Perhaps the owners voted against renovating the facade of the building (known as a ravalement), even though the building’s agents (the syndic) warned them that the city would force them to carry it out the following year, when it would be even more expensive. A ravalement can cost each owner thousands of euros, and this alone will convince some people to sell their apartment, with all its hidden future liabilities.
Perhaps someone proposed installing a lift, but the city refused to authorize it because the building is over 150 years old and cannot be structurally altered. When you read this in the compte-rendu, the seller’s assurance that the staircase is wide enough for a lift and that the other owners are all in favour counts for nothing.
Maybe the syndic is so fed up with the owners opposing any outlay on upkeep that it is going to terminate its contract and leave the building without agents to manage its affairs.
All this will be there in the minutes. Their revelations about a building’s secret life can be absolutely riveting. And can save housebuyers from making total fools of themselves.
The Paris tourist office provides a unique service for tourists who
want to take a souvenir home on their shoes.
THE
8TH
COMMANDMENT
Tu N’aimeras Pas Ton Voisin
THOU SHALT NOT LOVE
THY NEIGHBOUR
THOU SHALT NOT LOVE
THY NEIGHBOUR
THE FRENCH ARE PROUD OF BEING INDIVIDUALISTIC. THEY present this as proof that they have caractère, rather than being bland pack animals like English football fans and all Scandinavians. In fact, though, what they’re really trying to do is provide a philosophical justification for not giving up their seat to a pregnant woman on the bus.
This isn’t entirely fair. France has a greater sense of solidarity than lots of countries around it. The French pay high taxes and social-security contributions, which go to provide high pensions, high unemployment benefits and excellent medical cover. They have a law – non-assistance à personne en danger – that makes it illegal not to help someone who is being mugged or crying for help through the door of their apartment, at least by phoning for assistance. It is illegal to evict a rent-defaulting tenant in winter, or to cut off their electricity. It is almost impossible to write your children out of your will. And, as we saw in the Second Commandment, even in the midst of a long transport strike, workers stick together.
But inside this comfort blanket, the French enjoy the feeling of being on a solo crusade against the system and everyone else in the world.
Lycée-faire
The classic theory is that this individualism comes from their peasant background – practically all French families need go back only two or three generations to find farmers who had to battle not only against cheese buyers and plough salesmen but also against the elements themselves. But that’s a bit like saying that every French person should know how to milk a goat. In fact, they (modern French people, not goats) are rigorously trained in individualism at school. For a start, schools have no uniforms at all, so it’s every brand name for itself. Children can dress how they want (except if they want to wear religious symbols). At the age of eleven, they are thrown into the collège, a junior high school for eleven- to fourteen-year-olds. Few will have the same timetable as their friends as this depends on what subjects they take, and they will often begin and end school at different times every day. Things get even worse for fifteen-year-olds at the lycée, when the school day has virtually no structure. In some schools they can even smoke in the playground. It is total laissez-faire. What’s more, every time there are baccalauréat sessions or mock exams, many schools are emptied and pupils of all ages are thrown out on to the street and left to their own devices.
At university, life gets even more survivalist. In a spirit of so-called democracy, universities accept anyone with the baccalauréat who wants to sign up (and whose mum is prepared to stand in line for hours on registration day). So classrooms, or amphitheatres, are overfull, and students have to fight for a seat or stand at the back. The tutor, meanwhile, if he or she is not on strike or absent doing better-paid research, will turn up, talk into a microphone and then disappear.30 And that’s pretty well all the guidance new students get for at least the first year, when half of them will be kicked out for failing their exams because they didn’t get enough guidance. Darwin himself could not have invented a more efficient way of turning young French people into lone rangers.
This system does have one major advantage, though. Because school life is so unstructured, young people spend much more time concentrating on their extracurricular life. In the gaps in their school timetable, they will have had hours to talk about and practise seduction. They will have learned how to smoke convincingly and hang out in cafés just like the grown-ups. And because they generally stay at home with mummy and daddy till they’re at least twenty-five, they can practise living the adult lifestyle without the actual stress of finding a job and somewhere to live. They can lie back on their comfort blanket and concentrate on moi.
Je Fume, Moi Non Plus
I once read a novel set in France where the author had a character walk past a Parisian café and smell the coffee. But generally, if you can smell anything it is smoke. In some places, the no-smoking area is only a table away from the smokers, or consists of a few tables near the bar, where everyone stands and smokes.
If you are eating next to a table of smokers, you might as well order
