A hundred years of tea, in one room.

You climb a narrow stair. A man in a linen suit weighs leaves on a brass scale and never once asks if you need help, because he can tell you don't.

The room smells like a hundred years of tea, because it is. Every wall is a wall of tins. The labels are hand-lettered. The lighting is the lighting of a library where someone is, somewhere, reading. [^1]

I asked for green. He asked which kind. I said surprise me. He smiled in the way men in linen suits smile when you have given them permission, and brought me something he called Marco Polo Green.

It came in a cast-iron pot, on a wooden tray, with a small madeleine. The madeleine was not the point. The pot was not the point. The point was a man who had spent his life learning to do this one thing, and the room he had built around the doing of it.

I drank two cups slowly. He had moved on to weighing leaves for someone else. We did not speak again.

[^1]: Mariage Frères was founded in 1854. The shop has the calm of an institution that has long since stopped trying.