Ref: article from Gault Millau on the Drugstore Champs-Élysées, Le Nouvel Adam, October 1966
In America, they would call it “The Shop”. To make it American, we named it “Drugstore”. That is to say, a pharmacy. Over there, as Charles Trenet sang, in pharmacies the pills are a bit hidden. They sell toys, forks, cleaning products, sweets, and salad. In France, we did not wait for them and, long before our co-ops, Leclerc and Prisunic, our old provincial shops, under the name of haberdashery or hardware store, were village drugstores. Sometimes they still are, and we recently saw, for instance in Loctudy (South Finistère), a “Teinturerie Parisienne” that makes a specialty of dew-picked lettuces, praires clams, and kites.
But M. Bleustein-Blanchet’s “Drugstore” has nothing to do with all that. It is a very French invention: joining the futile to the pleasant.
The “Drugstore”, in fact, is not merely a shop where you can buy almost anything, eighteen hours a day, with a smile and at often reasonable prices. Even if you add that you could almost live there without ever going out (and that must happen), except from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m., closing hours—have breakfast there (pardon, your breakfast), do your shopping (shopping), have lunch (lunch), have your shoes shined by an elite shoeshiner, read every newspaper in the world, and all the good books, go to the cinema, perfume yourself, dress yourself, cure yourself, get drunk, send flowers and gadgets in all directions, ruin yourself, have fun, talk, look as if you are thinking in front of all Paris—that would still be insufficient. The “Drugstores”, and in particular the oldest, the most in vogue: the one on the Champs-Élysées, are also a little corner of the soul of Paris, like Lipp, Maxim’s, Castel and the Régie Renault (more precisely, its “Pub”)—a sophisticated, artificial, excessive, bastard little corner, but one that counts as much, in the evolution of our mores, as the aphorisms of Jean Nocher and the thinking of M. Hallyday.
As is our habit, we are going to make an almost complete analysis, with all the appearances of objectivity. The “Drugstore” on the Champs-Élysées now seeming to us a solid and inevitable institution, we might as well learn its ins and outs thoroughly, mightn’t we, so as to behave there with as much chic and nonchalance as our adorable minets.
Décor: 13/20
Honey-coloured wooden slats, dark leather, bright lighting that nowhere bounces off the glass panels of the display cases, and a whole elegant array of polished brass hardware: that is the basic kit. It is blond, welcoming, a modernism tempered by the accessories of the Conquest of the West. It is big, very big, but—by a miracle—you only notice it after you have visited all the stands, so ingenious and learned is the plan imagined by the decorator Slavik.
A play of perspective cuts the visual field, wherever you stand. In this former ground floor—relatively low-ceilinged—Slavik managed, by the sole articulation of volumes, to diversify his entire décor without resorting to the most “profitable” of interior architectural effects, the chain of level changes that make the charm of the Saint-Germain “Drugstore”. This plan, if we are to believe its author, was drawn up according to the customers’ likely “circulation patterns”, themselves determined by the placement of the doors.
On this point, one cannot say that the decorator’s forecasts proved true. For—to take only one example—the idea of establishing a one-way system around the “press” rotunda >> proved inept in practice. Today people circulate in every direction around the newspaper displays, without any incident interrupting the permanent round of those anxious to keep informed without spending a centime.
Welcome : 12/20
Two hundred and twenty-eight people are there to welcome you. Soon, M. Boudre will supervise them from his office on the first floor, thanks to the internal television screen that technicians are installing at this very moment. The qualities required of the female staff—by far the most visible—are, in order of importance: speaking English, being pretty, pleasant, and quick. The last two qualities being, at peak hours, contradictory. These young girls and young women assigned to the various services apply themselves to combining all the virtues of womanhood, according to the archetype shaped week after week by the catechism of the famous Madame Express.
Newsstand: 18/20
It is the most important newspaper sales point in Paris, therefore in France; it is the place where all press seizures are carried out as a priority. Three teams of polyglot saleswomen take turns there between 8 a.m. and 2 a.m., Sundays included. You can therefore find, at almost any hour, more than two thousand five hundred French and foreign magazines.
It is best to avoid this stand between 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and between midnight and closing (the arrival of the first morning papers causing a bottleneck). Famished-looking characters wait there for the first edition of “Le Figaro” and its “Petites Annonces d’emploi”. They mingle with foreigners—mostly Americans—who snap up the Paris editions of the “New York Herald Tribune” and the “New York Times”.
The clientele is, indeed, very cosmopolitan at any hour. It is also very mixed. Callas and the Hallydays, Joseph Kessel, Léon Zitrone, Bernard Blier, midinettes and young yéyés who cannot imagine being able to buy their favourite magazines anywhere but here, meet in front of this stand without fraternising for all that.
Bookshop: 18/20
It is no doubt because this bookshop, the most powerful in Paris, sells our Guides particularly well that we are going to write well of it on purpose. But it would be to deny the obvious not to admire the skilful, practical way the books are displayed; the way Mme Rabuteau, the director, knows how to draw her customers’ attention to the works they are supposed to be able to desire (fashionable novels, studies related to current affairs or sexuality, etc.); the great diversity of choice (all the recent books); the extraordinary richness of the “pocket” collections; and finally the great freedom left to customers to wander between the stacks and leaf through a book without any unpleasant intervention from the saleswomen.
Perfumery: 14/20
Beware of Mme Pierre Bloch; this strong-minded woman, without being particularly pleasant, has such talent that she is capable of making you buy every perfumery item she sells—from the vanity case to the wig, from the cap to the complete bathroom set—before you have even realised it.
All perfumery items are French. Only the sponges come from Italy. Provincial women buy a lot of costume jewellery (“maux, etc.”); foreign women, great traditional perfumes that French women no longer use; and everyone, the accessories and eaux de toilette that the magazines recommend.
Many men come here. Actors and singers (Jean-Claude Brialy, Johnny Hallyday, Claude Dauphin, Guy Bedos) but also many ministers (Maurice Bokanowski, Joxe and Grandval), and even more would-be ministers. It was here that long wigs for men were launched, well before they were sanctioned by the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures.
Records: 10/20
Classical, little. Almost none. Above all they sell “hits” that the minets come to listen to all afternoon without ever buying a single one. The big sales happen at night, after the cinemas let out. People come asking for the recording of the music from the film they have just seen, and foreigners, for “classics” of our music-hall (Aznavour, Montand, Piaf, etc.). The success of “musicassettes” (recorded tapes) was built from scratch here.
A theatre agency puts its very well-informed staff at the service of the area’s businessmen. Foreigners mostly book seats there for the big music-halls.
Here, the “minets rule”: don’t laugh. They set the fashion.
Gifts: 14/20
Mme Françoise Bleustein-Blanchet shares responsibility for this stand with Mme Rosetti. It is providence for husbands who realise at the last minute that it is Christmas or their wedding anniversary. Those who come back empty-handed from a trip abroad will also take advantage of it and will be able to pretend they thought to buy a gift over there. These ladies spend fifteen days a year in the United States and one week in Switzerland, Italy, England and Germany.
From Switzerland come the watches, obviously; from Germany, men’s leather goods; from England, silverware (and a few leather items); from Italy, lots of trinkets; from the United States, gadgets; from France, finally, everything else. It is not very much, but generally in good taste, or else very amusing and fashionable.
Marlene Dietrich buys here by telegram. The King of Morocco stocks up here on assorted gifts. Callas knows by their first names most of the fifty “rotating” or fixed saleswomen, divided into four teams. She buys everything she sees, takes it away, and returns the purchased objects little by little, asking that she be granted a corresponding credit for her next pass in front of the display cases, renewed each month.
Tobacco: 15/20
Regulars working or living in the neighbourhood, foreigners from Easter onwards: in all, about three thousand customers a day, served with astonishing speed. This shop is not profitable. It serves as a “test sales point” for new products (lighters, pipes, gadgets, ties and bright-coloured American socks). The tobacco stock, managed by I.B.M., is kept in a room equipped with a state-of-the-art humidifier (soon two). Léopold Senghor, Raf Vallone, Christophe buy a lot of cigars here; Barbara, lighters; and Jean-Christophe Averty, Claude Nougaro, Jacques Martin, Guy Bedos and Sophie Daumier simply their cigarettes.
Toys: 12/20
French and Italian plush toys are sold here by the thousand to fathers and mothers who come with their children, especially on Sunday mornings. Automata are no longer as appreciated as they once were. Electronic “gadgets” seem to have replaced them in the esteem of the general public. Are they toys? Walkie-talkies, for example (from 142 to 1,800 F a pair), mainly tempt grown-ups (a film producer shooting a film in Seine-et-Oise ordered some one evening for 5,000 F). As for the latest novelty, the television ultrasonic switch (400 F), its price, like its use, reserves it primarily for in-between-age amateurs of recreational physics, tempted to interrupt a programme by clapping their hands twice.
At any hour of the day one expects MM. Belmondo and Rossellini, who buy all their toys here.
Restaurant : 12 / 20
A restaurant whose top-selling drinks are Coca-Cola is not going to inspire us, as you can imagine, with dithyrambic comments. But we cannot ignore it either, since an average of a thousand people eat a meal there every day.
A recent trip to the United States leads us to a few reflections on the subject. The aim of the “Drugstore” restaurant could, at first glance, resemble that pursued by the big American “chains” like Howard Johnson: simple meals, all prepared, based on frozen products, neither good nor bad, inexpensive, pleasing to the eye and quickly served. It is likely that they wanted to do the same, on the Champs-Élysées as in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. But it seems that, in France, such an enterprise cannot succeed in the same way. The “Drugstore”’s gastronomic clientele is not, however, demanding. But French habits are such that one always believes one must subscribe to them, even in order to depart from them. Instead of presenting a real menu from a real drugstore, they offer here a cuisine that is neither fish nor fowl, where the Americanism of the dishes (hamburger, chicken salad bowl, club sandwich tunafish, banana split, etc.) loses its characteristics by becoming Frenchified or by undergoing other foreign influences.
That does not prevent us, moreover, from finding the oysters excellent, certain daily specials pleasant, and the gigantic desserts with Chantilly cream a delight to our childlike hearts. As for the prices, we must have been unlucky with them, since we are told that the average cost of meals does not exceed 9 F.
The clientele : 14/20
The “Drugstore” clientele would hardly differ from what one meets everywhere on the Champs-Élysées, if one did not distinguish a very distinct group of regulars who—though very much a minority—gave, from the creation of the “Drugstore” (in April 1958), a very particular character. This group, which forms an organised and closed clan, is commonly called the group of minets. It brings together young men—schoolboys for the most part—who do not seem overly interested in young women. These, few in number, follow them without complaint, sporting voluminous wigs and striving to resemble point by point the idea they have of an American female student.
The average age of the male minets—recognisable by the fact that they almost never wear eye make-up—can today be set at fifteen, but it drops every year. Their group, even renewed, has always included some sixty members. The birth of the minets was spontaneous, eight years ago, in a few cafés between the Trocadéro and La Muette. They therefore found their natural home at the “Drugstore”, shining with all the Anglo-Saxon sparkle of its novelty.
The “Drugstore des Champs” is the domain of these cute little consumers, generally quite polite with the staff, whom they amuse and above all fear. They come in compact groups, at a fixed hour, without making a scene, concerned above all not to enlarge their circle too much. The very inactive minority they form in this place therefore deprives them of any power to alter by so much as an iota its rather agitated atmosphere. But their problem is certainly not to “change life”; it is at the “Drugstore” that they have chosen to wait, without plan and without impatience, for life and time to change them.
I will let you discover this magnificent Drugstore des Champs-Élysées.
