In praise of the French

AS we’ve bumped into friends & told them about our holidays, we seem to have heard the same words so often. They tell of how nasty the French can be, how they rip you off, how poor their food is, hardly a good word to be said for them. This is just so contrary to our experience.

We’ve been to France several times over the years. The first time we ventured across the channel, we stayed in one hotel to be invited back the following year for a free holiday. A friendship developed which lasted for years.

Over the years we’ve been inundated with gifts – wine glasses, food, a painting, free drinks – from throughout the country. We’ve also been showered with assistance, as people determinedly push me up hills whether I want to go or not.

This year was no exception.

On the train trip from Paris to Tours, I met a disabled lady who happily told me about what places were wheelchair accessible & about the ease, or otherwise, of the transport system.

Once at Tours, we met a French couple in the hotel bar. They instantly drew up a list of must see places both in Tours & in Paris, the sort of places locals know about but are often missed by tourists. Later in the week we bumped into them in old Tours, along with their daughter, & had a chat with them.

We found one restaurant In Tours which we really loved. Our reward for frequent visiting, and being so “sympa” as they say, was a couple of glasses of free Veuve Cliquot champagne.

Even in Paris, renowned for its surly residents, we went one day to an Italian restaurant to be given a free glass of Montepulciano red wine to round off the excellent meal.

As for the kindness of people, it will be a long time, if ever, before we forget the two wonderful ladies in the Musėe d’Orsay. The building is extremely badly laid out for wheelchairs users. We were beginning to despair of ever finding the Impressionist gallery, when these two ladies, fellow visitors, though clearly regulars who knew their way around, offered their help. They desperately saught a lift to get us to the required floor. Lift A, the one we used only went to floors 0, -2 & 2, where we were when they’d discovered us. They insisted we stayed put while they split up to find another way. They found Lift A, but saw our problem. One went downstairs to ask the officials & discovered we needed Lift D. Soon she was back with a map of the building to show us where Lift D was. Meanwhile the other lady had been enthusing over the gallery, telling us some of the history of the building, & the wonder of some of the artworks, especially the Impressionists. After many thanks we set off, located lift D, & sure enough the art was wonderful.

I sometimes think we English tend to go off to foreign climes expecting everyone to speak English. This is quite unreasonable. It’s equivalent to a French person coming to England & expecting us all to speak French. We always try to speak French, even though it is at times very broken. We always go armed with a phrase book & a pocket dictionary. It’s amazing what a few words, plenty of gestures & good will on all sides can achieve.

Equally it’s only reasonable to try real French food, no matter how odd they sound. You may not get meat & two veg, as in England, but you will get plenty of good fresh bread, the French staple food. Most dishes do turn out to be delicious, though I will admit to some exceptions – pig’s snout for one. The Fox still shudders at the memory of cutting into andouillettes, an innocuous looking sausage, to find bits of rubber falling out. They’re a sort of tripe sausage, more than he can manage. I never tried them as I am nervous of sausages of all types, even English ones. One lady in one Paris restaurant was insistent upon having mint sauce with her lamb meal. For the French mint is used exclusively in desserts, not in a sauce for meat. But it really isn’t such a hardship to eat a well-flavoured piece of lamb without mint so why get stroppy about it.