Les Kelloucq en voyage

Scuffle at the Palais Royal

The other day, we went for a picnic at the Palais Royal with an American couple we had been introduced to over email by a friend in California (you know who you are). This was the second time in a short while we were sharing our beloved Palais Royal with an American family. It was market day at Saint-Eustache that day, so we picked up some olives, charcuterie, bread, cheese, fruit as well as some dessert at Stohrer for good measure. When we got there, all the chairs around the fountain as well as the benches in the small enclosed areas were taken. So we grabbed a bench under the lime trees and started spreading out our picnic. Gabriel was our spotter and started finding chairs as they became free. Soon enough, we had enough chairs for all of us to sit and one more to put down our stuff. We arranged them in the circle in the sun and were enjoying our picnic, chatting away without a care in the world.

Then a French woman came up to our group and asked us, in English, if she could have one of our chairs. We responded, in French, that we were using them all and that there were chairs becoming available all the time if she could just wait a few minutes. The exchange quickly became sour and she stormed off, threatening to get the guards. At the Palais Royal gardens, the guards are extremely discreet and rarely seen. But this woman clearly knew where to hunt them down because she came back a little while later with not one, not two, but three guards!

They gave us a lecture about sharing the chairs and about the fact that, technically, they were for sitting and not for use as tables. After a couple minutes of this conversation, I got up, cleared up the chair we were using at the table, cleaned it up a bit theatrically with a napkin (I guess I could not just give her my chair, that would have been too simple) and gave it to the woman. That was the end of that. I was a bit flustered, but our guests later said they enjoyed the evening, including the little episode with the woman. I guess French is so beautiful, even an argument still sounds good.

A couple minutes later, another woman who had been sitting close by came over to us. She told us that she had considered giving up her chair to the woman when she first asked us for one of ours because she was thinking of leaving. But she had actually decided to stay a little longer just because she felt the woman was being very aggressive and petty about the whole thing. That testimony made us feel a little better and comforted us in the idea that we had not acted that unreasonably and that the woman had indeed been a bit unreasonable herself. I sincerely hope that she enjoyed her time in the park even though, by the time she wrestled a chair out of us, the sun was getting low and it was about time people started leaving the gardens. The fact is that she could have enjoyed herself much longer if she had just waited a couple minutes for somebody to get up. But maybe part of the fun for her was making a fuss and getting all self-righteous about a silly chair.

kelloucq le 20.06.09 à 18:14 dans Actualités -
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