The Bisou

Running into an acquaintance the other day while at the boulangerie, I stop in the middle of ordering my usual cinq croissants et un baguette and lean in for the traditional greeting of ‘kiss-kiss’ or, as they call it in France: le bisou, but she expects an extra kiss-kiss, so we end up bobbing our heads gracelessly at each other for a moment, like two confused pigeons.  The bisou is a kiss given when two already acquainted people cross each other’s paths, and I understand it is to be given each and every time they ever meet again for the rest of their lives.  If one goes to the bakery, the butcher, the open market and the newspaper man every morning, that’s at least 8 kisses – add running into neighbors and cousins and old boyfriends and any other acquaintance you’ve ever made, and by the time you get back home, you’ve just kissed more people in one morning than a game show host has kissed contestants in a week.  I suppose I should be thankful that at least the French don’t jump up and down and scream while I kiss them.

When greeted, the more kisses you give and receive signifies how much you and the other person like each other.   It could be two or four or even six kisses.  (I once saw an old woman give eight in one greeting, but I was told later that her morals are suspect.)  The more kisses one gives you in France, the more one is conveying their fondness of you, and it’s a ritual everyone is expected to partake in – even if they are Americans.  If it’s pouring down rain and you forgot your umbrella and you’re darting through flashes of lightning across a puddled parking lot trying to find a public bathroom for your crying 5 year old who didn’t use the toilet as you had told her to, twice, before she left the house, and you happen to cross the path of someone you were introduced to a long time ago at a festival, you are obliged to stop and kiss-kiss this relative stranger as if he is your best friend Lazarus come back from the dead.   Because for the French tradition is everything.  If I’ve been introduced to this person – even if I don’t actually remember his name, even if for all I know he is a serial killer – then I must do my part to guarantee the very advancement of civilization by kissing him right then and there in the parking lot, rain and bladders and health be damned.