French Toast

by Harriet Welty Rochefort

  Indeed, it does seem like everyone is always fighting over something (the language lends itself to this). My American family has been convinced that everything was going up in smoke, when in fact all my husband and I were discussing was what wine to have with dinner. When in France, you have to know how to express your emotions. In other words, you have to know how to spend time dealing with others on a confrontational basis. This can be over simple things such as getting cheated on change or having it out with a taxi driver who is free but who is just not in the mood to take you to where you want to go.

  If you are a self-respecting Frenchman, you get mad. As a phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon, even after twenty years here, I fume inwardly but just can’t manage to externalize it the way the French do so admirably. “Tête de veau,” my husband yells at another driver as we slalom through a traffic jam. Cowering in the seat beside him, I’m sure I have just seen my final moments. Mais non. The other driver shouts something even worse.

  One typical day, I was driving down a one-way street and what did I see in front of me but a small white Peugeot whose driver had left the car, with lights flashing, in the middle of the street. When the owner of the Peugeot finally showed up ten minutes later, instead of apologizing for the inconvenience, he deigned to look me in the eye and say, “What’s the matter? Are you in a hurry?” I’ll never get used to this cavalier way of treating other human beings, no matter how long I live in this country.

  The most extraordinary discovery I made, after twenty years of living here, is that being nice is not high on the list of values. On the contrary, if you are constantly nice, you are seen as one big poire (sucker). Hence, since being nice is not something people set out to do, getting treated nicely is a totally unpredictable occurrence. As one observer noted, “Americans are nice to people they don’t know yet; the French are nice to the people they know.” That explains why you often see dogs in butcher shops (underneath the sign that says NO DOGS ALLOWED) and in restaurants, and smokers all over the place, because no one feels any deep obligation not to bother people one does not know. Who cares?

  “The Frenchman,” wrote Henry Miller, “protects the vessel which contains the spirit.” Perhaps only the French could have invented the expression for the way they deal with life: ils se défendent. They defend themselves against the unknown, against others. If you get a crowd of French people who don’t know one another, the results can range from excruciating to hilarious. An American friend of mine, who didn’t know any better, threw a big party, composed entirely of French neighbors who didn’t know one another. By the end of the evening, no one had said a word. This basic suspicion of others, which governs social life, is very French, and so, if you live here long enough, you soon learn to be on your guard and defend yourself. Where else but in France could you hear someone remark sarcastically to a new acquaintance who is getting too familiar, “On n’a pas gardé les cochons ensemble.” (“We didn’t keep the pigs together.”) Or “Est-ce-que je vous demande si votre grand-mère fait du vélo?” (“Did I ask you if your grandmother rides a bike?”) Private life is really private life.

  The French love to challenge authority. If it is there, it is to be contested. I used to be shocked that the only sign of national unity I could see in the French was their solidarity against authority. The general rule of thumb seems to be solidarity against the state—and, very frankly, when you see the way many French cops act (snotty, as if they’d love to throw you in jail if they could only think up a way), you’ve got to hand it to the French for warning one another against them. One day I was in the car with a French friend who had run a red light she hadn’t seen. When the policeman drew up alongside the car, instead of getting small and humble, she started bawling him out. Having gotten out of the situation without a ticket, she turned to me and laughed: “You’ve always got to be on the offensive; otherwise, you’re a goner,” she said.

  French cops can be lenient, depending on their mood and your powers of persuasion. It’s up to you to try to get out of what you’ve gotten into, and from then on, it’s a question of karma. One day in a fit of impatience, I peeled out of a traffic jam and crossed a white line, a very serious and costly traffic offense. My hope was that no one would see me, but as luck would have it, I drove right into a pack of police on hand for the express purpose of arresting idiots like me. I tried a new tactic (and, I am convinced that I succeeded also because I was well dressed and feeling rather charming that particular day): I looked straight at the officer with total abandon and said, “There’s nothing I can say, Officer. I am totally in the wrong. I admit it.” Then I hunkered down in what I considered an appropriately humble yet optimistic pose as he rounded my car (a technique the cops use to see what they can find, and they generally find something). He hadn’t even gone halfway when he appeared at my window: “Go on,” he said, smiling, “and don’t ever do it again.” I fairly sped away, hoping he wouldn’t be contradicted by one of his fellow flics.

  Although I said I would never be French, I applied for and was granted French nationality just a few months ago. Why? Because in the end, I’m here because I want to be. (Also, the U.S. government finally gave the green light allowing citizens to have double nationality, so you can believe I jumped on that one.) So, although I’ll never BE French, I now am the proud possessor of a French passport and a French identity card. From now on, when I criticize or praise the French, one could say that I am criticizing or praising myself, as well.

  In spite of all the things that I appreciate about the French and even the ways in which I myself feel almost French, there are still a number of things that daily prove to me that I will never, ever be French.

  The French will never get me to abandon my perhaps naïve belief that the customer is always right. I’m always shocked when a haughty salesperson drives me out of a store. However, after twenty years of experience, I still don’t know how to deal with this. My French friends do, though.

  One day, one of them went to buy a pan for fish in a department store. After finally locating the department, he told the saleslady that he was interested in buying an aluminum fish cooker, not the stainless-steel kind she was showing him. “I don’t talk to people who eat in aluminum,” she proclaimed, and started to walk away. My reaction would probably have been to slink away in disgrace, muttering to myself. My French friend drew himself up and glacially ordered her to get her boss. Moral of the story: Always go straight to the top.

  As far as teacher-pupil relationships are concerned, I’ll never get used to the negative attitudes French teachers have toward their students. Having grown up in a nation where the goal is to encourage even the worst of students, it is hard for me to see students I consider as not bad at all being treated as if they were nul (zero).

  In any case, French attitudes toward children in general are very different from American attitudes. Americans explain what they are trying to get across. The French, at least in my husband’s traditional French family—and in many others I know, as well—don’t waste so much time being diplomatic. “You do this because I said so” is not seen as a terrorist threat. The lines are clearly drawn, and it is unusual to see parents engaging in negotiations with their kids.

  One example comes to mind: A young American couple entered a Chinese restaurant in the Latin Quarter with their son. A normal two-year-old, the toddler proceeded to fiddle with the chopsticks (and almost rammed one into his ear), upset the water glass, and run around the restaurant. The parents began by reasoning with him, explaining that he had to be good.

  My French husband watched the scene in wonder. For him, it was obvious that you don’t take a two-year-old to a restaurant; that if you do, he is expected to behave in a civilized fashion; and, most important, you don’t negotiate with a two-year-old. I remember that one of the only times I ever got upset with my mother-in-law was when my son was that age and she was definitely not amused by one of his antics, one which I found cute.

  It’s not that my husband or in-l
aws or the French in general hate kids, although if you stick around Paris long enough, you may begin to wonder about that. It’s just that children in France have traditionally been seen as little adults and therefore there is a low tolerance for too much childish behavior. Lawrence Wylie, the Harvard professor who wrote a book about the town of Roussillon, where he lived for a year with his family, observed that the French were astonished when he had his kids stay home with a baby-sitter instead of taking them along for village get-togethers. In France, especially in small towns, children are included in family get-togethers once they know how to participate without monopolizing the conversation.

  In fact, the concept of children as children and not as miniature adults is a relatively recent one in French history. That’s why when a French kid comes up with a funny remark, no one makes too much of it. He’s a kid all right, but on his way to becoming an adult. One fortunate result of this that I have often seen, in my own home and that of others, is that children brought up this way do not dominate conversations. In fact, on several occasions, non-French visitors have asked me if my kids are okay, because they didn’t say much at the table. I assured them that they were indeed okay (I didn’t add that they are really silly in private) but that their French father had trained them never to interrupt an adult conversation.

  After a certain age, children are invited to the table with the adults, sit there until very late, even are allowed to taste wine, but never do they become the object of the conversation. They participate, but they don’t dominate. They are included, but not to the exclusion of an adult conversation. The good part of this is that they learn to listen to adults and form their own ideas. The adults are happy to have them around and don’t feel they are a nuisance or have to be excused.

  The flip side of the coin is that French children, forced to be so well behaved around their parents or other grown-ups (“Bonjour, madame”), are often quite noisy or ill-behaved when released from adult supervision. All that bossing has a perverse effect. The children are very well behaved in front of adults, and then, behind their backs, are perfectly horrible—rather like the proverbial preacher’s kid.

  I got another point of view on this from an American fellow who was working as an au pair. He told me he thought that “French children are obnoxious and very badly behaved by American standards. I think French parents are much more permissive in terms of what they let their children do.” I laughed with delight at these observations, I must say, because for years I had been hearing that American children, mine and others, are horrible little savages. In addition, in France I had encountered very few permissive parents.

  I would qualify our family as somewhere halfway between law and order and liberalism. My sons tell me that they have friends whose parents won’t let them watch TV or listen to rock music. One of my elder son’s friends came to our place for the first time and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Benjamin’s room, which was covered with posters of heavy-metal rock stars. “You mean your parents let you put those on the wall?” he asked my eighteen-year-old incredulously. “And they let you play Iron Maiden?” He couldn’t believe it. And I couldn’t believe there are parents who don’t let their kids listen to what they want, no matter how much they hate it, and boy, do I hate it! But many French parents, particularly those who have children in the grandes écoles, are determined not to have their attention diverted from their studies.

  Most French children maintain family ties long after they are grown, either because they really do like their families or because a family comes in handy. Given their reserve, making friends is a difficult task so it is easier to call on the family than on friends. Whereas in the United States a mother might call up her next-door neighbor to take care of Johnny, in France the child is much more likely to go straight to his mamie (grandma). Sunday dinners are obligatory occasions, during which mamie cooks for everyone, and maman and papa, even if full-grown, assume the roles of children. Many French families spend their entire vacations together, either in their country home or in a place they rent together. When the family gathers, it is the mother who makes and enforces the rules, which everyone follows. The sons and daughters fall back into being the sons and daughters of their parents, rather than the mothers and fathers of their children!

  Language, ironically enough, is another thing that separates me from the French, for in spite of fluency, I am plagued with an accent. And your accent follows you everywhere. For the past twenty years, every time I open my mouth and say more than two words, people ask, “Are you English or American?” In France, you can have an accent and of course be French—many naturalized Frenchmen have accents—but you know in your heart of hearts that until the day you speak French without an accent, you can never really be French.

  The French have such a thing about their language that they will do perfectly abominable things, such as making overt fun of your accent. What I hate the most are the instant imitators. These are the people who hear you say two words and then imitate those two words with your accent—for example, très bien. “Très bien,” they parrot with a perfect American accent in French. This may seem hilariously funny to them, but I am not amused to hear my own accent thrown back in my face.

  One evening, I was at a dinner with an eminent French doctor who did this for the entire duration of the meal. By the end of it, I was out of my mind with rage and humiliation. On another occasion, I put up with a Frenchman’s horribly accented English without saying a word—I was brought up to be polite—and when his wife joined us and we started speaking French, she started imitating my accent. On yet another occasion, a very good friend of my husband’s looked at me and declared, “When you talk, it’s like a caricature of an American speaking French.” Thanks, buddy. My husband’s friend, by the way, doesn’t speak a word of English.

  Being on the receiving end of that for the past twenty years has put me in a pretty aggressive state of mind, and I must admit that when I see it coming, I start yelling (in French), “Don’t even start doing that. I won’t take it.” It doesn’t make me the most popular person at the party, but at least it makes things clear.

  Otherwise, you’re in for comments such as “You must be kidding. You can’t have arrived twenty years ago. And you still have that accent?” Oh well . . . It’s not just me. It happens to all my friends who are burdened with that visible verbal stamp that says, I’m not French. As it happens, I do have American friends who, fortunately for them, speak beautifully unaccented French; this makes their lives much easier.

  “People make fun of your accent because they like it,” my husband explained to me. “Did you ever see anyone making fun of a German accent?” Oh, great, I thought. “Which means,” I asked him, “that if you like something, you make fun of it?” Are these twisted values or what? But, here again, this may go back to the French educational system, where teachers make fun of students all the time. It probably feels good to be able to do it to somebody else.

  Polite, cultivated Frenchmen (generally those who speak another language and know the difficulties entailed) say, “Oh, I really love an American accent,” or, better still, lie: “You hardly have any accent at all.” I love those people, and fortunately there are a lot of them.

  My husband has a very slight accent in English. While in Jay’s Drugstore in Shenandoah on a once-in-a-lifetime visit, he sat down and ordered a Coke. The waitress came up to him, bent over, and yelled in his ear, “Did you say a COKE? A LARGE OR A SMALL ONE?” She figured that talking louder would surely straighten him out. So it does happen the other way around, but for the moment, I’m the one with the greatest number of incidents to report on the accent front.

  Of course, one might say I deserve it. As a child, we had only one person in town who had an accent. She called one day, and thinking it was a friend of my sister’s imitating the woman, I yelled for my sister, making fun of the person on the phone. My mother and sister immediately let me know how disappointed they were in me for being so cruel.
But not to worry. I am paying for that inconsiderate childhood act every day of my life.

  My accent-afflicted friends and I are currently devising several solutions to this mockery. Being Americans, we first thought of guns. But being antiguns, we settled on a water pistol, which we would squirt at the surprised offender. A more peaceful solution: a sandwich board with the message YES I HAVE LIVED HERE FOR OVER TWENTY YEARS. I STILL HAVE AN ACCENT. SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? Yet another is immediate: Start speaking English to the offender. This causes instant embarrassment, as the majority of people who make fun of accents don’t speak any English at all. But, I admit, we still haven’t stumbled upon the perfect solution, other than taping our mouths shut forever. There’s an idea!

  Do I sound hostile or obsessed about the accent subject? I talked to a German air hostess, who told me that she had lived in the States for more than twenty years and every time she opened her mouth, she got the “Where are you from?” bit, just as I do. It made me feel so much better. Anyway, I am hatching up a secret plan, which is to hire an accent professor who will teach me once and for all to get those r’s and u’s down pat. I’ll let you know if it works. Until then, au revoir, with the accent included. My name, by the way, has four r’s in it. Quelle horreur!

  Accents are a problem—unless you speak French with a French accent. But let’s say that you do speak perfect French with a French accent. You’ve still got to get down the subtle art of the lingo, such as expressing a positive thought in the negative.

  Another language difference is the highly developed art of understatement. When you drink a glass of the most wonderful Bordeaux you have ever had in your life, you don’t raise the glass and exclaim, “Merveilleux!” You sniff it, sip it, and then say, with a considered frown, “Ca se laisse boire.” (“It’s palatable.”) The French speak in negatives, rather than positives, so rather than saying the weather is nice, they say it is pas mauvais (not bad). If a French person sees a newborn baby, he will say, “Il n’est pas vieux, hein?” (“He’s not old, huh?”)