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Penmanship

Tourists in Paris are wrong. Most Parisians would agree with this statement, show a bare smile, then shrug, as if to say, “Well, what do expect?” But the Parisians are wrong about the wrongness of tourists. Tourists think the Parisians, and the French generally, go out of their way to be unpleasant or just indifferent to them. Look, they will say, at that café waiter who lives off me and people like me and hardly shows any courtesy, let alone respect. Then they flash a weak smile and attempt a shrug, which usually fails them, as if to say... well, they don’t know what to say, so they make a fist and stick it in their pockets.

The tourists haven’t noticed, or maybe understood, that the same garçon de café who barely notices them is affirmatively nasty to his fellow Parisians. He knows he can get away with it. It is a statistical fact that no one in France has ever been injured let alone murdered by a French shrug but the hospitals and graveyards are full of the casualties of the Anglo-Saxon balled fist.

But this is merely hors d’œuvres. The French routinely torment one another for reasons that remain opaque to foreigners and which the French, in a rare display of national solidarity, have refused to divulge to the most sympathetic foreigner, post-Soviet mole, or Malaysian anthropologist as if guarding the secret handshake of the Masons. Which also may mean they don’t know. But the evidence is plain.

Take for example French handwriting. It is magnificently illegible, but with a spectacular range of individuality. Some societies have imposed on their children rules of penmanship that make them all write in the same hand—not always well and not always badly, but as if handwriting is a question of DNA or clan memory. Not so the French. It is unwritten law that all Frenchmen and Frenchwomen should have their own handwriting and equally true that, under threat of peine forte et dure, no one’s penmanship may resemble anyone else’s.

How this proliferation of illegibility has been accomplished is a matter of debate, but a recent body of research has uncovered a lead if not the absolute truth. French school children, unlike others elsewhere, are not taught to make their ABCs by teachers skilled in cajoling, charming, and occasionally beating the young into using their developing motor skills to write as a means of communication rather than of obfuscation or training for cracking codes and hieroglyphics.  

It is all but certain that the instructors who show up for penmanship classes are all practicing physicians, mainly elderly and heavily disguised, who distribute prescription pads, leaky fountain pens, and require students to stand up as they write.

This has the diabolical value of making it impossible to learn how to decipher M. Boucher’s scrawl after having mastered, or at least after coming to terms with, Mme. Fragonard’s. There is no chain of enlightenment, the learning curve is flat or heads south.

Elsewhere this problem of difficult handwriting has been solved by computers and printers. It should not be an obstacle for the French either, except for one stubborn fact: the French do not like computers. The Minitel, the mighty technological engine of 1983, was good enough then and now. So what sense does it make to type and print love letters or laundry lists? Does anyone really want to read them anyway? I would rather tell you face to face how much I love you or how much starch to put into my shirts.  

Talking takes more time and, of course, must be repeated if one has more than one mistress or laundress—or customers in the meat market. If I could make my declaration of passion or fashion once and be done with it, what would I do with my time—other than work forty hours a week like the Anglo-Saxons and wind up with a balled fist thrust into my pocket? How stupid.

Besides, wouldn’t you, mon vieux and ma vielle, be annoyed if I compelled you to read what I have written and then find yourself with much too much time on your hands? Of course. And can you imagine what would become of the art of conversation if we could make out letters, menus, price lists, and traffic tickets?

Paris would grow sullen and silent, like Anglo-Saxon capitals and villages. There would no longer be any point, any joy, in going to a café and going to jaw to jaw with the waiter whose behavior we delight in despising (and vice versa) and who’s handwritten bill gives us every right—n’est-ce pas?—to pay what we think is just, not what he thinks we owe. Otherwise, we’d be no better than the tourists.

And that would be wrong.

© Joseph Lestrange