When you see a delicious sauce sitting in front of you, you’re very tempted to sop it up with the bread. Actually, millions of Frenchmen do—at home—but when invited out, it’s a big no-no. Even cheating by skewing a piece of bread on the fork and then swishing it around the plate is bad form. At my mother-in-law’s house, I used to do something that no polite person would ever do, which was to take the white out of the bread and just eat the crust (I redden even to tell it). In her Périgourdine dialect, she called these little balls my tapous. Well, let me tell you, it didn’t take me long to figure out that making tapous was taboo.
From the time he learns to chew, every Frenchman is taught that le pain is a commodity not to be wasted. Hence, it is generally served already cut and you take only what you intend to eat (a general rule for the rest of the meal, as well). If an entire baguette is put on the table, you break it rather than cut it. Why break rather than cut the baguette? The answer to this is best provided by the Baronne Staffe in her book Règles du Savoir-Vivre (Rules of Etiquette). For the Baronne, it is quite obvious that “pieces could, under the effort of the knife, jump into the eyes of the guests” or, even worse, “on uncovered shoulders.” Of course, the Baronne Staffe’s little guide was written in 1889, when women dressed (or undressed) for dinner, and perhaps baguettes were crustier than they are now—but the tradition still holds today.
What to do when confronted with French cheese? This is a very unsettling experience the first time around. For people like me from the land of Velveeta, how exciting and frightening to see, all on one plate, a gorgeous blue-veined Roquefort, a whitey-yellow Gruyère, a perfect ash-covered chèvre, a creamy Reblochon. My late father-in-law took particular pride in presenting the cheese plate. Every single time he passed it, he would tell me exactly which cheese was on the plate and then present it as if it were a very special gift. “You must try this,” he would say, indicating the feuille de Dreux, a regional specialty, or say, “The Brie is particularly good today.”
But how does one cut cheese without perpetrating an atrocity? I learned, after cutting the nose off a Brie and massacring the Roquefort, that this is basically a question of common sense. Gruyère is cut lengthwise, round cheeses in wedges. Roquefort and all blue cheese are cut so that the last person doesn’t end up with all the white. Stands to reason. For all but the most calorie-conscious, Roquefort is often eaten with butter, all mashed up. Very bad for the cholesterol, but I refuse to get into that argument, because it would ruin my appetite. If people do choose to indulge in the Roquefort-butter combination, though, they mostly do so in the privacy of their own homes, not when invited out.
Another thing I’ve learned is that cheese goes around the table only once, and French custom is to never serve coffee with dessert, but after, as a separate course. Très civilisé.
Now, if you are in a French home and have had dessert and coffee and after-dinner drinks and the hostess suddenly suggests a nice glass of fruit juice, you know it is time to leave. In the old days, when people had a tendency to consume alcoholic after-dinner drinks, such as Cointreau or cognac, offering fruit juice meant that you had really been around too long. Now that people tend to drink less and especially have reduced their consumption of after-dinner drinks, the fruit juice routine somehow seems less menacing. But it still means the same thing: The party’s over.
Finally, the absolutely worst thing you can do in a French home, at least in my mother-in-law’s French home, is not to clean your plate. She explained it to me this way: “If you are serving yourself as the food is passed, you should just take what you are going to eat and eat it all. If you leave something, it is an insult to your hostess, who will assume that you didn’t like it.”
My mother-in-law, it must be said, does not apply the clean-plate rule to restaurants. There, she says, again with correct French logic, you are paying for your meal, so you eat what you want and leave the rest.
Having absorbed the food lesson (no pun intended), let’s now move on to how to give compliments, how to give a bise, and how many to give, how to converse and whether to drop in on people or not. Elementary, my dear Watson? Not really.
As far as compliments are concerned, they seem to be a source of embarrassment more than anything else. In fact, the direct compliment seems to plunge the recipient into a state of confusion. Writing in the late nineteenth century, the good Baronne Staffe advised her readers that “well-brought up people never give totally direct compliments, because these compliments can embarrass people who are modest, timid, a bit shy, and because it is embarrassing to answer a compliment coming from such close range.”
In Anglo-Saxon countries, when someone says something nice, you are taught to say thank you very simply. In France, the situation is much more complicated. At the end of a lovely evening in the home of French friends, I complimented the mother on the wonderful manners of her three boys. “Oh, you know, they’re not always like that. When their father’s gone, they are positively horrible sometimes,” she said, secretly pleased. A friend of mine told me that her daughter, who is half-French and was raised in France, had told her that she liked the way I was dressed. My friend asked her, “Did you tell Harriet?” And the daughter replied, “No, I didn’t dare.” So the compliment seems to be more problematic than one would think.
When first in France, I would literally groan with delight at what I was served at my mother-in-law’s house, until the day I could see that she thought I was making fun of her! For her, an exquisite lettuce salad with a perfect vinaigrette was something she made every day, and so how could it be so extraordinary?
The best way I have of complimenting her now is to ask her for her recipes. However, it is not proper to ask for recipes while at the table, for obvious reasons. Suppose the dinner has been catered? Many hostesses prefer to leave a bit of ambiguity as to the origin of the food. I learned this from my sister-in-law, who is a wonderful cook but who has been known to serve a frozen dish along with freshly prepared when pressed. Rather than publicly confess it, she says absolutely nothing. At the beginning, this bothered me. But I must be becoming French. I now think, Why should she tell all? She’s the cook!
So, do you compliment the hostess on the food? Some do; some don’t. Some etiquette manuals say it is best to reserve a compliment for the dessert, probably to avoid getting into a discussion about food, because, while it’s good to eat, there’s nothing so boring as to talk about it while consuming it.
Conversation, like many other things, has been elevated to an art form in France and is, even if you speak French well or your hosts speak fluent English, an area loaded with pitfalls. At dinners where people don’t know one another, the conversation is expected to be light and never to bog down in personal or “heavy” matters.
I used to sit in amazement and listen to these conversations, which for me were like the sounds of birds in an aviary, all chirping at once. An American friend asked me why conversations at these parties are so superficial and why no one seriously answers you when you ask a question, or why no one listens to your answer when you reply to a question. Serious answers, I told him, are out. Why? You might bore your entourage.
As French author André Maurois put it, “The conversation-game is a work of art. . . . A passionate man always spoils a conversation-game. He seriously refutes light arguments; he follows themes which have been abandoned. The rule is to accept all the movements of the ball and to follow it without regret.”
Other than table manners, the art of conversation, and the mysteries of the simple compliment, I found there were other things to learn. It seems that the French are always touching one another, kissing hands, shaking hands, or giving one another pecks on the cheek. There are even rules for all this. For example, the famous baisemain. Americans aren’t used to this, and one American friend told me that the first time it happened to her, she instinctively snatched her hand away for fear of being bitten! (She needn’t have feared a bit—technically, the lips do no more than graze t
he hand.) Do people really still do that in this day and age? Well, yes, rather more than you might think, depending on the social circle. Nevertheless, the baisemain is technically off-limits in the case of unmarried women, women wearing gloves, and women in public places.
There is another rule as well concerning greeting people. For example, when my children were growing up, it seemed to be a matter of great consequence that they say, “Bonjour, madame” or “Bonjour, monsieur,” as opposed to just a short “Bonjour.” Being American, I had a hard time enforcing this rule; it is a definite gap in their upbringing. On the other hand, I had to teach them that saying, “Bonjour, m’sieurs, dames” (the abbreviation of “Bonjour, messieurs; bonjour, mesdames”) is the height of vulgarity.
The bise, that light little kiss that just brushes the cheek, is great fun to try to figure out. An American guest of a friend of mine watched the pantomime of bises I gave my friend and her husband and her husband gave me and my husband and the children (about thirty-six bises in all) and exclaimed a bit huffily, “It doesn’t mean anything”! Actually, it does mean something. The bise means you like the person more than if you just shook hands with him.
Of course, the American man had seen only one exchange of bises; he would be horrified to see the number of times a French family kisses in one day. In my French family, there is the bise before you go to bed and the bise when you get up in the morning. I avoid this morning one by saying that my teeth aren’t brushed yet and by looking generally horrible enough to repel anyone who might want to approach.
One of the worst faux pas you can make in France is to drop in unexpectedly on a friend, even a good one. The French don’t like to have unexpected visitors. In fact, they don’t like much of anything unexpected. Never forget, as one American sagely pointed out, that unlike the United States, France is a one-time zone country, in which everyone is doing everything at just about the same time—hence a certain predictability in eating times, being home times, and bedtimes. Once I dropped in on a friend who was entertaining her parents. She kept me standing at the door, and it was obvious that she didn’t want to introduce me to them. I could never figure out whether it was shame—of them? of me?—or whether you don’t mix friends and family. But I tend to think it was the dropping in that precipitated what I felt was odd behavior.
Rituals, codes. These codified manners actually help to make life simpler—if you know the rules. As in a graceful minuet, each dancer knows the steps expected. Miss a step and the rhythm is broken. So it is with the decorum of French social life.
Curiously enough, there is no French Emily Post, Amy Vanderbilt, Miss Manners, or their equivalent, no one authority to consult to find out what to do and how to act. Perhaps because everyone old enough to read already knows how to behave? In any case, not to worry if you don’t get all this down pat the first time around. I certainly didn’t.
Just tell yourself that you could never, but never, attain the level of rudeness of a Parisian behind the wheel of his car. Nor, on the other hand, could you aspire to the heights of subtlety that constitute real French politesse. Should you put your foot in your mouth, or your giant lettuce leaf anywhere else, no one in France will embarrass you by howling with laughter. That most certainly is not done. At least not until you’ve left the room.
At the Table
Things to Do:
• Put your hands on, not under, the table.
• Decapitate your asparagus with knife and fork and eat only the tips.
• Cut Gruyère lengthwise, Roquefort so that the next person doesn’t get all the white, and round cheeses in wedges.
• Take just what you’ll eat and don’t leave substantial amounts on the plate—very insulting.
• Converse lightly.
Things Not to Do:
• Don’t eat with your hands (this includes pizza, fried chicken, barbecued spareribs, and even fruit).
• Don’t cut your salad leaves with a knife and fork (a custom dating back to when the acidity of vinegar would rust the blade of the knife).
• Don’t ask for toothpicks.
• Don’t ask where the WC is—just go find it.
• Don’t call the waiter “garçon.” Instead, say, “S’il vous plaît?”
• Don’t sop up the sauce with bread even if the bread is on a fork.
• Don’t get soused—the French drink moderately.
• Don’t yawn, especially with your mouth uncovered.
• Don’t ask for coffee and dessert at the same time—they are separate courses.
• Don’t get into a deep conversation on stocks and bonds—boring! Opt instead for a learned conversation on the world economic situation.
Interview with Philippe
HARRIET: Why do you, a Frenchman, think that the French have a worldwide reputation for being quarrelsome and cantankerous?
PHILIPPE: Because we hate one another. But other than that, the language makes it sound like we’re bawling one another out even when we aren’t. We’re just having fun. When we say something like “tête de veau” [head of a calf], it’s just friendly.
HARRIET: Why are the French so particularly rude and undisciplined in their cars?
PHILIPPE: We Frenchmen have a very Latin disrespect of the law. People who obey laws are considered stupid, so this makes France a very dangerous country. Also, a lot of Frenchmen put their virility in their cars.
HARRIET: Why is it that when a Frenchman asks you a question, he or she doesn’t listen to a long, serious answer—or even pretend to?
PHILIPPE: Because the French don’t like to have all the details (être besogneux). They like big ideas and the general picture.
HARRIET: You can say that again. . . . But back to rudeness. Why are the French nice to people they know and rude to everyone else?
PHILIPPE: That’s a real difference. The people you don’t know can die in front of you and no one cares. They are enemies, or potential enemies at least.
HARRIET: Is that why French people don’t go overboard about welcoming newcomers/visitors/tourists?
PHILIPPE: Of course. As I said, the person you don’t know may be an enemy. How many times have you been invaded? I myself have been invaded twice, first by the Germans, then by Euro Disneyland. You can never be too careful.
School Daze
Why leave a discussion of the French educational system
to the end of these little reflections on French society?
Very frankly, a child’s education is always a subject of
passion, and when you are putting your child in a foreign school
system, the subject becomes explosive. It may have taken me
a long time to get used to certain cultural differences,
but the one in which I have been the most personally involved,
for my children’s sake, was that of education. The differences
between my education in the United States and my children’s
education in French public schools were, very simply,
like night and day. It took a lot of getting used to.
And now that they are nearing the end of their
education . . . well, read on.
I decided that since their father was French and we were living in France, it would only be logical to send my two sons to French schools.
I didn’t know it then, but I was in for a big change. First of all, although I speak fluent French, I realized that I would be of little or no help to my children when it came to the finer points of French grammar. I also realized that in a country where parents spend endless hours helping their kids with homework, I was an exception, feeling that it was more important for them to understand through their own mistakes. Helping with homework is so widespread that many French teachers will not accept typed papers because they fear that the work will be that of the parents, not the students. My inability to help my children turned out to be fortunate. They did the work themselves.
Second, I learned that
in France, school is taken very seriously from day one. Students spend a lot of time studying and school is for learning, not for extracurricular activities.
The importance of school cannot be overestimated. Franco-American marriage counselor Jill Bourdais points out that in France “the cultural assumption is that children are supposed to spend all their time studying. In the States, parents want children to be well rounded. In France, kids have to do well in school or it’s death. Schoolwork is a problem anywhere, but worse here for a Franco-American couple because of the cultural assumption toward this work and its importance.”
Of all the things I learned, the most important one is the following valuable truism: American mothers with children in French schools are much more traumatized by the whole experience than their kids are. I italicize because this axiom turned out, I am convinced, to be the key to my own children’s success in this system. My expectations of French schools were typically American. My children would learn, of course, but not just from books. Sports and music, debate and drama—all would play an important part. Teachers would never overtly criticize them or make them feel bad. And if something unpleasant happened, well, I would hightail it to the school and have a friendly little conversation with the teacher.
It just doesn’t work that way in French schools. Teachers criticize students! Bad grades are given! School is work with a capital W! As an American mother of kids in French schools, I absolutely could not comprehend what was going on at school and decided to get my husband on the case—after all, he had gone through the system. Shouldn’t he be the one to deal with it?
This decision turned out to be a miraculous stroke of good judgment. Suddenly, problems that had seemed insurmountable were cut down to size. As only a Frenchman with a command of the language and its nuances could, he would size up a situation, decide when it was worthwhile to intervene, and then do so with such aplomb, such perfect word choice, such lack of emotionalism, and such sang-froid that I was literally bowled over. “Leave the French educational system to those who have been through it!” I tell my friends. You won’t believe what will happen.
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