That was an extreme example, of course. You’re much more likely to come across shop assistants who carry on gossiping about their boss as you wait to be served. In that case, if you really need what they have on offer, you should interrupt the conversation with a cheery but insistent ‘bonjour!’, which is French for ‘Are you going to serve me or what?’
The key thing is not to get annoyed. And this is going to be especially important when you reach . . .
Level Two
JUST SAY NON
In France, when a girl says no she often means yes. So does a guy, for that matter. I’m not saying that they want to get raped. Though sometimes getting good service in France does feel a bit like non-consensual sex.
Here’s how the French ‘no means yes’ works.
I was in Reims to visit the champagne cellars, and didn’t want to leave the city without seeing the most spectacular of them, at the Pommery winery. Only trouble was, it was Sunday lunchtime, I was due to leave on the five o’clock train, and you have to book a place on a guided tour.
I phoned Pommery and asked when the next tour was.
‘Oh, we haven’t got any vacancies till the four forty-five tour,’ the hostess told me.
‘You’ve got nothing at all before that?’
‘No, sorry. We’re completely booked up.’
At this point, the faint-hearted customer is supposed to ring off and leave the hostess in peace with her neat reservation list. But I’ve played the game before.
‘My train’s at five,’ I said, ‘so four forty-five would be too late.’
‘OK,’ the hostess replied, ‘how about two thirty?’
‘Perfect,’ I said, and reserved.
There was absolutely no point entering into an abstract moral discussion about why the hell she hadn’t offered two thirty in the first place. I’d got what I wanted, so who cared?
This happened to me again more recently, and I must be getting even better at the game because the result was an even more astonishing success.
I was travelling from Lannion in Brittany to Paris, first taking a regional train and then changing on to the mainline TGV at Saint Brieuc. It was February 6th.
At Lannion, I stamped my ticket in the composteur machine and got on my regional train, only for the ticket inspector, the contrôleur, to tell me that the date on my ticket was wrong. It said February 10th instead of 6th. This, I knew, wasn’t really my fault, because I’d told the man at the Gare de Lyon when booking my ticket that I wanted to come back on the Monday, and he’d got the date wrong. But there was no point telling the contrôleur this, because he’d only have told me that it was my fault for not checking the date. Which was true, I suppose.
‘It’s no problem on this train, because it’s a non-reservation service, but you’ll have to change your ticket before you get on the TGV, which is reservation-only. You can do it at Saint Brieuc station,’ he said, a worrying prospect given that I had only fifteen minutes to find the ticket office, queue up, get the change made and catch my connecting train.
I was first out the doors of the regional train in Saint Brieuc, dashed to the ticket office, and found only three or four people ahead of me in the queue, which was an organized line with barriers, and not some anarchic ruck as it would have been a few years ago. Things were looking promising.
My turn came – still ten minutes to go – and I set out to explain my problem to the lady behind the counter, a youngish woman who looked fairly at ease with the world and not out to prove to her customers what a cruel place it can be. Which was a relief.
‘Bonjour,’ I said brightly, as always.
‘Bonjour,’ she replied, a little too suspiciously for my liking.
So, taking a lesson from the (as yet unwritten) first chapter of this book, I heaped the blame on myself.
‘I made a mistake when booking my ticket. I got one for dix février instead of six février,’ I said. I handed it to her. She read – rather slowly, I thought – my itinerary. The regional train’s times of departure and arrival, the same for the TGV, with my seat and carriage number, and the wrong date.
‘I can’t change a ticket once you’ve started the journey,’ she finally replied.
‘But I haven’t started the TGV bit of the journey.’
‘Yes, but you’ve composted your ticket. I can’t replace it.’
This, I knew, was the moment critique. She had pursed her lips and put the ticket down in front of her, as if to wash her hands of it. If I gave up now and picked up the ticket, I was a goner.
‘Yes, I composted it before I got on the train at Lannion,’ I said, pushing the ticket barely a millimetre back towards her across the counter, ‘because I didn’t know it was the wrong date. It was the contrôleur who noticed.’
‘You should have checked the date when you bought the ticket.’
‘Yes, you are right, but I just assumed that the ticket seller would give me the right date. I don’t understand how the mistake happened. I always knew I was coming back today. Perhaps I said “dix” instead of “six”.’
We’d reached an impasse. But we’d had a nice philosophical discussion about the nature of my mistake and the way the French railway ticketing system works. And the most important thing was that I had found a comeback – a non-aggressive reply – to everything she said. I clearly wasn’t going to give up and go away, or offer to buy a new ticket.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said, and went away with my ticket.
I felt like the accused waiting for the jury to return its verdict. The SNCF clock
