California, Me Voil

On a mission to discover what the U.S. is really like, two of France's ablest magazine reporters flew into Kansas City early this year. Pierre Gosset, 42, and his 35-year-old wife Renee, who write as a team for Paris' handsome, perceptive monthly Realties, had previously explored 58 countries, from Argentina to Zanzibar. Last week, in the August number of Realties' French edition (circ. 135,000),* the Cossets told their story of life in the U.S., as seen "through fresh eyes" on their two-month, 27-state journey.

On the Road. With the help of that "national institution," the American Automobile Association, the Cossets bought a used Chevy (for $1,400) and started off. After years of driving a car in France, they were continually amazed at the courteous, law-abiding U.S. motorist (by contrast, "Anarchy and chaos prevail on the roads of France"). Stopping at a motel, the Cossets discovered that not all the patrons were bona fide tourists: "In fact, [motels] seem to solve delicate problems for people anxious not to offend the puritanism of cities."

In Jefferson, Iowa, the Cossets found a farmer foursome on the golf course ("French peasants will play golf the day that the Versailles Palace becomes a drive-in restaurant"), other farmers who fly their own Piper Cubs as much as 600 miles for a Sunday pleasure jaunt. Industrial workers were also plainly more prosperous in the U.S. than their French counterparts: in Pittsburgh, the Cossets met Patrick N. O'Connell, a rolling-mill foe man with a wife and eight children, who owns a station wagon, a TV set, his own home, gets no such "family allotment" as fecund Frenchmen get from a grateful government.

At California's Stanford University the Cossets studied the U.S. technique of "dating," learning that college rules forbid alcohol, but that it is proper for a coed to drink beer from a paper cup off campus. In Las Vegas, Nev. the Cossets would not have been surprised to find doctors trying to keep their gambling-mad patients happy with slot machines.

In Texas, the Cossets were startled to find the Lone Star Republic's flag still flying outside public schools alongside the Stars & Stripes, the French embassy still standing at the old Lone Star capital of Austin. They were even more startled by some of the tall tales Texans told until they realized that it was just gasconnade (as Frenchmen call the braggadocio of their own "Texans" of Gascony). In Crystal City, Texas, the world's self-styled spinach capital, the Gossets found a statue of Popeye in the public square.

Frenchmen who still pictured the South as a Scarlett O'Hara land of cotton plantations and Negro mammies were put wise: "To tell the truth, we did not see much cotton in the South. What we saw was oil, natural gas, helium, steel, magnesium, atomic energy and chemical plants." The Gossets were impressed with the advance of Negro education; they called all-Negro Howard University (in Washington, D.C.) "more modern than the average European university." To the French reporters, the Vieux Carre of French New Orleans was a fake--with its "pretentious airs of romanticism," its "tourist traps." In Paris, Tenn., the Gossets felt a twinge of outraged national pride at the "made in Paris" perfumes. But their spirits revived when they saw a horseman ride up to a parking meter, throw the bridle across the meter, dismount and deposit a coin.

Paradise Found. Hollywood, the Gossets found, "does not exist"; it has been entirely sublet to charlatans and parasites, "small people with small ideas." But San Francisco--"the most civilized, the most refined, the most cultivated and the most Mediterranean city of the U.S." captured the Gossets' hearts at first sight made them ready to sing "California, Me Voil`a!" (California, Here I Come). Last week, the memory still a warm glow, the roving Gossets were getting ready to move their home from Tangier to San Francisco.

-There is also an English-language edition (circ. 30,000), which will carry the Gossets' story in September.

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