The Parisian Job

This embarrasses me, but I’ve eaten many a Paris breakfast at the McDonald’s around the corner from my favorite Left Bank hotel (the Résidence les Gobelins, since you asked).

I try hard to do as the Romans do when in Rome, and likewise in any other city, but I have a problem with breakfast in France. I don’t mind breakfasting on caffeine and carbohydrates, but I can’t bring myself to pay twelve dollars for a cup of tea and a piece of bread, even if the morning-fresh French bread is like no other.

The high price is actually due to a quirk of Gallic hospitality: When you sit down at a table in a French café and order anything, no matter how small, you have the table until you choose to leave it. You can read the paper or a whole novel, you can write postcards—or a whole novel—you can stare out the window at Paris going by outside all day and indeed into the evening and until closing time, if you care to. That’s the rules. They haven’t changed since the young, unpublished Ernest Hemingway was too poor to buy wood to heat his studio and used to write entire short stories over a single glass of wine.

Thus, if you arrive at the café first thing in the morning, it has to charge you what amounts to rent for the day—and thus the eight-euro breakfast (less if you eat it standing at the bar), which comes to something over twelve dollars at current exchange rates. A cup of tea and an Egg McMuffin at the aforesaid McDonald’s, on the other hand, costs two euros.

But if I have a problem with the French café breakfast, much of France has a problem with McDonald’s, which represents to many the worst of globalization. Farmer-protester José Bové actually did prison time for taking a bulldozer to a Mickey D’s in the south of France in 1999. So I was never comfortable with the Left Bank Egg McMuffins, but I kept eating them, until the Great McMuffin Heist, otherwise known as the Parisian job.

My sister and I were in Paris with a couple of teenagers in tow. We keep early hours when traveling, but the teenagers partied late and slept in mornings. So my sister and I took to starting the day with a walk around the quarter, then stopping at the very McDonald’s, picking up breakfast, and bringing it back to the hotel.

It was working fine until the morning that, carrying the bag with the caffeine, I pushed open the swinging door of the hotel and was holding it open for my sister when she screamed, “Voleur!” She said afterward she hadn’t even known she knew the word. I knew it—it means “thief.”

The concierge, who knows me—I’ve stayed there several times—dove out the door to chase the voleur. My sister and I stood staring at each other, realizing slowly that her pocketbook was still hanging from her shoulder, but that in her hand was only the stub of the paper bag that had held the Eggs McMuffin.

After a couple of minutes, the concierge returned, crestfallen. He hadn’t caught the thief. We all laughed a lot when we told him what had been stolen.

We never knew whether our breakfast had been stolen by a hungry thief or an anti-McDonald’s prankster, but I haven’t had breakfast there since. I eat it like a Parisian now, grabbing a croissant and a cup of tea standing at the bar of the café across the street.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak