Conner's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 3: Bread and Fish Stew
The taxi was a black Peugeot 404 with a cracked windshield and a plastic Virgin Mary glued above the speedometer. The driver was a wiry, unshaven man in a cardigan who chain-smoked Gitanes.
“Rue Jacob,” Conner said, climbing in with his pack on his knees. “L’Hôtel des Marronniers, s’il vous plaît.”
The driver grunted, flicked the meter, and pulled out into the traffic in front of the Gare de Lyon as if he had a personal grudge against every other vehicle in Paris. Another cab driver leaned on his horn when he was cut off. The driver leaned on his, and they were off.
Conner sat back and let Paris happen to him.
He had been here once before, when he was thirteen, marching with the others like ducklings in blazers from the Louvre to Notre-Dame to the Invalides with Herr Brandt at the head of the column. He remembered it as a city of monuments. What he had not seen back then was this: the city at midnight in early summer. A couple kissing against a wall. Music, a saxophone moaning from somewhere and then gone. The dank smell of the river coming through the half-open window.
I live here now.
The thought made him grin at the back of the driver’s head.
He felt the inside pocket of his jacket for his money. The bursar at Saint-Aubin, in accordance with instructions from Mr. Hollis, the lawyer in New York, had given him an envelope containing what seemed to Conner an enormous amount of French and Swiss francs. Enough for the journey. After that, you must see American Express. Conner made a to-do note in his notebook. Herr Brandt again:
The difference between an intention and an action plan is a note.
They crossed the river on the Pont d’Austerlitz, raced along the Left Bank past the lit-up bulk of Notre-Dame on its island, and plunged into a tangle of narrow streets that the driver took at a speed that made Conner hold onto the door handle. And then, abruptly, they stopped.
“Voilà. Rue Jacob.”
It was a narrow street of tall, pale buildings with iron balconies, very quiet. The hotel had a green door with a brass plate. There was a dim light in the lobby.
Next door to it was a working man’s café, narrow and deep. A chalkboard menu was propped next to the door, which stood open. Inside were men in work clothes. A laugh sounded loud and hoarse. A radio was playing football results. And from the open door came a smell that stopped Conner on the pavement like a hand on his chest: fish stew with garlic and fennel.
He had eaten half a loaf of bread, some cheese, and part of an apple since six in the morning. He had walked twenty-two kilometers, stopped a thief, danced on a railway platform, and fallen a little bit in love.
He was starving.
He paid the driver, tipped him too much (the driver’s eyebrows went up and quickly back down before Conner could notice his mistake), shouldered his pack, and went into the café.
The chalkboard menu said SOUPE DE POISSON.
There were no free tables, but there was one stool at the end of the counter. Conner took it, setting his pack between his feet. When the waiter, who had a stained white apron and forearms like hams, raised a questioning chin, Conner ordered the soup, a glass of red, and bread.
The waiter shouted the order through a hatch into the kitchen, poured the wine, and slid it across to him.
The soup arrived in a wide, chipped earthenware bowl, deep orange-red, steaming, with chunks of white fish and mussels still in their shells, and a slick of oil on top. Beside it on a separate plate was a hunk of bread with a crust so dark and hard it crackled when Conner picked it up. There was a little pot of rouille, garlicky and rust-colored, and a bowl heaped with croutons.
Conner ate like a starving man. He tore the bread and dunked it, and floated the croutons in the soup the way Matthieu did.
For five minutes he thought about nothing in the world except the taste of that stew.
“C’est bon, hein?”
Conner looked up. The man on the next stool was watching him with amusement. He was young, twenty-two or three, broad-shouldered, with a round, cheerful face and enormous hands that were marred with small white burn scars. He wore white cotton trousers, a white T-shirt, and an old army jacket over the top.
“C’est extraordinaire,” Conner said. “Et le pain...” He held up the hunk of bread and turned it over, looking at the crust, the big irregular holes in the crumb, the faint sour smell of it. “This isn’t ordinary bread.”
The young man’s face lit up. “It’s ours.”
“Yours?”
“My father’s bakery. Rue de Buci, three streets over. Boulangerie Lemaire. We supply Gaston here.” He nodded at the waiter, who lifted a hand. “I’m Pierre.”
“Conner.”
They shook. Pierre’s hand was like shaking hands with a warm, friendly brick.
“Conner,” Pierre repeated, frowning a little at the name. “That’s not French.”
“No. I’m American.”
Pierre stared at him. Then he laughed and slapped the counter. “Non. Get out. You’re from the fifteenth. I’d bet my father’s oven on it. You talk like my uncle Raymond.”
“I practiced my French with a cook who grew up on the Rue de Vaugirard.”
“Ça alors,” said Pierre, delighted, and ordered himself a petit café and a calva and turned all the way around on his stool to face Conner properly. “An American who talks like a Parisian taxi driver and knows good bread when he eats it. It’s a good start to my day.”
They talked for an hour.
Pierre, as it turned out, was just coming on shift. He came into Gaston’s every night at a quarter to midnight for a coffee and a Calvados, and then at half past midnight he walked the three streets to his father’s shop, let himself in by the back door, and lit the ovens.
“Every night?”
“Every night except Monday. Since I was fifteen.”
“When do you sleep?”
“In the afternoon. My girlfriend insists that I’m a vampire because she’s never seen me in daylight.”
Conner instantly wanted to know everything. So he asked, and Pierre, who clearly had not been asked about his work with real interest by anyone in a very long time, if ever, answered.
He explained the difference between a baguette made with commercial yeast—fast, white, pretty, but tasteless—and the pain de campagne his father made the old way with a levain, a sourdough starter that was kept alive in a wooden trough in the back of the shop. It had been fed flour and water every single day since before the war. “My grandfather started it in 1936. When the Germans came, my father’s mother hid it in the cellar under the potatoes. When the Germans left, she took it out and fed it. Same starter. Same bread you’re eating now.”
Conner looked at the hunk of bread in his hand with reverence. Then the ridiculous part of his brain that caused so much trouble over the years instantly went to a scene with the Führer demanding of the SS, “I must have some sourdough baguettes from Boulangerie Lemaire in Paris. Bring them to me or heads will roll...”
He managed to quell that line of thinking and and get back to paying attention.
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