Tripping to Aix-en-Provence

Americans are constantly asking me how I can stand to live in France.
“The French are so rude,” they say. “Isn’t it awful to live there?”
A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to observe French manners on the
shuttle bus that goes from the TGV station just outside of
Aix-en-Provence into the center of town.
 

On most days our little bus carries a handful of passengers and takes
about 15 minutes to get into the city. I was taking the bus on August
1, however, and on that day all bets are off, because on that day an
immense vacuum cleaner sucks up most of the 10 million people who live
in Paris and deposits them either on the highways around the city (the
radio reported a traffic jam in Burgundy 30 kilometers long) or onto
the trains, planes and busses that lead into “France Profonde,” i.e.,
the rest of the country. I thus found myself on a hot and uncomfortable
train in the company of what seemed like 8 million people with 20
million pieces of luggage and 100,000 crying babies. The instant the
train glided to a stop at the sleek new TGV station at Aix-en-Provence
I bolted from the door and made a dash for our little bus: luckily it
was still loading, and with a sigh of relief I slid into my favorite
seat, the one immediately behind and above the driver that would give
me a full view of the road and the surrounding Provencal countryside
from the bus’s panoramic window.
 

As it turned out, my regular seat also gave me front row center for one
of this summer’s most amusing pieces de theatre, a new play called The
August 1 Trip From the TGV to Aix, starring M. Le Chauffeur de Bus and
a fabulous supporting cast of Mssrs. et  Mmes. Les Passagers en
Vacance a Aix-en-Provence.
 

The First Act curtain rose on a wonderful lady in her late seventies.
She had bright orange hair—a color much favored by ladies of fashion
here in the South—and she was elaborately made up and over-dressed in
the manner of a French provincial dame, swathed in a cloud of
frou-frous, shawls, ribbons and frills in shades of vivid orange,
scarlet red and lemon yellow. Limping and lurching heavily (she seemed
to have a bad knee; I sympathized), she heaved herself up the first two
steps of the bus; then she plopped her cloth traveling bag down on the
space in front of the driver and opened a pudgy, sweaty hand to reveal
a crumpled 10€ bill.
 

The driver—a man in his forties with an accent that said Morocco—smiled benevolently.
 

Do you have 1€?” he asked. (This was an act of kindness, for without
asking her age, he was informing her that she had a right to the senior
citizen fare.)
 

At first the lady did not understand. Very patiently, the driver therefore explained to her that the fare was “only 1€.”
 

“1€?”
 

“1€.”
 

The lady still looked puzzled. “That’s all?”
 

“That’s all.”
 

Finally she gave a gallic shrug and leaned over to unzip her cloth bag.
She began rummaging around inside the bag and after a minute or so
produced a zipped and snappered change purse which she slowly unzipped
and un-snapped. Then she wriggled her fingers around until she found a
bright and-shiny 1€ coin.
 

“C’est ça?” she asked, still not daring to trust her good fortune. “C’est tout?”
 

“Oui, madame,” said the driver politely. He took the coin, pressed a
few buttons on his ticket machine and thanked her politely as he handed
her a receipt.
 

Very deliberately, the lady folded the receipt in half and slipped it
into her change purse. She carefully re-snapped and re-zipped the
change purse; then she returned the purse to its hiding place deep in
the entrails of her carrying case. Only when she had completely
re-zipped the carrying case did she finally pick up her luggage and
begin moving towards the interior of the bus.
 

The lady’s transaction seemed to me to have taken at least 45 minutes.
People in the line behind her were rolling their eyes, but the driver
gave no indication of impatience, even though the line had by then
grown quite long. He quietly explained the fare to the next passenger,
and two or three people were soon able to board without delay or
complication as the curtain fell on Act I.
 

Act II was short but filled with humor and irony.
 

“What is the fare?” asked a well-dressed, 40ish gentleman who was
carrying what the French call “un attaché case” (pronounced “Attaché
keze”) and an umbrella. Clearly a Parisian, I thought, very poised and
elegant—and of course ready for rain at any minute, because it rains
all the time in Paris.
 

“3€ 40 centimes,” said the driver.
 

The Parisian looked puzzled: his expression said, Do the provincials
always have to pay to ride the bus? But he quickly realized that he had
the means to solve the problem.
 

“May I pay by check?”
 

“Of course, Monsieur,” said the driver. “I will be happy to take your check.”
 

The Parisian then proceeded to search (interminably) for his checkbook,
first in his suit pocket, then in his pants pocket, then in his other
suit pocket, then in the other pants pocket. Several minutes later,
after a series of misunderstandings about the exact spelling of the
name of the bus company, the date and the amount, all of which the
driver resolved with celestial patience, he handed over a check for 3€
40 (about $4 US).
 

The driver’s “Merci Monsieur” brought down the curtain on Act II.
 

The dramatic high point of the afternoon came in Act III. Two
aristocratic young Brits opened the Act by sauntering into the bus with
an expression that we Americans think of as supremely English, a
combination of boredom and condescension that includes both a curling
of the lip and a lifting of the eyebrow. We’re familiar with that
expression from a million movies that feature butlers and women who
look like horses; it had a special pungency when used as an arme de
guerre on a Moroccan bus driver in Aix-en-Provence.
 

“I say,” said the young man, his accent reeking of Eton, Cambridge and Mayfair, “does one pay a fare?”
 

“3€ 40,” said the driver in French.
 

The young man affected a look of puzzlement.
 

“Is that for two?” he asked in English, holding up two fingers. “How much for two people?”
 

The driver held up seven fingers to indicate seven euros. Because the
Englishman still looked uncomprehending, the driver picked up a pencil
and tore off a bit of paper from his receipt machine.
 

“6€ 80.” He wrote slowly and clearly. Then he politely repeated the words in French.
 

The Englishman looked at the scrap of paper as if it were written in hieroglyphics.
 

“I say, darling,” he drawled to his girlfriend. “Do you think we have any Euros? It seems we have to pay to take the bus!”
 

“Oh dear,” said the young lady. “Mmmm let me see. Perhaps we have some
of that German money. . . .” [Of course the Germans also use Euros;
it’s hard to know what she might have been thinking—or pretending.]
 

She began fumbling through her purse. “No darling,” she finally said
wearily. “I’m afraid we haven’t a cent. What do you think we should do?”
 

For a minute or two, the young man stood in front of the driver looking
put out. His expression made it clear that he expected the driver to
let them ride for nothing, presumably out of respect for the elegance
of their accent and bloodlines. But the driver politely stood his
ground.
 

“6€80,”  he said. And finally the young English couple,
reluctantly understanding that their hauteur was not going to produce a
free bus ride, got off the bus.
 

Only then were the remaining passengers—there were about ten by this
time, all of them patiently standing in line—finally able to board the
bus.
 

I leaned back in my seat, assuming that the play was over at last. (I
had found the last Act quite tedious.) But just as the applause was
about to begin, there was a surprise curtain call. Having left the bus,
the young Englishman had taken up a position on the pavement outside
the door and launched into a lengthy complaint (in English, of course)
about his need to get to Aix, his lack of French money, his attempts to
deal with the driver, etc, etc., etc. He also was apparently
panhandling, because he and his lady eventually did get back on the
bus—they were the last passengers to board—and he loftily handed the
driver the requisite 6€80.
 

“How long do you suppose it takes this bus to get to Aix,” he drawled
to his consort. (He did not deign to address the driver directly and he
did not actually use the words “this rattletrap,” but his tone quite
fulsomely expressed his disdain for the frogs and all their doings.)
 

She shrugged her shoulders.
 

“Combien minuit?” he finally asked the driver loudly. “How many midnight?”
 

The driver glanced up politely and held up both hands once and one hand
a second time. “15 minutes” he said in French. “Only 15 minutes.”
 

With a disdainful flip of his long blond hair, the Englishman turned on his heel and headed towards the back of the bus.
 

“Merci, monsieur,” said the driver with lowered eyes. Then he closed the door  and carefully pulled away from the curb.
 

We were about 15 minutes late—a significant delay in a schedule which
features busses every 25 minutes and is usually as dependable as the
sunrise. During the delay, the driver had not once raised his voice;
not once failed to thank a passenger for his or her fare; not once
indicated by word, intonation or gesture that he was in any way
displeased with the conduct of his passengers.
 

He had proved himself, in the small world under his dominion, a superb
politician (or perhaps a superb performer): he gave new meaning to the
phrase, Grace Under Pressure.
 

I myself had a different reaction to the boarding process. As soon as
the door was closed, I leaned down and spoke to the driver.
 

“Monsieur,” I said, “permit me to express my respect and
congratulations for your remarkable patience. That you could deal with
all those people so politely when there was a long line waiting to
board the bus; that you never pressed anyone to hurry, or raised your
voice in annoyance: I thought it was extraordinary.”
 

“Not at all, monsieur,” said the driver quietly. “I am only doing my
job. It would be terrible if I was rude to the passengers. After all,
many of them are foreigners who don’t understand the language. It’s my
job to do everything I can to be helpful to them. It’s only normale.”
 

“But that old lady!” I said. “The patience you showed as she searched for her money! It was amazing!”
 

“Ah, monsieur,” said the driver, carefully steering his way through the
late afternoon traffic, “she reminded me of my grandmother, who also
moves slowly. I was patient with that lady because I would like people
to be patient with my grandmother.
 

“And don’t forget, monsieur. Some day you and I will be like her. I
think about that when I see an older person struggling with her money,
or having a hard time with her heavy luggage. We would want someone to
help us; we have to help others for the same reason.”
 

I have no words to add to the driver’s closing speech, although I did
tell him that I thought that the world would be a better place if he
were the President of the United States rather than a bus driver in
Aix-en-Provence. At the end of the trip I thanked him profusely and
shook his hand. Traveling with him, I told him, had been a serious
pleasure.
 

“Merci monsieur,” he responded.
 

Thus ended the drama of The August 1 Trip from the TGV to Aix, a
morality play in three Acts starring a noble and generous Moroccan as
The Bus Driver and an arrogant young lordling as the Villain.
Nomination for Most Courteous Man in Europe pending; nomination for the
Palme d’Or at Cannes soon to follow.

Michael Padnos, who in an earlier life practiced law in Massachusetts,
Washington DC and Atlanta, GA, grows olives in Provence and writes on
France for various publications.  He is working on a book entitled
Sunshine and Fresh Garlic: A Tour of the Markets and Food Festivals of
Provence.  He lives near Aix-en-Provence and eats extremely well.