This speedway method of driving is not limited to the occasional lead-footed teenage boy. This is a way of life for the French, regardless of age or gender. Mon Dieu, I have seen Frenchwomen tailgate police cars! I’m not talking about unmarked cars. These are full-fledged squad cars with POLICE MUNICIPALE in bold print across the trunk.
I once took a ride with an eighty-two-year-old Frenchman at the wheel on a serpentine stretch of road between Saint André-les-Alpes and Digne. I wasn’t nervous, I was terrified! He was jamming gears and taking corners on two wheels, accelerating as he zoomed out of the curves.
Then this French senior citizen, this normally docile and gentle human being, decided to pass a slower, more sensible driver (he had to be British) on a blind corner. When another car emerged from around the mountainside, my elderly friend simply straddled the solid-white centerline while I noisily sucked wind. He seemed completely unruffled—as nonchalant as sitting on the edge of the bed and pulling up his socks.
The driver’s wife looked over her shoulder at me. “Do you have fear?” she asked. (The French idiom is “to have fear,” not “to be afraid or fearful.”)
“Just a little,” I gasped. I looked at my wife, who was sitting in the back seat beside me. “If I’m squashed like a bug, give my baseball cards to my brother,” I whispered.
One of the first tasks of any American driver is to get the hang of the ever-present ronds-points (traffic circles). My friend, Jean-Marie, told me that these road managers were installed to help slow down traffic. The French took it as a direct challenge and turned the ronds-points into diabolical merry-go-rounds. In the States young adventurers satisfy their craving for adrenaline by bungee jumping and hang gliding. In France thrill seekers hit the traffic circles during rush hour. For me the secret to negotiating the ronds-points was to quickly find my slot and go for it with undaunted courage (to hesitate was death). Personally, I found that shouting “yahoo” in the process was helpful.
Despite my fortitude, I was still occasionally undone by a Frenchman behind the wheel of a four-cylinder compact. On one sunny afternoon, I was making my way on a side road to a nearby town. As I was approaching a traffic circle, I looked in my rearview mirror. A white Fiat with red racing stripes was speeding toward me at full throttle. I eased into the circle counterclockwise, in strict observance of international law, you understand. That’s when the Fiat driver made his move, careening around the rond-point—clockwise—beating me to the exit at twelve o’clock high. For a moment, we looked like the Blue Angels cutting a Rorschach inkblot design in the sky.
I’m convinced that if you can manage the French surprises waiting for you at what should be a slumberous back road traffic circle, you can manage just about anything.
Except possibly the occasional low-flying moto. The motorcyclists in France are a different breed. They are on earth for one purpose: to trigger nervous ticks in American drivers. These are the twenty-year-olds in blackout full-face helmets for their heads and thongs for their feet (you figure it out). They ride Hondas, Kawasakis, Suzukis—all designed to peel the freckles off your face by sheer G-force.
Consider the sound of a Harley hog—the low rumble that you feel in the seat of your pants. Do you have that sound in your head? These super sport bikes do not sound anything like that. The monster motos do not rumble. They do not roar. They scream. The sound is unforgettable—like elephants in heat.
Even when driving ten miles per hour over the speed limit, I was repeatedly shaken when one of these crotch rockets blasted out of nowhere. Often riding the divider line through traffic at blistering speeds, I’m convinced that these young daredevils are responsible for reshuffling my DNA.
Are the motos dangerous? I’ll just say this. In 2012, French motorcyclists accounted for less than two percent of all vehicles but eighteen percent of all fatalities.
I may not have the most objective evaluation of French motorcyclists, which I blame on “The Nimes Affair.”
Nita and I were sharing a bit of the South of France with two American friends, Dave and Mary. A couple of decades earlier, Mary played Maria, and Dave and I played Jets in a community production of West Side Story, so it was great fun to see them again.
We were excited about taking in the sights at Nimes. We parked our car a few blocks away from the magnificent Roman arena, which is still the site of two annual bullfights. As always, the traffic was bumper-to-bumper, and the parking was at a premium. We were lucky to find a piece of curb the length of our Fiat on a narrow side street.
The four of us got out of our car, which halted the traffic for a split second. At that moment two impatient young motorcyclists, each with female companions hanging on for dear life, jumped the curb of the sidewalk and roared past us, leaning left and right as they skinned by Mary and Nita.
I was outraged. As they bounced back onto the street, I shook my fist at them and shouted, “Vous … vous … vous …” That was it. In the heat of the moment, that was all my brain could muster. “You … you … you …” I felt so inadequate. I wanted to blister their incivility with something elegantly pithy like, say, “How would you like me to reinstall your tailpipe, Buster?” But no—I had nothing.
To sour me even more, one of the bad boys looked over his shoulder at me and hollered, “Nice comeback, idiot!”
As they sped away, only their cackling muted the scream of their mighty two-stroke motors. There is no sound in the world more scornful, more contemptuous, more snarky than the sound of teenagers laughing their butts off.
I was still smoldering when Dave put his arm around me and said, “Easy, Allen, you’re not a Jet anymore.”
“That’s not right,” I said under my breath. “You know what I mean? That’s just not right.”
“Fuhgeddaboudit,” Dave said in Brooklynese. “It ain’t over yet, Action. We gonna rumble wid dem scumbags, an’ dis time we gonna be packin’ blades.”
Dave always knew just the right thing to say to make me feel better.
The French have a relaxed regard for traffic regulations. At a dinner party one evening, I asked two French couples what registered in the brains of French drivers when they saw the speed limit of seventy kilometers per hour (forty-three miles per hour). Both men responded simultaneously. “One hundred and ten kilometers per hour (sixty-eight miles per hour),” they sang out.
“One hundred and ten kilometers!” I howled.
“Of course,” one of the men said. “We add forty to the posted speed limit. If you are ticketed driving faster than that, the fine is much more severe.”
My friends may have been exaggerating a bit to implant fear in the mind of their American cousin (they succeeded) but not by much. The French simply do not respect the speed limit or any other traffic regulation. I have seen them crash red lights, turn right on a red light (not legal in France), and consistently blow off yield signs.
That is why I define driving in France, not as getting from one destination to another, but as staying alive on the road.
Driving courtesy also comes in small doses in the land of the Gauls. One day I was taking care of some business in Montpellier. It was raining hard, so hard in fact that le Lez River overran its banks, shutting down two key bridges in and out of the city. The streets quickly jammed up. I found myself in the left lane of a four-lane thoroughfare, needing to turn right to work my way home via the back door. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper.
I looked at the man in the silver BMW to my right. He had a mobile phone in his right hand and a cigarette in his left (as far as I could tell, he had to be driving with his knees). His hair was midnight black and perfectly cut and shaped like cake icing—a fifty-dollar haircut if ever I saw one. His skin had a high-sheen, porcelain finish, which made him look more like a Renaissance sculpture than a human being. His window was rolled down, his left elbow resting on the sill.
I tried to catch his attention so that I could get passage to the right lane in front of him.
“Yo,” I said.
(How do you say “yo” in French anyway? I don’t think the word translates into French, but I have heard the French say “Ohé.” I know that because that’s the expression they use to awaken me out of a daydream—something that happens more often than I would like to admit.)
In any case, my “yo” had no impact on the sculpted exfoliated Frenchman. I was getting closer to the intersection where I needed to make a right turn, so I started waving, first demurely and then with increasing frenzy as we approached the corner. Next, I was bouncing up and down in my seat, my arms flailing like a wounded chicken hawk. Still no response.
They tell me in France you only use your horn for true emergencies. The French would probably disagree, but by my account this situation more than qualified. I tapped a friendly toot on my horn. No response. I tapped two friendly toots. Toot-toot. Nothing. “Screw this,” I said out loud and laid on my horn—one long, unbroken blast. Finally, the well-groomed man with the pudding hair and toilet-bowl complexion did a slow burn over his left shoulder.
“May I?” I asked, gesturing that I wanted to cross in front of him.
“Et pourquoi? Moi aussi, je veux y aller.” And why should I? I, too, want to go there. To underscore his censure, he edged up a little closer to the car in front of him.
“Why should you?” I muttered to myself. “How about out of ordinary human kindness? Have you heard of the concept?”
As it turned out, the car ahead of me edged forward, and I was able to slip into the right-hand lane two cars beyond the BMW. Is gloating permitted?
The BMW affair was not the only evidence of the dearth of driving civility. One Sunday morning Nita and I decided to drive into Lattes to take advantage of their wonderful open-air market. We were in the right-hand lane coming off an overpass. Just behind us a subcompact truck came lickety-split from a merging road, two lanes to our left. He was either distracted or drunk (I’m guessing the latter) because he crossed a continuous white line (illegal even in France) and then crossed into our lane, running us off the road before crashing into us. None of us were hurt, but he pretty much turned my left door and front fender into papier-mâché.
The truck came to a stop thirty to forty yards ahead of us. I got out of the car to assess the damage and start the paperwork. A short man with a three-day beard charged out of the truck screaming something about my mental capacity.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you trying to tell me that this was my fault?”
The short man actually laughed in my face. “Eh oui—it’s your fault,” he said, raising his hand to his temple and turning his wrist as if he were unscrewing the bolt from an oil pan—the French gesture for “are you crazy or what?”
I leaned toward Nita, who was sitting calmly in the car. “Are you getting this?” I asked in English. “This guy is precious.”
“What?” the man asked. He was now hopping like a Kenyan Maasai warrior, his shabby black loafers clearing the asphalt by the height of a French cricket.
I thought it best not to aggravate the man any further. “Forget it,” I said to the bouncing Gaul. “Look, you can say whatever you want. I’m taking pictures.” (I usually carried my digital camera with me because I invariably saw something enchanting or, in this case, flat-out weird.) I started snapping pictures of my skid marks, the damage to my car, the damage to the truck—all with the choleric little man hopping up and down in the background of each frame.
When I shared this story via email with a French friend, who is now living in the United States, she offered this advice:
“Allen, what you experienced is typical. It is the Latin way. You must learn that in such cases, it is you who must jump out of the car and start insulting the other driver. It is the only way to be right! It is what we all do in such cases if the accident is not too severe.”
I am not trying to suggest through these fleeting anecdotes that the French are crazy—just a little self-absorbed, particularly when under stress and in conflict with a faceless stranger. Their attitude is not really hostile, that’s more American, but rather inconsiderate and self-serving. They are like the kid on the screaming motor scooter, sans muffler to gain that extra .01 boost in horsepower, who jolted me out of my dreams every morning at 5:35. If I were to ever catch that little scamp and question his civic sensibilities, I’m sure—as faceless as I would be and, what’s more, an American—he would tell me in common street French, “Ça, je m’en fous pas mal—I couldn’t give a damn,” and I would believe him.
* * *
I’VE SAID IT EARLIER AND I’LL SAY IT AGAIN. I’m sorry, but the French don’t have a clue about customer service. It’s just not their style. I don’t really blame them. After all, how can you expect them to emulate what has never been modeled?
The aftermath of our car accident proves my point. This is the story of how we dealt with the insurance company after the accident.
Day one: I called the insurance company. No one answered, of course; it was Sunday. But, in addition, there was no message machine and no number to call in case of an emergency. That night I transferred a copy of the accident photos to a CD.
Day two: I called the insurance company. Our agent, Jean-Paul, answered the phone.
“Jean-Paul, I’ve had an accident.”
“Okay, come into the office.”
“Can’t I just give you the information over the phone?”
“You had better come into the office.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do.”
I hung up the telephone and headed for the door and then, on a hunch, I decided to pack up my laptop computer. Ten minutes later, I walked into the insurance office. The secretary, Jacqueline, intercepted me before walking into Jean-Paul’s office.
“Jean-Paul told me you were coming in,” she said. “Let me help you over here.”
I pulled up a chair at Jacqueline’s desk.
“Can you run this CD?” I asked, presenting the silver platter. “It has the photos of the accident.”
“No, our computer system is not that sophisticated. Do you have the accident report?”
I ignored her question. “You don’t have a CD player?”
“No. Do you have the accident report?”
“No CD player at all?”
“No. The accident report, s’il vous plaît.”
“Fine,” I said, setting up my laptop. “Here are the pictures of the accident. See this?” I asked, pointing at the photo on the screen. “These are my skid marks. You can see where he ran me off the road.”
“Did you have a witness?”
“Yes, my wife was with me.”
“I see. No witness then.”
“All right, no one other than my wife, but as you can clearly see in the photo …”
“Photos are not admissible as evidence.”
“Huh?”
“Could I see the accident report now?”
I reluctantly fished out the accident report.
“The other driver didn’t sign the report,” Jacqueline said.
“No, he said he would not sign because he was not in agreement with my description of the incident.”
“Then it’s his word against yours.”
“But the photos …”
“Not admissible.”
I was starting to pant. I looked over my shoulder into Jean-Paul’s office. He was hunched over a stack of papers. “Could I speak to Jean-Paul, please?”
“He will tell you the same thing. Listen, Mr. Johnson, we will see what we can do, and we’ll call you back.”
I funereally walked out of the insurance office, my laptop in one hand, my besmirched CD in the other.
Two hours later, Jacqueline telephoned.
“Could you make color prints of your photos?” she asked.
“I don’t have a color printer. I don’t have any printer, for that matter.”
An audible sigh. “No color printer?”
“No, do you have access to a color printer?”
“No. Hang
on a minute.” Jacqueline put her hand over the receiver and shouted something to Jean-Paul. A moment later, she was on the line again. “Could you come back into the office again? Please bring the CD. I will also prepare a statement for you to sign.”
“When would you like me to come?”
“After lunch, two thirty.”
“Okay, two thirty.”
When I walked into the office that afternoon, Jacqueline was working with another client.
“Ah, Mr. Johnson. Did you bring the CD?”
“Yes. Did you find a way of making prints?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” Jacqueline said. “Not yet.”
“I can make prints,” the man at Jacqueline’s desk said. “I have a Macintosh.” Then, switching to English, he said, “It is zee best.”
“But my disc is in Microsoft Windows format.”
“It does not matter,” the proud Macintosh owner said, “I can do anyting.”
The Macintosh guy smiled. Jacqueline smiled. I smiled. We were all smiling.
“Great,” I said. “That’s awfully kind.”
When the Macintosh guy had finished his business, I thanked him again and walked over to Jacqueline’s station.
“I haven’t finished the report yet,” Jacqueline said. “Could you come back in a couple of hours?”
“Uh, no,” I said, feeling myself getting huffy. “Let’s do this. I’ll sign at the bottom of a blank piece of paper. You write out the report, and then email it to me. You can email right?” Jacqueline nodded that she could. “Good. I’ll read your report. If it sounds good to me, you can transfer the text to the sheet of paper I signed. Okay?”
Pardon My French Page 9