Signs of the times

When we used to drive in France, before we became experts thanks to the School of French Driving, we were frequently puzzled by road signs. The white circle with the black slash. The yellow diamond on a white ground. The red-rimmed triangle enclosing the black x. But no other sign was quite as puzzling to us as the exclamation point. A triangle trimmed in red, sometimes with a white background, sometimes with a yellow, and, in the center, a large, emphatic exclamation point. We would pass it on the road and think, ! . What now? What do we look for? What does it mean? It would leave us with a lingering sense of unease.

Then we went to driving school and they gave us--well, we bought--a copy of the Code de la route, the French driving rule book. (Insert here joke about there being a rule book for French drivers.) The first few pages were devoted to signalisation, to signs. And there, on the bottom of page six, the last sign to be explained, was our ! triangle. What did it signify? Dangers, said the code, for which there are no corresponding signs.

In other words, when you find the ! sign on your route, it could mean anything. Godzilla could be around the next corner (there's no monster crossing sign), or a bit of road could have washed out in this morning's rain, or someone could be pruning the hedge alongside. Slow down and watch for monsters. Make sure the road is still there before you continue. Look out for guys on ladders with chain saws.

It is a useful sign, the !, it seems to me. Especially these days, when it can feel like there are so many dangers for which we have no corresponding sign. How do you signal a failing economy? Global warming? Health care crisis? And that's just the front page news. It doesn't include all the domestic crises, the ailing relatives, the thousand small crises that unspool in a life. This morning as I drove along the upper lane in the village on my way to French class, I passed a ! sign in the road. It had a yellow background, which denotes, in code de la route parlance, that whatever it was referring to was a temporary danger. That this, too, shall pass.

Parking Annoying

When I came back to the car after meeting friends for lunch in another village the other day, there was a notice under the windshield wipers. Stationnement Interdit et Genant, it read, in capital letters. But not today, it hastened to explain: on the coming weekend, during the annual village fête.

No Parking is the dictionary translation of both stationnement interdit and stationnement genant. You see both versions of the sign, and they mean the same thing.

Except they don't, really.

If something is interdit, it is forbidden by law. It is interdit to smoke in the épicerie. Interdit to throw trash out of the car. Interdit to stop on the autoroute (unless you are having car trouble, in which case you can stop, but only in certain areas).

Genant, however, means annoying. The girls' profs at the Collège des vignes are fond of telling the kids how genant they are. Mothers at the end of their rope in the cereal aisle tell their toddlers that they are genant. The guy in the car in front of you who's had his turn signal on for the last kilometer, and slows down to 20 kilometers per hour at each driveway: he's genant.

No parking signs are about equally divided, in my highly unscientific poll, between interdit and genant. So my conclusion is that to be annoying is just as méchant as to do something which is forbidden. They're both illegal and could get you anything from a fine to a trip to the impound lot (though I've never seen an illegally parked car ticketed, and I've seen a lot of illegally parked cars). They appeal to different parts of the psyche. Maybe you don't care so much about ignoring the law (stationnement interdit), but surely you don't want to annoy the boulanger (stationnement genant). An annoyed boulanger, with a car parked where he likes to take the sun between customers, might sell you yesterday's croissants, or an over baked baguette.

It is--and bear with me here--another example of the French habit of thinking about the community, and the good of the community, more than of the individual. Annoying parking is different from forbidden parking. Forbidden parking doesn't require an object. It's just forbidden. Annoying parking asks the question, who is annoyed? And that question implies other people. It implies community.

So if you go to the fête des violettes this weekend, don't leave your car in the village parking. Not only will it be forbidden and get you in trouble with the law. It will also be really annoying to the folks who live there.

Confessions

I passed my driving test.

It took me two tries. The first time, two months ago, I prepared for days--months, actually--and was in a state of grim panic for the test itself. Then I failed. You're allowed to mix up to five out of 40 questions; I missed six. As 'Arry said when I saw him afterward, It's like that sometimes.


This time, I spent the morning taking practice tests. And failing them. 32, 34, 33 out of 40. The practice tests I was taking--from the new dvd of practice tests that the School of French Driving has issued--had questions like:

If I am driving in heavy traffic and my car is approaching an intersection at which the cars entering from the right have priority, and there is a car sitting in the road to my right (where it would normallement have priority), but the driver looks for all the world like he has come to a complete stop and is even reading a map--do I: A. stop (and yield to the driver on my right, who's stopped his car and is reading his map, and, in stopping, run the risk of the car that is immediately behind me rear-ending me) or B. keep going (since the car to my right is practically parked, I mean, he's reading a map at the wheel, for god's sake)?

Yep. A.

So after lunch I walked the dogs and then drove over to Charm City, the depressed market town where the driving test is given, to take the test. I parked in the garage where, when I leave the car there, I feel marginally less likely to be mugged, and which smells less like urine, than the other parking garage in the centre ville. I walked up the hill and through the unmarked doors that lead to the corridor and the staircase to the Salle des Augustins, where the test is given.

It's called the Salle des Augustins because the building it's in stands on the site of a former Augustinian monastery. The room is miserable in the way that bureaucratic rooms the world over are miserable: it's dirty, it smells like anxiety and cigarette smoke (and French teenager), the dropped ceiling has large water stains, the curtains are askew and don't close properly. In a weird nod to Provence, the walls are yellow and the curtains are blue. It's like provençal hell.

Augustin, the church father who gave his name to the Augustinian order, had particular theories about humanity and salvation. He believed that there was nothing that we could do on our own initiative to be saved. The only route toward salvation, toward living a holy life, lay through divine grace. We could read, write, struggle, study for days and weeks--but only if God reached out to us, extended grace to us, could we hope to be saved.

Thirty or so teenagers and I filed into the exam room. The proctor explained how the test would be administered, and warned us that if he caught us cheating, or appearing to cheat, we would be forbidden to take the test for five years. Then he turned out the lights and turned on the computer, and the questions were projected on the screen.

These were easier questions than those in my practice tests. If it was a question about yielding to traffic entering from the right, for instance, then it showed the driver of the car on the right leaning forward, making eye contact, poised to enter the roadway. I answered each question, inhaled, exhaled, pressed the key to validate my answer, and then answered the next question. Forty times.

And then it was over. The woman from the School of French Driving met our cohort (me and six teenagers) outside in the equally grimy hallway and gave us our results. Two of us had failed. The rest had passed. This time, I was in the second group.

After I failed the test the first time, I had thought about the Salle des Augustins, and about the bizarre theological cum bureaucratic appropriateness of taking the épreuve théoretique in a room named for Saint Augustin. 'Arry had told us, several times, that he would count himself lucky to find 35 questions that he could answer correctly on any given test. We could prepare and prepare, he said, and still there could be one question too many that we got wrong.

I took the inverse of that advice for my guide, the second time around: I had prepared for months, and it didn't matter if I prepared any more. Either I would find 35 questions I could answer or I wouldn't. It was, to a disorienting degree, out of my control. But the Augustinian god of French bureaucracy smiled on me this time, extended his ball point pen of grace in my direction, and I passed.

This time. Now I have to take the road test.

Betteraves

I went to driving school the other day to take a practice test. When I got there a few minutes before the hour--the practice tests are given on the hour--Madame le sécretaire and the teenagers who were also there to take the test were all standing outside smoking. I went in and took my place in the front row of red plastic chairs (once a good girl, always a good girl).

In a few minutes--after the hour, but really, what's time when you're the secretary of the driving school or 17?--they finished their cigarettes and came in. Madame started the test dvd. We rolled along through questions: speed limit here? pass in this instance? how many points off your license for smoking pot before driving?

I circled my answers and was coming along fairly well. No language difficulties, and I was remembering all the rules of priority, and whether a white arrow on a blue ground in a square meant the same thing as a white arrow on a blue ground in a circle. (It doesn't.) Then we got to this question:

I was at the wheel of the car, and through the pare-brise I could see that I was about to enter a curve. At the side of a road was a triangular sign, the danger shape. The pictogram on the sign was of a car with swerving lines of tire tracks, the universal sign for slippery surface. So far, so good. The pannonceau, the smaller sign under the main sign, that gives specifics of the situation, was what brought me up short. It read: betteraves.

And what, dear reader, is a betterave?

It is a sugar beet.

The sign was warning me that the road ahead might be slippery on account of sugar beets.

Now, there's another sign in the French répertoire for bumps in the road, and those bumps in the road are called dos d'ane, donkey's backs. A dip in the road is called a cassis, which means a black currant. So I wondered if perhaps there was another type of bump or dip that was called a betterave.

The next time we saw 'Arry, our driving instructor, I asked him about it. Ah yes, he said, I remember that question, absolutely. Betteraves. Did you answer it correctly?

I had, actually. The question itself had asked whether the sign applied to me only when it was raining. The answer to that type of question is always: No, the sign applies always, not just when it is raining. Unless of course the question is phrased: Does the sign apply to you if it is not raining? Then the answer is, Yes, the sign always applies. Lesson: slow down and check the grammar.

Yes, I replied. But what did the sign mean about betteraves? Is a betterave like a cassis?

Harry frowned a little, puzzled. Then: No, it is a vegetable, not a fruit. It is, what you call it?

A beet, I said.

Yes, it is a beet. And it can be very slippery if it falls out of a truck onto the road.

So my question is: are there signs for all fruits and vegetables? Or are beets particularly dangerous? What about cabbages? They could get a little slippery. Artichokes: now, you'd notice if you were driving over a spilled truckload of those. And then, what about bananas? I know they're not grown in France, but they do come off of boats and get loaded onto trucks, and what if, what if, they fell off?

At the wheel of my imaginary car, I could look into the rétroviseur and see the sublime receding rapidly into the distance while I drove on into the ridiculous.

The Cartesian School of Driving

Descartes, you know (or maybe you knew once, but it hasn't come up recently), is the philosopher who brought us deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning goes from the theoretical and abstract (Do I exist? Am I the green car?) to the concrete (I think, so I must exist; I'm looking out the windshield at the green car, so I must not be the green car). Inductive reasoning, which the English came up with, goes the other way round, from concrete observation to theory. I'm looking at the green car; that I can see the green car suggests that I must not be the green car; therefore, there must be something funny about my translation.

Now, we in the New World proceed from the concrete to the theoretical. We are inductive thinkers; that's why our politicians keep talking about individuals that they meet on the campaign trail. We go from the specific to the general. Here in France, the land of Descartes, it's the other way round. Politicians have (what seem to us absurdly) lofty conversations about the idea of the Republic but almost never talk about the plombier they met in Nantes.

That's part of the reason, I think, that the driving test is as difficult as it is. It's not just the language (though God knows there's that too): it's the logic behind the questions. There are a set of governing principles (traffic entering from the right has priority; always drive in the right lane) applied, over and over again, to concrete instances. And the answer is always to stick to the principle.

For example: you are at the wheel of a car, driving in the left-most lane on a highway. There is no other traffic. The question: Are you bien placé, are you in the correct lane?

The first time I came to this question I looked at the photograph for a long time. There were no lane markers suggesting that my lane was about to end. I was not in anyone's way. I shrugged and said, Yes. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with being in that lane at that moment.

Non, Madame Marron, ça n'est pas ça! came the response. The left lane is always only for passing. You are never bien placé when not in the right-most lane. It is the guiding principle that holds sway, not the concrete instance. Even if everyone else in France were en vacances on the Côte d'Azur, sitting on the beach and eating fresh sea urchins, and there were no other voitures even turned on, you would still not be bien placé if you were in the left-most lane.

So now that's how I try to think about the questions: instead of looking at the situation specifically, I try to find the principle that could be applied to the situation. Most of the time it works. Who knew that studying the history of French philosophy would have such a practical application.

I think, therefore I am

So I was at the School of French Driving the other day taking a practice test. (That statement pretty well describes most days.) I was skimming along doing quite well, thank you, missing a bare minimum of questions, guessing correctly on whether the piétons who were standing at the edge of the crosswalk leaning forward and with their left feet poised were actually engaged in crossing the street and therefore whether I needed to stop.

And I came to this question:

The photograph from behind the wheel showed a street en ville. In front of my car, the lane was blocked by temporary construction; there was a temporary light set up which was flashing yellow, giving me permission to continue avec prudence. A green Renault had already gone around the construction, following the arrows into the opposite lane.

The question: Je suis le véhicule vert. Oui ou non?

Well, I thought, I am not some kind of moron. I know I am not the green car. I am driving the car from which the photo was taken. This is not the first practice test I have ever taken. Of course I'm not the green car.

I circled B for Non.

Then the centime dropped.

In French, the verb to be is être. If you want to say I am, you say je suis. Thus the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes translated his Latin Cogito, ergo sum as Je pense, donc je suis. I think, therefore I am.

Also in French, the verb to follow is suivre. If you want to say I follow, you say je suis.

Really.

The question was not asking if I were the green car. The question asked if I should follow the green car. I think (about the complexities of the French language, and how maybe if something doesn't seem to make sense, I should pause and consider and not just go roaring off), therefore I follow.

One more thing to remember: sometimes even if you know the language pretty well, there's a verb you miss.

The School of French Driving

The photograph is taken from the driver's seat, looking out the windshield. The towers of Chartres Cathedral dominate the skyline; the car is on a cobblestoned street lined with all the standard shops of a French town. Bins of peaches and tomatoes line the sidewalk in front of the greengrocer's. Across the street, the window of the patisserie is filled with charlottes and éclairs and millefeuilles.

A stoplight is on the upcoming corner; the light is yellow. A diamond-shaped sign sporting a yellow diamond is fixed to the post under the stoplight. As you take all of this in, a voice says:

My route has priority. Yes (A) or no (B)?

and

I stop at the light. (C)
I accelerate and pass through the light. (D)

A, B, C, D. Never mind about Chartres: you have 30 seconds to choose the correct response.

That's how the driving theory test works. There's a photograph of a driving situation and then a question related to some aspect of the photograph. Sometimes it's the meaning of a sign. Sometimes it's about the speed limit. Sometimes it's about how much your tires should be inflated (actually, there seem to be a lot of questions about tire inflation); sometimes, about legal alcohol limits. Sometimes the questions are answerable by yes or no, as in: Must the driver wear a seat belt at all times? More often, the questions are like the one above, and require you to assess the situation in different ways. Or to know--or be able to deduce--a range of information from the photograph. But always, always, the photos are taken in a discernibly French setting, whether it's in a Norman village of whitewashed houses or outside the gates of a château, on a boulevard in Paris or in the French Alps.

When I go to the School of French Driving (slogan: Together, let's live the road!), Madame le secrétaire nods from behind her computer. I pick up a vinyl-covered clipboard from the corner of her desk, take a blank test form from the top of the ream, and sit in the front row of the classroom. Assorted teenagers trickle in and take up their places at the back of the room. The driving school fly--I think he's on a retainer--buzzes around.

Madame le secrétaire comes in after a few minutes, on the hour or after, and puts a disc into the dvd player. And then the images begin to come up, 40 of them in all, and the teenagers and I sit there and circle our answers. I take notes, too: I write down on my paper questions that I get wrong so that I can check them later. At the end of the test, the teenagers loudly wad up their papers and toss them into the red plastic poubelle. I fold my test paper, put it away in my purse, and follow them out of the room. Madame asks each of us our score, and enters it in her computer. Once we regularly score above 35, we hear that we'll be deemed ready for the actual test and sent off to the préfecture to take it.

When I began taking the practice tests, I noticed the churches and castles and avenues of plane trees. Now all of those things fall away. The charm departs and I am in a plastic-lined Citroen wondering if my tires are adequately inflated and if the carbon emission level of my car is listed on its registration.

I wonder, too, if this isn't how cultural assimilation happens, when Chartres becomes the backdrop instead of the goal, and when the small shops with their careful displays are just the unspooling green screen to daily life. When what you notice is no longer the sites and sights but whether you can turn left here, or need to wait for the next intersection. When it's Tuesday afternoon, and Chartres is lovely, but you have to answer the question about the stoplight. It becomes a question of reconciling the France of Chartres and all that that is shorthand for--history, culture, beauty--and the France of small shops--gorgeous food, community, tradition--with the France of cracked plastic chairs and cigarette butts. That, as much as anything else, is the challenge for us at the School of French Driving.

That, and remembering the formula for calculating braking distance.

'Arry

When we learned the sad truth about our need for French permis de conduire, we enrolled in the local School of French Driving. It's possible to get the permis without signing up with a school, but it means that you have to manage your paperwork and the préfecture on your own and, faithful readers, I'm sure you know the answer to that question.

So we called around to all the driving schools in the neighborhood and found the only one within 40 kilometers that has an instructor who speaks enough English to work with people like us. We made an appointment.

Our branch of the School of French Driving--it's a national chain--is two villages and one hill away, about a 15 minute semi-legal drive. The office occupies the street level of a building that dates, I imagine, from about 1650, on a side street in a village that routinely wins nationally-coveted charm awards. The office consists of a reception room, where Madame le sécretaire has her desk; a room behind that with a coffee maker, a counter, and a small refrigerator; and, to the left of the reception room, a classroom. Plastic chairs are lined up in rows facing the back wall, on which hangs a flat-screen television with a dvd player on a shelf just below. The ceiling is low, one of the only reminders that you are in a building that is more than four centuries old; for the rest, the office is tricked out in the latest white laminate and oak veneer, with red plastic accents.

'Arry, our instructor, was waiting for us when we arrived. His long graying hair was pulled back into a ponytail. He wore small rectangular sunglasses. He was leaning hard in the direction of portly, with a grey t-shirt stretching across his midriff, dark shorts, dark tennis shoes with dark socks, and decidedly not dark legs. His t-shirt showed a parrot perched under a palm tree next to a thatched beach hut, and it said "Bird's Paradise Jungle Motel.''

We all shook hands, and 'Arry explained how the process worked. Our enrollment fees would cover a copy of the Code de la Route, unlimited practice tests at the school, driving lessons behind the wheel, administrative costs, and additional sessions in English with him. The practice tests were the central component of the process: it was through those that we would learn the code, learn how questions were phrased, where were the traps and pitfalls, and thus be prepared, when the time came, to take our épreuve théoretique at the préfecture. We could come and take the practice tests any time, any day, he assured us. Madame le sécretaire started a different test dvd every hour on the hour.

So we can come any time to practice? we asked, wanting to clarify.

Yes, absolutely. You can come at any time, all day, between 10 and 12 and then between 2 and 7.

Ah. That sounded more like the France we knew. Open all day, except when it wasn't.

How long, we asked, would the process take? We were un peu pressés, for various reasons having to do with our cartes de séjour and the company cars.

'Arry nodded. The process normally takes at least four months, he said. But it can sometimes go a little faster, if you are studying a lot and learning quickly.

We gasped. Four months seemed an awfully long time to hang suspended in a semi-legal state, and, also, there was the not insignificant fact that we both knew how to drive. At least it did not seem insignificant to us. We suggested as much.

Yes, absolutely, I understand, said 'Arry. But--he held his palms out and upwards, never a good sign--what can we do? That is the process. Bienvenue en France! It's like that. 'Arry speaks a very French English; sometimes to understand what he means, it's best to translate his English back into French. When the French want to express exasperation and resignation with the constraints of the situation, they say: C'est comme ça. So 'Arry says, It's like that. And, he says, absolutely. Absolument, a common enough word in spoken French, expresses something closer to well, of course than to the dead certainty of an English absolutely.

So we made an appointment with 'Arry for the following week, and paid our registration fees. It seemed bizarre to be going to driving school again after 25 years--absurd, even--but, what could we do? We shrugged and held our palms out and upwards. It's like that. Welcome to France.

Dans le pétrin

Since July, C and I have been studying the code de la route in order to get our French permis de conduire. We've been driving, both of us, for several decades. But under French law an American driving license is only valid for driving in France for a certain period of time, after which the driver must have a French license. Unless, of course, the American license happens to have been issued in one of the 14 states with which France has a special driver's license treaty, in which case the licenses can just be swapped.

I sometimes ponder how this treaty was drawn up. Did the directors of the national Sécurité routière in Paris write to all 50 Departments of Motor Vehicles and invite them to join in negotiations? Why did only 14 states send their representatives? Were the negotiations held in France or in the States, in a dingy back room of a préfecture or in the banquet room of the Holiday Inn outside Scranton? And why, oh why, didn't the other 36 states show up?

When I have these thoughts it is usually because I have just answered a question like this incorrectly:

Q: Is it ever permissible for a child under 10 years of age to travel in the front seat of a fourgonnette?

What's a fourgonnette, and how are the seats arranged in it? I don't know; neither did the editors of my Larousse French-English dictionary.

A: Yes. A fourgonnette only ever has a driver's seat and a front passenger seat.

Oh.

There are two tests that would-be holders of the French permis must pass: a theory test (that's what it's called, really) and a half-hour driving test. The theory test has 40 questions, of which the postulant must answer 35 correctly. You cannot just show up of a Wednesday afternoon to take the test. You have to apply at the Préfecture; you have to have documentation of your age and qualifications; you have to have a set of mug shots. Then you are assigned a test date. If you fail the theory test, the rumor is that you must wait three or four months before you get a second try. So a fair amount of anxiety surrounds the event.

There is a cottage industry in France of driving schools and online driving test prep courses; you sign up and you take practice tests. A lot of them. My online test prep course doesn't just give me the number of questions I answered correctly after each test. It offers a slightly bullying judgment. When I do well, I get: That's not too bad, Madame Marron! Less well and it's: You haven't got it yet, Madame Marron! Not for the faint of self-esteem, this is.

The questions are un peu compliqué, like the one above, if French is not your first language. But the questions are complicated even if it is: every French person I have told about having to take the test has assured me, unequivocally, that if he had to take the test today he could not pass it. Every one of them, too, has done the hot pot lid gesture, holding his hand in front of and facing his hips and shaking it up and down rapidly. Olivier went so far as to add an Ooh la la.

The questions on the test are multiple choice, and there is generally more than one correct answer. If you do not give every correct answer, then the entire answer is wrong. For instance:

The painted lines at the edge of a two-way street and at the edge of a highway are identical:
--on the left side
A. Oui.
B. Non.

--on the right side
A. Oui.
B. Non.

Non and non, if you're interested. And, by the way, without looking, what do those lines look like in your country? And, while we're on the subject, if the line is a broken one, how far apart are the breaks? Is the line broken in the same way on a state road as on an interstate? And could you tell me, please, based on the way the lines are painted, what is the speed limit?

Just asking.

So now we take practice tests. We talk about the practice tests. And when C and I are in the car together, we parse signs.

Can you park here?
No, has to be the other side of the sign. Who has right of way?
You do; we've got the yellow diamond.
But I thought I saw a yellow diamond with a slash through it.
No, that was before we turned left.

E complained about it one day. All you guys ever talk about is driving.

We know. We bore ourselves, too. But here's the thing: we can't figure out a way around taking these tests. Believe me, we've tried. Thanks to those representatives of the other 36 states, we are,as the French would say, dans le pétrin. A pétrin is a giant kneading machine, standard equipment in a boulangerie. My friends at Larousse suggest that being in the kneading machine translates idiomatically as being in a pickle, but I've been in a pickle before. Being in a pickle is leaving your lunch on the kitchen counter. It's getting stuck in traffic and running late for an appointment. It's having a meeting at school the same night as a conference call at work.

Taking driving tests in a foreign language, country, and culture? That's more like being in a pétrin.