… you’ve looked in many stores for a new armchair and finally select one from BHV Marais, the department store located across the street from City Hall. You choose the fabric and the color. It’s Oct 22. Delivery is promised in handwriting by the mannerly floor section manager: Délai : +/- 19 Janvier 2024 ou AVANT ! LE PLUS TOT POSSIBLE !! – [Delivery] Date: +/- 19 January 2024 or BEFORE! AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!)–capitals and exclamation points in the original. You have the choice between pick-up at the store or, for 115€, delivery chez vous. The delivery fee seems exorbitant. You’d rather ask a friend with a car to help then take him to dinner. You pay for the chair in full (717€), without delivery, and go about your Parisian life.

Six weeks later, you receive a text message from BHV announcing a delivery delay. The new date is 31 January. You respond that the delay is inacceptable. Your message is ignored. Mid-February, you receive a message announcing that the armchair will be available as of 28 February. This time the message promises, as compensation (dédommagement) free delivery/assembly (livraison/montage), “[normally] billed at 139€.”

A week later, you’ve received no further news of the actual delivery date. It’s now February 21, four months since you paid for the armchair. You’re in the area of BHV so you enter the department store to find someone to speak with. You’re pleased to come upon the same floor section manager who sold you the promise of an armchair. She’s chatting with a colleague.

You greet them kindly: Bonjour. They turn to you with wary expectation. Looking only at the floor section manager, you calmly explain that you’ve received several (plusieurs) delay notices for an armchair that you purchased from BHV Marais four months ago and counting, and still no armchair. She leads you over to her desk and looks up the purchase order, the one with the buoyant and promising capitals and exclamation points, in her own hand: Délai : +/- 19 Janvier 2024 ou AVANT ! LE PLUS TOT POSSIBLE !!

She immediately blames the delay on the supplier, with whom “we always have problems.” Annoyed by the immediate deflection of responsibility, you ask why she kept that detail from you when you purchased the armchair. She says that she didn’t know at the time. You tell her that you have no direct relationship with the supplier, only BHV, so that for you BHV is responsible. “It should arrive next week, monsieur,” she says. “C’est comme ça”—That’s the way it is.

There’s no greater sign of your acculturation in Paris than feeling properly self-righteous and seizing the proper moment to râler (grouse, gripe, grumble). This is it. The battlelines are drawn with a c’est comme ça. Her why-are-you-still-here expression tells you that she thinks that should be enough.

You hadn’t actually intended to râler, you’re not a râleur (grumbler) by nature but by cultural adoption. The floor section manager’s rigid refusal to acknowledge the store’s responsibility is a sign that the moment has come. If you don’t start now, you’ll find yourself wondering while in the metro or in bed or trying to work what you would say or write to best express your frustration with BHV. So you begin with the word that signals to all within hearing distance—the floor section manager and her colleague who is standing nearby. You look the floor section manager in the eye and tell her that the situation is inacceptable. If you’d known it would take so long for the armchair to arrive, you say, you wouldn’t have purchased it.

She returns your square look in the eye as her colleague moves a step closer. She looks to him, he looks to her, they both look to you.

“Un instant,” she says, a sign that she will look on her terminal for proof that the situation is more than acceptable because it is what it is. Indeed, she points at a spreadsheet on her screen and says, “They say it will arrive in one week.” She repeats the offer for free delivery or, she now adds, an 89€ refund. Her tone in presenting the choice is like that of a bored waiter proposing pommes frites or haricots verts. It also bothers you that she’s offering 89€ when the last message spoke of a 139€ delivery value and four months ago she’d offered delivery at 115€. You call her on it. She has an immediate answer: 115€ was an old price. It’s now 89€ for delivery and 139€ if the deliverymen mount the piece of furniture and dispose of the packaging. You tell her that the only mounting required is screwing on the legs.

You’re not sure what to say next and you don’t want to repeat inacceptable so you chose another missile of a word from the râleur’s handbook—you tell her that this is inadmissible.

“I explained the situation,” she says. “Do you understand?”—Vous comprenez? She may or may not be making reference to your accent, but leaving it at that she remains within the rules of engagement. Her colleague inches closer. He can’t seem to focus on his own job until the situation is resolved. You can tell he’s dying to get involved, and he does as he, too, says, “Do you understand?”

What you understand is that you are now culturally obliged to râler further.  You say, “I understand that delivery of my armchair is so long overdue that I’d like to a refund.”

“I’ve given you a choice, Monsieur,” she says. “Delivery at home or an 89€ refund and you pick up the merchandise.”

Yes, you know that you’ll presumably soon have your armchair, whether picked up with your friend’s help or delivered with the legs screwed on and the box removed, and that you can then decide for yourself if you ever want to shop at BHV again. So even though you’re unlikely to make any headway against a business as detached, in your experience, as BHV Marais, and a salesperson as doctrinaire as this, with a workplace rubbernecker by her side, you proceed to tell her (you don’t acknowledge him) that she’s presented you with a false choice (un faux choix), one that is intellectually dishonest (intellectuellement malhonnête; it’s an expression that would get you laughed out of Walmart, but here the number of syllables alone signals that you’re a worthy Parisian adversary) since any reasonable choice would involve a full refund (remboursement total).

As her colleague watches, ready to leap to her defense, she tries to goad you into insulting her personally by asking if you thought she “lied” (menti) when she gave you the original delivery deadline (délai de livraison). You know how this works: Calling her a liar (une menteuse) would label you an aggressor and allow her to call victory and store security. The rules of an in-store râlerie require steadfast concrete reasoning. You won’t fall into her emotional trap. So you tell her that you aren’t here to discuss her feelings. You tell her that you were “duped” (dupé) into buying the armchair, with her own handwriting as proof (la preuve). Four months after the original order, you tell her, the honest choice is between a total refund and, you now add, appropriate compensation.

She says, “Do you want to give me a delivery address or not?”

You’ve had your say and there’s nothing more to do here. Despite your elevated heartrate, you coolly give her your address for delivery, should you decide to accept it. Her colleague walks away. Obtaining an 89€ refund sounds too complicated and isn’t an acceptable number anyway. That thought leads you to declare one more time that the situation is inacceptable and to ask now for the contact information for the complaint department.

She writes down the customer service email address.

One might think that any store salesperson properly trained in customer service would know that few clients would bother making a complaint at that point—after all, the chair is due to be delivered in one week and you’ve apparently accepted free delivery—and so would revert to the customary etiquette of farewell, perhaps with a kind assurance that you’ll be happy with your beautiful armchair. If so, one hasn’t shopped in Paris. As she hands you the slip of paper with the email address, and apparently feeling the need for a final power play, the BHV floor section manager says, “Whatever you send will be forwarded to me and you already have my answer.” You now have no choice but to formalize your grievance (réclamation).

At home, you write to BHV Marais customer service. You keep your message short and direct, just the facts of the delay and the unacceptability and inadmissibility of the offer of simply free delivery. You include a scanned copy of the invoice with its capital letters and exclamation points. You make no personal comments about the floor section manager other than to note your incrédulité regarding her parting shot about this réclamation being dead in the water (lettre morte). You conclude by requesting a full refund for the as yet undelivered armchair.

You’ve done your Parisian best. You’ve presented logic, you didn’t once lose your temper, and you’ve made proper use of two of the three most important words in any proper râlerie: inacceptable and inadmissible, using them sparingly, while throwing in an incrédule and an intellectuellement malhônete to let customer service know that you’re no stranger to complaint departments in France. For the time being you’ve refrained from using the third important word, scandaleux, so as to deploy it at the appropriate time with the appropriate interlocuteur.

Two days later you receive a message signed with a guy’s first name inviting you to please be assured that your request is being treated by the head of the concerned department so as to provide you with a response, and thanking you for your understanding. Business-speak for good luck (bonne chance). Since you’re also invited to rate and comment on his response, you give it a 1 of 5 and comment that the client is only reassured when a matter has been fully resolved, and you thank him in return for his understanding.

Several days later, on a Sunday afternoon, you get a phone call from BHV customer service. The female voice is young and sweet and her words are spoken with a smile. You’re offered free delivery (with the legs screwed on and the box disposed of) plus a 60-euro refund. You comment on the strangeness of that number, 60, remarking that it seems to be resting on its way somewhere. She explains that that’s the amount the manufacturer is willing to reimburse and they won’t give more. Since the number is clearly n’importe quoi (rubbish), you tell her that it is inacceptable for BHV to deflect responsibility in this manner. You further tell her that the so-called free delivery isn’t truly a gift because you had planned on picking the armchair up yourself at the store in January. She responds that delivery nevertheless costs BHV and that you could be reimbursed 89€ if you still wanted to pick up the merchandise. Actually, you would like it delivered but are still annoyed that she’s using 89€ as the figure for dédommagement. You tell her that 89€ is n’importe quoi given that BHV’s text mentioned a delivery value of 139€. She says she doesn’t understand. She says this with such innocent-sounding sincerity that you’re about to lose your own thread of logic, when suddenly you remember that you’re the wronged party and have yet to deploy the most important term of any self-righteous râleur. You use it now.

C’est scandaleux, you say.

You take a deep breath then launch into a mild rant about being dupé by BHV from the start and the floor manager’s faux choix, which was intellectuellement malhonnête, and how your many followers, as they say in French, will soon know that this is inacceptable, inadmissible and scandaleux, until finally she interrupts.

Monsieur, she says, you didn’t let me finish my proposition. You’ll get free delivery and assembly of the armchair, 60€ refunded through your credit card, and a 50€ voucher for in-house purchase.

Whether or not the extra 50€ came from your excellent and emphatic use of inacceptable, inadmissible and scandaleux, you can’t tell. But you know that this is clearly the moment for you to stop de râler and to accept that the négociation has come to an end.

So, with the proper air of resignation, you accept her proposition. And like that, the unacceptability and the scandalousness of the situation disappear like vampires at sunrise.

Once you’ve accepted the offer, you and the customer service rep discuss how and when all this will occur. Her voice is even more soothing and reassuring than before as she explains the timing: the armchair delivered next week, the voucher from BHV within 24 hours, the refund from the manufacturer in 2-4 weeks*. You can nearly smell the floral scent of her perfume. Your own tone is melodious, with a hint of sandalwood, as you provide her with your email address and mailing address. When she says that she knows where that is, you tell her to stop by sometime to see your armchair. The banter is so light and cheery that you nearly forget that you’ll both be glad when the conversation is over. But the time has come for her to ask if there’s anything else she can do for you today, for you to say, “No, that’s all,” and to wish each other un bon dimanche, a good Sunday. She will then return to other dissatisfied clients and you can now decide how strongly you want to advise against ordering anything from BHV Marais.

Very strongly indeed.

© 2024, Gary Lee Kraut

*Six weeks later, when the 60€ has failed to arrive, you wonder if BHV has pocketed the refund from the manufacturer.

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… there’s a public transportation strike going on and your good friend Achmed is staying with you for several days because he can’t get to work from his home in the suburbs. From Monday through Thursday you have dinner together. He then goes to sleep by 9:30 since he needs to get up by 5 to make his way to work. An easy houseguest. You both figure he’ll be with you for just those few days, but the strike continues. He goes home for the weekend then returns Monday evening for a second week.

This time he arrives bearing gifts. There’s a box of camembert, since he knows that you like cheese, and a Tupperware of cornes de gazelle, gazelle horns. He knows that you like them, too.

After dinner, while Achmed enjoys his customary yogurt (“No,” he said when you offered to buy some, “I’ll bring my own, I know what I like”), you serve yourself one of the gazelle horns. It has almond chips on the outside and a sweet almond-orange-blossom filling. Delicious. It’s the best gazelle horn that you’ve ever had and you tell him so. “Normal,” he says, “c’est de chez moi.” His sister in Algiers made them. They were delivered over the weekend by a visiting cousin. They’re all for you, he says; he has another dozen at home. Just save him the Tupperware.

Achmed knows that you like gazelle horns because last week when you went together to an Algerian restaurant for take-out portions of a stew called chorba you bought a powdered-sugar-coated gazelle horn for dessert even though he told you not to. You’d thought that he was saying that because he believes you eat too many sweets, but he was actually trying to warning you off without saying so in front of the owner. It turned out to be hard, stale and too sugary. “I told you,” he said. “I knew they were industrial, not homemade, and could have been sitting there for weeks.”

He then tells you the following story: Many years ago, soon after he arrived in France, he bought a gazelle horn at a Tunisian bakery. The owner had told him that it was freshly made. Achmed took it home to have after dinner. When he tried to break it in half he couldn’t. He took a knife to it and even then had to insist until it finally splintered apart. And it tasted like plaster. The following day he returned the shards to the bakery and told the Tunisian owner that his so-called fresh gazelle horn was stale. The guy offered to exchange it for a new one. Achmed said, “If you can easily cut into one of those on your shelf, I’ll buy them all.” The guy picked one up and tried to break it in two but it was hard as rock. He asked if Achmed wanted a refund. Achmed said, “No, but I’m never coming back to your bakery. My name isn’t Jean-Paul or Pierre-Jacques. Maybe they’ll keep coming back for more, but not me. I’m from Algiers. You can’t get away with that with someone from Algeria.”

You ask how he knew that the chorba we’d had last week was homemade. “Because I’ve seen the kitchen, I’ve spoken with the chef, and I’ve also seen the truck that delivers the pastries.”

You allow yourself then to broach the subject of the camembert. “Excuse me for mentioning this,” you say, “but the camembert you brought—and I thank you for it—won’t be good for the same reason: it’s hard, pasteurized and industrial. It’s camembert in name only. I don’t mean to offend you, I just want to let you know that if you’re going to buy a camembert it should be Camembert de Normandie, made from raw milk.”

“I’m not offended,” says Achmed. “I just didn’t think you were so French.”

© 2019, 2021, Gary Lee Kraut

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“It’s your prostate,” she says.

You tell her that you resent her recognition that you have un prostate.

“Une prostate,” she corrects. “Your prostate is feminine.”

It’s moments like this when you’re forced to confront the fact that your French will always play second fiddle to your English. You generally don’t mind being corrected for an erroneous conjugation of tenses, other than perhaps a slight embarrassment at the thought that you should have known better. But mistaking the gender of a noun as personal as your prostate is more than linguistic, it touches on your very sense of self. It reminds you of your tenuous grasp on the nature of things. Of course, reproductive anatomy wasn’t on your vocabulary lists in French class in high school, and you managed to live in France for this long without questioning the gender of your prostate. But that’s no consolation for now being informed, however matter-of-factly and by a close friend, that of late you’ve been awakened in the middle of the night by a feminine prostate.

Still, honesty from an old friend is to be accepted with grace. And more comes when, upon your return to the seat, she tells you about her uterus.

She’d been sent for an MRI, she explains, and has just gotten the results. “The doctor says that there’s nothing to worry about, just a few harmless polyps that no one will notice. What’s more disconcerting is that my husband and I aren’t having sex anymore. Not disconcerting for me, but for him, meaning for us, therefore for me, because now we have to talk whenever there’s a problem, but he’s never been good at that, which wasn’t a problem before because we would have sex instead, but now what do we do?, we sulk and imagine we don’t love each other anymore.”

Just then, thankfully, the lights of the theater start to dim and her monologue fizzles out. As the curtain rises you lean over and congratulate her on having une uterus saine (a healthy uterus).

“Un uterus sain,” she corrects, for it turns out that not only is your prostate feminine but her uterus is masculine—and not just hers but all uteri!

The play is a comédie de boulevard, meaning that it’s full of conventional sexism, mistaken identities and witty word play. Aside from some contemporary twists and political commentary, it follows the genre well as the husband, his young would-be mistress, the wife, her young lover the plumber, and several minor characters enter and exit in insatiable, farce-inducing desire and quid pro quo. Though predictable, it’s quite funny and well acted. However, while watching the circus of desire you find yourself stuck with the triply disturbing thought that your testosterone level been decreasing, that your old friend now shares stories about grandchildren and polyps instead of lovers and parties, and that your prostate as it exists in your adopted country is feminine. Admittedly, your testosterone level peaked at 20, your friend adores her grandchildren, and you’ve always lived with une prostate, but being faced with all three at once is disheartening.

You have trouble concentrating on the play, though not much concentration is required as the husband hides his mistress beneath the bed while the wife’s lover hides behind the curtain.

It’s one of those precious, ornate late-19th-century theaters whose red velour seating was installed when the average Parisian man was 5’6”. There’s basically only one way to sit in such a theater: with straight back, knees clamped together and forearms fighting for armrest dominance with the neighbor. Between the confining position and your new understanding of la prostate, you felt a certain pressure down below. While on stage the husband opens the curtain to reveal a shirtless handyman who now tries to explain that his shirt got wet from plumbing work, you need to pee again.

It isn’t urgent; it isn’t even truly a need; it can wait until intermission, but you’ll be thinking about it until then. You sneak a look at your phone to see what time it is. Well, sneak is the intent, but checking the time on your phone lights up the entire row. The actors on stage might well notice the light coming from your lap. The woman sitting to the opposite side of you from your friend certainly does. “Tsk,” she pronounces with a distinctly Parisian accent. This is soon followed by the sound of the vibration of your friend’s phone in her pocket as it presses against the armrest. She can’t resist having a look at the message that it signals, further lighting up the row and eliciting from the neighbor on her other side a Parisian “pff.”

As the curtain falls for intermission, your friend turns to you. “It’s a message from my husband,” she says, with the same eye-roll as the wife on stage.

“What does he want?”

“Reassurance.”

“Well, go reassure him,” I say. “I’ll take a little walk.”

“OK,” she says. “I’ll do what I have to do. You do what you have to do.”

And so, like the aging good friends that we are, we do, before the curtain goes up for more plumbing jokes.

© 2020, Gary Lee Kraut

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You now live at the center of a nameless territory with a radius of one kilometer, legally circumscribed by coronavirus confinement. If you were to give that territory a name, it would be your own, as noted on the form that the roaming border police may ask you to produce to explain your reason for not staying at home.

You might call where you live a neighborhood. But neighborhood implies that others share a similar sense of its borders. Under the circumstances, that would apply only those who live at your address, i.e. in your building, with the same legal radius of movement, along with the man who sleeps beneath the awning of the shuttered restaurant downstairs, were he to note that as his address, which he wouldn’t. Or, if neighborhood this is, then it’s a quiet neighborhood with lots of joggers, lots of pigeons, a few ducks, and a fine selection of bread, cheese, produce and meat products.

You might call where you live a community. But a community would have a common characteristic or shared interest that would differentiate yours from other communities. Or, if community this is, then what it shares is relative financial security and a belief that some other community will service its shops, remove its garbage and feed its homeless. It would be a community whose members acknowledge each other’s presence just two minutes per day, when applauding medical workers from their windows and balconies, before closing their curtains.

You might call where you live a village. But a village would have a place of worship, a square, a municipal building or a commercial street at its center, and boulevards, parks, mansions or monuments at its borders, and perhaps a canal or river as its edge. Or, if village this is, then it’s one with no history to celebrate, no idiot or sage, and if someone were to ask where you live in this village you would answer, as the other villagers do, that you live in the center.

You might call where you live a bubble. But a bubble sounds light, hollow, unhinged and unstable. Or, if bubble this is, then it’s one created by the second best forms of social distancing: seeking out useful information minimally, heeding current events frugally, and sucking on social media sparingly. And it would be like a bubble in a glass of champagne, one of more than a million, in a glass served in an international toast to good health.

If you still lived in Paris, you would say that you live in a time zone designated as GMT+2. But where you now live you’ve little use for a numerical notion of time. The baker does, the cheesemonger does, the pharmacist does, the stock broker does. But you now live on your own meridian, neither plus nor minus, with little reason to check the hour.

Where you now live, time is divided into two parts that ease one into the other: one part under a lighter sky, the other part under a darker sky. You’re equally at home in both the shifting brightness of the one and in the calming constancy of the other. You have no need to interpret them as the God of the Bible did when he “called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night.’” You don’t need a name for them any more than you need to call what you set out to do “project,” what you accomplish “productive,” what you exchange “conversation,” and what you now give to the man beneath the awning “charity.”

You don’t need a clock to know that it’s 8PM because that’s when the applause, that you may or may not take part in, starts. You don’t need a clock when, at sundown, a police car making drive-by rounds slows at the end of the street and a policeman inside draws down a window and tells the men who gather to drink wine and tall beers at the corner to break up the party and go home. Like teenagers, the gathering men complain a bit, but as the tone of the order rises they do as they’re told.

When you do check the digits of time, it’s to note them on your signed declaration indicating the who, why and when of an excursion into your namesake territory. An annoying reminder of constraint, yes. But, while you’ve been asked to produce your form under the lighter sky, you’ve never been stopped under the darker. As you put on your jacket and shoes for the latter, the outing feels venturesome, nearly clandestine. Then, once on well-lit streets, you feel curious and free. Here and there you pass a man with his dog, a jogger, a still or sleeping figure beneath a bus shelter, or a wanderer whom you recognize as neither friend nor foe but simply another.

You’re free of Paris, that place where you no longer live. Yet you’ll hear and read some people claiming that they still do. Grandstanding, they are, as they make declarations about “Paris” and “Parisians,” as if they’d been tasked with translating the philosophical or psychological or emotional state of the inhabitants of a zone designated on a map as Paris.

They will say that Paris is dormant or veiled or abandoned to nature. But Paris isn’t sleeping; Paris isn’t hidden; Paris isn’t empty. Paris does not exist. The birds you hear don’t live in Paris, they just live, with fewer other sounds to interrupt their questions. One grandstander wrote that the quiet of the monument-dotted Paris where he claims to live is reminiscent of the German Occupation. He must have been reminiscing about the life of a collaborationist, because for most others Paris also ceased to exist during the Occupation.

You wonder how journalists even manage to find Parisians to observe or interview because there are none where you now live. Parisians dress more fashionably than the people you see. Parisians smoke more and they jog less than these people who pant by you in stern prayer of good health. Parisians stand talking to each other in the middle of the sidewalk without moving until you ask them, not like these people who make room for you to pass. Parisians cut in line, unlike these people queuing a meter apart. Parisians take turns going outside with their children, not in couples like the people you see. Parisians enjoy going out after dark—they don’t turn off the lights at nightfall. Parisians flirt, Parisians are snobs, Parisians ride scooters into their 50s. These can’t be Parisians. How could they be when they don’t live in Paris any more than you do?—though many may wish they did.

Do you?

Well, you have many fond memories of Paris. Paris has taught you much: about language, culture, cuisine, wine, history, Catholics, Algerians, Muslims, Sephardim, atheists, intellectuals, Revolution, art, pigeons, cats, politics, friendship, sex, taxes, health care, love, age, death, and certainly more. You remember the way you moved from her periphery to her core.

But you no longer need Paris to reap the intellectual riches that you’ve sown, nor to enjoy the relationships that you’ve developed. You’re nearly relieved to no longer live there. What could be more satisfying than to live in this–your—place and time? What could be more fulfilling than being where you are, both connected and individual, collective and unique, part of a vast historical-cultural-eco-bio-system and alone with these thoughts?

Sometimes you miss Paris, though not for long—because this place where you now live is so true to who you are and you are so central to its life that if anything is now missing it would be something much larger or more intimate than Paris. And knowing that, you resolve to not return to Paris when quarantine ends, but to stay right where you are, centered.

Text and photos © 2020, Gary Lee Kraut

Gary Lee Kraut, editor of France Revisited, leads the Paris Vignettes Writing Workshop, an international workshop that meets weekly via Zoom. Workshop participants work on short texts, both fiction and nonfiction, not necessarily about Paris. Texts may be part of a longer work (memoir, short story, personal essay, novel). Current participants join from France, the United States, Canada, England and Israel. For details, contact Gary directly at gary [at] francerevisited.com .

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Working from home you managed to make lunch of the last of your cheese (a 24-month comté) and the last of your vegetables (a brown-edged endive), mixed with your homemade vinaigrette of Les Baux de Provence olive oil, Modena balsamic vinegar and Dijon mustard with honey and thyme.

Now, as night falls and your thoughts turn to dinner, your refrigerator offers you nothing but the Dijon mustard, a jar of apple-pear jelly from Normandy and a bottle of champagne. In the little freezer compartment there’s only a tray of ice cubes and a wine bag.

On a shelf beside the refrigerator there’s a bag of fusilli, a box of long grain rice and a box of couscous, with only olive oil and condiments to add to any of them. There’s cereal and a box of UHT 2% milk, for an emergency, but no need to panic. On another shelf there’s a collection of items that you’ve been given at press events and trade shows: several more jars of Dijon mustard (with curry and coconut, with Madagascar black pepper, with white truffles), from a food fair; a bottle containing a dry mix for making the chickpea crepe called socca, from a presentation about the Riviera; mignonettes (mini bottles, nips) of cognac, mirabelle de Loraine, genepi de Savoie, Grand Marnier, liqueur de chataigne and others, from various regional events.

Then you see something you forgot you’d been given: a box of French combat rations, from the opening of an exhibition about war photography and photographers at the Army Museum in Paris. You retrieve it from the lower shelf.

It’s stamped with the expiration date January 27, 2019, nearly one year ago today. You wipe off the dust and place the box on the table.

Expiration date

Just then your intercom buzzes. It’s a friend who said he would stop by to pick up a pair of shoes that he’d left at your place when his feet were hurting from walking so much during the transportation strike and you’d lent him a more comfortable pair. That’s another story—and it’s this story as well since your friend’s work entails ordering food for the cafeteria of a public hospital. So his arrival is perfect timing—you’ll ask his advice regarding the expiration date on your box of combat rations.

“The box looks clean,” he says. “Probably no extreme temperatures in this kitchen. I’d say it’s good. But you’ll have to see how it looks inside.”

You open the box. Inside are a compact abundance of packets and tins. Your friend observes that nothing is dented or torn.

“It’s good,” he says.

“Do you want to stay for dinner?”

“No,” he says, “my feet hurt. But I’ll take the chocolate for the walk home, if you don’t mind.”

He takes the chocolate and the power bars and his shoes, and he leaves.

Duck rillette

You decide to go for it, beginning with the tin of duck rillette. Rillette is a kind of cold pulled pork except that in this case it’s duck, 74%, so a cold, shreaded confit de canard is more like. You try a spoonful. Cooked in fat (20%), it’s slightly greasy, as is to be expected, but not too salty. Tasty!

You open the packet of army biscuits to spread it on. First, a bite of dry biscuit. It tastes like an underbaked mix of wheat flour, water and skimmed milk powder. Is it stale or is it supposed to taste like that? Or are you just spoiled by easy access to some of the finest bread in the world?

You give the biscuit another try with some duck rillette. It’s still bad. So you chuck the biscuits and enjoy the rillette by itself. Quite good indeed. Ensuring that deployed soldiers enjoy their meal is essential for troop morale.

“An army marches on its stomach”

“Une armée marche sur son estomac,” said Napoleon Bonaparte. An army marches on its stomach. He offered a prize of 12,000 francs to the person who could come up with a means of preserving food to feed advancing troops. It took several years for a Frenchman, Nicolas Appert, to perfect a method for bottling fruits and vegetables, which he then extended to other foods. The use of metal containers was then patented several years later in England. By the second half of the 19th century tin cans had begun to supply armies, doing so on an industrial scale beginning with the First World War.

More than 30,000 French soldiers are currently deployed around the world: about 20,000 in operations in continental France and its overseas departments and territories and most of the rest in Africa (Dijbouti, Mali, Nigeria, Chad, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and elsewhere) and the Middle East (Syria, United Arab Emirates).

A 10-person jury of military taste-testers in Rambouillet, 27 miles southwest of Paris, is partially responsible for approving of the contents of French combat rations. These rations, also NATO-approved, contain a hefty dose of protein along with a proper balance of carbs, lipids, calcium and omega 3.

Pasta and salmon salad

You gaze out the window of your quarters at the peace of Paris below. It’s momentarily disturbed by the bass horn of a bus intended to stir an ill-parked car without violence. Then the calm returns. You have nothing to fear but the fear of the expiration date itself.

Since you haven’t left your apartment all day, your nutritional and energetic needs differ from those of a soldier taking part in the Barkhane operation against Islamic terrorist groups in western Africa. Nevertheless, you’re still hungry.

You snap open the tin of pasta and salmon salad.

Forking some onto a plate reminds you of why you preferred dry food over canned for your cat back in the day.

After several years in the can it takes a dish a bit of time to get used to fresh air, so you let it sit for a few minutes, like fine wine. When you do take a bite you’re surprised to find that the chunks of Atlantic salmon (36%) actually still taste salmony. Another bite, then another. The dish is bland, but salmon and pasta do make for a worthy combination. You could add some of the enclosed packet of salt and pepper, but you’re glad for the salad’s blandness because if it had any bite to it that might come from rot rather than from the bits of red pepper, carrot and onion.

You stop halfway through the contents of the tin. Enough calories for now. Furthermore, you don’t want to tempt fate. Better to call it a meal and stop there for the evening. See how you feel as the evening winds down.

You put the unopened packets and tins in the box and place it on the shelf. Doing so draws your eyes to the assembly of mini bottles of brandy. What the hell, you think, and you pour yourself a nip of plum brandy from Lorraine. A little schnapps could come in handy should tensions flare in the night.

Muesli with chocolate bits

The night was calm. Few shots were fired. You slept well.

Opening the curtains in the morning and looking out the window you see people stopping in at the bakery across the street. Fresh bread is just a few flights of stairs away, but you resist. You stay in your quarters. You won’t let fresh artisanal bread about which food journalists write glowing articles distract you from what you now see as your mission: getting three meals from your box of rations. If you had any butter the choice would be more difficult, but walking 300 yards to the fromagerie for some raw-milk butter from Brittany would be undisciplined. Besides, it’s raining. So you follow instructions as indicated on the pack of muesli with chocolate bits: Tear open. Add water to line.

The muesli tastes like wet chocolate-flavored paper with bits of lyophilized apple (4%). The wet paper with apples would have been fine, but you haven’t liked chocolate (13%) in your cereal since you were 10. Of course, many of the soldiers for whom the ration box is intended are barely a 20-mile hike and a few hundred push-ups past adolescence, so the chocolate chips do have their place on the menu. Whatever gets a soldier going, you guess. But you, you stop after a few spoonfuls and make yourself some soluble coffee.

Breakfast. Check.

Chili con carne

For three hours you work cleaning out your gun (desk), examining the map of an upcoming mission (crossing Paris during the strike), conferring with fellow men at arms about the night shift (a dinner party that you didn’t go to because of the strike) and checking in on the wounded (calling a friend who had an MRI on her knee after tripping over a scooter lying on the sidewalk). You’re quite hungry by the time noon comes around.

Returning to your ration box, you see what remains for lunch. If you’re going to get out of your mission unscathed you’ll have to get past the box’s most formidable expired dish: chili con carne. You hesitate and return to your desk. One o’clock passes, then two. You consider putting it off until evening. You’d rather not face it alone, so you text your friend who works at the hospital to see if he wants to come over for dinner. “Chili con carne,” you write. He responds: “Don’t each much carne anymore.” You text back: “I have a packet of dried soup, just add water, for you.” “Feet hurt,” he responds. Then radio silence.

You’re famished. At 14h20 you make your move. While the box indicates an expiration date of Jan. 27, 2019, the tin of chili con carne is stamped 04 2019, meaning that it expired only nine months ago—that’s three months in your favor. And not a dent. You remember what the foie gras and smoked salmon producer said about an old glass jar of foie gras: “It gets better with time. So as long as it’s still properly sealed you can consider the suggested sell-by date as simply a legal obligation.”

You unpack the heating kit and assemble the pieces. You light the cube and place the tin on top. The contents boil quickly. After a few minutes the cube is consumed; the flame goes out. You unfold the plastic spork. Despite its resemblance to dog food (but isn’t that the aspect of chili con carne anyway?), the mix of ground beef (32%), rehydrated red beans (25%), tomato concentrate, salt, pepper, cumin and onions is appetizing, hearty and filling. After downing half the container you feel satisfied. More than that, you feel triumphant.

Caramel cream

You pop open the caramel cream dessert to end the meal. It has the look and consistency of orange-brown house paint. You taste the slightest bit. It’s disgusting. Or was that because there was some chili con carne left on your spork? You wipe it off and try another slightest bit. Equally disgusting. This one has certainly turned, at least you hope so for the sake of French soldiers in Chad.

Your training and experience have taught you make quick, logical decisions for the good of yourself and your team. You wouldn’t lead anyone down that orange-brown path, least of all yourself. You set it aside and immediately return to the chili con carne for a few more sporkfuls to end your meal on a meaty note.

Taking risks

You’ve completed your mission of three meals. You forgo the second packet of soluble coffee. After 20 hours garrisoned in your hovel you’re ready to go out. You’ll stop in a café while out food shopping.

You place the trash and unopened packets into the ration box and take it downstairs to the garbage. As you exit the building you’re nearly hit by a scooter on the sidewalk. You wave to the baker across the street. You think of the young, dedicated, dutiful soldiers risking their lives during operations, making an unsafe world a tad safer, nourished by a tin of chili con carne. Completing a mission of eating three meals from a box of combat ration was just a game for you—a food game in one of the world’s greatest food playgrounds. It was all for fun, a personal dare to have a story to tell, like a 15-year-old American trying escargot for the first time. There was never any risk in eating the expired combat rations. Of course there wasn’t. If you were truly a risk-taker you wouldn’t be living in Paris.

© 2020, Gary Lee Kraut

The post You know you live in Paris when…: French Combat Rations appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

… and texts you again the following morning at 10
Him: Bad news, there’s a strike today.
You: I know, I thought that was the good news.
Him: Not anymore. The teachers are on strike. I have to stay home with the kids.
You: Isn’t your wife there?
Him: She works in the private sector.

Version française

… t’envoie un sms à 23h
Lui : Bonne nouvelle, je suis gréviste demain.
Toi : Bonne nouvelle pour qui ?
Lui : Nous. Je pourrai passer dans l’après-midi.
Toi : Suis pas gréviste moi.
Lui : Tu travailles à ton compte chez toi. Tu fais comme tu veux.
Toi : Je bosse quand-même.
Lui : 14h, ça te va ?
Toi : Bon, d’accord.
Lui : Je dois partir à 15h30 pour chercher les enfants à l’école car les chauffeur du transport scolaire sont en grève.
Toi : Parfait.

… et t’envoie un sms le lendemain matin à 10h
Lui : Mauvaise nouvelle, il y a grève aujourd’hui.
Toi : Je sais, c’est la bonne nouvelle, non ?
Lui : Plus maintenant. Les profs sont en grève. Je dois garder les enfants à la maison.
Toi : Ta femme n’est pas là ?
Lui : Elle travaille dans le privé.

© Gary Lee Kraut

The post You know you live in Paris when a striker … appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Yet ever since you’ve spiraled up the staircase, passing the main dining room of Le Clarence along the way, a question has been nagging you, so as a waitress stops before you with a sweet smile and a tray of crab canapés you ask, “Why is the restaurant empty this evening?”

She responds, “Because there’s a private party this evening.”

“Where?” you ask.

She offers you a strange look, glances quickly to her bottle-cradling colleague, who offers a similarly strange look, then she says, ever so politely, “You’re at it, sir.”

“Oh,” you say, now feeling special, as you reach for a crab canapé from her tray and accept another pour from her colleague.

© 2019, Gary Lee Kraut

The post You know you live in Paris when…: Le Clarence appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

© 2019, Gary Lee Kraut, All rights reserved.

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© 2019, Gary Lee Kraut

The post You know you live in Paris when… : The B52s appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.