French Toast (11 page)

Jealousy is only one of the reasons the French don't like to talk about money. Following is another very good one: fear of the big bad wolf—
le fisc
(the tax inspector).

Besides jealousy, one reason not to flaunt wealth is fear of the taxman. In the city of Lyon, where there is a traditional wealthy bourgeoisie, affluent families drive the oldest, most run-down cars they can find, leave the Rolls-Royce hidden in a garage thirty miles from the city, wear dowdy clothes, and don't open their apartments to strangers. The other reason for this is that showing your wealth marks you forever as a nouveau riche, not a desired status for people who have “old money.”

I underestimated the fear of the taxman until one night a friend came to dinner with a couple of shoe boxes filled to the brim with gold bullion, a gift from his dying uncle. I thought it was so funny that I told the story at a dinner party one night in the presence of the friend, who immediately turned several shades of green.

My husband took me aside later and told me that you must never, but never, talk about such personal matters. After all, how did we know that there wasn't a tax inspector at the table? “The taxman,” says French journalist Isabelle Quenin, “is the big bad wolf. In fact, as soon as Frenchmen start talking about money, they have the feeling they are already in court.”

Why such fear? For one thing,
many
people cheat on taxes, the attitude being that if you don't, you're not quite normal. Why? French journalist François de Closets explains the historical reasons for the French propensity to cheat the government and then fear the taxman. Under the laws of the ancien régime, king, queen, nobility, and clergy were exempted from taxes, which were taken from the masses of poor peasants! The idea that “someone on top” is out to get them has never left the national conscience.

This explains why secrecy and dissimulation became the means of dealing with the fear of having everything taken away (I still know French people who hide money inside the mattress). The French love for gold bullion also stems from the idea “They can't take this from me.” When de Closets was researching his book back in the 1970s, it was estimated that the French people—not the French government—owned one-quarter of the world's gold reserves!

The taxman's visit, incidentally, may in actual fact be motivated by denunciation, from an unhappy client or
a former husband or wife, an angry neighbor. If you tell on someone and the tax inspector finds an irregularity, you will get 10 percent of the fine in cash—not a bad deal. “The traffic cops and tax inspectors are universally detested in France,” says Isabelle Quenin. “And the tax inspector is not only detested, but feared.”

The French are highly taxed but live in a society where a sixteen-week maternity leave, a minimum of five weeks of annual vacation and often much more, and all kinds of other advantages are taken for granted. Yet, as de Closets writes, “The idea remains anchored that the fairest state is the one which takes the least, and all the demonstrations from other countries do nothing to change this.”

The French yell and scream and cheat on their taxes, but how many would settle for roads with potholes, entire city neighborhoods that look like a bomb has hit them, and little or no insurance for health or old age? If you told the average Frenchman that he could pay fewer taxes and live in the United States but that he would have to put up with all of the above, you can bet he would prefer to live in France, screaming all the while.

Of course, some people scream less than others, as all Frenchmen do not pay taxes on the same scale. If you are a journalist, photographer, music and drama critic, airplane pilot or mechanic, you get an automatic 30 percent reduction off your taxes. Musicians, heads of orchestras, dramatic or lyric artists get 25 percent
knocked off. Stockbrokers and seamstresses for the great couture houses, and very precise categories, such as people in the Loire who “work at home filing bicycle frames” get 20 percent whacked off. Still others get anywhere from 5 percent to 15 percent off, depending on where they live and what they do. For example, clock-makers get 5 percent off if they own their own tools; printers of newspapers who have to work at night are allowed a 5 percent deduction, as well.

Some of these reductions are restricted to a certain geographical location, such as the Loire bicycle filers: others are in effect all over France, wherever the profession is practiced. If you're just a normal salaried worker belonging to none of the above categories, you pay the whole lot. No wonder people are jealous!

Of course, not all Frenchmen think it is normal to cheat on taxes. Various polls show—not unsurprisingly—that those classes of people who find it more difficult or even impossible to cheat disapprove of cheaters. Those who have more ways to find loopholes (shopkeepers, people in independent professions) approve of cheating. As people grow older, they find it less normal to cheat.

Of course cheating goes on everywhere, but cheating in France is special because it is often so petty. I'll never forget the first time I got the wrong change on a baguette. I counted and recounted, thinking, What interest is there in cheating someone out of ten centimes?

For a long time, I really did think that the petty
cheating I was subject to was due to my accent. After all, an American accent is
the
accent not to have when you want to buy something. The price shoots up anywhere from 5 to 95 percent. But it wasn't because of my accent, I found out. In fact, most small shopkeepers are honest. But the ones who aren't select their victims on a random basis, not by their accents. In my neighborhood, which, as I said, is filled with people who are nouveau riche, the shopkeepers have decided that since many people don't seem to be counting, they may as well take advantage of the situation. This went on for years, until suddenly one day they found they had no more clients—people were deserting the neighborhood to buy in big supermarkets, where the prices are marked.

Knowing what the situation is, we hardly ever buy anything in this neighborhood. But one day, my son, in a fit of adolescent hunger, went downstairs to buy a box of cookies at the small chain grocery store in the street. He looked at his change and saw that they hadn't given him the correct amount: Five centimes, admittedly a minuscule sum, were missing. He didn't say anything and came back home, where he immediately regretted not having said anything, for it wasn't the first time that a “mistake” had been made. He returned to the store and politely told them about the error. The answer: “Why didn't you say anything then?” and “Anyway, you don't look as if you need five centimes.” After that, the
coup final
from the irate grocer: “I've been in the grocery
business twenty years and no little creep like you is going to tell me how to run my business.”

Culture Shock!
I thought the customer was always right, if you want to keep his business, that is.
Mais non
. You complain about something and the merchant bawls
you
out.

The denouement of the above story is that I charged into the store the next day and closely followed my husband's instructions for bawling the storekeeper out. I was not, he told me, to engage in any discussion with him. After making sure that he knew that I knew what had gone on, I was to leave the store immediately with the line “
Je ne discute pas avec quelqu'un comme vous
.” (“I don't talk to people like you.”) I executed according to instructions. Had I let myself go, I would have been exposed to a fishmonger's tirade, my husband told me. This way, I would emerge the offended winner. He was right. (And to my great satisfaction, a few years later, the entire chain went bankrupt!)

I had won that particular battle but not the war. I had to get used to counting my change in the stores on my street—and to the idea that the customer is not only not always right but almost always wrong.

Dear readers, in case you are wondering if I am down on the French, you're wrong! Yes, I am impassioned every time something
goes awry, but only because in France things seem to be particularly complicated when it comes to money, business, commercial dealings. Nothing's easy! A case in point: This summer I was at a Target store (or, as the French say,
Tar Zhay
) in Minneapolis where I was erroneously charged for two CDs when I had purchased only one. I didn't see the error until I was going over bills with my son in Chicago. I called a suburban Target to see if we could straighten out the problem (the error was thirteen dollars, not a major sum, but worth checking out anyway). No problem: All I had to do was show up at a Target near my sister's home on the North Shore, show my receipt, and I would get my money back, no questions asked. I tried to imagine the same thing happening at a department store in Marseilles and my getting my money back this simply in another French town. I just couldn't. France is the fourth-economic power in the world, but in terms of customer satisfaction, there's a long way to go.

The idea that the customer is a second-class citizen is so deeply ingrained that even in stores where you are guaranteed your money back, you have to go through an interrogation. A friend recounted the following dialogue in a Monoprix (the French equivalent of a Woolworth) where she had taken back a pair of gloves she had purchased. My friend: “I'd like to give you back these gloves and get the money back, as I found the gloves I had wanted to replace.” Salesgirl: “Why did you wait so long?” My friend: “Well, as I said, I just
found them, so I don't need these now, you see?” Salesgirl: “Well, you needed them when you bought them.” My friend: “I want to talk to your boss.” And that was the end of the story. She got the money back.

First there is the issue of the salesperson's attitude to the customer; then there is the matter of the colossal amount of time wasted because of this attitude. French people have the same experience as Americans do with incompetence and get just as upset by it, if not more. They will also ask themselves why, in a country where streamlined trains run on time, public parks are beautifully kept and safe, and perfection shines in so many realms, one has to put up with the service problem.

I started thinking about this problem seriously during one particularly frustrating week in June in which I had to deal with a magazine subscription my son never received (it was a Christmas gift), as well as threats from a fax manufacturer who said we hadn't paid him for our fax machine. We had, but the company obviously couldn't find a record of the payment. However, they kept sending us menacing letters until they found their mistake, and then they never apologized. The week also included three futile trips to the train station to buy a ticket at a reduced price. It was never to happen, because each time I went, I was told that it wasn't the right day and I would have to come back.

In the same week, my French sister-in-law went absolutely nuts after ordering a refrigerator that, when it arrived, didn't fit into her kitchen. She reordered and the deliverymen came back with another fridge, which again didn't fit. The third time was not the charm, and she is currently hesitating between jumping out of her eleventh-floor window and suing them (the latter is a joke; lawsuits for incompetence are rare in France).

Computers are another major area for problems with price and service. After his last trip to France, my friend Ron Rosbottom, a French professor at Amherst and a bona fide Francophile, recounted: “The French have still not developed a culture of help for the consumer. We may complain in this country that service is going down the tubes, but they haven't even invented it yet, except in cheese shops and restaurants. The French pay a fortune for electronics, but when they break, the seller gives one of those Gallic shrugs that's a cross between ‘It's not my problem' and ‘A competent person wouldn't have done this.' ”

I couldn't have said it better myself.

The question is, Why are commercial dealings so extraordinarily complicated and byzantine?

One explanation is that many times salespeople go too fast and don't listen. If money is dirty, then, by extension, everything concerned with money is dirty. Therefore, it's not healthy to be too interested in the details of any money transaction, and this includes such
things as service. (This is my amateur Freudian explanation, but I like it.)

I have often noticed that when salespeople take your order, they want it quickly. If you slow down and explain carefully—but to them, tediously—they rush you along. They just want to move on. Hence the errors resulting from people doing things too fast.

Another explanation is that France is a “high-context” society in which information is supposed to be known but not shared. You are insulting someone if you launch into a laborious explanation. I tried it one day on a salesperson whose eyes literally became glazed with boredom.

Then there is the anonymity. In France, you don't get somebody sitting there with a nameplate reading
PAULINE DUPONT
. You often find yourself dealing with different people each time there is a transaction. Hence, my son's magazine subscription, where we talked with at least ten different people from the beginning of the unresolved affair to its end. They were all perfectly pleasant, and totally incapable of coming up with a solution until, as often happens in France, I got the director on the case. It was solved immediately.