Piu Marie Eatwell - F Is for France: A Curious Cabinet of French Wonders

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For my husband, Nikola, to commemorate ten years of adventure in Gaul

Of the many themed trivia books out in the bookshops today, there is a noticeable gap, a silence that seems all the more remarkable the more one reflects upon it. That is, there is no miscellany or book of trivia dedicated to France and the French.

This omission seems all the more glaring in that Franceabove almost any other countryis replete with arcane laws and bizarre paradoxes. What is more, it is often through these details of peculiar historical incident or quirky custom that we learn the most about our Gallic neighbors and allies. The same could be said of the people of any other country. Are the unique words of different languages telling: the fact that there is a word in Japanese ( karoshi ) for death from overwork, and in Brazilian Portuguese ( cafun ) for the act of tenderly running your fingers through the hair of one you love? Such words and phrases, unique to the language, exist in French, too: for example, the noun serein , signifying the clear, light rain that falls at sunset after a beautiful day.

The purpose and joy of trivia and miscellany books are precisely that they revel in supposedly insignificant minutiae. They prove that there is, as Hamlet said, special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Moreover, a book celebrating the delicious variety and vagaries of French culture seems all the more apposite today, when that very culture itself has been the subject of recent terrorist and ideological attack. To adopt and espouse everything fun and French has now become, to a degree, a political stance, as the popular Twitter hashtag #jesuisenterrasse has shown. To sit on a caf terrace and drink wine is no longer an act of French frivolity, but rather of cultural defiance.

With this in mind, therefore, and with the considered reflections of an Anglophone who has now lived for a decade in France, I offer the following as a tribute to everything eccentrically, paradoxically, surprisingly, and delightfully French.

Absinthe

Absinthe, an iconic drink intimately linked to the French cafs of the Left Bank, is a highly alcoholic beverage derived from the flowers and leaves of the herb known as Artemisia absinthium (or grand wormwood). It also contains green anise, sweet fennel, andthe key to its mind-bending propertiesthe chemical thujone. It is usually a bright green color, hence its popular name, the green muse or la fe verte (green fairy). Absinthe is traditionally drunk diluted with water, with the addition of sugar.

Elaborate rituals have developed around the preparation and consumption of absinthe, involving special glasses and perforated spoons to permit the mixing of water and sugar as they are added to the drink:

The Proper Way to Prepare Absinthe in Polite Society

1. Pour a quantity of absinthe into the glass, amounting to about one-fifth of the total capacity (1 to 1 ounces is common).

2. Place the absinthe spoon across the glass, with the notch in the spoon resting on the rim of the glass. Place a sugar cube in the spoon.

3. Slowly drizzle a steady volume of water over the sugar cube, allowing the cube to become saturated first, until the glass is full or according to taste.

4. Close your eyes and await the approach of the green fairy.

Recipe from the Wormwood Society

Absinthe was hugely popular from the 1860s onward in France and continental Europe, so much so that the hour between five and six p.m. was called lheure verte in bars and cafs. It was the muse of the poet Baudelaire, and the lurid colors of Van Goghs paintings have been attributed to the psychedelic influence of the drink. Edgar Degass 1873 painting Labsinthe epitomizes the loneliness and drugged haze of the absinthe drinker in the popular imagination. One detractor observed:

Absinthe makes you crazy and criminal, provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands of French people. It makes a ferocious beast of man, a martyr of woman, and a degenerate of the infant, it disorganizes and ruins the family and menaces the future of the country.

Absinthe was thus associated with social disorder, degeneracy, and crime. The reputation of absinthe reached such a low point that it was banned in most Western countries in the early twentieth century, including the United States in 1912 and France in 1915. In the United States, absinthe was banned until 2007 (the French ban was not lifted until 2011).

Nineteenth-Century Absinthe Recipe

Infuse the entire cucurbit for 24 hours, add 15 liters of water, and distill carefully to produce 15 liters of product, adding:

Produces 100 liters at 45 degrees; mix and let rest.

Translated from Trait de la Fabrication des Liqueurs, 1882

Recent years, however, have seen an absinthe revival, with the arrival of new brands boasting names evocative of the drinks bohemian origins, such as La Fe Absinthe or the Australian brand Moulin Rooz.

Adultery

The French have traditionally been famed for their tolerance of adultery by those in public office, especially with regard to their presidents. Perhaps the most famous case of publicly tolerated adultery was that of President Franois Mitterrand, who had a whole secret family, unbeknownst to the French public. The secret was only revealed after the presidents death in 1996, when his lover, Anne Pingeot, and their daughter, Mazarine, appeared at his grave. The French public was disgustednot so much at the presidents behavior, but rather at the press, for revealing details of his private life.

Cinq sept (five to seven p.m.) was the phrase used to describe the hours when married French couples would traditionally cheat on their spouses. In the days when writers such as Victor Hugo kept an entire establishment for their mistress, the cinq sept was the time for discreet liaisons, before a gentleman would set off back home for dinner with his wife. By the late twentieth century, however, all that had changed. In Paris, no one makes love in the evening anymore; everyone is too tired, sighs a character in Franoise Sagans 1966 novel La Chamade . Nowadays, the term cinq sept is more likely to be used in the Quebeois sense, of happy hour at the bar.

Under French law, infidelity can be intellectual as well as physical. In other words, excessive smoking, playing too much soccer, spending too much time with the local bishop, and phone sex can all be grounds for divorce. In 1986, a French court granted a divorce to a husband on the grounds of the intellectual infidelity of his wife. The reason for the divorce was that the wife had allowed a rival to assume intellectual precedence in her thoughts over her husband, thus giving her husband the impression that she considered him worthless.