French Toast

by Harriet Welty Rochefort

  On one rainy day shortly before Christmas, an elderly lady in our building went out to get into her red Renault 5 but couldn’t leave because she was blocked by another car. That’s par for the course around here, but infuriating all the same. After a good half hour, she finally spied the offender coming toward her. I thought in my naïveté that the guilty party would profusely apologize. Wrong. This made my neighbor even more furious. So she hauled off and belted the culprit. You may think this is the end of the story and that they were even. No!

  The Hateful Guilty One grabbed one of my neighbor’s windshield wipers, ripped it out, and yelled, “That’ll teach you to lay your hands on me!” (Remember, all this is taking place in a neighborhood that is the French equivalent of Westchester, Winnetka, or Knightsbridge.) She then trounced off to the astonishment of the little group that by this time had gathered around to witness the brawl. But she didn’t get far. A gallant Frenchman, yelling and shouting, dashed to the car of the offender as she was about to drive off . . . and gave a healthy kick to her rear lights, breaking them.

  These kinds of incidents happen often.

  There seems to be another unwritten rule among Parisians: Always get even with the appropriate response. By that, I mean something rather elegant that you just throw off, such as “Je vous emmerde, madame!” (“F --- you, madam.”) Even when they are rude, even when they are driving, the French stick to form.

  Getting your car into a parking place is also fun and games. In Paris, the method is to bang the car in back of you and then bang the one in front as you maneuver in (or out). If you’re lucky, the driver of one or the other will have left his emergency brake off, which facilitates the easing in or out. I tried this in the States. Unfortunately for me, the owner of the car I bumped into was standing right in front of his Chinese restaurant. I thought I was going to end up as chop suey. In France, everyone yells and screams and gesticulates and threatens, but you never FEAR FOR YOUR LIFE OR THINK YOU’LL END UP WITH A BULLET IN YOU. I surmised from the reactions of my fellow Americans that we need some lessons in Parisian creative driving.

  Creative driving means that if all of a sudden you decide to turn around in the middle of a road, you just do it. Creative driving means that you go as fast as you can to get to the red light, where you’ll be stopped anyway. The point is to get to the red light faster. There are some French drivers who don’t even bother to stop at red lights. Anyway, the purpose of driving for all these Cyranos is not just to get from point A to point B, but to do it with panache, style. The quality of the driving seems to be inversely proportional to the size of the car, the worst drivers being in the smallest cars, the Renault 5s and the Peugeot 205s. Do French cars also have a Napoléon complex?

  Anyway, not to worry. You get used to all of this. Besides, there are a few advantages to this strange, hectic behavior. No cop will ever pick you up for crossing the street against a red light—France must be the only place on earth where the meter maids jaywalk.

  A friend of mine pointed out that I seem to be a bit obsessed about cars. She’s right and I am! I mean, imagine having a car and parking it in a street in Paris because you don’t have a garage. Then imagine an assorted group of pigeons all flying above it and doing you know what to it. Next, imagine rows of beautiful linden trees dripping their sap over said car on top of the pigeon excrement. Finally, imagine people regularly bumping into it as they park—once in front and once in back—when they’re not hemming it in so you can’t even get it to the nearest car wash! Do you become obsessed? Un peu, oui!

  Although I quickly adjusted to driving and parking, I had a much harder time grasping the Parisian concept of a line. I finally figured out that a Parisian queue doesn’t look like one because it is not an orderly formation, but, rather, a collection of motley individuals all trying to get in front of one another.

  You always have to be sure to ask where the end of the line is in order to ascertain that you are in the right place. The next step is to make sure that no one jumps ahead of you. This happens all the time, so you have to be on the alert constantly. If you’re a real Parisian, the minute there’s a suspect move, you start yelling. If you’re a foreigner, even one who’s been here a long time, as I have, you tend to wait a bit, not wanting to believe that that person wants to get your place.

  In the market, at the bakery, but especially at the post office and banks, where you can easily fossilize if you don’t catch on to the great game of queue hopping, you must concentrate all your forces on defending your place in line. At the market, when the vendor yells, “Whose turn is it?” you’d better be ready to yell “moi.” Heaven help you if you’ve goofed and it’s not really your turn. Every time I go to the market, I am a nervous wreck for a half hour afterward from the strain of making sure no one is going to slip by and take my place or from the strain of not having slugged the person behind me, who is pushing me.

  The Silent Pusher is an endemic Parisian phenomenon. He or she is generally someone who is unhappy about not being in front of you but is afraid to tell you so directly. You will be standing in line waiting for a movie, say, and feel someone jostling you. You turn around and see nothing special happening. You go back to reading your newspaper or talking to your friends and then feel it again. The Silent Pusher is hard to catch. One day, my family stood in line for a movie in Montparnasse. All the while we were standing, I was being elbowed but couldn’t catch the offender. When we got inside, my son turned to me and said, “That lady behind me was pushing me the whole time!” “Oh, you, too!” I laughed, vowing that the next time I would spray a few cans of tear gas to make some space for myself and my family.

  The only place I have seen Parisians almost refrain from this pushing and shoving was at Euro Disneyland. On the contrary, I never dreamed the French could be so positively disciplined as they patiently waited forty-five minutes for the three-minute ride down Big Thunder Mountain. Of course it is to Disney’s credit that we were literally corralled into the Big Thunder Mine and there was no way, even for the enterprising French, to cut into or get out of line.

  Then there’s the post office. One day I had one hundred letters to post to the States. There was nary a soul in line, but the girl behind the counter informed me that I would be holding up a potential line if she were to pass each letter through her machine and that the only solution would be for me to lick each stamp individually. I honestly think that ten years ago I would have licked every single stamp, but fortunately I have outgrown that. Imitating a real Parisian, I haughtily told her that I would like to speak to her “directeur.” She passed the letters through the machine.

  Another Parisian idiosyncracy can be found in speech. First of all, Parisians speak faster than Frenchmen elsewhere. Second of all, they never really mean what they say or say what they mean. French journalist Alain Schifres points out in his book Les Parisiens (The Parisians) that, for example, if a Parisian says that something is pas mal (not bad), that means it is pretty good and certainly better than if he said moyen (average).

  If, Schifres continues, a Parisian says that his son or daughter is a cretin or somehow mentally defective (the French haven’t discovered PC yet; you can still say things like that here), it means he is very proud of him or her! My husband, a typical Parisian, indulges in this Paris-speak rather often. To hear him tell it, his three sons will be lucky if they end up as garbage collectors, when in reality the firstborn is a doctor, the second made it into a prestigious grande école, and the third is on the path to fame and glory (hey, somebody around here has to brag).

  Other hidden codes, according to Schifres, who has been around Parisian circles long enough to detect these nuances, are expressions like “Il est mignon” which does not mean he is cute, the literal translation, but rather “he is naïve.” If someone says of another person that he is conscientious, it actually means that he is an imbecile. The worst is “Everybody likes him a lot,” which, translated from Parisian vernacular, means “He’s a failure.” />
  Parisians also have favorite subjects. One of these, which has become less so since the bottom fell out of the market, is real estate. The conversation generally revolves around how much apartments have gained in value (“I could never buy this now”) or how expensive rents are.

  Real estate terms are a prime example of Paris-speak. An American relocation specialist and friend one day explained the hidden meaning of certain real estate terms, starting with the word coquet. Basically, to describe an apartment as coquet (adorable) is to say it’s so small a midget couldn’t stand up in it. The words standing (pronounced stawndeeng) and grand standing simply mean that the apartment referred to is not low-income housing. Standing usually refers to an apartment in a 1960s building with fake stone blocks, paper-thin walls, and a thin coat of grease in the kitchen. An apartment with standing generally needs a troop of cleaners to get off the grime, says my friend. An apartment qualified as having grand standing is usually done up with glass and chrome and so many marble floors that you feel as if you’re walking on kitchen counters or are in a showroom for tombstones.

  Mignon (cute) is better than coquet because you can stand up straight, but of course you can touch both walls with your elbows. When an ad says “grenier aménageable,” indicating that there’s an attic that can be fixed up, it means you’ll need to redo the roof. And when the ad mentions that the apartment just needs “refreshing” with a little “coup de peinture” (paint job), it means that the whole thing needs to be completely and totally refurbished, including replastering the walls and maybe redoing the electricity.

  Having always rented apartments, I can affirm that when the French say “unfurnished,” it means the place has been stripped down to lightbulblessness. When we moved into our current apartment, the kitchen was so “unfurnished” that there was nothing but the kitchen sink—and I was amazed to find even that! Under French law, the owner is not required to paint the place he rents. This, along with the price of painters, may explain why so many beautiful apartments are run-down. The lowest estimate to get my thirty-five-square-meter living room painted was eight thousand francs (about $1,300), and that was off the books and considered a steal. The highest estimate for the same room was 100,000 francs (about $16,500). It’s still not painted.

  It seems like the Japanese have a particularly hard time understanding Parisian behavior.

  The behavior of the Parisians may sometimes be incomprehensible to an American like me who has lived here for over twenty years, but it is almost a total mystery to some nationalities. Although one million Japanese flock to France each year and approximately 25,000 live in Paris, it would be an understatement to say that the Japanese have a hard time penetrating the French psyche.

  Many Japanese have such a hard time adjusting to life in the French capital that one Japanese psychiatrist, married to a Frenchwoman, has baptized the phenomenon “Paris stress.” Doctor Hiroaki Ota, the head of the Association Franco-Japonaise de Psychiatrie et Sciences Humaines (Franco-Japanese Association of Psychiatry and Social Sciences), explains that this is not a malady, strictly speaking, but “a perturbed psychological state accompanied by indeterminate somatic symptoms such as irritability, a feeling of fear, obsession, depressed mood, insomnia, impression of persecution by the French.”

  This would sound almost funny if it weren’t a very serious problem. Dr. Ota, who since 1987 has specialized in consultations for members of the Japanese community at the renowned Saint Anne psychiatric hospital in Paris, has a private clientele of 715 patients, and of them, three times as many women as men. His patients are divided into three categories: businessmen working for Japanese companies and in Paris with their families, Japanese or Franco-Japanese residents of Paris, and tourists. Some of these are “light” cases, which can be dealt with in ten to twenty counseling sessions. Others are more serious and take longer.

  One of the main problems for some of the Japanese businessmen is that they have jumped from one work category to another. They may have worked in nonprofessional jobs in Japan, but to be able to come to France, they have to qualify for “professional” (or, as the French say, “cadre”) positions to get a work permit. This means that they are asked to make decisions and carry out work that they are absolutely not used to doing in Japan, and all this in a foreign language. Under the strain of it, many become depressive.

  The cultural shock for the Japanese is not just the language, but everything that goes with the language, all the nuances, the nonverbal talk. One thing that particularly mystifies the Japanese, as it does other nationalities, is how fast the Parisians talk and how often they interrupt one another’s conversations. French humor, which consists largely of poking fun at other people, is no fun for the Japanese because they are unable to respond with alacrity. According to Dr. Ota, “They can’t decipher the different levels of the meaning of a discourse and stop at the first level, which, in French humor, often contains aggressive or vexing elements.” (Americans as well often stop at the “first level,” even though in France, it’s better to probe more deeply into what is being said, because it’s not always what is on the surface.)

  Another hard thing for the Japanese to cope with, Dr. Ota tells me, is the changing moods of the French, who are given to blowing up suddenly and calming down just as quickly. A Japanese thinks, It’s because of me that that person is angry, and he feels guilty. The Japanese take into account the emotions of the person or persons they are addressing, whereas the French base their discussions on logic and rationality. Dr. Ota says he advises his patients, those who are only light cases, to confront French reality by observing the French but not trying to “move with them.” In Japan, he says, life is more structured, calmer, more disciplined, and the discipline is respected. “In France things appear to be without discipline, but there is one.”

  One situation Japanese businessmen in particular have trouble coping with is the business meeting (la réunion). “In Japan we have a meeting once something is almost decided, and the meeting is just to confirm and conclude. In France, everyone is talking all at once and they are too tired to accomplish anything.” For the French, “principles are very important, which is why the French are such good diplomats,” says Ota. “For the Japanese, pragmatism is what counts.”

  Talking in general is a problem. For the Japanese, as for Anglo-Saxons, the spoken word is important, serious. “The French talk as if they are strolling. The conversation doesn’t go anywhere,” says Ota. And this leads to confusion for the Japanese, who have trouble, in any case, formulating an answer before the French have skipped to another subject. And yet, “if you don’t talk here, you don’t exist,” another contradiction for the Japanese, for whom silence and discretion are important.

  The Japanese aren’t alone in not understanding the French (and the Parisians in particular). The English have a centuries-old love-hate relationship with the French, which regularly springs up in the English tabloid press in the form of “hate Froggy” insults. The Americans—well, as one who has lived here for over two decades, I can attest to the fact that the Parisians, including my husband, are not always the world’s easiest people to understand. And yet—this is the crux—one is never bored!

  If there are so many cultural differences and the French are so cryptic, why, one might ask, do so many people keep coming—and staying? To which my Parisian husband would reply, “Where else in the world could you live?” As one Paris-lover remarked a century ago, “I only know that I found in Paris all and even more than I was expecting. I only know that I was charmed and enchanted more than I can say.”

  In 1869, Mark Twain wrote of Paris in The Innocents Abroad: “We secured rooms at the hotel, or rather, we had three beds put into one room, so that we might be together, and then we went out to a restaurant, just after lamplighting, and ate a comfortable, satisfactory, lingering dinner. It was a pleasure to eat where everything was so tidy, the food so well cooked, the waiters so polite, and the coming and departing company so moustache
d, so frisky, so affable, so fearfully and wonderfully Frenchy!”

  But the tribute I love the best is one written by Joe Murray in an “Opinion” column in the International Herald Tribune: “Paris should be declared an international shrine. The World Bank should finance its economy. The people of Paris should work at no other job than simply that of being Parisians.”

  I can only wholeheartedly agree with Joe Murray and Mark Twain. It surely must be this “fearfully and wonderfully Frenchy” side that’s kept me here for all these years, and I must confess (now I mustn’t get sentimental here) that I find this city as beautiful as the first day I laid eyes on it. Even with all the incomprehensible cultural differences and a certain amount of moaning and groaning about the inevitable vicissitudes of city life, I can’t really imagine where else I could possibly live. I guess I’ve become a real Parisienne after all.

  Interview with Philippe

  HARRIET: After all I have written here, do you have the feeling that I am being unfair, or even racist, about Parisians?

  PHILIPPE: Absolutely! Paris is not just taxi drivers or surly waiters. The criminality has nothing to do with what you find in the States. It’s better to get a coup de pare-chocs than a coup de revolver [a bang in the fender than a bang from a gun]. Parisians may be obnoxious but you can still drive around here without locking all your windows and doors.

  HARRIET: How about dog poop and snarling salespeople? What do you have to say about that?

  PHILIPPE: Shoot them all.

  HARRIET: Okay, one more question. Why do the Parisians do everything so fast?

  PHILIPPE: Because they’re—we’re—agitated. Voilà. And only a person from Iowa could live here for over twenty years and maintain your rhythm.