From my old blog:

There are a few rules of etiquette that one must know when in France. I told you about women not pouring wine, but that’s an old fashioned rule that goes right out the window in low-brow situations (but would probably be in effect if you dined at the Elysée). However, the ban on cutting lettuce is one that is so widespread that I have never seen a French person break it.

I thought of this when sitting next to my daughter’s nanny at dinner the other night. She has always lived within a few miles’ radius of our house, leaving only to go on not-too-far-away vacations, so I like to use her as my model for local tradition. After looking worriedly at the Caesar salad that was flecked with Parmesan and sprinkled with homemade garlic croutons she took a leaf and expertly began folding it into a little green package with her fork and knife and then popped it into her mouth.

I have seen this done a kazillion times, by everyone from my father-in-law (my model for working class artisan behavior) to Parisian socialites. And that gives me enough courage to make a sweeping generalization about the French…something I usually avoid in order to stay on speaking terms with Laurent. THE FRENCH NEVER CUT THEIR LETTUCE. Cutting your lettuce in France is akin to slapping your granny. It’s shameful, base, and just not done.

When I discovered this, years ago, I began tearing up the lettuce leaves into small, edible bites before serving it to dinner guests. Finally Laurent asked why I always tore the lettuce up. “Can’t you just leave the leaves intact?” he asked. I explained that I had heard that cutting lettuce was defined as a food crime under French penal code. He responded that, although this is true, the solution is not to serve smaller pieces of lettuce. You just allow people to fold it.

Folding lettuce was a watch-and-learn situation that took me some time to get the hang of. But now I’ve got it, it’s something I enjoy. It definitely falls under the “playing with your food” category of eating, as far as I’m concerned. It’s like making origami, but with a leafy green.

It reminds me of the way my Senora, the woman I lived with while studying in Florence, could peel and slice a pear after dinner without touching it: she used only a knife and fork. And she could do it while watching the game shows we watched while we ate. (I only knew a few words in Italian, which took us through a painful 2 minutes of conversation before she saved us both and turned on the TV.) Although lord knows how hard I tried, I was never able to imitate her pear-peeling stunt. But I am able to fold my lettuce. And so can you. This is how you do it:

Take a whole leaf of lettuce and put your fork down on the lower edge in the center, pinning it helplessly to your plate. Using your knife, fold the lettuce over the fork and keep it there, holding the pleated lettuce down as you slip the fork out and use it to pin the lettuce down again. Continue folding the sides of the lettuce leaf with your knife as you pin with your fork until you have a nice little square that is small enough to pop into your mouth.

Et voila! You now have the skill to eat with both French nobility and the stonemason-next-door.

Next French etiquette lesson: keeping your hands ON (not under) the table at all times.

So those are my stories from my job as a castle tour guide. (If you haven’t read them, they are: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V.) I have many more stories from that summer. But the highlights included:

• I gave a personal tour to the American ambassador, his wife (George Bush’s cousin), and their bodyguards.

Me w/the ambassador + wife. Don't ask me what I'm wearing. It looks like a pink bullet-proof vest.

• I cursed in front of a group of children. Okay it wasn’t like the F-word or anything, but I said “dégueulasse” (gross) instead of “dégoûtant” (disgusting) and got told off by the teachers, and then had to hear the kids repeating the bad word and giggling for the rest of the tour. I guess it would be the equivalent of saying “fart” in front of forty 6-year-olds. I swear: I DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS A BAD WORD!!!

Children gathering in the castle courtyard for my tour, as I prepare to corrupt their little minds

• I called the VIP castle director “tu” instead of “vous” in front of the mayor.

• I ran an experiment in the castle staff room where I put a box of high-quality chocolate next to a bag of M&Ms and timed how fast it took for the rest of the staff to eat them. (This was at the request of my blog followers. The M&Ms won.)

The chocolate challenge

• And lots of other mishaps and hi-jinks…

BUT I ALSO

• Translated all of the room cards into English and
• Did the historical research for the objects in the Sacred Arts room, which was translated into four different languages and is still there to THIS VERY DAY.

So in the end, everyone was happy. Especially me when it was FINALLY OVER. Want to see?

Me on my last day as castle tour guide

This is Part 5 of my Castle Story. Like Part 4, it’s from my unpublished book IN THE VINES!

The key to my office in the castle

One morning I walked into my office to see Audrey poring over a large book-bound calendar. “We have a school group coming next week. You can take half of the children, and I’ll take the rest.”

“Children?” I repeated, panic stricken.

Hearing the note of fear in my voice, Audrey looked up at me quizzically. “I don’t know how to talk to children,” I said.

“Of course you do,” Audrey said, looking at me like I had lost my marbles. “You talk to them like you would adults, just use simpler words.”

I sat down in front of her and tried to explain. “Audrey, I told Fabienne in the beginning that I didn’t feel capable of giving tours in French, but she wouldn’t listen to me. So when she insisted on my doing it, I wrote a tour using the books you gave me and memorized it. I don’t even understand half of the words that I am using. So I can’t just ‘dumb it down’ for kids. I would have to rewrite the whole thing, and learn it by heart.”

The elderly women sat stock still and stared at me. “You memorized your tour, but you don’t understand what you’re saying?”

“I’m starting to understand it. There are just a few words now that I don’t get,” I muttered, sheepishly.

She shook her head as if to banish my words from her mind. “Listen, the other guide is off next week, so it’s just you and me. There are sixty kids coming with some parents and teachers to accompany them. We have to split the group. It’s too big for me to take on my own: we couldn’t even fit the whole group into The Insignia Room. I’m sorry – I don’t have a choice.”

Walking across the room to my desk, I massaged my throbbing temples with my fingertips. I sat down, got out my dictionary and started writing a children’s version of my tour.

I stood in front of the group of thirty ten-year olds, thinking to myself that it would have been easier to get a job teaching Genghis Khan’s army to dance ballet than giving castle tours to hyperactive school children. As they leapt around the room a handful of parents and teachers stood silently behind, looking on with amusement, daring me to try to control the situation. “I wouldn’t lie on that bed unless you want to get lice,” I said, causing a young show-off to leap out of his reclining position on a 15th-century canopy bed and begin scratching himself furiously.

“OK everybody, sit down on the floor,” I commanded. Several children took that to mean “lie down spread-eagle, blocking the other tourists from entering or exiting the room.” I rolled my eyes and looked at the parents. They grinned. “I said sit, not lie,” I said, pointing to the offenders until they sat up.

Someone took a photo, popping their flash in my eyes. “I mentioned at the beginning of the tour – no flash photos!” I glanced back at the teacher for support, but she had suddenly become absorbed in a tapestry hanging in one of the back corners of the room.

“Everybody be still and listen,” I growled, and then stumbled my way through an explanation of how the rooms were used in the Middle Ages, and what purpose each piece of furniture served. I asked the children questions to try to get them involved. Some of them paid attention. Others sat in the back and made farting noises. Finally I asked if there were any questions. A handful of children raised their hands frantically, and I congratulated myself on having caught their attention.

I pointed to a random hand, and a skinny boy with glasses leaned eagerly towards me and asked, “Would you die if someone poured boiling oil on you, or would your skin just blister and peel off?”

I looked up at the parents, who were peering out of the window, apparently studying the castle’s back gardens with great concentration. “Does anyone have a question about what I was talking about?” I replied. Half of the hands went down.

“Where did the king and queen go to the bathroom?” a small blond girl asked seriously. I spotted the teacher slipping out of the room through a side door. Luckily I had come across a paragraph on medieval sanitation in my readings, and replied that there were sometimes toilet holes within the castle walls.

“So where did it go?” someone else asked.

“Where did what go?” I replied, confused.

“The caca and pipi!” they replied in unison.

“On the ground outside, I suppose,” I responded.

“Ewwwwwwww!!!” moaned the children in ecstasy, rolling around on the floor.

The remaining questions included:
“Why didn’t the king and queen sleep in the same bed?”
”Why is that window open?”
”Are there dungeons?”
And, regarding a large metal-bound safe opened only by coded levers, “So what if you used a flamethrower? Then could you get it open?”

Finally there was only one hand remaining up. “Yes, what is your question?” I asked the biggest boy, who was looking at me with a smirk.

“Can I take your picture?” he said, holding up his camera and wagging his eyebrows up and down.

“No,” I said, and led everyone into the last room, where I proceeded to upset half of the group by giving my regular speech about the high infant mortality rate in the Middle Ages, illustrated by the fact that seven of Anne of Brittany’s nine children died in infancy.

By the time the teacher had comforted the last crying child and left the room throwing me a look of pure hatred, I was ready to collapse. Knowing that Audrey had another half hour before her tour was over, I went back to our office, closed the door, and turned the enormous iron key, locking myself in and everyone else out. Then I lay down on the floor, resting my face on the ancient ceramic tiles, letting their coolness sooth my burning cheeks and thought to myself, “What the hell do I think I’m doing here?”

The next day Audrey told me that I would be taking another children’s group the following week.

“Audrey, please don’t ask me to do that again,” I begged. “Yesterday was a catastrophe.”

“I’m sure you did just fine!” she said, matter-of-factly.

I told her how awful the group had been, and she reassured me that yesterday’s group had been from a bad part of town and was known for its behavioral problems. “Next week’s group is here on vacation from a wealthy suburb of Paris, for their summer camp, and although they’re younger, they will be very well behaved,” she reassured me.

“How old?” I asked.

“Six,” she replied, as she penciled my name into the book.

“Six years old!” I moaned to Laurent that night over dinner. “That’s totally different from ten years old. I’ll have to write a completely different tour!”

“Mais non,” he said, laughing at my distress. “Just say the same stuff.”

“Well, I’m definitely cutting out the dying medieval children part this time. Do you think I should skip the Stag Hunt tapestries as well? Won’t that scare them?”

“No, kids love that gory stuff! Definitely leave it in,” Laurent replied.

I confirmed with Audrey the next day. “We always talk about the Stag Hunt tapestries in our tour,” she responded, surprised. “Why would we leave it out?”

“Don’t you think it’s a bit gory for little children?” I replied.

She looked at me quizzically and responded, “It’s a hunt. It’s historical. Keep it in the tour.”

I reminded myself of the dead animals one always sees hanging on hooks in French markets, and figured that, unlike American children who are used to seeing unrecognizable meat sold under cellophane, French kids must be used to the fact that a furry bunny had to be killed to put that “lapin á la moutarde” on their plates. I sat down at my desk to re-translate the tour using six-year old vocabulary.

A week later, I stood in front of a group of tiny children wearing identical blue summer-camp caps, pointing to a tapestry showing a hunter driving a dagger into a stag’s heart.

“This group of tapestries shows a stag hunt,” I said uncomfortably. “In the first one, you can see the hunter killing the stag with a knife. And over here, in the second tapestry, you see him hanging the stag from a tree, slitting its stomach open, and feeding its intestines to the hunting dogs.”

Evisceration of the stag, with hunting dogs feeding on the entrails.

By the time I got to the last tapestry, which depicts the tradition called the “Tribute of the Hoof” where the hunter cuts off the foreleg of the dead deer and offers it to his lord, the teenage girls chaperoning the group were looking at each other in horror and disgust. The children stared at me wide-eyed as if, instead of talking about art history, I was recounting a slasher film to them, scene by gory scene.

Forty-five minutes later I was lying in my office, hot cheek to the cool floor, thinking about the group of six-year olds, two towns over at summer camp, who weren’t going to sleep a wink that night.

Here’s Part 4 of my castle story, this bit from my unpublished manuscript IN THE VINES. (Read Part III here.)

The view of the fortress wall from my office window.

I stood in the courtyard of the 15th-century chateau, with the ruins of a 10th-century fortress perched on top of a hill in front of me. My knees shook uncontrollably as I tried to keep a calm demeanor and steady voice. I was surrounded by a group of about fifty French tourists, all holding tickets and fanning themselves with brochures.

I’m going to faint, I thought, as my mouth opened and the words came out in a squeak: “Hello and welcome to the Chateau de Langeais. My name is Amy. I am usually the English tour guide here, but today they needed me to fill in with the French tours.” (Okay, making it sound like I had actually given a tour before was a lie, but just a little one.) “So I hope you will be patient with me as I massacre your language. And, more importantly, I hope you have a good sense of humor.”

Obviously they didn’t, since my pleasantries won grins from a couple of teenagers and a worried look from the rest. I heard rumblings of discontent, and a few people looked like they were debating whether they should skip the tour and visit the chateau on their own. I hurried ahead before any desertions could take place. “Please feel free to stop me for questions, or let me know if you don’t understand me. So, here we go…The fortress we see on the hill before us dates to the year 994…”

And for the next hour I spouted stories and dates and art and furniture terms. I had brought some note cards with me, in case I blanked, but was too nervous to look at them more than once or twice. At one point, I had to ask the group what the platform under one of the medieval beds was called in French. Some rolled their eyes, but others treated it like a game and shouted the word out, laughing.

Since I didn’t have the right vocabulary to ad lib, I had spent days memorizing the whole tour word-for-word. So when I got stuck, I wasn’t able to fake my way out of it. And there were several words I was using, dug out of the history books that Audrey had loaned me, that I had never even heard pronounced. But all in all I felt like I was doing pretty well. Until we got to the Wedding Hall.

I stood in front of a double portrait of Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany, telling my group the story of their marriage: the war between their lands, the wedding held for diplomatic reasons instead of love, children they produced and lost, and finally the death of Charles himself, just seven years after the couple had married.

As I explained the strange manner of his death, by a sharp blow to his head on a low door frame (possibly while riding a horse through a castle), I saw surprise flash across several faces, and then a low rumble of laughter spread through the group. Those who hadn’t been listening leaned over to get an explanation from their giggling neighbors and then exploded into laughter themselves. I looked at the group quizzically, but continued with the tour.

Just one room later I stood in front of an enormous hanging tapestry that had a surface woven with hundreds of tiny wildflowers. “This is a ‘mille-fleur’ (or ‘thousand-flower’) tapestry,” I meant to say, but instead the words, “mille-feuille” came out of my mouth. I had just told my group that the tapestry hanging before them represented a cream-filled pastry. General hilarity ensued. The laughter was harder and longer this time, the crowd having warmed up with my previous unintentional joke.

By the end of the tour, people were chuckling and slapping each other on the back, while repeating to each other the more entertaining of my mishaps. As the group dispersed, several people walked up to me to congratulate me on my effort. One lady confessed, “When you warned us you were going to massacre our language, I almost left the tour. But your French isn’t that bad. And no one that followed your tour will ever forget it – that’s for sure!”

I groaned as I opened the door to the office that I was sharing with Audrey, and collapsed into a chair. “How did it go?” she asked. I told her that I knew I had made a few mistakes, but I didn’t understand why my explanation of Charles’s death had made everyone burst into laughter.

I repeated the paragraph for her word-for-word. Her eyes opened in surprise as she raised her hand to her mouth and started giggling. “What?” I asked, confused. Audrey struggled to compose herself and said, “You told them that King Charles VIII died by slamming his head in the door.”

And now…CASTLE STORY PART V

This is copied directly from my blog 5 years ago, just a couple of weeks after the scene that took place in Castle Story Part II:

Do you know who this handsome guy is? Neither do I, and that’s a problem because starting next Wednesday I am going to be talking to groups of people about him IN FRENCH.

The chateau where I have a summer job just asked me if I can start a couple of weeks early, since one of their regular guides quit. And instead of giving tours in English, they need me to give them IN FRENCH.

Anyone know the word for drawbridge in French? How about ramparts? And how about “The facade facing the town is made up of a crenelated wall, flanked with two turrets and big pepperbox towers with machicolation and a rampart walk.”? Me neither.

But it’s not only the vocabulary thing. It’s the fact that I am going to be lecturing to French people about their own history, while simultaneously slaughtering THEIR OWN LANGUAGE.  I am immobilized by panic and pre-emptive shame.

By the way, Prince Charming above is Louis XI. And I am Amy, your guide, otherwise known as “that girl who is up Shit Creek with only a French dictionary and some index cards for a paddle”.

Read CASTLE STORY PART IV