Texts for Translation 2007:
  Caroline Wyatt

Politeness & Perfume

by Caroline Wyatt

(R4 FOOC cue: This Christmas in France, many will be receiving books on good manners and etiquette, or even vouchers for the schools that are springing up to teach the uncouth or the arrivistes how to eat their foie gras with delicacy and politesse at the Christmas table. This new-found interest in politeness may baffle some visitors to France: a recent survey by the Paris tourist board found that the majority of visitors thought the Parisians amongst the rudest people in the world. Our correspondent Caroline Wyatt has been navigating the perilous waters of French etiquette...with sometimes distressing results.)

The title: "A history of politeness in France" might strike the uncharitable as being a very short book indeed. But Frederic Rouvillois' definitive study of manners in France through the ages weighs in at a crushing 550 pages. It joins Nadine de Rothschild's best-selling bible of politeness in offering advice to those in need of guidance on how to behave in that oxymoron, 'polite French society'.

For this season of festive meals can be a minefield for the unwary or those uneducated in French ways. Oh, if only I had read their advice before venturing out to my first Parisian dinner party.

I had arrived punctually at the chic Parisian flat on the Left Bank, on the dot of 8pm, as per the invitation, bearing flowers for my hostess. I wondered why she seemed slightly put out. I realised, when the other guests, politicians, a philosopher, a banker or two and their wives finally arrived an hour later. The conversation was in rapid-fire French, no allowances made for the only foreigner in the room.

So, to make myself feel more at ease, I reached over to the bottle of wine, to pour myself a second glass. The entire table suddenly fell silent as the wine emerged loudly, and in slow motion, into my glass. A deep froideur descended as 10 pairs of steely Parisian eyes turned to stare. I smiled weakly and remained quiet for the rest of the meal, fleeing as soon as I politely could. Clearly, I had committed an unforgiveable faux pas, though what it had been I wasn't sure.

It was only this week that I discovered just how many terrible solecisms I'd committed under the strict laws of French etiquette. My lesson came courtesy of Constance Reitzler, director of La Belle Ecole - 'the beautiful school' - which aims to give Parisians and oafish foreigners alike that special polish. It teaches the 'arts de vivre', that untranslateable French concept that encompasses everything from how to appreciate your wine and food, to whether to eat your sorbet with a spoon or fork. It's a fork, for those who want to know. And never spread your foie gras on your toast. Eat with it a fork, and the toast separately.

Constance patiently explained that a lady never, ever grabs the bottle of wine to pour her own drink. She must wait for her host or another man to pour it for her. And more than one aperitif before dinner is considered the sure sign of an alcoholic, or and Englishwoman. We are, after all, a nation renowned in France for 'le binge-drinking'.

And I had compounded the offence by wishing those at the table a 'bon appetit', before noisily expressing my appreciation of the food. Both, apparently, cardinal sins in the Bible of French Etiquette. "Wishing someone bon appetit is seen as very vulgar in polite circles," Constance explained, as I realised to my horror that I must have wished almost every French person I have ever met at a meal 'bon appetit'. Why hadn't the BBC sent me on this course before I began my job in paris?

Apparently in France it's good manners to keep your elbows ON the table, and your hands visible. The custom dates back centuries, to when noblewomen did so to display their dazzling rings, to show off their husband's social status. Keeping your hands above the table shows you are concentrating on your meal. And, I thought unworthily, that you are not using them to get to know the husband next to you rather better than his wife might like. I, of course, had politely kept my elbows off the table, and my hands beneath it while not eating - goodness only knows what all the wives had thought.

But I wondered who was ruder: myself, for not understanding local customs, or my hosts, for making me feel ill at ease.

It's not that the French are necessarily rude - but Parisians certainly are. A psychiatrist has coined a term for its effect on Japanese visitors to the city: "Paris Syndrome". Every year, several Japanese tourists have to be repatriated from Paris after falling prey to severe culture shock at the hands of less than polite Parisians. Waiters who fail to understand their order, taxi drivers who take them to the wrong place and then charge double. All this is too much for some to take, as their dream of the city of light crumbles into a nightmare of darkness, creating a sense of rejection and paranoia.

Yet I know exactly how they feel after my encounter at a dress shop last week. I picked up a skirt to try on, and as I took it to the changing room, the assistant shouted out across the crowded room: "I wouldn't bother if I were you - it'll never fit!!"

The phrase 'the customer is king' has clearly lost something in translation. Or perhaps the French think it a reference to the Revolution, a chance to cut the customer down to size. Madame La Guillotine may no longer be available, but a sharp tongue can do the job just as well.

Perhaps Constance can help both sides. As I rose to leave, she politely handed me a 2-page guide to etiquette at dinner, with an expression of sympathy, though whether for my past and future hosts or for myself, I wasn't sure.

I glanced at it. It could have been tailor-made for the oafish, drunken Englishwoman who came to dinner. "Never down your drink in one", and 'ne jamais ecraser le buste vers l'assiette' or "don't put your bust in your plate" and "never make noises of satisfaction at the dinner table. And never, ever say bon appetit at the best tables.

So now I know. And in spite of that, I'd like everyone across Britain to join me now in wishing all in France a very bon appetit indeed this Christmas.

ENDS

(R4 FOOC Cue: The film of Patrick Sueskind's best-selling novel 'Perfume' opens in the UK this Christmas. Its plot - about a perfume creator who turns to the dark side to create the ultimate scent - has proved a hit in France, home to the world's perfume industry. However, the country's greatest 'noses' or perfume creators have been rather sniffy about their evil fictional counterpart - though they well understand his obsession with smell. This week, French perfumiers recreated Marie-Antoinette's perfume, for sale at a mere 8,000 euros a bottle, which may make our Christmas purchases seem really quite reasonable by comparison. Our Paris correspondent Caroline Wyatt has been sniffing out the roots of the French obsession with scent.)

The British have always been rather sniffy about the French attitude to personal hygiene. Think of how the French smell, and our national imagination tends to conjure up garlic and onions, with a bouquet of Gauloises, and perhaps some top-notes of stale red wine. To the satisfaction of the British tabloids, a recent survey found that the French use far less soap than we do, and bathe rather less often. In fact, there is a simple explanation, according to my indignant French friends. They use scented shower gels, not soap, because they live in small Parisian flats without a bathtub, taking showers instead of baths.

Yet it's true that no Parisienne worth the name would dream of leaving home without a dab of scent. Often, not so much a dab as an overwhelming thunder-cloud of fragrance, which enters the room long before she does. I sometimes wonder, as my nose is assaulted by yet another over-scented neighbour on the metro, whether it's a form of territorial marker, a human version of same way Parisian dogs use lamp-posts or my doorstep: to mark out their patch.

That olefactory curiosity led me to follow my nose to a small laboratory in northern Paris this week, where two women sit surrounded by hundreds of tiny bottles, sniffing and weighing their contents on scales, until they agree on the exact odour they're seeking. Isabelle Doyen, the older of the two, is a 'nose' - a perfume expert who has devoted her life to scent, and possesses a suitably imperious Gallic conk. But she says, it's not so much her nose that creates the scents, but her memory - honed and trained to recognise thousands of ingredients, and summon them up as she desires, with all the emotions and memories they evoke.

As she bends over a jar to sniff, Isabelle mimicks pulling open an imaginary drawer in her mind. "Each smell is so evocative, so redolent with memory, that when you want to create a fragrance you go into your mind and take out the right ingredients." Her personal obsession with odour began in her grandmother's garden, with a rose and the taste of an apple that smelt like a pear (?). When she met the perfumier Annick Goutal many years later, she discovered they shared the same idiosyncratic wish to recreate exactly that fragrance, and a lifelong collaboration was born.

I pick up one of the scented candles on her bookshelf, and take a deep sniff. It's an indefinable odour - musty, not unpleasant, with the hint of old scent and worn leather, old-fashioned face-powder and lipstick. I look at the label. "Scent of my mother's handbag". And as I close my eyes to inhale again, it takes me straight back to my own childhood. Suddenly I am 7 years old, sitting in my mother's bedroom, playing with her handbag as she gets ready to go out, disappearing to a dinner party in a sweet-smelling cloud of Craven's 'Ma Griffe', an effect only slightly spoiled by my father's aura of eau du nicotine and mothballs.

"Perfume is all about our mothers," Isabel insists. "What they wore and what it meant to us." Her colleague, Annick's daughter Camille, is not so sure. She did learn about perfume from her mother, whose shops are a favourite destination for pomaded (?) Parisiennes. But, Camille says with a smile, choosing a perfume is more like falling in love, or choosing a boyfriend. "When you find the right one, you just know it."

In my Proustian moment with the handbag, I was not alone. Generations of writers have rejoiced in the sense of smell. In her recent book, "A Nosegay: A Literary Journey from the Fragrant to the Foetid," Lara Feigel cites Baudelaire on scent. He extolled the virtues of everything from the odour of cats to the olefactory satisfaction of endless kisses. Rousseau called smell "the sense of the imagination", and Diderot praised it as the most voluptuous of the senses. The ancient Egyptians used to burn incense in their temples, its sweet smoke a rich sacrifice to the gods - hence perfume's name, from the Latin 'per fuma', or 'through the smoke'.

But if the first perfume was meant for the gods, it was quickly annexed by earthly kings and queens, the only ones who could afford the luxurious ingredients. At the court of King Louis the 14th, aristocrats would scent their gloves with a different fragrance each day, a way to make clear their power and riches. Quite literally marking out their territory to less fragrant visitors, as the odour of wealth wafted out to the peasants begging beyond the Palace gates. Yet it wasn't until the 18th century that France's flaunting, extravagant queen, Marie Antoinette, first imported the idea of clean, sweet-smelling skin to the French court - from England.

According to perfume historian Elisabeth de Feydeau, Marie-Antoinette shocked the court by taking up the English habit of a daily bath, commanding her perfumier to create scented salts that turned the water opaque, for modesty's sake, as the ladies of the bed-chamber gathered to watch her bathe. "She was the first woman in France to use perfume not to cover up a bad smell, but for sensual reasons, to attract and arouse," Elisabeth says. No wonder the peasants cut off the Queen's head in their evil-smelling revolutionary rage.

But a little bit of Marie Antoinette has been given new life. Elisabeth holds out a scented stick for me to sniff: Marie Antoinette's perfume, recreated from the ingredients she loved. A heady mix of bergamot and cedar, the scent of a long-vanished Versailles fills the air, and with it the glorious thought of a Queen who died for the crime of importing personal hygiene to France.

(ENDS)

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