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A Year in Provence - extract

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 10 months ago
Read this extract from Peter Mayle's book, in which he describes how Provençal people greet each other. Do not worry about any words you might find difficult, you can look them up later. Think about the following question:
 

  How formal / informal is the Provençal way of greeting?

 
 You can also click here to answer some comprehension questions.
 
 “See that? Men kissing. Damned unhealthy, if you ask me,”our lawyer friend snorted into his beer…
 
It had taken me some months to get used to the Provençal delight in physical contact. Like anyone brought up in England, I had absorbed certain social mannerisms. I had learned to keep my distance, to offer a nod instead of a handshake, to ration kissing to female relatives and to confine any public demonstrations of affection to dogs. The Provençal welcome, as thorough as being searched by airport security guards, was, at first, a startling experience. Now I enjoyed it, and I was fascinated by the niceties of the social ritual, and the sign language which is an essential part of any Provençal encounter.  
                    
When two unencumbered men meet, the least there will be is the conventional handshake. If the hands are full, you will be offered a little finger to shake. If the hands are wet or dirty, you will be offered a forearm or an elbow. Riding a bicycle or driving a car does not excuse you from the obligation to toucher les cinq sardines, and so you will see perilous contortions being performed on busy streets as hands grope through car windows and across handlebars to find each other. And this is only at the first and most restrained level of acquaintance. A closer relationship requires more demonstrative acknowledgement.
 
As our lawyer friend had noticed, men kiss other men. They squeeze shoulders, slap backs, pummel kidneys, pinch cheeks. When a Provençal man is truly pleased to see you, there is a real possibility of coming away from this clutches with superficial bruising.
 
The risk of bodily damage is less where women are concerned, but an amateur can easily make a social blunder if he miscalculates the required number of kisses. In my early days of discovery, I would plant a single kiss, only to find that the other cheek was being proffered as I was drawing back. Only snobs kiss once, I was told, or those unfortunates who suffer from congenital froideur. I then saw what I assumed to be the correct procedure – the triple kiss, left-right-left, so I tried it on a Parisian friend. Wrong again. She told me that triple-kissing was a low Provençal habit, and that two kisses were enough among civilised people. The next time I saw my neighbour’s wife, I kissed her twice. ‘Non,’ she said, ‘trois fois.’
 

                                                        from the book A Year in Provence, by Peter Mayle

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