got a funny smile on her face. She 
couldn’t say why, but she knew that it 
was impossible.
A taboo as real as any that Malinow­
ski studied among the Trobriand Island­
ers kept us out, though why it existed 
and how it kept its spell I had no idea. 
Still, one of the things you learn if you 
live as a curious observer (or as an ob­
served curiosity) on the fringes of the 
fashionable world in Paris is that the 
Flore remains the most fashionable place 
in Paris, while the Deux Magots was 
long ago abandoned by people who 
think of themselves as belonging to the 
world, to ce pays-ci—this country here, 
as the inhabitants of Versailles called 
theiv little fashionable island. Somehow, 
at some point, in a past that was right 
around the corner but—to Nicole, at 
least—was irretrievable, something had 
happened to make the Café de Flore the 
most fashionable place in Paris and the 
Deux Magots the least.
IN Paris, explanations come in a pre- . dictable sequence, no matter what is 
being explained. First comes the expla­
nation in terms of the unique, romantic 
individual, then the explanation in terms 
of ideological absolutes, and then the ex­
planation in terms of the futility of all 
explanation. So, for instance, if  your 
clothes dryer breaks down and you want 
to get the people from BHV—the strange 
Sears, Roebuck of Paris—to come and 
fix it, you will be told, first, that only one 
man knows how it works and he cannot 
be found (explanation in terms of the 
gifts of the romanticized individual); 
next, that it cannot be fixed for a week, 
because of a store policy (explanation in 
terms of ideological necessity); and, 
finally, that you are perfectly right to 
find all this exasperating, but nothing 
can be done, because it is in the nature
of things for a dryer to break down, dry­
ers are like that (futility of explanation 
itself). “They are sensitive machines, 
they are ill-suited to the task, no one has 
ever made one successfully,” the store 
bureaucrat in charge of service says, 
sighing. “C’est n o r m a lAnd what works 
small works big, too. The same sequence 
that explains the broken dryer also gov­
erns the explanations of the French 
Revolution which have been offered by 
the major French historians. “Voltaire 
did all this!” was de La Villette’s ex­
planation (only one workman); an in­
evitable fight between the bourgeoisie 
and the aristocrats, the Marxists said 
(store policy); until, finally, Foucault 
announced that there is nothing really 
worth explaining in the coming of the 
Reign of Terror, since everything in 
Western culture, seen properly, is a reign 
of terror (all dryers are like that).
“It’s a good question,” a friend who 
has been a figure in the French media 
since the forties, and who eats lunch at 
the Flore every day, told me when I 
quizzed him about why, and when, ex­
actly, and how the Flore had outstripped 
the Deux Magots. We were sitting, as 
it happened, at the Flore, eating good, 
wildly overpriced omelettes. The down­
stairs room was as pleasantly red and 
melancholy as it always is, w ith its 
square, rather than round, tables, which 
give the impression that all the tables are 
corner tables.
In the week or so since my first in­
quiry, I had been doing some reading. 
The Deux Magots and the Flore had, I 
knew, existed beside each other for more 
than a century. The Flore had long had 
a white marquee with green lettering, 
the Deux Magots a green marquee with 
gilt lettering. The interior of the Flore 
had always been decorated in red leather— 
what the French call moleskin -and the 
Deux Magots in brown. But I had only 
just learned that, like so many timeless 
things in Paris, they got timeless right 
after the horror of the Franco-Prussian 
War. Although there had always been a 
church at Saint-Germain, the topogra­
phy of the Place Saint-Germain—the 
square itself—dates back only to the
eighteen-seventies.
The Deux Magots is the modest in­
heritor of a silk-lingerie store of that 
name which stood on the spot for de­
cades, until the eighteen-sixties, when
PARI5 JOURNAL
me growth of the big department stores 
across the river drove it out of business. 
The owners eventually rented out the 
space to a ca fé liquoriste, who kept the 
name and started serving coffee. No one 
knows exactly when the two famous 
statues of Chinese mandarins—the 
Deux Magots—were installed; Ana- 
tole France, in his memoirs, written at 
the turn of the century, speaks of a big 
picture of three m agots that used to 
hang in the lingerie store. The Flore, 
on the other hand, has no prehistory; 
founded in 1870, it was always a 
café, and was called the Flore be­
cause of a statue of the goddess 
Flora that used to stand outside.
Then, in 1880, Léonard Lipp, an 
Alsatian who had fled the Ger­
man occupation of his province, 
opened a b ra sserie across the 
street, and the basic topography 
of the new square was in place.
For many years, the Deux Magots 
was the more famous and fashionable of 
the two cafés. It was there that Oscar 
Wilde went to drink after he left En­
gland; he died about five blocks away. 
And it was there that Joyce went to 
drink Swiss white wine, with everybody 
except Hemingway, with whom he 
drank dry sherry, because Hemingway 
wasn’t everybody. (That’s how Heming­
way tells it, anyway.) The presence of so 
much history ought to be unmanning, 
or even just embarrassing. In Paris, it 
isn’t, not because the past is so hallowed 
but because it doesn’t seem to be there. 
The unsentimental efficiency of French 
commonplace civilization, of which the 
French café is the highest embodiment, 
is so brisk that it disarms nostalgia. His­
tory keeps wiping the table off and ask- 
ing you, a little impatiently, what you’ll 
have now.
Not until the nineteen-forties—I had 
learned a lot of this in the course of 
reading Olivier Todd’s excellent new bi­
ography of Camus, one of the big books 
here this year—did the triangle of the 
two cafés and the Brasserie Lipp at 
Saint-Germain-des-Prés become leg­
endary. This was when the group of ré- 
sistants came into being, and a culture to 
go with them—when Camus and Sartre 
and Simone de Beauvoir, as the cliché 
has it, brooded in one corner of the 
Deux Magots while Juliette Greco sang 
sad songs in another. The odd thing is
that the cliché is almost entirely tme. It 
was at the Deux Magots, for instance, 
that Sartre saw his famous philosophi­
cal ga rçon , of whom he wrote, “Plis 
movement is quick and forward, a little 
too precise, a little too rapid. He comes 
toward the patrons with a step a little 
too quick. He bends forward a little too 
eagerly, his eyes express an interest too 
solicitous for the order of the customer.” 
(I still get waiters like that.)
Yet, fifty years after the classic period, 
one café is more fashionable than ever 
and the other is not fashionable at 
all. You might not see this at once. 
At the Flore, the fashionable 
people are spread out among the 
tables rather than concentrated in 
one spot or area; they occupy the 
place clandestinely, following the 
law of Inverse Natural Appeal. 
The terrasse of the Flore, even on 
a sunny and perfect day (especially 
on a sunny and perfect day), is off lim­
its; the inner room, with its red mole­
skin banquettes, is acceptable; but by far 
the most O.K. place to sit is upstairs (I 
was sitting there now, with my friend), 
and the banquettes are made of an ugly 
tan leatherette. (The law of Inverse 
Natural Appeal is at work: the outlawed 
terrasse is, as it happens, an extraordinar­
ily pleasant place to sit; the inner room 
is a very pleasant place to sit; and the up­
stairs room is reminiscent of the cock­
tail lounge of a Howard Johnson’s.)
The sounds of the higher French 
conversation, with its lovely murmur of 
certainties and, rising from the ban­
quettes, the favorite words of fash­
ionable French people, resonated all 
around. Perversité, which means “perver­
sity” but is used as a word of praise, sug­
gests something—a book, a dish, a poli­
tician—that is aristocratic. C’est normal, 
which means something like “No prob­
lem,” and can also refer to any political 
or literaiy situation, is different from the 
American phrase in that its emphasis is 
not on a difficulty surmounted or evaded 
but on the return to a familiar, homeo­
static atmosphere of comfort: some­
thing that happens may seem unusual 
(say, the revelation that a former De­
fense Minister might have been an East- 
bloc agent) but, properly understood, is 
not shocking at all—it’s normal, even if 
a little deplorable. And from table after 
table, like the sound of a tolling bell, rises
68
the connective done, which just means 
“so,” or “therefore,” but, when used in 
literary and worldly conversation, and 
rung with sufficient force, means “It 
must therefore follow as the night the 
day,” and always sounds to me as con­
clusive as Gideon’s trumpet.
“But it all has to do with the charac­
ter of two men, Boubal and Cazes,” my 
friend said. Paul Boubal was the owner 
of the Flore from 1939 to 1983—he 
died five years later—and Roger Cazes 
was the owner not of the Deux Magots 
but of the Brasserie Lipp, across the 
street. “That is to say, both Cazes and 
Boubal were from the Auvergne—they 
were countrymen—and, though each 
thought the other was running a sneaky 
business, each respected the other and 
frequented the other’s place. This pro­
duced, in the fifties, a natural compact, 
a kind of family feeling between the two 
places. I mean family feeling in the real 
sense—of dependence and suspicion 
and resentment. The owner of the Deux 
Magots was a much more timid fellow. 
He was left out of the compact.” So the 
real force working was that of the Lipp: 
it was the third planet, perturbing the 
orbits of the two others.
There it was, the explanation in 
terms of the romantic individual in al­
most perfect form, along with the bonus 
of a touch of terroir, the French affection 
for a bit of native land. Then someone 
suggested that I speak to the essayist and 
editor Jean-Paul Enthoven, who is the 
author of the season’s most winning col­
lection of literary essays, “Les Enfants 
de Saturne.” Enthoven, I was told, would 
be sure to have an explanation; he could 
explain anything Parisian.
“Here is my hypothesis,” he announced 
when I reached him on the phone at his 
office, at the publishing house of Gras- 
set. “You must go back to the twenties 
and thirties, when the Flore became 
identified with the extreme right and the 
Deux Magots, by default, with the left. 
Charles Maurras, the founder of Action 
Française, used the Flore as his home 
base.” Maurras was simultaneously one 
of the most important stylists in French 
literature—a member of the French 
Academy, and a crucial influence on 
T. S. Eliot, among other modernists— 
and a right-wing anti-Semite. “Before it 
was anyone else’s place, it was Maurras’s. 
His most famous polemic was even 
named after the café—Au Signe de 
Flore.’ Maurras was a malevolent force, 
in that everything he touched was simul­
taneously disgraced and hallowed.”
Enthoven went on to say, “This 
meant that by the time of the Occupa­
tion, when Sartre and Simone de Beau­
voir came to Saint-Germain and began 
their résistance, they had to avoid the 
Flore like a plague, since it had been 
contaminated by Maurras. But then the 
tourists began to crowd into the Deux 
Magots in order to look at Sartre and 
de Beauvoir. The place became over­
crowded, and eventually the intellectu­
als noticed the emptiness of the Flore 
next door. By then Maurras was gone,
the Occupation had passed, and, con­
fronted with a choice between the pol­
lution of Maurras and the pollution of 
tourism, the intellectuals chose to re­
make the emptiness rather than abide 
with the many. So they went across the 
street and have never returned.” He 
stopped for a second, as if  readying him­
self for an aphorism, and then said, “The 
Deux Magots was sacralized by Sartre, de- 
sacralized by the tourists, and then left va­
cant by history.” 1870,1940,1 thought. 
Like so many lovely things in Paris, the 
two cafés were given shape by the first 
German invasion and then in one way or 
another were deformed by the second.
It was left to another, more dour friend 
to supply the futility-of-explanation ex­
planation, over coffee at a lesser, more 
despairing café—neither fashionable nor 
unfashionable, just a place where you go 
to talk. “There is nothing to explain 
here,” he said. “The explanation is a sim­
ple, Saussurean one.” He was referring, 
I realized after a moment, to the father 
of modern linguistics, who was the first 
to point out that signs get their mean­
ings not by being like the things they 
stand for but by being different from 
other signs: a sign for black means black 
because it isn’t like the sign for white.
“The fashionable exists only in rela­
tion to something that is not that way,” 
he went on. “The relationship between 
the modishness of the Flore and the 
unmodishness of the Deux Magots isn’t 
just possibly arbitrary. It’s necessarily ar­
bitrary. If you place any two things side 
by side, one will become fash­
ionable and the other will not. 
It’s a necessity determined by 
the entire idea of fashion. A 
world in which everything is 
fashionable is impossible to 
imagine, because it implies that 
there would be nothing to pro­
vide a contrast. The reason that, 
when you place any two things 
side by side, one becomes chic 
and the other does not is that 
it’s in the nature of desire to 
choose, and to choose absolutely. 
That’s the mythological lesson 
of the great choice among the 
beauties: they are all beau­
tiful—they are goddesses— 
and yet a man must choose. 
And what was the chooser’s 
name? Paris. C’est normal." *
&
Kişisel Arşivlerde İstanbul Belleği 
Taha Toros Arşivi


A tale of two cafes:What's the difference betwen the Flore and the Deux Magots? The essence of fashionabilitty.

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