I liked Mike O’Brien better than I knew him. He was a friend of my friend Charlie and we’d exchanged some boozy repartee at a few of Charlie’s parties over the years. He was a big Irish sort of American—funny, loud and a wonderful story teller. He grew up in Tunisia and spoke fluent French.
We last saw each other at Charlie and Veronique’s wedding in Sollies-Toucas, an old village about nine kilometers north of Toulon, France. I was living in Spain at the time and another friend flew into Barcelona to meet me and my wife and we all drove over to Toulon a couple of days before the wedding to meet O’Brien and a few other college buddies and make sure we got the party groove down before the actual ceremony.
One of those intervening evenings included one when 14 Americans and a couple of French sailors drank 24 liters of the local claret with Monsieur Meaux, one of Veronique’s neighbors. Monsieur Meaux was a retired French navy captain and was enlarging his home by hand chiseling a wine cellar out of the granite mountain outside his bedroom. He let us all take a few whacks with his big sledge after we’d had some wine and hummed along to a few French sea chanteys.
Veronique’s father did his bit to mitigate the claret’s effects by turning out crepes with butter and jam as fast as he could, but he was slowed a bit by having to constantly open more bottles of claret. Although none of the Frenchmen spoke English, we were able to adequately mime our comradeship and laugh until 4 a.m. By that time, we’d made so much noise the entire male population of the neighborhood and a couple of their dogs had joined us for a few more carafes and a nude swim in Veronique’s family pool.
We slowed down a bit the next day for the actual ceremony. I was an official witness, which mostly involved saying “Oui” when the priest looked at me and signing a bunch of French paperwork I didn’t understand. As insurance against the possibility I was confessing to the previous night’s international incident, I signed O’Brien’s name.
The wedding party in the town square was eventually subsumed by a general village celebration, because the wedding day happened to correspond to the anniversary of that day in 1944 when the Americans last arrived in Sollies-Toucas for a party from which the Germans had been rudely excluded. All the older Frenchmen were wearing their medals from the Resistance and bought us many drinks and kissed our cheeks. They danced with our women, and we with theirs. Monsieur Meaux reaffirmed his place in our hearts when he asked a particularly buxom older friend of Charlie’s parents, Mrs. Jones, to dance the rumba. She declined politely, in English, which he didn’t understand, and pointed to her chest as partial explanation that she’d just had heart surgery. “Yes, they are very nice,” Monsieur Meaux agreed.
Not all the French were so amiable, though. There were a couple of twins from Paris who had come to the party to play the part of the clichéd French who hate Americans. They sat across the long table from me and O’Brien and made snotty comments in French about the Americans who had come to their country and danced with their women, drank their wine, ate their crepes, and didn’t even bother to speak French.
This went on for an hour or so until O’Brien had had enough. He leaned over the table, grabbed Pierre by the tie and pulled him right through the wedding cake plates and wine glasses. “If it weren’t for Americans, you’d all be speaking German now, you prissy poodle pumper,” he said calmly. He let go of Pierre’s tie and Pierre dropped hard back into his seat.
Pierre and his brother both jumped to their feet to challenge O’Brien. On our side of the table, the six of us who could still stand up did so. Monsieur Meaux stood up, too, although it was unclear if he wanted to rumble or rumba, since he was standing on the side with us Americans and still eyeing Mrs. Jones.
Pierre and frère sat down faster than you can say Vichy.
So, given this experience, it came as no surprise to me that the French aren’t anxious to fight in Iraq. What was a surprise, though, was hearing that the owner of Cubbie’s restaurant in Beaufort, North Carolina was going to stop calling his French fries French fries because he’s mad at the lack of French support for our foreign policy. I’m tempted to phone Cubbie to explain that, if being called a pooch’s paramour wasn’t enough to get a Frenchman in a bellicose frame of mind, renaming pommes frites probably wasn’t going to do the trick either.
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