“What is your nom de jeune fille?” the banker asked me, as he entered my vital info in his computer to open my account. Jeune means young and fille is girl, or daughter, but the phrase jeune fille means something else altogether. A teenage girl, or a woman in her twenties. A sweet young thing, a hot chick, or as they say here, a nana (which is not a synonym for grandma, believe me). What’s my hot chick name? I don’t know? Can I make one up?

I didn’t say that, though. Instead, I asked, “The name of my daughter?” and started to spell it.

“No, your name before you were married.”

My maiden name. Because a jeune fille is also a maiden (or at least she was in Shakespeare’s time). A mademoiselle.

“We have to ask whether you want to use your maiden name,” he said. “And we have to use Madame, whether you are married or not. It’s a new law.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Everyone received a memo from the government. It’s illegal to use Mademoiselle anymore.”

“We got the memo, too,” said the woman from human resources, who was acting as our intermediary (because, apparently, it’s next-to-impossible to open an account without a connection).

“You can’t even call children Mademoiselle?” my husband asked. He was trying to endear himself to our French bureaucrats by engaging in the small talk we’ve been told is essential to doing any business here. If a fifteen-minute transaction takes an hour, count it successsful, because it’s all about “relationship building.”

“If fillettes start opening bank accounts, imagine, I’ll have to call them Madame!” our banker chuckled. I wondered, but didn’t ask, why little girls need titles at all.

Our previous account, at a different bank, listed our names (without asking how we wanted them) as M ou Mme James Harrigan, or Mr. and Mrs. James Harrigan. A title is not just symbolic, but practical, since this one caused many wasted hours trying to track international wire transfers that were unable to make the connection from Mrs. James Harrigan to me. I had disappeared.

But I’m back. I can’t choose my own nom de jeune fille, but I can invent a nom de plume. Candy? Bunny? Gigi? Perhaps something, like the phrase jeune fille itself, which seems to mean so many different things to so many different people—young but not too young, innocent and old-fashioned, worldly and nubile—at the same time.