What the Whelk Shells Tell

Skirting the tables at Les Deux Magots, the little tabloid vender issued a salacious trill and patted his stack of papers. He seemed to have the goods on “un triste scandaleuse!” but he might have been calling, “Caps for Sale!” by the looks of him. Slim and mustachioed, in a small green blazer and flat cap, its tongue-tip of brim shading his brow, he was flirting with café-sitters in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, urging them to swap a euro or two for a morsel of gossip, its probability as weightless and delicious as meringue. When no one nipped at the bait on our corner, he scampered across the street to have another go at it, and Anna and I finished our tea and headed out to find un tire-bouchon, a corkscrew.

I’d come to Paris for a week to try out studying French abroad (and fled after two days—my class placement too advanced, my French too limited, and my confidence too cowed to complain) and my daughter, Anna, who curates performance art in Chicago, had come along for the ride. We’d also brought along short shopping lists; Anna wanted vintage fashion prints from a flea market, and I wanted olive-wood salad-servers and the aforementioned corkscrew. I was old to be studying abroad—had been teaching for twenty-five years—and too old to be much interested in acquiring more things. In fact, I’d just begun what would become quite a radical purging campaign at home, dropping big bags off at the Goodwill on my way to school each morning. But if there was anything I’d learned in my almost sixty years on the planet, a sound corkscrew is indispensable to good living, and when I ran my current acquisitions and divestures program through the Jesus sieve—the particular wisdom tradition I grew up in—it came out: “Take everything you have and give it to the poor, but keep your corkscrew.” Who knows when your water might turn into wine.

We also had wedding gifts to buy, which took us down a few rabbit holes in search of boutiques described in detail online but nonexistent in the narrow rues of real life and finally led us to the famous department store, Galeries Lafayette. Galeries Lafayette is un grand magasin as tufted and gilded as an opera house, an only slightly smaller version (it seemed) of Versailles. Anna and I entered one of a thousand doors, made our way through sundry, glinting, smart salons that angled into one another like a couture house of mirrors. Eventually, we escalated to a higher tier from which we gazed down at the ground floor—the interior of the building is circular as a hive and all floors or galeries open to a vast atrium in the middle—and up at the magnificent, stained glass dome which filtered light like a blessing on all that well-heeled wanting and scheming and getting and spending, blurring the old boundaries between sacred and profane. Up to another floor, and up again, then down we went until, completely overwhelmed by the pulsing pageantry of it all, we accosted what seemed to be a customer au pair (God bless him), an impeccably dressed idler in the land of parfumeries keeping an eye out for the lost likes of us. And there between the opulent fiefdoms of Givenchy and Chanel, I broke out my hunch-backed, unimproving French.

“S’il vous plaît, monsieur, où est . . . les choses . . . pour la maison?” (“Where is . . . the things . . . for the house?”) And he directed us across a broad street to another colony in the Galeries empire, where we orienteered through villages of chocolates and cheese, veered around mountains of sea salts and hillocks of herbs, navigated nations of olives and pastries and oils before making our way upstairs to linens and glass, the sorts of things that would box up nicely, we thought, and make suitable gifts. Which they did. A few months later, the wedding we attended was très bien.

Who knows why people want what...