Every writer that ever wrote about seeing Paris for the first time always starts, I believe, by stating that the horse chestnut trees were in blossom, and the Rue la Huchette was a Renoir-green, and how nice it was to hear words like derrière, cochon, voyou and Vive l'Amérique et le chauffage central…. The first time I saw Paris I was five years old and Mama and Gramp were with me and all I remember is eating a poison-pink ice and getting a belly-ache and sleeping it off in a big room that in later years I seem to remember as being as big as the basilica of Sacré-Coeur above Montmartre.
The last time I was in Paris was in 1941, and I'm not going to write about that, as I wrote a book about it called, The Sound of an American. … But in the middle twenties I was seventeen years old and an art student, living near the Place des Vosges, and the world was made for art. My Harvard French helped out with the Petit Journal; and I could drink down my pinard with the best of them at the little zinc bar smelling of stale glasses and shout “Vive la France, et les pommes de terre frites!” when I sold a drawing to a magazine.
I was living then on the top floor of a decaying old castle, in a wonderful studio with an iron stove that had a half mile of pipe before it found its way out under the roof. I shared this huge space with a Pole named Rifkinoff, who painted flowers and who earned a living playing bridge with rich Germans. “Rich Germans,” he used to say. “Whatever you take away from them, it is for their own good. They lack feeling to spend money for the right things.”
Rifkinoff was very honest and a very good cook, and he would do his marketing at the pushcarts on the Rue Zacharie and come home and cook and meal that would melt the marrow of a French landlady. “Food, you understand, is something only the human race has learned to enjoy. Can a pig bake a pie or a horse stew a rabbit, or an elephant beat up a sauce?”
“No, Rifkinoff,” I would say.
Rifkinoff would nod and rub garlic on French bread and put it into our little oven to heat up. “But of course not. That is why we are above animals, and you and I are artists. It is up to us. Etre ou non être? Dormir, rêver, peutêtre.”
“Who said that?” I would ask … for my French still had holes in it you could throw Balzac through.
“Shakespeare—great Saxon author—but his mother was Polish.” I didn't say anything, because I had found in the six months I had shared the studio with Rifkinoff that Goya, George Washington, J. D. Rockefeller, and Greta Garbo had Polish mothers…
One of Rifkinoff's best dishes was Tribute to Renoir—a dish the great artist is said to have invented in his youth when the going was tough and no one wanted his wonderful paintings. Here is Rif's version of Tribute to Renoir.
From the corner eat shop he would bring home two pounds of boiled beef. This he would chop in a wooden bowl (he didn't believe in grinding) until it was smooth. Then he would add a half pint of red wine, salt, red pepper, and cinnamon to taste. He would shape this into cakes the size of ash trays and put a rim of bacon on each patty. A shake of nutmeg was then added and he would brown the patties until they were the color of rich old masters—that perfect tobacco brown that only good cooks get. He served this on slices of eggplant browned in flour and butter, and flavored with very small bits of thyme.
“Well?” Rif would ask after my second helping.
“Is it the red wine, or the last dusting of nutmeg?”
“Try it again and see.”
And I would. It was a game I could keep up for some time. But after a while we would run out of Tribute to Renoir. When the drawing market was bad we had it often. Last week I saw it on a menu at four dollars a plate … it was called Royal Ménagère … and was not as good as Rif's dish.
“Food, you understand,” Rif would say, watching me eat, “is really nothing but the mood and the place you are eating at. This same dish could poison a millionaire … and if you were in love you would think this dish vulgar. But the time and place are just right for it. You are not thinking of going to your banker or to bed.”
“I don't get it,” I said.
“You will someday.” I did twenty years later…
After we would eat we would feel better and Rifkinoff would paint a flower canvas … there were two hundred of them unsold in the studio … the landlord said they made very fine roofs for his rabbit huts. Rif, as everyone called him, said he didn't mind. He would lean back in his chair and chew a fistful of goujon and say: “Think of the turmoil and shouting that will come to Paris when in fifty years the collectors come tearing down M. Hilaire de Salignac's (our landlord, a poor but proud member of an old southern family—southern France, of course) rabbit huts to recover priceless paintings by Ignacy Dyonizy Rifkinoff! It is to laugh. Can I borrow your white shirt? I am playing contract bridge this afternoon with Miss Moffet.”
“Of course, Rif.”
Miss Moffet owned several oil wells in Kansas, but lived in Paris because, she said, it smelled better. “And besides, could I get L'Humanité fresh every day in Kansas?”
Rif and I always said no … not that it mattered, as she couldn't read French anyway. She liked to wrap gifts in French newspapers and send them back to Kansas, to show the folks back home she was dipping into culture. Rif and I loved Miss Moffet, and when we were very hungry we used to flip coins to see who would go to her and ask her if she wanted to buy a flower painting. (Somewhere in Kansas today is the greatest collection of Rifkinoffs in the world. The rabbit huts were burned down during the war, and Rif died in the battle of Warsaw.)
So Rif would go off to play contract bridge with people at the Ritz, and I would go to O'Rahilly's, a vast studio behind a church, where half a hundred art students worked from the nude (and slightly soiled) flesh of a beautiful model, under the eagle eye of old O'Rahilly's. He was a bitter old man with a polished head and a dark burning wit and a sad set of eyebrows. He had once been a great painter, in his youth, and had beaten Monet and Renoir at art shows, and had been spoken of as the greatest painter of light since Turner … only he had given it up to go to Ireland, and help in the Trouble. He had spent fifty years there—and when Ireland was a Free State he hated it and its narrow ways. His life was wasted, he used to say. He came back to Paris and started a studio and took in only those students he wanted with him. He spent his week ends getting drunk with James Joyce and reciting poems by Yeats until the brandy gave out. He no longer painted as his fingers were badly twisted, but he would rub a big thumb on a wet canvas and make something almost worth while out of a bad sketch.
He would come up behind me and stick his damned thumb into my canvas and snarl: “What is this, a buttock or two loaves of bread? Can't you see the shoulder go back … not the forehead, and who ever called a wedge like that a nose? Why don't you steal dogs for a living?”
“I don't like dogs.”
“Well, that's something in your favor. Where is Rifkinoff?”
“His aunt died.”
“She died two weeks ago … and before Christmas, and after the last frost.”
“He comes from a large family, sir.”
“It's the same aunt. He's most likely playing bridge on her coffin.”
“I don't know,” I said.
“He's at Miss Moffet's,” said the old man, and he allowed himself his daily joke, “Well, only the brave chemin de fer.”
“Yes, sir,” I said and I carefully redrew the buttocks his thumb had outlined on my canvas …
I mustn't give the impression that we went hungry very often in Paris … that only happens in books. We made a great deal of money doing drawings for magazines and Rif was a very fine bridge player. If he had not been honest he might have made a career for himself as a card player, but he didn't. He could have been a very great lawyer too but he couldn't stand the dishonesty that was a lawyer's stock in trade. We did dream of inventing a roulette system or a new school of art, or of winning a sweepstake, so we could hire a boat and tour the Greek islands, and eat new kinds of foods, and talk to new kinds of girls, and drink wine from bottles that hadn't been refilled by waiters.
One day Rif came home from a bridge party holding a small painting to his heart. He was very excited and his long nose shook like the end of a sword in a great swordsman's hand. His mustache was out of curl and my best shirt was soiled.
“We are rich, my young friend!! We are off to the isles of Griks … where Sambo sang and danced.”
“Not Sambo …”
“What matters … we shall fill up on boeuf en daube on gold plates. Good Burgundy and a bisque d'écrevisse and a chervil salad big enough to make a cow cry.”
“Bridge was very good today, Rif?”
“Bridge-smidge … pour une infante défunte! I have here a rare Daumier.”
He unwrapped his bundle and I saw a dark brown painting of three men drinking bocks. It was well done and it was signed h. daumier.…
“Give it back,” I said, “before they close up. They'll never know you took it.”
“I am an honest man, Ignacy Dyonizy Rifkinoff, Prince of Poland.”
“Then how?”
“It is l'beure du cocktail. I am having horse-radish sauce and shrimp at the Café des Deux Magots. On the cuff. La triste aventure. I meet there an old friend that I knew in Turkey. He is very rich … but un peu exalté … he is having trouble with love. Her husband is after him, just like in a stage show. He wants to leave town and his money is tied up in stocks and bonds. He has this painting he found in a little house he bought in Nice, and a fur overcoat, and two dogs. He will sell any one of them for three hundred francs.”
“The dogs?”
“The items. He knows nothing but the stock market and husbands. I buy the Daumier.”
“Is it his?”
“Yes, he buys the house furnished, the lady likes the sea. I have sale of bull.”
“Bill of sale,” I said, examining it.
“We will sell it to the owner of the Torride Tziganer.” (I give it the name it has, if you could translate French; in America the joint would be called the Hot Gypsy … but Torride Tziganer is what we all called it. Emince de volaille bongroise was its big dish.)
The Torride Tziganer was owned by a tall dark man with a limp. It was a night club painted a hydrangea-and-horizon bleu. They played a lot of Rimski- Korsakov under the idea he had invented barrel-house jazz in New Orleans, and their food was very fine. So fine we only went there with people who wore turquoise clips and wanted to see the table where Picasso had invented cubism. M. Tziganer collected paintings and explained his limp by “Ah, cette guerre … cette guerre terrible …”
“Before we begin talking of business,” said the gypsy…
“There is no business,” said Rif, “We offer … you take or you don't.”
The gypsy smiled. “But tonight you eat with me. I have prepared The Tziganer's Bride … the secret of my tribe when it comes to preparing duck. You will love it.”
In time when I again spoke to Tziganer about food, I found out the tribal secret without becoming a blood-brother … but even that would be worth it. Here is how you, too, can make the Tziganer's Bride (Duck).
Rub a fat duck inside and out with a mixture of salt, pepper, marjoram, and ground thyme soaked in olive oil. Roast your duck at 370° for 40 minutes, adding sweet butter from time to time.
While this is going on, prepare in a pot on a hot stove this mixture: an ounce of orange peel julienne, the blood of two oranges, one lemon, half a pint of bitter orange marmalade, and to top it all, four tablespoons of curaçao. Stir as it simmers and add one bay leaf and three cloves.
Cut up your duck into slices and pour over it the hot sauce from the pot. If you really like good food it will make a gypsy of you in one sitting. You will be going around with a rose in your teeth before dinner is over, offering to tell people the past and future.
The gypsy joined us and we put away enough of the gypsy bride to be arrested for bigamy.
With it we had a white Greek wine, and to finish off, a claret that the gypsy said was stolen from the cellar of a Frenchman so important that even the newspapers didn't dare mention what business he was in (later, of course, it came out he was making airplane parts for the Germans).
We finished and waited for our coffee.
After dinner we brought out the painting and the gypsy looked at it and rolled his eyes.
“This is no good. It is cracked, the figures are not finished, I don't collect trash.”
“Ten thousand francs,” said Rif.
“Nonsense.”
“Ten thousand francs down … and ten thousand francs a month until we have a hundred thousand francs.”
The gypsy groaned. “Twenty thousand francs and I'm sure it was stolen.”
“I have bill of sale and will write out a document to return the money if it is stolen.”
“Where it is from?”
Rif explained, and gave names, and the gypsy nodded.
“You understand I have not so much here on me. Bring it back Saturday night. Show it to no one. We shall shake hands on it like Americans, in that picture Scarface…”
We decided to tell our good luck to Miss Moffet…She was giving a little party in the rock garden behind her house. She had a house near the Place du Tertre but lived at the Ritz, keeping the house only to give parties in. I am speaking, of course, of the days when Americans did things like that.
She was very happy to see us, as the party was very dull. Two Congressmen were visiting her, and they spent most of their time inspecting the famous sewers and the stage shows. At first they had done more sewers than shows, but now they were catching up on the shows. The sewers were neglected, but then the Paris sewers always have been.
We told her our good luck and showed her the painting.
“You must sell it to me,” she said. “This is great art. It belongs in Kansas.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You've heard of Kansas.”
We let it go at that, and joined the party which was great fun. Seventeen Americans were saying they would never go back home. America was dull, shallow, stupid, and lacking in culture. Rif offered to fight them one at a time to defend the nation he loved.
“This is dreadful,” he said. “How can you knock this America, a great nation? They invent everything.”
“Their mothers are all Polish,” I said. “That explains it all.”
“Malgré tout! Defend your wonderful country…”
“Not with these bums,” I said. “Nobody wants them back.”
Rif was hurt. He ate his way around a sandwich, poured himself some brandy, and groaned. “It is lack of art. I sell Miss Moffet the great newly discovered Daumier!”
“How nice,” said Miss Moffet. “I'll get my check book.”
Rif said, “But first we must tell the gypsy he can't have it. We owe him for dinner … we pay it … then we take your check.”
“I trust you,” said Miss Moffet.
“No … I am honest … I will first settle with the gypsy.”
We left it at that and watched an American dancer who turned out to be a pretty good tap dancer.
The next morning we slept late, as all rich men do, and the beds were hard and we planned deeper wider beds … and more plumbing. We rose, had a few eye-opening apéritifs and dressed.
There was a knock on the door and we opened it and there stood our torrid gypsy, and two French cops known as flics that had that low Ile de la Cité look.
Rif said, “We are on our way to Rumpelmayer's to join the haut monde for breakfast. Will you join us?”
The gypsy shook his head and held out a pound of French civil papers with seals and stamps, and very small print.
“I have this morning bought a small villa at Nice for eighty thousand francs … the place isn't much, but I bought it furnished.”
“What is this?” asked Rif.
“Your friend had given the lady the villa … and so he could not sell you anything from it. I own that Daumier. I have just bought the place from the lady.”
“You mean …?”
“I will pay you back what you bought … three hundred francs. Here it is, now hand over my painting. The flics are in a hurry to get to church in time for Mass.”
“A bas les bourgeois! La ligne!” screamed Rif.
“My painting, please,” said the gypsy. “I want to have it cleaned and hung in my house.”
In the end we gave up the painting and went and cried on Miss Moffet's lap … well, we didn't really cry … but she held our hands and said we were foolish boys and shouldn't try to be businessmen.
A week later we found out that the men to whom the gypsy took the painting to have cleaned, tried to clean it, but the top layer of paint flaked off, revealing a beautiful picture of General Foch inspecting the great fortress of Verdun; it was later valued at twenty francs … with the frame.
“You see,” said Rif, breaking eggs for our breakfast, “Je m'en fous … never try to steal. Honesty is best. Dishonesty never pays. Can you reach the bottle of Asti spumante?”
“Yes.”
“Pour out two glasses for two honest men.”