la crise de foie, ça n’existe pas!
The phrase “lung crisis” reminds me of my old friends Paul-Jacques and Anita — a French couple I knew from my film school days. I attended their wedding (as Paul-Jacques’s witness) in Paris when I was five months pregnant with R Jr. It was quite a weekend. The same night I arrived in town, I fell down the stairs of the apartment building they were squatting in (no heat or hot water, no lights in the corridor — which is why I fell down the stairs). Deciding that a dillapidated, cold-water flat on the fringes of Paris was NOT the best place to care for my unborn child, I was happy to discover my dad on a business trip staying at the Meridien Etoile. The rest of my visit was spent luxuriating in a massive bubble bath, watching color T.V. (in English!) and letting my dad bring me to lunch at swanky places like Le Train Bleu, which sits at the top of a big marble staircase in the Gare De Lyon. No sooner had we left the restaurant when I fell down those stairs, too.
It was also a challenge trying to eat healthy: everything I came across was drenched in butter and cream. Paul-Jacques gave me a couple of tablets to swallow before the wedding reception. He said that what with all the rich foods and champagne, one must be careful or one might suffer a “crise de foie” or “liver crisis.” Which brings me back to my original thought.
Trying to figure out what a liver crisis is, I ran a search on the French phrase “crise de foie,” which returned a bunch of amusing pages about this common complaint and whether it is something real or imagined. It helps if you can read French, because if you use the Google “translate this page” feature, you get this:
“Too much eaten, of chocolates in particular… Et paf! you slaps a bilious attack! Sympathetic… But with the fact, the bilious attack, it is what?”
