Sophie Pedder writes about the French and their ways at More Intelligent life.com:
The general French respect for formality and form is nowhere more
finely observed than in Paris. Flowers don’t come in bunches with
elastic bands, but in artfully arranged bouquets, with crackly layers
of cellophane and tissue paper. Canapés at dinner parties are miniature
culinary works of art. When my son was learning to write, his school
report gave him marks for whether his boucles, or loops, of
his joined-up letters respected to the millimetre the inter-line
boundaries printed on the page. At the same time, he would bring back
English exercise books filled with a chaotic caterpillar of mismatched
letters. Why didn’t he use his neat handwriting in those books too, I
asked him? He looked perplexed: “But that’s not how you write in
English!”
The culture of elegance can be extremely stressful.
One thing I’ve still not worked out is why Parisians don’t get dirty.
My children come home from school with scuffed shoes and mud-splashed
coats. Their French classmates, in round-collar shirts and corduroy,
with dreamy names like Clementine or Aurélie, look as if they have just
stepped out of a catalogue. Mothers at the school gate are always
immaculately turned-out, silk scarf knotted just so. Children are
taught from a young age to value look and appearance. In Parisian
apartments, white sofas on parquet floors are there to be sat on, not
used as gymnastics apparatus for infants.
Perhaps living amid
the geometric elegance of Paris itself, with its tree-lined Haussmann
boulevards and enchanting bridges, imposes an ordered form of style.
Even now I find it almost an affront to spot a grown man dressed in
belted shorts and trainers walking through the Place des Vosges, or
across the Pont Neuf. Tourists in garish anoraks cluster around
monuments and museums. But domestic, historic central Paris—the local boulangerie, the école maternelle next to the office building—still belongs firmly to the French.
Or
maybe the answer lies beyond Paris, in the wider French mindset. From
Descartes to Dior, the French have long prized rational order and clean
lines. It is learned in school, where maths is rigorously taught from
an early age and considered the most prestigious speciality in the
baccalauréat school-leaving exam. My daughter’s English teacher here
once tried to explain to me why they did so little creative writing in
French in primary school: it takes so many years to master the strict
rules of French grammar, she said, that there’s just no time left.