CHAPTER 8

Bon Appétit

THE FRENCH DON’T EAT, THEY DINE. They don’t lunge at food, they savor it. There is a word that they often use to describe themselves. Gourmand. It means “one who loves food and eats with great pleasure.” (We have the same word in English, although, at least in my circles, it is seldom used. Moreover, it has a more negative sense in English: a person who is fond of good eating, often indiscriminatingly and to excess.)

I suppose that somewhere in the hills or back roads of France, there is someone who is not gourmand. Perhaps he is a shepherd who has never left his flock and has grown accustomed to eating berries and mutton chops. I suppose that man exists, but I have not met him yet.

The French I know make dining an event. In the States, eating (I will not call it dining) is more like an interruption. I have had meals stateside that have taken five minutes to prepare and three minutes to devour. In fact, as far as I know, we are the only country in the world that microwaves five-minute rice.

The French, on the other hand, will spend two or three hours at the table with guests—drinking, eating, and conversing about world affairs, current styles, and the neighbor’s five yapping shih tzus.

My wife and I grew attached to the leisurely three-hour dinners in France. It was so much fun to eat like royalty and needle the French as if they were old college chums. A week after our return to the States, we tried to replicate the experience. We invited two couples—both close and longtime friends—for a dinner at our home. We sat down at the table at 7:30. One hour later, one of our guests said, “Well, this has been very nice, but we need to call it a night. Lots to do tomorrow, you know.” And with that both couples whisked out of our home like swirling dust devils.

When they had left, Nita and I sat slack-jawed at the dining table.

“What the hell just happened?” I asked.

Nita shook her head. “It’s just another culture, sweetheart. You can’t expect them to be like the French.”

“I don’t like this culture.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to it. It’s who we are.”

“I’ll never get used to it.”

“Then prepare to be miserable.”

That sentence pulled me up short. As usual, I realized that Nita was right. Both people, French and Americans, have qualities that are endearing. However, they are not always the same qualities. The trick is to love what is lovable, tolerate what is not, and stop insisting on cultural blending.

Nita and I got a flavor of the French flare for cuisine the first full day we were in the country. I awoke with the sun and walked out onto the Ducros’ terrace. Even at six-thirty in the morning, the sun was warm and bright. Just another day in paradise, I said to myself. I noticed that Jean-Marie was in the open field across the street. He was doubled over, meticulously searching the ground … for what?

I crossed the street. “Hey, Jean-Marie, what are you looking for?”

Jean-Marie kept his eyes downcast. “It rained last night,” he said. “That always brings out the escargots. Look at this.”

Jean-Marie was now bent over an iron fence post. A half-dozen small snails were clinging to the rail. “Wow,” I said, more out of respect for my French host than genuine admiration. Snails are not really my favorite culinary delicacy. In fact, I’d say on the scale of tasty delights, I’d rate escargots right up there with grasshoppers and earthworms. There is something about their little slimy faces with their tiny eyes and those miniature antennas with the balls on top (what’s with that?) that makes me want to look in another direction like, say, directly into the noonday sun.

That said, I was in France, and, after all, I had made a sacred vow to keep an open mind during our stay. So, I bent over and started dropping what I judged to be the more succulent snails into Jean-Marie’s bucket.

“Whoa, look at this one!” I said, holding the granddaddy of them all between my thumb and forefinger. The snail’s articulated antennas were flinging wildly in the air like the arms of a drowning man. It was a monster, a gastropod with a coiled shell the diameter of a silver dollar.

“Size is not always synonymous with quality,” Jean-Marie said, uncharacteristically cryptic.

I wondered for a moment if he was referring to Americans’ penchant for all things enormous: five-carat diamonds, foot-long hot dogs, and Herculean football players, to name a few. “Oh, I see,” I said, dropping a more unpretentious snail into the bucket.

“Ça suffit—that’s enough,” Jean-Marie said. “Time for the next step.”

We crossed the street to the house. Jean-Marie took the garden hose and covered the twenty or thirty snails with an inch of water. “I’ll be right back,” he said, making his way into the house. While he was gone, some of the snails started inching their way up the side of the bucket. I imagined that they were instinctively aware that they were in mortal danger. A moment later Jean-Marie was back with a bottle of vinegar and a box of salt.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m going to make them baver,” he said. The first meaning of the word baver is “to slobber or dribble.” I don’t know the English equivalent for the second sense, but in French to “faire baver” is to cause the snails to discharge whatever slimy gunk is in their system. For Americans it is not a particularly pretty picture, but the French don’t seem to cringe at the thought.

Jean-Marie dumped a half-cup of vinegar and an equal dose of salt into the green plastic bucket. Now the snails stampeded up the side of the pail. Jean-Marie scraped them off with the flick of his hand and the hapless fugitives plunged into the fatal brine, traces of bave floating to the surface.

That was hard. I was starting to feel connected to a few of them—one in particular reminding me of a cocky Steve McQueen on a Triumph, leaping fences in The Great Escape. I couldn’t help rooting for the little guys.

* * *

THAT EVENING FRIENDS OF THE DUCROS INVITED THE FOUR OF US—Jean-Marie, Monique, Nita, and me—to a traditional five-course French dinner. The escargots served as our contribution to the affair. Our hosts were André and Nicole. They lived in a lovely stucco villa with a swimming pool in the front yard just inside a six-foot-high walled enclosure. As in most of the fine homes in le Midi, the floor was tile. You hardly ever saw hardwood floors—and never wall-to-wall carpet. French homes are built to last. At one time stone was the preferred masonry. Now concrete block is the material of choice.

Whenever I commented on the tile floors, I was always told that they were easier to keep clean. I’m sure that is true, but I think a more fundamental allure for the French is that tile will stand the test of time. The French I know do not think like Americans. Americans think a home should be built for a lifetime. The French think a home should be built for posterity, for the next generation and all the generations to come. That is something I found endearing about the French. I think their protracted sense of time and allegiance to unborn descendants encourages a society that is less disposable.

We were greeted like family, Nicole kissing me on both cheeks and André following suit with Nita. Three is the prescribed number of kisses in the Montpellier region (two in Marseille and an interminable string of four in Paris). However, at the end of the evening, when we were doing our kissing again, I noticed that Nicole only kissed Jean-Marie twice.

“Why was that?” I asked.

“Well, in principle, there should be three kisses, but sometimes Nicole gets impatient,” Jean-Marie explained.

“Oh.”

We were guided to the living room where we sat down around a large coffee table. André deployed an assortment of bottles on the table like tin soldiers in an imaginary theater of war: wine, whiskey, and liqueur. Serving alcohol was clearly the man’s role. Meanwhile, Nicole offered two bowls, one with pistachio nuts and the other with Jean-Marie’s escargots, toothpicks included.

Before going to France, I did not drink alcohol. It was a choice I had made as a boy after witnessing the devastation of alcoholism. But explaining that preference to the French—who per capita consume five times as much wine as Americans—can be a bit of a trial. They can’t seem to imagine a grown man choosing not to drink, especially wine. So, to avoid the drama, I decided on this trip that I would enjoy what was offered. At first I took to bubbly champagne and the sweetness of white wine. But by the end of our first year in France, red wine was my beverage of choice. Unfortunately, at this first dinner, I had not yet developed a taste for wine.

“What will you have?” André asked me.

I tried to make my tone as casual as possible. “Some orange juice would be terrific,” I said.

“With what?” André said.

“Just straight,” I said.

“Ah, mais non,” André said. “Ce n’est pas possible.” It’s not possible.

I glanced at Jean-Marie, who knew my drinking preferences at the time. “There is no need to insist,” Jean-Marie said to André.

“Quand même,” André said. “You must at least have some pastis. It’s from the region.”

“Some pastis, then,” I said, reaching the limit of my resistance.

André poured an inch of the yellow liqueur into my glass, topping it off with water. Made from the licorice-flavored seeds of anise, the sweet-tasting pastis is a favorite aperitif among the people of Provence and Languedoc. As for me, I have always liked the flavor of licorice, so pastis was a good choice.

The escargots were passed around. I noticed that Nita took one and hid it among the pistachio nuts on her napkin, where it stayed undisturbed for the rest of the night. I took three—a tidy sum, I thought. I bayoneted the first one with a toothpick and, trying not to visualize the face of Steve McQueen, popped it into my mouth. It was a little chewy, I thought, with an aftertaste of parsley—not bad but not something I would order in a restaurant.

After the aperitifs, we were led to an enclosed glass terrace that looked out on a flourishing Mediterranean garden. We sat down around a solid oak dining table where we would stay, eating and chatting, for the next three hours. In typical French fashion, there were five courses.

First course: Bite-size segments of octopus, coupled with a fresh salad composed of skinned tomatoes, onions, and green peppers lightly bathed in vinegar and olive oil.

Octopus is not my favorite starter—a little too much like eating windshield-wiper blades for my money—but I accepted a second helping, if nothing else but to prove that Americans were not total barbarians.

“Pas mal,” I said.

“This one is a little tough,” Nicole admitted.

“Oh, not at all,” I lied, my tongue working overtime on a piece of octopus gristle lodged between a pair of molars.

The French are big on fish. The annual per capita consumption of fish and shellfish in France is seventy pounds, compared to just under forty-seven pounds in the United States. So it is no surprise that fish is often the first course after the hors d’oeuvres.

In other homes I have been regaled with shrimp, mussels wrapped in bacon (very tasty), crayfish (not much to talk about there), lobster, and, a personal favorite, stingray. Une raie, one of Monique’s specialties, is a flaky and tender white meat that melts in your mouth. Had Monique not told me, I never would have guessed I was eating stingray.

It was not my first experience with the winged fish. I once went scuba diving among a school of stingrays in a bay off of Grand Cayman (the dive promoters have called the spot “Stingray City”). The fish were like puppies gliding overhead and through my legs in search of a handful of squid. They were sandpaper rough on the slate-gray topside, and silky smooth, some might say slimy, on the snow-white bottom. Now, did I ever consider throwing one of those puppies in the frying pan for dinner? No way. Would I eat one now? In a minute!

While we are on the subject of seafood, it’s not a big leap to amphibians and the French delicacy of frog legs. My friend Armelle once served them as an entrée. (I had told her it was something I wanted to try before leaving France. Lesson: Be careful what you ask for.) It is true what they say about frog legs. They taste like chicken, although a little more fatty by my palette. If you can get past the idea of eating a toad, they’re really not that bad, although I prefer lamb chops or just about anything else that doesn’t croak.

Second course: Stewed rabbit and a side dish of egg noodles.

The rabbit was tasty, not unlike chicken but a little wilder. The flavor reminded me of pheasant, a bird that my dad used to hunt when I was a boy.

“What are these kidney-shaped things?” I chirped, trying to make my question more of a children’s game than an accusation.

“They’re, well … kidneys,” André said.

“Of course they are, I knew that,” I laughed.

Monique turned to me. “You haven’t had rabbit kidneys before, have you?”

“Well, let’s see. Not for a long time. Not since … well, ever.”

“How do you like them?” André asked.

“They have a kind of organ taste,” I said authoritatively.

“Well, if you like that,” André said, “you have to try something really special.”

Actually, I had not claimed I actually liked them, but I let the assumption pass.

André leapt from his chair and disappeared into the kitchen. In a moment, I heard the rattling of what I imagined to be carving knives.

“What is he doing in there?” I asked Nicole.

“Oh, a little bricolage,” Nicole said, impishly sidestepping the question.

Bricolage is a word that is often used in French. It means tinkering or doing odd jobs. The word is so rooted in the culture that there is even a chain of hardware stores called Monsieur Bricolage. However, if you live in France long enough, you will learn that there is another nuance of the word: slapdash or jerry-rigged. Jerry-rigging—like attaching electrical wires or plumbing to the outside surface of a wall—is a rooted Gallic tradition, as entrenched as vacation in August. The French make no apologies about the custom. If anything, they are amused. I once spoke to a seventy-year-old French Catholic priest who defined bricolage as “the art of taking bedsprings and making a bookcase.”

So, when Nicole said that her husband was engaged in a little bricolage, I was not sure what adventure to expect.

“Et voilà,” André said, emerging from the kitchen with a butcher knife in one hand and a mysterious, leathery creature in the other.

“Uh, what is it?” I asked, making no effort to disguise my apprehension.

“It’s a violet,” André announced proudly, separating the two halves of the organism as if opening a clam.

“And what in the world is a violet?” I asked.

For the next five minutes, the native francophones exchanged impassioned definitions of the sea creature, none of which made much sense to me. A few days later, I referred to an encyclopedia of sea life in Jean-Marie’s library and discovered that a violet was, in layman’s terms, a sea squirt. As it turns out, it is a rather advanced animal because, like humans, it has a spine (and, unlike humans, both sex organs, which I thought could be pleasantly diverting).

“Look how clean the inside of the bladder is,” André said, standing over me with sea squirt and blade.

Sure enough, that was one clean bladder—like a sparkling white porcelain bidet.

“Here, it’s for you,” André said merrily, presenting the rubbery blob on the end of the butcher knife.

“Oh, I couldn’t. It’s too much,” I said, surveying the table for someone—anyone—who wanted the sea biscuit more than I.

Everyone sat stock-still, arms folded, grinning back at me like a chorus of Stan Laurels.

“I insist,” André said.

“Merci,” I said, giving up hope of rescue from the beaming quintet of diners. “Somewhere, I’m sure there are just the right French words to properly thank you.”

“No thanks are necessary,” André said. “It is given with grand plaisir.”

Grand pleasure, indeed. André’s rascally side-glance to Jean-Marie recalled the day my brother offered me a jumbo jalapeño pepper that barbecued the inside of my mouth for a week. “Eat the whole thing at once,” my brother had advised. “It’s mild. You’ll like it.”

I sucked the sea squirt into my mouth and began chewing … and chewing. There are Michelin tires that are more tender. Finally, when no one was looking, I cupped my mouth and slipped out a sliver of bone that, as far as I knew, may have been the tadpole’s backbone. “Yum,” I said. “Now, that’s eating.”

There are worse things to eat than sea squirts. I know; I’ve eaten the worst thing. At a dinner with the Ducros later in the year, the main dish was duck. Now, I’m not particularly beguiled by duck, but it’s not bad, and the French certainly know how to prepare it. So when the dish was served, I was content. But, I have to admit, I was somewhat surprised to see, in the center of the serving platter, the scalped head of the duck staring up at me with empty eye sockets. It was a sad expression, as though the duck were saying, “Gee-whiz, now I’ll never fly south again.”

“C’est la tête?” I asked, pointing with my dinner knife at the sorrowful duck head. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew it was the wrong thing to have said. A question like that, and it’s open season on naïve Americans.

“Of course,” Monique said. “It’s the best part.”

Jean-Marie swooped in for the kill. “Oh, yes, la cervelle de canard—it is a rare delicacy.”

“Duck brains?” I asked haltingly.

“Mais oui,” Jean-Marie said, stabbing the head of the duck with his fork. “Let me show you.” With that, he started slicing into the duck’s skull with his steak knife. “You’re going to love this.”

“You betcha.”

The skull cracked open, and Jean-Marie scooped out the bird’s brains with his spoon. “Here,” he said, tapping the morsel onto my plate.

Everyone was looking at me, waiting to see what I would do. I really had no choice. I rinsed out my mouth with a sip of red wine, took a couple of short Lamaze breaths, and eased the ganglion into my mouth.

I let my tongue and palette savor the tiny organ. It was squishy, rather like goose liver (another Gallic favorite that I have actually come to enjoy, although not nearly as enthusiastically as the French). I just couldn’t help thinking that I was devouring all the memories and aspirations of a feathered traveler: the hatching, the splashing around the pond with the other guys, and that interminable flight from Finland to the Mediterranean, year in and year out. (“Whose daffy idea was that?” my duck brain must have thought.)

“How do you like it?” Monique asked.

“Well … it’s not my favorite,” I said smiling, “but I suddenly have this irresistible urge to arrange all my peas in the shape of a ‘V.’”

Third course: The cheese platter comprised of blue cheese, goat cheese, Camembert, and Cantal (a hard, sharp cheese).

In an election speech General De Gaulle reasoned that no one could unite a country that has 265 kinds of cheese. In the American movie French Kiss, the character played by Meg Ryan grumbled that only France could produce 452 varieties of cheese. That’s a lot of curdled milk, but the largest count I’m aware of comes from Patrick Rance, author of The French Cheese Book, who placed the number at 750. Whatever the exact count, you can be sure that when in France, cheese will always be on the menu.

I do not know how the passion for cheese began in France, but I will tell you it is real. One of the hikes I took with the Pérols hiking club terminated at a farm that produced goat cheese. There were twenty-five hikers in the group and nearly all of them stood in line at the barn door to buy cylinders of goat cheese the size of a hockey puck for the bargain price of one euro a puck.

“When was the cheese made?” one of the hikers asked.

“This morning,” the farmer said.

“Ooh,” the hikers sang out, like a sacred incantation to the munificent god of the goat cheeses.

Nicole’s offering was a typical French cheese course. When the platter came around, I took a wedge of two or three varieties, along with a couple slices of bread—my standard routine. And then everyone froze for a moment. I sensed the silence and stopped dead, my mouth wide open, a chunk of bread and cheese at half-mast.

“What?” I said, looking around the table.

“That is not correct,” André said.

Now the adjective correct carries an impact in French that is missing in English. The first sense—as in English—means “without errors.” The second sense means “acceptable,” which is also shared in English. But the third sense of the word only exists in French: decent, moral, and just. When André told me that what I had done was “not correct,” I knew I had crossed the line into cultural impropriety—that what I had done was somehow “indecent.”

I smiled weakly. “What is not correct?” I asked.

“You cut a wedge of the blue cheese from the wrong end,” André said.

“Huh?”

Then André explained in vivid detail the proper way of cutting a slice of blue cheese. Picture a wedge of fromage bleu. If you look carefully, you will see that the blue flecks—mold actually—are all congregated at the slender front tip of the wedge. Therefore, any cultivated human being (I think that most French believe that “a cultivated American” is an oxymoron) knows that one slices blue cheese from the side, thereby leaving an equal amount of blue mold for all to enjoy. I had committed the barbarous faux pas (une gaffe in French slang) of cutting from the tip of the block of cheese. How wicked is the act? Have you heard in the States that some cities are installing smart parking meters that reset to zero when a vehicle leaves the space? It’s that wicked.

Naturally, I apologized all over the place. I even offered to paste the dishonorable wedge back in place. No, it was too late for that kind of nonsense. I poured a little more wine, more out of unstrung shame than thirst.

“Ah, I see you are enjoying the wine,” André said.

“Yes, it is very good,” I said, too embarrassed at the moment to confess that my palate was completely untrained. “I would say fruity without being ostentatious,” having no notion of what the devil I was talking about.

“That’s good,” André said. If you like that, you are sure to enjoy some cider from Normandy.

“Merci,” I said. A word of explanation here. With the right intonation, the word merci in such a situation is used to say, “no, thank you”—just the reverse of the American custom. To say “yes” in French—that you would indeed like something more to drink—it is more conventional to say “volontiers,” “avec plaisir,” or even “je ne dirais pas ‘non.’” Voluntarily. With pleasure. I would not say “no.”

“Mais si,” André said.

Happy to distance myself from the besmirched blue-cheese debacle and not wanting to offend my host again, I said, “Well, then, in that case, avec plaisir.”

André escaped into the kitchen and reappeared with a decanter of cider—“the real thing,” I was assured.

André filled my glass, despite my supplications of “merci … ça suffit … arrêtez!” Thank you … that’s enough … stop!

I took a long sip of the Normandy specialty. It was indeed tasty, rather light compared to the red wine—cider being four percent alcohol, one-third the alcoholic jolt of wine. Still, after the pastis and the wine, my head was beginning to say, “This is strange, and why does my wife have two sets of eyes, one set stacked over the other?” So I found myself reaching for my glass of water the rest of the evening.

One last personal footnote before leaving this section on cheese. My personal favorite is Camembert. I know it is the most pervasive, but there is a reason for that. It’s good. I could eat it every day with a fresh baguette and during my year in France came pretty close to fulfilling my wish.

Fourth course: Almond and pear tart.

The French pâtisseries (pastry shops) are a marvel. Although I’m certain the French would protest, I would sacrifice the Eiffel Tower before giving up one French pastry shop. Walking into a pâtisserie is like walking into a Lamborghini showroom. You wallow in the wicked decadence of the place, all the while knowing that if your wife caught you there, softly moaning in a waft of new car leather, she would wag her finger at you in wifely scorn. There is no argument for justifying your presence in a French pastry shop other than unbridled indulgence—and, for me, it was practically the only place I wanted to be. Only the horror of the bathroom scale slingshotting into new territory tempered my enthusiasm for the sugary snacks.

Although there are a few good imitations in the States, the wonders found in a pâtisserie have no rival: chocolate muffins (they actually use the word muffin), mille-feuilles (layers of custard and airy, razor-blade-thin wafers), and, my personal favorite, tartelette à la fraise, a three-inch diameter pie filled with pale yellow custard and topped with glazed strawberries. Tartelette à la fraise is a misnomer. It should be called “sixty seconds in heaven,” which is exactly how long it takes me to scarf one down if I’m trying to prolong the pleasure.

Now, I am generally rather prudent with my money (I have friends who would argue that the word I’m looking for is “chintzy”). All right. I admit I faithfully check the price tags in American grocery stores to ferret out the can of tomato sauce that registers the fewest pennies per ounce. And I will drive on empty for thirty miles if I think there is a gas station with unleaded fuel for two cents less. So it is amazing to me that I feel no reservation in plunking down two bucks for an apple tart that is gone in four bites. The only thing I can figure is that the euro coins are just novel enough to look like play money to me—like gambling chips in Las Vegas.

Nicole’s almond and pear tart was, naturally, delicious. I was glowing like a beautiful bride when she served me a generous portion.

“Do you always eat this well?” I asked André with a smile.

Before André could respond, Nicole said, “Not really. A dinner like this is usually reserved for guests or family on Sundays.”

“And as far as desserts are concerned,” André added, “we typically will have fruit.”

“Or nothing at all,” Monique said. “Il faut garder la ligne.”

Watching one’s figure, as Monique put it, is routine with the French. Conversely, they are dismayed by the extent of American obesity (their word choice). A French exchange student I met in the States put it tersely. “They’re fat. It’s the first thing I noticed getting off the plane.”

“You have a problem in the United States,” Nicole said. “Many Americans are obese.” (No argument there. In 2014 thirty-five percent of American adults were obese.)

“Yes, that is true,” Nita said. “It’s a big problem.”

“It is starting to become a problem here too,” André said. “What you have now, we will have in ten years.” (Although André’s prediction was inflated, the trend was certainly on target. In 2001 only seven percent of the French population was obese. Ten years later that number had doubled.)

Indeed, France has integrated a host of American practices, many of which I can hardly tolerate in the States. To see them arrive in France is agonizing. The French know this is happening. They know that their culture is being stripped away and, all too often, replaced with galling American exports: mindless cinema, degrading television talk shows, rap music, graffiti, sugar cereal, and MacDo (the French abbreviation for MacDonald’s). They know it is happening but feel helpless in fighting it off.

“Allen,” André said, “you have come to France to see the last remnants.”

“What do you mean?”

“We are the last of the true French. You will see our fossils in a museum someday. In two or three generations, we will be indistinguishable from Americans.” He said it with a smile, but it was laced with sadness that made my heart ache. I hoped he was wrong, but mounting evidence supports his prophecy.

“Have you seen our supermarkets?” André asked.

I had. Indeed, one of the most disturbing American transplants has been what the French call les grandes surfaces, the fifty-thousand-square-foot department stores that have spread across France like locusts. These stores (Auchan and Carrefour are two of the biggest) are replicas of the American Walmart discount store—only somehow more frenetic. Stepping into the Lattes Carrefour in August is like stepping into a Tokyo subway during rush hour—hordes of French people filling their carts with electronics, hardware, cookware, clothing, and groceries. Arms, legs, and hips are flying in every direction—the picture of chaos (and, incidentally, a microcosm of French roadways).

The stores employ a half-dozen roller skaters who weave in and out of aisles, skimming customers, all the while talking on cellular telephones. I interviewed one of these skaters—a tall, slender woman in her early twenties.

“What is your job?” I asked.

“Solving problems,” she said. “Chasing down prices, delivering products, cleaning up messes.”

“Is it fun?”

“Not really. It’s hard on your body. That’s why we wear all these pads.”

I looked at her knee and elbow pads. They were scuffed and dented, the scars from too many crashes. “How long have you been doing this?” I asked.

“Two years.”

“And how long will you continue?”

“Not long, I hope. I’m looking for something now.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She looked at me with a smile of gratitude. “Thank you for taking the time to talk to me,” she said.

For me, every French grande surface has a roller derby feel about it: noisy, pushy, and impersonal. It is clearly not my favorite hangout. But the prices are lower than in the smaller shops. Consequently, it is where most French go for their weekly shopping.

Even André, an old-school Frenchman who valued the intimacy of a mom-and-pop épicerie, conceded to shopping at Carrefour once a week for groceries. Why? To economize, of course.

I looked at André. His elbows were on the table, his fingers laced and pressed against his mouth. His eyes were downcast, staring at nothing.

“I hope you are wrong,” I said truthfully.

“About what?” André asked, looking up at me.

“About the death of French culture as we know it.”

“So do I,” André said without conviction. “So do I.”

Fifth course: Coffee.

The French do love their coffee, and it is almost always offered at the end of the meal. But faites attention (beware), what Americans call coffee is nothing like French café. American coffee is a beverage, and there are some Americans who drink it in liters. French coffee is not a beverage. It is an injection and is served in a tiny three-ounce tasse à café that is so dainty that the most diminutive of men look like professional wrestlers drinking from a child’s tea set.

By the time the coffee is served, the conversation often becomes more profound and, if you are really lucky, more intimate. On this evening, our hosts began talking about their roots.

“I was a pied-noir,” Nicole volunteered.

Pied-noir is a name applied to French citizens who settled in Algeria after the French invasion in 1830. The name means “black feet” and was coined by the Algerians, reputedly for the color of French army boots. In 1962 Algeria regained its independence, precipitating the exodus of 1.3 million French citizens, an influx that France was ill-equipped to manage.

“Our family left Algeria with two suitcases, nothing more,” Nicole continued. “I was seventeen. We lived in a one-room apartment in Montpellier. It was awful. Water would run down the side of the wall. I was cold all the time. All the time.”

The room was very quiet now, everyone listening intently to Nicole’s story.

“I could never get warm,” Nicole said. “I remember asking my teacher for permission to wrap myself in a blanket during class. ‘Absolutely not,’ I was told.”

“Were the pied-noir badly treated in France?” Nita asked.

“Oui,” Nicole said flatly. “I was treated better by the Arabs in Algeria than by my own countrymen. My father was a baker in Algeria, but he lost everything. In France there was no work—nothing. He died within two years, angry and penniless.”

Nicole paused for a moment. No one spoke.

“I miss Algeria,” Nicole finally said. “We were happy there. It did not have to end the way it did. De Gaulle was wrong to go to war with Algeria. Of course, Algerians wanted their independence. It was only natural.”

In 2002 the topic of immigration was already a polemic issue. (That controversy has not changed. In 2013 alone there was an influx of forty thousand immigrants, the largest share coming from North Africa.) I wanted to get André’s take on the subject.

“What do you think of the immigration problem now?” I asked.

“Problem is the right word,” André said. “Unemployment is already high in France. And relaxed immigration makes it worse. We are a socialist country, and when foreigners do not find work, which is often the case, we pay the bill. And we’re getting fed up with it.”

“Are the French racist?” I asked.

“No,” André said. “The French are not racist, but the Arabs are.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“They will not integrate into our culture. They will not learn our language. They live in their own communities. The girls go to school wearing veils. That is not right.”

I have heard similar examples from other Frenchwomen and men.

• One Frenchman criticized a fourteen-year-old Algerian for refusing to enter a Christian church on a historical field trip.

• A French science teacher complained that high school Arabs demand and are given a separate table in the cafeteria.

• A French parent was appalled that Arab students should be excused from reading the French nineteenth-century writer René Chateaubriand because his manner of describing the Orient was thought to be racist by the Muslim community.

Many French citizens complain that the Muslim refusal to be integrated into the French community is a violation of the Republic’s declaration of fraternity and the principle of separation of church and state. Some even fear that acquiescing to Muslim demands could result in the disintegration of French society. (It was in part for these reasons that Islamic head scarves were banned in French public schools in 2004.)

One fifty-year-old Frenchwoman I spoke to said, “We have gone to war over the question of religion before. I think it is time we do it again.” Later in the evening I spoke to another Frenchwoman who was present when the comment was made.

“Her words were a little severe, don’t you think?” I asked.

“Perhaps,” the woman said, “but one can understand. She is scared, just as I am scared.”

The issues of immigration and cultural integration are complex, but I do believe that one thing is certain. Most French people wish to protect their unique identity. They have a healthy and warranted pride in their heritage: their history, their language, their mores, their contributions to science and art. Understandably, they do not want to see that legacy vanish. So, it is not surprising to me that immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants, are often viewed as a threat.

When I asked my French friends in Languedoc what could be done, most shrugged their shoulders, a gesture of impotence. And then they would say, “I am not fearful for myself. My life will not change dramatically. But I am fearful for the lives of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to come.”

Not everyone in France shares André’s perspective on immigration. Jean-Marie, for example, is confident that the Muslim population will be integrated into the French culture in two to three generations. I think the future will lie somewhere between the attitudes held by André and Jean-Marie. Although integration may come with time, it will not be easy, and it will not be reached without embittered battles along ethnic, economic, and religious lines.

By the time we left the dinner table, nearly four hours had elapsed since our 7:00 p.m. arrival. The evening was an unbelievably rich experience. We had been introduced to a variety of foods and beverages, but, more importantly, to an intriguing culture, which, like all cultures, is a complex tapestry of virtues and challenges, courage and fears. And in the midst of it all, this American felt humbled and immensely grateful. What a joy to step into such an amicable and unrestricted learning milieu—a kind of cultural graduate school with the added benefit of good bread, cheese, and wine.