Garcon! Souriez!

Caricatured on the Continent as camera-toting innocents abroad, the first postwar wave of American tourists descended happily on gay Paree. They weren't quite as dumb as Europeans liked to think, but France was still an unexplored territory. And with prices low compared to the U.S., the early tourists didn't care too much if the garc,on sneered at what they knew was a very generous tip, or if a sullen taxi driver overcharged them.

They care now. The French government discovered with a shock last year that though more and more tourists were arriving--at least 6,500,000 in 1964--they were spending less and less time in France, often using Paris as a touchdown point from which to go on to other European countries where prices were lower and courtesy greater.

With foreign-exchange earnings from tourism dwindling, the French Government Tourist Office is now trying to change things with a campaign to "revive the French tradition of hospitality and courtesy." It cannot do much about prices (hotels and restaurants are already up 10% since last year), but State Secretary for Tourism Pierre Dumas is launching a $200,000 "campaign of welcome and amiability." Customs inspectors at major airports are being told not to think of themselves as "agents of repression." Instead, each arriving female tourist will receive a tiny bottle of Weil's Antilope and a single rose or carnation.

To encourage concierges, waiters, taxi drivers and the like, each tourist will receive a "carnet de cheques-sourire" (checkbook of smiles), with tickets that he can tear out and distribute (along with his tip) as a reward for especially cheerful service. At the end of the season, 50 beaming Frenchmen with the largest number of smiles will win a brand-new car, a free vacation to Tahiti or the West Indies, or another prize. Will it work? One skeptical tourist official sighs, "Parisians are born complainers--they don't even like each other, not to mention tourists." And he shrugs: "The smile of a cafe waiter is more fleeting than a rose."

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