French Toast

by Harriet Welty Rochefort

  Now with an American boyfriend, she says that the aggressivity has disappeared. “I had to fight twenty years for my identity, and now that I am with an American boyfriend, I find that I can really enjoy France,” says Julie, who has now lived longer in France than in the United States. Reflecting on her past, she says that “when you come and you are very young, you are absolutely dependent on the man you married and you don’t become a woman.” Another problem, perhaps independent of the cultural factor, was that she and her husband didn’t realize the importance of getting away together as a couple, that the couple comes first. “All this fed into my wanting to fight for my American bit, and the more I felt out of it, the more I was.” For her, “the middle road, which not many people get to, is simply saying, ‘I’m me and you’re you.’ ”

  It’s often hard, though, when attitudes are so different. One of these bones of contention is what family therapist Jill Bourdais calls the general attitude toward the outside world. “In the United States, you assume people are nice until proven wrong. Here, you’re almost a criminal until proven trustworthy. In the States, a couple wants to enjoy new people, but here you don’t just casually invite someone because they are nice. You need to find out more about them, their social status, and there is a complete lack of spontaneity.”

  Other sensitive areas in intercultural marriages include lack of communication due to language differences or social codes. Outgoing Americans are generally disturbed when they go to dinner parties and realize they have to button up their mouths on almost every single subject that could reveal something personal about themselves. Otherwise, the person next to them could think he’s been mistaken for their therapist.

  Then there’s the guilt complex about money. (I’ll go into more detail on this subject in the next chapter.) Many of my American friends married to Frenchmen say the same thing: Their spouse makes them feel culpable about spending the household sous. “We’re going to eat noodles this month,” wails Pierre to his wife, who is honestly terrified when this successful lawyer tells her he thinks that they may not make it through the month. She will spend the next day thinking of selling her jewels or getting a job. That night, however, he comes home and hits her with “I just saw the most fantastic pair of diamond earrings I’d like to buy you.”

  My friend and I commiserate with each other about this yo-yo behavior. I tell her that my French husband, one of the most generous people I know, has done this to me for years. The tense look, the tight voice, the desperate air—how many times did I think we would be going to debtors’ prison because I had splurged on a new tablecloth? And then he would gallantly invite me out to dinner. Another American friend tells me that the guilt complex is routine practice in her home, too. Her husband went so far as to make sure she didn’t have a checking account (she spends money like water, I must admit), and so the only money she could get would be by going through him, the Great Provider.

  Does this sound like the Dark Ages? It is.

  However, after two decades of observing and studying the phenomenon, I have finally figured it out. These men are Latin: They are just exteriorizing their worry, blowing off steam, so to speak. Frenchwomen know this. We literal-minded American wives sit there biting our fingernails, cursing ourselves for being so irresponsible, and becoming convinced we’ll end up either poor or in prison, or both. What we don’t understand is that the poor guy just had a hard day at the office and simply wants to express himself. Being the nearest and dearest, we’re in the direct line of fire. Since relationships are not equal, we have to listen to the histrionics—and they are histrionics—as part of the deal.

  I repeat: If the American wife thinks she will be getting into a union based on honey-dewed consensus, she is wrong. The French love to bicker, and a quarrel is not seen as anything particularly threatening. In a French couple, separation is tolerated, too. In August, the woman often takes off for the seashore with the kids, leaving the husband behind (the famous “August husbands”). No one is horrified by the idea of not being together. A little relief is seen as a positive, not a negative, element. Still, one American man confessed in counseling that he resented his French wife’s going off with the children and leaving him behind.

  As time goes on, I feel myself becoming more and more French—or less and less American—in my relationship to my husband. I don’t even listen when he rants and raves. Typical Latin overdramatization, I tell myself. It’s when he’s silent that I worry. As for dinner table conversations where there are sexual allusions, I shut my mouth, listen to the jokes, and join in the laughter—but I don’t translate. Some things you just can’t do.

  Interview with Philippe

  HARRIET: What about the criticism by some American women that Frenchmen don’t automatically take a shower before sex?

  PHILIPPE: Sex and soap don’t match. To excite an American woman, you have her smell a bar of soap. To excite a Latin woman, you offer the jungle smell.

  HARRIET: What about that mysterious French invention, the bidet?

  PHILIPPE: The French wonder why other countries don’t have them. How can the people be clean?

  HARRIET: What does a Frenchman look for in a woman?

  PHILIPPE: A Frenchwoman or an American woman?

  HARRIET: Ha-ha. Why are there so many dirty jokes and sexual innuendos in French conversations?

  PHILIPPE: This isn’t just French—it’s Latin. But French culture, from the Gauls to Rabelais to San Antonio, is filled with sexual allusions. You Anglo-Saxons are the ones who have a hang-up, not us. Calvin, who incidentally was a Frog, got you people all messed up.

  HARRIET: I thought he was Swiss.

  PHILIPPE: No, like Jules Verne, he was French.

  HARRIET: Chauvinist . . .

  The French and Money

  Food, sex, and the Frenchwoman, all the surprises found therein pale in comparison to what I found to be the attitude of the French toward money. It could best be summed up as secretive. Here goes for an attempt at an explanation.

  In a country where you can wax eloquent on almost anything, there’s one subject that everyone avoids. A Frenchman will go on for hours about the best way to prepare a canard à l’orange or the attributes of haute couture, but when it comes to lucre, he clams up.

  The basic attitude toward money seems to be this: the less said about it, the better. A French journalist told me that he once phoned the head of one of France’s wealthiest families to interview him for an article he was writing. The person refused, saying, “Ce qui est bien ne fait pas du bruit; ce qui fait du bruit n’est pas bien.” (“What is good doesn’t make noise; what makes noise isn’t good.”)

  This attitude toward money carries over into political life in France. The Anglo-Saxons are world specialists in the sex scandal. The more realistic French don’t expect any politician to be perfect. They couldn’t care less about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas or Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. The basic point of view in France is that a politician’s private life (that is, his sex life) is his private life and none of anyone’s (including the taxpayer/voter’s) business. For years, French journalists knew that President François Mitterrand had a mistress and a daughter by her. He even admitted it in an interview, saying, “So what?” and the matter was dropped. The scandals under Mitterrand were financial scandals.

  Nobody cares if a French politician has a mistress, or two or three, and he certainly wouldn’t care if this was discovered. In fact, he’d be proud. But there is one thing he would certainly not like, and that would be for people to know how much money he is making or have his tax form published for the world to see. Why?

  “Money is like sex,” writes French journalist and TV personality François de Closets. “It is talked about in general and not in particular, in the abstract and not with personal examples.” Of course the French love to joke about sex—but I’ve rarely if ever heard a joke about money. “The silence of the French when it comes to money,” observes de Closets, “is not that of
indifference, but of passion. It translates kind of a secret and guilty obsession . . . a censored desire, that is to say a taboo in the strongest sense of the word.”

  This doesn’t mean that the French don’t like money in all its forms, from the gold brick under the pillow to investments in real estate. But all this is laden with a terrible collective guilt complex. “The specificity of the French attitude [toward money]” writes François de Closets, “is not his love of it, but in his repression of this love.”

  Other than the nouveau riche, who don’t know how to act, most Frenchmen have figured out that it’s better to hide wealth than flaunt it. One of the reasons for this is to avoid the taxman; the other is to avoid sheer jealousy.

  Jealousy comes in many forms:

  • A journalist from a French magazine reported that he joined a young man for a ride around Paris in his brand-new flaming-red Porsche. Sure enough, they were stopped by the police for verification of their identity papers, which the French must always have on them just in case the police want to check them for some reason. The young man said he had been stopped several times and each time the police would say, “Anyway, with a car like that, you can pay the fine.”

  • I might never have believed that even the police are motivated by jealousy had I not seen the different way they acted toward my husband on two separate occasions. The first time, he was dressed in business clothes and driving our Renault 25, the “big,” expensive car. The police stopped us during a routine checkup and, in spite of our total innocence, were much nastier than they needed to be, which was not at all.

  The second time we were stopped, the situation was entirely different—and a priori much worse. My husband had on a leather jacket and corduroy slacks and was driving my small, inexpensive, pigeon-dropping-splattered, sap-covered Citroën. In a fit of very Parisian impatience, he had pulled over a white line and hit a cop on a motorcycle. In one split second, I had a vision of our children as orphans as he and I were hauled off to prison for life. Instead, the cop got up from where he had fallen, brushed himself off, and just smiled. The only explanation for this totally bizarre behavior that we could find was that the cop would have had a hard time explaining what he was doing on the wrong side of the white line. But the fact that we were dressed casually in an unassuming little car certainly didn’t hurt our case.

  • In the neighborhood of nouveaux riches where I live, the merchants have marked their prices up to almost twice what they are elsewhere in this particularly expensive suburb. Even the baguette, that staff of life, costs more than anywhere else in town. If you are stupid enough not to ask the price of whatever it is you covet, you’re sure to get a very big surprise indeed. The attitude is—and at least one boutique owner has admitted to it—If they can pay, we’ll soak them.

  • Friends of mine, a young Parisian lawyer and his American wife, decided to live for a year in a charming village in the southwest where his parents own a home. They bought a sizable old barn of a house, did repairs, and even added a swimming pool, to the horror of the locals. This was not the prodigal son returning home; it was an upstart Parisian flaunting his wealth. When the young lawyer, who, on top of everything else, is good-looking and blessed with eloquence and warmth, would visit the locals in his Mercedes, he would hear such comments as “Is it normal to have so much money?”

  Successful French publicist Jacques Séguéla writes, “The Frenchman is the most illogical person in the world. He spends his life running after his success but the success of others bothers him. Worse, it makes him aggressive. In other countries, winning gains you the esteem of your compatriots. Here, it’s the best way to lose it.”

  Or, in the words of the fictional character Major Thompson, created by French humorist Pierre Daninos: “The American pedestrian who sees a millionaire going by in a Cadillac secretly dreams of the day that he will get in his own. The French pedestrian who sees a millionaire in a Cadillac secretly dreams of the day that he will be able to get him out of the car so that he will walk like everyone else.”

  One reason for jealousy is that since no one talks about money openly, no one knows for sure what other people make and hence have totally false ideas. One day, my husband, a banker, was with two of his young employees. As they were early for an appointment, my husband suggested that they walk around the Place Vendôme, where they could admire the wonderful jewelry shops—Chaumet, Mauboussin, Van Cleef & Arpels. “Not only were they thoroughly uninterested,” he reported, laughing, “but one of them turned to me and said, ‘I see you are very rich to be so interested in jewels.’ ” Jealousy? Perhaps just boredom or a bad mood. But certainly a good deal of naïveté about his employer’s standard of living!

  Jealousy is only one of the reasons the French don’t like to talk about money. Following is another very good one: fear of the big bad wolf—le fisc (the tax inspector).

  Besides jealousy, one reason not to flaunt wealth is fear of the taxman. In the city of Lyon, where there is a traditional wealthy bourgeoisie, affluent families drive the oldest, most run-down cars they can find, leave the Rolls-Royce hidden in a garage thirty miles from the city, wear dowdy clothes, and don’t open their apartments to strangers. The other reason for this is that showing your wealth marks you forever as a nouveau riche, not a desired status for people who have “old money.”

  I underestimated the fear of the taxman until one night a friend came to dinner with a couple of shoe boxes filled to the brim with gold bullion, a gift from his dying uncle. I thought it was so funny that I told the story at a dinner party one night in the presence of the friend, who immediately turned several shades of green.

  My husband took me aside later and told me that you must never, but never, talk about such personal matters. After all, how did we know that there wasn’t a tax inspector at the table? “The taxman,” says French journalist Isabelle Quenin, “is the big bad wolf. In fact, as soon as Frenchmen start talking about money, they have the feeling they are already in court.”

  Why such fear? For one thing, many people cheat on taxes, the attitude being that if you don’t, you’re not quite normal. Why? French journalist François de Closets explains the historical reasons for the French propensity to cheat the government and then fear the taxman. Under the laws of the ancien régime, king, queen, nobility, and clergy were exempted from taxes, which were taken from the masses of poor peasants! The idea that “someone on top” is out to get them has never left the national conscience.

  This explains why secrecy and dissimulation became the means of dealing with the fear of having everything taken away (I still know French people who hide money inside the mattress). The French love for gold bullion also stems from the idea “They can’t take this from me.” When de Closets was researching his book back in the 1970s, it was estimated that the French people—not the French government—owned one-quarter of the world’s gold reserves!

  The taxman’s visit, incidentally, may in actual fact be motivated by denunciation, from an unhappy client or a former husband or wife, an angry neighbor. If you tell on someone and the tax inspector finds an irregularity, you will get 10 percent of the fine in cash—not a bad deal. “The traffic cops and tax inspectors are universally detested in France,” says Isabelle Quenin. “And the tax inspector is not only detested, but feared.”

  The French are highly taxed but live in a society where a sixteen-week maternity leave, a minimum of five weeks of annual vacation and often much more, and all kinds of other advantages are taken for granted. Yet, as de Closets writes, “The idea remains anchored that the fairest state is the one which takes the least, and all the demonstrations from other countries do nothing to change this.”

  The French yell and scream and cheat on their taxes, but how many would settle for roads with potholes, entire city neighborhoods that look like a bomb has hit them, and little or no insurance for health or old age? If you told the average Frenchman that he could pay fewer taxes and live in the United States but that he would ha
ve to put up with all of the above, you can bet he would prefer to live in France, screaming all the while.

  Of course, some people scream less than others, as all Frenchmen do not pay taxes on the same scale. If you are a journalist, photographer, music and drama critic, airplane pilot or mechanic, you get an automatic 30 percent reduction off your taxes. Musicians, heads of orchestras, dramatic or lyric artists get 25 percent knocked off. Stockbrokers and seamstresses for the great couture houses, and very precise categories, such as people in the Loire who “work at home filing bicycle frames” get 20 percent whacked off. Still others get anywhere from 5 percent to 15 percent off, depending on where they live and what they do. For example, clock-makers get 5 percent off if they own their own tools; printers of newspapers who have to work at night are allowed a 5 percent deduction, as well.

  Some of these reductions are restricted to a certain geographical location, such as the Loire bicycle filers: others are in effect all over France, wherever the profession is practiced. If you’re just a normal salaried worker belonging to none of the above categories, you pay the whole lot. No wonder people are jealous!

  Of course, not all Frenchmen think it is normal to cheat on taxes. Various polls show—not unsurprisingly—that those classes of people who find it more difficult or even impossible to cheat disapprove of cheaters. Those who have more ways to find loopholes (shopkeepers, people in independent professions) approve of cheating. As people grow older, they find it less normal to cheat.