Within a week or so a group of Balzar regulars, mostly editors and publishers and professors—the Balzar is around the corner from the Sorbonne—arranged to meet at the apartment of one of the staunchest clients, on the quaiAnatole-France, to think about what we could do. It was a beautiful day, but ominous reports were coming in from all sides. Someone had had a doubtful sole; someone else had noticed that oeufs crevettes, hard-boiled eggs with shrimp, had been sneaked onto the menu. (No, no, someone else said, reassuringly, the oeufs crevettes were there twenty years ago; it was really a restoration.) More seriously, it was said that the waiters were being forced to rush checks to the table. It is a Balzar tradition that you can nurse even a cup of coffee and a plate of cold cuts for as long as you like. Now, it was said, after seventy minutes the waiters were forced to put the check on the table. This was—well, there was no other word for it—so American. You see this in California, someone said; he had eaten once in Santa Monica, and the young woman slapped the bill on the table after an hour and a half. (I could only imagine the waitress, on her way to her tai chi or acting class, dying on the vine while a couple of Frenchmen sat polishing off a bottle and solving the world’s problems.) More horror stories were told; a keen-eyed regular claimed to have spotted a Flo Group camion parked outside the Balzar at six o’clock one morning, bringing in Flo produce.
It was obvious that something had to be done, but what? One person suggested a boycott; another person a sit-in; someone else a campaign of letter writing. We had a left, a right, and a center even before we had a party. Finally a leader emerged, a hand-some, round-faced young publisher named Lorenzo Valentin. He had an excellent plan: Why not invite all the regulars we could find to reserve tables on the same night, occupy the restaurant, make a scene, and demand that Bucher meet with us? Fine, someone else said, but added that if we did it, we had to be sure not to leave the waiters, on whose behalf we were acting, “in an ambiguous position.” If we sat in, occupied the restaurant, and didn’t order anything, they would be the ones to suffer. Therefore we also had to order and eat dinner. Good, one woman said, but we had to be sure to hold on to the tables for the entire evening. “Eat, but eat slowly” would be our motto. Why not order foie gras on toast, she suggested; that could be spread very slowly She mimed just how to do it, like a veteran of many a foie gras slowdown on the barricades. We all watched her studiously
During the next two weeks, as I helped organize the occupation, I felt exhilarated, though I recognized in my exhilaration a certain hypocrisy. Like every American in France, I had spent a fair amount of time being exasperated by the French because of their inability to accept change, their refusal to accept the inevitable logic of the market, and their tendency to blame Americans for everything. As I raged against the changes at the Balzar, I began to hear people repeating to me the same tiresome and sensible logic that I had been preaching so long myself: that nothing stays the same; change must be welcomed; one must choose to live in the world as it is or live in a museum whose walls increasingly recede inward…. It was all true, and when it came to the Balzar, I didn’t care. I would like to say that the difference was that my concern was now attached to particular people—to Thierry and Jean-Claude and the rest. But that would be giving myself too much credit for disinterestedness. The difference was not that it was happening to the Balzar. The difference was that it was happening to me. I was being asked to give up the continuity of a thousand small associations and pleasures—the night we went after we signed the lease, the night we went, still jet-lagged, after a summer away—and I didn’t see why I should.
“Can’t repeat the past?” says Gatsby. “Why of course you can!” And every American schoolchild is taught that in this belief lies Gatsby’s tragedy. But why should the thought be so absurd? Can’t repeat the past? We do it every day. We build a life, or try to, of pleasures and duties that will become routine, so that every day will be the same day, or nearly so, “the day of our life,” Randall Jarrell called it. There seemed to me nothing stranger about my wanting to eat forever at an unchanged Balzar than about my wanting to stay married to the same wife or be father of the same kid. (“M. Bucher has now bought your family, and will be adding a new child to the staff on the same terms. Change is good. Here, try Ralphie for a while. He comes from the centralized nursery and only speaks German, but you’ll soon find that…”) On the day of my life, I eat dinner at the Balzar—the Balzar as it is and was, and not some improved, Flo Group version. I realize that one of the tricks of capitalism is to lure you into a misleadingly unreciprocated love with a cash register, but what impressed me about my friends in the Balzar war was that they weren’t prepared to treat their attachment to the Balzar as somehow less real than the cash register’s attachment to it.
June 25 was picked as the day for our occupation of the Balzar. We carefully arranged to stagger our phone calls to reserve tables for that Thursday night, to avoid tipping our hand. When my turn came, I was so nervous that I had to dial twice, and then, in a high-pitched quaver, I reserved my table. (“Oui, madame,” said an obviously bemused maitre d’.) On the night I arrived with a couple of friends. The tables filled up with regulars, gaily overacting the part of ordinary diners: Oh, how sympa, you’re here too, we said to each other, exchanging meaty, significant winks. We ordered aperitifs and made nervous conversation. Finally, at nine o’clock, the last regular sat down, and, with two taps on a glass, Lorenzo Valentin rose. The revolution was under way.
“We are here tonight,” he said, “to demonstrate our sympathy with the waiters, clients, and tradition of the Balzar.” Valentin stepped away from his table and addressed Bucher’s man, M. Delouche, directly Delouche clasped his hands behind his back and thrust out his chin, both obsequious and defiant. When I saw him like that, bearing the brunt of a sudden wave of disapproval—and, surely, thinking, I’m the working stiff here, these people are rich gauchistes, easy for them—I have to admit that a small whitecap of sympathy for him rose in my mind.
“This is not a personal assault on anyone,” Lorenzo declared. “We have gathered here tonight as, shall we say, an opportunity to discuss the issue at the heart of our concerns about the recent purchase of the Balzar by the Flo Group. Our question is: Is this merely a place to eat or is it something more, and if it is something more, what is it? Our organization, Les Amis du Balzar, is here to safeguard the quality and, what’s more, to defend the spirit and the staff of a place that we believe offers a respite from time itself.” This was grandly said, and he got a big hand.