French Toast (16 page)

Now, if you are in a French home and have had dessert and coffee and after-dinner drinks and the hostess suddenly suggests a nice glass of fruit juice, you know it is time to leave. In the old days, when people had a tendency to consume alcoholic after-dinner drinks, such as Cointreau or cognac, offering fruit juice meant that you had really been around too long. Now that people tend to drink less and especially have reduced their consumption of after-dinner drinks, the fruit juice routine somehow seems less menacing. But it still means the same thing: The party's over.

Finally, the absolutely worst thing you can do in a
French home, at least in my mother-in-law's French home, is not to clean your plate. She explained it to me this way: “If you are serving yourself as the food is passed, you should just take what you are going to eat and eat it
all
. If you leave something, it is an insult to your hostess, who will assume that you didn't like it.”

My mother-in-law, it must be said, does not apply the clean-plate rule to restaurants. There, she says, again with correct French logic, you are paying for your meal, so you eat what you want and leave the rest.

Having absorbed the food lesson (no pun intended), let's now move on to how to give compliments, how to give a
bise
, and how many to give, how to converse and whether to drop in on people or not. Elementary, my dear Watson? Not really.

As far as compliments are concerned, they seem to be a source of embarrassment more than anything else. In fact, the direct compliment seems to plunge the recipient into a state of confusion. Writing in the late nineteenth century, the good Baronne Staffe advised her readers that “well-brought up people never give totally direct compliments, because these compliments can embarrass people who are modest, timid, a bit shy, and because it is embarrassing to answer a compliment coming from such close range.”

In Anglo-Saxon countries, when someone says something nice, you are taught to say thank you very simply. In France, the situation is much more complicated. At the end of a lovely evening in the home of French friends, I complimented the mother on the wonderful manners of her three boys. “Oh, you know, they're not always like that. When their father's gone, they are positively horrible sometimes,” she said, secretly pleased. A friend of mine told me that her daughter, who is half-French and was raised in France, had told her that she liked the way I was dressed. My friend asked her, “Did you tell Harriet?” And the daughter replied, “No, I didn't dare.” So the compliment seems to be more problematic than one would think.

When first in France, I would literally groan with delight at what I was served at my mother-in-law's house, until the day I could see that she thought I was making fun of her! For her, an exquisite lettuce salad with a perfect vinaigrette was something she made every day, and so how could it be so extraordinary?

The best way I have of complimenting her now is to ask her for her recipes. However, it is not proper to ask for recipes while at the table, for obvious reasons. Suppose the dinner has been catered? Many hostesses prefer to leave a bit of ambiguity as to the origin of the food. I learned this from my sister-in-law, who is a wonderful cook but who has been known to serve a frozen dish along with freshly prepared when pressed. Rather
than publicly confess it, she says absolutely nothing. At the beginning, this bothered me. But I must be becoming French. I now think, Why
should
she tell all? She's the cook!

So, do you compliment the hostess on the food? Some do; some don't. Some etiquette manuals say it is best to reserve a compliment for the dessert, probably to avoid getting into a discussion about food, because, while it's good to eat, there's nothing so boring as to talk about it while consuming it.

Conversation, like many other things, has been elevated to an art form in France and is, even if you speak French well or your hosts speak fluent English, an area loaded with pitfalls. At dinners where people don't know one another, the conversation is expected to be light and never to bog down in personal or “heavy” matters.

I used to sit in amazement and listen to these conversations, which for me were like the sounds of birds in an aviary, all chirping at once. An American friend asked me why conversations at these parties are so superficial and why no one seriously answers you when you ask a question, or why no one listens to your answer when you reply to a question. Serious answers, I told him, are
out
. Why? You might bore your entourage.

As French author André Maurois put it, “The conversation-game is a work of art. . . . A passionate
man always spoils a conversation-game. He seriously refutes light arguments; he follows themes which have been abandoned. The rule is to accept all the movements of the ball and to follow it without regret.”

Other than table manners, the art of conversation, and the mysteries of the simple compliment, I found there were other things to learn. It seems that the French are always touching one another, kissing hands, shaking hands, or giving one another pecks on the cheek. There are even rules for all this. For example, the famous
baisemain
. Americans aren't used to this, and one American friend told me that the first time it happened to her, she instinctively snatched her hand away for fear of being bitten! (She needn't have feared a bit—technically, the lips do no more than graze the hand.) Do people really still do that in this day and age? Well, yes, rather more than you might think, depending on the social circle. Nevertheless, the
baisemain
is technically off-limits in the case of unmarried women, women wearing gloves, and women in public places.

There is another rule as well concerning greeting people. For example, when my children were growing up, it seemed to be a matter of great consequence that they say,
“Bonjour, madame”
or
“Bonjour, monsieur,”
as opposed to just a short “
Bonjour
.” Being American, I had a hard time enforcing this rule; it is a definite gap in their upbringing. On the other hand, I had to teach
them that saying, “
Bonjour, m'sieurs, dames
” (the abbreviation of “
Bonjour, messieurs; bonjour, mesdames
”) is the height of vulgarity.

The
bise
, that light little kiss that just brushes the cheek, is great fun to try to figure out. An American guest of a friend of mine watched the pantomime of
bises
I gave my friend and her husband and her husband gave me and my husband and the children (about thirty-six
bises
in all) and exclaimed a bit huffily, “It doesn't mean anything”! Actually, it does mean something. The
bise
means you like the person more than if you just shook hands with him.

Of course, the American man had seen only
one
exchange of
bises;
he would be horrified to see the number of times a French family kisses in one day. In my French family, there is the bise before you go to bed and the bise when you get up in the morning. I avoid this morning one by saying that my teeth aren't brushed yet and by looking generally horrible enough to repel anyone who might want to approach.

One of the worst faux pas you can make in France is to drop in unexpectedly on a friend, even a good one. The French don't like to have unexpected visitors. In fact, they don't like much of anything unexpected. Never forget, as one American sagely pointed out, that unlike the United States, France is a one-time zone country, in which everyone is doing everything at just
about the same time—hence a certain predictability in eating times, being home times, and bedtimes. Once I dropped in on a friend who was entertaining her parents. She kept me standing at the door, and it was obvious that she didn't want to introduce me to them. I could never figure out whether it was shame—of them? of me?—or whether you don't mix friends and family. But I tend to think it was the dropping in that precipitated what I felt was odd behavior.

Rituals, codes. These codified manners actually help to make life simpler—if you know the rules. As in a graceful minuet, each dancer knows the steps expected. Miss a step and the rhythm is broken. So it is with the decorum of French social life.

Curiously enough, there is no French Emily Post, Amy Vanderbilt, Miss Manners, or their equivalent, no one authority to consult to find out what to do and how to act. Perhaps because everyone old enough to read already knows how to behave? In any case, not to worry if you don't get all this down pat the first time around. I certainly didn't.

Just tell yourself that you could never, but never, attain the level of rudeness of a Parisian behind the wheel of his car. Nor, on the other hand, could you aspire to the heights of subtlety that constitute real French politesse. Should you put your foot in your mouth, or your giant lettuce leaf anywhere else, no one in France will
embarrass you by howling with laughter. That most certainly is not done. At least not until you've left the room.

Interview with Philippe

HARRIET
:
Why do you, a Frenchman, think that the French have a worldwide reputation for being quarrelsome and cantankerous?

PHILIPPE
:
Because we hate one another. But other than that, the language makes it sound like we're bawling one another out even when we aren't.
We're just having fun. When we say something like
“tête de veau”
[head of a calf], it's just friendly
.

HARRIET
:
Why are the French so particularly rude and undisciplined in their cars?

PHILIPPE
:
We Frenchmen have a very Latin disrespect of the law. People who obey laws are considered stupid, so this makes France a very dangerous country. Also, a lot of Frenchmen put their virility in their cars
.

HARRIET
:
Why is it that when a Frenchman asks you a question, he or she doesn't listen to a long, serious answer—or even pretend to?

PHILIPPE
:
Because the French don't like to have all the details
(être besogneux)
. They like big ideas and the general picture
.

HARRIET
:
You can say that again. . . . But back to rudeness. Why are the French nice to people they know and rude to everyone else?

PHILIPPE
:
That's a real difference. The people you don't know can die in front of you and no one cares. They are enemies, or potential enemies at least
.

HARRIET
:
Is that why French people don't go overboard about welcoming newcomers/visitors/tourists?

PHILIPPE
:
Of course. As I said, the person you don't know may be an enemy. How many times have you been invaded? I myself have been invaded twice, first by the Germans, then by Euro Disneyland. You can never be too careful
.