Every Frenchman Has One

by Olivia de Havilland

  One thing not a single American traveler mentioned to me before I set out for France the first time, was the French liver. No book, no travel folder, had ever referred to this most significant of all human organs as far as the French constitution is concerned. Constitution with a small c, of course, although it is probably referred to in the one which begins with a big C, too. It’s of that sort of importance.

  Living in California, I knew, of course, that some Americans did have a liver. But they were usually hard drinkers and developed cirrhosis of the liver. I had the distinct impression that you developed first the liver, then the cirrhosis. Otherwise, you just had a stomach, which sometimes gave you stomach trouble, or stomach upset, or ulcer of the stomach. You might also have a bilious attack, which originated in and affected the stomach, of course. Now I know better. When Pierre finally got me definitely established on French soil, he set about filling in the appalling gaps in my education. He instructed me regarding the liver.

  Every Frenchman has one. Every serious Frenchman takes good care of his own and gives advice regarding his neighbor’s. A really patriotic Frenchman takes a cure every year, and if possible goes to a foreign spa to do so, showing himself to his European cousins as a responsible Frenchman.

  My husband told me that a stomach upset was really mal au foie. He told me that if one had a runny nose and a slight cough, it was a sign of un foie congestionné. He also told me that if you threw up after eating too much cream, the chances were that you were suffering from an intoxication du foie. Eggs were bad for the foie. Milk was dreadful for the foie. Chocolate was pure poison. One evening at a dinner party, a Frenchwoman told me she had un rhume de foie. My husband hadn’t spoken to me about that. I asked her not to mention it to him and please not to go near him either. When I thought of his poor foie, and all it had gone through—the congestion, intoxication, and the mal it had suffered—I just couldn’t bear the idea of its catching cold, too.

  Well, after we were married, my husband, who falls into the responsible class of Frenchmen, took me off to a foreign country for a cure. We went to Montecatini, northern Italy, near Florence. We established ourselves in a magnificent hotel called La Pace, unpacked our bags, and awaited the doctor. He came, asked us various questions about our health, probed our livers, put his perfumed head on our bosoms to listen, so I thought, to the heart and lungs, but now I realize he must have been listening to the liver too. Anyway, he commented that he had found my husband’s liver to be just a little large, just a little hard. Pierre went white, but he pulled himself together and with a steady hand took from the doctor a sheaf of instructions made out specifically for his case. I took mine.

  The next morning we rose early, dressed hastily, and walked up the avenue to a huge pink marble pavilion. Here we each bought a glass cup with quantities marked in grams on the side, and to the music of a sixteen-piece orchestra playing away among the Corinthian columns, we read our instructions and went to the appropriate marble counter for the appropriate water.

  Montecatini, you see, is situated on volcanic springs of warm mineral water. Several types of mineral water—of varying properties and effects and strength. The water is piped directly to the vending temples (what else can you call them?), where they spurt out of a series of soda fountain dispensers operated by young girls dressed in blue-and-white striped dresses. According to your personal prescription you take one or two glasses of Tettuccio, Torretta, Rinfresco, or Tamerici, hot, cold, or indifferent, and you drink it in two minutes or five. The whole thing about which, how much, how long, and how hot is an exact science, so they say.

  Well, my husband and I drank our Tettuccio, hot or cold as the case was, waited fifteen minutes as prescribed before we filled our glasses again with Rinfresco or Tamerici, drank that as we were supposed to, waited another fifteen minutes before the final glass of Torretta. Then we dashed. Back to the hotel. In the nick of time. Ten minutes later we were in the vine-hung courtyard of the hotel having Swiss rolls, honey and coffee, and our cure was completed for the day. The drinking and dashing part, that is.

  At about ten we went to the baths. I don’t quite understand why you take a radioactive bath when all the world is terrified of going out into the rain these days because there’s too much strontium 90 in it for safety. But anyway you take a radioactive bath. It’s green. They start you slowly with two bottles of radioactive water mixed into the tap water and you work up during the series to six. After each bath you rest for forty-five minutes, swathed in a warm sheet and lying on a couch. A radioactive bath is supposed to be very tiring. As I say, I don’t quite know why you take it. Now, the next day you repeat the water-drinking program, but you take a different bath—carbonated this time. That is to say, a bath in what appears to be 7 Up. This is not so tiring, so you rest only five minutes afterward.

  Back at your hotel after the 7 Up bath, you have a massage. It’s the best of your life.

  Then you have a cup of tea and descend to the great dining hall with its immaculate waiters, perfect service, splendid cuisine. Now I don’t quite understand this part of the cure either, but the chef sends you a message that if you’d like him to make something special for you, he’ll be glad to do so. Your husband orders pissaladiera, a special onion pie that he hasn’t had since he was a boy in Nice. Your neighbor just takes the bill of fare: pâté de foie gras (well, it’s liver cure, isn’t it?), gnocchi romaine, fish, veal scallopini, salad, cheese, strawberry tart, and fruit. Wine, of course.

  In the afternoon you sleep, or you go to a volcanic grotto in the side of a mountain and seat yourself, sheet-wrapped, on a bench in a cave with a lot of other phantoms of mixed sexes, and you sweat. No, I don’t mean perspire. The heat is natural volcanic heat and so you sweat, torrentially. It’s a very solemn matter, mixed volcanic sweating, and no distractions are allowed. You keep your knees covered or you’re spoken to by a monitress, and you don’t change places or the other phantoms glare at you and accuse you of creating a draft.

  Then, in the evening, you feast on a dinner much like your lunch, drink an espresso in the courtyard, and fall into bed to recover for the early morning routine.

  When the cure is over—it takes about thirteen days—you feel splendid, you look rested, and the doctor tells you your liver is now smaller and more supple. And you go back to life in the capital until the year passes and you are once more in need of the cure.

  Well, of course, I went along with this whole performance the first year just to be a sport, but now I, too, am responsible. I’ve grown a liver, I take good care of it, I can’t wait to go to Montecatini each year. I drink my waters, bathe in strontium 90 and 7 Up, and wind up, each time, with a liver “Plus petit, moins dur.” But every now and then I get homesick for a stomach. And good old American milk of magnesia.

  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Paris traffic just isn’t traffic at all. It’s a chariot race and every driver thinks he’s Ben Hur.

  I have a California driver’s license which I obtained in Los Angeles, and I don’t care how high the death rate on the Los Angeles Speedway may be, I’ll take it before the Place de la Concorde any day of the year. I can’t very well take it after the Place de la Concorde because I’m not taking the Place at all. Nor the Étoile.

  Not only because of the mortal danger, but because it is absolutely impossible for a foreigner to hold his end or anything else up in a traffic altercation there, or, for that matter, anywhere else in France. The French not only have it over you in fluency of tongue, but also in range and resourcefulness of insult and invective. Furthermore, because it is against the law to hit you, they’ve devised a series of menacing and hysterical gestures that will paralyze you much more effectively than a direct blow. Driving in France, and the conduct of the consequences thereof, is a deadly art.

  To begin with, there’s the matter of style. It takes a long time to catch on to that, and the best place to do it from is the side lines. The style of a Frenchman’s behavior in a near-
accident is entirely different from his style in a true accident. Of the two types of accident it is the first, the near-accident, which the foreigner should try to avoid. He stands a much better chance in a head-on collision.

  Let’s take an example: Two Frenchmen, each driving a Quatre Chevaux (that means Four Horses—what did I tell you: a chariot race), approach each other at a terrible speed from opposite directions in the Place de la Concorde. Just before the moment of truth, each jams on his brakes and the cars shriek to a stop, one centimeter apart. This is a serious situation. The drivers simultaneously emerge from their vehicles, slam their doors, and charge at each other until they are one centimeter apart. And what follows then! It isn’t just the foaming mouths, the flailing arms, the bulging eyes and distended blood vessels, it’s the things they say about your grandmother! And as for yourself, well—the things you are would stock a farmyard and overnourish the fields.

  It is some curious sort of built-in electronic device in every Frenchman which determines the time limit of this kind of fray. Suddenly the opponents turn, march back to their cars, enter, slam the doors again, and then drive off screaming and shaking their fists until out of view. That, as I say, is the style of the near-accident.

  Quite the contrary is the style of the full-scale holocaust. Take the same two Frenchmen in the same Quatre Chevaux. They approach each other at a terrible speed from opposite directions in the Place de la Concorde. This time they do not jam on the brakes and their cars do not shriek to a stop, but climb all over each other with a hideous crashing and crunching of metal and clinking of glass. As the last shard tinkles to the pavement, a silence falls. Then slowly there creep from the awful shambles the two drivers. They pull themselves upright, flick off the blood, and walk toward each other at a dignified and solemn pace. Twelve centimeters apart they stop and, swaying as little as possible, they discuss the accident in grave and courteous tones. Until the ambulance arrives. And the towing cars.

  After that, I suppose, they send each other flowers. As I say, this is the only type of accident I can recommend to the visiting foreigner, if he will drive in France.

  Now, of course, there’s another aspect of the Frenchman in an automobile: the Frenchman in the role of questing Romeo. As long as a woman is in the car with a Frenchman she is completely safe, as the charioteer in him remains completely dominant and he is much more interested in overtaking the car in front of him than in overwhelming his companion.

  But if you’re outside the car, and he’s in it, and he’s moving and so are you, and you are both in the Bois (the Central Park of Paris), the huntsman in him will rise and suppress the charioteer, and all I can say is, I hope you’re good at climbing trees!

  When I left for France for the first time I was counseled, among other things, never to go shopping unchaperoned, that The Worst would happen to me if I did. Well, I took the advice very seriously, and so when necessity required that I venture out alone on the Champs Élysées soon after my arrival, I did so in fear and trembling. Down the avenue I walked and into the Rue de Rivoli. Not an incident. Down the Rue Royale and into the Place de la Madeleine. Not a pass. Terror gave way to astonishment, astonishment to a sensation of letdown, letdown to indignation; finally I felt I had received a national insult.

  Well, you can walk down any street in Paris in relative safety, but don’t go near the Bois. If you do, within ten minutes ten cars will come slithering up to the curb and park just ahead of you. And when you sail past, ignoring them, they’ll follow you around the block; and if you cut through the woods they’ll block you at the other end. No, don’t go promenading in the Bois unless you’re with a large dog or you’re on a tall horse. A camel would be even better!

  Of course the thing that staggers you when you first come to France is the fact that all the French speak French—even the children. Many Americans and Britishers who visit the country never quite adjust to this, and the idea persists that the natives speak the language just to show off or be difficult. More than once Americans have arrived at my Paris house flushed and tardy, exclaiming that they were late because they had had the misfortune to get “one of those taxi drivers who would speak French!”

  I must say that by the time I reached the Cannes Film Festival on my first trip to France, I was pretty well shaken myself. However, I rallied and decided to apply myself to learning the language. When I left the country two weeks later I was able to pronounce Keerque Dooglahce and Clarque Gobbluh with the best of them.

  Then on my return in October I got down to business and started taking lessons three times a week with a professor, a textbook, and a notebook for my homework. I was encouraged by my professor to be brave and attempt not only words but phrases with taxicab drivers, news-vendors, anyone and everyone, and to cease depending on desperate gestures and strangled cries to make myself understood.

  No point in practicing on Pierre—he was practicing on me, improving his English. So I started with the taxicab drivers. Fortunately for me they were always the kind who would speak French.

  Of course, in the French cab, as in the Manhattan or Brooklyn cab, the driver always opens the conversation. And for the fare, in either case, the first principle is to understand what the driver has said. It really is more difficult in Paris. But one day after I’d started my lessons, a taxicab driver’s opening gambit swam murkily into my consciousness and instead of just swimming out of it right away, it hesitated, stayed, and then miraculously separated itself into intelligible words, which, I gathered, had to do with Paris being pretty in the winter. I was thrilled and inspired, and instead of playing safe with my usual international “hmmm,” suitable for all occasions, I assembled my first complete French sentence in less than 280 seconds and stated that I agreed, except for one thing: “Three days after it falls,” said I, “the snow in Paris becomes very salty.” That was one time a taxicab driver decided not to argue the point. And I still don’t see why salé should mean salty when sale means dirty.

  Not long after that, intoxicated by a really brilliant showing at my lesson, I gave some quite detailed instructions to another taxicab driver as to where I wanted him to stop. This time I made a splendid bouillabaisse of la crêpe (pancake), le crêpe (widows’ weeds), arrêt (stop), arête (fishbone), and rather authoritatively asked him to put me down at the fishbone of the autobus where the lady was standing wearing the pancake. He did, too.

  Then there was the day I shook my professor. I’d been on a household shopping excursion and had been rather dismayed by the high cost of things. Well, I don’t know if you see much difference between matelot and matelas, and I don’t know how you’d complain about the price of a mattress. But anyway I rushed in to my professor at lesson time in a state of outrage and indignantly proclaimed that I had discovered that French sailors were very expensive!

  I do better these days, but every now and then something will happen which makes it clear there’s still room for improvement. A few months ago, for instance, I took my son, Benjamin, to see Robin Hood on the Champs Élysées. I made it years ago, when I was only sixteen to be inexact, and I was enchanted to find it running again in Paris after such a passage of time. Of course the film was dubbed with French voices and Maid Marian and Robin Hood and everyone else in Sherwood Forest were chattering marvelously away in the Gallic tongue. When the picture was over my son turned to me and said in his flawless French, “It was for-mi-da-ble, for-mi-da-ble! But, Mamma, you spoke better French then than you do now!”

  And there was the evening not so long ago when I dined with a French publisher and his wife. After dinner, my hostess remarked on my accent, which, she observed, was “très personnel.” She said it wasn’t typically American and it wasn’t typically English. It was, she summed up, “légèrement Yugoslav”!

  For dogs and children, of course, French is no problem at all. My Airedale, who came to France when he was fourteen, learned it in no time. We loved him very much and so he was a happy dog, although he had lost a leg in his early y
outh. As a matter of fact, his infirmity gave him a sort of distinction. I am sure he was the only bilingual, three-legged Airedale in existence.

  And as for my son Ben, who was four when he settled down to live in France, he learned the language in six months and in two years won first prize in French in a French school. It just goes to show that we Americans can speak French if we just start early enough.

  How is Ben’s English? Lovely, simply lovely. He speaks it just like Charles Boyer!

  One of the most striking anatomical differences between the French man and the French woman, and, indeed, between Americans generally and the French, is the bladder. The male French bladder is unique and has no relationship whatsoever to the female French bladder, which is even more remarkable and which is even, one might say, admirable.

  Coming from the land of the comfort station, I was not really surprised to see, every few yards on every avenue in Paris, a curious circular metal screen, the use of which I accurately guessed without having to ask. But noting, for one cannot help noting it, that below the screen, which always ends about two feet from the ground, only trouser legs were visible, I discovered the use was strictly limited to the needs of the male of the race. The top of the screen, of course, is just above head height, although an Englishwoman once claimed to me that an exceptionally tall French friend of hers recognized her while he was engaged therein one day, and tipped his hat to her as she passed on the street.