June 21 // marc and steak
“Excuse me, Monsieur, has anyone ever told you that you look like Thom Yorke?”
The man with the graying ponytail scrunches up his face in anguish, muttering something under his breath as he hurries off –- as much as one can hurry with a club foot, anyway.
Way to ingratiate yourself to the locals, Eric.
Châlons-en-Champagne (née Châlons-sur-Marne) is the capital of the region, despite being dwarfed in size by Reims, and it seems that within ten minutes we’ve biked across it entirely.
Tonight’s lodging, a homestay called La canopée, is located a short walk from the center of town on the marvelously named Rue des Martyrs de La Résistance. The area is a bit ragged upon first glance, I admit, where the timber-framed buildings seem as if mid-construction and ready to crumble with a gust of wind and no one — apart from the poor man I managed to offend immediately upon arrival — seems to take notice of our existence.
Immediately contradicting my initial impressions, a Dodger-blue iron door slides open, revealing our hairless host, Pierre, who greets us in perfect English with a warm smile, as if he’d been waiting eons for the opportunity to welcome guests into his home.
And it’s no wonder. The building, a converted lumber mill, is absolutely stunning: even the garage looks like a film set. Mark, a homeowner himself, struggles to hide his admiration for the collection of invaluable hand tools Pierre has hanging up in a dedicated, orderly nook, or the mid-century enamel stovetop which sits unused in the corner.
Still, Pierre has plenty more in store. “Please, come, come!”
From the 1950s garage, the entryway blasts us with a candy-colored dose of 1960s France, with a thousand melamine cubbies holding thousands of nearly stacked work-and-hiking shoes, topped by a museum-worthy jewel case of travel and design magazines.
The sitting room further inside, immaculate and untouched, features deliberately mismatched period furniture, while the living room, with ceilings that seem to reach heights of at least twenty feet, faces out upon a vast garden, flooding the space with sunlight which, a mere five minutes previously, had been our nemesis.
A painting, primitive and vibrant and borderline fauvist, hangs over the staircase, and I share my compliments. “Ah yes,” Pierre says with a dose of admiration. “My lover does enjoy painting from time to time.” He urges us to take a seat. “Françoise, this is Eric and Mark.”
Françoise, who had been waiting with her newspaper and a bottle of lemon syrup, urges us to take a seat, lacking in the English of her partner but not the warmth. Pushing her round, Yves Klein-blue reading glasses up a thin, suntanned nose, she fills our glasses with mercifully cool water from a brown earthenware jug as Pierre stamps our passports.
Pierre catches me admiring the pitcher. “Ah yes, that was a gift from our wedding one million years ago.” He sighs, his hand on Françoise’s shoulder; they steal a smile. “It’s all long out of style now, of course, but we like it.”
Once we’ve settled up (at an unthinkable €20 per night), Françoise bids us adieu as Pierre shows us to our quarters. “I hope it’s okay, but we only have the Tarzan Room available for tonight,” Pierre says, guiding us up a steep set of wooden stairs with a thick, ancient rope for a handrail.
Overlooking the street from a pair of whitewashed wooden panes, one for each twin bed, the room feels like the well-preserved childhood home of a child who grew to be some great adventurer, with display cases full of first editions by the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Daniel Defoe, plus relics which hint at an epoch of adventure, from tortoise shells to safari hats. And have I mentioned the floor fan and the coffee machine? Ah yes: it’ll do.
The Magic of the S&S has us both feeling good, and we head into the center of town in search of some trouble. Eventually settling on the Place de La République, Mark announces that it’s time: now that we’re in an actual town, we’re going finally splurge on a proper bottle of champagne – his treat, goddamnit.
From the cellar of La Marotte, a bored, blue-eyed teenager helps us land on a bottle of Dosage Zero at while her bad boy boyfriend paces outside, waiting for her to close up shop so he can walk her home, then try to beat the shit out of her, only to trip over his own shoelace and fall into a pit of dog diarrhea. Sorry, what was I talking about?
Châlons seems to be readying for some kind of festival, with a crew putting the finishing touches on a stage at the heart of the Place and a number of scant-clothed young women out on the scene, sipping their aperitifs and tugging on their slender cigarettes with oversized black sunglasses. I fall in love with one in particular, the evidently argumentative blonde in the powder-blue sundress locked in debate with the three elder ladies at the next table over.
“You should say hello,” Mark says, and with each subsequent glass, I swear I will, but by the time we reach the bottle of the bottle, all the tables around us are gone from the Place and I find myself wondering, was there ever a blonde there to begin with?
Ambling back down the Rue Léon Bourgeois1, we land on the Restaurant Les Années Folles for dinner, and it is a good choice. Giving off period-appropriate, maximalist vibes, cluttered with Tiffany-style lamps, Art Nouveau lettering, dusty interwar advertisements on the tobacco-yellow walls, and piped-in music sourced from wax cylinders, no doubt, the space reconstructs the gaiety and hope of a time in France that many of us foreigners dream about.
Nevertheless, the vibe is, to my surprise, also decidedly young, packed with long, shared tables of students swilling cheap wine over heavy, utilitarian plates of untold meats which swim in puddles of beurre as the mute, overworked garçon in a soccer jersey buzzes from one table to the next, tasked with somehow keeping all of the glasses full.
Our server is a dour, significantly more seasoned woman dressed in black who doesn’t seem to love dealing with two champagne-drunk Americans, but does seem to love hating a bit, which makes things a bit enjoyable for all. She hesitate to taunt me for my decision to take a French-language menu, then proceed to ask five hundred questions about what is on it; I don’t hesitate to continue speaking French, just to piss her off, and I think after a certain point we reach a sort of equilibrium of disdain.
After much deliberation, I land on the lardons salad, an entrecôte with shallot butter, and a boozy sorbet champenoise, Mark the salmon terrine, a rump steak with peppercorn sauce, and the crème caramel, and at €26 – not including the one, maybe two bottles of local, chilled red wine. Topping things off with a shot of marc, a type of French grappa I force upon Mark – because, if you hadn’t noticed, it shares a name with one of us. Though he hates it (and let’s be honest, this is literally booze made from trash), our impression of Châlons is positive enough that, who knows, we might even stay another night? Just don’t tell Thom Yorke.
- A fin de siècle politician who went from deputy of the region to Prime Minister (even winning the Nobel Prize in 1920 for his work in the League of Nations), who had the relatively moderate belief that the wealthy owed a debt of solidarity to the poor and — gasp! — should be taxed accordingly. ↩︎