Delectations

We got off to a bad start linguistically when my sister Jane informed the Paris hairdresser first morning out that just as soon as she had disembarrassed herself of her pillow he could get at her greasy horses, the distinctions between oreiller and boucle d’oreille, chevaux/cheveux having dimmed since the dear, dead days of Mlle. Bouchex. Five days later, three days into our motor trip through Brittany, Jane had so adapted herself to the idiom that, at a crucial parting of the ways, she informed me happily: “The Departmental 139 empties itself into National 180, that which is a good thing” as that is where we had wished to be emptied en route from Pont Audemer to Honfleur.

We had wondered about our reception in this first post-de Gaulle fall in France and our initial reaction was that a touch of the Teutonic had worked itself into the vocabulary of French hotelkeepers. In Amiens (which is admittedly une direction un peu bizarre for one proceeding from Paris to Brittany) that fascinating bulletin on the back of every French hotel bedroom door informed us: “The management bids you welcome and kindly draws your attention over a few points of the internal organization.” Not explicit threat, but. … At Mont-St.-Michel, soaring and beautiful, a needle of stone reaching toward the heavens, the rhetoric was more extreme: “The evening meal is obligatory (17 to 21 hrs). No room is let unless this condition is accepted.” Actually Madame at the desk had put it more urbanely. Would we, she asked, be eating at the Du Guesclin that night since she would be very pleased indeed, if we were, to reserve for us a table overlooking the ramparts the sight of which, she added, is marrant in the moonlight. The ground rule in France is that you always eat at the country hotel you put up at since it is on the food and the drink that the French hotelkeeper makes his money (almost always the price of the dinner will be more than the very moderate price of room and breakfast).

PL

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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We got off to a bad start linguistically when my sister Jane informed the Paris hairdresser first morning out that just as soon as she had disembarrassed herself of her pillow he could get at her greasy horses, the distinctions between oreiller and boucle d’oreille, chevaux/cheveux having dimmed since the dear, dead days of Mlle. Bouchex. Five days later, three days into our motor trip through Brittany, Jane had so adapted herself to the idiom that, at a crucial parting of the ways, she informed me happily: “The Departmental 139 empties itself into National 180, that which is a good thing” as that is where we had wished to be emptied en route from Pont Audemer to Honfleur.

We had wondered about our reception in this first post-de Gaulle fall in France and our initial reaction was that a touch of the Teutonic had worked itself into the vocabulary of French hotelkeepers. In Amiens (which is admittedly une direction un peu bizarre for one proceeding from Paris to Brittany) that fascinating bulletin on the back of every French hotel bedroom door informed us: “The management bids you welcome and kindly draws your attention over a few points of the internal organization.” Not explicit threat, but. … At Mont-St.-Michel, soaring and beautiful, a needle of stone reaching toward the heavens, the rhetoric was more extreme: “The evening meal is obligatory (17 to 21 hrs). No room is let unless this condition is accepted.” Actually Madame at the desk had put it more urbanely. Would we, she asked, be eating at the Du Guesclin that night since she would be very pleased indeed, if we were, to reserve for us a table overlooking the ramparts the sight of which, she added, is marrant in the moonlight. The ground rule in France is that you always eat at the country hotel you put up at since it is on the food and the drink that the French hotelkeeper makes his money (almost always the price of the dinner will be more than the very moderate price of room and breakfast).