Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart

by William Alexander

  By the tenth century there were dozens of different languages being spoken throughout France, but they can be categorized into just two major groups: those whose word for “yes” was a variant of the word oïl (the langues d’oïl ) and those whose “yes” was a variant of the word oc (the langues d’oc). The langues d’oïl were spoken in the northern half of France; the langues d’oc in the south. Which would win out in the end? The growing influence of Paris boded well for d’oïl, but wandering troubadours spread the popularity of d’oc far and wide as they traveled through France, singing their popular tales of love and chivalry.

  The similarity between English and French is a story not of love and chivalry but of war and treachery. The wheels were put into motion in the first week of 1066, when King Edward of England died without leaving an heir or naming a successor, throwing England into chaos. Well, politically at least. Most of the population couldn’t have cared less. There’s a great and not altogether implausible scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which King Arthur rides up to a peasant woman (Terry Jones in drag) farming mud and announces haughtily, “I’m king of the Britons,” to which the woman replies, “King of the who? Who are the Britons?” Arthur explains.

  “I didn’t know we had a king,” she says.

  Harold Godwinson, a powerful lord and son-in-law to King Edward, not only knew the Britons had a king, but thought the king was none other than himself. Claiming a deathbed anointment (unfortunately there were no witnesses), Harold had as good a claim to the throne as anyone and was named king by the commission of noblemen who had assembled in London to settle this mess. Meanwhile, news of King Edward’s death had reached the not-so-distant shores of Normandy, a patchwork of duchies across the English Channel. A duke of one of those duchies, William (known at the time as Guillaume le Bâtard—William the Bastard—because of the illegitimacy of his birth), saw an opportunity to claim the throne for himself through a nebulous blood claim: his great-aunt was related to Edward’s ancestors.

  William was furious when he heard that Harold had ascended to the throne, for William’s distinct recollection was that he had been promised the throne some years earlier by none other than Harold himself, back when they were best friends forever (possibly under duress, but a promise is a promise).

  Harold retorted that he didn’t remember saying any such thing, and even if he did say it, he didn’t mean it, and even if he did mean it, he had no legal right to make such a promise. William in turn replied by assembling a large invasion force and building boats, lots of boats. Harold, having gotten wind of the sudden demand for oak in Normandy, hunkered down on the southwest coast of England with his army and waited. And waited. And waited. Across the channel, William was also waiting—waiting for favorable winds, because the sailing vessels of the day could sail only with the wind.

  We’ll leave William the Bastard waiting there for a bit, because as William the Tourist and his Duchess Anne are about to learn, you can wait a long time for the weather in Normandy to improve. I first feel the skies darken when Anne, settled on the train, picks up a discarded copy of Le Figaro and, frowning, asks, “What’s the word for ‘storm’?”

  “DO YOU THINK,” I yell through the wind to Anne as we bicycle toward the Normandy coast, our faces becoming reddened and sore from the pelting rain blowing directly in from the direction of England, “a nor’easter on this side of the Atlantic is a nor’wester?” The storm answers by literally blowing Anne and her bike to the ground. Yet not even the weather can prevent this from being a magnificent ride, through pastoral meadows and salt marshes filled with the bleating sheep who will provide tonight’s dinner—the regional specialty known as agneau de pré-salé, salt-marsh lamb, which needs no seasoning because the meat is naturally salted from the marshland diet of the sheep. We often ride for miles without seeing a car or another human being, although Anne suggests that this may be because the weatherman has told everyone to stay indoors until this dangerous typhon blows over. Two hours into our ride, we round a corner and are so stunned by the apparition before us that we almost collide. “Camelot!” I cry, to the fanfare of imaginary trumpets.

  “Camelot!” Anne cries as we stop alongside some curious cows.

  “Eh, it’s only a model!” I say in my best British accent, invoking yet another Monty Python and the Holy Grail line that never fails to get a laugh out of Anne—or me.

  “Camelot” is actually Mont Saint-Michel. Built as a fortress, but today housing a monastery, it rises in the mist from the flat Normandy coast so suddenly and dramatically it seems as if the earth itself has thrust it upward, breathtaking, inspiring, almost hallucinatory in the fog, and, most importantly, our lunchtime destination. We pick up the pace, and during periods when the downpour eases enough for me to open my mouth without drowning, I lead spirited choruses of Mister Rogers’s theme song: “It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood . . .”

  Then we get lost, so lost that we don’t even know whose neighborhood we’re in. The directions provided by our outfitter, who has supplied bikes and who transports our luggage inn-to-inn for this self-guided bike tour, are precise when least needed and vague at the most critical junctions, resulting in long stretches of staring at maps in the driving rain. Disoriented and out of ideas, we stop at a café to ask for directions, and while the men inside try to be helpful as we stand there with our Michelin map, water dripping onto their floor, they seem to view the map as a novelty; in fact, it seems as if it’s the first time they have ever seen a map of their own region. France invented the road map, for God’s sake! (Michelin, the tire company, got into the map and restaurant-guide business as a way to encourage people to drive into the country, thus wearing out their Michelin tires sooner.) The locals can’t make any more sense of the directions or the map than we, but in the end their local knowledge of the area gets us back on track and we finally reach the fortress.

  And what a fortress. The massive stone structure, begun in medieval times and rebuilt and enlarged throughout the centuries, sits on a tiny island that is accessible from the mainland via a sandbar when the tide is low, and protected from invaders and infidels when it is not. As the difference between low and high tide can be as much as forty-six feet (!), more than one soldier (or tourist, and that’s no joke) has drowned by mistiming the crossing. The famous Bayeux Tapestry, which illustrates the story of the Norman invasion, depicts Harold Godwinson (not yet King Harold) rescuing two of William’s Norman knights from the tidal flats back in happier days.

  The contemporary visitor need not risk his life to visit the abbey; today the island can be reached safely via a causeway and a car park. It is, I will warn you, a touristy, touristy place—the French seem no better at avoiding that fate than Americans—but to a pair of wet bicyclists the citadel offers comforting fish soup and a welcome break from bicycle seats and rain. After a tour, before remounting the bikes, we score some plastic bags to put between our shoes and socks from a friendly shopkeeper, because I remember the word sac and I fake (correctly, as it turns out) “plas-teek.”

  Two more phrases I know: il pleut (it’s raining) and il pleure (he’s crying), although I tend to mix them up. I remember them because of what, I explain to Anne between raindrops, is the poetry of it, rain as nature’s tears. Or vice versa. Il pleut plenty and we’re so tired we’re on the verge of pleure when we finally reach our destination, the town of Pontorson. As we pedal past a bus stop, a young woman who’s just gotten off a bus asks us for directions to the train station.

  “Là-bas,” Anne says, before I can answer. “À gauche.”

  “Merci.”

  “De rien. Au revoir! ”

  I could not have been more shocked if my bicycle started talking. “Two questions,” I say. “We don’t know where we’re going. How can you give her directions?” Anne shrugs. “And when did you learn French?”

  “I’ve just picked a little up along the way.”

  Not from me she hasn’t. I don’t know whether to la
ugh, cry, or rain.

  I IMAGINE NEITHER did my namesake, William the Bastard (that’s namesake as in “William,” not as in “Bastard”), in August and September of 1066 as he waited in vain, week after week, for the contrary Normandy winds to shift. Across the channel in England, King Harold, growing equally frustrated with the wait, decided finally that if William hadn’t come by now, he wasn’t coming—surely, no one in his right mind would start a war on foreign soil as winter approached. So Harold disbanded his restless army to allow the men to get back to their fields in time for the fall harvest. That was on September 8. On September 27 the wind direction shifted to the south and William set sail for the coast of southern England with 696 ships. Meanwhile, nearly simultaneously, yet another claimant to the throne, the Norwegian king Harald III, had landed in York, in the northern part of England, with fifteen thousand men, one of whom was Harold’s estranged brother. (This kind of intrigue demonstrates why Shakespeare was able to make a living off writing historical plays.)

  King Harold-with-an-o quickly reassembled his force and rushed to York to defeat to the death King Harald-with-an-a and Harold’s no-good brother in a furious battle, and the victorious troops were just catching their breaths and celebrating when a courier arrived with the news that William had landed on the undefended southwest coast of England, which he was undoubtedly surprised to find deserted. Harold raced south with his exhausted forces in one of the great marches in military history, but William had already gained a crucial foothold. Harold’s tired and weakened troops were defeated, and Harold was killed in the Battle of Hastings. William continued his brutal conquest of England—he was by all accounts not a gentle man—and on Christmas Day, 1066, just shy of a year since King Edward’s death, William the Conqueror (né William the Bastard), a Frenchman, was crowned king of England.

  The Normans made French the official language of England, bringing it first to the English royal court, then beyond, to the schools, courts, and commerce, as the tongue evolved into Anglo-Norman, which was French with an English twist. A thousand years later, some of our legal terms betray this uneasy Anglo-French alliance. Ever wonder why a court orders you to redundantly “cease and desist”? Aren’t those two words synonyms? They are, but the English word “cease” was coupled with the official French verb desister to make sure everyone knew what the court was talking about. Same for “null and void.”

  England wouldn’t be ruled by a king whose native tongue was English until 1399, an astounding three centuries later, when King Henry IV took the throne. The English that Henry spoke, though, would be far changed from the Old English in use before the Norman invasion. As we know, countless French words had by then become part of Standard English. Some of these, such as plege and remaindere, are no longer used in French, although their English forms persist. Others, while we understand them, are used only in formal English. We might commence firing, but we begin everything else.

  It can be revealing to look at the origins of some of our French-derived words. Millions of Americans finding their homes being foreclosed might be interested to know that “mortgage” literally means “death contract.” Another favorite of mine is “curfew,” which comes from the French couvre-feu, the time when everyone must cover his fire. At the same time, some, but not nearly as many, English words made it into French (including, rather ironically, considering how this whole thing started, “boat,” which returned across the English Channel to become bateau).

  ANNE AND I COULD use a bateau on the second day of our trip as we cross from Normandy into Brittany in the pouring rain, looking for a place to have lunch, which is more difficult than we’d expected, for the small, picturesque villages the route takes us through are often so small that they don’t even have a restaurant, only a boulangerie and sometimes a charcuterie, which sells cold meats such as sausages and pâtés. Together these would make a fine lunch—except that all the shops close down at lunchtime, including the ones that sell food. I wonder how long my local deli would survive if it closed every day for lunch. But at a small, nearly deserted café in a small, nearly deserted village somewhere in Brittany—we’re not exactly sure where—the proprietor takes pity on us, and even though they serve food only on weekends, at the urging of one of the regulars he warms up some soup. I don’t know where this notion of the French being rude comes from. Probably from rude Americans. Only a few days into our trip, young men have helped us put air in our tires with the unfathomable French pump supplied with the bikes, a shopkeeper has given us bags for our feet, a café owner who doesn’t serve lunch has prepared us lunch, and everyone has been eager to give us directions, which is giving me a chance to practice my French, although what I mainly practice saying is nous sommes perdus—we’re lost.

  Sure enough, after lunch we are perdus once again, although at least the rain has stopped for a bit. “Let me ask this man getting his mail,” I say to Anne as we brake to a stop. He looks like a classic French pensioner, with his shot-glass-thick glasses and walking cane, a man with all the time in the world to help us find our way.

  “Billy, I don’t think he’s—” Anne starts to protest, but too late. I am confident, in the mood to speak French, and off.

  “Excusez-moi, monsieur,” I say with a smile. “Bonjour! Nous sommes perdus.”

  He asks where we are going. Dinan, I tell him.

  “Ah, bon? ” We must be on the right track.

  I show him the map and point to a spot. “Est-ce que nous sommes ici? ” Are we here? As with the previous men, he seems never to have seen a map of his own neighborhood. I point to the road I think we’re on and ask if we’re here, on the D34. He frowns, consults the map, flips it top to bottom, and points to an entirely different spot. “Non, non, nous sommes ici.”

  I give the news to Anne, who expresses grave doubt. “He lives here,” I argue. “He ought to know.” Twenty minutes and a few miles later, it becomes clear that he doesn’t know. And that I don’t know that Ah, bon? when inflected as a question means not “Oh, good” but (as with j’ai un petit problème) the opposite: “Oh, really? (That’s what you think!)”

  “I can’t figure out the French,” I fume to Anne as we backtrack in the rain, adding yet more precious miles to the already long day. “How can they not know the name of the road they live on?”

  “Well, maybe next time you might not want to ask a blind man.” Oh, that’s why she was trying to stop me.

  We reach the walled medieval city of Dinan, built high on a hilltop in order to defeat foreign invaders and tired cyclists, long after dark, having traveled some fifty miles, by far the longest (and wettest) bike trip we’ve ever done in our lives, but the French penchant for dining late plays to our favor, our reward for the long day being a memorable meal in a cozy and dry seventeenth-century inn.

  The next morning we are back in the wet saddles for several more days of riding in the rain, but the sun finally breaks through as we return to the Brittany coast, riding past half-timbered cottages and atop seaside cliffs, the waves crashing below. Biking is a wonderful way to see a country. True, in a car you could cover ten times the distance as on bikes, but while you might see more, you wouldn’t see as much. Zooming by at forty or sixty miles an hour, even if you traveled the back roads we are traversing, which would be unlikely, you might glimpse the cottages but not notice the gardens or where new construction has almost seamlessly joined old. You might’ve seen the ducks in the yards but would’ve missed the old woman coming out and grabbing one by the neck.

  We roll into the final stop of the trip, the seaside resort town of Dinard (not to be confused with nearby Dinan), which is somewhat incongruously overseen by a larger-than-life statue of a famous Brit, Alfred Hitchcock. Local legend has it that Hitchcock based the spooky house in Psycho on one he saw in Dinard, giving the town a convenient excuse for an annual film festival that brings in millions of euros. At the hotel, my rehearsed, once-memorized sentence asking where we should store the bicycles is nowhere to be found, a
nd I fumble with some inadequate replacement phrases before it finally comes to mind. Yet even then, it turns out to be useless, because my pronunciation is so bad as to render my French unintelligible. Finally I just shrug and ask, “Les vélos? ”

  The clerk has us follow her outside, where she tries to tell us something of apparent great importance, without success. She says something, I say something in return, she shakes her head and says something else. This goes on for several minutes, both of us growing increasingly exasperated—wait a minute, I don’t have to describe the scene; it’s a virtual replay of the one in The Return of the Pink Panther where Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau is trying to check into a hotel, his preposterous French accent (I should talk . . .) pulling the r in “room” from somewhere between his larynx and his liver.

  CLOUSEAU: Do you have a rgghum?

  CLERK: A . . . “rgghum”?

  CLOUSEAU: What?

  CLERK: You said, do I have a “rgghum”?

  CLOUSEAU [IMPATIENTLY]: I know perfectly well what I said; I said, do you have a rgghum!

  CLERK: You mean, do I have a room.

  CLOUSEAU: That is what I have been saying, you fool!

  This fool is saved by Anne, who finally figures out from the clerk’s sign language that she is asking if we have a lock for the bikes. Like Clouseau, my greatest challenge is the French r. In English, we pronounce words with a leading syllabic r—“ready,” “arrive,” and, of course, “room”—with what is called the alveolar approximant, with the tip of the tongue slightly rolled back, safely out of the way, while the teeth touch lightly on the lower lip. In French, however, the r sound is produced using the uvular rhotic, a guttural sound that is produced by placing the back of the tongue firmly against the back of your throat with an open mouth, the result being a sound so different from our r that it ought to be represented by a different letter of the alphabet.