July 2013 - 41

A letter from France

unkempt. "Monsieur Tacchi?"
"Oui."
"Je suis Jean-Paul Géré, bonjour, we
play the Standard French five-card
majors and third and fifth leads,
OK?" Italics denote he was speaking
in French, but I know that there are
one or two of you who are even less
fluent than I am, so I have taken the
liberty of translating. This convention
shall continue.
"Oui" is my timorous reply and we
make our way to Table One, North-
South. Fortunately, through the power
of the Internet I have had the chance
to read a little about the standard
French system. We have an average
session (five beers) and win with 75%.
One of the most important things
I quickly learnt about the club was
that it had a cheap bar; at that time it
was about 50 pence for any drink. I
gained considerable "brownie points"
for consuming pastis (generally found
as Pernod in England, though there
are many different brands) at the
same rate as the president. It is also a
little known fact that one's ability to
converse in French increases directly
proportionally to the number of pastis
one has consumed.
Thus, by the end of the evening
I was fully accepted and a paid up
member of Nogent Le Rotrou Bridge
Club. Moreover, Monsieur Le President asked me to play with him again
the following evening. Yet again we
won and surprisingly yet again we
retired to the bar, this time for large
whiskies. At about two in the morning, I was asked to play for the club
first team. Though I am confident they
were interested only in my ability, the
fact that one of the team members
was unavailable for the next match
may have influenced their decision.
The match was the next Friday at
7 p.m., a time that surprised me as it
did not really allow time for a proper
dinner beforehand and would probably finish too late to eat a decent meal
afterwards. So yet again, I arrived 15
minutes early, having had a light but
sufficiently substantial meal. Happily,

Jean-Paul was already there, so we
drank a couple of aperos and talked
about our system. At about 7:05, the
others started to arrive and more aperos were consumed. We then played
16 boards, scored up and found we
had a comfortable lead.
I sat down again at the table and
started to get ready to redeal the
boards when I was summoned into an
adjoining room, where we proceeded
to consume a full four-course meal
with copious quantities of wine and,
fortunately, coffee.
Off we go again and play another
16 boards and win the match with
some ease. It is now well after 1 a.m.,
and one would have thought that all
would have rushed home to slumber,
but no, now the most important part
of any French match commences, the
postmortem. It is frequently accompanied by a glass or two and is especially important if one has won and even
more especially important (I was to
learn later) if one has lost.
One thing that does surprise me is
that the European tour undertaken by
Timothy the Toucan and the Rueful
Rabbit has hardly been reported in the
bridge press. It may surprise you to
know that their first port of call was
actually in Nogent Le Rotrou. What is
even more surprising is that we have
several people in our club who would
have felt completely at home in the
Griffins Club, and had they been there
I am sure that Victor Mollo would
have written about them.
I will briefly mention two of these.
The first is Papi, a French child's
name for a grandfather. He retired
comfortably several years ago at the
age of 55. He has two passions in life,
the first being to ignore the constant
hectoring of his wife. In fact, such is
his skill in this area that local ducks
who are having a problem shaking
water off their backs go to him for
advice. Papi's second passion is to replay the previous hand of bridge, partially out loud, partially in his head.
Because of the nature of the game of
bridge, this normally occurs whilst he

is playing the subsequent deal and of,
course, this frequently gives rise to
much to talk about the previous board
when he is playing the next.
As you can imagine, it is transparently obvious that the majority of
the time he is completely confused,
probably as nearly confused as the
previous sentence. The second player
is "Le Prof." He can best be described
as an intelligent Walrus. He knows the
French system better than anyone. In
fact, such is his knowledge that it is
he who teaches the newcomers to our
club, yet somehow his results never
seem to do justice to his profound
learning.
Now Timothy and the Rabbit had
prepared assiduously for their tour.
The Rabbit kept dreaming up more
and more new conventions for them
to play. One of his latest was that if
hearts was the agreed trump suit, then
4 would act as Blackwood. Meanwhile, Timothy had been polishing his
schoolboy French. He insisted that
he should try to talk to the natives in
their own tongue as a matter of politeness, especially as they were being so
well looked after by their hosts.
As luck would have it, Timothy and
the Rabbit were up against Papi and
the Prof for the first four boards. The
Rabbit as usual was South whilst Papi
was in the West seat. It was agreed
that Timothy would explain all Alerts
as his partner was rather more linguistically challenged.
The first board was, as usual, a bit
of a problem for Papi, as he had no
previous deal to comment on and
was caught nearly concentrating on
the cards in front of him. The Rabbit
was a little flustered as he had been
unaware that in France, it is South
who is in charge of the table and fills
in the traveling score sheet and puts
the boards on the table. His confusion increased during the second deal
as now Papi was constantly talking
about the first deal.
So now we come to the first board
that interests us. It was the third
one that was played, but the RabJuly 2013 Bridge Bulletin

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