Il y a longtemps que notre pays est beau mais rude.
--Newspaper editor Olivier Séguret, 25 January 2012
The USA are entirely the creation of the accursed race, the French.
--Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), writing to Nancy Mitford, 22 May 1957
(crazy; crazy about something) Etymology: possibly from the sound of a bell ringing.
L’appel à la prière a lieu cinq fois par jour et la première semaine, ça vous rend dingue ! Puis soudain, ça pénètre votre esprit et c’est la plus belle des belles choses.
--Liam Neeson quoted in an article about how he learned to love the muezzin's call to prayer in Istanbul
Strike and demonstration by Alcatel-Lucent employees on Friday 10 February
Air France workers, striking against a new proposed law that requires them to give 48 hours advance notice of their absence in case of strike. They want the passengers to be miserable at last-minute cancellations of their long-planned-and-paid-for travel, because that is how these public employees get what they want.
Nationwide strike of labor inspectors angry over a suicide
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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
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.
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."
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!
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!
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.
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! ]
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.
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!]
"Do you see that?" said the taxi driver, waving disgustedly at the hotel Crillon, where a large black Mercedes with German plates was picking up a group of tourists. "It's a taxi parisien."
"Ah bon?" I said. "How can it be a Paris taxi? It's from Düsseldorf."
"Düsseldorf, mon oeil," he said. "It's a taxi. There are hundreds of them. All those black Mercedes you see around the capitale... they're all taxis!"
"How can that be legal?" I said.
"Oh, of course it's not legal! But if the police stop them, the driver just says the passengers are his friends. Des cho-toles too."
"Des quoi?"
"Des cho-toles [shuttles], they go back and forth from the airport, there are more and more of them. And they have just put in 300 new taxis," he said in disgust. "You can't make a living any more. I'm going to work for eleven hours today, and I'll be lucky if I make fifty euros."
I got on the bus, said "Bonjour" to the pretty young woman bus driver (did you know you are always supposed to do that?), punched my ticket and struggled to the back of the bus with my parcels. Wedged into a seat with the bags on my lap, I opened the newspaper and started to read. Several stops later, I looked up. The bus was not moving, even though all the passengers at
that stop had already sat down. The bus driver was looking back from
her seat to the passengers.
"Madame!" she said loudly. "Madame! Could you come validate your ticket please?"
No one moved. She said it again, looking pointedly at the back of the bus. I felt guilty even though I hadn't done anything. A young girl sitting next to me said to her friend, "Mais qu'est-ce qu'elle est chiante!"["How annoying she is!" --but much ruder]
The bus driver stood up. "Yes, you! The lady in the black coat! We're not moving!" She sat back down with a stubborn air.
Across the aisle from me, a well-dressed middle-aged woman got up and made her way to the front of the bus, where she bought a ticket for €1.40 and validated it before going grumpily back to her seat. I recognized her coat from the window of the Max Mara store on the Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. It cost more than 1200 euros.
Yesterday as I passed the Assemblée Nationale I saw about twenty buses of gendarmes parked on the rue de Bourgogne, and there were guards on every corner. Maybe it was because Laura Bush is here. She and Cherie Blair, Ludmila Putin, the Queen of Sweden, and several other first ladies had a meeting at the invitation of Bernadette Chirac, to discuss how to protect exploited and endangered children.
Impôt de solidarité sur la fortune ISF (pronounced E-S-F). The Fortune Tax. It's enough to send shivers down your spine. At least if you are one of the people who has to pay it. It seems to send shivers of delight down those who don't.
The ISF is one of those really different peculiarities of France that you don't discover right away. I did wonder why a very rich friend of ours moved from Paris to London shortly after Mitterrand was elected. The day it became real to me, I met a poor, dignified, thin old lady in her eighties, who lived in a small apartment cluttered with the bibelots of a lifetime, overlooking the Champs de Mars and the Eiffel Tower. She had lived there since she got married as a young woman in 1937, and her husband's family had lived there since the building was built about 1915. "There were still cows on the Champs de Mars in those days," she told me.
Now, the old lady was being forced from her home of more than sixty years because she could not pay the ISF. "I would like to meet that Mr Fabius!" she quavered, shaking her fist. "I would tell him what I think of him! To take my home away from me, at my age!"
"What is the ISF?" I asked curiously as we descended in the creaking old elevator, barely big enough for a single person to use comfortably.
"It's a tax that depends on what you own, not what your income is," said my friend. "The old lady's apartment is worth a fortune nowadays, so even though her income is less than $800 a month, she owes a percentage of the total value of the apartment to the government each year. She can't pay it, so she has to move."
The ISF was originally a tax on actual possessions of only the very rich* --whom no one identifies with, of course; this explained our friend's decamping to London. In a convenient coincidence, works of art were not included in these property evaluations; Mr Fabius's family money came from an art dealership.
But the updated tax is now a yearly percentage of the worldwide possessions (not income) of any permanent resident of France. It includes the sum of the value of your apartment, your garden, your art, your jewelry, your furniture, your silverware, your car. Pony up!
One thing no one expected when the tax was instituted
was that ordinary people would be subject to it. But the relentless rise of real estate prices in Paris and other places has been cruel to people with valuable real estate, but no income, like the unfortunate old lady I met. They have to sell their homes to pay the tax. The most famous current examples are the old farmer and fisher families of the Ile de Ré, an island off the coast of La Rochelle which has become the Martha's Vineyard of France. A square meter of land there costs more than a thousand euros, and the ISF on this value is mercilessly exacted from families who have lived there for hundreds of years. Many of them have had to sell their ancient property to speculators. The French media does story after story on the plight of these people, and on those of retired doctors and lawyers in Paris whose retirement and home are in jeopardy, but the ISF remains politically untouchable.
In the movie Le Dîner de cons, the arrogant main character has to ask a tax inspector to help him find his errant wife. He suddenly realizes that inviting a tax inspector over to his apartment may not be the best idea. The ISF requires taxpayers to evaluate their own possessions, and naturally he has done no such thing. He and his friend run around the apartment stuffing paintings, silver, crystal into a closet, and pour vinegar into the inspector's wine before he arrives-- the vintage is too expensive. But the inspector (played by Daniel Prévost, center, who won a Cesar for the role) is a modern Sherlock Holmes. His keen eye goes to the rectangular patches on the walls and his finger traces the dust-free places where the statues stood. "There is something pas très net here," he announces as he leaves. "I'll be back!"
The result of the Fortune Tax has been a massive departure of the people the tax was aimed at. The latest famous person to leave is Johnny Hallyday, who said that he is moving to Gstaad, Switzerland because after a long lifetime of work, he finds it unfair to be able to offer no security to his heirs. "In France, I pay 70% of my income in taxes," he said. Johnny's friend, Nicolas Sarkozy, promptly said that he understood Johnny's decision; taxes in France are too high.
This caused an uproar in France. 
I heard Yannick Noah on the radio, saying that he did "not want to judge Johnny," but that he, personally, was proud to pay his taxes in France (another day I heard him modestly admit, "Yes, it's true that I am the best-liked person in France. It's a great honor to be so well loved").
A Swiss banker interviewed just afterwards said, "In terms of taxes, it is advantageous to live in Switzerland for any French person earning 50,000 euros and upwards."
This week, the socialists Ségolène Royal and her "companion" François Hollande, who famously announced, "J'aime pas les riches! [I don't like the rich!]" are in the news because of the ISF. Like almost anyone who owns a larger-than-studio-sized apartment in Paris, they are considered by the tax inspectors to be rich and subject to the "Fortune tax" themselves.
*The first website that pops up on Google when you type in French "Impôt sur les grandes fortunes" [Tax on great fortunes] is that of the Communist newspaper Humanité [ motto: "In an ideal world, Humanité would not exist"].
Unlike most Americans, I grew up hearing French a lot, even if it was the soft, 
r-rolling Louisiana French , in which a drapeau is a baby's diaper, a car is a char, and sometimes a scolding mother calls her children petits couillons! (which I would be surprised to hear from a mother in the 16th arrondissement, where I live).
I was lucky enough to live where French was spoken, but since it was by old people, who had vigorously discouraged their own children from learning the language, I still had to learn it in school, starting at age 8. I remember puzzling over an old French public-school primer my father passed down to me, which began in time-honored fashion with Nos ancêtres les Gaulois [our ancestors the Gauls], in which the martyr Saint Blandine of Lyons continues to repeat in a soft voice, "Je suis chrétienne" as the bull gores her. (The book dates from another epoch. A recent poll found that 88% of the French responders who described themselves as Catholics-- which is 51% of the population-- could recite the "Our Father" and 81% the "Hail Mary"; but that only 52% of these Catholics believed that God exists.)
When I was thirteen, I had a wonderful teacher named Ronald Brew, who taught me all the French grammar I ever really learned in the space of a single year. He encouraged us to babble on in French about current events or movies every morning in his class. On the final exam, one of the questions was:
"My French teacher is:
a) very handsome
b) very intelligent
c) a monster with three green heads."
We had to memorize dialogues which all these years later are still circulating in my brain:
"Allô, Passy vingt-deux quinze?" (Passy, not far from me, is a neighborhood of the 16th arrondissement. The kids in the dialogues were très bourgeois. Those delightfully short telephone numbers have been replaced with ten digits.)
"Come on, get up, don't stay in the snow!" "It is not me who forgets my affaires!""I have to go there to look for my book." [This innocuous phrase turned out to be a very useful one: to this day, because of it, I remember to use the subjunctive when I say, "Il faut que..."]
"He fell into a deep hole and was suffocated by his beret." [This sentence reminded us that "fell," like other verbs of movement, took the verb être, not avoir, and also taught us the reflexive se, that annoying and unnecessary French tic: the poor man literally suffocated himself.]
"You will take cod liver oil until you stop coughing!"
"The bathyscaphes of the French navy dive to more than 4000 meters." Eh oui. At the time, the French were in advance of the world in deep-sea exploration.
What are those long lines in the bakery every Sunday about 12:30? Sunday lunch is something special to most French people, and to me, too. As a child in Louisiana, I went to Grand'mère's house every Sunday for lunch with my family, and met long tablefuls of cousins, aunts and uncles. (As one of the oldest cousins, I ate at the children's table till I was at least 21.) One of the rites of Sunday was to go around the room kissing a lot of tantes sitting in a circle, in old-fashioned dresses, thin smiling women with soft dry cheeks. They called me chère [pronounced shaa]. It didn't occur to me till many years later that all those old ladies spoke French. They had grown up in a vanished Louisiane that faded out after two world wars took 
Louisiana boys to the outside world ("How you gonna keep them down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?") and after the oil business brought the américains into the heart of the "French triangle."
After lunch while the grownups sat around the table laughing in a haze of smoke, which didn't seem to bother anyone back then, we ran around upstairs or in the back yard or climbed trees or played under the table, listening to the murmur of voices, and wondering how on earth grownups could bear to sit there, hour after hour, just talking. But it was somehow deeply comforting too.
It took me a while to realize that the heartwarming all-afternoon Sunday gatherings I remembered chez Grand'mère were the same thing complained of endlessly by the anglophone women in France married to French men. "He expects me to spend every Sunday with Mamie!" is the gist.
This shared tradition must go back many, many generations, because my French forebears came to the New World in the early 1600s from villages in Poitou and Normandy and Picardy.
All these people standing in line for their Sunday baguettes are about to go off for this same family lunch. Tout se passe autour de la table! [Everything happens around the table.] Especially on Sunday.
Seems reasonable to me! Maybe I'm French after all. I adored Grand'mère. Here's a photo of her as I remember her, laughing at a story. I'm sure it was a Sunday.
.
The usual path of French young people to a job is to work as a stagiaire [intern] for year after year after year, getting paid almost nothing and living, usually, at home. Then they get their first real job around age 30. By age 45, they are considered too old to hire and are stuck in their job till they retire. Their valued work life is about fifteen years long! Only one-third of men from 55 to 64 work in France.
My friend the countess called me today and said her son is waiting to hear about an internship. He is 28 and has never had a real job. "They never tell the candidates for a stage that they have been accepted until the last minute. They prefer to let them marinate," she said.
* The sign of this protesting intern says: For sale at 30% of minimum wage
They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God given rights then what’s left? The French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.
--Rick Santorum, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination who just won three primaries, on Wednesday
Huge strikes underway in Greece as protestors complain about government austerity measures, which are required immediately in order for the Greek government to be able to borrow money from other countries to pay its bills and not go bankrupt in weeks.
Keith Eckstein also has a new book review site, Books About France
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