Travel by DAR

Paris: After Prozac

(First published in Madison)

You’ve heard the jokes. How did the French celebrate their World Cup victory? By bathing. How do you get two Frenchmen to agree? Shoot one of them. There’s even a whole subcategory of French horn jokes making the rounds. (How do you make a French horn sound beautiful? Sell it and buy a flute.)

Just in the nick of tardiness, America has struck back. After decades of being the butt of French badinage, we’re in full retaliation mode. In a recent column, Dave Barry likens the sound of the French “r” to trying to dislodge a live eel from the esophagus.

On a website devoted to teaching anti-French comebacks, the following is spelled out phonetically: "Would you stop spitting on me while you're talking? (voo-lay voo se-say de me cra-shay de-su pen-dan que voo parl-ay?)” Even the musical version of “Bright Lights, Big City” has a song called I HATE THE FRENCH containing this line: "I hate the French/ I hate them all/ From Toulouse-Lau-fuckin’-trec/ To Charles de Gaulle." Francophobia, it seems, is the height of fashion.

Amusant, non? And richly-deserved. The only problem with all this hayseed swagger is that it’s too late. The tide has turned, the cow has left the barn. Budding frog-bashers please note: All that French attitude we love to hate is in the past. Parisians, keepers of the most civilized culture on earth who have historically regarded the rest of the world as Bridge and Tunnel traffic, have at long last become civil. Dare we say it? They’re nice.

Best I can figure it, the change occurred about two years ago -- as overnight a sensation as these kinds of things can ever be said to be. As overnight, that is, as the transformation undergone by New York City in the summer of 1976 during the Democratic Convention for Jimmy Carter, when the city seemed to clean up its act instantaneously. . Of course it wasn’t so; it was a gradual evolution that had taken place over many moons and that culminated in the Annie Hall comeback and the “I Love New York” sing-o-mercials. But it crystallized when the media (quaintly called the press corps back then) recognized it all at once and starting bestowing upon New York the benefit of the doubt. Suddenly behavior that had always been seen as cranky was deemed eccentric, questionable characters were called colorful. Cabbies who let you off in puddles weren’t inconsiderate, that it is to say; they had Ring Lardneresque charm.

And the same snowball effect is occurring in Paris as occurred in New York back then: Perception Augments Phenomena. The more Paris is perceived to be growing pleasant, by God, the pleasanter it becomes. It’s a noticeable enough development so that it may officially be time to revise our opinions of the French. Over the last twenty or thirty months, suddenly, one can no longer sigh along with Saul Bellow: "Ah, the French, what can one do about the French, they are so wonderful, they are so disagreeable?" Now the argument can be made that they’re just, well, wonderful is a word that ought to be reserved for Trobriand Islanders. But disagreeable only a jot.

Item: May, 1998: A San Francisco heiress sits palpitating in ] one of the most elegantly romantic restaurants in Paris. It is the first time she has ventured back to this site since 1964 when the maitre d’, not favoring the fashion of the hat she was sporting, took it upon himself to remove it and hand it to her in a soup bowl, neatly scissored in quarters. Now the same maitre d’ approaches with an Armagnac on the house. “To welcome you back after a long absence,” he tells her, bowing deeply.

Don’t reach for your rose-colored glasses just yet, however. At least not until you flash back to the way things were in the not-so-long-ago. Dealing with the French has traditionally been as exasperating an experience as being stuck in an eternal DMV line. Their bureaucracy raised passive-aggression to the level of an art. Service people brought impertinence to a viral stage. And the thing that really galled non-Gauls was that they aspired to do these things. Whether it was rigging their answering machines to cut you off mid-sentence or refusing to sell you a plastic spoon to go with your take-out sorbet, you got the distinct sense that they enjoyed being rude. [?It energized them to leave you fuming.] Infuriating you made them feel chic.

Used to be, everyone had their favorite “Don’t You Hate Paris?” horror story. Miss Soybean USA, 1958 vintage, walked into a parfumerie to request a shampoo for dry horse. The tightly-bunned saleslady did not allow a smile to crack the surface of her foundation. “I believe you mean cheveux (hair), not cheval (horse),” she snapped, declining thereafter to so much as look in her direction. Another time a homespun Mark Twain type asked a Parisian if he was heading in the right direction for Mont-martyr. The Parisian ignored him as one does a gnat. Twain asked again. The Parisian let slip just a flicker of superiority. After being asked a third time, the Parisian uttered a reply that seemed to sum up the attitude of those days:

“I have Paris.”

There it is. Three words. I have Paris and you don’t. Nah nah, n’nah, nah. Did it never occur to them that they had it because we handed it to them on a silver platter after wresting it from Hitler? Or is that what they were sore about?

It was never such evil behavior, that impolitesse, in and of itself, but multiplied by three million – the number of Americans who visited Paris every year – it did get a bit old. And even when it wasn’t anything you could put your finger on, even when it was as subtle as the waiter behind you snapping a serviette at your ear to hasten you along, but so delicately you couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a mosquito, there were always so many pitfalls for unsuspecting Americans that visiting Paris was like touring a minefield. The natives lay in wait for us to screw up in any number of ways: by cutting off the nose of the cheese, by inquiring too soon in a conversation what they did for a living, by removing an ashtray from a caf? table, by calling to say hello on a Monday instead of a Wednesday as arranged, by presuming a tu relationship before taking the cue from them that it was proper to do so. (What a can of snails that tu business has been for us open-hearted people whose professors are on a first name basis with our gas station attendants. Ex-pat wannabes have been noticing to their peril for years that even entering into a love-making relationship did not guarantee them a tu status. Au contraire …)

Ironically, the most irritating thing about all this Cartesian comme il faut nonsense was how wrong-headed their take on America was. For a smart people, they held fast to a particularly dumb P.O.V., to wit: “I doan know, ees bizarre. American eestory is a contradiction in terms. You have the Declaration of Independence, and then ... nussing! A void! Whereas we have a glorious civilization that goes back zousands of years!” It was supposed to be a love-hate relationship, but where was the love? Except for the things we were ashamed of, like The Three Stooges and Ronald Reagan’s cowboy hat?

Item: August, 1998. An American student pulls out a phrasebook to ask the Metro lady how to get to the Tour Eiffel. Instead of considering him a cockroach who has landed in her proximity with the express intention of attacking her honor by mangling the language she loves, as her predecessor would have done twenty years earlier, she finds his efforts both valiant and dear. Chuckling indulgently, she comes out of her booth to personally steer him by the elbow to the correct staircase.

Donc, none of this would have bothered us all these years if we didn’t so badly crave the respect of the French. But we couldn’t help craving it, and for good reason. They were so much braver in matters of taste than we. In the arena of cheese, alone, they merited our undying admiration – they were extolling that smelly prince Gorgonzola when we were still scared to venture into anything naughtier than Velveeta. (One of their highest cheese compliments is one that makes us giddy to this day – that a particularly ripe treasure smells “like the feet of God.”) Their refinement consisted of being less squeamish in all matters, not least of all sex which they were perfecting -- orally, morally, contrapuntally -- when we were still pajama-clad Puritans. In bed and at table – where it was a joy just to watch them eat, with the elegant furtive manners of raccoons – they always seemed more instinctively liquid than we. . As Henry Miller put it, “One becomes aware in France, after having lived in America, that sex pervades the air. It’s there all around you, like a fluid.” Or as a metro graffito had it in the 1980’s: Libert?! Fraternit?! Sexualit?!”

Not only that, but the conversation was effervescent, the fashion sense unflinching, the very air seemed to hold a clarity, darned by blue dragonflies. For all these reasons and more, we letched after their approval. We were like that quintessentially striving American, F. Scott Fitzgerald, gaga as ever for class, who declared, “France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.”

They still have those things; the difference is they don’t lord them over us quite the way they did a while back. The gendarme of today, looking every bit as intellectual as a Camus scholar with his calf-brown eyes blinking behind bifocals, smiles bashfully as he takes it upon himself to tie the shoelace of the American schoolgirl who comes tripping off her school vacation van. Could this be the same officer who was a member of that beastly and reactionary police force of thirty years ago, nightstick-bashing Sorbonne coeds who took to the barricades in 1968? Of course not -- it’s his son, now married to the Sorbonne coed. Which brings us to the first of the explanations to account for the seachange undergone by the French.

Explanation 1. They’re a new generation. As the wonderful old expression has it, “Nous sommes divenus le plafond” (“We have become the ceiling”). Those selfsame folks who manned the barricades in ‘68 now manage the great hotels and kitchens of France. This new generation leaves a lot to be desired -- they consider the finest American export to be Bruce Willis, for instance -- but they’re definitely an improvement upon the tooth-sucking Jerry Lewis fans of yore.

2. We’re a new generation. After all, a good part of the reason they used to insult us (“I don’t understand: You’re neither fat nor loud, how can you be American?”) was because, it must be said, a lot of us were fat and loud. We’re not anymore.

3. If fat equals happy, as folk wisdom has it, the French are catching up. According to recent figures, eight percent now qualify as obese, the fault of increasing consumption of western-style corn chips, packaged pizzas, and colas. Still not up to America’s standards (20% of us are obese) -- but then, our culture hasn’t produced a punk band called Obnoxious, either.

4. The globe is undergoing one of its periodic pinball tilts. With the notable exception of middle-Eastern countries, sado-xenophobia seems to be on the slide. This chapter of world history might also be called: Pamela Mellows The Planet. When even flesh-eating Fijians rush in from their shuffleboard tourneys to tune in Bay Watch at 2 p.m., the world plainly has better things to do than regard well-meaning Americans as bumpkins to the core.

5. But the most plausible explanation, when all is said and done, is that Parisians must be putting Prozac in their Perrier. After all, they’re always taking some tonic or other to improve “circulation pour le cerveau;” it’s a fact that as a people the French take massive amounts of psych meds, an average of 52 prescriptions a year for every man, woman, and child in the land. Peter Kramer’s landmark book, Listening to Prozac, was a bestseller over there under the title Prozac: Happiness by Prescription? And isn’t it true that that smug and surly father-in-law of yours became cuddly after getting his 40 mgs a day?

C’que tu veux, as the French say. Whatever. All that matters is that they are pleasanter than before. Oh, Paris will always have its cutlery nazis who insist on banging your silverware back in place if you dare move it, its chateau bullies who scream if you object to their charging you for a free wine tasting. But let the word go forth from this day forward, that the majority of Parisians are at long last human. They may even, before we know it, stop cutting in line.

None of which means, of course, that we have to desist with the French jokes just when they’re starting to get good. I mean, there is such a thing as payback. Let’s try it phonetically, shall we? “Frawg walkz in-to a French horn store --”