Memories of a Jeune Fille Au Pair by Mary Donaldson-Evans

“Attention!” (Watch Out!) It was the first word I heard on French soil on that late September day in 1965, and it could have stood as a warning for the whole of my year in France. Sitmar Line’s “Castel Felice,” the ship from which I had just disembarked in Le Havre after nine days at sea, had set the scene for a very inauspicious beginning: I had been robbed of $100, a lot of money in 1965.

Here’s what happened. I, Mary Prudhomme, sailed from New York with exactly $300 and a one-way ticket to France, intending to find a job as an au pair when I arrived in Paris. I had seven years of French under my belt, and I was proud of my ability to converse in the language of my ancestors. On the ship, my friend Jan and I occupied an inside cabin fitted out with bunk beds. There were six of us. At dinner, we had assigned seating, and I recall a long table with about ten others, including a French-Canadian named Gilles. He spoke little English. What an opportunity for young Mary Prudhomme! Night after night, I conversed with Gilles in his native language, undeterred by the French-Canadian accent. And night after night, I sought to impress the other Anglophones at our table.

It was on Day 7 that my fluency in French became a liability. The normally happy-go-lucky Gilles arrived at the table looking anything but happy. His luck had run out: “Someone has stolen my wallet,” he told me in French. This was indeed a problem, as we, the ragtag hordes of students on this $129 one-way crossing, had been warned that we would not be permitted to disembark unless we had $100. Magnanimous Mary Prudhomme to the rescue! After dinner, submitting to pressure by Gilles, I went to the bursar’s desk and withdrew $100, which I handed over to my French-Canadian “friend.” But I must have had a smidgeon of common sense, because I took out a sheet of paper, wrote “Je dois $100 à Mary Prudhomme,” [I owe Mary Prudhomme $100], and had Gilles sign and date it. He would send the reimbursement to me, in care of the American Express, when he got a job. I began to have doubts when, the following evening, Gilles arrived blind drunk at dinnertime. I felt queasy, and it wasn’t seasickness. My money was enabling him to get wasted.

Fast forward to Paris, just a week later. After checking into La Louisiane, a modest hotel on the rue de Seine, Jan and I ventured out. We pretended to ignore the “Yankee Go Home!” signs—France wanted out of NATO, we learned later, but we couldn’t help sensing that the signs were directed at us. And yet we were confused by the term “Yankee.” The Civil War had ended over a hundred years ago. Why Yankee? Someone—I no longer remember who—set us straight: the term didn’t refer to “Northerners” but rather to Americans in general. What did we know? Two recent college grads, apolitical and naïve, surely we couldn’t be expected to understand international relations? We were homesick—boy, were we homesick! We would have gladly obeyed the injunction and caught the first flight home except for the fact that we were broke. Stuck in Europe. What a fate!

During those first few days, we met up with some North Africans. They followed us into the lobby of our hotel and were promptly chased away. “Ce sont des Arabes!” hissed the desk clerk. And it was there, in the lobby of that seedy little Latin Quarter hotel, that I got my first taste of French racism. It wouldn’t be my last.

Within a few days, my friend Jan left France for Germany. I was alone in Paris, alone and increasingly short on cash. With no time to waste, I managed to locate la rue du Cherche-Midi and presented myself at l’Accueil familial des jeunes étrangers, the agency that would place me with a family as a jeune fille au pair. I remember sitting on a rickety chair in a tiny waiting room occupied by only one other person, a woman slightly older than me who studied me intently, and then approached me and asked if I was looking for an au pair position. When I answered in the affirmative, she insisted on accompanying me into the interview room where, together, we filled out the requisite forms, and she instructed me to meet her at her apartment on the rue Nansouty, in the 14th arrondissement, two days later.

My utter delight at having landed a job so easily, and my pride at having submitted to the entire interview in French, were shattered when I met her seven-year-old daughter, Amélie. Her French was too good. I had studied French for seven years! How could this pipsqueak of a child have achieved greater mastery than I? Her accent was more authentic, her vocabulary wider, her comprehension impeccable. To make matters worse, she mocked me, the little brat, repeated my mistakes, made fun of my accent. When I flicked out the light in her room and bade her “Bonsoir” (Good Evening) instead of the more appropriate “Bonne Nuit” (Good Night), she would reply, “Bon-sware” in imitation of my accent.

The apartment was small. Very small. A galley kitchen, a small living room with dining area, one bathroom, and two bedrooms, one of which I was to share with Amélie. When the tiny bedroom was shown to me, I was puzzled. One single bed? Where would I sleep? Aha! A Murphy bed—remember those?—was pulled down from the wall. That answered my question.

It’s a wonder I stayed. But I did. I had four hours free each afternoon in order to take courses. I started at L’Institut Catholique and then switched to the Cours de Civilisation française at the Sorbonne. I was a student at the Sorbonne. Wow! I was filled with admiration for myself. Never mind the fact that my classmates were all foreigners like me, or that the classes were lectures in which participation was minimal. They were taught in French, and some of the professors were well-known scholars. That was enough for me!

But today, my most vivid memories are less of the courses than of my experience as an au pair. We ate dinner together, as if I were part of the family, but of course I wasn’t: I cooked, set the table, served dinner, cleared the table, did the dishes. However, we did converse in French, and Monsieur and Madame gently corrected my grammar and vocabulary mistakes. For that, I was grateful. Grateful too, when they tried to help me recoup my stolen money. Alas, the IOU, written over international waters with no witnesses, was worthless. It goes without saying that the much-anticipated letter never arrived at the American Express.

I would often hear Monsieur and Madame giggling in their bedroom after we had all retired for the night. Without any proof whatsoever, I imagined that they were laughing at my grammar mistakes or my cultural missteps.

My tasks were not onerous. I was to do light housework, pick up Amélie from school, and play with her in the Parc Montsour is across the street from the apartment for one hour before running errands and, once back at the apartment, get dinner underway. But things were not as simple as they seemed. In those days, supermarkets had not yet replaced the boucheries, boulangeries, patisseries,charcuteries, and épiceries, and one often had to wait in line at each concession to be served. It could take a full hour to buy the fixings for dinner. As for dinner prep, well, let’s just say that my skills at boiling eggs and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches did not properly prepare me for cooking in France. I attempted to serve artichokes piping hot rather than chilled with a vinaigrette. I overcooked steak on a regular basis. I was clueless as to how to prepare rognons (kidneys), one of their favorite meals, and one which I declined to share, having been repulsed by the cooking smells. But I learned. Oh boy, did I learn. It wasn’t only my cooking skills that needed to be honed, but my table manners. My family often had fruit for dessert. Imagine their horror when they saw me bite into an apple! I watched, entranced, as they halved their apples, then cut them into sections before eating them with knife and fork.

I was bitterly disappointed to learn that “my” family did not drink wine with dinner. Admirers of the politician Mendès-France, they were, like him, milk drinkers. What kind of French people had fate paired me with? And what kind of French people ate cornflakes with warm milk for breakfast? Where were the flaky croissants I had been led to expect? Worse still, they made a hell of a mess at breakfast time, then ran out the door, leaving me to clean up after them. One memory is indelible: “Madame” had spilled a whole box of cornflakes on the kitchen floor. “Zut alors!” (Darn!) she cried, and then left me to sweep up.

Seeing as how I used their bathroom, slept in the same room as their only child, and ate dinner with them every night, it seemed to me that we were on sufficiently intimate terms that I could use “tu,” the familiar form of “you” when I spoke to them. Amélie and I tutoied each other from the start, this being the usual form of address when speaking to a child.

“What would you like me to fix for dinner tonight?” I asked Madame one day, about a month in, using “tu” instead of “vous.”

“Vous pouvez acheter un poulet rôti et des pommes de terre,” [You—formal form—can buy a roast chicken and some potatoes], answered Madame.

Was it my imagination, or did she give special emphasis to the word “vous”? In any case, I didn’t try again. Never was I more aware of my inferior status.

Having grown up in Duluth, Minnesota, and attended a Jesuit university, I’d had little contact with ethnicities and religious traditions different from my own. The family I lived with was secular, and it never occurred to me to question their beliefs. Imagine my surprise, then, when one day as I was picking up Amélie at her school, the crossing guard called me over and whispered, “Ce sont des Juifs!”(They’re Jews!) That was news to me, although I suppose that Madame’s maiden name, Hoffman, should have given me pause. Amélie’s maternal grandmother, a supercilious woman, collected Amélie from school on Thursdays when French children only had half days, and I could well imagine that Madame Hoffman was rude to the crossing guard. Perhaps that was the source of his antisemitic attitude. Over dinner that night, I decided to find out for myself if what he said was true. Failing even to consider that the question might be sensitive, given European history and France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany, I asked baldly,

“Est-ce que vous êtes juifs?”

Silence.

Then Monsieur answered, “Nous sommes d’origine israëlite.”

And that was the end of the conversation. Today, what I recall was the discomfort that followed my question and the rather oblique answer.

Sunday was my day off. Typically, I went to church in the morning, carrying my French Sunday Missal and ignoring the “goodie two-shoes” mockeries of young men seated at café tables along my route. After church, I took a metro to the Gare Saint-Lazare and then a train to Saint-Germain-en-Laye to spend the rest of the day with my cousin, an American soldier posted in that Paris suburb. He and three other men had an apartment. They cooked for me, spoke English to me, and most of all, they provided a weekly escape from all things French. Their kitchen cabinets were filled with American products, the magazines on their coffee table were in English, their conversation was American! I was their American angel, and they spoiled me. Never once did they lay a hand on me. To satisfy their baser desires, they went to “Pig-Alley” [Pigalle]. I didn’t ask them for details. It was the way they treated me that was important. I felt loved! I felt special! On Sunday evenings, I returned, refreshed, to the drudgery of my servitude on la rue Nansouty.

Besides the cooking fiascos, I had other “mishaps.” I dropped their iron and broke it. For Christmas, my soldiers bought me (rather, bought them) a new iron. In addition, they bought me an IBM Selectric typewriter and a tan suede coat. I showed the gifts to Monsieur and Madame, expecting them to be happy about the iron. They exchanged a look. And then Madame said something unkind to me in French. I don’t recall her exact words, but I got the message: they thought I was being “paid” for “services rendered” to my cousin and his friends. As they saw it, there was no other explanation for their largesse. I was horrified.

In the springtime, my family allowed me to go away for a week. When I returned, the kitchen sink was full of a week’s worth of dirty dishes, not even scraped clean. Needless to say, there was no dishwasher. Scrub Daddies had not yet been invented. It took me a full day to clean up.

Then there was the phone. Because I had been named European Representative of a fly-by-night organization that called itself “Work or Study Abroad,” I used it often and without asking. Little did I know that every phone call cost the family money. One day, Madame took me aside to scold me. “It would be as if I had a roll of stamps, and each time you wrote a letter, you took a stamp without asking,” she said. Did I understand?

Suitably chastened, I stopped using the phone, with the result that American students expecting to find a job in Europe through me started showing up at my door. This did not make me popular with my host family.

My mother visited in the spring of the year I was an au pair. She stayed in a small hotel just up the block on the rue Nansouty. Her room was not heated, the weather was chilly and damp, and when I went to her room to fetch her, I’d find her in bed, with the covers pulled up to her chin. My family invited her to dinner once. It was uncomfortable. And when she sat with me in the park as little Amélie played, she would try to speak English to her, thinking that if she spoke very slowly, the child would understand.

Shocked by the frontal and anatomically correct nudity of statues she saw everywhere, my mother nearly gasped when, during an excursion on a Bateau Mouche, the May-December couple in front of us started making out. When my soldier cousin Donnie and I took her to a dinner show at the Crazy Horse Saloon—what were we thinking??—she was utterly scandalized. My dad had not wanted me to go to Paris, thinking I’d become a prostitute. My mother was convinced that I was at serious risk of fulfilling his prophecy.

Well, I didn’t become a prostitute, but against my will, I did lose my virginal innocence that year during a trip to Italy. It was one of many losses, and perhaps the one that was most overdue. It was hardly the saddest. Aside from the loss of $100 on the ship before I even set foot in France, a theft that destroyed my belief in the essential goodness of humankind, I lost my grandmother that year, and the fact that it took me a full week to get the news of her death magnified my sense of loss and for a time plunged me into a depression from which I emerged only several weeks later. But along with such deep personal losses, I lost my ethnocentrism, a salutary loss that was in reality a gain. I became fluent in French; my independence grew, as did my patience and my humility. I came to respect another culture while also gaining an appreciation for luxuries and freedoms that I had taken for granted in the United States. And since I was of French ancestry, I came to understand my own place in the long line of Prudhommes stretching back to medieval times. I actually felt French and almost wished I could stay longer in the country of my forbears.

But I didn’t. Immoderately proud of my new identity as a “citizen of the world” (as Diogenes once described himself), filled with missionary zeal to share the fruit of my experience with young Americans who had never ventured outside the borders of the United States, I came home and embarked on a teaching career in French and in the process persuaded generations of students to conquer their fears, swallow their pride, and do as I did. Today, the organization that placed me, rebaptized as AFJ Au Pair and now international, has a French division that places young foreigners in families living in the south of France and accepts applications on the Internet. I suspect that some of the rules have changed, but that the experience is largely similar.

Would I do it again? You bet! As inept as I was, the family that took me in, unable to hang onto an au pair for more than a month or two after my departure, actually came to miss me, and even visited me in the USA a couple of years later. However, lest I think I had “graduated” and was now their equal, the fact that they continued to address me as “vous” rather than “tu” kept me in my place.