False cities and restorations
FAUBOURG, n., RESTAURANT, n. A good way to make yourself sad during a pandemic—not that we have a shortage! and admittedly this sadness is trivial and selfish—is to read a book about a city you can’t travel to that lists restaurants you couldn’t safely eat inside even if you were there. So naturally I paged through The Historic Restaurants of Paris by Ellen Williams. Ostensibly this was research, since I’m still writing fiction set in nineteenth-century Paris, but thus far I have described zero restaurants. My characters are too busy with the other three Fs of survival to spend much time on food. Maybe in the next book.
I started thinking about etymology while reading because Williams writes that “faubourg”—a word that is common in names of Parisian neighborhoods like Faubourg Montmartre or Faubourg Saint-Germain and means “suburb”—comes from the French for “false city” (faux bourg). It’s true that “faux bourg” and “faubourg” sound identical in French, but in fact the word comes from Old French “forsbourc.” That “fors” is from the Latin preposition “foris,” meaning “outside.” A faubourg is an area outside the city proper. (This is no longer true for Montmartre and Saint-Germain. Paris has swallowed them.) The sound and spelling of “faubourg” were influenced by proximity to “faux” (false), so Williams isn’t wrong that “faux bourg” has played a role in the word’s history. It’s just not the whole story.
The illustrious Trésor de la langue française, France’s official dictionary, has also informed me that “faubourg” can mean a woman’s butt, or at least it did in the 1950s.
The eighteenth-century interior of Le Grand Véfour, one of the oldest restaurants in Paris. I’ve never been there, I borrowed this photo from their site.
The Historic Restaurants of Paris mostly covers places from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though there are a few older locations listed. I’m writing about the early nineteenth century—so early, in fact, that people were only just beginning to say the word “restaurant” and mean an eating establishment. This French word comes from the verb “restaurer,” to restore. Initially a “restaurant” was a food that restored you, specifically a “bouillon restaurant,” a restoring broth. These were meat-based, usually chicken or beef, but could have a variety of vegetables and herbs added. Eventually “restaurant” came to mean the place where you bought this broth.
The first one in Paris was supposedly opened by a man named Boulanger in 1765, but the internet brought me a lot of conflicting information about the man himself (probably Boulanger was a nickname and his real last name was Roze de Chantoiseau?), the street address (rue des Poulies, since destroyed by the extension of the rue du Louvre, or rue Bailleul, which still exists, but either way the place was close to the Louvre) and menu (broth of some kind, certainly, and probably also leg of lamb, which some English-language sites seem to have latched onto as “sheep’s feet,” which strikes me as extremely unlikely).
I checked Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût (Physiology of Taste), a nineteenth-century text about food and eating, to see if there was any mention of Boulanger. It’s not that Brillat-Savarin is the most historically reliable of writers, but he does have both a cheese and a cake named after him, plus the book was within my reach. He doesn’t have anything to say about Boulanger, so that will have to remain shrouded in mystery, but he is strongly pro-restaurant: it is a way to bring fine dining, previously the exclusive domain of the rich, to the masses.
So anyway, should you find yourself wandering a faubourg looking for a restaurant, now you know the etymology of both.
In a sort of happy coincidence, the small-r romance novels I’ve read recently are kind of a tour of twentieth-century American history. Plus one contemporary novelette because I refuse to be constrained too much by any theme.
Reel (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Kennedy Ryan. A lush contemporary romance between a Black filmmaker and the Black Broadway understudy he hires to star in his historical biopic about an unjustly forgotten blues singer. I love that this contemporary has some historical elements, including the blues singer’s letters—she’s queer, by the way—and there are also scenes from the film script interspersed between chapters. I wish the movie was real so I could watch it, or better yet, someone should adapt this book to the screen. Beautiful reflections on why we make art and tell stories, plus very sexy tension and big emotions at the end. The heroine’s chronic illness is represented with care. Content notes: death of a parent from illness, hospitalization, estrangement from family, sex.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club (f/f, both cis and lesbian, historical, young adult) by Malinda Lo. This is perhaps more of a coming-of-age story for its young Chinese-American lesbian protagonist than a romance, but it has romantic elements, so I’m counting it. Lily Hu is growing up in 1950s San Francisco, and you can hear and smell and feel the city in every description. She loves math and science fiction and sneaking out of her parents’ house on Friday nights to see Tommy Andrews, male impersonator, at the Telegraph Club. (The white lesbians she befriends at the club are mostly nice to her, but still make clueless, racist remarks.) You get a real sense not only of Lily and her neighborhood, but also of her family, whose stories are told in interwoven chapters. This doesn’t make it easier to bear when they don’t accept her sexuality—they fear she will be labeled a Communist and that they will be threatened with deportation because of it—but Lily finds her way anyway. Content notes: homophobia, racism, a supporting character has PTSD flashbacks of WWII, a supporting character has a miscarriage.
Peter Cabot Gets Lost (m/m, both cis and gay, historical) by Cat Sebastian. This is a dream of a roadtrip romance set in 1960, both funny and tender, and I read the whole thing in a single afternoon without really meaning to. One is grumpy, one is sunshine, there’s all the unexpected summer storms and only-one-beds you could hope for, plus incisive commentary about money and class. (The Cabots are a rich political family from Massachusetts and one of them is running for President; Caleb Murphy, Peter’s roadtrip companion, grew up poor in Tennessee.) I love Peter Cabot’s divorced bisexual aunt and her partner. Content notes: unsupportive family, some discussion of homophobia, sex.
Enemies to Lovers (f/f, both cis and bi, contemporary, novelette) by Aster Glenn Gray. If you were ever in fandom—by which I mean transformative fandom, the kind where you write fanfiction or make fanart—then this novelette will seem adorably, hilariously familiar. Two grad students meet and really connect with each other in real life, unaware that they’re nemeses online. That ignorant bliss doesn’t last, though, and when their shared writing group does an exercise where members get handcuffed together (shh, just go with it), naturally they end up bound to each other. After sniping at each other, they decide to see if hatesex is as good as fanfiction makes it out to be. This does what it says on the tin and I love it. The arguments they have about the nuances of characterization ring perfectly true. Content notes: sex.
And in books that are neither Romance nor romance, I read John Paul Brammer’s ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Wal-Mart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons. I love Brammer’s advice column of the same title. His memoir discusses his experiences with homophobic bullying, suicidal ideation, feeling inauthentically Mexican, loveless relationships and bad breakups with the same wit and earnestness as his advice column, and each essay is framed as if it’s responding to a letter writer. I enjoyed it very much.
