The Joy of Elevators

I feel like I've been a little hard on the French lately—accusing them of forming clumps and not lines and detailing the horrors of my particular experience with French banks. But let me take a moment to tell you something that I find extremely admirable chez les Français, because for all their quirks, I do love the French. (I did, after all, choose to live in France.)
Public transportation in France is a great thing. I don't have a car, and aside from the weekends when my fiancé travels home from school and drives me around in his tiny, neon green Nissan Micra, I exist solely on buses, trains, trams, and metros. I can go anywhere I need, nearly whenever I need to go there.
However, when I look around, I notice that public transport can be really difficult for anyone with a physical handicap, with a child in a stroller, or with luggage. Sure, some stations are equipped with elevators, but many aren't. The stations that aren't handicapped accessible have a whole lot of stairs to climb, and believe me, when you're lugging a suitcase around, navigating these stations can be pénible.
But here's the good part of living in France: all those perfectly coiffed French men whizzing past you in their black suits and thin ties heading to or from work will often wordlessly bend over, grab the edge of your baby carriage or the handle of your suitcase, and help you maneuver those stairs. You'll shout merci at their backs, but they'll keep walking. It's all in a day's work.
The other day, I took a train from Nogent to Pontault. I was traveling in the middle of the day, and there were only a handful of people on the train. I got off at my stop and vaguely noticed another three people get off at the same stop, all of them wheeling along their luggage.
We came to the stairs, and it was just me and these three people and their inordinate amount of luggage. Our three friends were attempting to make it down the stairs with three large suitcases, one dog in a carrier, and if we're being honest, lots and lots of body fat.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched them for a second. I felt bad, so climbed back up the stairs and offered my help. They eyed me dubiously, but one of the group, an older woman, handed me her suitcase and said “Merci.”
I grabbed the handle and started walking the suitcase down the stairs. What I didn't take into consideration was the fact that the stairs had been recently cleaned and were still quite wet. Also, I was wearing my tiny black ballet flats that slide on any wet or dry, inclined or flat, natural or man-made surface. So, not surprisingly, only a few steps down, my foot slipped, and I slid down the stairs.
I landed on my back just outside the turnstiles, wriggling around like a beetle. The woman who's case I was still holding came flying down the stairs after me, calling, “Are you all right? Are you all right?”
I was fine. A little humiliated, but fine.
She took my arm and helped me up. She said, “Oh dear. Now that isn't how you carry a suitcase.” She shook her head, “It isn't how you do it at all.” She righted the suitcase, took the handle, and demonstrated. “You need to lift from your legs, not your back.”
I took the suitcase, mimed her movement, and she nodded.
I dragged the suitcase through the turnstiles and waited on the other side for the woman and her fellow travelers to make it through. The two women made it through just fine—pas de problème—, but the man waited on the other side with the remaining suitcases and the dog. He reached the dog over the turnstile and dropped it on the other side. The dog howled. The ladies screamed and rushed over to the animal carrier.
“Why would you do that?” one yelled. “You just dropped him!”
“Oh,” he said. That was it. Just “oh.”
One woman picked up the dog and then there was a lot of shuffling and arguing and pushing until the suitcases and the man passed through onto the other side. We divided the luggage between us and staggered up the last set of stairs, onto street level. Once there, the vocal lady of the group said to a security guard standing by the gate, “A town of this size should really have an elevator.”
“We do,” he said, pointing to the opposite exit. “Over there.”
All of them turned to look at me, and I blushed. “I didn't know,” I said. "I promise I didn't know." I apologized and hurried off home.
Next time I'll know, though, because, you see, France is a wonderful place, full of public transportation, helpful, well-coiffed Frenchmen, and at times, even elevators.