Brasserie Lipp is the setting for a consequential lunch in Paris: Fabienne Issartel brings Eduard and Jean-Edern Hallier together, turning a meeting between two angry, polemical men into the beginning of Eduard’s French-language work with L’Idiot international.

The Introduction

Fabienne, described as a queen of Parisian nightlife and Eduard’s friend, tells him that she knows someone he should meet because he is angry with everyone and agrees with no one. She arranges the lunch at Brasserie Lipp with Hallier, who has recently relaunched L’Idiot international. The restaurant’s documented role is specific but decisive: it is where this new literary connection begins.

A Meeting of Contraries

At lunch, Hallier is restless, his hair tousled and his white scarf dangling in his plate. He tells Eduard that a Russian bullet took his eye in Berlin, where his father, General Hallier, was serving at the end of the war. The story is presented as fiction; Hallier had told different versions of the accident to different people, making the tale part of his performance of seduction. Eduard and Hallier nevertheless get along famously. Their enthusiasms do not coincide: Eduard politely agrees with Hallier’s contempt for François Mitterrand, while Hallier acknowledges Eduard’s contempt for Mikhail Gorbachev.

From Lunch to Literary Work

Hallier urges Eduard to write, and Eduard needs little prompting. When Eduard says he needs a translator, Hallier replies that he can understand Eduard’s speech and will understand his writing. The exchange becomes the immediate spur for Eduard to start writing in French and attend L’Idiot international’s editorial meetings. Those meetings take place not at Brasserie Lipp but in Hallier’s large apartment on Place des Vosges, where the weekly paper’s staff and a changing assortment of visitors gather amid arguments. The contrast fixes the restaurant’s narrative importance: it is the point of departure for a working association that soon moves into Hallier’s unruly editorial world.