French Toast Read online

  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.

  At the train station, I furiously asked the name of the person in charge. “Just write to the station chief,” the man behind the computer console told me. “He doesn’t have a name?” I queried incredulously, knowing I would never get it in any case. This ability to hide behind anonymity makes people perfectly irresponsible, and you, the customer, end up paying for their errors.

  In line with this is the personalization of the salesperson-client relationship. There is none of this “Business is business—I’ll serve anyone who will give me his money” attitude. It is much more a question of “Do I like her face?” If you’re on the right side of this equation, this has its distinct advantages.

  One cold winter morning, I was going to give a class way out in the southern Paris suburb of Massy Palaiseau. As I was driving along, my little vehicle began stopping, to the tune of honks and gesticulations from the people behind me. After a few more stops and starts, I managed to get off the road and made a beeline for the nearest garage. In the first garage, I asked for the owner, who came out, diagnosed the problem, told me he couldn’t help, and directed me to a neighboring garage. There I found a young mechanic to whom I explained that I was on the way to a class and was probably going to lose my job if I didn’t show up, and couldn’t he please do something for me?

  Was it the sincerity of my tone? Was it my American accent? Was it that I was putting my destiny into his hands? Whatever it was, he instantly took an interest in my case, jumped in a truck to go find the parts he didn’t have on hand, rushed back within five minutes, installed the broken piece of machinery, and had me ready to go in record time.

  The point is that if you can get someone personally interested in your predicament, you will often get amazing results. No one had scheduled me into that mechanic’s day, but he took off the time to do my job because he got involved in it. It even became a matter of honor for him to get my car repaired fast and get me on my way.

  And while we’re on the subject, I can report that I just got back from an exhausting stint of Christmas shopping. Every single salesperson I met was charming, amiable, courteous, wrapping my gifts with the utmost ease and taste. (The whole thing was expensive as all get-out, but that’s a fact of life in France; you finally get used to it and bid your hard-earned money good-bye with nary a thought.) It’s easy to focus on the negative, but the positive also exists, and as usual, when things go well in France, they go exquisitely well (which is why I have a theory of “magic days” that can only happen in France).

  The deal is, I realized, that in France standardized sales behavior does not exist. This results in highly unpredictable situations, but I can think of one distinct advantage. You don’t get the “Hi, my name is Joan and I’ll be your waitress for the evening” treatment. You may have an adorable waiter (I’ve had many more professional, well-trained, pleasant waiters than the opposite), a snotty waiter, or something between the two, but at least he’ll be himself.

  So now that I have figured all this out, I know that all I need to do is count my change in every store on the street where I live, inure myself to the idea that the customer is not always right, and, last but not least, remember never, but never, to talk about money. It’s dirty, you know.

  Interview with Philippe

  HARRIET: French people are always saying that Americans are materialistic. What does that mean? Why don’t the French think that they’re materialistic?

  PHILIPPE: The difference is that in France, it’s vulgar to talk about money. Talking about money is much worse than talking about sex.

  HARRIET: As a Frenchman, doesn’t it irritate you to be prey to the petty cheating of little shopkeepers? How can you explain this cheating on a small scale?

  PHILIPPE: You’re American. For them, you’re supposed to be rich.

  HARRIET: How about you? You’re French, and I’ve seen you get the same treatment.

  PHILIPPE: You just yell. That’s the end of it.

  HARRIET: So that doesn’t shock you?

  PHILIPPE: Shopkeepers are made to steal from other people. Otherwise, they would be professors of ancient Sanskrit at the Sorbonne.

  HARRIET: Oh Lord, the caste system . . . okay, why do people cheat on their taxes?

  PHILIPPE: Screwing the state doesn’t count.

  The Parisians

  After attacking (some might say literally) the subjects of food, sex, the Frenchwoman, and French attitudes toward money, how about a subject that fascinates everyone who visits Paris: the Parisians. The five subjects have one thing in common: They’re all hard for a foreigner to figure out.

  It was one of those wonderful Parisian evenings when the air is soft and it’s perfect to sit outside on the terrace of a restaurant and watch the world go by. My husband and I and an American friend of ours were savoring the food and the evening when suddenly my husband, irritated by a fox terrier who was getting too close for comfort, turned to its owner and, wearing his most disagreeable expression, ordered her, “Take your dog and put him as far away from me as you can.” Answer of dog owner: “You could ask in a nicer tone of voice.” My husband: “I’m not nice.” The dog owner: “Grossier personnage” (this is a standard insult, which means something like “boor” or “vulgar person”).

  I don’t like them, but I’m used to these little restaurant scenes (there are so many dogs in restaurants that it’s hard to avoid a clash). Nonetheless, I could see that our friend was getting a bit embarrassed. “Would you see a scene like this in the States?” my husband asked him, much more relaxed once he had bawled the lady out and the dog was no longer a problem. “No,” replied our friend. “First of all, you wouldn’t see a dog in a restaurant and, second of all, you’d probably get a knife pulled on you the way you were talking to her.”

  My husband, a true Parisian, was perfectly satisfied, even delighted. He had attained his goal, which was to get rid of the dumb dog which was ruining his dinner. He didn’t care if the dog’s owner hated him.

  “Welcome to Paris,” I told my friend.

  As a WASP, and a Midwesterner to boot, I view fights as things to be avoided. What I realized after two decades of living with my French husband is that for a Parisian, a day is no fun if there’s no dispute. There would be nothing to talk about over the dinner table at night. If you have a knock-down-drag-out with someone—another driver, a salesperson—you have fuel for a story in which you emerge the victor and the audience is wowed. This has been going on since the Gauls in Caesar’s time; it’s really nothing new. (Surely, French writer Jean Cocteau was thinking of a Parisian when he described a Frenchman as “an Italian in a bad mood.”)

  There’s no lack of occasions for getting into arguments in Paris. Dogs are high on the list, either because they have pooped in your path, or because they are going to poop in your path, or because they are licking your leg as you try to digest a meal. On the other hand, a dog can be a man or woman’s best pal in Paris. One woman told me that her world changed the day she bought her fox terrier. Before, she had been invisible, even with her two young children in tow. With the dog, people stopped her in the streets, asked her what kind it was, how old it was, told her how cute it was. (They ignored her kids.)

  Parisians may be slobs when it comes to letting their dogs poop all over the pavement, but, paradoxically, they are very interested in the cleanliness of their city, forking out one thousand dollars per head per year for it. Hence, some six thousand city employees clean the city in one way or another twenty-four hours a day. And, a friend told me, this includes Christmas Day, when she was astonished to hear the clatter of the garbage truck.

  Many quarrels, I have noticed, revolve around the car, one of the primary reasons for the bad humor of Parisians. Before I started driving, I thought of Paris as an almost gentle place to live, a place of radiant beauty. I walked on a cloud, with my head in the air, admiring centuries-
old buildings and penthouse apartments (not a good idea, I found, after slipping in dog doo). After I got up the nerve to drive, though, I discovered a whole new world, and all the various possibilities for disputes arising from the possession of a vehicle. Paris must be a lovely place to live in if you have a chauffeur.

  Of course, a real Parisian, like my husband, thrives on the thrill of driving in Paris. He heads into the nolane traffic mess around the Arc de Triomphe with glee. Whenever I can, I avoid the “Circle from Hell.” When I can’t, well, I’ve learned to fend for myself and actually enjoy watching the Parisians as they both drive and chat on car phones, file their nails, smoke big fat cigars, and flirt with one another. Why not?

  I discovered that, among other things, there seems to be an unwritten rule stating that a Parisian puts his car where he wants to when he wants to. It can block a garage or another car or an entry reserved for ambulances. None of these obstacles pose a problem for the Parisian. On one typical morning, my husband discovered that his car was blocked by an inconsiderate soul who had double-parked his van, locked the doors, and totally vanished. What can one do? My husband got his revenge by taking out a tube of greasy lipstick (which he keeps with him for this purpose) and scrawling something unprintable on the person’s windshield. He then proceeded to go to work . . . on the Métro.

  As I live in a neighborhood of nouveaux riches, this means that not only do the people have all the Parisian characteristics of aggressivity and hostility and general impoliteness but, on top of that, since they are newly rich, they think that anything worth having can be bought. Manners not being a commodity, there’s no reason to have any!