The Triumph of Aesthetics at the Post Office

August 1, 2013

     The Caunes post office has quirky hours: closed on Thursday afternoons, open only to 3 p.m. on the others, a visit is a mission, not a casual drop-by.  The space is quite small, with only one clerk behind one desk, and two or three chairs to sit in while waiting for the person being served to finish their transaction.

     Because transactions are frequently involved: the French post office also serves as a savings bank, and is where many people do their banking.  Everytime I have been there, someone is either depositing or withdrawing money.  Every time I have been there, too, there has been a different clerk at the window.

      The clerks are rotated from village to village.  During the summer holidays there are clerks called "remplaçants" who fill in for the permanent clerk on holiday leave.  I seem only to have met remplaçants, a man, a woman, and now another man, the latter a grizzly-haired man with a beard. When I call him a "facteur"  --the French word for postman-- he quickly corrects me, saying he is not a facteur, but a chef de service -- a department head.  Excuse my ignorance, I should have known.

     I ask about the Marianne stamps --no, they haven't any and probably won't until all the other stamps are sold.  On to the next topic: I need to buy five stamps to send postcards to the U.K., along with stamps for the U.S.  The chef de service pulls out a sheet of stamps featuring two images of Véhicules Postaux: on the left, one of a 19th century postal coach, a Malle-poste, 1840, pulled by a team of four horses; the other, on the right, of a modern post office van, a Renault Kangoo Z.E..  Although the vehicles are separated from each other chronologically by over 170 years, the side-by-side layout of the stamps has the stagecoach and the 21st century van seeming to drive on the same dusty road, the van a bit further along on the road, the same village behind stretching out behind them.    A very nice design a stamp collector would appreciate.

     I, however, am not a stamp collector, and all I want are five stamps for five postcards to be sent to the U.K.  In France, however, such considerations are secondary to crass considerations of utility.

     When I ask to be sold five stamps, the chef de service tells me I must buy six.  When I ask why, he tells me the sets cannot be broken up.  To instruct me in the matter of fine postage stamp design, he pulls out the sheet, puts his finger on the stagecoach, then runs it to the van.  "You see?  They cannot be sold separately."

     I buy six stamps.