Left Bank Street Fight

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/opinion/paris-left-bank-street-fight.html

Version 0 of 1.

PARIS — City of leafy boulevards, of Haussmann’s perspectives, Paris is also a collection of villages beset by old jealousies and family feuds. The other day, a perfect day, I returned to a favorite Left Bank haunt, the Au Sauvignon bar, established 1957, where the wines make no compromise with homogenized modernity and the definitive cheese-and-ham omelet is made. The place seethed with indignation.

Clients were muttering. They would not stand for it. Perhaps an uprising was justified. To the barricades!

Emilie Boussuge, the owner, went from table to table, met by hugs of commiseration and vows that the fight would continue. The French love a grumble; no day quite satisfies without its dose of bile. But this was a near-insurrectionary mood, of a spring morning when Paris is pure delight.

The issue, I discovered, was the second row. Of tables and chairs, that is, spilling out for many years onto the sidewalk, wide at this point, a capacious sun-capturing corner, to which clients were accustomed; the perfect spot for a plate of charcuterie or cheese with a glass of Côte du Rhone, nothing fancy, just tannic enough to offset the fruit, a little astringent on the palate, an authentic wine well made.

These tables were gone, nixed: eliminated by a verdict from the Paris Commercial Tribunal that the second row impinged too far on the “public domain.”

The complaint leading to this judgment came from the La Brazza cafe opposite. The Billoud family, owners of La Brazza, had gone to war with the Boussuge family, their neighbors of more than a half-century. They alleged disloyal competition by Au Sauvignon that jeopardized their business.

“They are deep in their hatred,” Boussuge told me, alluding to the Billoud clan. “They were jealous in my grandmother’s time. They were jealous in my mother’s time. They refuse dialogue.” She pointed to a photograph on the wall of a little girl in a white dress. “That’s me with my parents and grandparents. Most of my clients knew them.”

Bernard Billoud, age 77, stands bolt upright, packs of cigarettes stacked behind him. From his spot at the counter, he eyes Au Sauvignon across the street, where the sidewalk is wider and the afternoon sun falls. He has been gazing at Au Sauvignon since 1964, from the relative darkness of his establishment in the shadows.

Emilie Boussuge went too far, he contends. Families with strollers could not even pass! Nor could a woman in a wheelchair the other day! Sometimes the entrance to the apartment building next door was obstructed!

“They thought they could do anything,” Billoud told me. “You have to remain correct. They went over the top with all those tables. You have a right to a certain number of places, but no more.”

Christian Deville, a waiter at La Brazza who has only worked there for two decades, chimed in: “Here in France, the freedom of each person stops at the point where it impinges on the freedom of others. They passed that point. We showed tolerance; no longer.”

I confess I found the feud reassuring. Everything changes. Something in France does not. Here in the sea of chic boutiques and brands that is St. Germain-des-Prés today, in the midst of metropolitan transience, were two rooted families with long-serving employees, in the same businesses for decades, fighting over their rights to a patch of earth, sunlit or not, their urban “terroir.”

In France, the mix of soil, hearth and tradition that constitute “terroir” is personal. You poke around in it. You discover that some ineffable quality of the land, its particular characteristics, and the human bond to it has found expression in a unique wine, or cheese or paté — of the kind Au Sauvignon specializes in.

Of course, the sidewalks of Paris are not the French countryside. But the owners of Au Sauvignon and La Brazza are fighting over boundaries, like farmers squabbling over the line of a fence.

In reality, their battle has scant logic. The two cafes keep different hours. Their menus and wine lists have little in common. One sells cigarettes, one not. They’ve coexisted for many decades while all around them has changed. As Deville told me: “It’s gotten a lot more bourgeois around here. It used to be more convivial. People say hello but they don’t look you in the eye.”

That’s a scourge of the contemporary world: transactional interactions, stripped of human content, between solipsistic people addicted to their devices.

Billoud thinks that “logically’ he will get more clients now that Au Sauvignon has fewer tables. Could be. Boussuge says she’ll lodge an appeal, but the process may take a year. The line outside her cafe is longer. But, she says, her clients are faithful and patient.

I will be. My wine was perfect, my omelet as I recalled it. My cheese oozed. My time between feuding families comforted me. France may just have the balance between rootedness and globalized modernity right — and that’s what the whole world is fighting about.