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Mes fatigués, mes pauvres, mes masses recroquevillées:
I know it’s been forever since I’ve been in touch with anyone, and though I’ve no long-term excuses, my short-term one is my increasingly bad mood brought on by recent and ongoing dealings with the infamous French bureaucracy. If the weather had been warmer last week I’d have probably found this latest phase of my Parisian Experiment highly entertaining. With the Bone-Chill Index in the mid-popsicles, however, the irrational inefficiency of Parisian fonctionnaires has kept me in a near-constant state of irritation, no matter how many times I chant to myself a much-recommended mantra about not taking these only-in-France experiences personally.
During my last visit to the States in November a man at the French Consulate in Washington was kind enough to grant me a “compétences et talents” visa, something they give to people they gamble might make some societal contribution of mutual benefit to France and the visa holders’ home countries. As with all long-stay visas, this one requires a visit to the local Prefecture of Police to obtain a residency permit —a carte de séjour—within two months of arrival, and as anyone who’s ever spent more than a few weeks here on anything but a tourist basis will tell you, the Prefecture offers a glimpse of the French bureaucracy at its Frenchiest bureaucracissitude.
I’ve read enough advice in memoirs of the Hapless France-based Expat variety to have considered myself equipped to avoid most pitfalls that form the basis of the genre, and of course that’s just the problem. I made the silly assumption that if I just read all instructions carefully and asked the right questions before starting the process, I would very simply become the first person in the history of French immigration law to get his carte de séjour with no delay and without a trip (or two, or three) to the pharmacy to buy headache remedies or tranquilizers. It even occurred to me (ever-so briefly) that, were I not such a lazy and undisciplined writer, the slim volume I would pen to describe the astounding simplicity and lack of effort by which I obtained my carte de séjour would stand out from others on the shelf, and in fact give way to a whole new literary genre: the Hapful France-based Expat Memoir.
I suppose it goes without saying after such ham-handed foreshadowing that things have not worked out quite as I imagined. As I’ve discovered, every story ever told about the endless French bureaucratic demands for trivial pieces of paper to be generated and copied and stamped and stapled and shuttled from one office to another so that they can be filed away, never to be looked at again, has been true. And the best way to experience it firsthand is to visit the Prefecture of Police. The volume of frivolous paperwork they generate would be jaw-dropping all by itself; what makes it truly hideous is that every request that a carte de séjour granter makes ensures that the petitioner will waste the maximum amount of his own time with no certainty whatsoever that the latest errand to find the most remote and rarely open office or the least accessible information will ultimately satisfy the ravenous appetites of the ever-masticating maws of French government filing cabinets—or, after finally satisfying one demand, that another will not have materialized while you were waiting in line on the other side of town to satisfy the previous one.
The Prefecture’s Web site indicates that as a resident of the 4th arrondissement I should report to the Prefecture on the Ile de la Cité, a 15-minute walk from my apartment. When I arrived, the receptionist there asked which arrondissement I lived in and then handed me a piece of paper with the address across town in the 17th arrondissement where residents of the 4th are to report (unlike residents of the 11th, who are instructed to report to the 14th), but not before making an appointment by telephone. The number being busy for three days, I went to the 17th where I took a number and waited my turn to ask if it was possible to make an appointment in person (or simply conduct the business at hand without an appointment) but was told that an appointment wasn't necessary because the type of visa I was issued required that I report to the Prefecture on the Ile de la Cité (the very office where the receptionist told me to report to the 17th). That office, I was told, doesn’t require appointments.
The secret, I was now eligible to be let in on by the Prefecture’s agent in the 17th, is not to ask the receptionist in the 4th where to report but to breeze past her and go straight to an upstairs office where, I find out only when I arrive, they issue not only cartes de séjour for holders of my type of visa, but also the definitive list of documents one should have known to gather before appearing there. This list, which is somewhat different from a similar list on their Web site and from the Washington Consulate (sources that someone who wasn't French might trust to be reliable for information needed before an appearance at the Prefecture), requests a birth certificate that must contain information one doesn’t find on American birth certificates. The woman who reviews the list with me so I can be certain I'm not imagining a reason for my frustration tells me the birth certificate also must be translated into French by an approved translator whom I can choose from another list that I must obtain by going to reception at the Palais de Justice, a few blocks away. When I show the woman that I have my birth certificate with me (as well as all other required documents) but it shows only my name and date and place of birth, but not any of the other information it’s expected to contain, and I ask her what exactly I should ask to have translated to meet the requirements, she shrugs and says she has no idea, even though I know—and she knows, and she knows I know—that she’s processed thousands of these applications in the past and therefore could easily tell me exactly what I need to do, which logically would be nothing, because: a) none of the information is vaguely relevant or useful; b) no one will ever look at any of these papers; c) in all likelihood no one would know where to look if they did ever need it; and d) no one cares.
The woman tells me that peut-être—perhaps—I could tell the missing information to one of the approved translators I hunt down off the list from the Palais de Justice, who could then write out it out in an affidavit, which I could then take to the American embassy to have notarized. (Surprisingly, the U.S. embassy does indeed provide notary services. They require an appointment, according to their Web site, the day of which I should arrive before the doors open and wait in line outside. From there I would be escorted through a number of security checks and take a number to wait to be called at some point before their close of business, although it is not clear—in fact seems unlikely—that the notary service the embassy provides is actually the service that the Prefecture needs or will accept.)
It is the woman’s word “peut-être” that I think of later while reading the nightmarish appointment procedure on the embassy’s Web site that makes me scrap that particular adventure, and now I am taking a break before I wade once again into the Prefecture’s murky waters.
À vos tours lors de vos numéros sont appelés,
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This story continues. Soon. I promise.






