La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (16 page)

I told the butcher I wanted a five-and-a-half-kilo turkey, about twelve pounds. When it arrived a few weeks later, it weighed twice that. I would have cooked it, but it didn’t fit into my oven. A British friend told me to cut it up, but I decided that a turkey coming out of the oven in pieces would symbolize for my daughters the brutal massacre of their American way of life.

I called the butcher, told him he had made a mistake, and demanded an exchange. He told me I was at fault and hung up. Then I called the store’s customer service department; my calls were not returned. It took another day and a lot of complaining, negotiating, and sweet-talking to get a smaller bird.

It was the turkey experience that prompted me to make friends with Roger. He has become one of the most important men in my life.

Roger doesn’t really belong on the rue de Varenne. The presence of the prime minister’s office just a few doors down keeps the street quiet, boring, and guarded round the clock by police, who block it off at the faintest whiff of a demonstration. Roger is too outgoing, too familiar, too non-Parisian in his style of promoting his pâté of wild hare or his chicken sausages seasoned with lemon and parsley. He might fit in better in a more raucous neighborhood like Belleville on the eastern fringe of Paris or the area around Abbesses, where the movie
Amélie
was filmed. But he is an accident of the neighborhood. He quit school and started apprenticing as a butcher at the age of fourteen. He married Sylvie, the butcher’s daughter, and took over the family business.

Roger enjoys breaking the codes of the quartier. He has posed for photographers with necklaces of thick homemade pork sausages around his neck. When the Beaujolais Nouveau arrives in the fall, he sets up a stand on the sidewalk and offers the young wine and thin-sliced charcuterie to passersby. At Christmas, he and his team of butchers put on elves’ hats with blinking lights. For Valentine’s Day, he fashions chopped meat into hearts. Eyes may roll, but most of his customers love him for this. He is so deeply trusted that when avian flu struck France, his poultry sales went up, not down.

The day he hired a ten-piece brass band to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his shop, a neighbor called the police, who ordered the musicians to stop; Roger told them to play on. He was slapped with a fine of thousands of euros. Two years later, he was still fighting in the courts.

I had already been a casual, if fickle, customer when I betrayed Roger by sneaking off to the fancy-food emporium for the turkey. I later confessed what I had done. But forgiveness of my infidelity did not come easily.

“How could you do that when I sell the best turkeys in all of France?” he asked. He told me the turkeys from the fancy-food place are ordinary fowl. His, by contrast, are a special race raised on the same farm since World War II. He shoved under my nose an eight-page color brochure that showed a lot of fat turkeys roaming free and lovingly fed with the finest cereals in the land. From then on, my Thanksgiving turkey came from Roger. He cooked it in his oven when it was too big for mine. One year, when I ordered a sixteen-pound turkey and got an eleven-pound bird instead, Roger gave me an explanation that sounded more like a tall tale.

“The turkey’s way too small, Roger,” I said.

“It was the foxes,” he explained. It seemed that the electric fence surrounding the turkey pen at the special farm had shorted out. The foxes ran wild. “They were very smart,” he said. “They only ate the big turkeys.”

My experience with Roger illustrates a twist on the universal shopkeeper-customer relationship that seems particularly French. In a small, privately owned shop, seduction is a game both parties are expected to play. The shopkeeper selects his merchandise carefully and often presents it elegantly. He may feel that this should be enough to win your appreciation, which you should then find a way to express. It’s almost as if the merchant is telling you, “You should come here for the quality and the beauty of what I offer. I shouldn’t have to woo you further.”

An American accustomed to the direct and forceful appeal of price specials and chirpy exhortations to have a nice day may find a wall of reserve instead. Breaking it requires the right degree of friendliness and a lot of time. But when the wall is breached, a relationship can take root. The pattern is a familiar one: once you get beneath the layer of the clever, performing intellectuals, there can be quite a bit of earnestness in the French character, and it has a lot of charm.

It took much longer for Andy and me to break the ice at the fish store. It finally happened over a platter. Andy was picking up a whole poached salmon for the office Christmas party we hosted every year.

“Where is your platter?” asked the manager-cashier, to whom I had privately given the nickname Madame la Poissonnière.

In years past, when we were asked for our fish platter, we had to confess we didn’t have one, which always produced a loud sigh of frustration from Madame la Poissonnière, who then had to order the staff to secure the fish on a bed of Styrofoam. This time, however, Andy was ready. He dutifully produced a tin platter we had obtained. Alas, it was a tad too small. Suddenly, and without fanfare, the invisible barrier cracked and shattered. Madame la Poissonnière asked one of the fishmongers to find a proper platter. She smiled at Andy and told him to return it sometime after the party.

After that, we were treated not exactly like family but at least as if we were worthy of entering. Whenever I passed by the shop, Madame la Poissonnière and I would greet each other with a
bonjour
. One day when I was struggling with a bunch of green ferns from the florist up the street, Madame la Poissonnière insisted on tying them together. She was standing outside the shop, a cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth. She looked much younger than when she stood behind the cash box, and she was smiling. I told her she reminded me of the late and great actress Simone Signoret. She filled the street with deep, smoke-filled laughter.

Little by little, I began to make the rue du Bac and its arteries my own. First, I had to tell the longtime merchants that I was living in the neighborhood. Then I had to engage in long discussions about the merchandise, the way Julia Child might have done. The Italian
traiteur
turned talkative when I looked interested as he rattled off temperatures for grape growing in the south of Italy. The pinched-faced pharmacist smiled when I asked her to explain the medicinal benefits of the herbal teas, sprays, and oils.

Most important, Roger opened doors. He liked nothing better than to throw off his butcher’s apron, leave the shop, and introduce me to his friends. I met a third-generation owner of the street’s glove-and-hosiery shop, who uses a closet in the back as an archive and command central for the history of the rue du Bac. He, in turn, introduced me to the printer of fine stationery and calling cards. When, after several years, we decided to move to another neighborhood, Roger took me to meet Isabelle, the real estate agent across the street, who oozes elegance in her upswept hairdos and her swishing skirts. Soon, Isabelle was inviting me to tea in the attic above the office, where she keeps a pet turtle and vases stuffed with fresh flowers.

There was mourning every time an old business closed down: the pharmacy transformed into a women’s clothing store, the milk-and-cheese shop turned into a hair salon, the
traiteur
turned into a Nespresso boutique. It was especially sad when Monsieur Renault, whose family had been running a hardware store for sixty years, shut down to make way for a Benetton.

Over the years, some of the merchants abandoned their reserve and tried to woo customers to come inside as if this were Main Street America. Christine, the seller of antiques and bric-a-brac, set boxes of used books on chairs on the street. The owner of the liquor store that displayed hundred-euro bottles of Armagnac in the window put bargain bottles of rosé at the open door at the entrance and offered free tastings of port. The lure of the bargain was coming.

Learning to feel comfortable did not, however, put me under an illusion that the manners and folkways of French consumer culture are easy to deal with or understand. There are too many obvious frustrations, too widely shared, and not just by foreigners.

There is, for example, the maddening reluctance to correct or apologize for missteps. Whether they run small businesses in residential neighborhoods or large ones that are far less personal, merchants find it hard to admit they are wrong, and harder still to apologize. Instead, the trick is to somehow get the offended party to feel that the mistake was his or her own. I’m convinced the practice was learned in the strict French educational system, in which teachers are allowed to tell pupils they are
nuls
(zeros) in front of the class. What outsiders do not understand is that the French can be rude even to their own.

Just about everyone I have ever met in France has suffered from the lack of a service mentality in Paris. A doctor I know told me he once bought a coat at a small men’s boutique only to discover that it had a rip in the fabric. When he tried to return it, the shopkeeper gave him the address of a tailor who could repair it—for a fat fee. They argued. The doctor reminded the shopkeeper of the French saying, “The customer is king.”

“Sir,” the shopkeeper replied, “France no longer has a king.”

Maybe rudeness is a perverse form of seduction. This is my theory: seduction is all about illusion and expectation, not the end result. That means there should be pleasure in the process of getting something done, whether it is being served a
steak frites
or buying a cell phone. The processes are to be obeyed; the master will have his pleasure.

France also lacks the other motivator that fills American commerce with smiles and false friendliness: the Protestant ethic. I asked the business consultant Alain Minc why. He blamed it on the abrogation of the Edict of Nantes. I hadn’t thought about the Edict of Nantes since graduate school, but it is a sign of weakness to show ignorance, so I nodded solemnly and kept listening.

The Edict of Nantes, promulgated by King Henri IV in 1598, was a visionary act of reconciliation that gave France’s one million Protestants freedom of worship and other rights. In 1685, his grandson, Louis XIV, revoked it in a campaign to purge France of Protestants, who for him challenged the order of things. Several hundred Protestant churches were destroyed. The property and possessions of Protestants were confiscated. Business and financial leaders left the country; others died in prison or were sent to the galleys. Most Protestants were pressured into converting to Catholicism. “It was a dramatic move for the French economy because the Protestants had been the best entrepreneurs,” Minc said. “The absence of a Calvinist bourgeoisie explains much of the gap between the United Kingdom and France, industrially speaking. Aristocrats were not allowed to engage in trade. So there was nobody to engage in trade in France.”

Moneymaking is still not talked about much. Even France’s top business executives are loath to reveal or revel in their wealth. Money does seduce, but it is supposed to be used discreetly, quietly. This is one of the reasons French people of all classes disapproved of what they called Sarkozy’s “bling-bling” style early in his presidency: his Ray-Bans, his Rolex, his gold necklace, his penchant for hanging out with French billionaires.

“In L.A., when you drive a red Ferrari, people look at your car with envy; in Paris it gets scratched,” said Alain Baraton, the gardener at Versailles. “Money is still a taboo in France. People don’t dare say how much they earn—except the
nouveaux riches
. Either they earn very little and they’re ashamed of it, or they earn too much and they’re ashamed of it. You Americans dream about getting the other guy’s job; in France, you resent the guy who has the job and think he doesn’t deserve it.”

It’s the difference between a young country looking forward and an old country looking back. Frenchmen who have spent long stretches of time in the United States come back and tend to complain about French inefficiency and an uneven work ethic. “In the U.S., you say to people, ‘Okay, how can we go from A to B, the fastest way, where we can make the most money and have fun at the same time,’” said Andrée Deissenberg, the director of the Crazy Horse cabaret. “The French will go, ‘First of all, define A, define B, and why should we go from A to B if we can go from A to C to B?’ This is fabulous at the café but not necessarily in the business world.”

She blamed it on Descartes—and on the French habit of seducing. “Seduction is not fast, it’s not from A to B,” she said. “There is a bridge somewhere between this very pseudo-intellectual deconstruction of everything and seduction. When you seduce, what’s behind it is thinking, not gratification.”

Conspicuous self-promotion is also suspect, and the French can be confused by Americans’ insistence on “selling” themselves in the business world. When Bruno Racine was director of the Pompidou Center, one of his American assistants pushed him to promote the museum—and himself. “She told me, ‘You have to sell yourself,’” he recalled. “I would answer, ‘That’s too arrogant. We need to be more subtle.’”