Death and Food

Our plan today was to visit the catacombs, the Parisien mass grave where Mimi could indulge her affection for skulls; however, the line was around the block and we didn’t feel like wasting precious hours in line with loads of other American sweltering in the July sun.

So, instead, we took a stroll through the nearby Cemetiere Montparnasse, where I felt that strange mixture of awe, melancholy, and disgust that one gets viewing the impressive, excessive, and excessively impressive sepulchers that French families have historically built to house their remains. (One, for instance, was a grand mosaic, each tile laboriously applied to a structure the size of a large garden shed; many others featured beautiful stained-glass windows and/or columns to do a small chapel proud.)

An hour or so of that worked up quite an appetite, oddly enough, although I suppose in keeping with the tradition of large meals after funerals, so we wandered about, Michelin guide in hand, and having passed on a place the book highly recommended since all they had on the menu for the sissy non-flesh eater was, I dunno, maybe the paper it was printed on, we found ourselves at a bistro called Plomb du Cantal, whose beautiful composed salads provided the perfect sustenance for our weary bones.

It did seem a little weird (to me, anyway) to be enjoying such delicious meal such a short time after hanging out with the deceased. Something about the juxtaposition of life-giving nourishment alongside dead bodies just struck me as weird—not bad weird, but weird nonetheless.

Not that it stopped me from fully enjoying my food and the carafe of wine Jen and I shared along with it, but I couldn’t help thinking about all those lost souls who would never again enjoy a morsel blue cheese or a boiled potato again.

And even it they could, I wouldn’t have shared dessert; we had three spoons on one crème brulee as it was.