Spring 98 Volume I Issue 4

April in Paris: From the classic tune by Vernon Duke to Duke Ellington's big band playing it "'one more time," this souvenir of our cultural history transcends generations. PipeSMOKE visits Paris in the spring and tags along as George Fricker, in town on extended business, decides one morning to buy a new pipe. With photographer Pierre Vauthey, we followed George to a few of the best smokeshops and recorded how he found not only the briar roots he wanted, but the blossoms of romance. Here is the treatment for our story.

A short amble to the riverbank and the bookstalls, to browse and maybe find some new/old book he'd like. A painter sets his easel on the street to catch the first glut of tourists wandering across the Seine from the Louvre on the opposite bank. Teenage American girls wearing coordinated grunge uniforms took through stacks of used CDs and talk too loudly. Then, on a bookstall with large art books, there is a sizable tome on pipes. Beautiful pictures of gleaming briar polished to show the highlights, a cornucopia of tobacco spilling its contents across a two-page spread. The book is too big to carry around all day. He'll come back another time. But George knows now what to do today.

It is the perfect day to buy a new pipe, and he has all the time he needs, with no one to answer to. Alone - not that he wanted it that way - he can indulge himself.

He turns his aim towards the hub of the 6th arrondissement, the "Latin Quarter," where Boulevard Saint-Germain crosses the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the center of student and intellectual life in Paris. Shades of Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Matisse haunt the cafes and side streets, bookshops and galleries. There at 24, Boulevard Saint Michel, is Au Caid, on the same corner it has occupied since 1878, its classic oak fittings a throwback to the way George likes pipeshops to look, except that this one is authentic, time-honored.

Looking in Au Caid's window, George spots a few unusual pipes that speak to his sensibility, and enters the shop. Mme. Schmitt, the fourth generation of her family to own Au Caid since its founding, attends to George herself. A glance at him and the classic "neogene" (billiard) he held, and Mme. Schmitt pulls out a bin of standard shapes by Chacom and Butz-Choquin, the two major French pipe manufacturers, whose stock fills three-quarters of her inventory.

But George isn't keen on a classic. He admires two hand-carved bent pipes, one by Chacom's master turner, Pierre Morel - with his hallmark elongation of the bowl top - and the other from Butz-Choquin. George buys both. "Must be nice to myself today," he tells Au Caid's owner, and asks her to send the pipes to the address on his business card. "Something more modern to take with me?" he asks. "A designer look, perhaps?" George needs to break the mold today ... adventure in a small way.

The proprietress shows him a Chacom "Volute," an award winning design with sculpted flowing lines and an inventive use of molded acrylic fused to the briar. George is hooked. "It is worthy of a museum exhibit," he comments. "A lot Of younger men are looking for the more modern pipes," Mme. Schmitt tells him. "The 'Danish' style," she says, "is coming back into fashion."

On the footbridge crossing the Seine, George thinks to take a look at the Monet "Waterlilies" in the Orangerie. Deciding that the Volute is calling to be smoked, George lights up, only to find that he can't smoke in the museum. He returns to the left bank, trailing fragrant smoke past the Musee d'Orsay, the brilliant architectural adaptation of an old railway station to an art museum (mostly modern), past the palace housing the Foreign Office, where he has spent the past week negotiating for a client, past the regal esplanade of Des Invalides. A left turn onto the Rue Surcouf brings him to the SEITA Museum (tobacco history, art, and artifacts), where the bookshop has the same book that inspired him earlier, but new and for less money. He arranges to have it sent home to New York.

An automatic impulse puts him in a taxi en route to the Avenue Victor Hugo, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, one of the city's posh districts. Not until he pays the fare does he realize that he doesn't live here anymore. Sabine still does, but the concierge regards him with suspicion, as always, and says that his ex is gone for the weekend.

For old time's sake, George stops in at Lemaire, just down the street at 59, Avenue Victor Hugo, feeling a bit like one of Les Miserables himself. Mme. Pihan, the proprietress, does her best to cheer him up by bringing out a rare packet of tobacco - "La Escepcion" from Havana, which he likes to mix in with his regular blend for a change of pace - that she'd put aside for him. Touched by her kindness, George looks at her pipes, but they're mostly classic shapes, and Dunhills at that. He gets those in London. Couple of nice Larsens and Savinellis and a vintage Charatan, but he decides to pass. This is where he used to buy his cigars regularly: best Cubans in Paris. With an au revoir and a' bientot, he's off, grateful for her kindness and discreet, knowing silence.