Restaurant
4 February 2008
Greg was in Paris this week. He travelled with a photographer, working on the Sepulchre Tour.
It has become quite a fashion for paperback issues to include extra material - perhaps extracts of the author's next work, maybe reviews or commentaries from friendly journalists.
For Labyrinth, we included notes for reading groups - including some interesting questions on story-telling and research. Greg and I also prepared a guided tour to the Cité of Carcassonne with photographs and historical notes. You could follow the route round the ramparts and cobbled streets in about 90 minutes - more if you took our advice and stopped for lunch ...
When you come to put together a tour, however, you can't necessarily include everything. It has to make sense as a visit. Sepulchre has several locations - Paris, Rennes-les-Bains, Rennes-le-Château - so we decided to sketch a trip to each.
In Paris, something odd happened. Greg went looking for a restaurant - a particular restaurant - of which we have a couple of photographs and a note of an address near the Gare Saint-Lazare. And he couldn't find it.
The restaurant appears in Sepulchre like this:
Meredith crossed the street. The menu was chalked up on a blackboard on an easel on the sidewalk. The large glass windows were modestly covered by lace half-curtains so she couldn't see inside. She pushed down the old-fashioned handle and a shrill bell jangled and clattered. She stepped inside and was met instantly by an elderly waiter with a crisp white linen apron tied around his waist.
The establishment on which this scene is based is, I suppose, what most people would imagine to be a typical Parisian restaurant - wooden door and windows tight on the pavement, shutters, window boxes. I suspect it's better than just typical though. I have only ever heard good things about it and enjoyed the meal I ate there.
None of the details I describe in Sepulchre - the waiter, the food and wine, the pictures on the walls that become, for Meredith, important clues - are real. But, like Meredith, I did leave a good tip!
I just wish I could find it!
Another
mystery in the Sepulchre.
