Marcelle Renaud

Sixty-one years old, twenty-five of them at the top of the stairs with a seating plan — a short account of myself.

I was born in Lyon the year the métro got its rubber tyres, and I came to Paris at nineteen with a chef's daughter's thoroughness and absolutely no money. I intended the restaurant trade and I got the whole theatre of it instead: a year of serving tables in the ninth arrondissement, then a post as a junior hostess on Boulevard de Clichy, and then — twenty-five years, three maître d' before me, thousands of evenings — the seating plan was mine.

The job, for those who have not done it: you stand at the top of the stairs as the house fills, plan folded in hand, and you place nine hundred people in ninety minutes so that honeymooners are together, regulars are recognised, noisy parties are where they cannot spoil a proposal, and the evening runs on rails. It is diplomacy at walking pace. I was good at it, and I say that plainly because I earned it.

The building taught me everything I know about audiences. That a room is a living thing that must be fed and seated and flattered. That the difference between a good evening and a famous one is forty small courtesies nobody ever names. And that people dress up and cross the world not for feathers and sequins but for the feeling of having been somewhere — properly, fully, beautifully somewhere.

I retired in the spring, at sixty, when the knees that had climbed those stairs decided they had done their duty. I live now two streets from Place des Abbesses in a third-floor flat full of orchids and old menus, and I write these notes in the mornings with the window open to the square. My orchids are unremarkable. My memories, I flatter myself, are better.

These pages are a private undertaking — a memoir, a notebook, a set of letters to friends I have not yet met. They carry no commerce and no complaint; only affection for a room where I spent my working life, and an old professional's pride in doing things properly. If they help one person arrive relaxed and sit well and love the evening the way it deserves, then the pen was worth taking up.

People who write to me often end their letters asking what the work cost, because they sense it was not all candlelight. The honest answer: my feet, mostly, and a certain number of family dinners given to other people's. Twenty-five Decembers I watched other families celebrate; mine learned to celebrate in January. I do not regret it — a trade that consists of making strangers happy is a rare and lucky way to spend a working life — but I put it here so the picture stays honest. The rest of the cost, I suppose, was that I can no longer watch any performance anywhere without reading the room instead of the stage. A professional deformity, my doctor calls it. I call it twenty-five years well spent. And the pension, modest as it is, comes from a trade union card I am prouder of than any medal.