French and German in particular have an interesting feature that you can use the plural form of you when talking to a single person to convey extra respect.
That's definitely true in French (using
vous instead of
tu to convey extra respect), but that's somewhat inaccurate in German, where the "respectful" form of
du is, as far as I can tell,
Sie, which is more like the German for "they" (and also for "she" *). But I'll leave it to German native-speaking monks to confirm and elaborate further if needed.
Update: * But the verb is conjugated at the 3rd person plural, so it appears it's really "they," not "she."