Conner's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 4: The Royal Bakers of the Rue de Buci
He ran the whole way. Out of the green door past Madame Aubert, who watched him go with her coffee cup halfway to her lips; down the Rue Jacob; left, right, through a little street full of antique shops just rolling up their shutters; around a corner so fast he nearly took out a woman pushing a stroller and into the Rue de Buci, which at half past eight in the morning was the loudest, most crowded, most delicious-smelling street Conner had ever seen in his life.
Stalls lined the market street on both sides: pyramids of fruit and vegetables, wheels of cheese under cloth, fish laid out on ice with their eyes still bright, strings of garlic, buckets of flowers.
A man selling live chickens out of a crate was having a loud argument with a housewife holding a string bag.
And halfway down the street a shop with a faded green front and gold letters on the glass: BOULANGERIE — PÂTISSERIE — E. LEMAIRE — Maison fondée en 1921.
There was a queue out the door.
Conner went around, found the back door and knocked. It was opened not by Pierre but by a short, round man of about fifty, bald as an egg. He wore a white apron over an enormous stomach and had a welcoming smile on his face.
“Ah!” said the man, before Conner could open his mouth. “The American!”
“I’m very sorry, Monsieur. I was supposed to be here early and I overslept. I’ve never overslept in my life, I...”
“Pierre has gone to bed. He waited. He doubted you would come. I said, Pierre, a man who asks about the baking comes back. And here you are! Late! Like a real Parisian! Come in, come in.”
He seized Conner’s hand in both of his, which were soft and warm and floury, and pumped it. “Ernst Lemaire. Pierre’s papa. Welcome. You are hungry? Of course you are hungry. Sit.”
The bakery’s back room, the fournil, was hot as July at noon. There were two great ovens set into the brick wall, a long scarred wooden table now dusted white with flour, racks of cooling loaves stacked to the ceiling, and in the corner, under a damp linen cloth in a wooden trough, something that Conner knew without being told was the levain. Pierre’s grandfather’s starter. Hidden from the Germans under the potatoes. Saved from the Fuhrer’s appetite.
Ernst put a croissant in front of him, and a mug of café au lait and then another croissant, and then a pain au chocolat for good measure.
He talked the whole time. Ernst was from Alsace, which explained the German name, and had come to Paris at seventeen to apprentice under Pierre’s grandfather. He had married the boss’s daughter, “the most beautiful woman on the Left Bank, Conner, and the most terrifying, I say it with love.”
He had been making bread in this room for thirty-three years. He switched to German halfway through a sentence. When Conner answered him in German, with the slight Swiss lilt the school had given him, Ernst clapped his hands together so hard that flour flew up in a cloud.
“Wunderbar! French like a Parisian, German like a Swiss banker! What else do you do?”
Conner thought about it. “I can cook a little. And fight. And dance.”
“Can you count?”
“Yes.”
“Can you smile?”
Conner smiled.
Ernst studied him for a beat. Then he leaned in close and dropped his voice, as if someone might be listening.
“My wife,” he said, “is in Rouen. Her sister is sick. She is gone one week, maybe two. Before she goes, she makes me promise, on my mother’s soul, Conner, that I will not work the front of the shop.”
“Why not?”
“Because I give things away.”
“What things?”
“Everything. A child comes in, she looks sad, I give her a pain au chocolat. An old man comes in, he says his pension is late, I give him a loaf. A pretty girl comes in, I give her a tarte aux fraises because she is pretty and it is spring. The priest comes in, I give him a brioche for the poor. It is not for the poor, Father Anselme eats it himself.” He spread his floury hands helplessly. “When she finds out, she banned me.”
“So who works the front?”
“Nicole.” Ernst pointed at a slender girl of about seventeen with her dark hair formed into a tight bun. She was working the counter with grim efficiency. “Nicole is very good. Nicole also cannot serve forty people at once and I must bake. My wife’s cousin who was supposed to help has broken her foot falling off a Vespa.”
He looked at Conner, and his round face went beautifully hopeful. “You said you would not mind working.”
Conner looked at the queue out the door. He looked at the ovens. He looked at the trough of levain under its linen cloth, saved from the Fuhrer.
“Where do I get an apron?”
He could tell at once that Nicole did not approve. It was obvious within the first ninety seconds, when Ernst brought him out front and announced that this was the American and he was going to help.
She looked him up and down:
“Madame’s orders are that no one gives anything away. No one gives credit. No one sells the day-old bread at half price until after four o’clock. The tartes are counted at eight in the morning and counted again at noon and the numbers must match the till. Madame will ask me.”
“That seems fair,” said Conner.
“You do not touch the till. You wrap. You smile. You say merci, bonne journée. That is all.”
“Merci, bonne journée,” Conner repeated obediently.
Nicole narrowed her eyes and turned back to the queue.
For the first hour, Conner wrapped. He wrapped baguettes in their little paper sleeves and pain de campagne in brown paper and tied the cake boxes with string in a bow. He learned the prices in ten minutes and the names of everything in the case in twenty. He smiled. He said merci, bonne journée. He was, by any reasonable standard, a model assistant.
The silliness emerged at half past ten.
A little boy, holding his mother’s hand, had his nose pressed against the glass of the pastry case where the croissants were piled up in a golden heap. He looked at them, and then he looked up, and up, and up, at Conner, and said:
“Why are they shaped like that?”
His mother shushed him. Nicole did not look up from the till. And Conner, who had been taught for eight years that a question deserved a real answer, leaned down over the counter until his face was level with the boy’s and said, with perfect seriousness:
“They weren’t always that shape. They used to be as round as the moon.”
The boy’s eyes went round.
“You see,” Conner went on, lowering his voice to the tone of someone sharing a state secret, “the recipe for the croissant was invented for Napoleon himself, by his personal baker, who incidentally was Ernst Lemaire, the owner of this shop’s great-great-grandfather. His name was Gustave. It was shaped like a crescent moon because Napoleon liked to eat them at night, on the battlefield, when planning the fight. The recipe was kept locked in a box of pure gold that was stored in the Louvre, guarded by ten soldiers day and night.”
“Really?”
“Really. But one night, a wicked thief came from England, crept into the Louvre dressed as a cleaning lady and copied it down on the inside of his sleeve and snuck it out. The King of England had been demanding croissants like these with his tea.”
“What happened?”
Conner glanced left and right, as if checking for spies or the secret police. He dropped his voice even further.
“Napoleon found out. He was very, very angry. He gathered his Army rode all the way to Bretagne on his white horse. He found the wicked thief, and he challenged him to a duel. With baguettes.”
The boy gasped.
“Napoleon won, of course. He always won. That’s why he’s on the money. And ever since then, every croissant in France has been made in that shape in his honor.”
He straightened up, took a croissant from the heap with the tongs, laid it on a square of paper, and presented it to the boy’s mother. “One franc twenty, Madame. Merci, bonne journée.”
The mother, who had been standing with her mouth as open as her son’s, paid, took the croissant, and walked out of the shop in a slight daze. At the door, the boy turned around, clutching the paper bag to his chest as if it contained a holy relic, and gave Conner a look of pure worship.
Behind the till, Nicole had stopped counting change.
“None of that,” she said, “is true.”
“No,” Conner agreed cheerfully. “But it should be.”
By Wednesday, he gave up trying to control the nonsense.
A dignified old gentleman with a white mustache and a cane asked, quite innocently, whether the pain de seigle was very sour. Conner explained, with the same grave, scholarly earnestness he had once brought to Thucydides, that it was precisely as sour as it had been in 1505, when it had been the favorite bread of King Louis XII, who had insisted on eating it every morning with a single raw onion and a glass of goat’s milk, which was why, according to history, he had lived to be fifty-two, a very great age for a king in those days.
That also explained why his wife would not kiss him before noon.
The old gentleman bought two loaves. And an onion from the stall next door.
It went on from there.
The tarte Tatin had been invented by two sisters who had dropped an apple pie on the floor of their hotel kitchen while being chased by a bear.
“A bear, Monsieur? In France?”
“A very small bear, Madame. From the circus. It had escaped. It was a very confusing day for everyone. They were all glad it wasn’t the elephant who decided to go for a swim in the Seine.”
The éclair had been named for the flash of lightning that struck the Pâtisserie Lemaire in 1921, on the very day it opened, and set Ernst’s father-in-law’s mustache on fire; you can see the scorch mark it made on the ceiling. (He pointed to a water stain in the corner.)
The pain aux raisins was spiral-shaped because Joséphine had liked them that way. Two of them eaten with wine calmed her nerves before she had to dance a minuet with Napoleon on one of his victory celebrations.
“All lies,” hissed Nicole. She had spent the days muttering to the cash register that there would be a reckoning when Madame came back.
“They’re all lies that would have been truths, except for an accident of fate,” Conner whispered back happily.
Of course, the customers knew. That was the beautiful thing. Nobody believed for a minute that Napoleon had fought a duel with a baguette. But Conner told it all with such steadfast, wide-eyed sincerity, looking every questioner straight in the eye with his clear baby blue eyes, that the bakery became a joyful theater of nonsense.
Women came back a second time in one morning to see what he’d say about the brioche. His stories changed from one moment to the next. Schoolboys came in after lunch and begged to hear about the mille-feuille.
“Why is it called a thousand leaves?”
“Because the first one was made by a monk who had taken a vow of silence and could only communicate by writing in food coloring on folding pastry. Rumor is that he spent his life writing the entire Bible in it in tiny tiny letters. The Pope ate it one morning by mistake.”
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