The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris by Jenny Colgan Page B

from the fridge, turning the mold upside down so thirty-two perfect chocolates popped out onto the workshop top. He pressed the diamonds of jellied fruit into the tops of the whirls, then, with a mere glance, sent one down to me.
    â€œTell me what you think,” he said.
    I bit into it. The soft sweet edge of citrus—it must have been cut from the lime plant—mellowed the perfectly balanced chocolate; the entire thing tasted so light it could have been good for you. The chocolate flavor didn’t fade away in the mouth; its richness intensified, grew stronger. The tiny tart jelly on the top perfectly stopped the sweetness from overpowering the rest of the bonbon. It was perfect, exquisite. I smiled in pure happiness.
    â€œThat is what I like to see, heh?” Thierry indicated to the rest of the room. “That is the face I like. Always the face I like. Today we will make lavender four hundred piece, rosemary and confiture , mint…”
    He turned to Alice. “You want to try?”
    She gave him a stony look.
    â€œI joke,” he said to me. “She does not eat. Like a robot.”
    â€œI do eat,” said Alice frostily. “I just eat food, not poison.”
    The wonderful aftertaste of the chocolate suddenly turned ashy in my mouth and I wanted to cough. Thierry looked at me mischievously and winked broadly, and I smiled back, but I wasn’t sure I liked that either, being lumped in with the massive fatties.
    â€œIt passes?” said Thierry.
    â€œIt is sublime,” I said honestly. Frédéric smiled at me, which gave me the impression that I wasn’t doing so badly so far. Thierry snapped his fingers and Benoît gave him an espresso into which he poured copious amounts of sugar, then necked it. There was a silence in the room for one hanging half-second, then he announced, “Finish!”
    He and Alice swept out of the workroom, and the men immediately started to move. Frédéric gave me my mop and instructed me to basically wash and polish anything that wasn’t tied down. Once they’d gotten going, they moved with awesome speed, turning out Thierry’s creation exactly over and over again with huge molds; the lime, then the rosemary and jam, which sounded very peculiar to me until they let me taste it. As soon as I had tried it, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever eat anything else.
    At 11:00 a.m., Frédéric took off his dirty apron, swapped it for a smarter, more formal clean one with the name of the shop and his own name embroidered on the pocket, and went to open up. The shutters made a loud rattling noise, echoing throughout the street as the other shops, cafés, and emporiums started opening up for business. Even though I’d seen the sun was up through the hazy workroom windows, seeing it beam in through the front of the shop made me blink.
    It was a ravishing day. Even though my back was already sore from stooping to clean so many nooks and crannies in the workshop, and Benoît had indicated he wanted me to start on the copper vats, which had a complicated-looking box of harsh-smelling cleaning products attached to it. Claire hadn’t been wrong about the hard work.
    But Frédéric beckoned me out for a cigarette break at the front. I didn’t smoke, but I kept him company as he waved and bantered with the other shop holders setting out their stalls; the little bookshop was putting racks of paperbacks outside, some of them, I noticed, looking a bit dog-eared; there was a little print shop with maps of vintage Paris in careful plastic pockets, framed in card, and some larger touristy work—Monets, Klimts—on the walls for sale. One shop seemed to sell nothing but hundreds of different types of tea, all in little metal boxes, brightly colored, lining the walls in a hundred flavors: mint, cardamom, grapefruit, caramel. That shop smelled dry and refined, of leaves, not the earthy deep flavors of