1945, Paris, France

By Alexandra Oliver

My husband and I live what might be termed a tasteful and frugal existence. We, along with our small son, live in a one-bedroom rented apartment in the Madison Park neighborhood of Seattle. We don’t throw ourselves into online shopping binges, we watch movies at home, and we keep our restaurant forays down to one per month. We buy wine once a week. I suppose we hope that being careful now will bring about some kind of economic good karma later.

I do, however, have one necessary ritual, in which I indulge every two months. I venture downtown and have my eyebrows attended to (stenciling, waxing, plucking, penciling) for the kingly sum of $30.

When I told my husband, he was horrified. “That’s $15 a brow!” he sputtered.

There are plenty of beauty joints in Seattle where one can have one’s brows done for $15 a pair. But I like my expensive, movie star eyebrows. Having them done this way is my one small luxury. To explain the value of having one small luxury, I told my husband the following story from my father’s youth.

It was 1945, and Paris had just been liberated. My dad was stationed there with British Intelligence as part of the British Liaison Mission. Photos from this time show my dad as a handsome, solidly built young man, dark, broad-faced and brilliantined, in the manner of Orson Welles. He was a young man of ambition and integrity, but one with a decent Achilles heel when it came to cultivating the second life of a bon vivant. He liked parties, Champagne, showgirls, the lot. People liked my dad, too. In addition to being handsome, he was well read, witty to a fault and able to identify with and relate to people, whoever they were, whatever they did. This made him a superior intelligence officer — and a much sought-after guest.

My dad, through some string of introductions, found himself one evening invited to the home of a certain Comte de R., an aging aristocrat who, like many of his ilk, had fallen on considerably harder times with the advent of the war. Now in his early 60s the Comte supported himself by living on a dwindling lump of family money and contributing a few small articles to the newspaper Le Figaro.

Necessity had forced the Comte to move from far more splendid dwellings into a two-room apartment in the 16th arrondissement, just off the rue François. Here, he lived amongst the trappings of better days — heavy tapestries, giant oil paintings of glowering ancestors, antelope heads, Chinese screens, suits of armor — crammed into every corner, seemingly heaped up to the ceiling. Things were fraying, rusting, fading, settling comfortably under a thick film of dust.

It was in this environment that the Comte would every so often hold court, resplendent in a dark cerise velvet smoking jacket that remembered the late 1920s. His guests included other down-on-their luck aristos, journalists, artists, poets, dancers, people of questionable profession, and always, always, a smattering of smolderingly handsome young men, usually North African ones with long, glossy eyelashes.

For these dinners, the Comte prepared the food himself. He had been obligated to let his cook go (along with the valet and the driver) the year before, not willingly. Marie-Claude had felt sorry for the Comte and, wishing to stave off future disaster and embarrassment, had set him up with two books and a box of recipes, each written in large, childish block-letters.

Cooking, at first, wasn’t easy, but he soon got the hang of the basics. He was able to whip up an acceptable soup, a small roast or some fish, vegetables, and a simple pudding, followed by cheese. His nephew usually brought the wines and they were always excellent. This covered most of what the Comte served on these occasions.

My dad procured an invitation to the Comte’s apartment through a friend who was acting theater critic for Le Figaro. Upon his arrival, he was greeted most warmly by his host, sparkling with obvious pleasure that another comely young man would be gracing his table at dinner.

After a pre-dinner drink at eight, the guests (numbering about 12) sat down at the table. There was a clear game soup, followed by a very small rack of lamb with parsnips and asparagus. My father, by 8:40, was more than a little warm and tipsy and deep in conversation with the Irish girl from the Folies to his left, that he felt somewhat jangled when he heard the doorbell ring briskly.

“Ah,” said the Comte as he excused himself to open the door.

He came back into the room. With him was a diminutive man wearing a tan raincoat and a tweed hat. He had a small, neatly clipped moustache, and he gave a small, perfunctory bow to those present.

“Bonsoir, Mesdames, Messieurs,” he said. In a single gesture, he whipped off his coat and hat and disappeared into the kitchen.

He remained in there for a good 10 minutes. From the kitchen could be heard a great deal of clattering, cracking and vigorous stirring. Finally, he emerged again. He re-doffed his coat and hat, bowed again, and addressed the company.

“Bonne soirée, Mesdames, Messieurs,” he said. And then the small man vanished, like a squat apparition, into the Paris night.

Once he did, my father tells how everyone turned, like clockwork, toward the Comte, trying to silently extricate an explanation for this fleeting visit.

“Oh, him?” said the Comte, wiping his lips with a table napkin. “That was the chef saladier from the Hotel Georges V. He comes to make my salad dressing.” This he said as directly and nonchalantly as if he were giving someone the time of day.

Alexandra Oliver is a Canadian poet and humorist. Her first book, Where the English Housewife Shines (Tin Press UK), will be appearing in April of 2007.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, March 16th, 2007 | Email This Post

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