Rue Rude

Anomalies of French life: museum mania

Waiting in the rain for the Degas exhibit at the Musée d'Orsay

Some German friends came for dinner last night. They had brought their three sons to Paris and were determined to show them some culture, so they first went to the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Grand Palais. To their horror, there was a three-and-a-half-hour line. So they decided to go to a smaller museum that they hoped would be off the beaten path-- the Jacquemart-André. They were also looking forward to its nice café. Unfortunately, they didn't realize the J-A has a big Canaletto exhibit. The line was at least an hour long, and it was raining. To their surprise, their 17-year-old, who had never shown any interest in art, wanted to go back to the Hopper. "If people are willing to wait three and a half hours, it must be worth seeing!" he said.

Museums here have learned that big exhibits bring in the crowds and the cash. It is becoming harder and harder to visit places like the Louvre or the Sainte-Chapelle without crowds, even on a rainy weekday in the off season. 

Paris is indeed a city of wonderful museums. It's hard to live here without getting caught up in museum mania. At dinner parties or cocktails here, if you haven't seen the latest big show of Monet, Van Gogh, Hiroshige, Hopper, or Canaletto... you'd better fake it!

The Assumption holiday: choose a different route!

The way I discovered that Assumption (August 15th) is a special day in France was that I was trying to return with my family to Paris that day from Normandy. We left about seven p.m. after a last day at the beach, expecting to be back in the city by nine-thirty. It was the middle of the week.

But somehow everyone in France seemed to be on the road that day. The autoroute was so crowded we were inching along. It got dark and we were still only about ten miles from where we entered the autoroute. The children fell asleep. At three in the morning, still only an hour closer to Paris, we got off the autoroute, hoping to find an alternate way into the city, only to find ourselves blocked en pleine campagne [in the middle of the countryside] in a huge traffic jam. It was so stationary that families got out of their cars and were picnicking on their roofs or by the side of the road under the stars. We finally rolled into Paris around dawn, having learned our lesson.

After that I took care to avoid traveling in France on the 1st or 15th of August. These days are notorious as those when the entire country goes on holiday or moves from visiting the parents to a vacation with friends. (Naturally, these dates are big favorites for transport strikes as well.) The traffic warning system Bison Futé, or "Savvy Buffalo" [represented by a cartoon Plains Indian] classifies these days as Red and warns you to "Go a different way"!

 

Anomalies of French life: the philosophy exam

At the time of year when American high school seniors are finished with school, having spent the last two months with severe attacks of senioritis, French students are buckling down to the dreaded Bac exams, which this year begin on Monday 18th June. Traditionally, the exams begin with Philosophy, which every French student is expected to study. The kids have to choose among three questions, and they have four hours to write.

Last year the questions in various series (for students studying different Bacs) included:

--Is Man condemned to have illusions about himself? [In France, "Man" "he" and "him" are still used to mean "Human"-- which seems old-fashioned to me....]

--Does feeling an injustice teach me what is just?

--Does culture take away from Man's nature?

--Is Art less necessary than Science?

--Explain an extract from Pascal's Pensées.

 

Anomalies of French life: strange numbers

After all these years in Paris, I still have a hard time with French numbers. That's because the French, unlike other French speakers, for example in Belgium or Switzerland, still use the "score," as in "four-score-and-seven years ago...."

75 =  sixty-and-fifteen                (Do you see a seven in that?)

98 = four-twenties-and-eighteen  (Do you see a nine in that?)

Even French people always hesitate just a fraction of a second when writing these. And when you think that telephone numbers in France are always given as, for example, 

"zéro-un-quarante-deux-soixante-treize-quatre-vingt-quatorze-quatre-vingt-douze"*

you see why we anglophones still have trouble writing that as fast as they say it.

Honestly, I don't know how they do math.

 

*0̶1̶.̶4̶2̶.̶7̶2̶.̶9̶4̶.̶9̶2̶ ̶  01.42.73.94.92 (just a random Paris number I picked, sorry if it's yours!)

Anomalies of French life: Loving New York

The French do not share the Middle American distaste for New York City. The mention of New York in a conversation will instantly call up coos of admiration and envy from those who have visited or those unfortunates who have never yet had the privilege of acquaintance with the Grosse Pomme.

A girl I know just got a coveted internship in New York City for the summer. She is very excited because she's never been to the U.S. and it was her dream to work in New York. She can't afford Manhattan rents and is living way up in Bronxville, and I hope that the commute doesn't put a dent in her enthusiasm. She also smokes and will find out the hard way about that....

Her friends put together a travel kit for her. She was already wearing the stars-and-stripes scarf when this photo was taken (notice the U.K. flag on the bottom. In France, this is often used as an abbreviation for "English," which really annoys me)!

with a few things from home in case she feels homesick:

To wind up the evening she posed in her new U.S. flag scarf, pointing up at McDonald's, beaming.

Anomalies of French life: the cigarette voice

 
Journalists Isaure du Fretay and Jean-Pierre Gaillard. J-P  starts talking at about 0:12

It took me a while to figure out why French radio authority figures sounded so different from American ones. The Americans, no matter their age, just sounded... younger somehow. One day I was listening to Radio France Info, as usual, and Jean-Pierre Gaillard came on with his emblématique "Jean-Pierre Gaillard: La Bourse" [the stock exchange]. His voice was deep and strong, somehow reassuring. Suddenly it hit me. 

Smoking is the reason these people's voices sound different.* 

Of course, there are still plenty of smokers in the U.S.A.  But on the whole, the upper and media classes (what the Brits call "the chattering classes") are non-smoking, and the broadcast scratchy voice disappeared years ago when they quit. 

 

*I have no idea if J-P smokes. My guess is he used to smoke a lot and has given up in the past few years-- he's not as scratchy as he used to be.

Anomalies of French life: the carte de visite

Not that I hang out with apostolic protonotaries -- this was just the best example I could find online of a French carte de visite.

You might think that this kind of thing went out with spats and corsets. Ah ben, you'd be wrong. One was slipped under my door yesterday to apologize for another leak. In the beaux quartiers of Paris, visiting cards are a very convenient way to dash off a note and leave your coordonnées (name, address, and these days, email) at the same time. When someone in our building has a big party, a carte de visite often appears downstairs near the elevator, with a note scribbled on it asking for pardon in advance for the dérangement. When two people meet and like each other, they pull out cards. A woman I know has a way of leaving her visiting card with all and sundry, I honestly think just so people will know she's a countess. It would not be cool for her to tell them outright.

The best ones are still engraved. When some people receive them, you can see them surreptitiously passing their fingers over the back to feel for the telltale indentation that marks the true gravure. 

 

Anomalies of French life: loving Obama

In general I try to avoid politics on this blog, partly because I have relatives and even friends of extreme persuasions in both directions. But I don't think it's controversial to say that President Obama is not overwhelmingly popular in the U.S. right now and is by no means sure of being reelected.* However, the same is not true of France. The French love, or at least loved, Obama, can't understand why anyone would even think of voting for most Republican candidates, and tend to ask about Americans' preferences in a black-or-white way (haha!): if you don't like Obama, it's a dealbreaker. I can only compare it to an ordinary American's finding out that a French person they were meeting was a communist.

Part of this is the décalage between the American and French political mainstreams. Sarkozy is quite far to the right in France, and Obama quite far to the left in the U.S.A., but in fact they are very similar in their politics. It's their countrymen who are different. 

Having lived through most of the George W. Bush years in Paris, I must say that the change in atmosphere towards Americans after the election of Obama was remarkable. George W. was so unpopular in France that when he won in 2004, one headline read, "George W. Bush reelected, the French disappointed."

But when Obama won against all French predictions of American racism, an American suddenly went from being persona non grata with many French people (much like the French in the U.S. when they were "cheese-eating surrender monkeys") to being a rather cool person to know. While a lot of Obama's original supporters here have become disillusioned, they still prefer him to Mitt Romney (Mormons are unusual and the religion considered a cult here) or any of the others.

If Obama were running here, he'd do just fine. This won't help him.

*Full disclosure: I voted for him and plan to do so again.

Anomalies of French life: the code

Standing in front of our outer gate this evening were two shivering girls I didn't know. It's been really cold in Paris, below freezing. They looked relieved to see me.

I opened the gate for them and one of them assured me in a delightful Spanish accent, "I live here, but I can't get in. I don't know what is wrong."  I'd heard about these neighbors, a family from Madrid who is in Paris only occasionally.

"The code has changed," I said. I gave the girl the new code and she tapped it into her iPhone to be sure to remember it. 

"They should change it in the summer!" she said. I couldn't agree with her more. Like an idiot I had to stand outside in the cold myself this morning, flicking through my phone's contacts list trying to remember how I had listed the new code, which we had been informed would change this morning because of a recent burglary in the building. But of course I had forgotten, and was standing there stamping my feet and desperately pushing all the combinations I could think of... I think it ends in A? After what felt like a very long time, the concierge came out, saw me and opened the door, but it took me half an hour to warm up afterwards.

I've written about the code before, so suffice it to say that if you don't have the code or your cell phone, you are not getting into most residential buildings in Paris! Always remember to ask if you are going to someone's place.

Anomalies of French life: reverence for psychoanalysis; or Le Mur, autism, and the shrinks

In the past few days and weeks, a French documentary about the use of psychoanalysis to treat autism, Le Mur, has been raising hackles and consciousness all over France. I was surprised to learn that psychoanalysis is still overwhelmingly the method used to treat autistic children in France. To put it mildly, it is old-fashioned, like phrenology, and not known for impressive results. You could call it the French exception.

In psychoanalytical treatment of autism, the mother is blamed for the child's autism: she was too cold, or possibly too warm (emotionally "incestuous"), and this terrible behavior made her child psychotic. The nicer shrinks say that the mothers didn't severely damage their child on purpose. 

Le Mur is a Michael-Moore-style documentary in which well known French psychoanalysts who treat autistic children find themselves hoist by their own petard and are made to look arrogant idiots, or at times well-meaning ones, in their very own words. To be fair, some of them seem like kind people; but the things they are saying do not come off as sensible. Furious at the movie, three of the psychoanalysts who had agreed to be interviewed sued the documentary maker, saying their words were taken out of context. Yesterday the tribunal in Lille agreed and ordered the documentary maker, Sophie Robert, to pay them €30,000 and to remove the incriminating passages from the 52-minute-long film, which as she points out means no movie. She plans to appeal. She also plans to reveal all the footage, including some she said was worse than what she put in the movie.

Crocodile representing the mother. The psychoanalyst says she is happy when the child hits it.

However, it was a Pyrrhic victory for the shrinks, because the lawsuit itself made the film far better known. Le Mur is making headlines in all the media this week, and is being shown to people involved with autism around the globe (making France look ridiculous). It has now become a cause célèbre, with journalists calling the Lille judgment a dangerous precedent for censorship, and a French lawmaker sponsoring a bill to make psychoanalysis illegal in treating autism. As it should be. 

In the meantime, the film will be banned from the sites where it is still available in France, so if you are in France when you read this, and want to see it, check it out now. (There are subtitles, although not by an English speaker.) 

If you don't have time, you can get a bit of the flavor of it by these little tidbits. I'm going on and on a bit because the film made me angry. I'm sure you, too, know people with autistic children. Do they strike you as so cold and evil so that they could turn a child psychotic? That is what these shrinks believe. They have forgotten their Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. Think how many divorces and how much misery they have caused in the families of these children. Psychoanalysis is basically a set of unprovable and undisprovable beliefs: the trademark of a religion, not a science.

The pregnant mother does not think of her child as a person

The child is treated coldly and becomes autistic

The mother does not want the child, and this causes autism

 

or she wants the child too much, and has an incestuous relationship with him 

This shrink declares that all mothers have an incestuous relationship with their child, "whether they are aware of it or not"  (well, that's that then, isn't it?)

As Marie-Antoinette famously said when she was accused of incest toward her son, "La nature se refuse à répondre à une pareille inculpation faite à une mère. J'en appelle à toutes celles qui peuvent se trouver ici." [Nature itself refuses to answer to such an accusation against a mother. I call on all the mothers who might be here."] And the women in the room were furious, and for once supported her; the claim of incest was withdrawn from the accusation.

Note that this shrink is talking about emotional incest by the mother, versus actual incest by the father.

They come clean if they talk long enough.

Literally admitting that a shrink can't actually educate or treat a child with autism.

Progress is not expected from the child. According to psychoanalysis, this liberates the child. Or... just leaves it incontinent and speechless as an adult.

Psychoanalysts try to make you happy with your humdrum little lives; it would be unrealistic to have big hopes for a child with autism.

O.M.G.