Those Flummoxing French

By JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG

Jan. 2, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

PARIS —

Harriet Welty Rochefort, an Iowan married to a Frenchman, once made the colossal blunder of making her father-in-law a sandwich for lunch. He gazed at the bread-encased object as if it were some unknown life form.

When told he would have to pick up the thing with his hands to eat it--like a caveman with his kill--the elderly man rebelled.

“Well, why don’t we just get down on the floor and throw bones over our shoulders while we’re at it?” he asked.

Since that faux pas more than 20 years ago, the sandwich and even the hamburger have landed on Gallic soil and put down deep roots, but Rochefort remains convinced that the French are different. And more than a quarter-century spent living among them--an experience she has distilled into a wise and devastatingly funny book--has done little to shake Rochefort’s sense of surprise and wonder.

For instance, how does her sister-in-law, to Rochefort the flawlessly made-up and manicured epitome of French feminine chic, manage to whip up a five-course dinner in high heels and no apron and not spatter her silk blouse?

How do you deal with salespeople who can be very rude? When one of Rochefort’s acquaintances went to a French store to buy an aluminum pan for cooking fish, instead of more expensive stainless steel, the saleswoman turned up her nose, saying, “I don’t talk to people who eat in aluminum.”

Do the French dislike Americans? Or, disliking one another, are they simply unwilling to make an exception for foreigners?

When somebody calls you cher ami, does it literally mean “dear friend,” or, as is often the case, “drop dead?”

Do you eat a round Camembert cheese the same way as a rectangular slab of Gruyere?

Finally, what are the ground rules for relations between the sexes? Should you shower before making love? (No, in the opinion of the author’s husband, a Paris banker and graduate of the elite Ecole Centrale.)

Rochefort offers answers by the score in her book, “French Toast: A Humorous Tour of What Living in France Is Really Like,” and fields online queries through a cyberspace column, “Tell Harriet” at https://www.paris-anglo.com. Even longtime foreign residents of France have become grateful readers.

“She has been able to zero in on the joys, annoyances, frustrations and the wonderful things about living in France and the French mentality that I’ve never been able to verbalize or put into perspective,” said Marilyn August, a correspondent in the Paris bureau of the Associated Press who has lived in France for 20 years, is married to a Frenchman and is the mother of two children.

August, who speaks fluent French and specializes in covering French cultural affairs, calls Rochefort’s book a “wonderful trouble-shooter” for recent arrivals and partners in Franco-American marriages alike. She has already lent her copy to four people.

The French have a saying, “Those who love well punish well.” That seems to sum up Rochefort’s often conflicting feelings about her adopted land, where she has lived since 1971.

The seed of interest was planted when her paternal grandfather married a woman who was a professor of French at Grinnell College in Iowa. At 8, Harriet already knew she had to see France.

“France is such a dream to Americans,” she said over a lunch of lemon chicken and Alsatian white wine at a Thai restaurant in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. “I get mail from readers saying they envy me, that they want to come here. There’s a whole mystique about Paris that you don’t have about Bonn or Frankfurt. Where else would you want to end up?”

That doesn’t alter some stubborn truths about France that Americans, in particular, may have a difficult time understanding.

For instance, she says, anybody in France who is unfailingly nice to others is taken for a poire--a sucker. When her brother visited from the Midwest and was taken to visit a beautiful Paris garden, he congenially said “hi” to one and all; everyone concluded that there must be something wrong with him.

In France, Rochefort says, the generalized smile is “something reserved for dolts.”

“If you live in France for any length of time, you need to cultivate the art of being vache,” she counsels in “French Toast.” “Vache [yes, it means cow!] is a word that encompasses the concept of petty, mean, spiteful. . . . It is knowing how to send the dart without being transparently offensive.”

Example: When visiting someone’s home and being shown the drapes, one would say: “Oh, I like those living room curtains. I put the same ones in my little girl’s bedroom.”

Being vache is not the same as being frank with your friends, a French trait that Rochefort still finds disconcerting. An American friend will say, “You look great,” she says, while a French friend will unhesitatingly tell you your beige pantyhose are all wrong for your black dress and your eyebrow pencil has left a greasy streak across your forehead.

Rochefort, the mother of two Franco-American sons, and a former English-language teacher at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, is intrigued at how the French got to be the way they are. It may be the effect of centuries of Roman Catholic dogma about original sin--children here are seen as congenitally flawed creatures who need to be straightened out by adults.

Rochefort remembers taking her boys, now 17 and 21, to primary school and dropping them off with a cheery, “Have fun.” French parents, meanwhile, were solemnly instructing their offspring to “sois sage”--”be good.”

Public schools are highly competitive and tough in France, and teachers are uncompromising about standards. Her younger son, who had a problem with his vision, was told he was a “zero” in art. When they are 16, students are already being assigned readings from philosophers such as Plato and Descartes. One key to the wide-ranging French intellect might be that in school, there are no multiple-choice quizzes, only essays.

What still puzzles Rochefort is that the French can be monumentally impolite when they want to be but as discreet as the Japanese in circumventing delicate situations so as to avoid a loss of face to the other person. That ability to switch from rudeness to exquisite courtesy also flummoxes many Japanese; a Japanese psychiatrist, she points out, specializes in treating his countrymen here who are having a hard time coping with the French.

In separate chapters, Rochefort deals with the mysteries of French food; the French woman; sex, love and marriage; money; ornery and charming Parisians; the French standard of politeness; and the French educational system.

Then there’s criticism, which may be the real national sport.

“In France, intelligence means criticism. You’ve got to criticize to be considered intelligent,” Ambassador-at-Large Jean-Daniel Tordjman, who spent nine years in Washington, said recently.

The French enjoy arguing and don’t take it too personally. Rochefort says she has provoked embarrassed silences during her return trips to the United States by arguing passionately like the French citizen she has become.

One discovery that shocked Rochefort in her Iowa-bred primness was the relationship between the sexes. Men in France will make love with their shoes and socks on in the heat of the moment, and will even buy underwear for their girlfriend or wife. Women in France do not wear unisex business suits and tennis shoes.

“The sexual tension, the recognition that one person is a man and that the other is a woman, permeates life in France,” Rochefort notes. “There is none of this, ‘Oh, we’re doing business, we’re all neuter’ stuff.”

She approves--but admits it has taken her two decades to get used to billboards of women in their brassieres and men in tight briefs. And though French men and women may flirt outrageously, she says, it doesn’t mean they’re seeking any follow-up.

Since she met her husband-to-be in a Left Bank cafe, where he was glowering over an ongoing divorce with his first wife, Rochefort has accumulated a fascinating catalog of the do’s and don’ts of French society.

To Americans, her conclusions may seem as strange as if she were describing the folkways of New Guinea headhunters. For transplants to France, the challenge is simultaneously acquiring the hard-edged smarts you need to go head to head with other drivers around the Arc de Triomphe, and enough of the French social graces so you don’t laugh or talk too loudly when you are somebody’s guest.

Rochefort decided to put her experiences and thoughts on paper “because I told myself, ‘Uh-oh, I’m becoming a native.’ I may have acquired a French veneer, but it’s not me.” She has kept her U.S. citizenship, and home still means America. But she couldn’t imagine living anywhere but Paris.

For where else on Earth, Rochefort asks, could you eat finer food? And where else might other people at a dinner party not feel obliged to make small talk to help a newcomer feel welcome?

* Harriet Welty Rochefort, “French Toast: A Humorous Tour of What Living in France Is Really Like,” Anglophone S.A., Montreuil-sous-Bois, France. Available in North America through Mosaic Press, 1252 Spears Road, Units 1 & 2, Oakville, Ontario L6L 5N9 Canada, (800) 387-8992. Also expected to be available this month at Dutton’s, 11975 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 476-6263.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GALLIC GRACE: A QUIZ

What constitutes savoir-vivre in France, the country where the term (Meaning the ability to meet all situations with “poise, good manners and intelligence”) was coined?

Here are a few potential snares from Harriet Welty Rochefort’s book “French Toast: A Humorous Tour of What Living in France is Really Like”-- and her advice:

1. The right time to invite your boss home for dinner is:

a. Soon after you are hired.

b. A year after starting work,

c. Never.

2. At the dinner table, it is taboo to talk about:

a. Money.

b. Sex.

c. Religion.

d. Politics.

3. In France, one should never:

a. Drop in unexpectedly, even upon a good friend.

b. Criticize how a friend is dressed.