Top Five Misconceptions about les français

5. French people eat a lot of baguettes.

There is a big difference between a baguette and a baguette de tradition -- typically called a tradition (tra-DIH-see-ohhn) around here. The latter is more expensive, but also more delicious. So this is actually a technicality. Baguettes and traditions are both eaten quite regularly.

4. French people don't shower. And they smell.

Stereotype! Smelly people and clean people can be found in all corners of the globe.

3. French people don't work hard.

I don't always work so hard, but that's not a culture-wide phenomenon.

2. The Sorbonne is the best school in France.

Before coming to France, I'd heard about the Sorbonne, and was made to think that anyone who had a degree from there was really something. Nope. Perhaps in the US it is the most well-known French university. However, the most prestigious schools here are called les grandes écoles and they include Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole nationale d'administration (a factory for churning out future French politicians), the écoles normales supérieures, and several others.

1. French people like to say ''oh la la!'' or ''c'est la vie'' and ''crème de la crème.''

While they do say ''oh la la'' quite a bit (I love to say it for dramatic effect in a variety of situations, too),  I have never heard the other two expressions used.  You're more likely to hear ''C'est top!'' or ''C'est fashion!''

Monday

A few days ago my Great-Aunt Nora died. Nora lived in a trailer park in Maine, and did her shopping at the park's convenience store, unless she got a ride to the supermarket from her friend Amber, or someone in our family. Nora had a sweet tooth and a zest for life; she celebrated both with a splash of Bailey's in her coffee, and a scratch-and-play lottery ticket whenever the budget allowed (probably even when it didn't). I remember her modest home filled with Pomeranians and stray cats, giant cans of Chock full o' Nuts coffee, stale cigarette smoke, piles and piles of magazines and promotional flyers, and best of all, her bubbly, rolling laugh. ''Heee-heee-heee,'' she would giggle, tipping forward with her dowager's hump. My father loved Nora -- she was my mother's aunt -- and always insisted on visiting her before going home, even though that pit stop meant an hour-long detour before an eight-hour drive.

As my brother and I discussed the flowers we would send to the funeral home, my mind drifted towards the autumnal horizon, which will forever be linked with the anniversary of our own father's death. His passing was swift and unexpected, though when I had seen him the day before, I said, ''Goodbye, Captain,'' and somehow knew that it was a final goodbye. The next day I woke as usual. Before going to class, I called home. No one answered, but I left a message, thanking my parents for bringing me homemade applesauce and cinnamon raisin bread. We shared love through food, and my belly was the best emblem of this love. That evening, I had a three-hour lecture, from 7 - 10pm.

Sometime before eight, while sitting in the lecture hall, I started to panic and feel agitated. I tried to wait for the class break, but suddenly, and without knowing why, I gathered my things, left the lecture hall, and immediately called home. When no one answered, I called my mom on her cellphone. At that moment, she was driving down the lane to our house. Richards Lane is a narrow road with barely enough room for one car to pass. In early November, there are few remnants of the plush tree canopy that beckons you down the hill, and since the lane is privately owned, there are no street lamps. Our house, built by my grandfather in 1936, is at the end of the quarter-mile path.

I don't remember what my mom and I were talking about until she said, ''that's funny, daddy didn't leave the lights on for me.'' We chatted as she parked the car and walked up to the backdoor. ''Hmm. There's a note on a business card: 'Taken to the hospital - call police.' Johanna, something's happened to daddy, let me call you back.''

A few minutes passed and my phone did not ring. So I called her back. ''Johanna,'' my mom said in a frazzled voice, ''I haven't found your father yet. I am going to have to call you back.'' I sat on the steps behind my dorm and waited. Then my phone rang. ''Johanna,'' my mom began. ''I have some terrible news. Daddy died. . .When they couldn't find him in the ER, I knew to call the morgue.''

These melancholy memories were only heightened last night when I watched Sir Terry Pratchett's documentary, Choosing to Die. It chronicles his interviews with a few people who, like himself, were considering Dignitas, an assisted-suicide facility in Switzerland. Prachett currently battles Alzheimer's, and wants assisted suicide to be legalized in the UK.  Towards the end of the film, a woman sits by her husband as he drinks the poison, then begs for water (he is denied by the Gravitas staff member, who urges him to relax), falls asleep, and dies. The whole process takes fifteen minutes, but is condensed to two or three in the documentary. Sir Prachett is in the room as it happens, and as the viewer, so are you.

Lately I've been reading French Children Don't Throw Food by Pamela Druckerman, an absorbing, yet frustrating comparison of Anglo-Saxon and French child-rearing habits.What's most difficult about living in France is that I miss both: births and deaths. A good friend gave birth in Los Angeles on Thursday night; another gave birth nine months ago, but who knows when I will meet either baby. Coming home for Nora's funeral is hors question, but sending flowers feels like an unsatisfying ritual. Does it matter if we choose a colorful bouquet or standard white lilies?

With my balcony doors open this morning, I can once again hear the steady cries of the children playing at school across the street. The voices will change and the sounds will vary, but the gaiety remains strong all day long. I keep thinking that my life will morph into a neat, and easy-to-digest Hollywood ending (one of these days), but instead, I'm starting to think that messy and bittersweet are here to stay.

How to make a bad impression

As far as work goes, I've been feeling pretty good about myself lately. Not because I've been working a lot, per se, but because of what I'm doing: I just started researching at the Musée d'Orsay for a museum back in the US. My job is to comb through files in search of any pertinent information on the French painters in the US museum's collection, and any published or unpublished material on the paintings in the US museum itself. The documentation center at the Orsay is on the fourth floor, and my preferred seat is by the window, overlooking the Seine. Surrounded by shelves and shelves of brown acid-free boxes, long white tables, and overhead lamps that hang too low, I've become friendly enough with some of the documentalists, so going to work has been satisfying, to say the least.

Last week I was working on Léon Lhermitte, and despite my background in the decorative arts, I knew nothing of this painter. I quickly became intimate friends with him and his series of wood block prints and pastels. Things got good and exciting when I had to start cross-referencing his files with separate files on 19th century Parisian Salons. He'd won an award or two, and I wanted photocopies from the Salons which proved those distinctions. Next I mined exhibition catalogue bibliographies for other references to his work, and happily copied the relevent pages from those other works. I carefully flipped through crumbling gallery catalogues (in which his work was featured) that survived from the 1890s, and copied those fragile pages as well.

Lhermitte is known for painting real figures in his life, and I wondered about the tired faces and ample bodies that he painted. It seemed fitting to be learning about Lhermitte's fascination with farmers and farming (potatoes and wheat, notably) just as I was vamping up my own home garden with kale (the first sprouts have shot up!).

Today I was a bit less excited to start on Monet because there are more than 80 boxes. And, to be frank, because it's Monet. This summer I visited his house in Giverny, and only after seeing his magnificent gardens am I willing to look at his work with a little bit of pleasure. Monet completed about 2,000 paintings, and many of them center around his homes, including those at Giverny and Argenteuil. A little bit boring, non? I started to think that if Monet had been around in the time of Facebook, he probably would have photo-bombed his page with photos or paintings of Giverny much in the same way that many of us photo-bomb our own pages with personal photos, too. The main difference is, he was able to afford some fine bottles of Bordeaux because of the success of his repetitive canvases; I have not yet reaped similar rewards.

As I rifled through boxes on Argenteuil this afternoon, I kept seeing files labeled with ''Wildenstein'' and then a number. I sensed there was something important in this coding, but didn't think to figure it out on my own. And there is no such thing as a stupid question, right?

Proud of my fearlessness (stupidity?), I walked up to the documentalist and asked what that coding meant. Today the front desk was occupied by an unfamiliar face. The man was seemingly disgruntled to be disturbed from his work, especially to be disrupted by an outside researcher. Who was a woman. And foreign.

I pointed to the mystery code on the front of the file and asked for help. ''Well,'' he snidely began, ''that refers to Daniel Wildenstein, who is the author of the catalogue raisonné of note for Monet's body of work. It is the ultimate reference guide when doing research on Monet.''

I cringed as I realized I'd been caught. I tried to imagine what he must have been thinking about me, and the countless hours I'd spent researching in his department, while seemingly knowing nothing of 19th century French painting. Gathering from his reaction, researching impressionism and not knowing about Wildenstein is a little bit like studying American movies of the 20th century and not knowing about Siskel and Ebert (or, since I clearly don't study film either, insert your more academic movie critic here). Fortunately, I didn't have too much time to feel self-conscious, because my upset stomach, which has been surprising me with bouts of trouble since Thursday, revved into action.

So in addition to feeling foolish about my mediocre knowledge, I also began to feel self-conscious about my inefficiency at work. Whenever I walked by the grumpy documentalist to get to the ladies' room, I imagined him scoffing and uttering a very soft, ''putain!''

Last week I was explaining this job to a friend here, and he remarked, ''that's great! And then you'll get to write up your findings, right?'' I paused for a minute, wondering if I should feel bad that I didn't have to draw any impressive and intelligent conclusions about these painters. Then I said, ''no. That's not my job. I'm just doing the research, which I send to the US. I don't really feel the need to have any big ideas. I'm simply happy to be learning.'' And that is the truth. I don't want to be an expert on Lhermitte or Monet. I simply want to go back in time, pretend I'm living in the late Victorian period (sans oxygen-restricting corset, of course), and see that a lot of the painting that came out of this time was not overwhelmingly sophisticated: it was a bunch of guys sitting in their backyards, thinking it looked pretty, or feeling sad that industrialization was taking over, and setting paint to canvas.

I'll be back at the Orsay tomorrow afternoon, scouring everything and anything written by Monsieur Daniel Wildenstein. More importantly, I'm looking forward to moving on to Renoir later this week.