Ready-blended, like a smell

The students in the cafés were exclusively male. A number of coeds attended lectures, but they used no makeup, wore cotton stockings, took masses of notes, and disappeared as soon as class was over. They went straight home, I imagine, or else to a room in some dark and hideous pension de famille, with a window giving on a court into which boys threw lynched cats. I used to suspect that in order to win their parent’s consent to such unwomanly careers the coeds had to make a show of being completely uninterested in sex, like nuns, and that in default of a habit they utilized steel barrettes and straight hair to advertise this indifference. Nowadays there are almost as many étudiantes as étudiants in the cafés of the Quarter – a lot of them married and living with their husbands, and others still single but en ménage. The petites femmes of the kind I remember, a species peculiar to the environs of the university, have been eliminated, like the Soufflet. Many of the women students today are prettier than the Soufflet girls, but they are more intimidating.
“Ce n’était pas vraiment du vice,” a very old friend of mine who still inhabits the Quarter said recently, reminiscing, “C’était une espèce d’artisanat.” From the point of view of the bashful foreigner, one advantage of the petite who could always be found in the same place was that they could observe her at leisure – for several evenings, if he chose. He might learn to like the way she looked up to greet fellows she knew, or the way her head sat on her neck or her neck on her shoulders. That would achieve what Stendhal baptized the “crystalization.” By the time the young man approached, he felt that he knew her as well as the girls in his high-school class, whom he had first observed in the same manner. He would find her receptive but not precipitate, practical but not rapacious. The greatest treat he could offer, within what the boys on the quarterlies would now call the Soufflet’s frame of reference, was the prix-fixe dinner on the wide balcony that overhung the grande salle. (It was not reasonable to assume that a customer who could afford better would be at the Soufflet at all.) The prix fixe more than nourished the girl; it raised her standing with the management and with her other male acquaintances. Best of all, it infuriated her colleagues who had not been invited anywhere and who bitterly watched her as they masticated the sandwiches that hunger had at length impelled them to order grudgingly for themselves. The prix fixe, at sixteen francs, comprised a choice of soup or a spectacular hors d’oeuvre varié and then fish, entrée, vegetable, salad, and cheese and fruit or dessert. Wine was included, but coffee wasn’t. The franc was twenty-five to the dollar.
I cannot truthfully say that I think of all these details specifically whenever I see the Restaurant Dupont on the site of the Taverne Soufflet, but I have thought about one or another of them so often on reaching that corner that the memory of the whole scene hits me ready-blended, like a smell.

Days with the Daydaybay [fragment]
uit: Just enough Liebling : classic work by the legendary New Yorker writer - A.J. Liebling


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