A Day at the Prefecture

It's been quite a while since I've posted on my blog. I'm now in France with my family, supposedly teaching for the semester at the University of Montpellier. The beginning of our time in France has been fraught so far . . . Not especially fun to live but perhaps worth reading about? So here's my first entry . . .


I thought I’d give you a little taste (or reminder) of the legendary French bureaucracy.

Last week, I was told by Madame Loretz in Personnel at The University of Montpellier where I’m teaching for several months that I had been given the wrong visa by the Chicago Consulate. It’s actually NOT the wrong visa, but it was impossible to convince Madame Loretz of that. The visa is a three-month visa with a note attached (in English though it should be in French) stating that the three-month visa was not a mistake, and that I needed to report to the Prefecture within a week of entering French territory and apply for a Carte de Sejour. “No,” Madame Loretz insisted. “You need a Scientific visa.” As a result, she told me that they couldn’t pay me until I applied for my Carte De Sejour successfully and at least returned to her office on Friday with a receipt.

“Do not leave the Prefecture without a receipt!” she told me.

Actually, I understood none of what she said, but my handler, Phil Carr, originally from Edinburgh, but living in France for the past eleven years, translated for me. Phil is a few years older than I am, has bushy white eyebrows and gray hair and a muted Scots accent. His wife is from Belgium, but she pretends she’s from England because the French make fun of her accent even though, according to Phil, the Southern French have accents that deviate from standard French too, Instead of C’est bon,” for instance, they say, “C’est bongue.”

Madame Loretz told me that if I returned on Friday (today) with a receipt, they would be able to give me an advance for twelve days to last me the entire month of February. Twelve days?! I had been expecting the better part of a whole month’s pay. That’s what my predecessor had reported and what I had assumed would be the case for me since the pay never changed for visiting professors, I’d been told.

So today, Phil and I met near the gate of the university at Le Ranch (a brasserie) and took the tram to the center of Montpellier.

At the front of the Prefecture, a lone policeman with a metal detecting wand gave us the once over and let us through without a word.

The Prefecture teemed with people applying for this and that, the majority of the applicants North Africans, women with head scarves, some with children. The French officials sat behind their counters like Legionnaire’s defending a dusty outpost.

To our right was a set of chairs where most of the crowd waited and a little deeper in the hall was the Welcome Desk (Welcome in this case means Go Away). We timidly approached the Welcome desk and Phil explained to the man there my situation. I knew that this wasn’t going to be easy and I thought, Okay, go ahead, tell us we’re in the wrong place.

That’s what he did. He said I needed to go to the place that fills visas for students.

“”But he’s not a student!” Phil said. “He’s a professor.”

“Same thing,” the man said. “Same place.”

That didn’t sound right to Phil. “They hear a foreign accent,” he said, “and then they screw around with you.” I suggested that we ask one of his colleagues, two equally chipper and welcoming women.

One, a woman in her early fifties, told us that we needed to go to the “Offis” where they handled international students and scholars, and she gave us the address: 29 Rue de La Wild Goose (or something similar).

“She was nice this time,” Phil told me after we had left. “Last time I was there she was absolutely horrid to some North Africans. But you have the right color skin.”

We trekked about half a mile to the Rue de La Wild Goose and found #29, a building called Place du Martin Luther King that housed many offices, all of them deserted, and none of them the one we wanted. We walked into the building, climbed stairs, peered into windows, tried to find someone alive, but could find no one.

Finally we gave up and headed back to the Prefecture. An African man was wanded by the policeman at the gate and briefly searched, but when it was our turn, the policeman waved us through.

“And the French say they’re not racist,” Phil remarked.

Phil tried to tell the sometimes nice/sometimes nasty woman at the Go Away Desk that the place didn’t exist and she shrugged. She accused him of lying. “Don’t tell me you were unaware this isn’t the place to apply!” she said and called over the next person in line. I feebly tried to show the other woman my little note in the passport stating that I should apply for the Carte de Sejour at the Prefecture. She said she understood and then told us to bugger off. “We’re not going to deal with you two all day!”

But before we left I told Phil to get the phone number from them of the place where we were supposed to go. Reluctantly, they gave us the number and we buggered off.

With the number in hand, Phil called the office and they told him that no, they were not at Rue de La Wild Goose, but far away in another building.

Phil was incensed. “I’m going to go back and tell that woman at the Prefecture that she has the wrong address for the Offis.”

“Right,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll care a lot.”

We took the tram to the center of Montpellier to the Place de la Comedie,, and eventually found the right building and office. The woman there told us we had to go to the Prefecture. “But we’ve already been there,” Phil said, “and they told us to come here.”

“This is not the place,” she told us.

Phil asked her to call the Prefecture and I asked her for a note. A colleague of hers went to a back office and supposedly called the Prefecture and she put a little sticky note in my passport stating that they did not handle Carte de Sejours, that it was the Prefecture’s job. And then she affixed the most important thing in French life to the note: the Tampon, a little stamp making it official. The French are crazy for these things. A saying in France goes. The basic things in life are wine, bread, cheese, and the tampon.

My friend the writer Bret Lott made his own tampon when he taught a semester in France. It was a rubber stamp of Oscar from Sesame Street, which he’d smudge a little, and with this stamp in hand, he never had any problems with documents.

Phil and I were both deathly afraid of returning to the Prefecture Go Away Desk for a third time. He told me about a woman from New York who had been on the faculty two years ago. She never received her Carte de Sejour, he told me, though she went six times. She finally received her appointment for an interview three months after she had returned to New York.

“Well, this will be my third visit to the Prefecture, and all in one day,” I told him.

I gave him my passport and suggested he walk up to the Go Away Desk with my passport open to the page with the tampon, brandishing it like a vampire slayer might hold it to ward off vampires. He thought this was a good idea.

At the gate of the Prefecture, the policeman seemed to take notice of us for the first time.

“Where are you going?” he demanded.

“To the Prefecture,” Phil said, with an implied, “you Git,” appended to the sentence.

“What’s your business?”

Phil said something about an American professor and the policeman waved us in.

This time, we faced neither of the women at the Go Away Desk, but the first man who told us we had to go elsewhere. We showed him the note and he kindly told us that maybe we should go to the window where all the North Africans were waiting and talk to someone there.

“But once the number reaches a hundred, they will be done for the day, and all the numbers have been given out. You should come back in the morning. Or you could cut in line and ask them to help you.”

That was a lot of help. We went up to one of the windows just as the woman behind it was finishing with another customer. She said she wouldn’t help us without a number and that maybe we should go back to the guy we’d just spoken to and speak to him again.

People had been lining up for numbers since 5 a.m. A person who had arrived at nine received number 99. It was hopeless.

We gave up and decided we would try again another day, but as we were leaving, the policeman at the gate stopped us and asked us what the problem was. Phil told him in great detail and the policeman listened , then reached into his pocket and Voila! produced a ticket with a number! But it had already been called. So he reached in his pocket and pulled out another crumpled number. Number 56.

What? What had just happened and why? Phil and I were both baffled. But now Phil told the formerly indifferent, racist policeman (who might still of course be racist and indifferent to others, and of course by osmosis I was racist and indifferent for accepting the number when others had lined up since 5 a.m., but I was also tired and crumbling emotionally and I hadn’t eaten anything and it was nearly noon) he was tres gentil and we entered the Prefecture again. This time we waited with the North African women, who were laughing and joking among themselves, even as they were turned away, brushed off, and generally derided by the women in the windows. Phil chatted with several and we all commiserated and compared numbers. By this time, Phil had missed both his classes and was going to also miss a lecture he needed to supervise at one.

We waited an hour and a half. We were afraid that we might get the same woman who had told us she wouldn’t see us without a number. Phil worried that she might turn us away even with the number so we concocted a story that I, had taken a number idiotically , with no purpose in mind, just because that was my habit (some mild form of OCD) and that when she had asked him for a number, I had been too much in my own American world of numbers (56 being a favorite of mine) to realize that my number actually had a purpose.

It wasn’t quite that bad a story, but almost.

There had been only two women behind the window all morning, but eventually they put three on the job and the cases started moving rapidly. Usually, the scenario was this: North African man or woman pleasantly greets the dour woman behind the window. She asks for a dossier and papers are produced, after which she looks at the people as though they have asked her to serve them a coffee when obviously she has no coffee to give them. Why are they asking her for coffee? She, shakes her head, shrugs, and waves the person away.

Next!

When it was my turn, another dour woman took my passport and looked at it with great disapproval. We were summoned to a back room then where another official, a man, explained that we were in the wrong place.

Again with the wrong place.

This time, he produced a form, an actual form with all of the requirements I needed to bring and an address of the place I needed to bring it to. Not Martin Luther King Place. Not Rue de La Wild Goose, but somewhere new.

“Huzzah!” Phil and I cheered. “You mean we get to go somewhere else? We so love this type of day. We are filled with fondness and appreciation for all your many kindnesses.”

Or we might have looked at one another in astonishment.

But we did learn at least that I had, indeed, the correct visa, whether Madame Loretz believed it or not. He pointed to a capital “D” and gave us a nod of approval.

We asked if the man would call Madame Loretz for us. He wouldn’t because that would be seen as putting pressure on his office. We asked if he might then write a note to her explaining that my visa was correct. He consulted with his boss who said absolutely not because that might jeopardize their office’s good relations with the university.

At least, we had a piece of paper, though it was not the piece of paper Madame Loretz had asked for.

Back at the university, Madame Loretz was, of course, unbending. Yes, it was a Scientific visa, but not the correct scientific visa. Even when and if I ever got my portfolio together, it might still be rejected. And then she delivered the coup de grace. Yes, she would give me a pay advance still but now I wouldn’t receive it until February 10th.

They would only give me twelve days advance because she had been aware of my physical existence with twelve days left in the month. My payment started based on the day Madame Loretz first set eyes upon me, December 18th. This was something that no one had bothered to tell me. Or Phil. Otherwise, he would have brought me to see her the day after I arrived in Montpellier on the 11th. Still, I should have known this even though there was no way of knowing. It was a well-known fact, at least to Madame Loretz, that until you see Madame Loretz, you do not exist, and in fact, you still might not exist, no matter how many times you present yourself to her.

And by the way, she needed my birth certificate.

But I had sent it to Phil and he had given it to her.

“No,” she said. “I don’t have it.”

I probably looked ready to burst into tears when I left her office.

“Courage!” Madame Loretz called cheerily after me.