French Toast (2 page)

Let's face it: being married to a Frenchman and feeling the imperative need to figure things out in order to fit
into his world was a powerful motivating factor. Unlike an academic grappling with arcane points of French history or philosophy at a safe intellectual remove or a tourist struggling to order from a menu, I was here for the long haul. I needed to buy groceries, needed to understand what my mother-in-law was saying to me (hoping it was nice), needed to make appointments to see the doctor and the plumber, and when I got the appointments, understand what they were saying. Not only did I need to talk to and understand these people in French—I needed to answer them in French. And when, many years later, I was able to do both of those with ease, I needed to go a step further. I needed to figure out the unspoken language, the language of nuances and codes that is so important in France. For by then I had learned that in France what is
not
said is often as important as what
is
said.

After I married, I quickly moved from the status of College Girl on a Fling in Paris to Wife of a Frenchman, complete with French in-laws. I suddenly found myself in a small Paris apartment, my dreams of a huge American house left by the roadside. I found myself racking my brains to figure out what to serve my French in-laws for dinner and made a lot of mistakes which I recount in the chapter on French food. The biggest challenge of all, though, came when we decided that our children would attend French schools. If it's the penultimate chapter in the book, it's because the French educational system
had me totally stymied. I solved that one quickly: since my French husband survived it, he got to deal with it. It turned out to be the best decision I ever made. And here's a nice end to the story: my two sons survived the French system! The one who went the
prépa
and
grandes écoles
route is now a software engineer in Montreal (nicely combining the French and English speaking parts of his life). His brother, who wanted nothing to do with the
grandes écoles
, studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and has just published his first novel with the prestigious French publishing house Gallimard (think Camus, says the proud mother. . . . ). And in one of those ironic twists of fate, the son I thought was my little American turned out to be TOTALLY French, and the son I thought was TOTALLY French turned out to be much more American. Fortunately, my stepson, Nicolas, a neurologist in Marseilles, is a bona fide Frenchman, so no surprises there!

Just in case anyone thinks that I'm the only one in my couple who's on the alert for cultural differences, I should add here and now that my French husband has his own personal laundry list of how the Americans are different. That would make a separate, and very entertaining book. Only one problem: for all the faults they have, the French have one quality we Americans don't. Ready? Since they live in a society where criticism, although painful, is seen as necessary and even a path to improvement, they are more inured to it. They can dish
it out in spades but some of them at least are able to laugh when their foibles are pointed out, even by a foreigner—whereas I highly doubt that a book by a French person pointing out the “oddities” of Americans would be seen as anything more than Gallic arrogance (an expression, by the way, that has become a tired cliché and not
always
appropriate). Food for thought . . . and correct me if I'm wrong.

Since this is a personal tale, there are a couple of caveats. First of all, readers are advised that this is MY life and MY tale, and in no way “the truth about the French.” It is my reaction to France and the French based on where I come from and who I am and where I am in France and with whom. The book would have been quite different had I been a New Yorker marrying into a rural French family, or a Southerner marrying into an artistocratic French family, or a Catholic or Jewish or Muslim American married to a French Muslim or Jew from the countryside. But that's not the case. I am a WASP (a term our politically correct language still allows), born and raised in the heartland of the United States, married to a Frenchman from a traditional Catholic family, who was born and raised in Paris with parents whose families came from the isolated mountainous Auvergne region of France and the
foie gras
land of Périgord in the southwest.

My husband was born in Paris and is very Parisian, and Parisians, like New Yorkers, are NOT like people
in the provinces. They have a different way of speaking, acting, walking, talking. Like all big-city people, they're in a hurry. They can be cold and nasty but, if you get to know them, can be (almost) warm and funny. Since Paris is made up of little villages, if you stick around your
arrondissement
long enough, you'll get to know the baker, the butcher, and the
fromager
. If you're a tourist passing through, you won't see this “neighborly” aspect of the French. Speaking of French neighbors, I've had a smattering of just about everything, low to high social class (a Marquise!), rich, poor, noisy, quiet. The only thing my various neighbors had in common was their discretion. In Paris most people simply want to avoid each other (although I've heard of entire buildings in which the neighbors exchange recipes and keep each other's children—I keep HOPING I'll end up in a place like that). Note to all those who think I write from the point of view of the American who's never frequented any parts of Paris other than the Latin Quarter or the chic West of Paris, I've lived in the ritzy 16th and upscale Neuilly, the staid 7th, the intellectual 5th, the “normal” 15th, and now the working class going bourgeois bohemian 20th.
Et oui!

And now let's go one further. I'm from Iowa. This is odd, definitely odd,
non
? Even in the States, people would ask me “how I got out.” (Funny, huh? I walked out, barefoot, I tell them.)

When, as sometimes happens, the French accuse me of criticizing them (which they rarely do, since as I mentioned above, they are more used to giving and taking criticism in a culture that values it), I just repeat their own expression “
qui aime bien chatie bien
” (“the more you care about someone, the harder you are on him”).

It's easy, sometimes too easy, to criticize a foreign culture, to use it as a scapegoat. BFT (Before
French Toast
) I did that a LOT. The writing of
French Toast
taught me that before automatically criticizing it's preferable to try to understand—which is what I encourage the newly arrived to do. There definitely was an AFT (After
French Toast
) in which I controlled, or at least tried to, my kneejerk reactions and finally accepted the fact of “when in Rome.” Of course when some bureaucratic jerk is bawling you out or some salesperson is filing her nails instead of serving you, it's hard to stand there and tell yourself to understand. . . .

In case I'm giving you the mistaken impression that writing
French Toast
cleared up all the little mysteries of French culture and that I have gently fallen into a
Pollyannish state of beatitude, let me clarify. The fact that I understand the French concept of
laïcité
doesn't mean that I understand why the French sabotage their own universities with useless strikes, why they're letting the Sorbonne go down the drain, why they want to cut your head off if you stand out, why they don't encourage their young people to stay in, not flee, France, why they tax the rich . . . and the list is long.

I still don't understand (but do admire) how the French can be so comfortable with ambiguity. We Anglos want detailed instructions and procedures. The French don't feel uneasy if there aren't any. For example, one recent weekend my husband and I traveled to Marseilles to attend the year-end concert of the dance school our little seven-year-old granddaughter is in. We were told that it was quite an event, that it would take place in a beautiful old theater in the town, so we packed a change of clothes to look decent and off we went.

When the curtain came up, everyone gasped and clapped as a line of perfectly smiling four-year-olds in pastel colored tutus began to dance. I looked at my program and saw that this was indeed the “class baby” (in English for some odd reason). I then looked around to see if anyone besides me was wondering where on earth the director or the master of ceremonies was. I couldn't fathom that no one was there to explain about the various classes, the music chosen, the dance steps, the progression of the students during the year. When I said
that to my French daughter-in-law, she replied: “But there was a program.”

The point is that the French are not uncomfortable, are even quite comfortable, with what they call
le flou artistique
, which could be translated as an artistic vagueness. It means that they can handle not knowing, but just enjoying what they see. An American, or at least this American, wants more structure, more framework, more information.

At the end of the performance a woman I presumed was the director stepped on stage. I presumed this because she was offered flowers and she then clapped her hands to applaud the performance of her students. At least, I think that's what it was. I'll never know. (And, hey, is it really that important?!)

A lot of changes have come about since I wrote this book. As I said, I changed after writing it simply because investigating topics that disturbed me dramatically dedramatized them. For example, I thought that all kinds of truly horrid things were happening in my kids' classes at school because we parents were not exactly welcomed (see chapter on education) but when I actually got inside a classroom, I was impressed by all the good work going on in there.

Almost all of the material in the book is timeless and I see in rereading it, that if I were to turn the clock back, essentially I'd write the exact same book. Some things that have changed since its writing are that France has gone nonsmoking so I could no longer riff on secondhand smoke, and French parents, after making fun of Americans for their laxity in child-raising, have gone the Dr. Spock way. French children can be as bratty as American children! As far as the strictness in schools that I described in the chapter on education, it still exists in some places—but there's more and more violence in schools (with knives, not guns, since this is France with strict gun laws) and less respect for teachers. The world changed as well. With 9/11 came a lot of hate mail from many Americans who couldn't understand why the French wouldn't side with Bush on Iraq. Things heated up in France as well. Most, not all, of the French were against Bush and against the war in Iraq but didn't take out their disagreement on Americans
personally
. An American journalist friend of mine was asked by the editor of a major U.S. news operation to do in-the-street interviews with Americans who, he was convinced, were being chastized and raked over the coals by the French. When she reported back that there was no “news” on that front, that the Americans she interviewed were pleasantly surprised that there were no tensions, he was incredulous and disappointed. That underscores another cultural difference: France is an old country which has
had many wars leading to dissension among friends and within families. The French are used to debate and disagreement and capable of being in total disaccord with friends but keeping the friendship—once again, it's that quality of being comfortable with ambiguity, the gray area.

But Bush and the Iraq war did indeed give the French a perfect excuse to unleash a latent, generalized anti-Americanism that I had never seen before Bush, and did it ever come out. From the death penalty to the right to own guns, the French were all over us. They were right, we were wrong! (OK, all right already, but did they have to rub it in? Ouch!) And, just as quickly, when Obama won the supreme victory, we found ourselves back in favor. That was nice—I can quit saying I'm Canadian. . . .

Another factor of change since I wrote this book was the election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency of France. The proof that it's easier to write about sex than money since the French have fewer complexes about the first than the second has been proved a thousand times over by the ebullient, iconoclastic Sarkozy. His Ray Bans and Rolexes and yacht trips shook up the French much more than the coming out of President François Mitterrand's secret love child and the view of Mitterrand's
two families—the wife and the mistress—standing together at attention at his funeral. French president Félix Faure died in the arms of his mistress, but the sexual peccadilloes of former French presidents were nothing compared to the way Sarkozy played hard and fast with his money in his
nouveau riche
way. In a country where wealth is best hidden, his ostentation was unseemly, even shocking. Added to that was his breaking the un-spoken pact by which French presidents kept their families in the background and their mistresses off in a corner. Sarkozy very publicly divorced and remarried in office and—who knows—perhaps he'll be the first President to father a child while in office as well.

French people, upon hearing my accent (hard not to), often ask me which country I like best, France or America. Americans who know I've lived in France longer than I've lived in the States ask me if I've “gone native,” become French. To me, the answer is clear: Although I have a French passport and French citizenship and a deep affection for my adopted country, I'm as American as apple pie, as my five ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War, as the Fourth of July, the day I'm writing this introduction, and as Thanksgiving, my favorite American holiday, which I celebrate every year in
France (French turkeys, by the way, are delicious and take half as long to bake!). I must admit I never read much of Gertrude Stein or liked what I read but I know and totally identify with her famous phrase, a phrase that provides a perfect answer to all those questions about whether I've gone native or which country I prefer: “America is my country and Paris is my home-town.”