Taking an Unhappy Bite Out of Paris

Yes, I can explain the pull Paris has for me every year without fail.

It’s the cafe noir. It’s the rain. Rue du Faubourge Saint-Honore after a rain. It’s the Bois de Boulogne at night, Le Musee National Auguste Rodin on a Sunday afternoon. The jambon in general. The food in particular.

But this year, there was another type of pull.

My tooth--in Paris, by a young French dentist with a luxurious Space Age office, no credentials on his walls and buxom nurses who looked like they stepped out of the cartoons of the New Yorker.

The dentist had been recommended by my three-star hotel concierge. My first impulse was to call Mitterand for help, but the concierge intervened. “Is he an experienced dentist?� I asked the concierge. “Ee’s young, but verry goot,� the concierge assured me.

“Ouch,� I said after the third hypodermic needle tracked, then penetrated the main valve of my nervous system. I thought of Laurence Olivier as the mad dentist in the movie, “Marathon Man.�

Ringing in the Mouth

The doctor tapped my tooth. The bells of Notre Dame went off in my mouth. The Space Age dentist chair quivered.

The sixth needle slid into my gums like silk. My lips felt like whales.

Nurses buzzed by, but none attended the dentist. I felt imperiled. A chisel worked at the base of my tooth. I could hear the crunch, crunch, crunch and wondered if the dentist was a doctor after all. A pliers appeared. Then my tooth.

“One-thousand francs,� said the young doctor swinging from side to side on his expensive leather chair, as he handed me the bill. At the rate of exchange, that was about $150, which, I imagine, he had to split with the three-star hotel or the three-star concierge or both. No matter, I was glad to get rid of a throbbing 10-star toothache that had plagued me from the moment my own dentist in Los Angeles replaced a filling in a problematic wisdom tooth the day I left for Paris.

Seeing Stars

I had toyed with a fabulous one-star duck dinner at Michel Pasquet on one night and saw stars the following night trying to bite into my two-star cote d’agneau et son paillasson de courgettes a l’ail served with onion marmalade and olives at Michel Rostang’s. I watched my husband down terrine de foie de canard frais and medaillon de lotte with the relish of a sultan. Beautiful sweet breads and salmon tarts passed under my nose at La Coupole and my eyes feasted. My fever rose.

It was over the filet de boeuf a la graine de moutarde served with haricots verts at the Vegenande (after which le grand epoc moldings at Los Angeles’ Le Chardonnay were fashioned), that I decided that I could not let another day pass, another d’agneau go by. To be in Paris and not be able to eat was madness. I would see a dentist--any dentist--immediately.

Slowly the anesthesia wore off. The throbbing, 100 times more wicked than the previous hourly attacks, razed every nerve ending in my gums. I threw myself onto my three-star bed and cried.

That was at 10 a.m. At noon, when drug stores in Paris open their doors, my husband bolted for the nearest pharmacy to fill the dentist’s prescription for antibiotics and a pain killer. The last thing I remember was the pulsating entry into sleep. Deep sleep. It was 10 p.m. when I finally woke up. The Parisian phase of the journey was over. And the only blessing was that the pain was gone and my stomach growled.