FOOTNOTES IN THE MOUTH

IF A SPOONFUL IS GOOD, THE WHOLE BOTTLE IS BETTER

        

   Is there a name for it?  Wives absent-mindedly brushing the dandruff from the shoulders of total strangers in the supermarket checkout? Or mothers of small children automatically cutting up the meat of the person seated next to them at the municipal banquet?  

Whatever it’s called, I never thought it would happen to me. But write enough about anything, but particularly Paris, and you find yourself adding footnotes to almost everything. “It’s not generally known,” you hear yourself saying, in response to a request from a dinner companion to pass the salt, “that the gabelle or salt tax levied during the 19^th century accounted for no less than 6% of the national income” – or responding to a companionable “How they hangin’, bro?” with an exact account of the state of….well, you get the idea.

I used to think of my wife’s practice of pausing in the middle of perfectly ordinary conversations to put me straight on matters of French history (“Ah, no, you are thinking of Catherine de Médicis (1519-1589). It was Maria de Médicis (1575-1642)…”) as an endearing personal trait – until I read, in Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, of how, while riding in a Paris taxi,  a query from his wife as to why the French called a couple having a son, then a daughter, as "le choix du roi" – the King’s choice -  was answered by the driver, who explained that any monarch would be gratified by having a son to inherit his throne and a daughter to marry off in some advantageous alliance. He then pulled over and wrote out some titles for further reading.

Talkative taxi drivers are hardly rare. Driving must be among the most tedious of professions, and the need for relief desperate. My ear has been comprehensively bashed by cabbies in many countries and most languages, but the content seldom ranges beyond general abuse of other drivers and “How about those Celtics, eh?”

 French drivers, however, can elevate it to an art. My Australian accent often excites their curiosity, and last week, a remark to the driver about the music on his radio elicited a Django Reinhardt discography, while a brief bouchon gave him time to jot down some titles for me.  By the way, did you know that “bouchon” – literally “cork” - is French slang for a traffic jam? Not to be confused, however, with embouteillage…