Rue Rude

Adieu à tout ça

It's time to say goodbye to Rue Rude for a while. I am leaving my Paris home, a bit unexpectedly, for a long sojourn in my native land.

If you like, you can come with me to California.

It's going to be weird.

"The emigrant's destiny: The foreign country has not become home, but home has become foreign."

        --Alfred Polger (d. 1955), Der Emigrant und die Heimat

Emigranten-Schicksal: Die Fremde ist nicht Heimat geworden. Aber die Heimat Fremde.

 

Admiring the "mirrored wardrobes" (armoires à glace)

Waiting in line patiently at the new terminal at CDG.  The counter agent is tired, I'm the last person before she leaves for the day. Her friend has already gotten off and has come by to wait for her as she finishes with me. I have three suitcases and you're only allowed two. Oh no! I think. She'll be crabby and  in a hurry. There goes 150 euros in excess baggage fees, plus waiting in line at the Air France office to pay the fee, then waiting in line again to hand over and ticket the baggage....

"An American world championship football team is here," the other agent says chattily to her friend, who is checking my passport and seat assignment. "American football, you know, not real football! And they call it a World Championship! But the men are so handsome-- real armoires à glace*, huge, and so goodlooking!"

"Are they on my plane?" I said, interested.

"Where are you going, Madame? ...No, they are not on your plane. C'est dommage! Anyway, they are all younger than I am [implying,"too young for you, as well"!]."

"One can always admire!" I said.

The ticket agents both laughed. Mine took my last suitcase, deftly fit the label around the handle, and sent it onto the conveyor belt.  "Here is your boarding pass, Madame. Have a good flight!"

No extra luggage fee, and when I got on the plane, I discovered we were in prime seats.

*Mirrored wardrobes-- this is slang for a really huge guy with wide shoulders

Bordeaux for breakfast

In Germany, I discovered while living there, you cannot get water at your table in a restaurant unless you pay for it. Das geht nicht!

This was a constant irritation for someone who grew up in the South, where a large pitcher of ice tea comes around for free refills after your first glass, and a big tumbler of ice water is the first thing any waiter brings you.

I spent my first couple of years in France just ordering mineral water, out of fear. It took me a while to figure out that you can always get tap water. Just ask for "une carafe d'eau."

This morning, I went to the cafe around the corner from here with an old American acquaintance from college who is in town. We both ordered the ridiculously expensive breakfast of bread, freshly squeezed orange juice, croissants and coffee, because I actually eat breakfast every day and feel cranky if I can't get it. My friend ordered in French, to my surprise.

"Et un verre d'eau, s'il vous plaît," I added to the waiter.

"Quoi, un Bordeaux?" asked the waiter, looking surprised. "À cette heure du matin?" [At this time of the morning?]

The waiter knows me perfectly well, but my friend didn't know that, and gave me a funny look-- Was he being rude?

He came back with the carafe and put two wine glasses on the table, then with a straight face held out the carafe out to us with both hands for inspection, as if it were a wine bottle. I nodded approval, and he poured the water formally into both glasses.

It's little things like this that make me love France.

The unlucky skiers

Winter in Paris is usually mild and drizzly-- restaurants leave their cafe tables outside because you can sit there all year long. But after a weird warm spell at Christmas, it has suddenly gotten very cold this week and it's nine below zero today (that's in the teens in Fahrenheit, I believe; I've never completely made the adjustment to Celsius). It snowed all over France this week, although not in Paris.

One of my friends told me about some friends of hers who went skiing last week. It was so warm that there was no snow, and they couldn't ski a single day. Then on their way home to Paris, it started snowing, and the autoroute became so dangerous that it was shut down with the traffic still on it. They had to spend 20 hours in their car.

"Yes," said some workers who came to my house today, "in France the authorities do not know how to deal with bad weather. We were going to Switzerland on Tuesday. We left at 6 in the morning and it started pouring down snow. Between ten and eleven o'clock, they closed the A6 near Auxerre. Luckily our truck has independent heating and a place to sleep. The firemen came by later on and gave us a baguette with a piece of ham inside, but that was all we had eat-- we got pretty hungry! They evacuated all the emergency cases first, then the automobilistes; but they did not clear the roads until Wednesday afternoon, so we spent more than 30 hours in the truck."

The brave decision: I stop tipping

Long ago I worked as a waitress in a tourist restaurant in New Orleans with an old black waiter named Gaynor. He had many years of seniority and the main way he used it was to hand off to the rest of us any tables of people he thought were poor tippers: mainly any groups of women, the French, and his fellow African-Americans. "You take the jungle bunnies!" he would say, waving his hand dismissively. "I have a family." I found his behavior deeply shocking and called up my mother to talk about it.

But she shocked me again by saying that she didn't believe in tipping at all. It made people servile, she said, and everyone should receive a living wage anyway. "But we don't!" I said.

I was happy that she changed her opinion, or at least began to tip, once she started working again and had to eat out a lot. In the U.S., waiters and waitresses depend on their tips for their income, as they usually do not make the minimum wage without them.

I often think of my mother's anti-tip argument these days. The service is included in France, 15 % on the restaurant bill, which means no nasty surprises (if you're bad at math) at the end of the meal; but most Americans I know here still tip. How much is a puzzler: do you leave enough extra to make 20%, the amount many people pay in New York City these days? Do you leave a couple of euros, or a fiver? or do you just round up the change?

When I asked my French friends, almost all of them said, "I don't leave anything." Some of them made exceptions for really grand restaurants ("At the Grand Véfour, you must leave something more. But you won't be paying, you're a woman. You will get the menus with no prices"). But on the whole, they all seemed to think that 15% was quite enough.

So in the past few weeks, I've been trying an experiment. I bravely leave nothing at most cafés. At the beginning, only in places where no one knew me, to see the reaction.

....Nothing. Still the same smile, the same friendly "Au revoir, Madame!"

What about the second time I went back? Would there be any difference? Non! The third? The waiters and waitresses were just as pleasant as ever.

In France, being a waiter is a career, with a living wage. Not an easy life, necessarily, but you get health benefits and a pension and a six-week vacation each year.

I've done it. I've become French! I don't tip!

Condoleezza Rice is in town

President Chirac is presiding over a conference on the future of Lebanon. Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz of the World Bank, the Lebanese Prime Minister, forty representatives of other countries, and the Secretary General of the United Nations are in town.

A good day to avoid the Arc de Triomphe area!

Roman à clef

Jean-François Deniau is dead. You probably haven't heard of him, although he is very well known in France (even...ubiquitous). He was a member of the Académie française-- so a seat is vacant now, and there must be underhand maneuverings going on. But from a reliable source, I heard that he was an inspiration for the Older Man in the Paris-American book (and later, movie)  Le Divorce.

Paul's wrong number

I don't have anything to write today, so I am stealing from my real diary.

Sunday night, January 9, 2000

Paul and N on the phone, laughing over a wrong number: A woman called and Paul answered, telling her it was a wrong number. The second or third time she called, he just played along:

Woman: Chéri? 

Paul: Oui?

Woman: Ça va?

Paul: Mway... [= Mmm, ouais]

Woman: Pourquoi tu n'es pas allé à la soirée?

Paul: Bof, j'avais pas envie....!

N was literally rolling over and over on the rug with laughter (with the mobile phone)....

[Translation:
--Darling?
--Yes?
--You okay?
--Yeah.
--Why didn't you come last night?
--Bof, I didn't feel like it!  ]

A cold manif

As I was going home, I walked by the square between the Louvre and the Conseil d'État. It was full of demonstrators preparing to march.  It wasn't clear what they were protesting against. The banners were full of acronyms like FSU and CGT and CNU. A strange personage carrying a little dog in a sling walked around picturesquely, occasionally sounding a police siren. The Venus de Milo and a huge nude boy looked down at the group from the side of the Louvre.

"Can you tell me what the protest is for?" I asked a fat man from the provinces.

"It's against the new proposed law of Sarkozy's," he said. "Teachers and social workers would be forced to denounce people." [The proposed legislation is called "Law for the prevention of delinquency."]

So that's what the big banner "Educators not délateurs" meant, I thought. A délateur is a sneak or informer.

The demonstration got underway, with the banner carried first, toward avenue de l'Opéra. A woman in a white van, with a shrill, ineffectual voice, chanted slogans into a microphone, but they were all too long, and nobody picked them up. She went on chanting into an embarrassing silence as the van worked its way north. It was too cold for me to stick around, so after getting a last few photos of the relaxed riot police, and the honking traffic that continued to pour heartlessly past the marchers ("Je travaille, moi!"), I went on home to my warm apartment.

   

Death of the Abbé Pierre, the most admired man in France

After several weeks of weirdly warm weather, it has suddenly gotten very cold in Paris, and it is even snowing in Toulouse, far to the south. The huddles of homeless people all over the city seem more pathetic in this bitter cold, and yesterday the Abbé Pierre died. He was an old man who in the icy winter of 1954 saw a woman frozen to death on the street, still clutching her eviction papers. The Abbé Pierre (the name was a pseudonym from his years in the anti-Nazi Resistance) made a radio appeal the next day, heard by 10 million people, that touched the hearts of the French and caused what was called the "insurrection of goodness" (insurrection de la bonté): donations poured in to help the homeless. In the years that followed, the Abbé worked steadily to help the poorest of the poor. He founded Emmaus, one of the most important French charities. He regularly came first in the list of most admired people in France, until at the end of his life he said that he wanted to be taken off the list: it was time for new people to take up the torch.

The new "insurrection" against homelessness, led recently by Les enfants de don Quichotte [the children of Don Quixote], has brought a different kind of demand-- as usual, for the government to help. There will soon be a law in France that everyone has the right to shelter, and this right will be enforceable against the various communities. The consequences are unforeseeable. But no doubt the law would have pleased the Abbé Pierre, and now it will be named for him.

No matter what you think about politics or the law, it is heart-wrenching to see a bundle of rags and a crutch huddled against the wind near a cash machine, one hand emerging from the bundle to hold out a bread-basket with a few centimes in it.

Today in the newspaper I saw a cartoon showing the Abbé entering the Pearly Gates. He says to Saint Peter, "What, you don't let in everyone?" and Saint Peter rolls his eyes and says, "Ça commence!" [It's starting!]