When she was about fourteen, our daughter Louise arrived home with a new notebook; the kind with plastic pages, and pockets for business cards.
“It’s for restaurants and cafes,” she explained. “Also my fleuriste. And my coiffeur.”
At her age, living in a small outback Australian town, I’d barely understood the concept of a florist or hairdresser, but Louise is, after all, French, and Parisienne at that, so one makes allowances
Still, I pursued the question. Pointing to a shelf overflowing with restaurant and tourist guides, I said, “Why not just look them up.”
She dismissed the massed scholarship of Michelin and Gault-Millaut with one of those shrugs which only the French can execute successfully, and which, like the “pouf” sound of casual contempt, they apparently learn in the cradle.
“But those include all cafes and restaurants. This…” She held up her new cahier “…is only for ma griffe.”
She disappeared into her room, leaving me to reflect on this most Parisian of all concepts. Though “ma griffe” literally means “my claw”, Parisians have refined the word to mean “signature” or “track”. It describes the pattern of favourite cafes, shops, walks, meeting places which each of us superimposes on the city, and which makes it uniquely “our Paris”.
A griffe is no trivial thing. As surely as an identity card, it identifies one as a bona fide resident, with a very personal list of loves, hates, tastes and prejudices. I’ve seen arguments erupt over which fromager stocks the best Roquefort, which chocolatier the most fragrant ganeche, whether Mulot or Fournil de Pierre sells the crustiest baguette , and the superiority of a poissonier who throws in a free lemon and bunch of parsley with your filet of cabillaud. Even the merits of rival dry cleaners, hardware stores and supermarkets can trigger bitter fights.
A griffe, passionately held, can survive its creators. President François Mitterand used to browse the bookstalls of the bouquinistes along the Seine near his home on Rue de Bievre, and eat at a little restaurant on nearby Rue Pontoise called La Maree Verte (The Green Tide), which, for reasons even the present owner doesn’t understand – it was like that when he bought it –, is decorated in the style of a 1930s ocean liner. Mitterand died in 1996, but locals still speak as if he might at any minute stroll up to a bookseller and leaf through an edition of Rimbaud or ask the restaurateur whether the os a moelle – marrow bones - comes with genuine Sel de Guerande and not some dubious commercial substitute.
Our arrondissement, the 6th, which runs from the Seine up the slope of the Left Bank to the Jardins de Luxembourg, is criss-crossed with phantom griffes worn by the great of three centuries. Just a few doors down our street, Sylvia Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses at the most famous of all English-language bookshops, Shakespeare and Company. Since we live in the building where Sylvia and her companion Adrienne Monnier shared an apartment, the tracks of Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and numerous other literary lions and lionesses wind up our staircase, as does that of Hemingway, who, at the head of his own private platoon, “liberated” the building in 1944 – though not before drawing Monnier aside to ask for her reassurance that Sylvia hadn’t “collaborated”. (Far from co-operating, she’d closed down the shop rather than sell a copy of Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer.)
The griffe isn’t entirely unknown in other countries. In his story The Sex That Does Not Shop, English writer Saki wrote of a Londoner who, about to buy some blotting paper, is stopped by his friend Agatha.
"You're surely not buying blotting-paper HERE?" she exclaimed in an agitated whisper …."Let me take you to Winks and Pinks. They've got such lovely shades of blotting- paper--pearl and heliotrope and momie and crushed--"
"But I want ordinary white blotting-paper," I said.
"Never mind. They know me at Winks and Pinks," she replied inconsequently. Agatha apparently has an idea that blotting-paper is only sold in small quantities to persons of known reputation, who may be trusted not to put it to dangerous or improper uses.
Exaggerated? No Parisian would think so. Colette, author of Gigi, so loved a particular kind of ice blue paper, available only from Papeterie Gaubert on Place Dauphine, just over the Seine from her apartment in the Palais Royale, that she would write on nothing else. Gaubert mainly served the legal profession, so sold their paper by weight, like potatoes. The papeterie is still there, they still stock the same paper - and yes, it’s still only available by the kilo.
Marie-Dominique, my Parisienne wife, is more level-headed than most. But when she tells me, “I am going to the bookshop”, she can only mean the little independent Librairie de l’Escalier, just around the corner from us on Rue Casimir Delavigne. She would never look for new books anywhere else, and has been doing so since she was a teenager. Before its present incarnation, it was Le Divan, preferred bookshop of Jean Paul Sartre. It was there that he posted his famous notice disowning the so-called existentialists who clustered around singer Juliette Greco and haunted the cellar clubs of St. Germain-des-Prés. And before that? Who knows? Perhaps a stall that sold copies of Camille Desmoulins’ paper Le Vieux Cordelier before he lost his head during the Revolution. Parisians are in business of keeps.
Likewise, “I’m going to buy some flowers” means a walk beside the Luxembourg Gardens and along Rue Vaugirard to Fleuriste Clery on Boulevard Raspail, where the owner, Monsieur Bertrand, will greet her as an old friend, and say, “We have some of your favourite lilies, Madame Baxter. They just arrived today. You must have smelled their perfume.”
Both bookshop and florist are part of Marie-Dominique’s personal griffe. So is Troisfoirien, an untidy store on Boulevard St Michel that sells factory overstocks. On Monday, its shelves will be piled with cartons of some obscure and obviously inedible Italian vanilla pudding. But on Tuesday, the pudding has been replaced with red wine or chocolate or reams of typing paper or hair care products, all at give-away prices. Each visit becomes a roll of the dice. The fact that none of her friends ever goes there makes it even more deliciously personal.
Of course one can take the griffe business too far. I have friends who cross Paris to buy their fruit and vegetables at the Grand Epicerie in Bon Marche when you can get the same thing, if not better, in Marche St Germain. Speaking for myself, I would never shop anywhere else….
I LOVE this. Such a French concept, such concrete personal conviction. The blotting paper bit... bravo, thanks for this morning read, John.
Loved this piece!!
Très bien!
Cheryl Mueller