Fizzy Lifting Drinks

Some readers may be under the impression that I have spent all my time in France sipping Champagne from ladies’ slippers. This is not entirely true, and I hasten to admit that I do drink other beverages — including some with bubbles. For the French, not content to discover Champagne, have also discovered other truly uplifting fizzy drinks.

Whereas good Dom Pérignon believed, upon his first sip of Champagne, that he was drinking stars, my brother had another reaction entirely when he first drank Ricqlès: “It tastes like fizzy toothpaste!” For my part, I find the stuff absolutely brilliant: a lightly carbonated, almost entirely natural soda flavored with mint, and quite a lot subtler than any toothpaste. The very idea!

The Ricqlès brand is terribly old and respected, dating back to 1838, when Henri de Ricqlès distilled a sort of mint alcohol. (You can still buy this product, which is useful in flavorings and is said to have some medicinal properties, as well.) Because of the use of natural ingredients, the soft drink is sometimes difficult to find even in France, and it’s my belief that the name Ricqlès is one of those words which no American can pronounce intelligibly to a Frenchman’s satisfaction. (Because of course so many other things sound exactly like “Ricqlès.”)

The cans are virtually impossible to find, anywhere,
except in certain bars.

But on a hot day, when you’ve been driving across the French countryside in an un-air-conditioned automobile, for example, there is almost nothing more refreshing than a well-chilled glass of Ricqlès.

The most famous fizzy beverage in France, after Champagne, is surely Perrier water. I regret to inform you that it’s far from the best of the mineral waters in the country. My personal favorite, Badoit, from a natural spring in Saint Galmier, is distinguished by bubbles so tiny and elegant that one realizes instantly just how vulgar and aggressive Perrier truly is, and one will shun it evermore.

The mineral content of Badoit is much more flavorful, as well, and presumably the water also possesses all those important health benefits that are so important to Europeans. For a long time I used to call it “salt soda,” and it’s an absolute essential for me on any kind of road trip, whether by train or by car. Fortunately, then, it’s relatively easy to find almost anywhere in shops and cafés throughout France (and even in some groceries in Manhattan, if you’re willing to pay for it).

Such is Perrier’s dominance of the market for eau gazeuse that, a few years ago, Badoit began selling “Badoit Rouge,” with big popping bubbles like those of its better-known rival. Of course I refuse even to taste the stuff. As usual, I stick to the classics, merci beaucoup.

For me, both Badoit and Ricqlès are among the most evocative flavors in all of France. I can’t count the number of Proust moments they’ve evoked: one sip, and memories of summers past come rushing to the fore.

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Pineau des Charentes

It tastes like home.

In preparing my departure, I realized with horror that we were lacking an essential ingredient: I had no Pineau des Charentes in the house with which to make a toast. Mercifully, there was still time to run down to the Nicolas shop (a national chain of liquor stores) to pick up a bottle. Whether it will turn out to be as good as my customary brand, which comes from the Château de Beaulon (located on the road between Bordeaux and Royan), remains to be seen. But as a disciple of Henri Boutrit, I could not observe a moment of such significance without raising a glass of the stuff.

Inside the distillery: Copper makes it taste better.
All photos from the Château de Beaulon website*

Henri was a passionate Charentais, sprinkling his conversation with vocabulary from the traditional patois and faithfully upholding the cuisine du terroir. It’s no surprise, then, that Pineau was one of the first of the local treasures he shared with me, the night we met, 20 years ago.

Charente-Maritime, souche d’Henri
The Château de Beaulon is in St Dizant du Gua, also in Charente-Maritime.
Map from Wikipedia

Pineau is a fortified wine, made by mixing fermented grape must with a more famous Charentais invention, Cognac. It comes in white or red, sometimes described as rosé though it’s really a dark purple, resembling the color of some port. (There’s a similarity in taste and in consistency, as well.) Generally one serves Pineau chilled, in small glasses, since it packs a wallop. Most people, including Henri, favor it as an apéritif, but connoisseurs recommend it as an accompaniment to certain dishes, including foie gras. I have sampled that particular combination and judge it to be so exquisitely pleasurable that I am confident that my Puritan ancestors disapprove completely.

The Château de Beaulon dates back to the reign of Louis XI.

The best Pineau is that in which the alcohol in the Cognac slices through the sugar; sadly, however, most of the stuff that one finds in the States is quite sweet and syrupy, and the rouge, which I prefer, is extremely difficult to find. The Château Beaulon is among the best I’ve tasted so far, and their aged Pineau almost obscenely good. But one hears rumors of even better Pineau, and on a couple of occasions Bernard and I have gotten lost in Charentes, searching for another château that is evidently more secret and better guarded than most military installations in this country: we never have found the place, despite our persistent zeal in quests that somewhat resembled a Pineau version of the search for the “domaine perdu” in Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes.

Un autre domaine perdu, retrouvé:
The park of the Château de Beaulon

This is what Pineau does to you, when you get hooked on the stuff. I say it again, there was no way I could leave France without tasting it one more time. And I’ll drink to France, to both Charentes, to every Boutrit and especially to Henri, my maître, who passed away five years ago this month, and who did so much to make my life here so much more special and more flavorsome.


*NOTE: Be advised that, by entering the Château de Beaulon website, you certify that you are old enough to drink Pineau. Click responsibly. The folks there also produce an excellent Cognac.

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Beynes There, Done That

I said goodbye to my vegetable vendor yesterday, which, like every Thursday in Beynes, was market day. I told him I was going back to America, and Franck* received this news with a remarkable lack of sentimentality: he cocked one eyebrow and exclaimed, “So I’ll see you in a couple of months, then?” Apparently, my “definitive departures” have gotten to be undramatic, even routine.

But the fact remains that I can’t afford to keep coming and going this way: can’t afford it financially, or physically, or emotionally. It’s grueling, this business of pulling up stakes every few months, packing all my belongings into heavy suitcases, and bidding farewell — no, not farewell — au revoir — to the only roof I can call my own. Sort of. And this time, I honestly don’t know when I’ll be back.

I’ve been coming to this little house for 20 years, making my first prolonged stay in 1999, when I spent an entire summer here. And here, I’ve had the opportunity to pursue a kind of housekeeping that’s remote in many ways from my old habits in New York. I cooked my first rabbit in the little kitchen, my first leg of lamb, and my first preserves. My back is stooped now from washing dishes at the little sink. (The house’s original owner, a spinster schoolteacher named Juliette Challat, was evidently very, very short.) This is the only place I’ve ever lived where I lock the front door with a skeleton key.

All the while, I have been able to live out a boyhood dream, and it seems important to bear in mind that, no matter what happens next, nothing can change that fundamental fact. I always wanted to live in France, like a Frenchman. And for seven years, I’ve done it. Not many other people can say the same. I mustn’t let myself look on this move as a retreat.

So rather than getting maudlin (or worse), I ask your indulgence as I celebrate some of the lessons I have learned, here on the sleepy banks of the Petite Mauldre, in the shade of the mirabelle tree.

What I Have Learned in Beynes

1. How to use a gas stove without a pilot light, and how not to blow up the house in the process.

2. How to mow the lawn with an electric-powered machine that has no wheels and therefore must be shoved, and that does not cut the grass so much as mash it down for a while.

3. How to do this without running over the extension cord.

4. That mowing the lawn in spring means ruining the wild violets and primaveras.

5. That the idea of gardening is better than the fact of it, particularly when you get a cold, rainy summer. There is nothing romantic about tomatoes rotting on the vine.

6. That the garden is home to many kinds of wild life, including songbirds, moles, hedgehogs, snails, all manner of insects, and the occasional feral cat, most of which are determined to destroy all nearby vegetation and not one of which recognizes your right to live there, too.

7. That living on the main street means that the picket fence in front of the house will be periodically knocked down by vehicles driven by people who are in no hurry to help you repair the damage they’ve caused.

8. That the main street is the parade route for thrice-annual celebrations for the local schoolchildren, who evidently would be traumatized if they weren’t allowed every four months to dump heaps of confetti all over your doorstep, which neither they nor anyone else in town will bother to clean up afterward, and which you’ll be tracking into the house for the next year.

9. That ditto ditto dog shit ditto ditto.

10. That there is really nothing you can do to keep a white-tile floor clean in the entryway of a house on the aforementioned main street in a country village.

11. That the French penchant for do-it-yourself home repair and remodeling projects (bricolage) is much less quaint and adorable when portions of your home are indefinitely uninhabitable, and you can’t even open the back door for all the equipment and supplies stacked there, while in the meantime other, minor repair jobs go unattended. For years.

12. That if you keep your radiators clean in winter, and your clothesline hanging in summer, you’ll never need a dryer. Except during the spring and fall.

13. That keeping the larder stocked requires meticulous planning, since every store in town takes a lunch break, then closes for the night between 7 and 8, and if you aren’t on your toes, you’ll starve.

14. That living in the miraculous land of Picard frozen foods doesn’t mean much if your refrigerator doesn’t have a freezer compartment.

15. That, in France, eating alone is no excuse for skimping on the courses. Ideally, every meal should consist of a starter (perhaps soup), main course (with multiple vegetables), green salad, and cheese course, all accompanied by wine, and perhaps dessert and coffee. If you cooked a meal in your cuisine in Beynes, then it’s French cuisine, de facto, and it must be respected as such!

16. That preparing nice things for Bernard to take back to Paris and eat during the week does not guarantee that he will actually eat them. (Subtitle: “What’s That Smell?” or The Sad Fate of That Roast Chicken I Made for You the Other Weekend.)

17. That, while it’s very nice to be so close to Paris, the commute would probably drive you insane if you did it on a daily basis, and there are times when it’s really too much hassle to go into town.

18. That, therefore, it is sometimes quite easy to keep ’em down on the farm when they’ve seen the lights of gay Paree.



*NOTE: Yes, after all these years, I have learned my vegetable vendor’s first name. I overheard someone addressing him the other day.

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La Nostalgie: Le Minitel

Yes, I own albums by Gainsbourg and Brassens, and I know by heart more Trenet songs than I can count; yes, I do sometimes visit the shopping mall in Plaisir, and I pay for my purchases with a Carte Bleue. But while watching the documentary show “50 Years That Changed the Way We Live” the other night, the really personal burst of nostalgia for me came when I saw the humble Minitel.

Originally intended as an electronic replacement for the telephone book, the Minitel was distributed free of charge upon roll-out, in 1982, and it quickly became a forerunner of a personal computer on a primitive version of the Internet. Using a dial-up modem, charged to your phone bill, you’d connect to the Minitel universe, where you could (and still can!) look up the information you sought: store hours, train schedules, ticket prices, and so on.*

Soon, almost every company and organization in France had a Minitel number, most of which were prefaced with the figures “36 15.” Minitel has the capacity for chatting and mail, too, and for on-line shopping with payments made by credit or bank card. Thus, the French were actively on-line even before the World Wide Web turned the rest of us into screen-addicted zombies.

Minitels are still in use, though I never see them anywhere.
The home page for Ségolène Royal, Socialist candidate for President in 2007:
As I say, the graphics aren’t state-of-the-art.

The ugly little Minitel boxes were meant to be portable — on most models, the keyboard folded up for easier storage — because if you left it hooked up, then you couldn’t use your telephone. The Minitel wasn’t supposed to replace a word processor, and I’m not sure I ever saw one that hooked up to a printer.

The Minitel’s screen wasn’t designed to display photos; instead, your programmer could put up a sort of computer cartoon, much like a Lite-Brite image. (At first, the screen was chalkboard green-black, the letters white, but well before the Minitel declined, a wider range of colors became available.) Because you couldn’t see clearly what a purchase item looked like, it was hard to shop on-line — but some French people tried it anyway, especially for things such as air and rail tickets.

Tout de même, these were minor annoyances! They’d all be addressed in time! The possibilities of the new technology seemed endless, and for several years, the Minitel’s success seemed guaranteed. Surely everybody in the world would start using one!

The French were so confident that, Tortoise-and-Hare-style, they lagged behind in other telecommunications innovations — and that’s why I’m posting this from a Mac.

This is the Magis, the basic model in the latest Minitel line.

*NOTE: The one time I ever used a Minitel, I got information about a play I wanted to see. I found the process exhausting: it would have been easier to walk to the Théâtre de Ville and ask in person. On the other hand, this was back in the day when I didn’t know how to use the Web, either. It would be interesting to compare the two systems, now that I’m (slightly) more tech-savvy.

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La Nostalgie: Le Distributeur et la Carte Bancaire

An ATM of the Société Générale
As the sign suggests, you can make withdrawals but not deposits.

While I was watching the documentary series on “50 Years That Changed the Way We Live” (or whatever it was called), this tidbit came as a surprise: the French launched automatic teller machines all the way back in 1968. The banks had planned to start up in May, but talk about bad timing — Paris became a war zone that month, in an uprising of students and workers. Wisely, the banks waited until July to unveil the new machines.

The original machines used punch cards (on paper), which the bank would return to you the next day. Later, cards with magnetic coding came along, and you could use them not only at the bank but also at certain stores. Since then, the French started using puces (fleas), microchips implanted in the card; you don’t sign a paper, but tap your ATM code into a machine. Since almost nobody anywhere ever checks signatures, using a code ostensibly reduces the incidence of fraud.

Hey, guys, I’ll be right with you — I just have to run to the bank.
May 1968

Puces have made bank cards irresistibly practical, and payment by carte bancaire is now more popular than cash — except at the doctor’s office, for example, because a credit card somehow strikes the French as less professional and more commercial than currency. (The pharmacist will happily accept your card.) At the market, my fishmonger takes bank cards, but my veg vendor does not, because his goods are typically cheaper; both merchants accept checks, a practice that is on the decline.

Bank cards are also referred to as Cartes Bleues (blue cards, abbreviated as “CB” in signs but not in conversation). Cartes Bleues are infinitely preferable to the cartons rouges or jaunes that signify penalties in soccer. Or anyway, that’s what people tell me the red and yellow cards mean. What do I know about sports?

Co-co-ri-co: A bank card from the Crédit Agricole, showing the cardholder’s support for the French soccer team.
The puce is the gold area on the left.

American credit-card companies have dithered over microchips for years. At one point, there were rumors that American Express would begin using them — back in 1995 or so. And we’re still waiting.

So this is why, mes chers amis américains, none of your credit cards will work in the ticket machine at the train station, no matter how hard you kick it or how loudly you cuss at it. This is also true in the parking lot, and almost anywhere else there’s no living human being and a ballpoint pen to process your transaction. You are warned. Everyone will see at once that you are an American, and they will whisper and point.

(Your American bank cards should work, however,
in a French ATM.)

Finally, I observe that, though it’s hard to believe, ATMs used to distribute francs, once upon a time. The conversion to the Euro, in 2002, is another phenomenon I witnessed firsthand, and I can’t explain how I made the transition so easily. Really, it’s not like me. Some French people are still traumatized, and you see them in shops and on the street, making mental calculations, trying to convert Euros back into francs. Groceries and many other stores still post prices in both currencies. Which goes to show that, even for people who speak the language, paying for stuff in France is an adventure.

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La Nostalgie: Le Centre Commercial

The Place Carrée, inside the Forum des Halles

Americans are often surprised to find shopping malls in France. But the French invented the department store,* so they naturally pounced on the American concept. And to a degree, a mall is just a variation on the theme of the French passage, parallel rows of independent shops that face each other, under a roof covering or skylight. And the passage itself evolved (in the 19th century) from stately arcades.

How the French used to do it:
The Galerie Vivienne, one of Paris’ more famous passages.

According to the French documentary series I saw the other night, the first centre commercial in France opened on the outskirts of Paris in 1969, and it was quite a chic affair. For the first time, big-name fashion designers opened stores outside central Paris, and prosperous French families flocked to the place. Saturday at the mall became a family tradition, and soon, there were shopping malls all over the country — including the town of Plaisir, not far from Beynes. Most, if not all of these centres commerciaux are less expensive than the original, but chances are that all would look familiar to you: apart from the brand names, you’d hardly know you weren’t in America.

P'tite photo of the Grand Plaisir mall, near Beynes

Suburban malls tend to focus on one “grande surface,” usually a hypermarket such as Auchan, Carrefour, Marché U, or Le Clerc, with other, smaller shops around it. The mall in central Paris, the monstrously ugly Forum des Halles, is too big, perhaps, to be dominated by any one store: it goes down four levels, and includes a swimming pool, multi-screen movie theater, municipal library, subway and commuter-rail stations.

Since France banned indoor smoking in public places a few years ago,
this atrium at the Forum des Halles has become a refuge
for nicotine fanatics.

The Forum mall replaced the city’s central food market, Les Halles, a bustling yet beautiful collection of soaring, cast-iron pavilions that Emile Zola once compared to a Gothic cathedral. Though the pavilions had deteriorated by the early 1970s, tearing them down — and transplanting the market to the nearby town of Rungis — stirred plenty of controversy and really did change many people’s way of life. In the neighborhood around les Halles, for example, small cafés served hungry market-workers at all hours: apparently a bowl of onion soup at 4 A.M. was a popular ritual, all but vanished today.**

There goes the neighborhood:
Construction site at the Forum des Halles

I despise the Forum des Halles and go there as seldom as possible. That antipathy informs my desire to see Touche pas à la femme blanche (Don’t Touch the White Woman), Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film starring Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni. A burlesque of American Westerns and Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, it was shot on the construction site of the present-day mall. But it doesn’t seem to get revived much; I’ve never managed to see the picture.***



*NOTE: The world’s first department store, Au Bon Marché, still operates on the Left Bank in Paris. Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames is a fictionalized account of the rise of the department store and the devastating consequences it had on mom-and-pop stores in Paris — comparable to what Americans saw more than a century later, when Wal-Mart came to town.

**Because Paris is emphatically not “the city that never sleeps,” it’s hard to get a cheap meal after midnight — or after 10 or 11 P.M., really. The neighborhood around les Halles still boasts some all-night restaurants, but they’re comparatively expensive. Les Halles is the setting of Zola’s novel Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris).

***As the Forum des Halles undergoes renovations today, much of it has been turned into a construction site again, looking very much like pictures I’ve seen of Ferreri’s film. (Except there aren’t any French guys dressed as American cavalry, or white guys dressed as Native Americans, or Catherine Deneuve. Otherwise — just the same.)

Deneuve as the titular white woman in Touche pas

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La Nostalgie: Dead Poet Societies

“Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be,” as Simone Signoret observed in the title of her (wonderful) memoir. What strikes me is how much nostalgia depends on who’s around to feel it.

Brassens: Un copain d’abord
He described himself as “Le pornographe du phonographe, le polisson de la chanson,” but really, his songs aren’t dirty.

For instance, France is now commemorating the 30th anniversary of the death of Georges Brassens, a sly and gifted songwriter about whom I’ll write more, one of these days. We just finished an exhaustive series of tributes to another songwriter, Serge Gainsbourg, who died 20 years ago and who has been the subject of countless “Un an déjà,” “Dix ans déjà” and “Quinze ans déjà” retrospectives. Among the tributes to Brassens is an exhibition at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, co-curated by Joann Sfar, who made last year’s fever-dream biopic, Gainsbourg, vie héroïque.

Gainsbourg: Vingt ans déjà
His songs can get pretty raunchy sometimes.

Poor Charles Trenet had the bad luck to die exactly 10 years after Gainbsbourg, and moreover, he died an old man. Many of his fans were hardly younger than he, and by now they’ve followed him to the Great Beyond, whereas Gainsbourg died young, with an even younger fan base. And so, on the anniversary of Trenet’s death, you didn’t see a single TV report or magazine cover to commemorate him. I’d like to do my part to correct that omission, and I encourage you to follow the links above to other articles I’ve written about him.

Le vieux chantant: Trenet in old age

The other night, I caught a nostalgia-tinted documentary series with an unfortunate title, something like “50 Years That Changed the Way We Live” — as if any half-century would not have meant change. But in looking back at these developments in France, I was surprised to see how many have become part of my life; some of them, I witnessed more or less from the get-go. In the next few entries, I’ll examine these extraordinary phenomena: shopping malls, bank cards, and the legendary Minitel.

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Scotché devant la Télé

Apart from miniseries adaptations of Proust, French television has a lot to offer — principally, endless reruns of American crime series, with the voices dubbed. The networks typically present these, as well as lighter fare such as Ugly Betty and The Simpsons, in two- or three-hour blocs; the British sci-fi epic Torchwood: Children of Earth ran its full length in a single night. This strategy can be great when you want to catch up on missed episodes, or when there’s nothing else on.

Some programs require less translation than others.

You do find yourself wondering how voice actors get hired: the fellow who speaks Marc Saint James’ lines in Ugly Betty sounds as if he’s just returned from a bus-and-truck production of La Cage aux Folles and is about 30 years older than Michael Urie; it’s easier to understand why the woman who voices Marge Simpson can’t compete with Julie Kavner’s mix of uncanny emotional and narrow vocal range. Dubbing accounts for the time-lag between a program’s airing in the U.S. and its airing here: an episode of an American series typically will turn up a full year later on Canal Plus, a satellite-cable channel, and another year after that on the public channels. Often, the French don’t bother to translate the titles of American series, although C.S.I. would be I.S.C. (or maybe E.P.L.C.) in French and is probably inscrutable to most viewers. (They must watch anyway, because it’s inescapable.)

Enquête Policière au Lieu du Crime?

Of perhaps greater interest are those things that the French do for themselves on television, rather than letting the U.S. do all the work. Since the advent of “télévision numérique terrestre” (digital terrestrial television), or T.N.T., we’ve now got access to about 20 channels: something shy of the farandole of cable or satellite, but more than sufficient for this viewer.

Le Téléjournal

As a former CBSer, I watch the French news programs faithfully. The 1P.M. and 8P.M. broadcasts differ from American newscasts in a number of ways, starting with length: they run about 40 minutes, commercial-free,* not counting the weather reports that run both before and after the news. Perhaps not surprisingly in a country that’s in such close proximity to so many other countries, foreign news grabs a good deal of air time; more surprisingly, so do police-blotter stories (or faits divers) and regional news — surprisingly, that is, until you remember how small France is.

There’s also much more arts coverage here: France 2, my network of choice, typically concludes each newscast with a feature story or interview with an artist (usually a performer). Some of this may have to do with the fact that, in France, both the arts and the major television networks receive state funding — and perhaps people here are simply more interested than Americans in knowing not only about movie stars but also about opera singers, jazz pianists, ballet dancers, and more about their artistic processes than about their personal lives. It’s all very high-minded. Mostly.

Les Présentateurs

The only French newscaster to approach the status of a Dan Rather or Peter Jennings was Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, the longtime anchor of the evening newscast on TF1, so famous that his initials were practically a brand name. (For a while, Dan was routinely described in the French press as “the PPDA of the United States.”) However, PPDA was abruptly relieved of his duties a couple of years ago, and since then, the era of the celebrity anchor seems to have ended altogether in France.

Partly I think this is due to the French labor laws: yes, for example, in the States, Jennings might stay on the air for 72 hours, but in France, that’s a violation punishable by fines. The anchors here are rotated frequently, and being French, they take lots of vacations, too. Hard to assert your dominance when you’re not around much.

French anchors are also much less compelling personalities than their erstwhile American counterparts — one could almost say that the lack of a distinctive personality is the goal here. And in something of a challenge to my own long-held ideas about the need for authority in newscasting, it turns out that you really don’t need to know much about an anchor in order to find her or him credible. (Does anybody care what David Pujadas’ journalistic background is?) Still, a couple of French newscasters have impressed me favorably.

Elise Lucet is the principal anchor of the 1P.M. newscast on France 2, and she is phenomenally well-prepared, able to conduct wide-ranging interviews on everything from monetary policy to folk dancing. If she has not in fact seen the play or heard the new album of the performer who is her interview subject in the closing segment,** I have been unable to detect any clue of it; she usually persuades me she’s read an author’s books, too. Intelligent, serious, and engaging, she’s easily the best newscaster I’ve seen in this country: pretty, without being a fashion model, and impeccably poised.

Carole Gaessler, an anchor of the lower-budget evening newscasts on France 3, is likewise professional and capable, a standout among younger television journalists. But the real appeal here is her eyes, which are quite possibly the most beautiful in France. Sometimes I watch just to look at her. Two other favorites, the hard-charging interviewer Christine Ockrent and the glamorous anchor Béatrice Schoenberg, have been largely sidelined lately, because their husbands’ governmental duties posed potential conflicts of interest. Ockrent’s husband, Bernard Kouchner, was until recently Foreign Minister, and Schoenberg’s, Jean-Louis Borloo, held a number of ministries in succession, until last year.

Laurent Romejko presents the weather reports at France 2, and he’s also held other jobs at France Télévisions, including host of the long-running quiz show Des Chiffres et des Lettres, where I first saw him. I was sitting in a Moscow hotel room; in the trance state that typically defines my excursions in the Russian language, I was more than usually grateful to hear anybody speak French. I wound up with a bit of a crush on him. (Blame it on the room-service vodka.) Despite his boyish looks, he’s nearly my age.

Les Séries Documentaires

The best program on French television is Thalassa, a weekly series on France 3 devoted to the sea (thus the title, from the Ancient Greek), but somewhat loosely so: a report may focus on an oasis or a drought, for example. Even when the program follows its theme more strictly, the possibilities turn out to be endless and fascinating: each week sees wildlife, fishing and shipping industries, naval expeditions, treasure hunts, histories both ancient and modern, and travelogues from any point on the globe. The nearest comparison on American television would be a National Geographic series, and the producers and reporters aspire to that level of excellence.

Nearly as good is Des racines et des ailes (Of Roots and Wings, hosted by Louis Laforge, pictured), which looks at cultural subjects, usually focusing on a particular city, monument, or museum. Also on France 3, the program features taped reports interspersed with live interviews and round-table discussions in situ, with experts and an audience. The live camera work is sometimes a bit hyperactive, and the show’s theme music melodramatic, but given the intellectual content, I can forgive the producers for trying to spice up the proceedings a little. The show has become a great favorite of France’s cultural institutions, though it does often look beyond this country’s borders.

Arte, la Redoute

When the restored edition of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was screened at the Berlin Film Festival, Arte simulcast the movie —
the first time I’d seen more than a few minutes of it.

While the state-owned channels of France Télévisions do feature a good deal of cultural programming — sometimes including live performances of opera and theater*** — our most reliable source for quality television is the Franco–German channel, Arte. We get all kinds of great programs, from classic films to Classical music, from The Tudors to documentaries — often organized around a single theme for the evening. Many of those documentaries come from the History Channel, and are dubbed into French (and into German, across the border), but they’re typically pretty good; the selection of movies is brilliant, a combination of repertory cinema and international film festival, though in recent years the channel has shown fewer in the “version originale” (with subtitles) and more with dubbing. Dommage.

Also available in convenient book form

Original programming has included Le Dessous des cartes, brief, completely engrossing lectures (using maps) about geopolitics; Karambolage, a quirky comparison of French and German customs; and Les Petits Marmitons, a reality show about adorably ordinary kids learning to cook. (All of those show’s titles include plays on words, and translation would require excessive explanation.) There’s an evening newscast, too, extremely international in its focus, and a number of programs devoted to cultural news and live events.

Autrement

If you have to be told who this is, you are not a serious person.

On French TV, we get plenty of soccer matches, of course, and I do sometimes watch those. Most French movies are produced with funding from one channel or another, so you can expect them to turn up on TV within a year or so of the theatrical release; the glossier miniseries and movies-of-the-week are seldom as bad — or as ambitious — as the Proust debacle.

Some of the superior efforts have featured actors I admire, including Ariane Ascaride as George Sand in a miniseries shot in Sand’s own home; and Jean-Pierre Darroussin in Le Septième Juré (The Seventh Juror), a kind of socio-psychological crime drama.

Laurent Ruquier, host of On n’est pas couché,
a late-night Saturday talk/variety show.
I’ve been told I look like him; Sarkozy is said to dislike him.

Then there are the shows I don’t ever look at: cheesy variety shows, inane reality series, so-so game shows, and cop shows that look just like American cop shows except, you know, the uniforms are French. I’ve never seen a full episode of Joséphine, ange gardien, which seems to be much like Touched by an Angel; its star is a little person, Mimie Mathy, who’s pretty much a folk hero in this country. French TV also boasts at least one homemade soap opera, Plus belle la vie, set in working-class Marseille.

All of these shows must be hugely popular, because TV and gossip magazines breathlessly chronicle their every development, and they account for the bewilderment I feel every time I go to the newsstand or grocery store: “Who are these people? Why don’t I recognize them? Am I in the wrong country?” (I do have the same reaction when looking at popular American magazines, too.)

Mathy as Joséphine, the Guardian Angel

Ultimately, I can justify spending a few hours scotché devant la télé — glued (literally, “Scotch-taped”) to the television. Just by listening, I’m practicing my French comprehension. But I have limits — and even in France, there are times when I peel myself away, grumbling, “Il n’y a rien à cette télé de merde” (There’s nothing good on, dammit).

You will have to take my word for it that, if Apostrophes were still on the air, I would watch faithfully. That program, an influential, wildly popular talk show about books, was hosted by Bernard Pivot.
In one of his books, I discovered the neglected word
that is now the title of this blog.

*NOTE: The state-owned channels run commercials in discrete blocs (usually about five minutes long) in between programs. Commercial channels more often run the advertising blocs in the middle of a program, then segue without a break into the next program, so that you won’t change the channel. Commercial breaks are very tedious to sit through, but they do make it easy to get up, fix a snack, visit the bathroom, make phone calls, etc. There has been much less nudity in French TV advertising lately; I’m not sure why.

**The closing interview segment of the 1P.M. newscast on France 2 is called “Les 5 dernières minutes,” in tribute to a classic French TV series, in which the detective (played by Raymond Souplex, seen below) would ingeniously and elaborately solve the mystery in the last five minutes of each episode.

***France 2 recently broadcast a performance of Feydeau’s Un fil à la patte from the Comédie Française. It was terrible — lacking only Leonard Pinth-Garnell — but at least they tried. When was the last time an American network did anything comparable?

Raymond Souplex as Inspector Bourrel in Les 5 dernières minutes.

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