Around the World in 80 Days, Part VI

By Temple Ligon
February 28, 2014

 
Leaving the Morgan motorcar factory in the Cotswolds late Monday afternoon, March 26, I stayed on the train until it pulled into London. I was looking forward to a long night of deep sleep. Travel was always fun for me, and it could be slow and relaxing, but on the trail of Phileas Fogg with a demanding schedule was not necessarily slow and never relaxing.
 
I stayed at the Bedford, a plain pedestrian property best regarded for its full English breakfast as a complimentary part of the reasonable rate. Near Russell Square in the heart of Bloomsbury, the Bedford’s neighbors included the University of London and the British Museum and all the bookish types direct from Central Casting wearing tweed jackets with leather patches on the sleeves, complaining about most everything. As a college section of town, there were plenty of affordable features on the street in an otherwise expensive city.
 
But even in the student sections of London, hold on to your wallet. The strength of the pound keeps it that way.
 
Speaking of the pound, I always tried to return to the Royal Exchange across Threadneedle Street from the Bank of England and the London Stock Exchange every time I made it to London, not because I knew much about currency or investment, but because South Carolina began on the other side of the Royal Exchange, the south side of Cornhill Street at #25 Birchin Lane.
 
The address was a bar/restaurant, more of a wine bar than a pub, and next door was a fancy men’s shop called Cad and the Dandy.
 
It’s important to me because it’s important to you. This was where the Carolina Coffee House was occupied by usually six of the Carolina Lords Proprietors every Tuesday morning at 11:00 to talk about possible moves to Charleston.
 
Boston was begun by religious fanatics, and Jamestown was a bunch of daddy’s boys, neither group knowing much about day-to-day survival and eventual hard-fought gains in prosperity. Charleston, however, was designed to start with families, particularly farming families, people who could grow the grain and grow the population and grow the wealth.
 
The first Carolina Charter was signed by King Charles II in 1663, and the second, a larger land deal, in 1665. From today’s Virginia/North Carolina line south to roughly Daytona Beach, take all that west to the Pacific, and you have the limits of Carolina in 1665. It was soon after the 1665 organization was accomplished that the Tuesday morning meetings began. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the leader of the group, and his secretary John Locke typically sat for the curious every week. They distributed brochures with reprints of the Fundamentals for a Carolina Constitution, ideas and principles picked up by Thomas Jefferson in his Declaration of Independence.

After Charleston actually kicked off as a colony in 1670, the Carolina Coffee House stayed the course on Birchin Lane for longer than another 100 years. The place made for a post office of sorts, and it made for some especially personal opportunities. Ben Franklin frequented the Pennsylvania Coffee House to keep up on his home guard, but he always said the female staff and the food and the drink at the Carolina Coffee House were the best. In the same area of London were the New York Coffee House, the New England Coffee House, and the Virginia Coffee House among others.
 
In 1685 when King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, Huguenots knew they had to leave France. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was in 1572, and after 1685 there could be another one most any day. Over the next decade, more than 1,500 Huguenots left for Charleston, having heard the religious freedoms published by Locke and Cooper. Their document, however, was never ratified. The kind of people attracted to Charleston didn’t care for government.
 
The bartender inside #25 Birchin Lane had never heard the story, the history of the address. The Carolina Coffee House building was long ago torn down to make way for what’s there today, but the fun part is the bar’s name: #25 Birchin Lane. A fact-finding field trip is in order.
 
I bought boxers at Cad and the Dandy next door and returned to the Bedford to get on with the 80 days.
 
I carried my bags with me to St. Pancras Station to see about a seat on the Chunnel train to Paris, a k a Eurostar. I picked a busy time, so I had to take a first-class seat – had to. Actually it was the price that bothered me because I had to pay the full fare. I was not carrying a rail pass of any kind. I had planned to take the trains as I needed them to get out of Europe and on a boat to Suez. Fortunately the Chunnel train first-class cars observed the old British Airways trans-Atlantic cocktail policy: Drink all you want. And the food was awfully good. Money well spent.
 
The train ordinarily rolled across the countryside at 187.5 mph, but inside the Chunnel the speed fell below 125 mph because of the pneumatic phenomenon inside the tube for the distance under the English Channel. As the trains surfaced above ground on French soil, the routes were split between the trains for the Paris-bound and for those going to Belgium.
 
The Chunnel train was put together by three nations: U. K., France and Belgium. And in 1998, when I put 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) on my two-week Eurail pass, I had to talk to all three countries in their offices at the Gare de Nord in Paris to reclaim my seat back to London. I had no ticket because it was lost with everything else in the middle of the night in the middle of the South of France. My bags and raincoat and Chunnel ticket were decoupled without announcement while I slept through Lyons en route to Geneva.
 
I bought washable clothes in Rome and toughed it out for another 10 days while I had to assume my wardrobe would be found. Never was. The tuxedo I carried for an opening night at La Scala never made it.
 
With one more day left on my Eurail pass, I pleaded to the French since it was their station, Gare de Nord, that connected with London. That’s impossible, they said in language unbearably thick with accent. The Belgians were about as helpful. No one seemed concerned that I might not get back to London in time to catch my flight. Then I crossed the street to see the Brits.
 
Here we are, she said. This must be your seat. Can’t imagine it would be anyone else’s, what? I mean, you’re here and no one else is. Let’s get you onboard.
 
The Brits got me back, God bless them.
 
I told that story to illustrate my degree of Anglophile fever. I have always been treated well by the Brits. Not the French.
 
FTF.
 
This time I was coming back into Paris through the Gare de Nord, a place gaining in non-native populations every time I get through the station. The Gare de Nord, it must be said, is the same arrival Fogg and Passepartout experienced before they took a carriage to Thomas Cook.
 
It was about mid-afternoon when I worked through the Gypsie beggars at Gare de Nord and went below to the subway to get over to the Bastille stop. London I knew pretty well for a middle-class American, and Paris I knew better. This run around the world was put into play as a learning experience, as a means to get to places I didn’t know and otherwise would probably never see. So staying very long in London and Paris kind of missed the whole point. Since I spent far more than my intended time in London and for the side trip to the Cotswolds, I told myself not to take more than one night in Paris. That was a shame. I was going to all that trouble and expense to get to Paris, the world’s most beautiful big city, and I was spending one night. Well, I might as well spend, I thought.
 
I checked into the affordable Les Sans Culottes at 27 Rue de Lappe, part of a stretch of nightspots where Edith Piaf used to take her gangster boyfriends for after-hours whatever. For a little variety among the dance clubs and bars in the Bastille neighborhood, only about a block away was the Bastille Opera House, opened in 1989 to celebrate the second centennial of the French Revolution. Today, assuming construction inflation since 1989, the Bastille Opera House could be built for less than $2 billion.
 
I first stayed at Les Sans Culottes in the summer of 1996 just after reading about it in the Sunday New York Times. The writer’s nom de plume was the Frugal Traveler, and she was spot on. The place had been a good cheap deal every time, probably once every two years since 1996. The streetside bar/restaurant was also the hotel office where the keys were kept. With only 10 rooms, the place was too small to make most travel guides, but that kept the price down. I think I paid 54 euros. That was the summer of 2012.
 
For 54 euros I got an upper-level window on the street, private bath and access to a city tennis court out back. The food was pretty good and the crowd was great. Fun place.
 
Since I was in town for just one night, I was not going to spend any money or time on fun downstairs. I was engaged with a table for one at the world’s most expensive tourist trap, La Tour d’Argent, overlooking Notre Dame. I had been there for dinner three times before, each time with one or two travel companions, and each time I felt like an idiot, paying that kind of money for a view across the river to the roofs of Notre Dame.
 
My first time for dinner was in April 1996. We, two of us, shared the press duck, which was numbered in a sequence they began in 1890, and today it runs to well over a million. At that time La Tour d’Argent was awarded three Michelin stars, the highest in the business. I found out the next week we had eaten on the restaurant’s last three-star weekend. The next week it was ranked with just two stars, and in 2006 the place was downgraded to one star. Claude Terrail, the owner since 1947, had stayed with the menu he inherited from his father who pretty much preserved the menu of 1890, all Escoffier-style cooking with rich sauces and hardened arteries to match. Terrail died several years ago, and his son moved to sell thousands of bottles of wine to raise millions of dollars to pay for major renovations. The menu has also undergone a profound shift, so do expect an eventual return to Michelin’s stars. The prices, on the other hand, never softened and never let up. Even with the loss in Michelin ranking, La Tour d’Argent kept its status as the world’s most expensive tourist trap.  
 
It started in 1582, and it really did begin as a tower. The afternoon sun would set as it picked up on the mica in the building’s stone walls. The reflection reminded the Parisians of silver; hence, the name.
 
A little bit before La Tour d’Argent got underway, Catherine de’ Medici of Italy, wife of Henry II, introduced the fork while she showed the French how to cook and how to eat. Catherine’s family was the richest in Europe; no one argued that point. The Medici were not only the richest; they could prove it, too. They were the world’s first to put to expert use double-entry bookkeeping. In 1600 Henry IV of France married Marie de’ Medici, continuing the Italian influence on the French court.
 
The original location was just about where the restaurant moved to the sixth floor after elevators were perfected. The stone tower was long gone, but the street intersection address had been there for more than four hundred years. Until a few years ago when the restaurant was forced to sell bottles of wine to finance renovations, the peak count of bottles in the cellars came to more than 500,000. Now it’s a few more than 450,000. Where did the Germans first go after the fall of France in WWII?
 
 
(To be continued…)