Every Frenchman Has One

by Olivia de Havilland

  Now, the point is that the French will receive you in their homes, but only if they can do so in the style of Louis the Fourteenth. This means seventeen courses, and nine butlers behind every chair. Most important, it means a marvelous cook in the kitchen. And even in France marvelous cooks are a vanishing breed.

  In other words, if you are invited to dine in a French home, it means either that your hostess is gloriously at home on her range or that she’s finally found a gem of a chef and wants to give a dinner party in a hurry, before she loses him.

  If this last is your case, and you receive that engraved invitation, you are already in trouble. If you’ve managed to translate the French part of the invitation and are congratulating yourself on doing so, your eye at that moment will be struck by the single, ominous English word in the lower left-hand corner. It is the cryptic notation: SMOKING.

  It paralyzes you. What can it possibly mean? Can it be true that the well-bred Gaul simply never smokes publicly in Paris and that you’ve been making your vulgar error in restaurants, taxicabs and hotel lobbies, when you should have been waiting for this private occasion when you are invited to dine and are given to know that at last, behind closed doors and in discreet and genial company, the privilege of smoking can finally be indulged in? No, surely that’s not it. Then perhaps it means that you may not accept the invitation unless you are willing to smoke—that if you do accept you are not only expected but required to smoke. Oh no, it can’t mean that, either. Then the sinister thought crosses your mind that a special kind of smoking is clearly implied. Marijuana? And bring your own, please? Or, possibly, opium. And damn well bring your own hookah.

  The first time I received such an engraved invitation, before Pierre and I were married, I panicked. I called Pierre at his office and asked him weakly if he, himself, had found a similar one among his own mail. Yes, he had, to the same party, of course, since it was from friends of his to whom he’d introduced me.

  “Well,” I asked him, “what does ‘smoking’ mean? You know I’ve given up the habit, and I’d hate to break my vow, even for these charming people.”

  “Oh,” he laughed, “that only refers to what one is supposed to wear!” And then he left the line.

  Well, I sat down heavily after that remark, I can tell you. My word—“what one is supposed to wear”! What in the name of Heaven could a smoking costume possibly be, I wondered. Oh, how unsophisticated, how rudimentary we Americans are, I thought. Never, never have I had a smoking costume. Now, a smoking costume would be…well, for a man, anyway, it would be…one of those velvet jackets, perhaps, that Men of Distinction are always wearing in front of a fire with a glass of aged whiskey in hand and a pipe between the teeth? Or something made of plaid—didn’t the Duke of Windsor wear something of the sort in a recent photo taken in a leisurely, smoking, evening moment? Or instead, perhaps a dressing gown of dark blue velvet, such as the one in which still other ads love to pose their genial cigar-smoking models? Yes, of course, this last was it, and Pierre was expected to attend in a really grand and luxurious formal dressing gown, and I was supposed to wear…There, I was hopelessly stuck. Not a negligee, surely. And I didn’t have one, anyway.

  Demoralized, I called Pierre again.

  “I don’t,” I explained, “have anything to wear that is designed just for smoking. We wear any old thing for puffing away in our backward United States, you know.”

  “That reference is not to what you wear, just to what I wear,” he replied. “You wear a dinner dress, of course,” he continued, “and I wear smoking.”

  “What do you mean, you wear ‘smoking’?” I asked.

  “You know, ‘smoking.’ It’s just the same sort of thing that men wear to a dinner party in the United States,” he elucidated.

  “You mean a dinner jacket?”

  “Yes, yes, black tie—you know, ‘smoking.’ ”

  This time I hung up really full of bewilderment. Well, that beats all, I thought. In the States we think it’s frightfully chic just to say “chic,” and in France it’s clear that a Frenchman just doesn’t know his way around if he doesn’t flash his knowledge of English terms and usages. Black tie, no. Smoking, yes.

  Well, once you get over this first perilous hurdle, you are in for others, and they are usually compounded if you should be invited to the very richest type of Parisian establishment. This, though in the French manner, will not be French, but South American. Don’t believe it when they tell you that the Greeks are the richest people in the world. It’s not true. The very, very richest are the South Americans. And when they live in France they do things as the French do. Pure Louis the Fourteenth. And they always have a marvelous cook.

  All right, you’ve got the “smoking” thing settled, you dress in your best dinner gown and you get into a taxi with your escort and head for the address on the card of invitation. It is probably on the Avenue Foch. Sumptuous. What follows then will be something like what happened to me one night when I set off with Pierre for one of my first grand soirees.

  We entered the foyer of a magnificent and luxurious apartment. Someone took my wrap. We proceeded to the salon. At the entrance were our hostess, our host, and an extremely handsome woman with blue eyes and auburn hair, wearing a yellow velvet Dior gown. Beyond them other guests stood talking, and smoking, I noticed with a certain relief, perfectly ordinary cigarettes. We greeted our hostess, our host, and were presented to the charming lady in yellow. She was, so I understood, the Comtesse de Paris. She shook hands with me graciously and then gave her hand to Pierre. To my astonishment, his heels seemed to snap together and suddenly he bent double. At first I thought he’d suffered a cramp, but then I realized that he had actually bowed, deeply, over the Comtesse’s hand. When we were at a discreet distance I turned on him for an explanation—he who had never, never kissed mine, had never so much as nodded over it, either, much less done a jackknife at the very sight of it. The Comtesse de Paris, he told me, would be Queen of France if France were a monarchy, and it is the custom to accord her the courtesies which are traditionally hers.

  I thought that over, and democrat though I am, loyal citizen of a republic though I be, I had to admit that this reasoning of the modern Republican French was very nice indeed. Very attractive, very sensitive. Just as it should be. I then turned to other guests and began to converse.

  Now, the guest of honor on this particular occasion was a fellow American. None other than Fleur Cowles, in fact. But minutes went by and she’d not arrived. Couriers eventually brought news to the hostess that a grave misadventure had befallen Fleur at the Ritz. She was locked in the bathroom and could not get out. However, the entire repair force of the hotel was working on the situation and messages assured the hostess that the crews of carpenters, plumbers, and locksmiths would be able to release her at any moment from her sarcophagus. Eventually, I noticed a quickening of the atmosphere, a sudden new radiance in the room, and looking toward the entrance of the salon I saw Fleur, dazzling in turquoise lace, greet her host and hostess. She then passed to the Comtesse de Paris and promptly fell to the floor. However, she recovered with extraordinary rapidity and marvelous grace and carried on, as did everyone near her, with the most astonishing aplomb, as if nothing untoward had occurred.

  Then with a sensation as of a thousand elevators plunging at five hundred miles an hour down through the hollow void of my interior, I realized what Fleur had done. She had curtsied. Curtsied! And no doubt about it, every single one of the ladies in the room must have done the same thing. Every single one except one. Me.

  I will never, never get over it. The cold, hideous realization that I’d let down my country, that in front of the French, the South Americans, the multi-nationed guests, I, and I alone, had failed to render the courtesy that was expected of me was enough to embalm me on the spot for my sarcophagus. Somehow I pulled myself together and determined to make a brave face throughout the rest of the evening, although it loomed before me an endless, accusing witness of m
y appalling disgrace.

  When we entered the baronial dining hall and were seated at the long, magnificent table, I began to feel a little better, although I was placed really perilously close to the Comtesse de Paris. She was, in fact, in the position of honor directly opposite her host, on her immediate right was a French general who looked exactly like Charles Boyer, and immediately next to him, alas, was me. I mean I.

  However, as each splendid course was served, and as each appropriate wine glass among the series before my place was filled by a footman at my right, I did really begin to feel a little bit at ease. I talked to my neighbors and listened with grave, responsive attention to everything the Comtesse said. Just as I was willing to live again, a most appalling thing happened.

  Suddenly, on my left, between the general and me, a white-gloved hand thrust a silver tray. On it was a single, huge, bulbous sort of crystal vase. In the vase was a deep red liquid. And at this moment, somewhere above my head, a stentorian voice rang out with some sort of sonorous pronouncement. It seemed to me that a hush fell upon the table and that every eye was observing me. I looked at that white-gloved hand, at that silver tray, at that curious curving vase like a giant brandy snifter, and wondered what I could possibly be expected to do about it. As the minutes ticked by it occurred to me that I was just supposed to admire it. So I did. The hand, the tray, the glass, remained. Then I thought perhaps I was supposed to sniff, so I did. The hand, the tray, the glass, remained. Desperately, wildly, I looked up and gasped, “Merci,” just to indicate to the bewigged and begloved gentleman that I’d already received the very maximum of pleasure from admiring and sniffing and that he could now take the tray and the glass on, on, on—anywhere at all. Mercifully, the hand, the tray, the glass, were finally withdrawn. I watched them, fascinated, as they rounded the table and were presented to the lady across from me. She simply took the glass and placed it beyond her plate. A second later she sipped from it.

  This time I really did want to die. There was no longer any point in living. I would have died right then and there, too, except that I realized it would be the summit of my gaucheries if I did so.

  I turned to my general, and because of his nice, warm Charles Boyer eye, I said, “You know, I really am an American in Paris. When that enormous glass was presented to me I simply could not imagine what it was for. I’d never seen one before in all my life.”

  He smiled, and then made of me a friend forever. He said, “Now that you know, would you like another one just like it?”

  He signaled the footman to bring me another glass exactly like the one I’d so recently refused. This time I took it and did just what I’d seen the lady opposite me do. It isn’t often that you get a second chance in life, and that French general made me feel I’d never messed up the first one.

  When the sumptuous repast was over, and we were all in the salon once again, I felt so much better that I really did have a rather wonderful time. You couldn’t say I was reincarnated, but I was, at least, revivified.

  Then, as if she’d forgiven me for my two fiascos, who should come over to me, as the evening wore on, but the radiant and gracious Comtesse de Paris. She said that she understood that I was soon to marry a Frenchman, and that she not only wished me happiness in my marriage, but also in my new life in France. I was deeply touched by her gesture, and as we shook hands and said good night, I felt that at last I’d been fully redeemed. I followed her with grateful, misty eyes as she passed from guest to guest. Then I saw, with horror, one lady after another drop to the floor in a deep, graceful, nobly executed curtsy of adieu.

  Well, since then, I’ve been practicing and I’ve done quite nicely, thank you, by the King and Queen of Greece, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Princess Alice of England. I’ve been on the alert, too, and only the other day I was brilliantly ready. I met Alexander of Yugoslavia in the Rue Pierre Charron, and I want you to know that when our hands met I made a beautiful, first-class, distinguished knee bender. I do wish, though, he’d not been on the sidewalk and I’d not been crossing the street at the time. Why, oh, why did we have to meet just as I reached the gutter?

  The first time I flew back to California to make a film after my marriage, I received, on the day of my arrival in Hollywood, an invitation from some very good friends of Pierre’s and mine to spend my first evening with them at dinner, together with other mutual friends whom they’d asked to join them. It was a delightful and joyful reunion for me with people I’d not seen for some time. In the gaiety of the moment, although it was four in the morning in Paris, my host decided to telephone Pierre, and placed a call by the transatlantic cable, which would assure clear and perfect communication.

  While we were all at the table, I heard the telephone ring, and a few moments later the butler came into the dining room and whispered into my host’s ear. Since I was directly on his left and have 20-20 hearing, I heard the butler state, “The operator says she’s been ringing the Paris number for ten minutes and there’s no response.”

  “Tell her to try again in an hour,” replied my host, a look of panic spreading over his face. Then, since he was a very successful studio executive, experienced at meeting every sort of disastrous crisis, an expression of confident geniality quickly replaced the panic, and he announced to us all that the cable was not yet free and that the operator had not yet been able to reach Paris.

  I knew exactly what my American host was thinking: That French devil, the first night his wife’s away, he’s out on the town. Knowing perfectly well that that French devil, the first night his wife was away, was spread-eagled and unconscious all over our double bed, darn glad to have it to himself, I observed that I was sure there’d be no response until midnight California time, nine in the morning Paris time, when the maître d’hôtel would come into the kitchen to heat the croissants. Since we’d just installed ourselves in a house with only one phone, which was on the first floor, and since my husband was asleep on the second floor and the domestics on the third, no one would hear that phone until they were awake and perpendicular. A flicker of tender pity gleamed in my friend’s eye, and I realized that the more I might say, the more pathetic my case would appear to him. I was not only the betrayed wife, I was the duped wife.

  Well, since I was myself still geared to Paris time, I’d been up without sleep about twenty-four hours, and when 11 P.M. California time came around, much as I wanted to talk to Pierre as he crunched his croissants, I reeled off to bed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. At my host’s house, however, my husband was on the line at midnight (9 A.M. in Paris), choking on his croissants, furious that his wife hadn’t remained to talk to him and, forgetting the difference in time, furious that I’d been up until eight in the morning. Darkly suspicious he was. My first night back in the States and I’d been carousing about until dawn rose simultaneously over Montmartre and Mount Wilson.

  I must say that I understood my host’s apprehension and misapprehension very well indeed, because before I learned better I too thought, as most Americans do, that infidelity is as common to the French husband as café complet.

  I remember that during my first weeks as a newly engaged, new resident of Paris, I received from a malevolent Irishman a copy of Nancy Mitford’s The Blessing, which concerns an Englishwoman who marries a Frenchman and discovers that, although he obliges her beautifully in the evenings, he spends his afternoons with his mistress. The book shook me. At each fresh example of the husband’s perfidy, I exclaimed to Pierre: “So this is the way a Frenchman spends his honeymoon!” “Is this the way a French husband toys with the tea hour?” “Is this…, etc.”

  Pierre was enraged. Finally he threatened to throw the book out the window, howling, “No, eet ees not true about Gaston, Alain, Georges, Robert, Raymond, Thierry, Jean-Pierre, Jean-Claude, or Jean-Paul!” Then he ran out of breath. I was enheartened, but not wholly convinced. So I studied all our friends—Gaston, Alain, Georges, Robert, Raymond, Thierry, and all three Jeans—and found that it was clearly true,
none of them was unfaithful to his wife, and obviously had no desire ever to be so.

  Somewhat reassured though I was about my own personal destiny, I felt a curious sensation of dismay and bewilderment about Frenchmen as a whole, and confided to André Maurois one day at tea that I was rather shocked by the discrepancy between the reputation of the French husband and the low incidence of infidelity that really existed chez lui.

  Having agreed that the average Frenchman much preferred to be faithful to his wife, Maurois reflected for a moment and decided that the reputation must once have been well-founded—“in the romantic period,” he said, “over a century ago, when the life of the feelings was given so much importance, and when the poetic imagination was accorded so much expression. Nowadays the style is different because conditions are different. The French husband no longer has the leisure that his inheritance used to assure him, because the last two wars have wiped out the old French institution of the carefully nurtured and passed-on family fortune, and almost every modern Frenchman must therefore work. He marries young and has his children promptly. And you know,” concluded Maurois, “to have a mistress, a man must have the money for it—and the time—and the energy!”

  With Pierre that evening I did a little careful checking. The family fortune had been thoroughly wiped out by 1946. He must have been bewildered by my expression of pure delight. He was puzzled but pleased when I myself took The Blessing and threw it out the window. After all, it was about the rarest type of modern Frenchman—a marquis, who had the time, the money, and the energy!

  Another thing about which I’d had no instruction before I landed at Orly for the first time was French medicine. It’s a world of its own. When I got off the plane on that initial visit I did so with my own bottle of paregoric, manufactured in the United States, clutched in my hand. This was for the disaster which my friends at home had said would follow if I should have the misfortune to drink the tap water. It came in handy because, although I didn’t drink the water, I did brush my teeth with it. Anyway, the point is, I brought with me Stateside paregoric. I also brought with me American aspirin, American mercurochrome and American Band-Aids. I wasn’t going to trust the French products, even if they happened to have such articles, which I very much doubted.