Our French Connection

Paris, Texas does not, it turns out, exist in Paris, Texas—at least not the backdrops. Those pinnacles and mesas featured in the Wim Wenders film are found several hours further west or south. But none of the film was actually made in Paris, here in the state’s northeast corner, less than 20 miles from Oklahoma. Paris and the surrounding country are flat, open, desolate, and the trip from Dallas is a straight line on a two-lane road.

That afternoon—day six of my journey—the sky is humungous and blue, under which my rental sedan is a lone mouse. Other automobiles are mostly pickup trucks, and the trucks are mostly American, big rigs with stick figures to flaunt their family roster. Stores appear occasionally, and farms. But more often, nothing. I pass a cowboy church. It has a corral big enough for a hundred cowboys to attend service without dismounting. I run over two tumbleweeds. There are signs along the road advertising “Hay For Sale” and at least two—separated by half an hour’s drive—that say, “Hey For Sale.” On the outskirts of Paris is a Ford dealership as long as two city blocks, with at least 10 monster American flags that do not flap uniformly, but suggest a cavalry approaching. The motel I’ve booked is also on the highway, The Inn of Paris. Behind the reception desk is a poster of the French Eiffel Tower. On the counter is a bobble-head version of the Texan Eiffel Tower, which can be found here in Paris, about 60 feet tall and wearing a red cowboy hat. The base of the bobblehead is etched, “Bonjour Y’All.”

In case you live in a large metropolis and haven’t seen these, people line up a row of stick figures on their rear window to demonstrate their family’s quantity—dad, mom, girl, boy, dog. (They’re all stick figures, though; to measure mass, other shapes than sticks would be necessary.) It’s a form of sentimentality I never saw in France—people in Marseille don’t fly French flags in their yards. Not that the French are shy about displays. They wear scarves for their favorite soccer team, carry banners for a union. But it’s not the same. America’s displays, our flag pins and rear-window college stickers, say “Look at me.” French displays, by and large, say “Look at us.”

I’ve gotten in around 5 p.m. after a day of travel. I realize I’ve only eaten two Clif Bars that day in addition to a Bomb of Heaven Singing, what I call a Diet Coke with espresso. I ask the receptionist if there’s a decent bar nearby.

“There’s a Walgreens that sells beer across the street,” the girl says. Her hair’s flat and brown. She’s maybe 16, rigid and thin, like she’s made out of aluminum siding. “But you can’t drink there.”

“Well,” I say, “any chance there’s a bar somewhere?”

“There’s an Applebee’s. The food is good.”

“How about Tex-Mex?”

“There’s a Chili’s.”

“Any chance there’s a downtown in Paris? An old part of town with shops and things?”

“No. But there’s a mall over there,” she says, pointing to a shadowy rhombus in the distance underneath the highway. “They have like downtown stuff.”

I leave the girl with a “thank you,” not a “thank you very much, that’s terrific, thanks, super”—which is my way of saying I wish her boss would replace her with a computer.

The Paris Applebee’s, it turns out, is popular. The beer’s a dollar and people drink a lot of it. The bar, thickly packed, has every stool taken, mostly by big boys in hats, baseball or cowboy, with sunglasses pincer-ing their temples. Two booths are open. I perch in one, with a bad view of three different televisions, and order a Budweiser. A menacing guy in his forties sits down across from me. He’s twitchy, off-balance, possibly tanked. We’re about 14 inches from each other. He wears a goatee, black fitted Marlboro Racing cap, and a red-and-black hoodie that’s two sizes too big.

I call him, in my head, This Penis.

“Anyone here?” This Penis says after sitting there for a moment.

“Nope,” I say. “All yours.”

Previously in "Our French Connection": Part One, Part Two

Commercials interrupt the football game. I decide to strike up conversation—and at the same time I think about also shattering a pint glass on my face because it’ll be more fun than asking This Penis to clarify his feelings about berets. But here’s the thing: If I do not engage him, what value will my survey have? If a pseudojournalist isn’t willing to start uncomfortable conversations, what good is his report? I will not be the coward of Frenchiness surveyors. And who’s to say This Penis doesn’t love or hate the French. Doesn’t have a poster of Robert Doisneau’s The Kiss hung up in his mother’s closet where he self-molests.

“It’s a tough angle,” I say, to break the ice.

“What?”

“You have to find a good angle to be able to see the game.”

This Penis lights a cigarette.

“Man,” he says loudly and getting louder, “I can’t get a fucking drink.”

A waitress passes, ignoring him.

“That’s not our waitress,” I say.

“I don’t even know that one,” This Penis says, with rancor.

Suddenly there’s a ruckus: Game over, Patriots win. People turn inward, to their companions. I say, “So I’m from out of town,” but then I falter. The guy’s expression, it’s now snarling…I lose courage. I start inventing things. “So I’m here on business. I’m a consultant. For IBM. Computers. So where’s a good place to get a drink?”

He takes a second to digest all of this. “What? Around here?”

“In Paris,” I say.

“Well, you’re fucking here, dude. This is it.”

Finally our waitress arrives and This Penis brightens up, puts a hand around her waist and orders a PBR draft, the $1 special. The waitress asks me, “You want something else?”

“What should I get?” I ask This Penis. Though why I say this, who knows, really. As if I need his recommendation. As if the Applebee’s house chardonnay is incredible.

“Fucking PBR’s only a dollar, dude,” he says. Once our beers arrive, though, he becomes conversational: “Most people start here.” He’s back to my question about where to drink. He spits under the table. “The Applebee’s is good, man. It’s real good—if you want to tie one on. Or Buffalo Joe’s. People start here or there, then move out. You can go to the Depot, but they’re closed Mondays. But when you’re shitfaced enough, we go over to the teen center.”

I say, what?

“I said, get drunk enough, you go over to the teen center and act like idiots.”

At that point I chug my beer. He keeps going: “Tonight we’ll probably stay here for a while. You want another? Shit, where’s that girl?”

I tell This Penis no, I need to leave.

“Your family?”

Work, I say, big meeting. I ask him how much I owe. “They’re a dollar,” he says. He’s upset. I leave the money on the table. He stares me down as I leave, he says, “Whatever, dude.”

“People start here or there, then move out. You can go to the Depot, but they’re closed Mondays. But when you’re shitfaced enough, we go over to the teen center.”

At Walgreens I buy a four-pack of Bud Light tallboys. I ask the checkout lady about French people. She takes 10 minutes to complete the survey, and I will admit I am impatient with her. Because I’ve had enough—enough engaging every stranger I meet, enough talk. France and the United States can implode tomorrow, for all I care. In my motel room, I turn on all the lights. Energy-saving bulbs—blue, depressing. I unpack, undress, though I leave on my boots and boxers because the carpet’s swampy and I wouldn’t trust the linens not to bestow on me gonorrhea. There’s an uneasy feeling. A strong desire to do something. The Gideons have left me a Bible—I open it and read and it doesn’t make an impact. A card from the motel urges me to save the environment, to leave my towels on the floor (like a child) and accept the reduction in service for my own good (like a child)—this from an industry that still installs bathtubs and lights its buildings like prisons. I get in bed and start watching Paris, Texas on my laptop. That was the plan all along, to watch Paris, Texas in Paris, Texas, but now my interest in the mirroring, to see what one lends the other, is gone.

Forty minutes later, watching Harry Dean Stanton lose, find, and lose his way again, I’m four times sadder. Which gets worse when I learn on Wikipedia that the movie was the favorite film of fellow suicides Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith.

The beer is going, going….

Scraaaaaape—a loud noise outside. It’s after midnight. I hear it again, closer. Scraaaaaape. I look out the peephole. My car, parked outside the door, is the only one in the parking lot. I put on a shirt and go outside. There’s no one in the dark, just me and a shuttered restaurant, and a billboard that advertises gold bought and sold.

Those billboards are everywhere in America right now.

Enter a skateboarder, stage left, pants belted at mid-thigh. He grinds a railing—scraaaaape—kick-flips, and rolls into the darkness.

A minute later, I’m back outside, this time with my clipboard, going over to interview him, when I see his butt tattoo. It’s tribal latticework—the same kind found equally on Urban Outfitter clerks and Dartmouth fraternity presidents. But this is a first for me: It’s not a tramp stamp, but a crack tattoo, one that dips into and returns from his anus. Which I get to fact-check when he does an aerial.

That night, the highway is silent except for sporadic thunder. Goods are being shipped, business doesn’t sleep. There’s a neon sign to light my room through the window, like in a Wim Wenders film. Nearby, teenage girls are putting up with This Penis and other drunks. The remains of downtown have been shoved under the overpass, and the rebel, skating in the dark, chose to stick his pseudo-rebellion up his ass. This is Paris, Texas, and the reality is different from the dream—worse or better, at least unique.

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Among the three words that people choose to describe the city of Paris, France (question no. 5), two words show up more than others: “beautiful” (33 percent of respondents) and “romantic” (20 percent).

But when asked to describe French people in three words (question no. 4), “beautiful” only registers 9 percent. “Romantic” gets 4 percent. Not because those notions don’t apply, I think, but due to Americans’ views about the French being more nuanced. We have more words to describe the French—84 different words, in fact—than we do for their capital city (60 words total). To be “Frenchy,” as Twain said, is simply more complex.

In 2003, NBC’s Tom Brokaw and Senator John Kerry had the following chat:

Brokaw: Senator Kerry, what about the French? Are they friends? Are they enemies? Or something in between at this point?

Kerry: The French are the French.

Brokaw: Very profound, senator.

Kerry: Well, trust me, it has a meaning. And I think most people know exactly what I mean.

One person who knew exactly what Kerry meant was an apple farmer I interviewed in Maine, who wrote down for me, when I asked her for three words to describe French people: “Very, very French.” But it’s that “meaning” of Kerry’s that I wanted to pin down when I devised this question. For example, if we look at the words people use to describe French people by categories, the beauty column includes “fashionable,” “stylish,” “elegant,” and “pretty.” Under romance, French people are described to me as “sexy,” “charming,” “passionate,” and “amorous.” (I do not include the person who wrote down, simply, “titties,” though I still laugh about it.) So the ideas of beauty and romance are important to Americans when thinking about the French, but they’re not predominant: Only 25 percent of words used to describe the French invoke beauty; 18 percent reference romance.

Arts and intellect come in higher: “artistic,” “sophisticated,” “cultured,” and related synonyms pull around 40 percent.

Then there are entries more unique:

• “Smoky, mushroomy, woolen”
• “Less than ambitious”
• “Humans speaking French”

For the most part, the words can be organized according to three prevailing stereotypes of France, as symbolized by Jean-Paul Sartre (“intellectual,” “opinionated,” “cigarettes”), Catherine Deneuve (“pretty,” “fashionable,” “enjoying life”), and Anton Ego, the acerbic Parisian restaurant critic in Pixar’s Ratatouille (“pompous,” “epicurean,” “close-minded”). This shook out as follows:

French Stereotype	No. of Adjectives	Examples
Catherine Deneuve	46	“Passionate,” “joyous,” “elegant”
Jean-Paul Sartre	43	“Smart,” “smelly,” “socially conscious”
Anton Ego	21	“Unfriendly,” “antagonistic,” “rude”

But no one mentions anything linked to France’s history of militarism, its scientific minds, its superlative athletes. There were two mentions of “unshaved,” but I think that can apply to all three categories, even Deneuve. The main conclusion seems to me that “Frenchness” is a concept we can richly, if narrowly, describe, even when John Kerry can’t—being made of different parts sex, satisfaction, mind, and perspective. A promised life, whether or not the French themselves actually experience it, that is mostly about the heart, but also about the brain, with restraint and good manners occasionally sacrificed for joie de vivre.

So I’m beginning to think the notion of Frenchness has a lot more to do with the Americans who care about it than the French people they look to for inspiration, and perhaps little to do with France at all. Our fantasies of the other tell a truth about our longings. We age our wines in their oak. Slim our bodies to their shapes. Teach our children to be more like Jean-Luc or Françoise. When will we ever be good enough for ourselves?

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“Anything that happens in the rest of the world,” one Texas business owner tells me, “happens 20 years later in Paris.”

The downtown of Paris, Texas, has extra-wide avenues and a majestic square. A few stores downtown are new—one sells kayaks—but many are empty, even caves. On the bigger buildings are blanched ads for Sky Chief Gasoline, Paris Cotton Exchange, Harold Hodges Insurance (“if it can be written, I can write it”). There are more old Coke signs than I can find places to buy Coke.

There’s also, not far from downtown, an Eiffel Tower wearing a red cowboy hat. I visit it my first morning. It’s smaller than I thought—I expected to see it in the skyline, but it’s shorter than a cell phone tower, surrounded by acres of empty parking lot that set a stage for dissatisfaction.

A 1992 study for The Journal of Advertising of French and American ads found that 24 percent of French ads use sexual appeal compared to only 9 percent of American ads (and 73 percent of those ads contained only women). Also, 23 percent of French ads use humor as compared to 11 percent of Americans. Another study, “Foreign Branding and Its Effects on Product Perceptions and Attitudes” (1994) found that, among American consumers, French names produce a more hedonic perception than English names. I think it can be safely extrapolated by now that Americans believe the French know better how to enjoy life.

Around the main square of Paris, there are at least eight antique or junk shops. I walk the downtown for two hours and come away with a sense of gloom—because when a downtown is mostly in the business of selling off its furniture, there’s a problem. Racially, the business district is whites, whites everywhere. I pass a statue paying tribute to confederate soldiers. The sun’s beginning to blast and already I feel dazed.

Among my interviews on the street, a young woman, a business owner, says about the French: “They’re culturally slow. What I mean is, they like the slow-paced lifestyle. They enjoy life.” A similar sentiment’s echoed by a middle-aged woman, a marketing executive wearing a black leather jacket: “They’re more lovers than fighters, you know what I mean? People here don’t identify with them. We have Texas pride. People from Paris—Paris, Texas—are doers. We get things done.”

Off the main square, I see a sign outside a one-story building that says OPEN. Inside is a dark crypt for unwanted paperbacks, piled in mounds. The owner, probably in his forties, is watching a movie on his laptop. He’s roundish, friendly, with pallid skin. His hands are salamandrine. I tell him why I’m visiting. “You’ll know about the racial crimes then,” he says, hitching up his glasses. He explains about several cases—a black man recently killed and dragged beneath a truck; a black girl given seven years in prison for shoving a hall monitor when, three months earlier, the same judge only gave a teenaged white girl probation for an arson crime.

“That kind of stuff,” the man says, “does not give very good press.

“People like us,” he continues, meaning him and me, “they want to leave here as soon as they can get out. Now, I’m one of those people who can entertain themselves. My father gave this building. The internet is my intellectual outlet.”

I visit the Chamber of Commerce to investigate Wendersgate. But everyone there is just so goddamn talkative and nice, professionally so—I forget why I came as I’m being inundated with the good news about Paris! Paris, a great place to be!

He continues, without me asking any questions: “So, how do I view people around Paris?” He takes a moment, arms crossed. “Provincial, parochial, narrow view.” A few breaths before speedy resumption: “The intellectual elite isolate themselves. Now, what are the problems? Rampant drug use—meth, crack. Lots of crime. Personally I love France. I’m part French myself. Have you seen Paris, Texas, the movie?”

I tell him I did the night before. He nods, saying, “You’ll have noticed it wasn’t filmed here. Now, it was supposed to be. Yes. Wim Wenders came to town, they were supposed to start, but he had an argument with the Chamber of Commerce about filming—you’ll have to ask them. But I met him, I sold him postcards. Nice guy, very nice guy.”

So, after a BBQ lunch from a trailer, I visit the Chamber of Commerce to investigate Wendersgate. But everyone there is just so goddamn talkative and nice, professionally so—I forget why I came as I’m being inundated with the good news about Paris! Paris, a great place to be! “A town so named…?” I say, but no one knows, not even the president of a local college, who happens to be stopping by. But Paris, I’m told, is very much on the up and up!

Two of the women, Mindy and Becky, explain that they, in fact, have been to the French Paris recently; they were part of a Texan contingent that visited France the previous March. And those Parisians…Well, they were so friendly. You hear the French don’t like Americans, everybody says that, but that is just not true. And all the Parisians wanted to know everything about what’s going on back in Texas. Listen, we even brought over a Stetson hat for the mayor, the deputy mayor, he’s just a little guy, he puts that hat on and is laughing—he said he looked just like JR from Dallas! Now the Parisians themselves, there were a lot of sophisticated, pretty people. Very mission-oriented. Not stuck-up, just busy. One weird thing, though? They didn’t have washcloths in the hotel. No washcloths! And fish for breakfast, that was tough to get used to, seeing fish in the buffet.

Becky says they’d gone to France because a French photographer, his name was Léo Delafontaine, had arranged the trip as thanks for a recent stay in Paris, Texas.

“People would feed him, have him over for dinner,” Becky says. “He walked, walked, walked everywhere. We said, ‘Léo, you’ve got to have a car!’ But he didn’t want one. So we got him a bicycle, and then he just rode and rode.”

Becky adds, “You know, one thing Léo said he noticed is that people in Texas smile a lot. People in France don’t, he said. Isn’t that funny? Say, did I give you one of our bobbleheads yet?”

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My toughest question: “Name up to three current French artists (writers, painters, musicians, actors, etc.)” I figured that most people wouldn’t be able to name more than two. It’s worse than I expected. A barista in Detroit bristles when I ask him, as though I’m mocking his ignorance. A photographer’s assistant in Boise beats herself up for being unable to summon a single name. She’s not alone: 78 percent of respondents can’t name one.

The decline of French culture from heavyweight to ringside to concessions has been documented widely, not least by the French. For American purposes, the best guide is Donald Morrison’s 2007 Time article, “The Death of French Culture,” which caused a typhoon in Paris when it came out and was widely denounced. It also was subsequently expanded to book length. Among its facts:

• Few contemporary French novels find a publisher outside of France anymore. However, 30 to 40 percent of new novels published in France are translated from a foreign language.
• Only about 20 percent of French movies are released in the U.S.
• French auction houses account for approximately only 8 percent of public sales of contemporary art. Fifty percent occurs in the U.S., 30 percent in Britain.

For the most part, the book makes a convincing case that France has lost the position it once held of vast cultural influence. It includes a response by French intellectual Antoine Compagnon, who sums up France’s spot as being “a middle-ranking cultural power on the world scale, as suits our status as a middle-ranking economic power.”

Though Americans do like a good remake. Boudu sauvé des eaux was the basis for Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Le dîner de cons, with Thierry Lhermitte and Jacques Villeret, became Dinner for Schmucks, with Steve Carell and Paul Rudd. Trois homes et un couffin = Three Men and a Baby. La femme infidèle = Unfaithful. There are more, and more than a few French film people find this trend annoying.

To my question: Of the correct answers given, the most popular is Gérard Depardieu, the actor, with five mentions. Next comes the novelist Michel Houllebecq (three mentions). With two showings each are the musician and actor Charlotte Gainsbourg, the basketball player Tony Parker, and Renoir, who is dead and doesn’t count.

Getting one vote each: singer/actor/First Lady Carla Bruni; singer Mireille Mathieu; composer Pierre Boulez; actor Jean Reno; actress Marion Cotillard; actor Vincent Cassel; “the actors in The Artist”; and “the guy who tightrope-walked the World Trade Center.”

About Tony Parker: Well, I happen to see the art in basketball.

About Renoir, though…For the first couple people who write down the names of dead people, I point out that the question asks for living artists. Then I often get a queer look. As if it’s not common knowledge that Renoir has left the building, same for van Gogh, who has the bad luck of being both dead and Dutch—a woman in a Texas train station looks up with incredulity, “He’s dead?” So I stop saying anything, to see which lifeless artists are noted.

• Two votes each: van Gogh, Renoir.
• One vote each: Degas, Flaubert, Redon, Messiaen, Maupassant, Michelangelo, Rimbaud, Sartre, Hugo, Manceau, Louis de Funès. Also, Plato. And Julia Child. And the questionably artistic former French President François Mitterrand.

Wrong answers aside, no one writes down musicians like Daft Punk, Phoenix, or Air. No one mentions J.M.G. Le Clézio, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008. No one mentions the artist Sophie Calle, or even Louise Bourgeois, who’s made her career in New York. And yet it wasn’t so long ago that French artists ruled the planet, and Paris was where, as David McCullough writes in The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, people who “were ambitious to excel in work that mattered greatly to them…saw time in Paris, the experience of Paris, as essential to achieving that dream.” But it is America that now governs, for who knows how much longer.

• By the 1990s, 83 percent of Western Europeans between the ages of 18 and 24 were studying English in school.
• In the early 1980s, more than 50 percent of the Netherlands watched Dallas every week.

In fact, regarding Le Clézio’s Nobel win in 2008: While in Maine, I was in a lovely French bakery buried in Lewiston between car dealers and shops that advertised WE BUY GOLD, and while I was interviewing the bakers of the finest croissant I’d ever tasted, a customer told me she found this question silly, not even worth asking. France’s day was finished, she said. “If you think of literature, I don’t think France. They had their heyday. You look at the authors winning Nobels, they’re from other countries.”

Perhaps French culture’s bigger problem isn’t simply distribution, but marketing. If a writer wins a Nobel Prize but no one notices, it matters less. If an economy lacks demand, it struggles to endure. The longer stereotypes stay fixed, the faster they become barnacles.

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For the rest of my stay in Texas, I racially and financially profile to avoid only speaking to white professionals.

This leads me to seeking out local hair salons. About half of the 11 businesses I look up are closed, but half aren’t. People in the shops give me recommendations to others. The so-far typical ratio of people willing to talk or fill out a form holds up, and the consensus about France and French people is pretty much what I’ve found elsewhere in Texas—Paris is a beautiful city; the French are decent folks—if pressed, then they’re beautiful/creative/smart/smelly/rude—but France and the French are cartoons having almost nothing to do with daily life. It’s what I hear in the poorest neighborhood, where I almost run over a pit bull while parking outside a one-chair shop, and in the fancy hair/nail salon I find in a strip mall.

One note: 100 percent of all hairstylists and barbers I survey in Texas know that Nicolas Sarkozy is the president of France, as compared to a national success rate of 51 percent. Maybe because many of them have TVs playing the news while they work. Or maybe because they’re simply better read, or required by the chatter of their customers to be informed.

The next morning, I finish my barbershop canvassing and stop on my way out of town at a bakery on Lamar Street for a croissant. Well, they don’t make croissants. But they do have vanilla cake, which I order to go. I pass a video shop near my motel, Family Video. They’ve just changed their big roadside sign to read, Midnight in Paris / Now in Stock.

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Certain things must be noted while on a two-week reporting trip, no matter whether they relate to the journey’s purpose. The miniature horse farm advertising BUY ONE TODAY. The pretty maid at Howard Johnson’s with a jagged scar running from her left eye socket to the corner of her mouth, severing her left cheek, that she angles toward me while she passes in the hall, locking eyes with me, leering at me.

The man in the airport bathroom who gee-yips through his bowel movement. The man on the plane dressed like the Joker from Batman, reading a library copy of John Irving’s The Cider House Rules.

The no-secret-to-anybody romance between a Delta gate employee and a ground crew member in Phoenix—the latter in love, the former stringing the latter along.

Then there are details that actually pertain to my subject, like the Dallas coffee shop that starts the Amélie soundtrack the moment I walk through the door. Or the coffee shop in Portland, Maine, called Mornings in Paris that I pass one day randomly, where there’s a cute girl in the front window sitting under a poster of the Eiffel Tower. She’s sipping a latte. Looking delicate, hopeful, staring at the laptop that’s perched next to a blue Longchamp bag. Do I fall in love with the idea? Turns out she is a saleswoman of athletic sportswear. She’s never been to France, but it sounds nice. In fact, the one time she went to Europe, she begged her boyfriend to take her to Paris—and he was like, “Why would you want to go to Paris?” and I was like, “Are you serious?”

Seeing how I take a lot of flights in these two weeks—11 flights, 5,878 miles flown—I spend a decent amount of time noticing what’s on them. E-readers, for one thing—I stop counting them after my first flight, realizing that print is dead. But I do count 16 Louis Vuitton bags and 14 North Face backpacks. SkyMall, the in-flight shopping magazine, contains only one good with any French connection: “Mademoiselle Haute Couture,” a six-foot-tall lamp shaped like a woman with “the chic knee-high boots, trendy cocktail dress and accentuated curves that make her a timeless, always-in-style, fashion statement.”

Among its other cultural clichés, SkyMall also sells a Civilized Butler Clock, which wakes you up with the British actor Stephen Fry intoning one of 180 different witticisms like, “Good morning, Madam. I’m so sorry to disturb you, but it appears to be morning. Very inconvenient, I agree. I believe it is the rotation of the Earth that is to blame.”

But where is the lazy Mexican’s sombrero with built-in sunglasses? Where is Braun’s patented Jew detector? Other nations, you too can have your hackneyed figures, caricatures, and totem characters merchandised for sale in the American airspace—but you should know we do not offer a returns policy.

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I email Léo Delafontaine, the Parisian photographer who went to Texas. Of life in Texas, he says, “We know very little of it in France except for clichés.” The following is edited and translated from the French:

Baldwin: So what was your first impression of Texas?

Delafontaine: It felt like a movie! Not the one from Wim Wenders, but a combination of American films. It was both very familiar and very new. After a few days, though, it felt like home.

Baldwin: How did the Texans respond to you?

Delafontaine: Before I’d left France, I contacted as many people as possible. Especially emblematic figures: the mayor, the fire chief. So I had a very clear idea of the people I would meet. At the same time, people in Texas were so open and welcoming—I met a lot more people than I expected. I guess they were happy to have someone from Paris, France, taking their picture. But I don’t think that explains everything. I really felt a kindness toward strangers that you rarely experience in France.

Baldwin: Had anyone met a French person before?

Delafontaine: Yeah, and I also met many people who’d traveled to France. Here’s a story: On my last day, I met an old woman, a Frenchwoman who’d lived in Texas for 30 years. We figured out that she used to live right next to where I now live in Paris. It was so unlikely and cool.

Baldwin: What do you think is the average American’s impression of France and French people?

Delafontaine: I imagine the French, just like Americans, have plenty of clichés in mind when thinking about one another. But the average American still looks a lot like the average French person—and vice versa. For my part, the only culture shock I had was the gun culture—this is completely foreign in France.

Watch for the conclusion of “Our French Connection” next week. Or you can read it in its entirety now when you pick up a copy at the Kindle Store.