Sometimes it was easier to duck into the nearest office, shake the hand of the bemused occupant, and wait until the directors and my boss had gone.
Most of the above also applies when bumping into neighbours or acquaintances in the street. You have to put everyone you meet into a category – handshake, kiss, ‘bonjour’ or ignore. If you have a meeting with someone – a bank manager, estate agent, or even a doctor – it is polite to shake hands. If your estate agent starts kissing you, you know you’re in trouble.
When meeting someone for the first time, the good news is that the French really do say ‘enchanté’. It feels beautifully old-fashioned to tell someone you’re enchanted to meet them, especially if you really are. Looking into someone’s eyes and telling them they’re enchanting is so much more exciting than a quick ‘hi, how ya doin?’ And if you’re not enchanted to meet them, it feels deliciously hypocritical to tell them you are. It’s a no-lose situation.
The big question when meeting a woman for the first time is, kiss or no kiss? Some men chicken out of this by only kissing women they fancy, or women whom they have to kiss if they don’t want to annoy someone (e.g. their girlfriend’s best friend or sister). The general rule for a man meeting a woman, or a woman meeting anyone, is this: if the other person is a friend of a friend, close relative of a friend, under the age of thirty, at a party of any kind, someone you might like to kiss more amply later on, or just looks as if they’re expecting a kiss, you have to kiss them or they’ll think you’re a cold, unfriendly Anglo-Saxon.
If you think you’ve made the wrong decision and missed a kiss, you can always put things right by kissing when you say goodbye, which is a friendly way of saying that now you know each other better, it’s OK to get politely physical.
What Do I Do with My Lips?
If you do want to kiss, there is a definite technique to it.
In Paris, cheek-kissing, or faire la bise, involves two ‘mwas’ with little or no actual lip–cheek contact but an audible smack of the lips. Left cheeks first, then right.34 The no-lip-contact rule is important unless you are very closely acquainted. Someone you don’t know all that well may not think that your relationship extends to smearing your bodily fluids on their face – the complete opposite of a ‘French kiss’, in fact.
Even teenagers manage to control themselves in this respect. Boys will brush cheeks with girls in a way that seems to negate the presence of any hormones in their bloodstream at all. These same teenage boys often shake each other’s hands like old men, unless they’re trying to be cool and do the rapper’s hand-slapping and fist-touching thing. (Most French boys like to think they were born in the Bronx.)
Men kiss each other pretty rarely, outside of gay districts, family reunions and artists’ soirées. As a male, one of the dangers of being accepted as a member of a French family is that you may be required to rub cheeks 35 with the clan’s male members.
If you do get on kissing terms, you have to hope that there aren’t too many unshaven men in the family. Since coming to live in France, I have developed great admiration for women with unshaven partners, who have to put up with this hairy scraping every day of their lives.
Outside Paris, by the way, the kissing ritual can vary. ‘En province’, as the Parisians condescendingly call anywhere not within about a hundred kilometres of the Eiffel Tower, people often give four kisses. The Parisians say this is because their life is so dull that they have to find ways to fill the time.
To conclude: imagine if you can the following scene. It’s eleven a.m. in an office building out in the four-kiss zone. Two groups of three female workers meet in the corridor on their way to a coffee machine. By the time they’ve finished kissing each other, it’s lunchtime.
Which brings me to the next complication . . .
Bon Bons
Even after the business of kissing and shaking hands has been dealt with, you are by no means out of the forêt. When you part company, don’t think you can get away with ‘au revoir’. That would be much too easy. If you know people well and they’re below, say, fifty, you can say ‘salut’ both as hello and goodbye. But that’s not enough – you also have to remember what time it is. As you part company, you have to wish the other person a good whatever period of the day it is.
At the start of the day you can wish them ‘bonne journée’ (have a good day), or ‘bonne matinée’ (have a good morning). Later on in the morning, ‘bonne journée’ will still be OK, but a ‘bonne fin de matinée’ (have a good end of the morning) is optional. If it is just before lunch, then ‘bon appétit’ is of course obligatory.
After lunch, everyone must be wished ‘bonne après-midi’ (have a good afternoon). Later on in the afternoon, at some hazy time around dusk, you have to start greeting people with ‘bonsoir’ instead of ‘bonjour’, and leaving them with a ‘bonne fin d’après midi’ or ‘bonne fin de journée’. And if you’re at work and it’s just before going-home time, a ‘bonne soirée’ (have a good evening) will be appreciated.
The politeness game is even more varied outside the office.
Some cafés now get their staff to say ‘bonne dégustation’, literally ‘good tasting’. And it is common to wish someone happiness whatever they’re doing, from ‘bon ski’, ‘bon film’ and ‘bonne
