Talk to the Snail

by Stephen Clarke

  MARCEL MARCEAU (‘ ’)

  The French have long forgotten who Marcel Marceau is, but his legacy lives on. So when you want to pay, there’s no need to call the waiter or waitress over to your table and explain this. You simply catch his or her eye and mime writing something on a notebook, while mouthing ‘l’addition’ (the bill, pronounced ‘addi-sio’). This means, I want to pay. Or you can just hold up your credit card with a willing look on your face. This will bring the waiter over with a little credit-card machine. Surely this is the biggest advantage of the chip and pin system – no more chasing waiters when they disappear into a back room to email your credit-card details to a crime syndicate. In France, they’ll usually come over and let you type in your pin number. And they’ll even look away while you do it.

  32 At the end of this chapter, you’ll find a few essential French words and phrases for the linguistically challenged who would like to get served. Use those and you’re in with a fighting chance.

  ‘Hands above the waist, s’il vous plaît, Marcel.’ Jean-Philippe (right)

  gives etiquette lessons to new residents of Paris’s arty Latin Quarter.

  THE

  10TH

  COMMANDMENT

  Tu Seras Poli

  THOU SHALT BE POLITE

  (and simultaneously rude)

  THOU SHALT BE POLITE

  (and simultaneously rude)

  THE FRENCH ARE GENIUSES AT BEING POLITE WHILE SIMUL-taneously insulting you. You’ve never been put down until you’ve been put down by a Frenchman. And they do it with such aplomb. They can wish you a good day, call you an idiot and send you sprawling into the verbal gutter before you can even open your mouth to reply.

  I was once queuing at a famous French restaurant that doesn’t take reservations because it doesn’t need to. A chic-looking American expat, with a smug ‘yes I live here’ look on his face, sidled to the front of the line and quietly informed the maître d’ that he’d reserved a table for two.

  ‘Reserved a table, Monsieur?’ the maître d’ replied for the whole queue to hear. ‘We don’t take reservations. Is Monsieur sure he didn’t call the McDonald’s on the corner by mistake?’

  He got a big laugh, and presumably lost a customer for life, but couldn’t resist the temptation to get in an insult that put the pretentious interloper firmly in his place. The French may claim to live in a classless republic, but they are very keen on keeping everyone in their place. And politeness, combined with extreme rudeness, is often the best way to do it.

  Before they insult you, though, you will see nothing but impeccable manners. At a time when English-speakers all introduce each other by their first names, the French still call one another Monsieur or Madame. One way to attract the attention of a waiter or an evasive sales assistant is to call out ‘Monsieur!’ Yes, the customer is having to say ‘sir’ to get served. The world can be turned on its head once the French start using their politeness on you.

  A Bad Début

  One Saturday morning, at a slightly snooty cheese shop near my home in Paris, I saw a woman get sadistically put in her place by a man in a white overall.

  I was being attended to by the female half of the husband-and-wife crémerie team, and was ogling some small decorative goat’s cheeses – a selection of round pats of fresh white cheese sprinkled with black pepper, encrusted in sultanas or coated with herbs. But the viciousness of the snub was shocking enough to distract me from my drooling.

  The victim, a middle-aged lady, bustled into the shop, already rifling through her handbag for her purse. Probably in a rush to get home to give her kids their lunch.

  ‘Un litre de lait frais demi-écrémé, s’il vous plaît,’ she said. A bottle of semi-skimmed milk.

  The male co-owner exchanged a look with his wife, who raised her eyebrows in sympathy. ‘Bonjour,’ he said to the woman.

  ‘Un litre de lait frais demi-écrémé, s’il vous plaît,’ she repeated, getting out her cash.

  ‘Bonjour,’ the owner repeated, a little louder this time.

  ‘Je voudrais juste un litre de lait,’ she said, changing tack and still not fully realizing that there was a problem. She was explaining that she only wanted milk, and was not splurging on the expensive cheeses, because cheese-shop owners sometimes think that it is beneath their dignity to sell unfermented dairy products, especially semi-skimmed ones.

  ‘Don’t you ever wish people a good day, Madame?’ the cheese seller asked. Subtext: I am not a servant, I am a noble purveyor of fine foods, I have a house in the country and a cleaning lady who irons my overalls, so you’re not getting your piffling bottle of milk until you say hello.

  ‘Oh, sorry, yes, of course, bonjour,’ the woman said, blushing and apologizing. She looked expectantly across at the cheese seller. She was still in a hurry, still hoping to buy some milk and get back home before the weekend was over.

  ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ the cheese man said. ‘What would you like?’

  The customer had to repeat her request for a bottle of milk, and then wait while the shopkeeper counted out her change and put the plastic bottle in a bag, ‘because we like to treat our customers comme il faut’. He saw absolutely no contradiction between what he was doing and what he was saying.

  At last the woman was allowed to leave the shop, with a loud ‘au revoir’ from both husband and wife ringing in her reddened ears.

  I really should have walked out, but I’d been sent on a last-minute errand to get the cheese for a lunch party, so I meekly made my selection, paid, and wished them a polite ‘bonne journée’.

  By the way, I must emphasize a key aspect of the previous scene – it was a clash between two French people. We non-French people often think that the French are trying to insult us because we’re foreign, but it’s not true. They’re like that with each other, too.

  Coming Through, with a Pout

  The French are experts with their elbows. Sometimes, walking along a pavement or trying to shop in a crowded supermarket, you might think they were all educated at an American football university. However, they must be the only people on earth capable of shoving you unceremoniously out of the way with perfect manners. And all because of one word: pardon. In theory, you are meant to say ‘pardon’ (pronounced ‘pardo’, ending with a pout) before shoving anyone or instead of doing so, but in practice you say it as you shove.

  In Paris, the pavements can get very narrow, and are often partially blocked by empty rubbish bins and the little metal posts that physically prevent drivers from parking on the pavement (it’s the only way to stop them, short of minefields). Anyway, you often have to weave in and out of obstacles as you walk. This may involve waiting while someone else squeezes between, say, a wheelie bin and a shop window. In which case, they’re supposed to, and often do, say ‘pardon’. Some people, though, simply blunder forwards mumbling ‘pardon, pardon’ for form’s sake and not worrying if they have to crush a few toes or force someone out into the road. They’ve respected the convention, so everything is all right.

  This is not a totally risk-free strategy. An overt blunderer might come up against someone who retaliates with a scathing reminder of the need to do things comme il faut. A person who has been shoved, or, if they are very good at retaliation, who is about to be shoved, may express their disapproval with another key word: franchement. This, pronounced ‘frONsh-ma’, is a lot like the English ‘honestly’, but is usually said with a look of such crushing scorn – shared if possible with everyone else within ten yards – that you’re transported back to the seventeenth century, and it feels as if someone has just farted in the presence of the Sun King. Franchement, such a person does not belong in Paris. They should be banished to some barbarous wilderness like Brittany or America . . .

  To Kiss or Not to Kiss?

  The range of polite French words and gestures is huge. At the Parisian company where I used to work, a trip down to the coffee machines on the ground floor was more socially complex than taking tea with a
Samurai.

  If you encountered someone in the corridor or the lift, first of all you had to decide whether you’d seen them before.

  If you hadn’t, you would say ‘bonjour’ anyway, because France is a polite country. If you had seen them before, they were either a ‘bonjour’ acquaintance (that is, people you know but not all that well), or you were on more 33 familiar ‘salut’ (‘hi’) terms.

  In either case, two men would have to shake hands. Women were more complicated (as is often the case in France).

  If there was a woman involved in the encounter, cheek-kissing might or might not be necessary. ‘Salut’ women would always expect a kiss. ‘Bonjour’ women might not, but then they might not expect a handshake either. Shaking the hand of a woman you know can feel a bit butch. I would often meet my immediate boss, a woman, walking with one or two of the (male) directors. I would shake the directors’ hands, saying ‘salut, Jacques’ to one of them (because he was a ‘hi’ kind of director), and ‘bonjour, Monsieur’ to another (whom I knew less well). I would say ‘salut’ to my boss, but not shake her hand because I knew her too well to do that but not well enough to kiss her.

  Sometimes it was easier to duck into the nearest office, shake the hand of the bemused occupant, and wait until the directors and my boss had gone.

  Most of the above also applies when bumping into neighbours or acquaintances in the street. You have to put everyone you meet into a category – handshake, kiss, ‘bonjour’ or ignore. If you have a meeting with someone – a bank manager, estate agent, or even a doctor – it is polite to shake hands. If your estate agent starts kissing you, you know you’re in trouble.

  When meeting someone for the first time, the good news is that the French really do say ‘enchanté’. It feels beautifully old-fashioned to tell someone you’re enchanted to meet them, especially if you really are. Looking into someone’s eyes and telling them they’re enchanting is so much more exciting than a quick ‘hi, how ya doin?’ And if you’re not enchanted to meet them, it feels deliciously hypocritical to tell them you are. It’s a no-lose situation.

  The big question when meeting a woman for the first time is, kiss or no kiss? Some men chicken out of this by only kissing women they fancy, or women whom they have to kiss if they don’t want to annoy someone (e.g. their girlfriend’s best friend or sister). The general rule for a man meeting a woman, or a woman meeting anyone, is this: if the other person is a friend of a friend, close relative of a friend, under the age of thirty, at a party of any kind, someone you might like to kiss more amply later on, or just looks as if they’re expecting a kiss, you have to kiss them or they’ll think you’re a cold, unfriendly Anglo-Saxon.

  If you think you’ve made the wrong decision and missed a kiss, you can always put things right by kissing when you say goodbye, which is a friendly way of saying that now you know each other better, it’s OK to get politely physical.

  What Do I Do with My Lips?

  If you do want to kiss, there is a definite technique to it.

  In Paris, cheek-kissing, or faire la bise, involves two ‘mwas’ with little or no actual lip–cheek contact but an audible smack of the lips. Left cheeks first, then right.34 The no-lip-contact rule is important unless you are very closely acquainted. Someone you don’t know all that well may not think that your relationship extends to smearing your bodily fluids on their face – the complete opposite of a ‘French kiss’, in fact.

  Even teenagers manage to control themselves in this respect. Boys will brush cheeks with girls in a way that seems to negate the presence of any hormones in their bloodstream at all. These same teenage boys often shake each other’s hands like old men, unless they’re trying to be cool and do the rapper’s hand-slapping and fist-touching thing. (Most French boys like to think they were born in the Bronx.)

  Men kiss each other pretty rarely, outside of gay districts, family reunions and artists’ soirées. As a male, one of the dangers of being accepted as a member of a French family is that you may be required to rub cheeks 35 with the clan’s male members.

  If you do get on kissing terms, you have to hope that there aren’t too many unshaven men in the family. Since coming to live in France, I have developed great admiration for women with unshaven partners, who have to put up with this hairy scraping every day of their lives.

  Outside Paris, by the way, the kissing ritual can vary. ‘En province’, as the Parisians condescendingly call anywhere not within about a hundred kilometres of the Eiffel Tower, people often give four kisses. The Parisians say this is because their life is so dull that they have to find ways to fill the time.

  To conclude: imagine if you can the following scene. It’s eleven a.m. in an office building out in the four-kiss zone. Two groups of three female workers meet in the corridor on their way to a coffee machine. By the time they’ve finished kissing each other, it’s lunchtime.

  Which brings me to the next complication . . .

  Bon Bons

  Even after the business of kissing and shaking hands has been dealt with, you are by no means out of the forêt. When you part company, don’t think you can get away with ‘au revoir’. That would be much too easy. If you know people well and they’re below, say, fifty, you can say ‘salut’ both as hello and goodbye. But that’s not enough – you also have to remember what time it is. As you part company, you have to wish the other person a good whatever period of the day it is.

  At the start of the day you can wish them ‘bonne journée’ (have a good day), or ‘bonne matinée’ (have a good morning). Later on in the morning, ‘bonne journée’ will still be OK, but a ‘bonne fin de matinée’ (have a good end of the morning) is optional. If it is just before lunch, then ‘bon appétit’ is of course obligatory.

  After lunch, everyone must be wished ‘bonne après-midi’ (have a good afternoon). Later on in the afternoon, at some hazy time around dusk, you have to start greeting people with ‘bonsoir’ instead of ‘bonjour’, and leaving them with a ‘bonne fin d’après midi’ or ‘bonne fin de journée’. And if you’re at work and it’s just before going-home time, a ‘bonne soirée’ (have a good evening) will be appreciated.

  The politeness game is even more varied outside the office.

  Some cafés now get their staff to say ‘bonne dégustation’, literally ‘good tasting’. And it is common to wish someone happiness whatever they’re doing, from ‘bon ski’, ‘bon film’ and ‘bonne promenade’ (have a nice walk) to semi-absurd things like ‘bon coiffeur’ (have a good time at the hairdresser’s).

  One of my favourites is ‘bonne continuation’, a formal way of wishing someone luck and happiness with whatever they’re up to when you leave them. A taxi driver might say it, or someone you’ve been talking to on the bus. I’ve often wished I could walk in accidentally on two people making love, just so that I could discreetly close the door again, leaving them with a polite ‘bonne continuation’.

  When you’re out in the evening, the whole Japanese-tea-ceremony side of French life comes into play again. Anyone you meet will need a ‘bonsoir’ (unless you’re on ‘salut’ terms, of course), and if you part company, they’ll need a ‘bonne soirée’.

  When saying goodbye after an aperitif, restaurant, film or some other event that might not be the end of the ‘soirée’, people usually wish each other ‘bonne fin de soirée’. It is quite chic to do this late on in the evening because it implies that you, and the recipient of the farewell, are night owls and probably off to some late-night champagne celebration.

  It’s important to bear in mind that anyone saying ‘bonne nuit’ (goodnight) before they are actually heading towards their bedroom will be laughed at. Though after a day of remembering how to greet people, you might feel that bedtime can’t come soon enough.

  What’s the Délai?

  In France, a woman can – or rather should – be late for any kind of rendezvous, otherwise the man will think that she’s too easy. It also avoids the embarrassment of turning up on t
ime and seeing that the man is late. These days it is usual for a man to send a text message saying that he’ll be a few minutes late. This is not only polite, it also helps him to find out exactly how late the woman is going to be.

  In business, being late is less a form of impoliteness than a way of showing how special you are. If you do any business in French, when you first learn that the French for ‘deadline’ is ‘délai’, you laugh. The joke soon wears thin, though, when you realize that they’re just being honest.

  How late you are for a meeting is a measure of your importance. If you arrive on time, it probably means that you haven’t just left a previous meeting, which suggests in turn that no one is interested in your opinions. Basically, get there ‘à l’heure’ and you’re a nobody.

  I’ve sometimes found that your ‘right to lateness’ is in proportion to the size of the diary you lug around with you. People may even snub electronic diaries in favour of a huge appointment diary, the implication being that an electronic one is physically not big enough to contain all their appointments.

  There are, of course, limits to lateness. In my experience of dealing with the French, a boss can get away with strolling into a meeting twenty minutes late, smiling and apologizing hypocritically for their retard. Lower ranks – the cattle of the meeting – should be there about five minutes late, preferably armed with a coffee so as to fill the time before the decision-maker arrives, and to make sure they get enough caffeine into their system to stay awake during the interminable discussions that are about 36 to begin.

  However, if you have an appointment with anyone who holds your fate in their hands – a doctor, say, or a solicitor, bank manager, estate agent or absolutely anyone working for the state – be there on time. They can be late, because they’re important, but if you dare to do the same you’re implying that they’re not important, and your fate is sealed.