Rue Rude

Laughing along with ÉDF

This morning I had to call the EDF, or Électricité de France, for a problem with our chambre de service. I got a cheerful woman who quickly set up a new account with electronic billing. Most regular bills in France can be paid through prélèvements (automatic payments) on your bank account. It's a great blessing for someone who travels a lot or is absent-minded, like me. However, when you move away it can be hard to get them to stop.

The operator started laughing when she heard what my billing email is. It's a children's insult. "I can see you've lived in France a long time!"

"I was proud to get that one!" I said. "I was one of the first people in France to have gmail!"

"What's the password-- caca boudin?" she asked. 

Cutting the red tape

Something you will not see in France: a number to take your turn

"Do you have your receipt? Oh-- I can see from your face that you don't!" said the nice bureaucrat at the Mairie. "Never mind. I remember you." She dug around in her files, then handed over the precious document. "Et voilà!"

Next I went to the post office. In the past few years, the post offices of Paris have undergone a huge change. Gone are the windows and the long lines of people waiting behind ropes (or, even earlier, the milling mob of people all  planning how to resquiller their way to the front of the lines). Now, most of the post offices have machines all over the place and shelves of ready-to-post envelopes and boxes. Next to these is a single stand where a harried postal employee gives advice and takes packages. I'm not sure it's an improvement.

I picked out an envelope for the book I was trying to send and addressed it. The envelope tore-- I asked for some tape and the post office employee, a young woman, said, "Oh là là! You can't send a book in this envelope!" 

"Why not? The book is very small and doesn't weigh much."

"It's for documents only," she said as she carefully taped it up. "That's why it doesn't have a customs form on it." She took it to ask her superior, and the older woman shook her head. 

"You shouldn't have bought this. It says clearly on the display that these envelopes are just for documents." (It didn't.)

But to my surprise, instead of making me go buy a box and fill out a customs form, they just casually tossed my taped-up envelope into the overseas box. "Next time, pay more attention!"

French bureaucrats-- sometimes I love them!

 

Bon anniversaire, Georges Wasington!

 
Many Americans don't realize how popular the American Revolution was in France. The people liked it because the Americans were commoners rebelling against a throne, and the aristocrats liked it because it was the values of the Enlightenment and the British lost. At the end of the war there were huge public dances to celebrate at Place de la Concorde (then called Place Louis-XV) and elsewhere.

This print of Wasington, Généralissime des Etats unis de l'Amérique shows Washington in the blue and buff uniform of the Continental Army, during or just after the war. When the war started he was 44. I bought it at an antiques fair in Paris years ago. On the bottom it says, "Drawn by Bonnieu from a painting furnished by Monsieur the Marquis de la Fayette."

 

Pluie, pluie, go away

My view out the bus window

I've been waiting for more than a month for a clear day to make pralines with my carefully hand-carried Georgia pecans. I have a craving for pralines, but long ago I discovered that they need dry conditions to come out well.  The one perfect day, several weeks ago, I was busy, and since then, we have had nothing but drizzle and overcast, gray days and night. (What full moon?) I am so ready for spring! At least buds are visible now on Paris trees. 

Lundi lundi
il faisait gris

The Freemason who lent his house

The neighbors came over for dinner and started talking about the Masons, or as they are called in France, les francmaçons (while looking that up I discovered that there is a research specialty called la maçonnologie!). They were full of gossip about it and exchanged lots of anecdotes.

Prince Philip is supposedly a Freemason, so is Sean Connery in "The Man Who Would Be King," and the hero of War and Peace joins the Masons in Moscow, hoping to find enlightened comrades (he doesn't). In the old days, Catholics could be excommunicated for joining, so being a French Freemason could be socially dangerous--much of the upper class in France is very Catholic to this day. So I was surprised to hear how powerful the neighbors thought the Masons were. 

"And they have to obey their hierarchy," said Joséphine. "It can help you a lot in business."

"I was looking at photos of the gorgeous villa where someone I know spent his holiday, on the Côte d'Azur," said Jean-Louis. "He said it was lent to him by someone who works for him. In the month of August! Lent to him for nothing!

"When we asked him how he managed that, he just said, 'He had to.' The other man was below him in the Masonic lodge!"

A proposal at Sacre-Coeur

N and his girlfriend went to Montmartre on Sunday, and saw a marriage proposal at Sacre-Coeur.

"It was this Belgian couple, at the top of the steps. He was down on one knee, and everyone in the crowd was cheering! They didn't have champagne, but someone shook up his beer can and sprayed it."

All the leaves are marron

You know how, when you find yourself humming a little tune as you go about your life, that tune surprisingly often turns out to be a manifestation of your subconscious? In the past week, under the relentlessly overcast white skies, I haven't been able to keep this one out of my head.

All the leaves are brown
and the sky is gray
California dreaming
on such a winter's day.

Saint Valentine's

Without thinking much about it, I invited a friend of one of my children to come visit us in Paris. No problem, of course! But the girl is a citizen of one of the unprivileged countries, and needs a visa to come to France. No problem, except that I have to get an Attestation d'Accueil from our local mairie, or  town hall of our arrondissement, for her to visit. This involves a stack of papers (originals AND copies) proving that you, the inviting person, are legally in France, legally live somewhere capable of lodging the visitor, and have enough money to deal with any problems that might arise. After the usual paperwork hassles (I didn't have everything I needed, if the bureaucrat had been a stickler; but this is what I love about France: bureaucrats think for themselves, and you can get on the right side of them), I got the Attestation. I hadn't been to the mairie for a while, and decided to look around. On the second floor, I came to this nice reception hall, all in bleu-blanc-rouge, puzzlingly furnished with paintings of Venice. At one end of the hall was the arrondissement mayor's office, or at least where it was. In Paris, every arrondissement has its own mayor, and the city as a whole also has one.

I heard tinny wedding music, Charpentier's Te Deum, coming out of a room near by. In France, it is the law that you must be married at the mairie. The church ceremony is very pretty, if you want one, but legally you are married only at the mairie. Usually couples who want a traditional wedding have the mairie ceremony on Friday, and the church wedding on Saturday. In front of any Paris mairie on Friday afternoons you will always see excitable little groups of dressed-up people, women in hats and high heels, little girls in fancy dresses. But it was Monday-- not a usual day for wedding. But of course, it was Valentine's day!

I sneaked a peek into the Salle des Mariages. It looked very pretty. The cleaning woman was sneaking a peek too. She winked at me.

As I crossed the street to the metro, I noticed that the municipal message board was displaying Valentine's messages, each one for twenty seconds or so. This one says, "This evidence of the first moment that left every question in suspense makes my head turn and lights up my heart. Oh! My love thanks for these 12 years."

The broken leg and the arrêt de travail

Last Tuesday morning it was so cold that as soon as I came into the entryway I could feel a frigid breeze and almost went back upstairs to put more clothes on. There was a thin layer of ice on the balcony. I had decided to wear my rubber-soled boots after looking out the window at all the people slipping and sliding down the sidewalk. 

"Bonjour María," I said to our nice South American gardienne, who was swabbing the stones as she does every morning. She looked exhausted on this morning and I stopped for a minute. "It's really freezing today, isn't it? Is everything all right?"

"Bonjour madame. Yes, it's very slippery outside. Imagine, last night my husband was coming home from work and he slipped on the ice, fell and broke his leg. And he was all alone in an empty parking lot at 3:30 in the morning!"

"Oh no!" María's husband manages a restaurant east of Paris, an hour or more away by train, and we rarely see him because he works a night shift.

"He didn't have his cell phone, either-- I bet that's the last time he forgets it! I'm always telling him. Luckily two men came out just afterwards and found him, and called the ambulance."

"Mon dieu! It was so cold last night he could have died," I said. 

"Yes, but instead he is in the hospital. I went out to get him, but I had to leave him there. He'll be home on Saturday."

And here is what is different between France and the United States:

"At least, he has six weeks of arrêt de travail," she went on.

Six paid weeks off work! 

A sudden death

Last week I heard that a woman I don't know very well, Madame D, had just lost her husband. When I saw her a few days ago, I stopped to talk to her, and said I was sorry. I asked if it was sudden or unexpected, because I hadn't heard that he was ill.

"Yes," she said. "It was so brutal. Everything was normal that night. And then, at two in the morning, the police knocking on my door. 'Vos papiers, s'il vous plaît!'"

"That's horrible!" I said. "They really demanded to see your papers?"

"Before they would tell me anything. I'm sorry if I've seemed strange. I have been so disoriented, lost in la paperasse and so many details.

"Et on était si bien tous les deux*," she said. Her eyes welled up with tears.

 

*We were so happy together.