• Just because something smells like poo does not mean it will taste like it. Reblochon cheese, for example, can smell faintly (or not so faintly) of a urine-soaked sock. But grilled over a dish of potatoes it is sublime. If you are served a particularly ripe-smelling cheese or sausage, breathe through the mouth and take a bite. You might well get a pleasant surprise. If you get an unpleasant surprise, remember that in France, one spits to the right.
Mouton Dressed as Lamb
The French have few scruples about calling a spade a spade, or a brain a brain, when they’re talking about food. For a start, in French porc, boeuf, mouton and veau (calf/veal) are the names of the animals, so when talking about the relevant meat, the actual furry four-legged creature automatically springs to mind (as it does with lamb in English, of course). This, coupled with their taste for unusual parts of the animal, can produce some graphic-sounding translations.
15 Admittedly, this lack of public epidemics may have more to do with France’s love of secrecy – see the Seventh Commandment.
16 Allergie aux arachides (‘al air-djee o’zarasheed’). Ideally, if they had enough breath left, the patient would say, ‘J’ai une allergie aux arachides et je suis en choc anaphylactique’ (‘djay oon al air-djee o’zarasheed ay dje swee o’shock anna flak teek’), basically explaining that they have this allergy and can’t breathe very well.
17 The arrondissement’s menus are published monthly on its website. Go to http://www.mairie4.paris.fr/mairie4/jsp/Portail.jsp?id_page=86 and click on one of the links under the heading Menus de la Caisse des Ecoles.
18 This, by the way, was the sailor who once claimed to have been slowed down during a round-the-world race by a sixty-foot squid clamped to the hull of his boat.
19 The cows have nothing in common with the luxury cars except their name. Apparently limos are so named because the first cars with an enclosed section for passengers had roofs shaped like the hoods of cloaks worn in Limousin, not because they looked or drove like cows.
A French invention that was not adopted by the rest of the world,
the long-distance suppository applicator.
THE
4TH
COMMANDMENT
Tu Seras Malade
THOU SHALT BE ILL
THOU SHALT BE ILL
IN 1673, FRANCE’S GREATEST COMIC DRAMATIST, MOLIÈRE, wrote a play called Le Malade Imaginaire – The Hypochondriac – about a man who is so obsessed with his health problems that he wants to marry his daughter to a doctor to save on medical bills, and threatens to banish her to a convent if she refuses. It was supposed to be a satire, but the French seem to have decided that he is a role model rather than an anti-hero.
In this they are aided and abetted by the state. The French social-security system may be cutting back on expenses, but it is still one of the most generous in the world, and this encourages the French to get ill as often as possible.
It’s always surprising to go to a pharmacy in a seaside resort in midsummer and see masses of people there. And they’re not just buying sun cream, condoms and insect repellent. It’s as if on holiday they have time to realize how ill they really are and decide to try out all the remedies. And although the French have been saying for at least the last decade that their health service is about to collapse, it keeps going strong. Partly because the government commits so much money to its public services, but also because there is cash in the system. Patients pay out and are then reimbursed. This cash pays doctors and pharmacists, and keeps things turning over.
At first, it can feel strange to give your doctor a cheque at the end of your appointment, but the discomfort is relieved when 70 per cent of the price is refunded by the social security. And if you work and have a good mutuelle (private health top-up scheme), the refund can be 100 per cent of your costs, even for things like capped teeth and glasses.
Even so, the French aren’t satisfied.20
The best example of this dissatisfaction I ever heard was at a spa hotel in the southwest of France. I had come for a long weekend of relaxing massages and seaweed baths, and was surprised to discover that before they would let me anywhere near the hot tubs, I had to see a doctor, who was going to prescribe my treatments. ‘Don’t worry,’ I was told, ‘la visite est remboursée’ – the consultation would be refunded by the state. I seriously considered asking whether the same applied to the minibar.
As I sat in the waiting room in my fluffy bathrobe, I listened to two elderly ladies discussing the French health system. It was ‘going to the devil’, they agreed. I thought they were repeating the common complaint about le trou de la sécu – the ‘hole in the social-security system’ or health-budget deficit. Most years, France overspends on health by several billion euros. Not surprising, really, if all the French guests at this spa spent twenty euros or so of the state’s money to see a doctor when all they wanted was a bubble bath.
But no, this wasn’t what was bothering the two ladies. It was the difficulty one of them had had persuading her doctor to prescribe the spa treatment itself as a medical necessity. She’d been going on cures for twenty years, she said, and it had always been automatic before. This time, the doctor had forced her to identify some specific problem (she’d chosen sciatica) to treat, rather than prescribing her a week of massages and sploshing about in a seawater swimming pool just for her general well-being. Soon, she said, they might be limited to the purely medical spas like Aix les Bains – a former Roman spa in the Alps, famed for its sulphurous waters and casinos.
I had to admit that the situation
