Aix is a university town, and there is clearly something in the curriculum that attracts pretty students. The terrace of the Deux Garçons is always full of them, and it is my theory that they are there for education rather than refreshment. They are taking a degree course in café deportment, with a syllabus divided into four parts.
One: The Arrival
One must always arrive as conspicuously as possible, preferably on the back of a crimson Kawasaki 750 motorcycle driven by a young man in head-to-toe black leather and three-day stubble. It is not done to stand on the pavement and wave him good-bye as he booms off down the Cours to visit his hairdresser. That is for gauche little girls from the Auvergne. The sophisticated student is too busy for sentiment. She is concentrating on the next stage.
Two: The Entrance
Sunglasses must be kept on until an acquaintance is identified at one of the tables, but one must not appear to be looking for company. Instead, the impression should be that one is heading into the café to make a phone call to one’s titled Italian admirer, when—queue surprise!—one sees a friend. The sunglasses can then be removed and the hair tossed while one is persuaded to sit down.
Three: Ritual Kissing
Everyone at the table must be kissed at least twice, often three times, and in special cases four times. Those being kissed should remain seated, allowing the new arrival to bend and swoop around the table, tossing her hair, getting in the way of the waiters, and generally making her presence felt.
Four: Table Manners
Once seated, sunglasses should be put back on to permit the discreet study of one’s own reflection in the café windows—not for reasons of narcissism, but to check important details of technique: the way one lights a cigarette, or sucks the straw in a Perrier menthe, or nibbles daintily on a sugar lump. If these are satisfactory, the glasses can be adjusted downward so that they rest charmingly on the end of the nose, and attention can be given to the other occupants of the table.
This performance continues from mid-morning until early evening, and never fails to entertain me. I imagine there must be the occasional break for academic work in between these hectic periods of social study, but I have never seen a textbook darken the café tables, nor heard any discussion of higher calculus or political science. The students are totally absorbed in showing form, and the Cours Mirabeau is all the more decorative as a result.
It would be no hardship to spend most of the day café hopping, but as our trips to Aix are infrequent we feel a pleasant obligation to squeeze in as much as possible during the morning—to pick up a bottle of eau-de-vie from the man in the rue d’Italie and some cheeses from Monsieur Paul in the rue des Marseillais, to see what new nonsense is in the windows of the boutiques which are crammed, chic by jowl, next to older and less transient establishments in the narrow streets behind the Cours, to join the crowds in the flower market, to take another look at the tiny, beautiful place d’Albertas, with its cobbles and its fountain, and to make sure that we arrive in the rue Frédéric Mistral while there are still seats to be had at Chez Gu.
There are larger, more decorative, and more gastronomically distinguished restaurants in Aix, but ever since we ducked into Gu one rainy day we have kept coming back. Gu himself presides over the room—a genial, noisy man with the widest, jauntiest, most luxuriant and ambitious mustache I have ever seen, permanently fighting gravity and the razor in its attempts to make contact with Gu’s eyebrows. His son takes the orders and an unseen woman with a redoubtable voice—Madame Gu, perhaps—is audibly in charge of the kitchen. The customers are made up of local businessmen, the girls from Agnes B. round the corner, smart women with their shopping bags and dachshunds, and the occasional furtive and transparently illicit couple murmuring intently and ignoring their aioli. The wine is served in jugs, a good three-course meal costs 80 francs, and all the tables are taken by 12:30 every day.
As usual, our good intentions to have a quick and restrained lunch disappear with the first jug of wine, and, as usual, we justify our self-indulgence by telling each other that today is a holiday. We don’t have businesses to get back to or diaries full of appointments, and our enjoyment is heightened, in a shamefully unworthy way, by the knowledge that the people around us will be back at their desks while we are still sitting over a second cup of coffee and deciding what to do next. There is more of Aix to see, but lunch dulls the appetite for sightseeing, and our bag of cheeses would take a smelly revenge on the way home if they were jostled through the heat of the afternoon. There is a vineyard outside Aix that I have been meaning to visit. Or there is a curiosity that we noticed on the way into town, a kind of medieval junkyard, littered with massive relics and wounded garden statuary. There, surely, we will find the old stone garden bench we’ve been looking for, and they’ll probably pay us to take it away.