French Toast (10 page)

Then there's the guilt complex about money. (I'll go into more detail on this subject in the next chapter.) Many of my American friends married to Frenchmen say the same thing: Their spouse makes them feel culpable about spending the household
sous
. “We're going to eat noodles this month,” wails Pierre to his wife, who is honestly terrified when this successful lawyer tells her he thinks that they may not make it through the month. She will spend the next day thinking of selling her jewels or getting a job. That night, however, he comes home and hits her with “I just saw the most fantastic pair of diamond earrings I'd like to buy you.”

My friend and I commiserate with each other about this yo-yo behavior. I tell her that my French husband, one of the most generous people I know, has done this to me for years. The tense look, the tight voice, the desperate air—how many times did I think we would be going to debtors' prison because I had splurged on a new tablecloth? And then he would gallantly invite me out to dinner. Another American friend tells me that the
guilt complex is routine practice in her home, too. Her husband went so far as to make sure she didn't have a checking account (she spends money like water, I must admit), and so the only money she could get would be by going through him, the Great Provider.

Does this sound like the Dark Ages? It is.

However, after two decades of observing and studying the phenomenon, I have finally figured it out. These men are Latin: They are just exteriorizing their worry, blowing off steam, so to speak.
Frenchwomen know this
. We literal-minded American wives sit there biting our fingernails, cursing ourselves for being so irresponsible, and becoming convinced we'll end up either poor or in prison, or both. What we don't understand is that the poor guy just had a hard day at the office and simply wants to express himself. Being the nearest and dearest, we're in the direct line of fire. Since relationships are not equal, we have to listen to the histrionics—and they are histrionics—as part of the deal.

I repeat: If the American wife thinks she will be getting into a union based on honey-dewed consensus, she is wrong. The French love to bicker, and a quarrel is not seen as anything particularly threatening. In a French couple, separation is tolerated, too. In August, the woman often takes off for the seashore with the kids, leaving the husband behind (the famous “August husbands”). No one is horrified by the idea of not being together. A little relief is seen as a positive, not a negative, element. Still,
one American man confessed in counseling that he resented his French wife's going off with the children and leaving him behind.

As time goes on, I feel myself becoming more and more French—or less and less American—in my relationship to my husband. I don't even listen when he rants and raves. Typical Latin overdramatization, I tell myself. It's when he's silent that I worry. As for dinner table conversations where there are sexual allusions, I shut my mouth, listen to the jokes, and join in the laughter—but I don't translate. Some things you just can't do.

Interview with Philippe

HARRIET
:
What about the criticism by some American women that Frenchmen don't automatically take a shower before sex?

PHILIPPE
:
Sex and soap don't match. To excite an American woman, you have her smell a bar of soap. To excite a Latin woman, you offer the jungle smell
.

HARRIET
:
What about that mysterious French invention, the bidet?

PHILIPPE
:
The French wonder why other countries don't have them. How can the people be clean?

HARRIET
:
What does a Frenchman look for in a woman?

PHILIPPE
:
A Frenchwoman or an American woman?

HARRIET
:
Ha-ha. Why are there so many dirty jokes and sexual innuendos in French conversations?

PHILIPPE
:
This isn't just French—it's Latin. But French culture, from the Gauls to Rabelais to San Antonio, is filled with sexual allusions. You Anglo-Saxons are the ones who have a hang-up, not us. Calvin, who incidentally was a Frog, got you people all messed up
.

HARRIET
:
I thought he was Swiss
.

PHILIPPE
:
No, like Jules Verne, he was French
.

HARRIET
:
Chauvinist . . .

Food, sex, and the Frenchwoman, all the surprises found therein pale in comparison to what I found to be the attitude of the French toward money. It could best be summed up as secretive. Here goes for an attempt at an explanation.

In a country where you can wax eloquent on almost anything, there's one subject that everyone avoids. A Frenchman will go on for hours about the best way to prepare a
canard à l'orange
or the attributes of haute couture, but when it comes to lucre, he clams up.

The basic attitude toward money seems to be this: the less said about it, the better. A French journalist told me that he once phoned the head of one of France's wealthiest families to interview him for an article he was writing.
The person refused, saying, “
Ce qui est bien ne fait pas du bruit; ce qui fait du bruit n'est pas bien
.” (“What is good doesn't make noise; what makes noise isn't good.”)

This attitude toward money carries over into political life in France. The Anglo-Saxons are world specialists in the sex scandal. The more realistic French don't expect any politician to be perfect. They couldn't care less about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas or Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. The basic point of view in France is that a politician's private life (that is, his sex life) is his
private
life and none of anyone's (including the taxpayer/voter's) business. For years, French journalists knew that President François Mitterrand had a mistress and a daughter by her. He even admitted it in an interview, saying, “So what?” and the matter was dropped. The scandals under Mitterrand were
financial
scandals.

Nobody cares if a French politician has a mistress, or two or three, and he certainly wouldn't care if this was discovered. In fact, he'd be proud. But there is one thing he would certainly not like, and that would be for people to know how much money he is making or have his tax form published for the world to see. Why?

“Money is like sex,” writes French journalist and TV personality François de Closets. “It is talked about in general and not in particular, in the abstract and not with personal examples.” Of course the French love to joke about sex—but I've rarely if ever heard a joke
about money. “The silence of the French when it comes to money,” observes de Closets, “is not that of indifference, but of passion. It translates kind of a secret and guilty obsession . . . a censored desire, that is to say a taboo in the strongest sense of the word.”

This doesn't mean that the French don't like money in all its forms, from the gold brick under the pillow to investments in real estate. But all this is laden with a terrible collective guilt complex. “The specificity of the French attitude [toward money]” writes François de Closets, “is not his love of it, but in his repression of this love.”

Other than the nouveau riche, who don't know how to act, most Frenchmen have figured out that it's better to hide wealth than flaunt it. One of the reasons for this is to avoid the taxman; the other is to avoid sheer jealousy.

Jealousy comes in many forms:

• A journalist from a French magazine reported that he joined a young man for a ride around Paris in his brand-new flaming-red Porsche. Sure enough, they were stopped by the police for verification of their identity papers, which the French must always have on them just in case the police want to check them for some reason. The young man said he had been stopped several times and each time the police
would say, “Anyway, with a car like that, you can pay the fine.”

• I might never have believed that even the police are motivated by jealousy had I not seen the different way they acted toward my husband on two separate occasions. The first time, he was dressed in business clothes and driving our Renault 25, the “big,” expensive car. The police stopped us during a routine checkup and, in spite of our total innocence, were much nastier than they needed to be, which was not at all.

The second time we were stopped, the situation was entirely different—and a priori much worse. My husband had on a leather jacket and corduroy slacks and was driving my small, inexpensive, pigeon-dropping-splattered, sap-covered Citroën. In a fit of very Parisian impatience, he had pulled over a white line and hit a cop on a motorcycle. In one split second, I had a vision of our children as orphans as he and I were hauled off to prison for life. Instead, the cop got up from where he had fallen, brushed himself off, and just smiled. The only explanation for this totally bizarre behavior that we could find was that the cop would have had a hard time explaining what
he
was doing on the wrong side of the white line. But the fact that we were dressed casually in an unassuming little car certainly didn't hurt our case.

• In the neighborhood of nouveaux riches where I live, the merchants have marked their prices up to almost twice what they are elsewhere in this particularly expensive suburb. Even the baguette, that staff of life, costs more than anywhere else in town. If you are stupid enough not to ask the price of whatever it is you covet, you're sure to get a very big surprise indeed. The attitude is—and at least one boutique owner has admitted to it—If they can pay, we'll soak them.

• Friends of mine, a young Parisian lawyer and his American wife, decided to live for a year in a charming village in the southwest where his parents own a home. They bought a sizable old barn of a house, did repairs, and even added a swimming pool, to the horror of the locals. This was not the prodigal son returning home; it was an upstart Parisian flaunting his wealth. When the young lawyer, who, on top of everything else, is good-looking and blessed with eloquence and
warmth, would visit the locals in his Mercedes, he would hear such comments as “Is it normal to have so much money?”

Successful French publicist Jacques Séguéla writes, “The Frenchman is the most illogical person in the world. He spends his life running after his success but the success of others bothers him. Worse, it makes him aggressive. In other countries, winning gains you the esteem of your compatriots. Here, it's the best way to lose it.”

Or, in the words of the fictional character Major Thompson, created by French humorist Pierre Daninos: “The American pedestrian who sees a millionaire going by in a Cadillac secretly dreams of the day that he will get in his own. The French pedestrian who sees a millionaire in a Cadillac secretly dreams of the day that he will be able to get him out of the car so that he will walk like everyone else.”

One reason for jealousy is that since no one talks about money openly, no one knows for sure what other people make and hence have totally false ideas. One day, my husband, a banker, was with two of his young employees. As they were early for an appointment, my husband suggested that they walk around the Place Vendôme, where they could admire the wonderful jewelry shops—Chaumet, Mauboussin, Van Cleef & Arpels. “Not only were they thoroughly uninterested,” he reported, laughing, “but one of them turned to me and
said, ‘I see you are very rich to be so interested in jewels.' ” Jealousy? Perhaps just boredom or a bad mood. But certainly a good deal of naïveté about his employer's standard of living!