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that’s taking a bad turn; things going sour); etre serrés comme des sardines (being packed together like sardines, used when people are squeezed into a very small space); and ne pas manger de ce pain-là, or “not eating that kind of bread,” meaning refusing to act in a way that goes against one’s values. For each phrase, Dusoulier also gives an example in a complete sentence in French and provides a link for an audio sample; for the example for ne pas manger de ce pain-là, we have this translation: “I’d have to kowtow to the principal to get a spot for my daughter, but I don’t eat that kind of bread.” This idiom highlights two kinds of people, she notes: those who would do anything for a piece of bread and those who would rather do without than “eat bread that was acquired in a way that doesn’t sit right with their sense of ethics or morals”—and we know how the French feel about their bread. The phrase was the title of a 1936 book of poems by Benjamin Péret, a French Surrealist whose tombstone in the Batignolles cemetery bears the phrase as its epitaph. His book in its English translation is titled I Won’t Stoop to That. I just love how much you can learn from a simple phrase.

Eiffel Tower

No matter that it is one of the world’s most touristy symbols: I love la tour Eiffel. Writing in the New York Times in 1989, the year the tower turned one hundred, architecture critic Paul Goldberger aptly noted that, compared with nearly all other famous architectural icons, the Eiffel Tower is bigger than you expect: “That is the first thing that differentiates it from almost every other well-known structure in the world: no matter how many times you have stood before the Eiffel Tower, it is always at least a little bit bigger than you expect it to be.” Writing for Gourmet in 1977, Joseph Wechsberg admitted that ever since arriving in Paris some fifty years earlier he had never been up inside the Eiffel Tower until recently. Once he did go, it was an “astonishing experience—and not only for the view,” and I completely agree.

Gustave Eiffel’s other works are noteworthy as well, including the Tan An Bridge in Vietnam, the Oporto Bridge in Portugal, the Garabit Viaduct in the Massif Central, the frame of the Bon Marché department store, and the framework for Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty—but it is of course the Tower for which he is best known. If you admire it as much as I do, I encourage you to read the chapter entitled “The Ogre of Modernity: Eiffel’s Tower” in Frederick Brown’s excellent book For the Soul of France (Knopf, 2010). The building of the tower took twenty-six months, Brown informs us, and “eighteen thousand numbered pieces” were delivered to the Champ de Mars with military precision. Yet its construction was mired in controversy. Guy de Maupassant, along with other writers and artists, signed an open letter of protest—known as the Protest of the 300—addressed to Alphonse Alphand, minister of public works, referring to the tower as “useless” and “monstrous” and declaring themselves devoted to stone. In Paris, they wrote, “stand the most noble monuments to which human genius has ever given birth. The soul of France, the creator of masterpieces, shines from this august proliferation of stone.” They criticized the tower as being “American,” and “an odious column of bolted metal.”

The details surrounding this structure are endlessly fascinating. For example, the Eiffel Tower is classified within a catégorie spéciale indicating that it is not designated as a historical monument. If you want to learn more, another good account is Eiffel’s Tower: And the World’s Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count by Jill Jonnes (Viking, 2009), a truly fascinating peek into the Paris Exposition of 1889 and the history of the tower, defined by Eiffel as “not Greek, not Gothic, not Renaissance, because it will be built of iron.… The one certain thing is that it will be a work of great drama.”

F

Faire le Pont

The French word pont (bridge) is also used as the equivalent of “long weekend