(Not Quite) Mastering the Art of French Living

by Mark Greenside

  10. Rule Number Four: No rush. The only way to get out of the hospital in a day or two is not to go in. A splinter in France is not a splinter. It is a breakage of the skin, a rupture, a foreign invasion, and if not an actual problem yet, a potential one: infection. And unlike unemployment, strikes, immigrants, or farmers dumping artichokes and milk on the highway, this is something they can do something about, so they order more tests and prescribe more drugs. Anything that could possibly happen must be explored and stopped and treated so it won’t happen—and all of that takes time, a resource French people excel at using.

  “Je Voudrais Une Con Avec Deux Boule . . . ”

  Before I bought my house in Plobien, I thought French was the most beautiful language in the world. Now, I think it’s the most difficult. It’s not the language per se—which is no more difficult than Finnish, Hungarian, or Xhosa—but the precision with which it must be used. French people care more about the precise usage of French than they do about the precision of their products, which is why the Académie Française is more important than the French Better Business Bureau, and why I’m a functional illiterate and my thermos and vacuum don’t work.

  I Am, I Have, I Go

  I know words—lots of words—especially cleaning, plumbing, and hardware words. I understand most signs (except road sign directional arrows) and can communicate with anyone willing to listen to me: people with lots of time, goodwill, and fortitude, who are mostly my friends; strangers who don’t know better; and shopkeepers who wish to make a sale. I’m like the peasant in those movies set in the dark ages or India who hands a piece of paper to a scribe, asking him—it’s always a he—to read it to me and write a reply. If France had a twelve-step program for illiterates, every day would begin like this: “Bonjour. Je m’appelle Marc, et je suis illettré.” As far as I know, no such program exists, so I don’t have to say it, but I think it and feel it most of the time.

  I didn’t set out to be illiterate anymore than Lou Gehrig set out to have Lou Gehrig’s disease. In my dreams, I sound like Charles Aznavour and Yves Montand. I write like a transplanted Beckett. However, between my dreams and my tongue falls reality—and the reality is I can’t speak, read, or write anything a French person would consider to be French, though it’s not for the lack of trying.

  Years before I bought the house and entered my French life, LeRoy and I enrolled in a conversational French class at Merritt College, where we both taught U.S. history. We enrolled to meet women, though we weren’t opposed to learning French. We believed learning French was the kind of useless, interesting activity intelligent women were likely to do.

  The class was an evening class, and good students that we were, we got to the first class early. The room was full, standing-room only, and lots of good-looking women were there. The teacher, a good-looking woman herself, began speaking French—and never stopped. No English at all. Nada . . . Nadda word. LeRoy and I sat there studiously listening when all of a sudden, a quarter of the students raised their hands. Fifteen minutes, I thought, and I’m already sixteen behind.

  “What do you think she said?” LeRoy whispered.

  “‘Are you registered for this class?’ That’s what I always ask.”

  We raised our hands.

  The next thing we know, we’re sitting in the smart people’s group, where we discover the question was, “Who’s taken French before?” We then did what every upwardly mobile student driven by success and fear of failure and foolishness does in this situation: we volunteer. We volunteer to find a dozen more chairs. We volunteer to carry the chairs into the class and to set them up. We volunteer to find chalk, colored markers, and erasers; we show the teacher, a Madame Gironde, where the projector is, how to use it, where to locate a screen, get copies made, find the dean, the faculty bathroom, coffee during the break, a water fountain, the mail room, maps. We volunteered so much we were hardly in class. The one thing we did understand was none of the interesting women were interested in us. By the third class, the only question remaining was whether LeRoy or I would be the class dunce. Having no incentive to find out, we quit. I lived the next fifteen years perfectly content with subtitles. Then, I bought a house in France . . .

  I returned to California determined to learn French. I began at Alliance Française in Berkeley, where I quit after two months because they were way over my head. Later, I enrolled at the Piedmont Adult School, where I quit because I was way over my head. Finally, in the privacy of my home, I watched French in Action videotapes, which by lesson number nine became French inaction, because I stopped doing the homework. I never got beyond être, avoir, and aller—I am, I have, I go. It’s my version of veni, vidi, vici, minus the conquering . . .

  Bon Usage

  I can’t pronounce the R, so I turn it into W, making Roissy Woissy, and sound like Elmer Fudd speaking French. My friend Thierry becomes sherry—or worse, chéri—which thankfully he never figures out or responds to. To say pain and vin correctly, I have to hold my nose to nasalize, not the most polite way to shop for bread or wine. Imagine: I walk into a store, hold my nose, and say, “Le pain, s’il vous plaît.” How’s that going to go over? The only good news is H is silent and I never have to pronounce it, like in New York.

  Then there’s gender. This is a language where every word has sex. No wonder French people are considered lascivious. Melons and vaginas are masculine and cars and motorbikes are feminine. There’s no logic to it. You can’t figure it out. You learn it osmotically or genetically by being French. On several occasions, I’ve introduced myself as an American girl—“Je suis américaine,” and I’ve changed the sex of both of my neighbors, calling Françoise (Françwaas) François (Françwa), and vice versa, thereby outing them and their heterosexual partners as either very butch couples or transsexuals—and that’s not even the worst of it.

  The worst is you. In English, there’s one you—there’s only you—which makes speech easier and simpler, though definitely not clearer. In French, there are two, a formal (vous) and a familiar (tu), thereby acknowledging the complexity of life and making it even more so. You would think having two yous and recognizing different categories of relationships would be helpful, but it’s not.

  I’ve asked all my bilingual friends in France—Henri, Jean, Sharon, Gilles, Tatjana, and Bruno—when to use tu and vous. No one knows. Sure, they all say use vous if the person you’re speaking with is superior to you in age, education, status, profession, income, and stature, which is easy if she or he is ninety years old with a PhD, a doctor or a lawyer, making 200,000 euros a year, six foot five, with the Croix de Guerre—or a complete stranger. Short of that, there’s trouble.

  For example, you’re introduced to your wife’s second cousin for the first time, or a new colleague, classmate, roommate, neighbor, or best friend’s girl- or boyfriend, and before you say a word, you have to assess if the person is older, smarter, or richer than you—thereby asking yourself every day, in every new encounter, is this person superior to me? In the U.S., land of equality and individualism, the answer is universally no, and the inferior go around feeling superior. In France, land of liberté, égalité, et fraternité, the answer is also no, but the response is yes, because people fear committing faux pas and thereby publicly affirming their inferiority to their inferiors.

  The result is I say vous to everyone: Jean and Sharon’s sons, Noé and Yann; Marie and Gaëlle, whom I’ve known since they were teenagers; Gilles and Tatjana’s two young boys; everyone, including my closest friends and Monsieur and Madame P, is vous.

  Mostly, people ignore me, but Louis and Jocelyne, my former next-door neighbors, tell me it’s jarring and grating to hear vous when they’re tutoyering me. The way they say it, I suspect it might even be offensive. Still, I hold the line and continue to say vous, because I know once I cross it, I’ll have the same problems French people have, and I need those problems even less than they do.

  This works until the day Monsieur and Madame P, who have been tutoyering
me for years, demand I tutoyer them and call them Joe and Yvonne. I cringe just thinking about it, but not to do so after they ask would be disrespectful—the last thing I wish to be. So I compromise: I continue saying vous and call them Yvonne and Joe when I have to, like when introducing them to friends. “C’est Yvonne. C’est Joe.” But mostly I try to say as little as possible, and even that often turns out to be too much.

  The problem is, if you ignore conjugation, pronunciation, gender, and grammar, as I do, French appears to be easy.

  For one thing, there are a lot fewer French words than English. The Petit Larousse has about 75,000 words; Webster’s Third New International has 470,000. The average French person uses 3,500 words, with 1,500 being the minimum for everyday life. The average American uses 10,000. For someone trying to speak French, this is a major plus.

  Even better, more than one-third of English words originate from French, and many of them are the same: words like bureau, comment, loin, chose, bras, pays, ton, store, and main. Unfortunately, they have different pronunciations and meanings in French. Still, it’s comforting to see these words, and it makes French feel familiar and accessible to people who know nothing, like me.

  It also helps that French is literal, logical, and rational. You can almost see the language developing: apple is pomme; potato is pomme de terre, apple of the earth; sky is ciel; rainbow is arc en ciel, arc in the sky; earth is terre; earthquake is tremblement de terre; to fall or faint is tomber par terre; a butterfly is papillon; a moth is papillon de nuit, a butterfly of the night; a mouse is souris, a bat is chauve-souris, a bald mouse. Pretty clear—except for the bald mouse.

  The truth is the vocabulary is relatively easy. It’s the bon usage—using the right word, tense, grammar, pronunciation, gender, and form, as well as making incomprehensible chain-reaction-like liaisons between the consonant at the end of one word and the vowel at the beginning of the next—that’s bewildering. It’s like driving: the cars are small, fast, efficient, familiar; the roads are great. I get behind the wheel and everything is where it should be—mirrors, signal, horn, brakes, lights, defroster—and I think, I know what I’m doing, and then I drive in circles and get lost.

  In English, I end a business letter with “Sincerely.” In French, it’s “Nous vous remercions, et vous souhaitons bonne réception de notre courrier”: We thank you, and we hope you like what our letter says. This is from a chimney repair person I met once. How do you construct a sentence like that? And why? In French, it is proper, formal, florid, and clear, conveying mood, intent, and content. In English, it’s a waste of time, ink, words, paper, and space—and reads as insincere. In American English, people tend to write as they speak, unless they’re lawyers. In France, people try to speak the way Proust writes.

  In English, what a person says matters most: “Je suis ici hier.” I am here yesterday. It isn’t elegant or proper, but it is understandable to a French person, which is what’s most important to an English speaker—and the most important difference between English and French.

  In English, if you’re understood, make your point, and convey the required information accurately—Je suis ici hier—you have successfully communicated. Not so in French. In French, it’s how you say it, and if you don’t say it correctly, properly—and in intellectual conversations cleverly and wittily, not half-wittily, as I do—the message you convey is you arrived yesterday, and you’re a dolt, which is exactly why so many French people who can speak English won’t. They don’t wish to be judged and found intellectually and aesthetically lacking.

  It used to annoy me that French people who studied English for eight years in school, and who spoke it and understood it better than I ever would French, let me struggle and make a fool of myself. Like most Americans, I attributed it to French arrogance, some inferior French need for superiority, the taking of perverse pleasure, even sadism—the Marquis de Sade was French, after all. But now I know better, or at least more.

  French people worry about using the wrong word, pronouncing or spelling it incorrectly, and not knowing proper punctuation and grammar—in French! No wonder most people would rather waste hours and painfully struggle to understand my French than make life easier for themselves and speak “bad” English. For me, there is no choice: Je m’appelle Marc, et je suis illettré. French people do have a choice and until very recently they’ve mostly chosen not to speak English. If I were them, I’d be even more afraid of speaking French. Slowly, though, things are changing. Lately, more and more people are speaking English to me—partly because using English words has become trendy, and partly, I think, because I’ve lowered the foolishness bar so much, they know they can’t fall under it. You’d think this new willingness to speak English would make communication easier, but it doesn’t. French-English is often more difficult to comprehend than French-French, especially proper names. Add deconstruction, cultural relativism, structuralism, and post-structuralism, and it’s a miracle anyone understands anyone—and most especially that anyone understands me.

  Savoir Faire and Not

  Given bon usage and communication differences, it’s not surprising I’m an illiterate. What is surprising are the advantages there are to being one—like when Mom and I land at Aéroport Charles de Gaulle and Air France loses her luggage. We immediately go to customer service, where, astonishingly, someone is there who is pleasant, apologetic, and helpful, confirming that indeed we are in another country. The woman assures us she’ll have Mom’s bag back in an hour and gives us each a coupon for a free lunch.

  It’s eleven in the morning French time, five in the morning in New York, and Mom and I both want breakfast—cereal, fruit, yogurt—not a ham sandwich, salade Niçoise, or quiche for lunch. I tell Mom to sit at a table and I’ll take care of it. Mom speaks French and I don’t, but this, I figure, I can handle. I go to the counter and order two bowls of fresh fruit and two containers of yogurt by pointing at them and saying, “Plus pain, beurre, et deux grande café crème,” and hand the very professional eighteen-year-old behind the counter the coupons, politely adding, “s’il vous plaît.”

  He takes them, looks at them, studies them, and becomes serious. His face changes from a nonchalant-on-top-of-the-world-could-not-care-less professional to merde! I feel sorry for him. He probably just began his shift, is happy to have a summer job—maybe gets free or reduced flight privileges—and all he wants is to get through the day without doing anything wrong, and he draws me. He hands me back the coupons and points to the box boldly marked with an X: déjeuner/lunch. Then he points to the other boxes: dîner/dinner, boissons/drinks, and petit déjeuner/breakfast. We’ve been approved for free lunches, not free breakfasts, and he shows me the premade ham and cheese, ham and lettuce and tomato, and ham and butter sandwiches; prepackaged chicken salad, salade Niçoise, and quiche lorraine. There’s also croque monsieur and madame and giant hot dogs floating in a huge glass jar, reminding me of a headless Walt Disney and cryogenics.

  “Un moment,” I say, and walk back to Mom to see if she’s changed her mind and wants lunch. She hasn’t. She still wants breakfast, as do I.

  I walk back to the youth, who looks professionally cool again, though a tad less sure than last time, clearly expecting me to order lunch.

  “S’il vous plaît,” I explain. “C’est onze heure ici . . . ” I hold up two fingers hoping he understands them as eleven, not two, then point to the floor to show him I mean here, “en Paris. Mais en New York . . . ” I point to somewhere far away, “c’est cinq heur . . . ” I hold up five fingers: “en la matin. Nous prefer le petit déjeuner. S’il vous plaît,” and I hand him back the coupons.

  He refuses to take them and says something I’m probably glad I can’t understand, which is another advantage of illiteracy: it keeps me in bounds. He stabs at the X in the déjeunier-marked box, and says, “C’est tout. C’est tout. Terminé.” We’re done.

  This is ridiculous and absurd. I can have a free ham sandwich or salade Niçoise but not a free frui
t bowl or yogurt. “Monsieur,” I say. “S’il vous plaît . . . ”

  “Non.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “Ce n’est pas possible.”

  I’ve entered the world of no. Neither of us is going to budge. It’s the Maginot Line, with me playing the Germans. I’m waving the coupons in the air, repeating, “S’il vous plaît, s’il vous plaît . . . ” and he’s standing still. Luckily, it is late for breakfast and early for lunch and no one else is waiting.

  Another youth, this one a supervisor—I can tell because he’s wearing a tie—senses discord, as in ‘who knows what foreigners will do?’ He walks over to see what’s happening, and says something to the lad, who responds immediately, excitedly, in great detail, now taking the coupons from my hand and showing the supervisor the marked box, and pointing and gesturing at me. In the U.S., I wouldn’t tolerate it, and I’d do my best to one-up him. In France, I can’t—so instead of becoming the ugly American I want to be, I become the quiet American I am, and lo and behold, like the Red Sea parting or an episode of You Are There, the entirety of French history unfolds before my eyes: from anarchy to authority, protofascism to existentialism, chaos to rationalism, the Reign of Terror to the Rights of Man. Enlightenment.

  The supervisor, destined for the Pantheon, becomes a combination Talleyrand, Voltaire, Hugo, and Rousseau. He takes the coupons from the outraged youth and slashes a giant X in the box marked petit déjeunier/breakfast, and it’s done. The supervisor is happy because the incident is over and his authority has prevailed. The lad is happy because he didn’t make the decision that violated the rule. Mom and I are happy with our yogurt and fruit bowls for breakfast. None of this would have happened had I been French or literate, and it’s another lesson learned—illiteracy brings out the kindness of strangers, and, as an added bonus, works well with authority and the stubborn.