What Is a Frenchman?

by PIERRE DANINOS

1

ONE day, in the secrecy of his Harley Street office, a friend of mine who is a famous brain surgeon opened up an Englishman. Inside he discovered the following: one of Her Majesty’s battleships, a mackintosh, a royal crown, a cup of tea, a bobby, the Rules and Regulations of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, a Coldstream Guard, a bottle of whiskey, a Bible, the Calais-Mediterranean timetable, a nurse from Westminster Hospital, a cricket ball, some fog, a bit of earth upon which the sun never sets, and — at the very bottom of his lawn-covered subconscious — a cat-o’-nine-tails and a black-stockinged schoolgirl.

Aware of having committed an unpardonable indiscretion rather than appalled by his discovery, he called neither Scotland Yard nor the Vice Squad; he simply closed him up again. And he was obliged to admit, that all this went into the making of a really good Englishman.

I have often wondered what my friend would find if he opened up a Frenchman. (What the Major does not say is that the surgeon was French. A little later he had to undergo a brain operation himself. To everyone’s amazement, when his skull was opened, there were found inside nineteen expremiers, three dancers from the Folies-Bergerc, half a box of overripe Camembert, a completely finished Magi not Line, and several lorry loads of devaluated francs. P.D.)

By Jove, how can one define a Frenchman?

The accepted definition of the Frenchman as someone who eats bread, knows no geography, and wears the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole is not altogether inaccurate (although the Legion of Honor on closer inspection often turns out to be the Order of Ouissam Alaouite). But it doesn’t go far enough.

I’m alarmed by the thought that if my friend were to open up a Frenchman he would be seized with dizziness and fall into an abyss of contradictions. For really! How can you define these people who spend their Sundays proclaiming themselves republicans and weekdays worshiping the Queen of England; who call themselves modest, yet always talk about being the torehbearers of civilization; who treat common sense as one of their principal exports while keeping so little of it for themselves that they overthrow their governments almost before they are set up; who keep France in their hearts but their fortunes abroad; who are the enemies of Jews in general but intimate friends with one of them in particular; who love to hear their comedians make fun of the army, but whose legs assume a martial gait at the first bugle call; who detest having their failings exposed but arc constantly running themselves down; who say they love purity of line but cherish an affection for the Eiffel Tower; who admire the Englishman’s straightforward honesty but would think it ridiculous to declare their real incomes to the tax collector; who revel in stories of Scotch thrift but always try to buy at a price lower than the one marked; who hate crossing a frontier without smuggling over a little something but don t like not being en regie; who insist on proclaiming that they are people who “can’t be taken in but rush to elect the first deputy who promises them the moon; who say “In April don’t take off a stitch of clothing!” but shut off their heating systems on March fit; who vaunt the charms of their countryside but deface it with architectural monstrosities; who have a marked respect for law courts but never go to a lawyer except to find ways of getting around the law; and finally, who fall under a spell when one of their great men talks to them about their greatness, their great civilizing mission, their great country, their great traditions, but whose dream is to retire’, after a pleasant little life, to a quiet little corner, on a little piece of land, of their own, with a little wife who, satisfied with inexpensive dresses, will concoct nice little dishes for them and know how to receive their friends charmingly when they come for a little game of cards!

What is a Frenchman? A being who is, above all, the living contradiction of what you think he is.

If I had to determine the dominant feature of a Frenchman’s character, I would say that it is skepticism. My old friend Monsieur Taupin says that he is much attached to republican institutions; yet if a deputy closes a speech with an appeal to the great principles of 1789, he smiles ironically. Obviously he no longer believes in them.

Invaded, occupied, oppressed, bullied, dragging behind him memories of 1900 and the gold standard, Monsieur Taupin is a man who believes in nothing, because in his opinion there is no longer any point in believing in anything.

Take the Chamber of Deput ies. You might think the French manufactured deputies just to have them there to throw out. If I ride in a bus with Monsieur Taupin past the Chamber, his face lights up with a sarcastic smile. Is he a Royalist? No. A Bonapartist? Not that either. Does he long for a dictatorship? No, he has a horror of dictatorships. Well, then what is he?

He is a moderate whose revolutionary spirit is limited to requiring him to vote Radical or, if he is really in a bad temper, Radical-Socialist. But he votes all right; and he has a deputy. And yet even he doesn’t believe in deputies any longer. Monsieur Taupin claims that a man is no longer the same once he has taken his seat in the Chamber with six hundred others. Perhaps he is right. In any case it is clear that Monsieur Taupin treats his representatives with scant good-will — almost with that look that we reserve for the bounder who has the nerve to sport a black tie with blue stripes when he never went to Eton. And to judge by their expressions, his neighbors think as he does. Never would one think that the passengers of this bus had sent to t he Chamber the people who are sitting there. They seem to belong to two different planets.

Generally, the situation is summed up by a gentleman wearing a decoration: “What we need is a strong man to clean things up a bit in there. A good house-cleaning— that’s what we need!”

You might suppose that these people were hoping for a dictator. Well, you’d be wrong. Just let the strong man appear on the horizon, let him talk about reforming institutions, restoring order, establishing discipline, and for every man who’s pleased you’ll have a thousand up in arms. He’s a traitor, he’s a scoundrel! He wants to butcher the Republic! The heavy artillery of republican slogans is brought up, 1789 is invoked, and this date which a moment ago made Monsieur Taupin laugh now makes him very grave.

An impartial observer might thus be tempted to believe that what the French have most at heart is universal suffrage, the expression of the will of the people, republican institutions; in a word — the Chamber. But you have only to pass by in a bus . . . (see above).

2

GEOGRAPHY books and dictionaries say: “Great Britain has forty-nine million souls”; or else, “The Lnited States of America has one hundred sixty million inhabitants.” But they should say, “France is divided into forty-three million Frenchmen.” For France is the only country in the world where, if you add ten citizens to ten others, you get not an addition, but twenty divisions.

As for enumerating all the divisions that separate the French, I give up. One remark, however: if a Frenchman gets up and announces that he has become a nudist in Port-le-Boue, you may be sure that another Frenchman will arise in Malo-les-Bains and proclaim himself an anti-nudist. You might think the antagonism would end there. But no! The nudist founds an association which elects an Honorary President (himself) and a Yice President. The latter, having quarreled with the former, founds a neo-nudist Committee, rather more leftish than the first. The anti-nudist, for his part, having put himself at the head of a Presidential Committee . . . and so on.

The same process holds true for politics, for in the heart of every Frenchman there slumbers an “anti” ready to awaken at the approach of the slightest “pro.” This explains the inextricable puzzle of French political groups. How can a normally constituted Englishman — that is to say, one just barely able to differentiate between a Conservative and a Socialist — appreciate those essential nuances that separate a Gauche Republicain from a Re publicum de gauche, or a deputy of t he Union republicaine et d’action sociale from a deputy of the Action republicaine et socialef Really, I can’t.

And inasmuch as I am incapable of examining the hundreds of thousands of divisions among Frenchmen (who, as is well known, hate hairsplitting), I will content myself with studying the difference which daily divides France into two armed camps: officials who tell you that they are being maltreated and trampled upon, and non-officials who claim that the whole trouble is caused by the officials. The result is that every day except. Sunday — the day of truce when the French frankly confess that they are bored — forty-two million citizens are arrayed against the forty-third.

At first sight this numerical inferiority would seem to condemn the officials. But in Franee you must never judge things at first sight. Fresh mysteries are always coming to light, so that you end up by understanding perfectly why these people are so incomprehensible.

The citizen who ventures into a police station, Savings bank, or a town hall reminds one of a bowman about to set out for the Hundred Years’ War. Armed with a bad temper and a quiverful of sarcastic rejoinders, he knows in advance that he won’t get his way, that he will be sent from Bureau 223 on the mezzanine floor to Guichet B on the third floor, from the third floor to the police station, from the police station to the prefecture, where he learns that a new by-law dispenses with the necessity for producing the certificate he thought he had to have, in favor of a new one which is the same as the old one except that it requires fresh formalities.

Sheltered behind his grille, the official maintains his calm: over the applicant he has that advantage which people seated in a café have over the passersby. Sometimes the combatants are separated by glass perforated at a certain height by a dozen small holes. I used to believe that these holes were made to facilitate the passage of verbal bullets. Not at all! They are arranged so that the mouths of the official and the spluttering applicant are never on the same level. The opponents are therefore reduced to shouting a bit louder. Sometimes a small opening is arranged on a level with the head of the official. That means that the applicant is forced to lower his head, and this movement at once places him in an inferior position.

Through these slits, holes, and gratings, the Frenchman devotes a precious part of his existence to proving that he does exist, that he really lives where he lives, and that since his children are not yet deceased, they are alive.

You might think that any Frenchman who is not dead is alive. Wrong! In the eyes of the administration he is not alive. He must first have a birth certificate, then a life certificate, and sometimes both. It is true that lately the life certificate has been replaced by a certificate of non-decease. (The French are decidedly fond of playing with words, even with words that it is best not to play with.)

Having proved in black and white — if I may be allowed such a funereal expression — that he is alive, the Frenchman must still prove a lot more if he wants a passport to go to Italy. Strange as it may seem, a Frenchman’s trip to Italy begins in the office of his concierge, the concierge being empowered to deliver to him on the hour — or later, depending on his mood — the certificat de domicile which he needs. An adult Frenchman cannot by himself certify that he inhabits the house he lives in. For that he needs the statement of his concierge. After that he will have all the time in the world to exhume old memories while searching for his military service book, which is rarely in the place he left it ten years ago.

Some time ago I ran into Monsieur Taupin on his way to the police station. He needed a new identity card. A naïve observer might think that Monsieur Taupin, who has been well known and respected in his neighborhood for some thirty-five years, would not need someone else to declare that he really is Monsieur Taupin. Well, he’d be wrong. To declare who he is, Monsieur Taupin must produce two witnesses. You would think that these two witnesses would have to be people who had known him a long time. Wrong again! The witnesses called upon to state that they know him don’t know him at all, but they do know the Inspector. Usually it’s the nearby bistro owner and the grocer who make a nice little something on the side in the daily witness trade.

The important thing in all of this is the form. I realized that fact the minute I set foot in France at Calais, when I heard a disillusioned customs officer with a luscious Auvergnat accent say to a traveler guilty of two infringements of the law: “If you go on like this, I’ll be obliged to enforce the Regulations.”

3

THE French may be regarded as the most hospitable people in the world so long as you don’t want to enter their homes. Many foreigners who come to spend a little time in France dream of living with a French family. After many unsuccessful efforts I have decided that the best way to manage it — short of becoming a governess, which it must be admitted is somewhat difficult for a British major, even in kilts — is to settle down on the spot, find a Frenchwoman who will have you, and start your own family. That’s what I did.

An Englishman with whom you have just struck up an acquaintance may at the end of the hour— unless you have shocked him by an excess of intelligence or curiosity — ask you to spend the weekend in his cottage. Five years later you’ll discover that you don’t really know whether he likes women, men, or postage stamps.

At the end of an hour, sometimes sooner, a Frenchman will have explained to you how and why he is occasionally led to leave his wife, who is, he assures you in passing, “très gentille, un ange, mais voilà . . . vous savez ce que c’est” . . . (yet how on earth should I know?). Ten years later you’ll realize that you have never spent a night under his roof.

The first time I went to Lyons, Monsieur Taupin warned me: “Now remember! Lyons society is very exclusive. Just be patient. When they get to know you, you’ll be received everywhere.”

This, he explained to me, was a particular trait of Lyons society. Yet I received exactly the same warning (with the emphasis each time on the purely local character of this attitude) in Bordeaux, Lille, Marseilles, and even in Mazamet. Most important — Mazamet. You may know Paris, Roubaix, Toulouse, and Carcassonne, but you won’t know France if you haven’t become familiar with Brisbane-surArnette, I mean Mazamet, the sheep capital in the wool sock country. There, as elsewhere, I was told, as I stood in front of noble town-houses with austere facades: “Once they’ve adopted you, you’ll see, they’ll receive you like one of the family.”

Here’s another of those vicious circles in which this healthy land of France abounds: to be received you must be known, and to be known you must be received. The most important thing about these closed societies is to start getting into them. What you mustn’t do, as the people of Limoges say when they’ve forgotten their latchkey, is res ter fame (Ichors — to stay shut outside. (An expression that can be compared to finissez d’entrer — stop coming in — which the Limousins also use for someone who seems to have congealed on the doorstep.)

Just how long may this period of observation —

I was going to say of incubation — last ? It’s impossible to say exactly. Some say six months, a year. But that’s an obvious exaggeration. It can last ten, twenty years. The best, thing, therefore, is to prepare for the second generation, which will start being received, then receive in turn, and will finally become very exclusive itself.

I must admit that there is a great difference between the provinces and Paris. In the provinces you are told at once: “They’re very exclusive.” They cite the case of the businessman from Central Europe who spent seven years laying siege to Bordeaux without ever effecting a breach; or that of the family from Oran which waited half a century before the doors were opened to it (and which of course in its turn became very exclusive). But in the end, after all, you are received.

In Paris you are not received at all: you are taken out. The arrival of the Nicholsons or the Marlinezes has a rather curious effect on their Parisian friends. 1 happened to be at the Daninoscs’ one day when the telephone informed them of the arrival — I believe they spoke of the landing — of the Svenssons who had put them up for a fortnight in Stockholm. The announcement of a major catastrophe couldn’t have caused greater dismay.

“We’ll have to take them everywhere!” I heard. Confronted with ihe prospect of such a trial, my hosts seemed terribly tempted not to take them anywhere at all. In the end, the dinner “at home” having been put off to a later date, the Svenssons were invited to prendre un verre at a Champs Elysées café; and then, after several more days of postponements, they were taken to a couple of those sanctuaries of art and pleasure where Parisians rarely venture unless accompanied by foreign mentors.

I must say, in defense of the French in general and of the Daninoscs in particular, that the Svenssons’ appetite is monumental. I’m not. speaking of the table (though many foreigners who cat like birds at home simply gorge themselves when with the French) but of stone buildings. Gunnar Svensson is a formidable devourer of stone. I had always thought that the Swedish stomach was modeled along roughly the same lines as any other. Well, that’s a mistake. He swallowed the Sucre Coeur, for example, just like an hors d’oeuvre.

“Now,” said Svensson, “ ve must see Catacombs.”

If the Catacombs had been in Florence, Monsieur Daninos would doubtless have already visited them three times. But having lived in Paris for forty years, he hadn’t yet got around to visiting them. He merely recalled that one day—when he was seven years old his father said to him, “ If you re a good boy I’ll take you to the Catacombs on Sunday.” He couldn’t have been good, for he had never set foot in them.

My hosts made a serious attempt to talk Gunnar out of his project: “Instead, why don’t we go and have a drink on the Place du Tertre?”

But no. Foreigners sometimes have fixed ideas. Gunnar wanted his Catacombs. .Just try throwing a Swede off his bearings some day!

“It’s simple, ‘ said his host, “I’ll take you there.”

Admitting that he has never visited the Catacombs is pretty embarrassing for a Frenchman. But not even knowing where to go and look for them is really awful. On the pretext of having to go buy some cigarettes, my friend and collaborator disappeared for a moment and tackled a policeman. “Tell me, what’s the best way to the Catacombs?” The policeman hesitated, smiled, then took out his pocket guidebook. It seems they even shook hands — just between Frenchmen, you know.

As for hospitably as such, I really do believe that it’s easier for an American to gain admittance to the drawing rooms of Buckingham Palace than to lunch with theTaupins, On arrival he is told: “You must come to lunch with us. Yes, you really must!” Then the weeks go by. Something unexpected happens, the children are ill, the cook has given notice. Finally the Parisian takes the stranger, hungry for local color, to an American Grill, where the menu isn’t even printed in French, as it is in America.

I exaggerate, no doubt. Well, if you stay more than six months in France, I admit, you’ll end up being invited by certain families. Then you are warned: “You’ll have to take potluck.” That kind of luck, of a truly skeletal meagerness in England, assumes the most generous proportions in France. It explains the whole problem. For you begin to understand, when you see the French treat you to such elaborate potlucks, why this improvisation, like the impromptu speech of a British M.P., must be prepared long beforehand. No English hostess could achieve such a result without several months of work. The whole question, then, is one of deciding whether it is better to be invited immediately by the English or to wait six months to be invited by the French. For my part, I incline to the latter solution. Good Lord! The meal is so splendid that you don’t mind at all having waited.