Pave: Mock Shock

As a French person in England, you must embrace the flattery of [British] attention and take the insults for what they are: cries for help.

Hortense de Monplaisir,
a made-to-order chauvin,
graciously tolerating her inferiors
Le Dossier: How to Survive the English
(London UK: John Murray, 2007)

Recently the Sunday Times published extracted material from a book by Hortense de Monplaisir,* some sort of French person.

What sort? Well, the sort that sports a nifty Dickensian moniker. The sort that can only be invented for pitch perfect stereotypy. The sort that is l'outrance itself. Here is how the times presents her French bona fides:

An incisive observer of the English, she remains French through and through. Her interests include le scrapbooking, painting on porcelain and organising holidays in Verbier, St Barts and the Ile de Ré.

She has an exceptional IQ and is a member of French Mensa.**

Mdm. de Monplaisir writes with the tireless cattiness of a hairdresser. She insults everything British -- bottoms, basements, bras -- and finds nothing comparable to anything French.*** It's all good fun, except the Sunday Times readership failed to spot the joke, overlarge French caricatures being indistinguishable from the real French. The response from indignant Brits (and Americans), giving as good as they got, became deserving of its own story.

EN GARDE, YOU SEXLESS, WORKSHY, UNWASHED FRENCHIES
A Frenchwoman’s Anti-English Diatribe In Last Week’s
News Review Has Stirred A Patriotic Riposte

November 11, 2007 (Times Online) - So incensed were some of our readers by de Monplaisir’s audacious attack on her host nation that we felt it only right, proper (and English) to allow a riposte.

... On appearance, many objected to the notion that all Frenchwomen are small-bottomed and immaculately coiffured. ... One of our readers used his own girlfriend to contradict Hortense; K, Bristol:

My French girlfriend can’t cook and only brushes her teeth every few days. She also dresses like a clown. But I do love her.

An Englishwoman living in France took exception to her compatriots being labelled as the "great sluts of Europe":

How about the French housewives who, having never heard of epilation, cycle happily home from the boulanger with the baguette stuck under their sweaty armpits? Or the French habit of flushing the loo once a day to save water? Better still, the men that you can see peeing on any roadside all over France. Women who turn up at the beauty salon and have what looks like camembert between their toes thinking that it wasn’t worth washing before going to the salon as it’d get done there!

Anne in France:

Frenchwomen and dress sense? Ha ha ha! Round here the look is off-duty prostitute.

Cat Walker from Birmingham:

Well, we may all have huge bottoms, but at least we use proper toilets here in England, unlike the French, who insist on going by the side of the road. Leave Paris and not 10 miles out of the city you start to see country lanes strewn with toilet paper. Disgusting.

S Ward, from Brighton, recalling his romantic encounters with Frenchwomen:

I personally found their lovemaking cold and unimaginative in comparison to American or Italian women, and their cooking at home: sacré bleeeugh.

Captain Haddock from Hampshire, a self-confessed Francophile:

French food – I’ve had some wonderful meals there. I’ve had some of the worst also. Beautiful women – yes, there are many but I’ve seen some of the ugliest and worst-dressed women in the world teetering between the piles of dog poo on the boulevards.

Jedsil from New York:

The French are like the caricature of the classic indolent brother-in-law. He doesn’t work, produces nothing of consequence, but has a taste for the finest things in life: yours. I adore the UK, but America has one great advantage over your country. We are further away from France.

Frank D from Boston:

The funniest part was utilising ‘French’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘excellent service’ in the same vapid thought bubble.

Oh, touché.

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* Penned/translated, the confusion deliberately cute, by one Sarah Long, who so strongly identifies with the author as to believe herself one and the same. Cute. Ms. Long surfacing to claim her press clippings gives the game away.

*** All except home newspaper delivery, which edges out les livreurs français.

PFFT (What is this?): Readership hoisted on the Times petard 4 | Ouchitude 4 | Rayonnement français 0