In your rented apartment or hotel
In hotels, never complain that there are no tea- and coffee-making facilities in your room. Those who require an early-morning or late-night cuppa will usually need to come equipped with a kettle.
Similarly, it’s not worth complaining if your accommodation is gloomy or noisy. Any room or apartment below the second floor will probably be gloomy because almost every street in Paris is lined with six- or seven-storey buildings. Also, even with double-glazing, if you’re right above the pavement, you may well have to listen to yelling drunks at night and the dawn chorus of clattering dustbins (they’re plastic but still make a racket when slammed against a truck to be emptied and then dumped back on the pavement).
If you’re renting an apartment in a building occupied by Parisians, don’t say to yourself, ‘Excellent, this entrance hall is empty, so there’s lots of room to park the bike I’ve rented and/or stow the buggy rather than humping it up six flights of stairs.’ In fact, the entrance hall is empty precisely because the residents who own apartments in the building have voted to forbid wheeled machines of any sort in their entrance hall. Leaving a bike or buggy, even for one night, will probably earn you an angry note from the old man on the second floor who’s lived there for forty years and who tripped over a badly parked bike in 1982 and has needed an annual health-spa holiday ever since. If he hasn’t got arthritis in his fingers, he might even let your tyres down.
Essential phrases for getting on with Parisians
Bonjour!
To be said in a loud sing-song way, so that rather than wishing someone a good day, it comes to mean anything from ‘Hello, I’m not an enemy, honestly’ to ‘Yes, you’re not hallucinating, I am here and you’re going to have to stop yakking to your colleague and serve me.’
C’est à moi, en fait
‘It’s my turn, actually’—to be said with a calm, polite smile that proves beyond doubt that the wannabe queue-jumper is not going to be allowed to push in front of you. Try not to weaken and say, ‘C’est à moi, je pense (I think), because the queue-jumper can say, ‘Non, je ne pense pas,’ and carry on with their evil-doing.
Permettez-moi
Literally it means ‘allow me’, and strictly speaking should be said to accompany some polite gesture. However, it can be turned on its head when, for example, a Parisian grabs a visitor’s métro ticket out of their tentative fingers and shoves it in the turnstile slot so that the dawdling visitor will go through and get the hell out of his life.
Après vous
‘After you’—again, instead of its literal meaning, it can be used to mean ‘Get through that door and out of my life.’
Pour qui il/elle se prend?
‘Who does (s)he think (s)he is?’ A confusing one, perhaps, but this is often said directly to someone who has got the better of you or is seriously trying to. In old-fashioned Parisian argot, to avoid the tu-vous issue, people used to talk in the third person. In black-and-white films, waiters asked strangers, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il veut, le Monsieur?’—‘What would the gentleman like?’ So ‘Pour qui il/elle se prend?’ is a combination of a direct ‘Who do you think you are?’ and an appeal to anyone else in the vicinity to confirm that this other person is an idiot/snob/bastard, etc.
Franchement!
‘Honestly!’—perhaps safer than trying to use the above vintage slang. To be huffed loudly if someone does anything to dent your Parisian sense of superiority.
Bonne journée/soirée, etc.
At the end of any transaction or meeting, as well as saying au revoir, Parisians usually wish each other a good day, afternoon or evening. In fact, despite their reputation for being unwelcoming, they will wish each other a good anything. A friendly waiter might wish departing tourists bonne visite (if he’s received a decent tip), a hotel receptionist will say bon séjour (‘have a good stay’). Once I even heard a woman wish her friend bon dentiste—the ‘bon(ne) + noun grammatical structure is so economical and flexible that this could have meant anything from ‘I hope your visit to the dentist goes OK’ to ‘I hope you enjoy yourself on your date with the hunky dentist.’ In short, it’s a safe way of using your limited French vocabulary to the full, and winning Parisian friends. Bonne improvisation!
* For more on this museum, see Chapter 5.
** For more on this annual phenomenon, see Chapter 3.
The sorely missed pissoirs were phased out in the 1980s, though many Parisian men pretend not to have noticed.
2
PAVEMENTS
PARIS EST LA VILLE où les caniveaux sont les plus propres du monde parce que les chiens les respectent.
(Paris has the cleanest gutters in the world because the dogs respect them.)
ALAIN SCHIFRES, FRENCH
JOURNALIST
IN MAY 2009, Beaux Arts, a monthly art magazine, published a survey entitled Les Français et la beauté. Amongst other things, the French were asked about the biggest ‘source of beauty’ in their everyday life.
Predictably, 35 per cent replied ‘making love’, but that was only the second most popular answer. The first was ‘walking in the street’, with 44 per cent of votes.
The conclusions are pretty catastrophic for the country’s reputation. French buildings are more beautiful than French lovers? The curves of a passing Renault are more aesthetically pleasing than those on a French body? Even if this is over-interpreting the survey a little, the results do say something about the importance of street life in France, and particularly in Paris. In fact, walking around Paris is such an established tradition that it has its own art form. It’s called flâner, a verb meaning to stroll aimlessly, and its artist is the flâneur, the man (women seem to be too busy to ‘flan’) who wanders the city streets in search of inspiration for his poems, paintings or travel books.
The concept of flâner was invented by the decadent poet Charles Baudelaire in the nineteenth century. When he wasn’t writing verse or
