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  TALK

  TO THE

  SNAIL

  Ten Commandments for

  Understanding the French

  STEPHEN CLARKE

  BLOOMSBURY

  To the French, with my sincerest apologies

  DON’T GET ME WRONG – FRANCE IS A GREAT PLACE to live. It’s a country devoted to pleasure. And pleasure is one of my hobbies. No, it’s all of my hobbies.

  But gaining access to that pleasure can sometimes be as fiddly, painful and ultimately frustrating as eating a lobster. You use a hammer, nutcrackers, surgical probes and a laser-powered meat detector, and you can still end up with lacerated fingers and a mouthful of lobster claw.

  Many people visiting France, or coming to live here, get stranded in the pre-pleasure and partial-pleasure zones. They get little further than the moody waiter or the rip-off estate agent. They need advice on how to break into the total-pleasure zone. Because living in France is not a gift that you’re born with. Lots of French people never learn to do it properly. That’s why they’re known as a nation of complainers.

  Living in France is a skill that you have to work at. I’ve spent half my adult life here, and I’m still learning.

  This book sums up what I’ve learnt so far.

  STEPHEN CLARKE, Paris, 2006

  CONTENTS

  1 THOU SHALT BE WRONG (if you’re not French)

  Why every Frenchman is ‘Monsieur Right’

  2 THOU SHALT NOT WORK

  Why long weekends are good for the French economy

  3 THOU SHALT EAT

  Just because it smells of pig’s droppings doesn’t mean it’ll taste like them

  4 THOU SHALT BE ILL

  Getting the best out of the French national drug habit

  5 THOU SHALT SPEAK FRENCH

  Fun ways to mispronounce words and offend people

  6 THOU SHALT NOT SING (in tune, anyway)

  A French artiste says: ‘Pretentious, moi?’

  7 THOU SHALT NOT KNOW

  Don’t mention the war, nuclear power, tax or structural surveys

  8 THOU SHALT NOT LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR

  Oui, I am smoking into your dinner, et alors?

  9 THOU SHALT NOT BE SERVED

  Garçon? Waiter? Bonjour? Oh, forget it

  10 THOU SHALT BE POLITE (and simultaneously rude)

  Bonjour, Madame, vous êtes une idiote

  11 THOU SHALT SAY ‘I LOVE YOU’

  The perils of French-style amour

  Epilogue

  Attentive readers may note that there are eleven, not ten, commandments here. But surely you didn’t think you could fit a nation as fascinating and complex as the French into just ten commandments, did you? Merde alors!

  Nude pétanque, a French game that gives a whole

  new meaning to the phrase ‘playing with your boules’.

  THE

  1ST

  COMMANDMENT

  Tu Auras Tort

  THOU SHALT BE WRONG

  (if you’re not French)

  THOU SHALT BE WRONG

  (if you’re not French)

  WHEN DEALING WITH A FRENCHMAN, YOU NEED TO BE aware that there is a voice in his head. It is constantly telling him, ‘I’m French, I’m right.’

  Even when he’s doing something that is quite obviously illegal, antisocial or just plain stupid, he is sure that right is on his side.

  Of course, the French aren’t unique in this. We Brits think we invented Western civilization. The Americans are convinced that they live in the only place on earth where people are truly free. The Belgians are certain that they invented French fries. We’re all sure that we’re right about something. The difference with the French is that they not only think they’re right, they’re also convinced that everyone in the world is ganging up to prove them wrong. Why, they wonder, does everyone on 1 the planet want to speak English instead of le français? Why does no one else play pétanque? Why does the world prefer Hollywood blockbusters to French movies about Parisians getting divorced? Ce n’est pas normal.

  Their reputation for arrogance comes from this. They’re not sure of themselves. They’ve got something to prove to the rest of the universe.

  Observe a Parisian driver when he or she comes up against a red light. ‘How dare this coloured bulb assume it knows best whether it is safe to cross this junction?’ the driver thinks. ‘It’s obviously safe to go through, there’s nothing blocking my way except a few annoying pedestrians.’2 He ploughs through, certain that the universe is on his side.

  It’s the same with much of the French service sector. How can the customers possibly be right? What do they know about the service industries?

  The list goes on and on.

  Pushing L’Enveloppe

  One of the best ways of seeing the French person’s innate sense of rightness in action is to visit a crowded post office. The people who work here have even more reasons to be right than the rest of their compatriots. They have two layers of rightness that they wear like armour.

  First, of course, they are French.

  Second, they are state employees and therefore impossible to fire. Even if they were to snooze all day or feed all the letters through a shredder, the worst sanction they could expect would be a transfer to some distant outpost of the French empire like Tahiti or Calais.

  In a relaxed rural post office, this can be to the public’s advantage, because the people working there will be able to take the time to help their customers (and thereby show how right they are about things).

  But if you walk into a busy urban post office at nine a.m., things might not go so smoothly.

  There will probably be a long queue of people wanting to withdraw money from their post-office bank accounts, pay their electricity bills in cash, or simply post a letter because they don’t have change for the automatic franking machine.

  A post-office cashier who’s just coming on duty will enter the room, sum up the size of the queue, see the urgency of opening another window, and smile inwardly. Or sometimes outwardly. He or she will then proceed to interrupt their co-workers’ transactions in order to exchange good-morning kisses or handshakes.

  Any grumblings from the queue will be answered with a look, or an overt comment, to the effect that, yes, we state workers are human beings and we have the right to greet our colleagues just like anyone else, non?

  They are in the right and are therefore totally shameless.

  Next, the new arrival will sit down at his or her counter and settle in, starting up the computer, slotting in the cash drawer, checking that the books of stamps are all in place.

  Any customer who dares to venture from the ‘wait behind this line’ barrier up to the counter at this point will be politely told that the worker has to get properly prepared before receiving customers. That is normal, non? In what other job does a worker have to start work before things are properly prepared?

  They are in the right and therefore completely unhurried. The only thing to do is stay patient. It can be tough.

  Once, in my local post office, I was praying that fate would not send me to the counter nearest the door, because it was about to be manned by one of the worst cases of ‘I’m Right, You’re Wrong’ I’ve ever met, even in France.

  Monsieur Right was just coming on duty, and was apparently testing his seat for signs of bounciness deficiency that might oblige him to put in for a month’s sick leave if he sat on it for a whole morning. He could see all the people waiting, and seemed to be relishing the groans of frustration emanating from his audience. I was next in line, hoping desperately that he’d keep bouncing until one of the other counters was free.

  But no, fate decided to be cruel to me that day.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I sa
id loudly, as you must.

  ‘Bonjour,’ he replied, slightly put out by my merriness. Outside of the post-office combat zone, I’m sure I would have got on fine with the guy, who was a fairly laid-back, jeans-and-earring type and probably listened to the same kind of music as I do. But on his throne, he was obviously a complete tyrant, the Sun King hoping to burn my fingers.

  I told him that my postwoman had left a slip telling me to come to the nearest post office to fetch a parcel, which is the usual practice when a delivery is too big to go in the letter box.

  ‘Do you have ID?’ he asked me, which is also the usual practice.

  ‘Yes, I do, but there’s a problem. You see, the slip says that the parcel was addressed to Red Garage Books, which is the name of my company. But I don’t have an ID card in that name because there is no person called Red Garage Books.’ I attempted a little philosophical laugh, which is necessary in France when you want to show people that you are joking.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, grimacing as if I’d just pierced his other ear. ‘If you have no ID then I can’t give you the parcel.’

  ‘But I know it’s for me. I’m the only employee. Look, I’ve brought along a piece of stationery with the logo on it.’

  ‘That is not official ID. I can’t accept it.’

  ‘I understand that,’ I said, diplomatically acknowledging his rightness. ‘But I don’t know what else to do. I know what’s in the parcel, though. It’s books. Can’t you just check, please?’

  The guy agreed to go and look. These counter assistants are human, after all. And, like all French counter assistants, if you show them – politely – that you aren’t going to go away and leave them in peace (yes, two can play at being in the right), they will back down.

  He went off backstage with my paper slip. While he was away, I turned to the people waiting and gave them an apologetic wince. Not too apologetic, though. After all, he was the one who’d gone off. I was in the right.

  Eventually, he returned with the package. It was obviously, as I’d told him, a parcel of books. The word ‘livres’ was clearly marked on the green customs form stuck on top of the parcel. He looked at the package, at the paper slip, at me, and came to a decision.

  ‘I shouldn’t really give this to you, but I’m going to,’ he said, putting the parcel on the counter.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said.

  ‘Sign here.’ He gave me the parcel register.

  I signed, and as I did so, I saw that the address on the package was in fact ‘Stephen Clarke, c/o Red Garage Books, etc’. So it was in my name, after all. The postwoman had got it wrong on her paper slip. I looked up at the counter guy, who had obviously seen this, too, and seemed to be daring me to make an issue of it.

  I didn’t bother. That postwoman possessed the same two levels of rightness as her colleague behind the counter, so it would have been totally counterproductive to suggest that she’d been in the wrong.

  ‘You must get some ID in your company name to avoid this problem in the future,’ he said.

  ‘You are right,’ I told him. I gratefully took possession of my parcel, wished him ‘bonne journée’ and left.

  In France, a tactical retreat is often as close as you get to total victory.

  The Right Stuff

  Sometimes, the whole world gets things spectacularly wrong.

  One of the most traumatic recent examples of this was the day the Olympic Committee announced the host city for the 2012 Games. London? Non! How could the Committee get it so completely wrong? The 2012 Games were destined for Paris, everyone knew that.

  Yes, everyone in France. Which, unfortunately for the French, did not include the Olympic Committee.

  And what made things even more unbearable in French eyes was that they had lost out to their dreaded rivals, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, as they mistakenly call English-speakers. Because, as every French person knows, those evil, globalizing Anglo-Saxons have been leading the conspiracy to prove the French wrong for centuries now . . .

  In a Breton village called La Masse, on a hilltop near the Mont Saint-Michel, there is what looks like a miniature 3 This windmill with its sail jammed in the vertical. miniature windmill was part of a French communications system that was supposed to revolutionize the world back in the 1790s. It was one of a chain of similar structures on hilltops at fifteen to twenty kilometre intervals between Paris and Brest, on the west coast. The sails on top of the buildings were in fact arms that could be moved, semaphore-style, to send a message from Brest to Paris in only twenty minutes. The most frequent message was probably, ‘It’s really cloudy here in Brittany. If you sent us any messages recently, we didn’t get them.’

  The system was invented by a French engineer called Claude Chappe, who thoughtfully designed relay stations consisting of two buildings – one for the sending of messages, the other as a dining room for the messengers. Beautifully French.

  The idea was simple and yet doomed to obsolescence in a combination that only the French seem to manage. At first, the Chappe telegraph spread outwards from France, with lines even extending as far as Amsterdam and Milan. Then in 1836 a Brit called Charles Wheatstone invented the gloriously simple wire telegraph that was adapted and adopted all over the world, and the French Chappe telegraph was dead. As was poor old Chappe – he killed himself in 1805.

  Yes, the French have a perverse gift for inventing things that no other country wants to use, and then brooding about it.

  The prime example is the Minitel.

  Launched in 1983, it was a forerunner of the Internet. It was a lot like Teletext or Ceefax, except that it was more interactive, and instead of being accessed via a television screen that most households already had, the French complicated things by forcing Minitel users to rent a small dedicated screen.

  The Minitel was as slow as all computers were in the eighties, but earned a fortune for France Telecom and the French advertising industry when its sex chat sites caught on. Every billboard, TV channel and magazine in France was suddenly decorated with pouting topless models and Minitel server addresses like 3615 SEXY. Millions of French people spent their nights typing capital-lettered messages on to little fold-down keyboards attached to their cranky beige boxes, and then waiting minutes for the black-and-white screens to refresh themselves and the answers to come back. France, the country that loves conversation more than anything, conceived the online chat room fifteen years before its time.

  But then an Englishman called Timothy Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web to make the American Internet work anywhere, and killed the Minitel. The streets of France were littered with miniature beige screens, and once again those scheming Anglo-Saxons had inflicted a non-French idea upon the world.

  Some other examples of this universally unwanted French inventiveness are:

  • Pétanque, the only sport designed to be played in a dogs’ toilet.

  • The Citroën DS – shaped like a flattened frog, it is the only road vehicle in the world guaranteed to give all passengers instant carsickness.

  • The gear lever on a Renault 4L – perfectly capable of changing gear, but only when it felt like it.

  • The primitive soap dispensers that used to be fitted in French café toilets. An oval cake of soap was loaded on to a curved metal bar screwed to the wall above the sink. In theory this was a good idea, as it saved the soap from falling on the floor or melting away in the sink. In practice it was disgusting, because the (usually bright-yellow) cake of soap mostly served as an exhibition space for the yuk that the previous occupant of the toilet had smeared on it. The world was very lucky that the liquid-soap dispenser 4 was invented and killed off the French prototype.

  Of course, the French have many reasons to be proud of their creativity, because they have contributed some great inventions to the world – the bikini, scuba diving, Braille, pasteurization, the hot-air balloon (pretty apt, you could say), batteries, the parachute and photography, to name just a few.

  And some of
their versions of existing technology have become global success stories. Few Americans realize, for instance, that when they take the high-speed train from New York to Boston, they are getting on what is 5 basically a cleverly camouflaged French TGV.

  France also conceived some typically French, and very successful, variations on an existing theme:

  • The château, a building that pretends to have a military function but is in fact merely decorative. A lot like the French army in 1940.

  • The Foreign Legion, a group of expendable ex-cons and unemployables who can be safely sent into danger zones to do the dirty work. If they don’t come back, no influential person is going to kick up a fuss about a lost son.

  • Not forgetting the camping municipal, that ridiculously cheap (or occasionally free) campsite in countless villages all over France that encourages the passing traveller to stay the night and spend some money in the local café. French hospitality at its best.

  But top of this list of inventions that France is right to be proud of has to be a certain edible delicacy.

  The farmer who conceived foie gras must have been a very inventive Monsieur indeed. You can imagine him explaining his new pâté to his friends:

  ‘Oh, you don’t just mince up offcuts of meat like you do with other pâtés. You take a goose or a duck, stick a funnel down its throat, and pour as much dried maize as you can into its gullet every day until it is so obese it can hardly walk. Then you rip out its grossly deformed liver and spread it on toast.’

  ‘You’ve been at the absinthe again, Jean-Pierre,’ his friends must have said. ‘Come and get some fresh air over at the dogs’ toilet.’

  But old Jean-Pierre was right, and foie gras could only have been a French invention. If it had been an Anglo-Saxon idea and called ‘fat liver’, no one would have bought it.

  Am I Right or Am I Right?

  The Frenchman’s favourite tool when showing how right he is is the rhetorical question. Why is it his favourite tool? Because it emphasizes just how right he is. Why does he use it so often? Because it makes his opinions sound so important that even he has to beg himself to reveal them. Isn’t the rhetorical question annoying when it’s overused? Yes, it bloody is.