French Lessons

French Lessons is escaping la Côte d’Azur’s oh-so-jolly-and-bright annual Fête and heading across the Pond in search of that Christmas spirit of old.

 

As we head into the New Year, I invite readers to offer subjects they’re keen to read about during 2009.  Just like Santa’s sack, my idea box is filled to the brim, but I’m delighted to accept suggestions.

 

In the meantime, I wish you all a Joyeux Noël et Bonnes Fêtes!

It's Beginning to Feel a Lot Like . . . Christmas?

Laurelle bounded into Bellevue last Friday after school.  “The lights are on!  The lights are on!”

 

You’d have thought Paul Revere was arriving on horseback.

 

Yes, someone had switched on Antibes’ illuminations.  It was big news.  For a good month now, three-and-a-half-year-old Laurelle and the rest of us had watched crews and more crews of workers hang Christmas lights around town.  And now – at last – Antibes had caught up with the rest of the world.

 

The first vision of this year’s candied lights dancing in our heads surfaced in the quaint, old village of Biot, a short journey into the hills from our seaside location.  The last weekend of November, as Pierre, Laurelle and I drove to celebrate a late Thanksgiving with friends, les illuminations guided the final miles of our journey.  Our preschooler shouted with glee from the back seat as we bounced along Biot’s winding roads. 

 

On our return that evening to Antibes, the obvious question sprang from the back seat:  But why don’t we have lights yet?

 

The calendar turned from November, and Laurelle began attacking her chocolate-filled Advent calendar each morning.  Antibes’ lights remained firmly off. 

 

The following weekend Cannes produced its month-long Noël fair, complete with an illuminated ferris wheel that’s visible the length of La Croisette.  Antibes’ lights stayed dim.

 

My explanations to Laurelle – excuses on behalf of our tardy town council – became weaker.

 

A week ago, Friday, December 12^th to be exact – Joy to the World! – the good citizens of Antibes could enjoy the twinkling in its full splendor, too.  I must say, the array of white and blue and yellow and red and green lights – formed into stars and snowflakes and ribbons and ornaments, and strewn over and along just about every central street in Antibes and neighbouring Juan-les-Pins – this get-up is truly impressive. 

 

Add to this glittering trove the icicles and flashing lights that sparkle in trees; a succession of rising suns that arch over the seaside road; little blue lights that wrap the trunks of giant palms; and an immense banner of lights declaring “Joyeux Fêtes” that heralds your entry to our beloved city.  Top it off with masses of giant Christmas balls and bows and evergreens that hang in all the right spots, and there’s no question that these Christmas decorations are far more festive than those of any American, British or South African city in which I’ve lived.

 

 But for all this gorgeous glitz and gold, why doesn’t it feel more like Christmas around here?  Where’s all the peace and goodwill, Christmas cutout cookies and mince pies?  Where’s the Christmas that hovers, as some English friends put it in their annual card, somewhere between my memory and my imagination?

 

Maybe this strange lack of feel-good, Christmas spirit actually has to do with the lights.  People – and by people, I mean private citizens – don’t really get in on the illuminations act here.  Sure, a few folks dangle lights from balconies, but there are hardly neighbourhood competitions with bushes and trees ablaze, blow-up Frosties on front lawns, and Santas in their sleighs lurching off icicle-bedecked roofs with eight tiny, well-illuminated reindeer at the helm.

 

Nor do the local shops jazz up their windows in any whole-hearted sense.  It’s not that we need Macy’s fully mechanised Christmas display and piped-in music to emanate from each mom-and-pop shop that lines our cobbled streets.  But the measly string of fairy lights tossed over clothing in Blanc et Bleu’s storefront windows is just not – how do you say? – adéquat.

 

So, like good French citizens, we rely on the Government to do the job of our Christmas illuminations.

 

On further thought, perhaps my problem in getting all Christmasy this year is the weather.    

 

Sure, you say, the weather is easy conversation.  It’s an ever-available excuse for just about every ill in the world.  And this is the beautiful Côte d’Azur, right?

 

Well, not really.  Hear me out.  Friends in Denver and Toronto and Chicago have been feigning their condolences for the tough winter we’ve faced so far here on the Cap d’Antibes.  “Ooo-wah!  It hit 50 degrees in Antibes!”  they’ve mocked over email.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

The problem is not the temperature.  It’s not even November’s once-in-two-decades hailstorm that paralyzed the area in a blanket of white for three days.  The issue revolves around a true cornucopia of new French words I’ve been learning this season:  le crachin (drizzle), la bise (the glacial, North wind), and la neige fondue (sleet).

 

It’s tough to conjure up the Christmas spirit – even to get out of the house to do the crucial Christmas shopping – while the skies pummel you with a canopy of horizontal rain, le crachin, la bise and on occasion, la neige fondue.  This errant behavior churns up the sea, which continually has burst past wide beaches and retaining walls to lash fresh rocks and debris onto seaside roads, leaving virtual lakes along the area’s commercial thoroughfares. 

 

Thus hovelled within the thick, stone walls of Bellevue, with all the hissing and bluster from the neighbouring sea, I swear I’ve been living inside an electric tea kettle that’s constantly just off the boil. 

 

Last week, the day before Antibes’ lights went on, I was busy typing up here in le pigeonnier, my little, circular study at the top of Bellevue.  I was making my lists and checking them twice.  ‘Tis the Season, you know, and what a complicated one it is to organize from over the Pond. 

 

The kettle continued its hissing as furious seas outside le pigeonnier’s porthole windows smashed onto the rocks below Bellevue, and even beat at her perimeter wall.  High up here, under a dry (yes, dry at last!) roof and behind closed windows, the racket sounded like a soundtrack to some new age, calming methodology – something that would put a bit of zen into my succession of list-making and re-making, box ticking, and order tracking – my virtual, Christmas shopping frenzy.

 

The wind shifted as I pushed the lists aside and started to tackle my email in-box.  I heard fat raindrops spatter more distinctly against some window panes, or perhaps onto the ceramic patio tiles below, upping the volume on my soothing soundtrack.  An email from Merrin.  Another from my mother.  A travel confirmation.  Bills to pay.  A joke from Oxana. 

 

Then Pierre’s voice from below.  Qu’est-ce que c’est…?

 

The spa soundtrack, it turns out, was less virtual than my online correspondence.  I squeezed down le pigeonnier’s stairs to stand at the top of Bellevue’s main staircase, a circular, white marble chamber that plunges three stories to the garden level.  Here I found a magnificent cataract that cascaded over the marble landing, freefalling 30 feet and pummeling the marble below with a dance of resounding splashes that echoed back up through the space. 

 

I must say this new water feature was pretty impressive – a deep-from-the-Amazon jungle thunder that rang through the cavern that is Bellevue’s very core.

 

Except that it was all happening INSIDE.

 

It turns out that the enduring Côte d’Azur rain and windstorms had whipped oodles of pine needles onto Bellevue’s top floor terrace, and they’d gathered to create a top-quality plug in the two-inch balcony drain.  (It’s worth nothing that beneath this tiny drain hole, the pipe that whisked water away from Bellevue’s terrace is actually a good FIVE inches in diameter.)  Some six inches of water had accumulated over a 200-square-foot balcony – think about the size of that bathtub! – et voilà, Bellevue’s terrace doors were the weak link.

 

Pierre and I spent the next hour mopping up our brand new water feature. 

 

A few weeks ago Laurelle and I built a crèche out of paper cups, egg containers and a wine box.  Pierre is instead talking about building an ark. 

 

And he has begun to sing about how he’s dreaming of a DRY Christmas.

 

To find the spirit of Christmas, though, we actually had to leave the house.  (We understood this principle, but turning our backs on Bellevue involved an element of trust and goodwill which we were just about willing to extend to the construction folks, this being the Season and all.)

 

What bounty awaited us!  In addition to the spray of Christmas lights flung throughout Antibes, the local government has splashed out with a most generous array of seasonal goodies.  We’ve been able to locate them with great ease:  As with most State initiatives here, the government had kindly produced a pamphlet.

 

Within this sixteen-page tabloid on the subject of Noël in Antibes Juan-les-Pins, we learned that from December 13 – the day after the lights switched on – our town would se métamorphose.  Just like the Angel Gabriel, the paper foretold of festive manifestations (Hey, isn’t that the same word they use for protests?) that would tickle our Christmastime senses each and every day through January 4:

 

·         La Féerie des Eaux – La Place de Gaulle’s water fountains would dance to music and a light show.  Also in the central square a 15-meter Christmas tree would loom over life-sized dioramas of Père Noël’s house and his laboring elves.

 

·         Le Jardin de Glace – La Place Nationale would be inhabited by rows of huts nestled within a forest of fake-snow-blown pine trees.  These dwellings would offer traditional Christmas goodies like crêpes and churros.  Another would house a Greek crèche, complete with fishermen and Greek Orthodox church.  Free tickets would be given to good little girls and boys for a manmade ice slide (sleds provided) and a toy jeep circuit on ice.  And for a couple Euros, kids could jump in la joie et la bonne humeur of the Season within une structure gonflable.

 

(What’s a French fête without a bouncy castle?  And you can’t miss this one, I must tell you, sprung up next to the white-frosted pine trees and ice slide:  an over-sized, persimmon-orange and rain-slicker-yellow bouncy slide-and-castle contraption, adorned with – get this – emerald green palm trees.) 

 

·         Une voiturette gratuite avec chauffeur – What? Really?  A free, little, chauffeur-driven car?  Hail one or book one by telephone, but the idea behind this unbelievably generous offering by the local Uncle Sam is to help gift-laden shoppers reconvene with their parked cars.  Les voiturettes are a magnificent way to jump-start the local economy – if, of course, the Government doesn’t overspend on the free service in the first place.

 

The tabloid foretold of special shows, too, like:

 

·         Transe Express – A company of animated, face-painted drummers who would parade through Antibes’ central streets.

 

·         Karnavires – A theater company that would march through town with fireworks.  Elsewhere I found their performance described as un immense cabaret.

 

There’d be seasonal music (if “seasonal” only for its timing):

 

·         L’Orchestre de Chambre du Philharmonique de Nice would play Bach, Mozart and Poulenc.

 

·         Les Choristes et l’Harmonie Junior du Conservatoire de Musique d’Antibes would perform such well-known Christmas jingles as the theme from New York, New York and excerpts from Carmen.

 

·         La Médiathèque (Antibes’ new library on steroids) would “vibre au rythme de la Fête” with a dozen free concerts ranging from classical and jazz to a single concert of (Latin-inspired) Christmas songs.  Another pop concert in the Christmas line-up was described as nothing other than psychédélique.

 

·         Juan-les-Pins would get in on the act the Saturday before Christmas with des chalets gourmands erected in the park across from Laurelle’s school.  What music would accompany seasonal shoppers?  Why, le jazz, of course!

 

·         …along with plenty of piano and chamber music recitals – and the listing of one, yes one, TRUE Concert de Noël, which unfortunately happened in the far-flung Fontonne section of Antibes on December 7, well before I’d even discovered the special Noël newspaper.

 

One more thing.  To keep the season jolly and bright, we need Père Noël.  I mean, in all households with three-and-a-half-year olds bouncing through the seasonally decked halls, WE NEED PÈRE NOËL.  Not to worry.  Père Noël, the one and only, would be making a couple appearances right here in Antibes: 

 

·         One Saturday afternoon, horse-drawn carriages (as sleighs, of course, need snow) would sweep through Old Town Antibes, driven by the lively-and-quick one himself. 

 

·         And on the afternoon of Christmas Eve – there’s one shot, so get ready and get set, Père Noël would pose (for free!) for photos with good little girls and boys.

 

Santa’s sack of seasonal treats was overflowing!  And so that first Saturday morning when Noël descended on Antibes, Pierre, Laurelle and I bounded out of Bellevue, umbrellas in hand, to discover this période de fêtes – as the special pamphlet encouraged us to do – with intensité et poésie. 

 

Ahh, pure poetry, I tell you.  The lyrics of a new French Christmas carol. 

 

In the morning we occupied ourselves in Le Jardin de Glace.  Like a good little Canadian-American girl, Laurelle stuck mostly to the sledding and wholly avoided the palm tree-studded bouncy castle. 

 

That evening we again slipped out from Bellevue, this time to la Place de Gaulle – just in time for the Transe Express drummers to parade directly in front of us, their faces all grinning and wild with white paint, their snares punching a rhythm that pummeled straight into our hearts.  Laurelle leapt backward to hide. 

 

Soon the water dance began.  Place de Gaulle’s fountains jumped and arched and pirouetted to the Christmas classics “When I Wish Upon a Star” (which, with a bit of lateral thinking, takes you in the right direction anyway) and a movement from Vivaldi’s ultra-seasonal Four Seasons (a selection which may very well have been “Winter,” but I wonder who else actually wondered). 

 

Next Laurelle bounded onto another seasonal showcase:  the merry-go-round-style swing.  As she twirled and squealed, loudspeakers erected over la Place de Gaulle blared some 1950s (what, Pat Boone?) song and then – incredibly – “Here Comes Santa Claus.”  Both songs, of course, were in English.

 

Et voila, Noël – at least as we watch it unroll and switch on before our eyes this mid-December in 2008 – is just another big French Fête. 

 

In a society where religion has a greatly diminished importance, the root of Christmas is missing from all the festiveness and festivities.  For many the crèche is just another quaint decoration.  Christmas songs – when they might pop up – are festive but hardly personal.  People give some gifts, as is expected in the grand build up to the Fête of Noël.  But by comparison, while the US has gone way too far in commercializing Christmas (and we say this every year), there is somehow a more authentic Christmas spirit – call it a mood or a general notion of goodwill – that burbles through North American malls and communities in a way that is hardly replicated in this corner of the world.

 

As Pierre, Laurelle and I drove away from that first evening’s festivities on la Place de Gaulle, we caught a wave of some beat-less French tune that had taken over the English music airwaves.  It made us think about Christmas music.  Where exactly IS Christmas music in la Côte d’Azur?

 

Back in Denver, I remember being annoyed each year when KOSI-FM tossed out its usual soft rock repertoire in favour of full-on Christmas music – beginning some days BEFORE Thanksgiving.  Most all radio stations, in fact, as the season progressed, threw at least a portion of seasonal tunes into their line-ups.  A sprinkling of Christmas music was nice – oh, so happy and bright.

 

But not so in France.  The only station we’ve discovered that regularly plays Christmasy songs, even at this late date in December, is Riviera Radio.  The English-language station.

 

Even Charles Aznavour – France’s answer to Frank Sinatra – has failed to pump out enough recordings to fill the French airwaves.

 

Suddenly it began to make more sense.   Suddenly we realized why this little, Christmas-celebrating family had been so keen to venture beyond the borders of Antibes Juan-les-Pins to hear Christmas carols.  Just a few nights earlier we’d cruised to the hillside village of Valbonne – umbrellas in hand, of course – to take part in an annual Christmas concert performed in the 12^th-century St. Blaise church.  The name of the choir?  The Riviera International Singers. 

 

No, the group’s name is not a translation.

 

The choir was a collection of international, English-speaking folks.  To be diplomatic the Christmas programme included Il es Né (He Was Born) and the rather unappetizing Quelle est Cette Odeur (What is This Odor).  A third song was sung in Renaissance-period Spanish.  The other 20 songs were in English.

 

The audience?  Lots of English-speakers, of course, but some French ones, too.  The French had actually come to join the English Christmas celebration. 

 

To be fair, I should mention that the second to last page of the special government bulletin on Noël, in something like a boxed ad, did mention les célébrations religieuses.  Failure to wax poetically about these Christmas festivities could very well be a mark of State and church separation.  But the paper’s emphasis on those spectacles that totally evade Christmas and its spirit – all those goodies that were more exotic than sledding and Pere Noël sightings – is a mark of how far the annual Fête has strayed.

 

There certainly are some bright (well-illuminated!) spots.  Laurelle’s school – being Catholic – celebrates Noël in its true fashion.  There’s a Christmas tree in Laurelle’s classroom that she describes as “prettier than the one at home.”  A few crèches even adorn its base.

 

Then this Wednesday morning, as I waited for the end of Laurelle’s music class at the government-sponsored Espace Les Arcades, I was delighted to notice a brochure at the center’s welcome desk advertising a special concert of piano and singing this Friday evening.  Perhaps, finally, I’d stumbled on Christmas. 

 

I asked the welcome desk attendant:  “Le concert, c’est pour Noël?”  I was smiling, hopeful.

 

“Oui,” she said.  Then she caught herself.  “C’est pour la FÊTE de Noël,” she said.  It’s for the celebration of Christmas.  And then with a barely evident finger wag, “mais ils sont pas les chansons de Noël.”  They’re not Christmas songs.

 

In the same spirit of the Fête, Laurelle’s preschool class welcomed parents to a mini-spectacle and some Christmas treats yesterday afternoon.  What two selections did this 33-strong, three-year-old choir sing to its adoring audience at this good, Catholic school?  Hardly tunes like “O Christmas Tree or “Silent Night,” which seem to crop up in just about any language.  In the shadow of the classroom’s well-adorned Christmas tree and little crèches, the first song we parents enjoyed identified the hand’s five fingers.  In the second tune the children bade us not to take their doudous (security blankets) away.

 

Oh well.  We’ll just have to sing our Christmas carols within Bellevue.  We’ll make our own Christmas spirit. 

 

And at least we still have the Fête of Christmas to get us jolly.  How nice of the Government to hold our hands, as usual, through these delightful and fully underwritten initiatives.  Water will dance.   Père Noël and a bevy of chauffeurs will drive.  And lights will twinkle defiantly over Antibes’ puddle and debris-ridden streets. 

 

But there are rumblings of discontent.  The Sunday morning after Antibes’ Fête began in earnest, a worrying newspaper headline splashed across television screens.  One paper from western France had launched this Christmas cracker across its front page:

 

FAUT-IL ARRÊTER LES ILLUMINATIONS?  Do we need to stop the lights?

 

The cost of the electricity was pretty high, you see, and….  Bah humbug!

 

The headline got me thinking.  It took a cast of seemingly hundreds to organize and string Antibes’ illuminations.  And we know their activities carried on for a good month before someone finally threw the switch.  These lights will glitter for about three weeks, and then the whole endeavour will be performed again, this time in reverse – another month’s guaranteed work for the local mairie’s troops.

 

With today’s unemployment figures zooming skyward, this crew of hundreds will have a very merry Christmas, indeed.  So will we admirers of the twinkling lights.

 

All thanks to the Government.  Our very own Père Noël.

A Most Charitable Neighbourhood

Friends – particularly our family’s former neighbours in Denver – often ask me what our new neighbours are like on the Cap d’Antibes.

 

It’s not exactly like that, I tell them.

 

The spacing of the land and sea around here means that we really only have two sets of neighbours.  One lives across a busy street behind a high stone wall.  They are Austrian and very nice – or so we hear anyway.  The other set of neighbours is next door.  I understand they actually occupy the pad most Julys.

 

Surprise, surprise, we do not have block parties in this part of Cap d’Antibes.  No one invites every household and its dogs to his front lawn, like we did during those balmy summer eves in Denver.  No one bothers to set up an enormous charcoal grill on his front lawn, to flip piles of burgers and squirt bottles of ketchup on buns while brace-faced kids skateboard down driveways into the street. 

 

No one has invited us into a Neighbourhood Watch scheme – even in an environment that, several burglaries later, truly could benefit from one. 

 

And certainly no one brought us a tray of oven-fresh, chocolate chip cookies when we moved into Bellevue.  Neither did their butler.

 

Today I learned a bit more about this broader Cap d’Antibes neighbourhood.  Bernard, our round and fatherly estate agent, loves having a scoop.  He always seems to have a juicy tidbit, relishing the chance to pepper conversation with the names of former ambassadors, Russian oligarchs or even the Aga Khan. 

 

Today he offered us a new name.  Know that $50 billion swindle that’s commanding financial headlines, even amid otherwise record-breaking and heart-wrenching economic news? 

 

It is true.  The one and only Bernard Madoff, and his wife Ruth, are apparently our sometime-neighbours on Cap d’Antibes, too.  And just as our trusted estate agent looks after our property and invoices when we’re out of the country, he ministers to the needs of the Madoffs’ apartment on the Cap.  And their 80-foot yacht in Port Gallice.

 

Connection to the headlines may suit our man Bernard.  Loss of a paying client probably isn’t quite as hot a ticket.  Even if the Madoffs weren’t the cookie-baking sort, these clients kept their affairs orderly.

 

Except for last week, when the annual French taxe d’habitation was due.  Mr Madoff’s bill arrived in the post, but his account didn’t quite cover the amount, so our kindly agent footed part of the bill out of his own pocket.

 

The financial fallout has gone global.  Poor Bernard hardly plans to get repaid. 

 

Not even a chocolate chip cookie crumb.

 

Texas Two-Step

Friday morning, October 24, 8:15 a.m.  I remember it clearly. 

 

I cowered under an umbrella on the pavement outside my three-and-a-half-year old’s school.  I’d just dropped her off for the last day before a twelve-day Toussaint holiday.  The wind lashed ribbons of rain at my trousers and the bottom of my coat.

 

Of course I didn’t stand there alone.  The father of one of Laurelle’s classmates stood with me.  The Frenchman retreated under his own umbrella while offering me a fuller response than I’d expected to a cheery question about their family’s plans over the holiday break.

 

No, he and his family weren’t travelling anywhere.  They were staying put.  Texas Instruments, his employer, had announced a slew of upcoming job cuts.  He needed to stay close to home.

 

For those twelve days that our families were relieved of the 8:15 a.m. tardy bell, I wondered how our friend fared.  On Halloween, would TI give him a pink lollipop or a pink slip? 

 

School reconvened in early November, and the Frenchman had neither the lollipop nor the notice. 

 

Non, non, it doesn’t work that way in France, he explained.  First there’s a four-week period when such-and-such happens.  Then there’s another sixty days when the rebuttal to such-and-such takes place.  With my rudimentary-but-improving French and his southern lilt, I surely missed a bunch more such-and-such’s in between.

 

The point is, this poor guy still had no idea about his job.  Yes, he wished to learn his fate earlier, but heh, this is France and that’s just how it goes.

 

Yes, that is how it goes, I began to learn from the newspapers.  TI’s trade unions needed time to make their pleas with the Government.

 

Dallas-based Texas Instruments has maintained a microelectronics operation in the nearby town of Villenueve-Loubet since 1994.  The TI manager quoted in the local Nice Matin newspaper that first week of November underlined that his organization has created hundreds of jobs in that time.  It has always bent over backward to limit la casse sociale, compulsory redundancies or literally “social damage.”

 

Things change.  Some 300 or 350 local TI jobs now faced the axe.  The figure must be a fair whack of the shop given that designers and engineers onsite number around 800.

 

“L’État ne peut pas s’engager à la place des dirigeants,” one trade union representative told the newspaper.  He got that right.  Having just met with Government representatives, he understood that the State couldn’t get involved in the place of a company’s managers. 

 

What the union man said next was my great curiosity:  “On garde quelques espoirs, notamment de réduire au final le nombre de suppressions de postes.”  He held out some hopes that the final number of job losses would be fewer. 

 

What “hopes” was this guy talking about, I wondered?  Wasn’t TI a private company?  Booms and busts, hirings and firings – wasn’t that just how markets work?  So what, exactly, did he expect of the French Government’s generous shoulder?

 

The article continued with an explanation from a TI manager:  “Le plan ne vise pas particulièrement la France…,” he explained.  TI was hardly targeting France.  It was the soft markets in semi-conductors and mobile phones that prompted job cuts.  The union reps understood what was going on, even if they didn’t like it, the TI man asserted.

 

So we had one problem and two sides.  One side made absolute, logical sense to my American upbringing.  Stuff happens.  Businesses change and folks are let go.  Don’t whitter on about the matter with company management, and certainly don’t try to plead your case with the mayor.  Get real.

  

The other argument – the French union one – was reminiscent of a world where the Government holds hands with its private enterprises.

 

[Yes, you are right.  Now is a very good time to bring up America’s own disasters in GM, Ford and Chrysler.  And AIG, and the host of banks that are benefitting from the Fed’s handsome handbag.  The US Government is certainly doing a number here, and a big one at that. 

 

Not that the US plan is perfect – could anything possibly be perfect given the state of the world? – but there are a couple big differences with the US model.  The first is scale.  Lose the Big Three, and you lose a large metropolis-worth of jobs.  Allow a country’s financial system to fail, and even the experts wonder how you’d extract an economy from the mess.  The second difference is job cuts.  Oodles of them will accompany US financial assistance.] 

 

Don’t get me wrong.  Texas Instruments – Villeneuve-Loubet branch may be prominent.  But it’s hardly a city.  Something more had to underpin the union’s hopes for government interference. 

 

My first guess involved French mentality.  What undoubtedly propped up union hopes was simply that this is France.  While HARDLY an exhaustive list, here’s a bit of local flavour: 

 

·         In France, people talk matter-of-factly about l’ANPE (l’Agence nationale pour l’emploi).  As far as I can tell, it’s a federal marriage service for job seekers and employment opportunities.  (Britain and Germany actually have something similar.) 

 

·         There’s also Sicler (Secretariat d’Information des collectivities locales et regionales), a governmental organization that helps folks relocate to small French villages where they take up manual jobs.  Sicler is France’s answer to the country’s oft-languishing entrepreneurial spirit.

 

·         Closer to our 72,000-person home of Antibes, one senior government official confided that some 2,200 folks populate the local government payroll.  What’s worse, this officer hasn’t a clue what two-thirds of them actually do.

 

Put simply, business – according to the French mentality – is the State’s business.  The persuasion has roots.  France has endured three rounds of nationalization (in 1936, 1945-46, and 1981).  A full two-thirds of the country’s top 20 companies have, at one point or another, experienced state ownership. 

 

Sure, the world is getting flatter.  Government involvement in business is increasing worldwide in these unusual times, and net-net, France has been reeling in the State’s tentacles over the last couple years.  What’s tougher to change is people’s memories.

 

So the unions said one thing and Texas Instruments’ management said another, and the wait time was an enforced cooling off period that in today’s world would prove fruitless.  Et voilà, I’d pretty much answered my own question. 

 

Or so I thought.

 

The local rag then mentioned (oh-so-un-editorially) des éclaircies, or some bright spots.  A couple meetings between TI management and various governmental bodies would proceed, the paper said, with the aim of saving jobs.  One mediator indicated that weakened economic activity could come to everyone’s rescue – creating the first occasion when this French “06” governmental departement could benefit from State employment credits.

 

Quoi?

 

I brought the Nice Matin article to Christine, the instructor of my French-for-Foreigners class.  She happily offered her insights. 

 

Christine explained that President Sarkozy has been railing against the country’s employment rigidities, the slurry of conditions and restrictions that prompt viable businesses to give up on France and relocate beyond her borders in friendlier employment environments.  In these cases, the Government isn’t so keen to offer a shoulder.

 

But that’s hardly the situation with Texas Instruments.  The company is closing down lines of business for economic reasons.  The problems are hardly the employees’ faults.  Thus the union “hopes.”

 

Okay, and so when I get let go from a job for economic reasons – like from a company that makes five-pronged electric plugs – I’ll be sure to contact my State Representative.

 

A week later at French-for Foreigners, a Scottish classmate – someone who’d missed the prior class – rocked up late.  He was grumpy.

 

You guessed it.  The grumpy Scot works at TI.

 

Still no news?  The instructor enquired.

 

No.   Nothing for a while yet.

 

Good news, she said.  This means you can enjoy Christmas.

 

Good news?  This means I can worry all the way through my holidays.

 

The Scotsman told us that he can, in fact, worry all the way until February 17.  Instead of passing out pink lollipops with the pink slips, the French division of TI must be opting to send its love notes on pink doily hearts.

 

Can you imagine the atmosphere in that Villenueve-Loubet hub?  Think the cranky Scot times 800, plus all their assistants.  Bonjour to hourly rants around the water cooler and round-robin email “jokes.”  Au revoir to stellar French work efficiency which – in terms of output per hours actually worked – surpasses that of the US.  Or here’s a thought:  Like the good folks at Monaco’s L’Oreal factory who heard their shop would close sometime in 2011, why shouldn’t all of TI just go on strike RIGHT NOW? 

 

To some, the more capitalist-oriented, hire-and-fire system may seem inhumane.  But in my opinion, so do months of built-in, French pleading time.

 

As it happens, I met a third TI guy at a bring-and-share Thanksgiving meal.  This chap was an American who originally joined the Villenueve-Loubet operation as a handsomely paid expat, but more recently he moved onto a local, open-ended package. 

 

I couldn’t help asking, you know, American to American.  Didn’t all the union and governmental bickering bother him?

 

Yes, of course it did.  Not knowing your fate was in many ways worse than knowing the worst.

 

So what was he going to do?

 

Wait it out, he said.  And while all the socialist nonsense – the drive to involve the government in private business matters – made no sense to him, the American intended to stay on the social benefit bandwagon.  He was, after all, employed under a French contract now.  Why not wait out the misery and milk the deal for all it was worth?

 

Exactly like his French and Scottish counterparts have chosen to do. 

 

You know, these guys have a point.

A Homemade Circus

Tuesday morning Pierre and I drove home from a(n extremely strenuous) pilates class with two contraband pains aux raisin wrapped in a crinkled boulangerie bag.  The rest of the morning, we reckoned, we’d occupy ourselves in early festive bliss, nibbling brioches and sipping cafés-au-lait while writing Christmas cards.  Maybe we’d even put on some cheery, seasonal tunes.

 

Pulling up to Bellevue, we dropped the “It’s a Wonderful Life” film script.  We couldn’t even enter our own driveway.  A van was illegally parked on the busy road, smack in front of our gate.

 

We soon discovered that more than one vehicle stopped our show.  Both the small courtyard behind our entry gate and our off-road parking area were miniature circuses.  They were chock-a-block with further cars and vans belonging to the local workforce. 

 

Anitou and Jessica, our cleaners, directed traffic.  Someone unearthed Olivier, the brawny electrician and owner of the most intrusive van.

 

Meanwhile 70-year-old Jean and his nameless sidekick, les menuisiers, stooped at Bellevue’s front door, tacking a weather strip around its frame.  Their work flung Bellevue’s massive wooden door agape – letting into the chilly morning air all the precious warmth we’d managed to eek out of the home’s grudging heating system. 

 

The warm air flooded out, too, from Pierre and my festive morning plan of sugar and spice and everything Christmas-y and nice. 

 

“Now that we’re the only ones giving work away,” Pierre said as we crept into the drive, “we have everyone here.  I mean, we have a traffic jam in front of our house.”

 

It was true.  Some of this circus-like phenomenon at Bellevue relates to the ever-deteriorating real economy (as I described in Monsieur 90%, my blog dated 13 November).  And some of it, we are finding out, relates to the ever-fractious relations in the home maintenance trades. 

 

Whatever the cause, the sudden availability of workers is a ripe opportunity to sort out some of Bellevue’s endless ills and – so we’ve discovered in the process – to become re-educated about life in the south of France.

 

Septuagenarian Jean and his baggy chinos stood up as we stepped out of the car.  Blue eyes twinkling, he was delighted to show off his weather stripping invention, arms flapping in typical enthusiasm.

 

Before the economic meltdown, we’d been unable to entice Jean back to Bellevue for a good year and a half.  Our odds-and-ends jobs weren’t nearly lucrative enough.  These days, having complained to Pierre and me several times that he no longer has enough work, Jean has become something of a fixture around Bellevue.  We’re actually delighted to see “the Little Man,” as he is affectionately called in the area for his charming but errant ways.  (Jean keeps a scooter in his garage, for example, just in case the cops repeat their same injustice of relieving him of his driving license after a teeny glass of lunchtime wine.)  

 

In fact, for the last few weeks Jean has swung by Bellevue every other day.  He and his gangly, bearded colleague have repaired and re-repaired four doors (always flinging them wide to allow maximum heat escape).  They’ve mended broken locks, cracking varnish and gaping doorframes.  They’ve put up laundry room shelves.  They’ve built storage for outdoor lounge cushions.  They’ve even fixed a bed. 

 

We’re doing our part for the French economy.

 

During these visits, Pierre and I have been rewarded with French economic news (namely, which worksites have given up the ghost).  We’ve gained a new appreciation of French banking relations (from a client who lost his EUR 8,000 credit line).  And we’ve become privy to some gossip (as the 70-year-old Little Man is only too pleased to boast of his new, young squeeze).

 

Late Tuesday morning, after weather stripping the last of the Bellevue’s leaking doors, Jean offered to build shelves in the simple wine cellar.  This time Pierre put a plug on his creativity and paid Jean and his associate a nice Christmas bonus. 

 

Les menuisiers grinned.  They took turns shaking both Pierre’s and my right hands and headed – I’m guessing with fair certainty – straight for a slap-up meal.  It was, of course, lunchtime, and recession or not, no one messes with that hour and three-quarters in the south of France. 

 

We’ll be looking for Jean on his scooter in the new year.

 

The precious heat that Jean and his mate let out of Bellevue’s front door Tuesday morning is exactly, in a circuitous fashion, what brought Olivier, the illegally parked electrician, back to us.

 

Just like all grand projects, ours began with a small problem.  (Wasn’t World War I prompted by a single assassination?  Ditto the Rwandan genocide?)  And so one particularly chilly Saturday morning in November – what’s more, don’t all small problems crop up at the least convenient times? – Pierre and I discovered we had no hot water. 

 

Heat-related problems at Bellevue were hardly a surprise.  The heating system had been acting up since we’d switched it on in early November.  Put simply, there seemed to be no heat in the bedrooms or the small, round pigeonnier at the top of the house.  We purchased a space heater to make my pigeonnier workspace fit for human existence.  Soon afterward we phoned le chauffagiste.

 

Mr Martin, our extraordinarily punctual and efficient heat and air-con man, had made several November visits to Bellevue.  All was well, he’d explained one chilly, Friday afternoon, half-moon eyeglasses perched low and professor-like on his nose.  It was only a pressure problem, he was sure, although the manometer was broken so I guess he wasn’t that sure.  Mr Martin added water to the heating circuit.  All we needed was to wait for the system to respond.

 

The next morning was that chilly, hot-waterless Saturday.  Mr Martin’s promised heat hadn’t kicked in appreciably.  In addition to having no hot water, we soon had a deluge of dirty water in Bellevue’s main entrance.  Then we had a puddle in the boiler room.

 

Mr Martin conveniently MIA, we found Mr Marc.  He was recommended to us by Bernard, our estate agent.  More importantly, Mr Marc was available.  A chubby plumber who was new to Bellevue, Mr Marc fixed her leaks.  Then, despite gray shadows beneath his eyes, he sniffed around and made some rather startling observations:

 

·         Despite the fact that we’d completed a bones-up overhaul of Bellevue just three years ago, her 85-year-old pipes had never been properly flushed out.  Mr Marc could do that.

 

·         The heat to the bedrooms had been disconnected from the control system.  No wonder, he explained, it had been no use fiddling with thermostats.  He could fix that, too.

 

·         None of the manometers or purgers worked correctly.  Mr Marc replaced them, bumped up the water pressure in the heating system to the recommended level, and promptly created a new leak in the pigeonnier.  His work order lengthened. 

 

·         There was, in fact, no proper return ventilation built into the master bedroom.  We were sucking air out of the dusty attic.  (Barring invasive surgery, I think we will continue to do so.)

 

·         The circuit that brings heat into Bellevue’s two most far-flung rooms – the library and the blue guest room – was constructed out of flexible pipe and 90-degree bends.  I’m no plumber, but even I can picture that higher water pressure is required just to keep that system moving.  Ditto the subordinate loop that delivers heat and a/c to the whole of the ground floor.  Sturdy new cabling, that’s what we needed.  Mr. Marc could fix that, too.

 

·         As we were on a roll, Pierre showed Mr Marc a secondary temperature gauge in the master bedroom that didn’t seem to function properly.  Mr Marc promptly unearthed a whole new piece of Bellevue’s heating system.  Not only had the main circuit in the bedroom been disconnected – up until Mr Marc’s recent assistance – but this new subordinate unit was completely disconnected from the main one.  More work for the lucky plombier-chauffagiste.  

 

By taking Bellevue under his wing, Mr Marc had, in fact, wholly obliterated the word “recession” from his vocabulary.

 

“I don’t know who to believe anymore,” Pierre said after Mr Marc departed from a recent visit.  Both he and Mr Martin seemed such knowledgeable and credible characters. 

 

I reminded Pierre of Vivian, the general contractor on our prior home project, six years ago in Denver.  As with Bellevue, we lived far away during the big construction activity.  But on the day we moved our trunks into that Denver home, Vivian surprised us.  Not only had she left a posy of white flowers.  She’d created an enormous, meticulously labeled, three-ring binder that housed all appliance instruction manuals; many of the house’s hard-wired details, such as the sprinkler’s watering zones; and a list of key contractors and their phone numbers. 

 

I longed for a thick binder entitled “Bellevue.”

 

In the meantime a mistral blew in.  Outdoor temperatures plummeted, and indoor ones followed suit.  (Yes, this IS the south of France, but homes around here aren’t climatically bulletproof like they are in Edmonton.)  Pierre ran out to purchase a second space heater, this one to make his own office inhabitable. 

 

The heat slippage reminded Pierre about the floor heating we’d installed at Bellevue during her major overhaul three years ago.  Marvellous idea that it had been, we hadn’t the foggiest where the “on” button was.  Or the “off” button for that matter.  The marble floor in the living room had been ablaze for a couple weeks, creating Bellevue’s only truly warm room.  There, and in the cramped toilet off the entryway, where floor heat somehow flows year-round.  Elsewhere Bellevue’s marble and stone floors remained icier than her air. 

 

Jean, who was tinkering with a lock when the query arose, suggested we ring Bellevue’s original electrician, Michel.  Through Guy the gardener – as that’s how things work in this area – we found Michel.

 

Actually we found out about Michel.  It seems that Bellevue’s formerly responsive chief electrician wasn’t so responsive anymore.  But it was Olivier who installed Bellevue’s floor heating, the gardener said.  And Olivier was happily available. 

 

My enduring memory of this Top Gun-built electrician was the moment he hung Bellevue’s four-foot-diameter, wrought iron chandelier.  Dangling this behemoth within the center of a three-story, cylindrical stairwell, over an unforgiving floor of marble, Olivier fixed himself to an upper floor railing and to a few colleagues while twisting the fixture into the ceiling.  That was when I had to leave the scene.

 

The electrician was too happy to return to Bellevue.  It turns out that the unresponsive Michel had become unresponsive on pay dates, too, and so Olivier set up his own shop.  He swung by Bellevue that very afternoon to look at the floor heating.  While he was here, we made more startling discoveries:

 

·         Most of the circuit breakers for Bellevue’s floor heating were actually switched off.  The system was, in other words, completely disconnected.  Olivier bypassed Bellevue’s control panel, et voilà, heat! 

 

·         And happy days, entire rooms within Bellevue were fitted with floor heating without our knowledge (or at least without our recollection).  It was hardly a bad thing that Olivier remembered wiring the bathroom floors in the master suite and Laurelle’s room.  Had the control panel told these circuits to heat, the floors would’ve remained cool.  The units had never been connected.

 

·         The temperature controls associated with the floor heating, Olivier explained, are embedded within the heating panel that no one can figure out (hopefully bar Mr Martin, who built it).  Some floors sizzle; others simply take the chill off bare feet.  But at least now they sort of work.

 

·         So – as Olivier was here – Pierre mentioned that Bellevue’s garden lights again were failing to illuminate.   (Good thing, as I was close to forgetting we even had garden lights.)  Olivier isolated a short circuit, et voilà, light!  But get this:  The circuit that causes these regular shorts is the lighting around the pool.  The electrical boxes aren’t . . . waterproof.  (Duh?)  As soon as there’s water in the area of those boxes – think rain, sprinklers and a whole, fricking pond of pool water – pop go the lights. 

 

·         Oh, and could Olivier have a look at the front entry lights?

 

At the end of his second visit to Bellevue in as many days, Olivier handed Pierre and me his business card.  He was most available, it turns out, to fix anything that needs fixing around Bellevue. 

 

That evening, the floor heating ablaze, we felt truly warm within Bellevue’s stone walls for the first time in a month.  We even turned off some of the floor heat.

 

Today, all day, six – SIX! – of Mr Marc’s plumbing and heating crew have taken up residence in Bellevue.  Meanwhile, various opinions about how to fix the big picture are emerging. 

 

The frontrunner belongs to Bernard, the estate agent who – put one way – got us into this mess.  Bernard advises that we call a meeting among all the contractors, both old and new, who are associated with Bellevue’s heating and plumbing systems. 

 

I like my idea better.  Let’s get someone to take notes.  Someone who will track down circuit breakers and label them appropriately.  Someone who will bother with the details of whether subordinate circuits exist, and if they do, where their switches might be.  Someone who will outline the riddle of synapses that compose the control panel’s enigmatic brain.  Someone who is both intelligent and meticulous.  That someone could even ensure client phone calls are answered and employee paychecks are paid.

 

In short, we need to hire an expert to manage this building project. 

 

We need to hire a woman.