France and the French
Dr Vernon Coleman
The French don't much care what you or they do as long as it is done with style and elegance. When they go camping they take chairs, table, tablecloth, napkins, silverware and a wine cooler. When you buy a single cake in a pâtisserie in Paris the assistant will carefully place your selection on a white cardboard tray, wrap it in pretty paper and then tie the whole thing up with a ribbon so that you can walk out of the shop dangling your purchase from a single finger.
The posh French always set the table with the tines of the fork pointing down against the table cloth rather than up in the air (as most other people usually do). They do this in order to display the family crest on the back of the fork.
Look around in the shops (including the supermarkets) and you will see that Parisian housewives of all ages invariably put on their best frocks to go shopping. They never go out in public without having their hair done and without full make-up.
The French continue to care about their appearance however old they get. A 20-year-old English girl probably doesn't give two hoots about what she will look like in fifty years. A 20-year-old French girl does. By the middle of the 21st century British nursing homes are going to be full of elderly women with roses tattooed on their breasts and buttocks. This will not happen in France. French women don't have tattoos; they long ago realised that what might look quite fetching on a 20-year-old girl would look downright silly on a 70-year-old dowager.
Even women in their 80s and 90s totter out with nails, hair and make-up all looking immaculate. In Britain women of this age would be sitting in red plastic chairs in nursing homes. In Paris, women of that same age have a little apartment (with a budgie or a cat for company) and they do their own shopping and cooking. They never, ever pop out in their curlers and slippers. No one hurries them.
We were in a French department store recently, passing through the bra department, where several acres of expensive lingerie were offered for sale. We saw two women in their 70s who were looking at bras. `No, this is no good,' said one, discarding a bra she had been looking at. `This is far too plain. There is not enough lace.'
`Might I be so bold as to ask just who is going to see?' asked the second woman.
`Just me,' replied the first woman rather indignantly. `That is enough.'
***
The disappearance of the once famous French pissoirs is a consequence of the French obsession with style and manners over substance. Pissoirs were small, green painted metal facilities which were introduced so that men would no longer have an excuse for urinating in shop doorways. They were extremely popular with cab drivers and bus drivers but they were remarkably simple.
The business part of the erection (the porcelain) was protected from the world by a green metal screen which started about two feet off the ground and finished a few feet higher. There was no roof (so the pissoir was cleaned every time it rained). Pedestrians passing by could see the feet and heads of those using the pissoir, but they couldn't see the business end of the operation being conducted. One of the last pissoirs to go was the one outside the Ministry of Defence in the rue Saint Dominique.
Pissoirs disappeared after the French Parliament spent days debating whether a gentleman in a pissoir should raise his hat if he recognised a woman passing by. They simply couldn't make up their minds and, in the end, decided that the easiest solution was to get rid of all the pissoirs.
The Government replaced pissoirs with high tech self-cleaning unisex vacuum modules which are, no doubt, very sanitary and high tech (every few minutes they are hosed down with force and so if you use one make sure you get out fast afterwards) but rather ugly. Photographers used to take wonderfully evocative shots of pissoirs but we can't see anyone bothering to waste pixels on Paris's new modular conveniences.
The French love codes, formalities and style. They love to do things the right way. La règle rules. Everything should be done at the right time and speed, at the right place and in the right way. And while you are doing what you are doing, you must be wearing the right clothes. We suspect that the French would forgive murder if it was done by someone wearing a well-chosen outfit.
Occasionally, the French obsession with doing things `comme il faut' (properly) creates problems.
A young French friend of ours called Henri is desperate to look like an Englishman (surprisingly this is a common yearning among French men). He goes about wearing a sports coat, grey flannels and brogues but he doesn't look in the slightest bit like an Englishman.
`Do I look like an Englishman?' Henri asked us. `You must be honest with me.'
He could tell from our faces that he didn't.
`What is wrong?' he asked.
`None of your jacket buttons is hanging loose from a single thread, your trousers are creased in the right places and the leather patches on your elbows are polished rather than scuffed,' we told him. `You're trying too hard.'
NOTE
The essay above is taken from Vernon Coleman’s book `Secrets of Paris’. To purchase a copy of the book CLICK HERE
Copyright Vernon Coleman April 2025
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