France is a country hidebound by regulations; the national sport consists of gracefully subverting them. The trick is not to follow the rules, but to avoid getting caught breaking them. It is Casablanca on a grand scale. One adapts quickly but sometimes ambivalently, especially since this is not necessarily the lesson one cares to impart to one’s American children. 2002 was an election year in France, which meant several things. It meant there was a strike of some kind pretty much every minute; one might call the Louvre to confirm that the children’s weekend class was in session, only to hike across town to discover that, indeed, class was not canceled, but that the building was locked tight. (The opposite might also be true. The post office was open, but the employees on strike.) The library staff might well be in place—except those who delivered titles from shelves L through S. Under the highly regulated exterior all is chaos: The order at a piano recital is whoever wants to go first. The TV news starts at a set time—and continues until the news is finished, a signal triumph of content over form. There may be a hockey bus to convey the team to Meudon, or there may not. (Naturally this non-truth requires three phone calls to establish.) There is no such thing as a Gallic work ethic, and in an election year there is no constituency that is too dignified, or too disenfranchised, to strike. In the course of the year, the emergency-room doctors, the gendarmerie, the teachers, the unemployed, all walked out on strike. Everything is predicated on the crucial except, and exceptionellement quickly became our favorite word in the French language. The exception of the day became a staple of our dinner conversation.
Election year brought with it lessons apart from the political ones. As every Frenchman knows, all driving violations are promptly pardoned by the incoming Président de la République. It is his gift to the people of France; it is the -modern-day version of royal prerogative; it is the tradition every candidate must vow to uphold. Which means that for the months leading up to any presidential election, all speed and traffic laws are de facto suspended. (Road fatalities rise accordingly.) Essentially what this means is that any piece of Parisian surface—sidewalk, driveway, bus stop—suddenly qualifies as a parking space. Quickly we went native; our children seemed ambivalent about what they termed our “rural parking.” What kind of lesson, they asked, were we imparting? The lesson we were imparting was, should our children ever settle in France, they had better get with the program, or they will be circling the block eternally.
And then there is that staple of French life: the specious argument. After a full day’s drive to the country, fully wilted, we inquire in a restaurant at 5 p.m. if there might be anything on hand to eat. No, is the answer. Not even an ice cream? Well yes, of course, comes the reply. We got very good at playing Go Fish. Also at heading off the brand of logistical display we had encountered years earlier on an Air France flight, when we attempted to settle the firstborn in the airline’s bassinet. He did not fit. The bassinet was for children under two. Ergo, reasoned the indignant stewardess, the child was not under the age of two. (As his passport duly attested, he was nine months old. Under other circumstances, my outsize American children have elicited plaudits, of the kind a Great Dane wins in a city of poodles. “Ça, Madame,” offered a well-dressed gentleman in the Jardin du Ranelagh one day, pointing to a different nine-month-old, “Ça, Madame, c’est un bébé.”)
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