A group recently asked me to talk to some new arrivals about the problems of adjusting to life in France. I thought it might be useful to recall an incident from my first days here.
Bernard was a friend of my wife-to-be, and sympathetic to my feelings of isolation and inadequacy, since he’d experienced them himself.
“My first wife was English,” he explained, “but before we got married, she insisted that I meet her parents.”
He did the pouf thing that the French use to express exasperation.
“Well, they are not exactly the British colonel and his lady – but close. And the house! A kind of hotel particulier on the hills above London, with the butler and the maid… The whole catastrophe! And as for their little girl marrying a Frenchman….” He mimed their horror.
My adoptive family-to-be were not so hostile. There was caution, of course: Marie Dominique had gone to Los Angeles on what she said was a holiday and returned with me. But having been over-run by the Romans, the Bourbons and the Germans gave the French an acceptance of social change which the British didn’t possess
“So we go to bed,” Bernard continued. “Back in Paris were are sleeping together, of course. But for us to do so under the roof of her parents, c’est impossible! She is in her old room, somewhere on the top floor, while I am on the rez de chausee…” He smiled ironically. “…close to the front door. ”
Then his face lengthened as he recalled the moment.
“I am still young, you know. And to feel such hostility…” He shook his head. “I do not sleep well. And almost as soon as I do sleep, I wake up again.”
It wasn’t hard to imagine his feelings. We all have our moments of despair, often in the small hours of the night – “those hours,” someone wrote, “when people die, and babies are born.” As Scott Fitzgerald wrote in the account of his own break-down, The Crack-Up, “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”
Bernard, however, refused to surrender to despair. Putting on his clothes, he slipped out of the house to his rented car and drove downhill towards what he imagined was central London. He had nothing in mind except the urge of any animal to escape from a trap, but as a lifelong Parisian he expected to find people and lighted streets and a few cafes still open where he might enjoy a cognac and some company.
London was not Paris, however, and Oxford Street no Champs-Elysées. The few cafes were dark, and the sidewalks deserted. Parking, he wandered into the bohemian district of Soho, but even the prostitutes who usually strolled its narrow streets were in bed.
He had almost given up hope when he saw a lighted doorway, the sign Saddle Club, and steps leading down into a basement. On an impulse, he descended.
“And imagine!” he continued. “It is a little boite de nuit. A nightclub? The chairs are all up on the tables and there are no customers. But on the stage, two musicians are playing; a guitarist and un contrabassiste. And the guitarist….it is Brassens!”
France had few artists more revered than George Brassens. His open, friendly face with its bushy moustache and ever-present pipe was an icon, and his songs, written in a trademark chatty style, with lots of slang, and sung in his slightly cracked voice to his own guitar accompaniment, furnished an anthem for post-war France.
“I didn’t know he ever performed in London,” I said.
“Nor I,” said Bernard, “but there he was.”
“Did you speak?”
“Well, it is difficult, you know. They think they are alone. But they play, and I listen – and then Brassens, he puts down his guitar and leaves the stage, and I see he is going to the double vay say ...the….”
He groped for the word in English.
“The toilet?”
“C’est exact! And so I follow him – because in the….the toilet?...men can chat, no? … And there is the great Brassens, making pipi. I take a place next to him, and I turn, and I say ‘Excusez-moi, m’sieur Brassens….”
He paused, treasuring the moment.
“….and I wake up to find I am urinating in the bed of my future father-in-law.”
He nudged me. “So you see, cher ami, it is not so bad for you, I think. You have not pissed the bed.”
This reminds me: years ago, I was at my girlfriend's parents' home, enjoying a meal of wine and cognac and other hydrating libations. It was one of the first times I'd ever met my girlfriend's parents. They were prominent French judges. I wanted to make a good impression. After my girlfriend and I had crept upstairs into bed, careful not to wake the parents in the bedroom next door, I found myself walking up to a stone French cottage. A quaint elderly woman opened the door and asked me to please enter. I promptly went to the small cupboard with the toilet, and for some reason I sat down, and began urinating on my inner thigh.
I woke up in a puddle of piss. My girlfriend began laughing. The next morning I walked downstairs with soiled sheets in hand. "Je suis desolé, monsieur .. I've pissed the bed," I cowered. He began laughing, too. "Pissing the bed? That's nothing. I pissed myself last week."
Masterfully crafted little tale, made me laugh. I suppose I'm on the better side of this story too. Even after a few hard hours in the French tax offices last week, I can at the very least say I have not wet the bed of my European experience.