Femsplainer Cocktails with Danielle Crittenden (Premium)

[PREMIUM] Down & Out in Paris: What my short-lived career as an au pair to a grand French family taught me...

PLUS: A podcast conversation with Richard V. Reeves on what is ailing modern boys and men.

Oct 16, 2022

October 2022

AT 18, I decided to learn French by living in Paris. The best way to do this, I thought, given that I had no money, would be to work as a servant.

That I had never worked as or considered myself a servant in no way hindered my plans. The French term for what I would be was au pair, and many of my girlfriends were taking these positions as a cheap way to see Europe. They wrote me letters (as we did back then) exclaiming about the charm of French life, the skiing and boating trips the kindly French families took them on, and how much language they were picking up just from being with the children, let alone the classes they managed to squeeze in. Shortly after I arrived in Paris, a student agency gave me the phone number of a Madame C., who was seeking an au pair to look after her two boys.

Madame C. lived in an apartment high atop the Avenue de Suffren, a very grand boulevard that runs alongside the Champ de Mars, the magnificent parade grounds that Louis XV laid out for the École Militaire. It was a beautiful building, older than I could possibly imagine and for that reason, packed with charm. You reached the apartment by an ornate, caged elevator that ascended from a tiny lobby inlaid with at least eight different colors of marble.

Madame C. was an immediately imposing, tall woman with beautifully swept back blonde hair in the style of Catherine Deneuve. A pair of expensive black sunglasses perched on top of her head were, I would later discover, a permanent accessory, their position changing only slightly when she lowered them, like Roman shades, as she stepped outside.

Madame C. showed me around the apartment, vaguely waving at all the rooms, while giving me a brief description of her boys, aged six and ten, who were at that moment in school. My job would be to start at about two in the afternoon, and last until the boys were ready to go to bed, around eight at night. That would leave me the mornings free to pursue my “studies.” I would live in a chambre de bonne, a small maid’s room housed separately on the top floor of the building, among others chambres de bonne, three flights up and accessible by an outdoor fire escape that connected to the back of her kitchen. In addition to all this, I would be paid two hundred francs per month (the euro had not yet been born) — or forty dollars, as the exchange was then — including room and board. It seemed an excellent deal.

That very evening, Monsieur C. picked up me and my suitcase from the youth hostel where I was staying, and drove me to my new employment in his shiny, sporty Citroen.

THE PROBLEM BEGAN my first afternoon when Madame C., wearing her bathrobe and sunglasses, tried to instruct me in the art of ironing little pairs of boy’s underwear. As I scorched and mangled pair after pair, Madame C. hovered over me, sighing impatiently and muttering, “Non, non, pas comme ca — comme ca!” I grew balkier and balkier. It wasn’t that I was opposed to ironing boy’s underwear. It had just never occurred to me that underwear needed to be ironed — or even folded.

I was raised, after all, in the modern, North American, middle-class fashion. My mother had equipped me with some basic skills of survival. I knew how to make a bed (if sloppily). I knew to separate colors from whites (and to wash one in cold and the other in hot water but I often wasn’t sure which). Thanks to several years of home economics, still mandatory at my public school (along with square dancing), I could sew a hem proficiently — and even straight if I cared enough about it — and bake hard, tasteless biscuits from flour and baking soda.

As a bonus, thanks to many years of summer camp in the Canadian wilderness, I’d earned badges in canoeing and sailing, knew how to tie several sturdy types of boat knots (handy for younger brothers), and could tell deciduous from coniferous trees. As for cooking, while it’s true I grew up before microwaves were ubiquitous, I’d still never met a vegetable that hadn’t been frozen first.

Madame C. sized this up pretty quickly, and took it upon herself to instruct me a la francaise. When I finally got the ironing right, she moved me on to the kitchen. There she lined up a row of lettuces and ordered me to make a salad. After I hacked the first one up, she moved in. She ripped my unwieldy pieces into elegant bits and scolded, “Danielle! We are not rabbits! Comme ca!” And so it went. As I crawled up the fire escape to my room at the end of my first evening, I felt pathetically sorry for myself and regretted what I’d got myself into.

THE NEXT DAY was the same, and the same after that. Madame C. would stage surprise attacks, always managing to catch me in the act of screwing up. “Zee bed corners, Danielle!” (She gave up trying to speak French to me, realizing that her English was better than the French my bilingual country, Canada, had so laboriously tried to drill into me.) “Zay should be tucked in like so — you see?” When she wasn’t monitoring me, she was wandering around the apartment, chatting on the phone, and holding up swatches of silk against the dining room walls. Occasionally she’d vanish for an afternoon appointment, and I’d breathe easier — until the boys arrived home and began their daily taunting of me in phrases I didn’t understand.

Meanwhile, my little chambre de bonne — so charming at first! — more and more began to resemble a tiny prison cell. It had only a small sink, which made it hard to bathe in the mornings (a North American affectation I know). Madame C. had generously offered me the use of her shower (the only one in the apartment), but she was in her bathroom every day until noon. She’d also suggested there were some sort of communal facilities down the open alleyway from my room, but I avoided them. I got the sense from the clatter and wailing from behind the closed doors, and the laundry strung over the wrought iron balconies, that there were entire families living in chambres de bonne, and if they weren’t families, they were leering Algerian men who hissed and clicked at me through their teeth.

I wrote despairing notes home, full of underlining and exclamation marks. She wants me to iron the underwear!!! My older brother delighted in my new situation and wrote back: “What did you think it would be? Wake up and smell the coffee?” Madame C., sensing my unhappiness, one day brought up her fabric swatches to my room. It was sweet, I thought, how nice she wanted to make it for me, her prisoner. Another day, after I’d asked her for a small table, she brought up a tiny, gilded écritoire — a desk she’d used as a girl — impossible to sit at and even more impossible to write upon. “Perhaps we should paint …” she would say on these rare visits, glancing around before scuttling off again.

She was trying — and certainly I was trying her. Unfortunately, we were at cross purposes. Madame C. needed me to gain herself a bit of freedom from the children, and my happiness therefore became critical to her happiness. But she declined to pay the sort of wage that would have hired her someone actually willing to do the work. I’d taken the job in order to see Paris, yet had neither the freedom or money to do so: I was obliged to dip into my tiny savings simply to buy a few subway fares and a daily coffee at the café on the corner.

So she dangled little incentives before me: “You know, Danielle, we travel to Austria in the winter, where we ski. You’ll of course come with us ….” Alas, I knew this not to be an invitation to join them with a mug of gluvein halfway down the piste, but for a week of overtime without pay, watching the boys kill each other out of boredom in the hotel while Madame and Monsieur enjoyed the slopes. When these gambits failed, Madame C. tried to impress upon me the couple’s importance in Parisian social circles, as if, like Anthony Hopkins in “Remains of the Day,” the pride and reflected glory I’d enjoy serving this fine and honorable family of France would more than compensate me for my humble poverty.

The days grew tense. Madame C. would leave me vegetables to cook that I had never seen before. “Danielle, zees is sorrel. Have you not heard of it? It is bitter. It is chic.” My best friend from Canada, who was passing through Paris on her way to a semester at the university at Dijon, arrived on the afternoon of my greatest test: a roast chicken. Madame had left the raw bird for me in the sink, with orders to cook it for supper.

Fortunately my friend knew what to do. As she lay in my chambre de bonne reading a novel, I carried the chicken in a roasting pan up and down the fire escape, first to have her inspect my washing and tying, then to make sure the bird was seasoned correctly, and then several times after that to check whether it was cooked. She’d glance across the top of her book: “That looks fine, Danielle. Another ten minutes, until the skin is nice and brown.” Back down I’d go. Finally it was ready. I presented it to the boys, alongside some boiled green beans. They greeted the chicken as they greeted anything I offered them: like it might contain poison (I was not offended — they were this way with their mother, too). They picked sullenly at it and ran off to watch TV. I washed up.

The next day, Madame C. stopped me in the kitchen. “Danielle, zee chicken you cooked last night — it was very good, very tender. Monsieur and I had some for our dinner.” I beamed — and then offered her my resignation. She took it very decently. She sensed I was not meant for a life of dutiful household service. I packed my suitcase immediately and dragged it down the fire escape to join my friend at her youth hostel.

The next day we would take the train to Dijon. For the next six months we’d live in a two-room, sparsely furnished flat in a 17th-century tenement. Only much later — after enduring snickers whenever we gave our address to the male bank tellers — did we learn that for most of its history our building had served as the town’s brothel. Now it housed us, and a few crazy old women who rarely came out from behind their doors.

We were so chronically broke that I was forced to learn to cook the hard (and best) way — like a French peasant, with a few fresh ingredients bought in tiny quantities at the nearby market each day, We boiled carrots and saved the water for broth. We figured out how to thicken soups with potatoes and crushed tinned tomatoes. And since we were in Dijon, we made the happy discovery that strong mustard and cheap burgundy could improve almost anything.

BUT THAT WAS many, many years ago. Long since I have become a mother, which is the best training for becoming a good servant. Madame would be very proud to employ me now. I can’t think of her without a pang of sympathy. How useless I must have been! As my children grew up, and I taught them to make salad, I’d find myself fussing over them, tearing the pieces smaller and saying sharply, “No, no, no — we’re not rabbits!” And to this day, of all the things I’ve learned to cook, I remain proudest of my roast chicken.