Talk to the Snail

English friend, was over visiting from the UK for the weekend. At the end of Saturday morning she examined the soles of her trainers, compared them with mine and asked how on earth I’d kept mine so clean. I admitted I had no idea. That afternoon, as we walked, I studied my feet to see how they avoided the poop, and discovered that they’d joined forces with my eyes to beat the problem. My eyes would permanently scan the pavement about fifty yards ahead, looking for dog trouble on the horizon. If they spotted a miniature Montmartre up ahead, they alerted the feet so that when we got to the doggy mound, the feet nimbly skipped round it. Brown alert over. Rosie, meanwhile, her eyes wildly scanning the streets for signs of medieval architecture, men’s backsides and clothes shops, kept on skidding. I taught her the technique I’d evidently acquired, and her feet became miraculously clean-living, especially on Sunday when the clothes shops were closed and distractions were at a minimum.

C’est la Vie

The French are a philosophical nation. They go around saying ‘C’est la vie’ and talking about everything’s raison d’être. Or, more sceptically, its je ne sais quoi. So it’s not surprising that France has produced some very influential philosophers.

There is Descartes, who is famous for ‘I think therefore I am,’ but whose main belief was that there was no such thing as totally reliable knowledge, a concept adopted by builders the world over when you ask them when the job is going to be finished.

And then there is Rousseau, who was born in Switzerland but did much of his philosophizing in France, and who caused all the trouble with European farm subsidies by inventing the notion of the ‘noble savage’ – that honest, unspoilt peasant who wouldn’t even be able to conceive the existence of a fraudulent subsidy claim.

But French philosophy’s greatest contribution to world thought has to be Existentialism. This is basically an intellectual justification for hating your neighbour, or at the very least denying his or her importance. It preaches that there is no morality and no absolute truth, and that life is therefore absurd and meaningless. Nothing really matters, therefore it doesn’t really matter if I push in the queue in front of you.

So if you’re at the restaurant and you ask the man at the next table why he is blowing smoke in your onion soup, and he replies, ‘I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter because life is basically meaningless,’ you know that you’re sitting next to an Existentialist.

Amongst the most famous philosophers in the movement was Albert Camus, who wrote L’Etranger, an existential novel with a hero who cares so little about his fellow beings that he shoots one of them for no reason at all.

The biggest Existentialist star, though, was Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote Huis Clos (translated as In Camera or No Exit), in which two women and a man are sent to hell and end up locked in a room together for eternity. They understandably get on each other’s nerves, which leads Sartre to the conclusion that ‘hell is other people’. If that’s not a good reason to blow smoke in someone’s dinner, I don’t know what is.

I had a great Sartre moment on the Paris metro once. I was sitting reading a book, and I must have been jiggling about without noticing because I suddenly realized that the man next to me was furious. Our eyes met and he said, ironically, ‘Ça va?’ He jiggled his shoulders and elbows around to show me how I’d been annoying him, and I saw the title of the book he was trying to read – it was Huis Clos. My mouth opened to say ‘Hell is other people, huh?’, but the sound never came out. Here was one Frenchman who hated his neighbour enough already.

30 There are also so-called TD (travaux dirigés) and TP (travaux pratiques) – smaller, supervised classes. But if a student doesn’t turn up, no tutor is going to bother hassling a slacker and create extra work for him or herself.

31 To get an idea of the full effect of a well-placed franchement, see the Tenth Commandment on politeness.

French waiters and waitresses sometimes adopt extreme tactics

to avoid serving their customers.

THE

9TH

COMMANDMENT

Tu Ne Seras Pas Servi

THOU SHALT NOT BE SERVED

THOU SHALT NOT BE SERVED

IN FRANCE, ‘SERVICE INDUSTRY’ CAN OFTEN BE A CONTRADICTION in terms. Everyone who has been there for any length of time has stories about being ignored, sent away without getting what they want, or quite simply insulted.

And this doesn’t only happen to foreigners. The French can get just as bad service as anyone else in France. The only way to get great service all the time is to be an incredibly good-looking woman. Not that I’ve ever tried being an incredibly good-looking woman – I don’t have the knees for it. It’s just that I’ve often watched and waited as a babe gets fawned over while I’m standing in line or sitting at a table wondering if I’m ever going to be asked what I want.

So, given that very few of us will ever be incredibly good-looking women, we may need help getting decent service.

The first thing to do is to speak French.³² If you can’t do that, you’re as done for as a fat snail on a barbecue, unless you’re in an obviously international place like an airport, a Paris department store or the Dordogne.

If you can speak the basic French necessary to communicate what you want, or at least know how to say that you can’t speak the necessary French, then the only other thing you need to do is remember one simple rule of life in France.

It is this: ultimately, if you manage to gain the other person’s attention, and convince them that your cause is worthwhile, you can get fantastic service. You