This morning there was a truck blocking the street as I stopped to pick up some milk. The truck driver rushed in and asked, "Vous permettez, Madame?" He bought two canettes of apple juice and rushed out again to move his truck. He looked a bit dusty.
"It's the flour for the bakery," said my Berber friend at the cash register. "He's been there for half an hour."
"He blocked the street for half an hour at rush hour?"
"Yes, but it's only once a month. He delivers all the flour for the month through a big pipe that goes from the truck directly into a big vat in the cellar of the bakery. Imagine how much work that would be if it had to be carried downstairs on men's backs!"
Afterwards I went across the street to buy a baguette rétro and a few morning pastries for my latest visitor from the British Isles. Of course, you can buy croissants in Oxford, but what is wonderful about France is that every little bakery in every village across the country has good ones.
The boulangère was covered with white dust too and looked hassled but happy. Every once in a while she would call down the dumbwaiter shaft at her husband in the cellar. The monthly chore was bien terminé.
Marie-Antoinette was once called la boulangère [the baker's wife]. The poor of Paris were starving and had no bread-- it was the days before the bare boiled potato became the national starch. "If the king were in Paris, we would have bread," people said.
The women of Paris marched to Versailles on the fifth of October, 1789, to bring back "the baker, the baker's wife, and the baker's boy." That was the beginning of the end.
Most bakeries in Paris sell bad quality bread. A baguette costs €1 (or more!) and is sold without any protection bag.
French people, who aren't very clean, don't mind to walk the extremely dirty streets of Paris carrying their so-called baguette.
Posted by: Eric | 24 September 2006 at 23:07