Place Saint-Sulpice: Elbows In — You're Not a Chicken (#692)

At a restaurant on the edge of the Place Saint-Sulpice, I noticed a family having lunch.

There were six of them.

Mother and father. Grandmother. Three children.

The oldest was a boy with tousled hair. The middle child was a girl. The youngest was another boy, distinguished - at least in my memory - by a particularly unfortunate haircut.

They were having a wonderful time. They talked. They laughed. They smiled.

The children participated in the conversation. The adults listened to them. The grandmother was part of it all.

Three generations around one table on a sunny afternoon in Paris.

It was exactly the sort of scene I had been admiring all day.

And then I noticed how they ate.

Good heavens.

Close Your Mouth When You Chew!

The children chewed with their mouths open.

Not occasionally. Regularly.

They talked with food in their mouths. Elbows appeared everywhere.

The older boy attacked his food with knife and fork, elbows extended like wings. The younger one wasn't much better.

Nobody seemed remotely concerned.

I could hear my parents.

Close your mouth when you chew!

Don't talk with your mouth full!

And the unforgettable:

Elbows in. You're not a chicken!

These weren't suggestions in the household in which I grew up.

They were rules.

There were correct ways to sit at a table and incorrect ways.

We knew the difference.

Or we were rapidly reminded.

The Invisible Parents at the Table

And there, decades later, sitting in Paris, I realized that my parents were still having lunch with me.

They had been dead for years, but there they were.

Watching those children.

Correcting them in absentia.

Sit up. Elbows in. Use your knife properly.

Don't speak with your mouth full.

Close your mouth when you chew.

The French family couldn't hear them.

I could.

Perhaps that is one of the strange things about growing older.

The voices that disciplined us as children eventually become our own internal voices.

Our parents stop telling us how the world should work.

We start telling ourselves.

But Look at the Family

Then I caught myself.

Because while I was mentally correcting their table manners, something much more important was happening.

They were enjoying one another. Really enjoying one another.

Nobody was staring at a phone. Nobody appeared bored. Nobody was trying to escape.

The children weren't eating separately from the adults.

The grandmother wasn't parked at one end of the table while everyone else ignored her.

They were talking across generations.

Laughing. Sharing food. Sharing stories. Sharing time.

And suddenly my imaginary scorecard became rather complicated.

Table manners. Questionable.

Family meal. Outstanding.

What Were Manners For?

It made me wonder what all those rules of my childhood were actually intended to accomplish.

Why did elbows have to remain close to the body?

Why was the position of the knife important?

Why did chewing with an open mouth matter so much?

Some rules have obvious practical value.

Watching half-chewed food while someone speaks isn't particularly appealing.

But others belong to a much larger cultural tradition.

Table manners were part of being well brought up.

And being well brought up mattered.

A child's behavior reflected upon the parents.

Good manners indicated discipline, respectability and self-control.

You didn't merely eat dinner.

You demonstrated that you knew how dinner should be eaten.

You're Not a Chicken

Of all the instructions, "You're not a chicken" stayed with me.

It was wonderfully effective.

No child wants to resemble poultry at the dinner table.

The elbows immediately came in.

But what exactly was being achieved?

Perhaps discipline.

Perhaps consideration for the person sitting beside you.

Perhaps preparation for adulthood and the expectation that one day you would eat in places where people noticed such things.

But there was something else involved too.

Restraint. The body was supposed to be controlled. Sit properly. Hold the cutlery properly. Keep your elbows in. Chew quietly. Don't interrupt. Don't reach. Don't make a spectacle of yourself.

The successful child at the table was, in some respects, the child who had learned to contain himself.

The French Table

The family before me seemed to operate according to a different priority.

The table wasn't a place where children demonstrated that they had learned the rules.

The table was a place where the family came together.

Conversation was animated. Bodies moved. Hands gestured. Elbows wandered. Food was attacked enthusiastically. People talked, sometimes apparently before they had entirely finished chewing. And nobody seemed embarrassed.

Perhaps this was not French culture at all.

It was one family at one table on one afternoon, and it would be foolish to construct a theory of French child-rearing from six strangers eating lunch.

But the contrast with my childhood was irresistible.

Which Family Meal Was Better?

Suppose we had transported my childhood family to the next table.

I suspect our manners would have been better. Mouths closed. Elbows in. Food properly cut. No talking with a mouth full.

But would we have laughed as much?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

And that is where the question becomes interesting.

Because there are at least two ways of judging a family meal.

One asks:

Did everyone behave properly?

The other asks:

Did everyone enjoy being together?

Ideally, of course, you might hope for both.

But if forced to choose?

Sitting in the Place Saint-Sulpice, watching this wonderfully animated family demolish lunch with appalling technique, I wasn't entirely sure my childhood rulebook should automatically win.

What We Pass On

Every family passes something to the next generation.

Some pass religion. Some pass recipes. Some pass stories. Some pass expectations about education, work, money or marriage.

And some pass instructions about elbows.

My parents passed theirs to me so successfully that, perhaps seventy years later and thousands of kilometers from the dinner table of my childhood, I could still hear them.

Close your mouth.

Don't talk with a mouthfull.

Elbows in.

The French children across the square may inherit something different.

Perhaps they will remember long lunches. Grandmother at the table. Their father's laughter. Their mother's stories. The taste of Sunday lunch. The freedom to participate in adult conversation. The feeling that meals were occasions to be enjoyed rather than performances to be judged.

And perhaps they will pass that on.

The Boy with the Bad Haircut

I looked again at the youngest boy with the bad haircut.

He was eating. Talking. Laughing. His elbows were everywhere.

My parents would have had work to do.

But he looked extraordinarily happy.

So did his brother. So did his sister. So did their parents. So did their grandmother.

Six people. Three generations. One table.

Nobody on a phone. Nobody rushing away. Nobody apparently wishing they were somewhere else.

Perhaps their table manners were terrible.

Or perhaps I had been watching the wrong thing.

Because when lunch was over, I suspect the important question wasn't whether the children had kept their elbows in.

It was whether six people had enjoyed sitting around a table together.

And by that measure, the family at the Place Saint-Sulpice had impeccable manners.

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