I wish I’d paid attention in French class

I wish I’d paid attention in French class.

I’ve grown complacent about the world speaking English. Everywhere we travel I speak to people in English, assuming that they speak it as well. Of course, that works well when you are dealing with folks who work in the tourist industry. It’s a requirement these days. Even in Paris.

Years ago, we would go to a lovely bistro in the city, the kind where the owners were up at 4 a.m. shopping for fresh food and making sauces from scratch, hand writing the plat de jour menus and starching the linen tablecloths. And the waiters, not “waiters/actors/writers”, but actual professional waiters who were making a career of it, would greet you in French and wave you to a table. They would slap down menus in French and you would ask if they, by chance, had a menu in English.

They were practiced at the expression of disdain. Of course, they didn’t have menus in English. After all, we are in France. Why would they bother with menus in different (and by implication inferior) languages?

So, we would struggle through the menu in French, hoping that the cervelle de mouton was going to be a lamb chop and not sheep’s brains (it wasn’t lamb), while the waiter stood stiffly, impatiently tapping his pencil on his order pad, looking around the room and humming something—probably the buoyant “La Marseillaise”—while we made up our minds.

Twenty years later, in the same bistro, the same waiters—yes career waiters—would greet us cheerfully, plop down English menus and make helpful suggestions in charmingly French-accented English. Time—or tourist dollars—changes everything.

That’s all very well if you stick to the tourist places—restaurants, museums, taxis, etc. but it’s a whole different world in France when you venture outside, even just a tiny bit, into the world of the real everyday France.

I discovered this about three weeks ago when we landed in Paris. Smooth sailing from customs to cabs. We arrived at our loaner apartment and the first thing I did—the thing I’d been dreaming about—was to go out and buy some cheese. French cheese, real cheese, not the dead stuff we eat at home but the gooey, smelly stuff that they scoop out of a bucket like melted vanilla ice cream. It could be gorgonzola—I don’t know because it’s not something I would find at home.

As soon as I got back to the apartment, I spread a gob onto a stale baguette. A stale baguette in Paris is a baguette that left the oven more than four hours earlier. The Acme baguettes at our local Mollies supermarket—tasty by our standards, stale by French standards.

In fact, there is a morning baguette and an afternoon baguette. Twice a day Parisians faithfully visit their favorite neighborhood patisserie and buy them. (Along with fresh croissants and a tarte aux de pommes or two in the morning.)

Unless you are a couple or a family, I don’t think you should finish off a baguette in one sitting. So, I wondered what happens to all the half-eaten loaves that single people buy. They are definitely not eating the whole thing, judging by the jolie filles that elegantly roam the city in casual silk blouses, designer jeans, and the most unimaginably feminine sneakers you could think of (Swooshless). Yes, high heels on the cobblestone street are history unless you are a femme of a certain age.

Oddly, there don’t seem to be any recipes that I know of for stale bread in France. I mean the Italians are more imaginative. They invented the panzanella salad for just that purpose. Of course, the Italians will tell you that they invented cuisine in general and that the French brazenly stole it.

As the myth goes, Catherine de’ Medici crossed the Alps with her cooks, food products, and recipes and introduced Italian cuisine to the humble French plate. She went on to marry Henry, Duke of Orleans (she was 14 for god’s sake, what did she know about food?) and eventually became the Queen of France. A pretty poorly negotiated deal in my opinion.

But I digress. Back to my stale baguette. I greedily tore into it, the crusty bread with the soft cheese piled on top of it.

That’s when I heard the sound you never want to hear. Especially on the first day of an eight-week vacation. It’s loud and echoes through your head. It’s the sound of your expensive veneer breaking off your front tooth. The one in the middle that everyone sees when you smile, or even grin. Fortunately, I retrieved the tiny sliver of enamel before I swallowed it which would have complicated retrieval matters a lot.

A quick online search of “dentist near me” gave me a phone number which I called and was greeted by a pleasant young woman’s voice—in French. “Parlez vous anglaise” I asked? And then a dial tone.

Fortunately, we have a French friend—Noemi, the owner of the apartment where we are staying. Yes, she would call and make an appointment for me, and she set me up three days hence. She even prepared a lengthy letter, describing my condition and suggested solutions, all handwritten in a lovely French scroll.

After three days struggling not to smile, I turned up five minutes early at the dental clinic, clutching my note. Two pretty French girls sat behind the reception desk (is it a French employment law that there be two pretty receptionists, not one in every clinic?) I introduced myself, inadvertently smiling which I guess would probably have been a clue as to why I was there.

No, they did not know who Monsieur Currier was and what I was doing there. No problem, I thought, and handed over the note. Each girl tightly gripped their side of the paper and promptly read it aloud in a sing-songy unison. For a minute I thought I had dropped into some kind of high school play audition—perhaps for “Don Juan” by Moliere. I haven’t read the play in a while but I think I was cast as the “Hapless American.”

When they finished, they looked at me blankly for a full minute, and then suddenly one disappeared, clutching the note, into a nearby office.

There was much muffled French going on behind closed doors and eventually a woman of a certain age, you know, extremely well dressed for the office and glittering with bling. I recognized the perfume from wandering around the cosmetics department in Saks Fifth Avenue.

She invited me into her inner sanctum (at which point I was getting a bit nervous, after all, I’d heard about the libido of French women of a certain age, but then concluded that it only applied to young virile men under 30 and I didn’t meet either criterion).

Silently, she scanned the note, at least twice, looked at me grimly, and announced what I believed was a denial. At least I was hoping it was, but for all I understood it could have been a pronouncement that I had a fatal brain tumor and had only a few minutes to live. Did I want to die in her arms in a truly romantic French way? Or should I just shrug? (I’d been practicing the beautifully executed French shrug thinking that it would get me through situations where I didn’t really understand what people were saying.)

As she shook her head sadly, I had a brilliant idea. I dialed up Noemi and put her on speaker. For the next ten minutes or so there was a clatter of rapid French back and forth out of the speaker, into the speaker, while I stood there helplessly, my sole purpose being the holder of the phone. At some point the woman (I finally understood by her manner that she had been cast in the play as the officious office manager) stalked out of the room, me following aimlessly with the phone in my outstretched hand.

A handsome young male dentist (I could tell because he was dressed in a perfectly pressed blue smock over his brilliant white shirt and Gucci silk tie) came back into the office following Mademoiselle Office Manager.

He was apparently summoned because he spoke some English. At which point he declared, without apology, that he could indeed glue that broken veneer back onto my tooth but it would fall off in two hours. I was impressed that he knew the exact time it would fail me.

But Noemi would not take no for an answer, apparently, because there was considerable rapid French continuing to flow in and out of my poor overwrought speaker.

After a few classic huffs from the officious manager of a certain age (she was doing a great job in her role, clearly an experienced stage actor), she left her office (and me, still holding the phone) and came back dragging a startled Indian woman dressed in the same blue garb as the English-speaking dentist so I assumed she too was in the profession.

She looked at my mouth, my broken smile, and the tiny white chip of veneer and nodded, beckoning me to follow her into a sparkling clean room with an ultra-modern dental chair. A fresh new bib was placed under my chin. (I wondered if I could keep it since I was planning on lobster that evening if my teeth worked.)

After 20 minutes of fussing, grinding, and putting that funny blue lamp into my mouth she declared victory. And so did I. Three weeks later it’s still hanging onto my tooth. I’m sorry that I didn’t get the handsome male dentist’s email address because I would have happily sent him a smug update.

In any case, you young people, unless you have a good French-speaking friend like Noemi, I suggest that you pay attention in French class because it will, believe me, come in handy someday.