In some countries, it’s the brake that keeps drivers out of trouble. In France, it’s the accelerator. The driver who manages to look mad and dangerous enough will win through every time. He will probably get killed smashing into the back of a truck while doing 200kph through black ice on a foggy day (his last words – ‘What was that idiot trucker doing out on the roads on a day like this?’), but before then he will be le roi de la route.
Ironically, these huge pile-ups are even worse in summer, when French individualism behind the wheel is combined with the holiday herd instinct. Almost every car owner in the country heads for the motorway on one of six Saturdays in summer – the first weekends in July and August, the weekends closest to the bank holidays in mid-July and mid-August, and the last weekends of both months. These six grands départs are for the suicidal only. The jams on the main roads are like hundred-mile-long queues, with all the trauma that this implies for the French psyche. The picnic basket is probably full of wine, ideal for relaxing the frustrated driver. The kids are fighting in the back seat. And the imbécile in front is trying to cause an accident. It’s just too tempting for French drivers. They feel almost honour-bound to get into a smash.
After all, what do you expect from a nation whose favourite spectator sport is the Tour de France, a three-week traffic jam?
Walk on the Wild Side
As a Parisian pedestrian, I often get the feeling that I am flying in a pheasant costume in front of a line of men with shotguns. And the bad news is that, like pheasants on a shooting estate, I can be mown down quite legally. Because Parisian pedestrian crossings are not like those in other countries. In Paris, you’re not actually supposed to cross, even when the little man is green.
Here’s how it works: imagine a crossroads with traffic lights. The lights go red on the east and west sides, and the little men go green for the pedestrians there. At exactly the same time, the lights go green for cars on the north and south sides. Consequently, the pedestrians are fair game for drivers turning right or left. There is nothing to force these drivers to stop for the pedestrians, except the flailing arms of those attempting to cross, pointing vainly at the tiny green man as cars screech round the corner towards them. When you add to this all the cars that run the red light, or who were (illegally) stuck halfway across the junction and drive through after the lights change, you realize why some junctions are only safe to cross on foot if you’re a pole vaulter.
And that’s with the supposed protection of the little green man. The black and white stripes painted on to road surfaces where there are no lights are regarded by most drivers as nothing more than horizontal graffiti. No Parisian driver ever stops at these. I was once sitting at a café terrace opposite one of these fake pedestrian crossings. A pregnant lady was waiting hopefully on the pavement, wondering whether she’d be able to get across the road before her baby arrived, when suddenly a car stopped spontaneously. A wave of surprise rippled across the terrace, and a woman at the table next to me murmured, ‘un provincial’. And sure enough, when the driver pulled away, the car had a 44 registration number – Brittany.
Outside Paris, drivers do stop for pedestrians without being forced to by traffic lights, a roadblock or a gun pointed at their windscreen. In summer, when the Parisians are on holiday, you can see them crossing the road, staring at the courteous local drivers with a mixture of surprise, gratitude and scorn: ‘Why is this provincial stopping for me? Doesn’t he have anywhere to go?’
This is the key to dangerous driving in France. Again, it’s all about lifestyle. I, French driver, am in my car to go somewhere incredibly important. I have to hurry to my workplace so that I can get to the coffee machine at the same time as my cute new colleague, arrive at my holiday home in time for dinner, or get to the supermarket before it closes. You, other driver, pedestrian, traffic light, are in the way of my lifestyle. Watch out, here I come.
A Walk on the Merde Side
It’s a similar story with dog poo. Why should I, dog owner, waste my precious time cleaning up after my dog or taking it to poo in a place where no one will be likely to tread in it? I don’t want it to poo in my living room or outside my front door, so I’ll walk it a few doors away, let it dump there and then go back home and get on with my life.
Some considerate Parisian dog owners do make an effort. They take their chiens to pretty pedestrian streets, where the dog won’t have its digestive system traumatized by the noise and vibrations of passing cars. The fact that the street cleaners don’t clean up as often in the pedestrian streets isn’t the dog owner’s problem. On the contrary, the dog will feel more at ease and will poo quicker if there is a bit of prior doggy décor lying about.
But many dog owners prefer to go out just after the street cleaners have been through. There are dogs who need a nice clean canvas for their artwork.
These days, some dog owners do clean up after their pets, but even in posh areas, the pavements can be filthy, despite the fact that the street cleaners come by every day. Walking along the narrow pavement can be like one of those video dance games where you have to step on the panels that light up, except that in this case you try to avoid the brown panels.
When I first came to live in Paris, I used to get my shoes mired up every day. I spent my whole life with my eyes on my feet, looking like a chronically shy shoe fetishist.
I also used to take out my anger on the dog owners. I worked in a chic part of the city near the Champs-Elysées, and found it satisfying, although completely ineffectual, to tell ladies in their fur coats who were letting their poodles poop in mid-pavement, ‘Il ne faut pas chier sur le trottoir, Madame’ – ‘You mustn’t shit on the pavement, Madame.’ It was fun to see them recoil in shock, but of course I hadn’t taken account of the French attitude to the niceties of politeness, so instead of changing their ways, my victims simply went into a huff about my rudeness. ‘Franchement,’ they would gasp as little Fido dropped his muck outside a food shop. ‘You Anglo-Saxons are so 31 uncivilized.’
Things got better when I learned the essential survival tactic. Or rather when I realized that my feet had evolved into Parisians. Rosie, an English friend, was over visiting from the UK for the weekend. At the end of Saturday morning she examined the soles of her trainers, compared them with mine and asked how on earth I’d kept mine so clean. I admitted I had no idea. That afternoon, as we walked, I studied my feet to see how they avoided the poop, and discovered that they’d joined forces with my eyes to beat the problem. My eyes would permanently scan the pavement about fifty yards ahead, looking for dog trouble on the horizon. If they spotted a miniature Montmartre up ahead, they alerted the feet so that when we got to the doggy mound, the feet nimbly skipped round it. Brown alert over. Rosie, meanwhile, her eyes wildly scanning the streets for signs of medieval architecture, men’s backsides and clothes shops, kept on skidding. I taught her the technique I’d evidently acquired, and her feet became miraculously clean-living, especially on Sunday when the clothes shops were closed and distractions were at a minimum.
C’est la Vie
The French are a philosophical nation. They go around saying ‘C’est la vie’ and talking about everything’s raison d’être. Or, more sceptically, its je ne sais quoi. So it’s not surprising that France has produced some very influential philosophers.
There is Descartes, who is famous for ‘I think therefore I am,’ but whose main belief was that there was no such thing as totally reliable knowledge, a concept adopted by builders the world over when you ask them when the job is going to be finished.
And then there is Rousseau, who was born in Switzerland but did much of his philosophizing in France, and who caused all the trouble with European farm subsidies by inventing the notion of the ‘noble savage’ – that honest, unspoilt peasant who wouldn’t even be able to conceive the existence of a fraudulent subsidy claim.
But French philosophy’s greatest contribution to world thought has to be Existentialism. This is basically an intellectua
l justification for hating your neighbour, or at the very least denying his or her importance. It preaches that there is no morality and no absolute truth, and that life is therefore absurd and meaningless. Nothing really matters, therefore it doesn’t really matter if I push in the queue in front of you.
So if you’re at the restaurant and you ask the man at the next table why he is blowing smoke in your onion soup, and he replies, ‘I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter because life is basically meaningless,’ you know that you’re sitting next to an Existentialist.
Amongst the most famous philosophers in the movement was Albert Camus, who wrote L’Etranger, an existential novel with a hero who cares so little about his fellow beings that he shoots one of them for no reason at all.
The biggest Existentialist star, though, was Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote Huis Clos (translated as In Camera or No Exit), in which two women and a man are sent to hell and end up locked in a room together for eternity. They understandably get on each other’s nerves, which leads Sartre to the conclusion that ‘hell is other people’. If that’s not a good reason to blow smoke in someone’s dinner, I don’t know what is.
I had a great Sartre moment on the Paris metro once. I was sitting reading a book, and I must have been jiggling about without noticing because I suddenly realized that the man next to me was furious. Our eyes met and he said, ironically, ‘Ça va?’ He jiggled his shoulders and elbows around to show me how I’d been annoying him, and I saw the title of the book he was trying to read – it was Huis Clos. My mouth opened to say ‘Hell is other people, huh?’, but the sound never came out. Here was one Frenchman who hated his neighbour enough already.
30 There are also so-called TD (travaux dirigés) and TP (travaux pratiques) – smaller, supervised classes. But if a student doesn’t turn up, no tutor is going to bother hassling a slacker and create extra work for him or herself.
31 To get an idea of the full effect of a well-placed franchement, see the Tenth Commandment on politeness.
French waiters and waitresses sometimes adopt extreme tactics
to avoid serving their customers.
THE
9TH
COMMANDMENT
Tu Ne Seras Pas Servi
THOU SHALT NOT BE SERVED
THOU SHALT NOT BE SERVED
IN FRANCE, ‘SERVICE INDUSTRY’ CAN OFTEN BE A CONTRADICTION in terms. Everyone who has been there for any length of time has stories about being ignored, sent away without getting what they want, or quite simply insulted.
And this doesn’t only happen to foreigners. The French can get just as bad service as anyone else in France. The only way to get great service all the time is to be an incredibly good-looking woman. Not that I’ve ever tried being an incredibly good-looking woman – I don’t have the knees for it. It’s just that I’ve often watched and waited as a babe gets fawned over while I’m standing in line or sitting at a table wondering if I’m ever going to be asked what I want.
So, given that very few of us will ever be incredibly good-looking women, we may need help getting decent service.
The first thing to do is to speak French.32 If you can’t do that, you’re as done for as a fat snail on a barbecue, unless you’re in an obviously international place like an airport, a Paris department store or the Dordogne.
If you can speak the basic French necessary to communicate what you want, or at least know how to say that you can’t speak the necessary French, then the only other thing you need to do is remember one simple rule of life in France.
It is this: ultimately, if you manage to gain the other person’s attention, and convince them that your cause is worthwhile, you can get fantastic service. You will find people who bend the rules, work the system on your behalf and make a huge effort to give you the service you’re after. It’s only if you annoy, insult or bore them that you’re in the merde.
Lots of French people in the service sector – all sectors, in fact – are virtually impossible to fire or reprimand, and a 15 per cent service charge is automatically added to all restaurant and café bills, so if push comes to shove, they don’t give a damn whether you get good service or not. The essential thing is not to lose your temper, however strong the temptation may be. As long as you view the whole French service experience as a game, it will become a learning process. If it ended in merde this time, next time you’ll do better.
The Waiter Can’t Wait
The French waiter is a much misunderstood creature. A bit like the hyena. The hyena isn’t really laughing at you – it just naturally makes a smug-sounding noise. French waiters are sometimes the same. They can also be incredibly charming, helpful and efficient. As can the hyena, when feeding hunks of dismembered antelope to its young.
The trick is not to present yourself as a potential antelope. If the waiter is in a rush or a bad mood, or both, you may get mauled. You must always remember that you are a lion, and give the impression that you know the savannah as well as the waiter, even if you don’t. This doesn’t mean that you have to be a wine buff (though knowing the difference between champagne and Chablis can help) – that’s where the waiter can be legitimately asked for advice, and will be glad to give it. What it means is that as you sit there in your café or restaurant seat, you should feel as at ease as anyone else in the place.
If for any reason you don’t feel at ease – if you’re being pointedly ignored by the waiting staff, which can happen – just do what a lion does if it decides that its resting place isn’t shady enough – cheerfully and calmly get up and leave. As long, of course, as this isn’t the only eating place you’ve seen open for the last twenty kilometres, in which case you just have to tell yourself ‘C’est la vie’ and get on with it.
And rest assured, if you do bite the bullet and pull off the whole ordering trick, then you will gain the respect of all but the most awkward of French waiters or waitresses, and get as good service as they are capable of giving.
How to Get Good Service in France
What I’ve learnt in twelve years of living in France is that getting good service here is anything but a divine right. It’s like a computer game. You’ve got to press the right buttons or it’ll be game over before you’ve had a chance to buy a single croissant.
And before play even starts, you’ve got to realize that your opponent, the French person offering service, is not your friend. I’ve been served in California by people who seemed to be offering me their body when all I’d ordered was a glass of seaweed and echinacea juice. You won’t get that in France, unless of course you happen to stumble into a massage parlour that also offers health drinks. But then again, you probably don’t want the French waiter as your friend, so what do you care whether he likes you or not? The important thing is that he should respect you as a worthy adversary, not want you as a pétanque partner.
If you bear this in mind, you won’t be put off as you try to progress through the three levels of the French service game.
Level One
IGNORE THE CUSTOMER
My worst experience of this was when I tried to get a cup of coffee at a certain trendy café near the Centre Pompidou. The décor was designed by Philippe Starck and the prices suggested that they were still trying to pay off the furnishings. The round metal tables were welded to the floor, which really ought to have warned me that the basic attitude to the customers here was that they were potential furniture thieves.
The place wasn’t very busy, and there were only three occupied tables up on the mezzanine. I sat in a steel armchair and waited to be served. Sure enough, after ten minutes or so, a waiter ambled up the stairs, a very tall male-model type in a black suit.
As you should always do with a French waiter, I looked him straight in the eye. As soon as he blinks in your direction, you have to blurt out your order before he can get away. In this case, though, he met my gaze, pouted moodily as if I was a Vogue photographer snapping him on the catwalk, and turned his back on me. He took the orders at the other tabl
es, ambled back towards me, and, avoiding eye contact this time, went downstairs.
What did I do wrong?, I wondered. Had I forgotten that I was wearing my invisibility cloak?
In fact, I think I made two fatal errors.
First, I hesitated for that millisecond when I had his attention. I let myself be beaten into submission by his withering look. I ought to have got out my ‘Bonjour, un café, s’il vous plaît’ in that minuscule window of opportunity between stare and pout.
Second, I now suspect that I was on the wrong side of an invisible border. I wasn’t at one of ‘his’ tables. If this was the case, the other waiter was obviously excused stairs that day (fell off a catwalk, maybe?), because no one else made any attempt to serve on the mezzanine. And my waiter certainly couldn’t be bothered to explain the situation to me.
Whatever. This kind of thing will happen to Parisians and visitors alike. It’s a trendy jungle out there sometimes. It’s not worth worrying about. The only solution is to laugh and leave. There are enough cafés in Paris where you can actually get served.
That was an extreme example, of course. You’re much more likely to come across shop assistants who carry on gossiping about their boss as you wait to be served. In that case, if you really need what they have on offer, you should interrupt the conversation with a cheery but insistent ‘bonjour!’, which is French for ‘Are you going to serve me or what?’
The key thing is not to get annoyed. And this is going to be especially important when you reach . . .
Level Two
JUST SAY NON
In France, when a girl says no she often means yes. So does a guy, for that matter. I’m not saying that they want to get raped. Though sometimes getting good service in France does feel a bit like non-consensual sex.
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