The Secret Life of France (12 page)

When I first moved to Paris, I was struck by the gap I kept encountering between what was preached and what was practised. People were always banging on about
solidarité
and yet they didn’t know or care to know the other
people in their building. For all her talk of fraternity and its modern equivalent, solidarity, France is a monumentally individualistic society. Her political system facilitates a certain detachment from her outcasts and high levels of taxation redeem the consciences of her citizens. And so the millions of unemployed and dispossessed on the fringes of all her big cities can be forgotten … At least until the next time they rise up in protest.

When Laurent and I rented our first flat together, I went and knocked on doors to introduce myself to my neighbours on the other floors. I was greeted first by mistrust – I must be a Jehovah’s Witness – then, when they discovered that I was English, amusement and good will. Yes, I was English and therefore to be forgiven, admired even, for my eccentricity.

For the sad truth is that, for all our French-bashing, we are in fact loved by the French. They love our eccentricity, they love our sense of humour; they love our moral courage, our excess, our restraint and our imagination.

Laurent’s despondency on returning home after watching the English rugby team beat the French team in their Stade de France offers a good idea of most Frenchmen’s view of their own countrymen as compared to the English.

‘As usual the English chants gave me goose pimples and our doleful “
Allez les Bleus
” sounded like a band of snotty, undisciplined brats, just like our players were in the face of the impeccable order of the English game.’

If they could, many French people would gladly
exchange their character for ours, be rid of their earnest intellectualism, their conformism, their indiscipline, their petulance, their pusillanimity and their bigotry. But there is a problem: these are the very traits which lie behind the extraordinary quality of their lives, the quality which people like Peter Mayle help us to drool over and for which thousands of Britons abandon their long-suffering island every year.

Laurent and I settled with our new baby into his small flat in Montmartre overlooking the gardens of the Sacré Cœur. Armed with my vaginal probe, I went for my biweekly sessions with the
kinésithérapeute
and succumbed to pressure from
la bande
to stop breastfeeding Jack after three months. I also became inured to the practice of medicating my child through the bottom. I now consider the widespread use of suppositories in France as sensible, rather than rude. The body absorbs medicine more quickly this way and bypassing the stomach makes perfect sense, particularly for children who can vomit easily or refuse to take medicine orally. Today, what I find suspect is the Anglo-Saxon hysteria surrounding the idea of suppositories.

Often Laurent and I would get a babysitter from a company called
Alpha Bébé
and go out to dinner with his friends, usually in noisy, brightly lit brasseries, and I would cling on to the edges of comprehension as they discussed the function of Art or the death of History or whatever happened to be the zeitgeist of the week.

Jack cried a lot at night, and as my own mother was in
Australia and usually asleep when I needed her, I sought the advice of Laurent’s friend Magali – the one who had chosen not to breastfeed her children. She suggested
Théralène
to ease Jack’s nights, and our own. Years later I’m appalled by the fact that I was actually giving a liquid tranquilliser to a four-month-old baby and often wonder if the addictive tendencies that plagued Jack’s adolescence were not due to this early exposure to narcoleptic substances.

It was April 1986 and I was beginning to miss my friends back at Oxford. While I was out in the Paris spring, shopping with my baby and learning how to choose in-season vegetables with enough authority that the greengrocer didn’t try to choose them for me, I thought of my friends, eating jacket potatoes with baked-bean-and-cheddar topping from the ‘Spud-U-Like’ van. While I was learning how to avoid being given the worst cuts of meat by the butcher, or how to greet
la boulangère
, not with friendliness but with the routine civility that she expected of me (ideally, one’s ‘
Bonjour Madame!
’ should be sung with the cloying enthusiasm of a nursery-school teacher), I imagined that my friends would be reading
Paradise Lost
in front of their bar heaters or perusing manuscripts with fingerless mittens in the Bodleian, or getting fall-down drunk, or shagging each other in damp rooms with their underwear drying comfortingly on the radiator, or dancing to Chaka Khan … I missed my student life; having longed to escape from it, of course, I missed it.

One weekend, David, a friend from Oxford, came to
stay. Laurent and I took him to a dinner party given by Aurélie and her boyfriend. The dinner party was held in the same flat, belonging to Aurélie’s boyfriend, Daniel, which Laurent had staked out in the aftermath of their break-up. Daniel was the same boyfriend who had been kept awake all night by the sound of Laurent pleading outside on his doormat. One of the difficulties for me about all this lay in the fact that it was impossible to imagine my stable, rational husband ever behaving like this about me. His claim to have grown up since Aurélie was no consolation.

Like all of the women in
la bande
, Aurélie was a good and effortless cook. A long table ran the length of Daniel’s garret flat and the little dormer windows were soon steamed up with conviviality. Daniel’s lugubrious grey-and-mauve paintings – mostly, as far as I could tell, of couples involved in serious car crashes – hung on every available wall, and Aurélie, wearing a dress that looked like her perfect body had simply been wrapped in black bandages, flirted with the men and the women with equal commitment, lavishly kissing both on the lips. She was excited about a set of chairs she had made, entirely out of cardboard, as part of her course at Camondo, one of Paris’s leading interior-design schools. In retrospect, those chairs showed real, even prophetic talent. Sadly Aurélie – who always had her eye on what she considered to be the main game (the Game of Love) – was always too busy with the pressures of adultery to fully live up to her professional potential.

The wine flowed, it didn’t gush. People sipped, they didn’t quaff. The evening seemed to be all about men and women and the games they play to entertain each other. In this context, inebriation felt inappropriate, even pointless, since if you became too drunk you would miss the fun. As my poor, dazed English friend would soon discover,
all the fun
would turn out to be the discreet to-ing and fro-ing between the dinner table and the divan in the next-door room. What began as a
ménage à trois
(two girls and a boy) became
quatre
(two boys and two girls), then
cinq
(three boys and two girls) and, at the point when we went home to ‘liberate the babysitter’ – a
ménage à six
.

I noticed that people kept disappearing into the little room and assumed that somebody was showing a film they had made or perhaps watching a Formula 1 race. David seemed happy talking to someone else, so I stood up and went to have a look. I cannot remember the exact anatomical details but I did register my friend Betty (the one who saw a hypnotist for her climaxing difficulties) in a semi-naked, human knot with a small, male architect (the one who had learnt his English from Monty Python records) and a female psychiatric nurse (who had already frightened David during dinner by asking him if he liked having sex with strangers). Betty looked up and smiled sweetly at me and asked if I would like to join them. I said, ‘No, no, I’m fine,’ as coolly as I could and closed the door behind me.

My heart racing from the embarrassment, I sat down again next to David, wondering whether I should tell him
what I had just seen. I remember looking across the table at Laurent and trying to decipher whether or not he was aware of what was going on in that little room. Later on, a man emerged from the room and came over to whisper something in Laurent’s ear. Laurent shook his head, rather as if he were declining a cigar. Then he looked across at me and gave me a cosy smile.

Poor Laurent drove home that night to the sound of David and I squealing like a couple of schoolchildren. What astounded us most was the fact that there had been no drugs at the party and no one had seemed particularly drunk. How had this understated debauchery come about without the usual disinhibitors? In retrospect, what strikes me as uniquely French about that evening was not the fact of several people having sex together, but the rather elegant spontaneity of it all. There had been no need for such strategies of disassociation as the Key Game or Strip Poker, or indeed any kind of erotic formalisation. It had just been a matter of allowing the charge – that can come about when men and women are confined to a steamy room with good food and good wine – simply to take effect.

The early days of my married life were spent learning how to negotiate my way through the thick, plastic abattoir curtain of Parisian rudeness, without responding to every incident with an unsightly and ineffectual emotional display. I learnt that you did not show weakness or you
would be shat upon, and that being overtly friendly or polite is widely perceived, in Paris at least, as a form of weakness. I learnt that there is a kind of behaviour that must be offered in lieu of politeness or friendliness. This behaviour is, I believe, a technique developed to mask social inequality, to gloss over any differences in status that would be uncomfortable to both parties.

The behaviour, adopted when one person is supposed to be ‘serving’ another, is a kind of formulaic banter in which each person says his or her lines and then moves on, entirely unscathed by the milk of human kindness. A decent knowledge of the language is essential for this banter (which of course puts foreigners at a considerable disadvantage). The ritual serves for many occasions, from buying a baguette to ordering coffee to dealing with the administration. If you don’t have the words, then you don’t have a chance. It’s as simple as that.
The right words
show that you have reached a certain level in the social hierarchy and, at the same time, disguise the possibility that you might have risen above that level. They make possible the uncomfortable business of servitude in a society wedded to the myth of equality. It took me about ten years to learn this meta-language, which has its essential written version and without which it is hard to get anywhere in France.

This language is at once simple and complex. It insists upon the right delivery – in men, a detached indifference, and in women, a kind of singsong, pseudo-bonhomie, which amounts to the same thing. In this
aping of politeness, you don’t so much talk
to
your interlocutor as
at
them.

This defensive approach to communication is, I suspect, the result of the particular cruelty for which French society has periodically shown itself capable. History has taught the French not to trust each other. Indeed, at various times in her past, France’s citizens could not be trusted
not
to denounce each other to the authorities – were they royal, revolutionary or Nazi. This habit of mistrust forms the bedrock of her society. It explains why Parisians never talk to each other in bus queues (except, of course, during a general strike) and why they never share a taxi.

In those early years in Paris, as I struggled to learn what was of course innate to most French people, Laurent was my champion and my defender. How many hours a week did he spend writing, in that meta-language that he uses so eloquently, to heads of Parisian department stores? Or reporting taxi drivers to their employers for having driven off while a pregnant English woman, with a child in a pram and three bags of shopping, watched the quicker, less burdened client climb in the other side? How many times did he write on my behalf to lament the mistreatment of me and countless other poor foreigners sucking their bloody fingernails as they clawed at the tower of the French administration? Five times I had to return to that citadel of bureaucratic impenetrability, the Préfecture de Police, in my quest for a resident permit (
carte de
séjour
), which, incidentally, European citizens no longer
need. I would return each time with the missing piece of paperwork and peer, hopeful and teary-eyed, through the scratched plexiglass at the stinging indifference of the civil servant in charge of my
dossier
. I’d watch in trepidation as he or she pulled out that pink list of required documents and with a deep sigh, which could have been either pleasure or exasperation, scratched a deep cross with his or her biro beside one more missing element, to be brought back on the prescribed date in a month’s time. A month later I would be back to wait my turn on the hard benches – on one occasion for four hours.

Years later I returned to this place, aglow with good intentions, in order to apply for French nationality. General elections were coming round again and it was time for me to take a stand, particularly in view of the fact that my own children had recently reached voting age. I walked into the old room – with its strip lighting and its peeling paintwork and its particular smell of bleach and damp wood – this time armed with the right language and attitude and ready to dish back whatever indignity I was served. A woman in her fifties with glasses on a string greeted me, or more accurately, came as close to shunning me as possible without actually turning her back on me. While I explained that I had lived in the country for twenty years, had had four children here and would like to apply for citizenship, she managed to make me feel that I was wasting her time. I cut my preamble short and asked her what the formalities were.

‘On what grounds are you applying?’

‘On what grounds?’

‘On what grounds,’ she repeated wearily.

‘I would like to become French,’ I said firmly. ‘As I have said, I’ve been here …’

‘Those aren’t grounds. Anyone could come to this country illegally, stay for twenty years and ask to become French.’

She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was ten to twelve: nearly lunchtime.

I could feel the old anger and humiliation. I could feel myself being pulled back into the dark vortex of that core experience …

‘What grounds do I need?’

‘Are you married to a French national?’

‘I was.’

‘I asked if you were married. If you’re no longer married, then the answer is no.’

I was now awash with anger, my head clamouring with the wrong words.

She pulled a form from beneath the counter and slid it towards me.

‘Fill that in and bring back two copies. Your request will be assessed and if your dossier is complete and your request valid you’ll be called for an interview.’

‘Could you tell me how long this process usually takes?’

She answered me without looking up.

‘If everything is in order, about two years.’

Then she pulled out the dreaded list of paperwork and put deep crosses beside every document.

I looked down at the list and felt a wave of calm. Then I looked up at her and said: ‘You know what? I would like to thank you. I’m grateful to you for having cleared something up for me. Your behaviour, your particular kind of rudeness, has made me realise that I have no wish to become French after all.’

‘Good,’ she said, taking back the forms with a flourish. And without further ado, she turned off her desk lamp, took her jacket from her chair, opened the door of her booth and vanished from my life.

I have heard many theories about the reasons for Parisian rudeness but, for me, the most plausible lies in the city’s history. The Franco-American writer Julian Green, who was born in Paris in 1900 and died there in 1998, once said of his city that she had lost her soul during the Nazi Occupation. Indeed, the now legendary incivility of Parisians seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. Between the wars Paris was ‘gay Paree’, a dazzling place of creativity, hope and intellectual and sexual freedom. It was the extravagantly permissive city of Jean Rhys and Tristan Tzara and André Breton; the literary mecca of André Gide and Marcel Proust; the intellectual capital of the world, where Joyce could publish
Ulysses
and Gertrude Stein and Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Marianne Moore and Ernest Hemingway could make their dollars last long enough to reinvent American literature. It was the haven of artistic genius that nurtured Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Fernand Léger. It was a cultural
melting pot where jazz could flourish … All this until the Occupation.