La Panique du Pain

What I love most about living with a French family is the ritual of having dinner together. It's not just the meal itself that I look forward to--I've decided to adopt the French habit of not eating between lunch and late dinner in the hopes that this is the secret behind the slenderness of gallic women--but the ceremony that this entails. Madame will slice tomatoes while I spin-dry leaves of lettuce, coordinating our movements into a kind of parallel dance around the tiny kitchen as the vinaigrette is mixed, the fish arranged. The clink of ceramic against the table cloth, the methodical placement of knife, fork; couteau, fourchette. The pitcher of water. The glasses, facing upside down until we take our place around the table and conversation unfolds like a tumbling waterfall.

This evening we were joined by the boyfriend of la Soeur du Radio, who is visiting for two weeks before her classes begin again. We were halfway through the salad (tomatoes, mozarella, basil) when we realized, all four of us with little puddles of vinaigrette on our plates, that zut alors! there was no bread. And it was eight thirty! And the boulangeries were closed! But Madame looked so sad, without a piece of bread to wipe her plate clean--That's what I like so much about tomato salad, the vinaigrette left aftwards--that la Soeur and her boyfriend jumped up and flew out the door in search of bread.

I couldn't stop smiling because it was so very French, this love for bread, and it was proof positive that I'm really in Paris. And it's true: when they returned, breathless, with the last baguette in the entire arondissement in hand, that the salad was much better with the promise of crunchy baguette afterwards. Madame certainly thought so.

Wikipedia doesn't lie--it really looks like this. Another thing I learned while ripping this picture off the internet just to make you drool? The article on bread is semi-protected. I blame Atkins.

Monsieur arrived halfway through the fish course, gesticulating wildly about the perils he encountered on his bicycle this afternoon. Then, with a mischievous glint in his eye, Monsieur pantomimed slamming his fist on the table and demanded to know the new words I had learned today, which the entire table assisted in enumerating for him (they are, after all, my round-the-clock professors). It's a certainty I've come to expect, like the cheese course (today, goat cheese dipped in olive oil and Lebanese spices) and the fruit (white peaches and matching pale nectarines) and the chocolate (which Monsieur, gasping theatrically at the presence of cacao nibs and an unfamiliar label, insisted I test for poison first).

Every member of the family is always so enthusiastic in their response to my questions about a new word or an unfamiliar phrase; their interest is always genuine. A question about Tati launches a discussion of Rabelais with Madame, during the course of which I learn that pantagruelesque is used as an adjective. The word oie elicits a comparison of the relative merits of foie gras du canard (duck) and d'oie (goose); the explanation of happée from La Soeur's boyfriend includes sound effects and pantomime. It's so much better than looking up a word in the dry pages of a dictionary: now, whenever I see the word happer, I'm going to see La Soeur, laughing, as her boyfriend grabs her while sucking in air like a vacuum.

And then they sat back down and we launched into a comparison of the styles of Barthes and Deleuze. Paris, vraiment, je t'aime.