Faux Pas

Yesterday morning, I made a mistake.

It was really obvious, and the moment I said it I felt like such an idiot. I did, after all, LIVE in France for six months, but I guess the influence of the somewhat prompter and more time-concerned Netherlands has rubbed off on me.

Marie Clare and I had stepped into a honey store near her apartment. There was a funny round man presiding over the store, stocking and unpacking boxes at a leisurely pace. We said our bonjours and began to hover over beeswax candles and soap and the widest collection of honey varieties I have ever seen.

Really: Orange honey, lemon honey, and honey of just about every other citrus fruit you can imagine, plus their blossoms. Rosemary honey and thyme honey and all sorts of other herbs. Eucalyptus and Acacia honey and other trees. Even Buckwheat honey.

Another man came in to look around. He was either a street cleaner or a garbageman or one of those other jobs that involves green clothes and a brighter, more neon vest on top. The two men were chatting happily. Marie Clare and I wanted to smell some of the honey, so I turned to the man and politely waited for him to finish talking to the other customer.

When he turned to me, I asked if we could smell the honey.
"Non," he said, and for a second I was afraid I had asked if I could feel the honey rather than smell it, but then he continued to explain that we could taste it.

Then he turned back to his other customer.

I waited a moment longer, and when he turned back to me, I explained (still in French, of course!), "It's just that, we don't have that much time."

I knew the moment I spoke those words that they were the wrong words to say. Very wrong. Faux pas is an understatement, I think.

But it turned out okay. Although I could see a little glint in his eye, He simply replied, "D'accord. Mais je finis", and turned back to the customer.

At which point I thought, okay, laisser tomber, fair enough. Let the guy finish his conversation. It is Sunday morning, after all, and you should probably just be glad that he hasn't kicked you out of his shop.

In the end it was fine. He seemed quite happy with us. I asked if he had a larger jar of some of the flavors and he began explaining to me how the bees, you see, they are not like humans, they take vacations all the time (which to me sounds an awful lot like some French persons. Marie Clare has lived in that area, a very non-touristy one, since August and never passed the honey store when it was open, and then suddenly on a Sunday morning, voila!) and therefore it is impossible to predict when you will be able to get honey and when you will have to wait. And then, after we made our purchases, he said, "Merci, jolies filles", so I think it worked out okay.

But still. Really. Telling the Frenchman in the store that we were in a rush, when he was in the middle of a conversation? I thought I knew better!