The morning being sunny, we took the opportunity to visit one of Paris’ most attractive outdoor areas, Parc Monceaux—"a garden of dreams" as it was called when it was established in the eighteenth century. Before going into the park, however, we acted on the real reason for our trip across the city. Namely, an early lunch at the venerable café:

4 ave de Villiers, Paris 17. Métro Villiers.

The bright, high-ceilinged dining room was already jammed by 11:30 am, long before the fashionable lunch hour in France. The atmosphere was relaxed and pleasant. People were talking animatedly, but the sound level remained below the threshold of pain. The waiters, gray-haired but athletic veterans of the restaurant business, scurried about frenetically through the throng while keeping accurate tabs on a dozen orders. To them, it would seem, panic was the normal state of affairs.

We drank a 50 cl carafe of Beaujolais Villages (F50).

Ris de veau: Veal sweetbreads with pommes dauphine—fried potato pastries—served on a brown sauce with stuffed tomato and a small salad. The sweetbreads were overcooked, and the pommes dauphine were dry and tasted, oddly, of cheese. Were they intended to double as gougères? Yet both the sweetbreads and the potato (cheese?) pastries had taken up some of the mild, wholesome brown sauce, and the overall result was pleasing. A side order of French fries proved soggy.

Confit de canard: Preserved leg of duck served with pan-fried potatoes, stuffed tomato, green beans and a small salad. With its skin cooked to a lovely golden color and borderline-brittle consistency, this confit was good enough to set us thinking of coming back some time. The accompaniments were best left uncommented upon.

The total at café le Dôme de Villiers was F256.

***

We spent a relaxing hour or two strolling the park, admiring its great variety of plants and its ornamental architecture: a Corinthian colonnade flanking a reflecting pond, a miniature Egyptian pyramid that looked to us more like a church steeple without the church, follies, a fanciful grotto. We were surprised at the great number of people—the elderly out to soak up spring sunshine, adolescents engaged in courting rituals, many nannies in charge of small children. The little ones were well catered to by playgrounds and pony rides. Parc Monceau is still a garden of dreams.

On the way back to rue Friant we started to think about our plans for the evening. We had been in touch with a French couple, friends of a friend, and had accepted their invitation to dine with them at a restaurant not far from their apartment on the edge of the Luxembourg Gardens. Maurice and Jeanne were to pick us up at 7:30 pm. The question was—what should we get as some token of appreciation? Flowers seemed to be the thing, so we bought a bunch of tulips—F45 for a dozen blooms. They looked so handsome we bought another bunch for ourselves.

***

At Maurice and Jeanne’s apartment, the flowers presented and an apéritif imbibed (a Rivesaltes—an illustration that an inclination to sweet preprandial tipples is not unFrench) we went up to a high balcony for a view of the city. The evening was clear. Our hosts pointed out some of the famous sights—the Montparnasse tower, the Dôme Church, the Eiffel tower (for the locations of these and other places in Paris that have nothing whatever to do with food and wine: Map: Monuments and Neighborhoods).

We set out by car for the restaurant, but to our surprise, after only a few blocks we were obliged to stop at a police barricade. Policemen lined the streets, quietly standing in the shadows, obviously ready for trouble. The usually bright street lights were doused, and the only vehicles were camouflage-painted vans and buses outfitted with searchlights and machine guns. What was going on?

We learned that in the nearby Palais du Luxembourg there was to be a vote that evening on a contentious issue to do with foreign workers. Anticipating protests from interested groups, the authorities had ordered precautions against demonstrations or terrorism. No civilians or civilian vehicles were allowed on the streets.

The upshot was that Maurice took the car back to the apartment, and we were obliged to proceed to the restaurant on foot. At first this looked daunting. Although we were within a couple of hundred meters of our destination, we faced a long hike around the blockade. But then Janine talked the police commander into letting us take a short-cut across forbidden territory.

It was eerie to walk along streets normally congested and noisy, but now empty and silent but for our echoing footsteps. The ambience seemed more Communist East Berlin than Paris. It was a relief to arrive at the small, Provençal-style and definitely Parisian restaurant:

7 rue Corneille, Paris 06. Métro Odéon.

We sat in a small upstairs dining room, crowded but still quiet enough that we were able to enjoy conversation with our hosts.

Maurice’s style of conversation was in keeping with his calling as a nuclear physicist, in that he took a typical scientist’s pleasure in events that are unexpected but turn out to have a perfectly simple and logical explanation. He told us of one such paradox he encountered through his professional interest in the safety of nuclear power production. After the Chernobyl disaster, in which a reactor blew up and spewed cancer-causing radioactive material over a large area in the Ukraine, many people thought the cancer mortality rate in the area would zoom, but in fact it decreased significantly—why?

Anticipating that the reader will wish to mull over this conundrum while vicariously sharing our gastronomical adventure, we defer the answer until after dessert.

Distracted as we were by the social obligation to talk about other things beside food and wine, we registered only a few highlights of the dinner.

First among the highlights was the tremendous concentration of eggplant flavor in milles feuilles tiède aux aubergines grillée façon Riviéra. In this dish, thin slices of eggplant—we picture a small variety slow-grown in the heat of the Midi—were grilled, flavored with garlic and interleaved with goat cheese.

Almost as notable, but for texture as much as for flavor, was risotto crémeux de coquilles St-Jaques, "ail et persil." With its soft, fully distended grains held together by a gentle liason, the risotto nudged perfection.

Among the desserts, croustiant tiède de banane caramelisée, sauce caramel—sautéed banana wrapped in brittle pastry, on a caramel sauce—particularly pleased us with its perky "just-cooked" quality.

Remember the paradox? The resolution is that while the incidence of cancer rose in the wake of the nuclear accident, mortality fell because of enhanced screening and early intervention.

After the meal, having ascertained that the police had packed up and returned to their barracks, Maurice fetched the car and picked us up outside the restaurant. We expected our hosts to drive us back to our apartment, but first—pleasant surprise!—they treated us to a tour of Paris by night.

Silently but for an occasional muffled rumble of cobblestones, we wafted from one grand and spectacularly-illuminated monument to the next—the Musée de Cluny in the Latin Quarter, Île de la Cité (Notre-Dame and the Conciergerie with its conical-roofed towers), Musée du Louvre and the Tuileries, the Musée d’Orsay with its row of back-lit statues along the roof line, the Trocadéro fountains. Then the Arc de Triomphe, and a thrilling silent swoop down the Champs Élysées to the Obélisque (Place de la Concorde) before peeling off southward towards our apartment. Out of the dazzle of the city center, Jeanne pointed out some grand, austere buildings, once convents, that nowadays house some of the city’s specialized hospitals.

On this night of our tour of the City of Light, the air was clear but for a faint mist that invested every vista with a magical diffuseness. When we told our hosts that we had enjoyed the evening, we really meant it. Thanks again, Maurice and Jeanne!