Adieu to the City of Lighters

Gourmets complained that smoking affected your taste buds.

I found it was true. One evening I was at La Tour d'Argent. I had the pressed duck, and just before that I had smoked a cigar at the Ritz Bar. I couldn't taste the duck. Since I was a restaurant critic, I didn't mention it to my companions.

The smokers in cafes in France needed a cigarette in their lips before they spoke. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder got all their ideas as they exhaled smoke from their mouths.

My favorite cafe was La Coupole in Montparnasse. You could hardly see the people for the smoke. I have ashtrays from there and other cafes. I guess my trophy is from Maxim's.

If only my ashes could talk.

Frenchmen do not laugh when they are smoking. They take it very seriously. Cafes supply matches. Tourists take them home as souvenirs.

Cigar smokers use lighters. The sexiest thing a woman can do is light a gentleman's cigar.

It is hard to imagine France as a smoke-free country.

Only the old movies will show people smoking. If "Casablanca" were filmed today, Humphrey Bogart's nightclub would have signs all over it saying "Sans Fumee" (No Smoking).

Imagine the hookers in Pigalle standing in doorways, biting their nails.

A French friend, Henri Fouquet, said, "When Americans stopped smoking, their culture went downhill. It will happen in France."

Victor Hugo would never have been able to write "Les Miserables" if he didn't have a pack of fags next to his pen.

The ones taking the big hits are, of course, the tobacco companies -- and also the armed forces. The country will have a sorry lot of soldiers, without Gitanes in their rucksacks.

No civilized Frenchman would be caught having his morning coffee without a cigarette.

Where this all leads, Dieu only knows.

2006Tribune Media Services