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

by William Alexander

  Anyway, my Clouseau impersonation over, we lock up the bikes, take turns soaking in the tub, and then head out for a walk and a drink. Speaking of movies, we’ve had the outfitter alter the standard tour to include this stop in Dinard solely because of the effect that Éric Rohmer’s film A Summer’s Tale, which was shot in Dinard, had on me years ago. It is your typical French movie, meaning that there’s not much of a plot, but there are plenty of long, talky walks featuring teenagers in existential angst discussing the meaning of life; in this case the walks occur on the trails cut into the cliffs surrounding Dinard, and ever since seeing those dramatic paths I’ve wanted to vacation here with Anne. Go ahead and snicker, but yes, I have based our vacation on a few scenes from a fictional movie filmed thirty years ago.

  It never rains in A Summer’s Tale, but despite the sunshine we are enjoying now, the heaviest rain yet is forecast for tomorrow. Not a day for walking the trails, which we’ve been looking forward to for years. “Let’s do them now,” Anne says cheerily, and we spend what’s left of the afternoon in our own Rohmer movie, except our existential crisis is how to escape the rain of Brittany.

  Over drinks afterward we decide to bail out of Brittany a day early to head to sunny Provence, where we’ll be biking the rest of our trip. This means checking the train schedule, contacting our tour coordinator, finding a room in Avignon, and so on. I’ll need help, and I dread trying to relate all of this to the clerk, who doesn’t speak a word of English.

  “Maybe,” I say to Anne as we devour a towering platter of chilled fruits de mer—literally, “fruits of [the] sea,” the incredibly lovely French term for seafood—“someone else will be at the front desk when we return.”

  No such luck. I try to make a fresh start by apologizing for the earlier scene with the bikes, explaining my terrible French by saying that I am très, très fatigué from all the biking and rain. It seems I find myself saying “sorry” a lot in France, although only later do I realize that at least half the time I’ve been saying not désolé, but désiré, and you don’t need your French dictionary to know the difference between those two words. This possibly Freudian slip might be what sends the young clerk, who bears a resemblance to the sexy French actress Ludivine Sagnier, over the edge.

  “Would you prefer I speak English?” she says sweetly.

  “Sure, if you don’t mind—” What? She speaks English? Why on earth did she put me through that nonsense with the bike locks? Did she learn English in the past hour while I was eating oysters? This is a communication phenomenon we have already experienced more than once on this trip. So, regaining my composure, I politely ask her why, given my obvious struggle and inability to communicate, and her fluency in English, she let me continue stammering away in pidgin French.

  “You need the practice,” she says with a smile.

  Touché.

  ARRIVING IN SUNNY, WARM Provence, we find a timeless place of Roman ruins, fields of lavender, olive trees, and cobblestone streets, alive with the ghosts of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Marcel Pagnol. And something else I hadn’t expected: street signs in two languages: French and Occitan, the language of southern France, the langue d’oc.

  Remember that when William the Conqueror sailed for England, there were still two families of very different languages being spoken in France—the langues d’oïl (those languages spoken in the north of France, centered around Paris) and the langues d’oc (those of the south, centered on Toulouse, in the heart of southern France). It was becoming clear that sooner or later there was going to be one France: which language would it speak? Northern France had the might of Paris, the king of the Franks, and the armies. Southern France had the troubadours and Toulouse. Guess who won?

  The day the music died arrived in 1209, when the troubadours, caught up in a bit of holy war not of their making, fled mostly to Spain, while the king of the Franks saw a chance to double the size of his kingdom, virtually destroying Toulouse in the process. D’oc would not expand into northern France. Yet it wasn’t going away quite yet. Despite efforts by Napoleon to make what was now known as French (the language derived from the langues d’oïl ) the only language of France, even as late as World War I, many young men from “the provinces” heard French for the first time when they were conscripted into the army, for pockets of local languages and dialects still thrived in such areas as Provence, Brittany, and Alsace. The first words these men learned may have been “Ready . . . aim . . . fire!” but learn French they did. The langues d’oc today survive mainly as a regional dialect of French and in the form of these redundant street signs, a display of local pride, as well as in the name of a region—the Languedoc—that Peter Mayle made famous (some would say ruined as a result of its ensuing popularity) in his book A Year in Provence. Well, nothing can ruin our week in Provence. With new bikes, better directions, and much better weather, Anne and I set off on the short ride from Avignon to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, once home to Vincent van Gogh. Saint-Rémy is your typical Provençal town, with narrow, winding streets; restaurants with outdoor seating ideal for people watching; fountains; a nice little church; and a street market.

  What drew Vincent van Gogh here from Arles in 1889, however, was its asylum. While not wrestling his demons, Van Gogh was allowed outside the grounds, where he painted, in a single year, some of his best-known works: The Starry Night, Bedroom in Arles, and The Sower, to name a few. Van Gogh’s Saint-Rémy period is characterized by the broad, energized, almost manic swirls of cypresses and, most famously, the stars of The Starry Night. It is a starry night, and Anne and I can’t resist. After dinner we walk to the edge of town and look up. “Nope, same stars as at home,” I say to Anne. “It was all in his mind.” His poor, tortured, brilliant mind. But thank God for that mind.

  While in Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh also painted Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background. It is a hallucinatory, even frightening painting, the olive trees twisting in agony toward the sky, reflecting the tormented state of the painter, the Alpilles Mountains roiling in the background like a stormy sea. Those menacing mountains, clearly visible in the starlight, lay between us and our next destination, the city most associated with Van Gogh: Arles.

  Taking a slow but steady approach, Anne and I climb les Alpilles without too much difficulty, the scenery being so utterly beautiful we forget how hard we’re working. The mountains, protected as a national park, covered with olive trees and almond groves, and breathing an intoxicating herbal scent I can’t place, seem not to have changed much since Van Gogh’s time. We pause at the summit to gaze at Arles, looking angular and Cézanney (and far) in the distance. Then with a push we are whooshing down the mountain, whooping with joy as we careen through switchbacks and lean into turns, flying past other bicyclists huffing and puffing their way up the mountain, descending toward the timeless city of Arles.

  By late afternoon, we are watching the sun set from atop the Roman amphitheater. But it doesn’t just set; in French it literally goes to bed. Le soleil se couche. As if you were saying your son is going to bed (mon fils se couche). In the morning, both your sun and your son se lèvent. In between, there is not just twilight, but the time entre chien et loup—between the dog and the wolf—the time when the light is so dim you can’t distinguish a dog from a wolf, although this poetic idiom is also used to describe one who is between the familiar and the unknown, the comfortable and the dangerous, between the domestic and the wild.

  That’s how I often feel while in France, especially when our visit to Provence is cut short by a national strike (la grève) called for the day we are to return by train to Paris. Two million—not twenty thousand or even two hundred thousand, but two million—French workers and students take to the streets, protesting President Nicolas Sarkozy’s proposed raising of the retirement age—to sixty-two.

  On the last day of our bike trip, as we’re preparing to return home, we finally meet the driver who’s been transporting our bags from hotel to hotel each day while we bike, a classic working Fre
nchman with a firm handshake and a Gallic twinkle in his eye. He asks where we’re from, and when we say the United States he nods gravely, smiles, and says, “Courage! ” before taking his leave. Anne and I take it to be a reference to our country’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although for all we know he means much more. He might as well have been referring to my French. This trip has made it clear that I have a lot of work ahead of me. I’m going to have to buckle down, double up, get to it, if I am going to have any hope of learning French before fatigue and discouragement set in, leaving me roadkill on the route to Paris, just another statistic. Several of the French we’ve met during this trip tell us they’ve learned English as adults, making me wonder whether they have some secret, some technique that we’re missing in the States.

  Having lunch outdoors at a small café, I hear a vaguely familiar voice from, of all people, our French waiter, who speaks English with hardly a trace of a French accent. In fact, his English, if anything, suggests the eastern United States, where I’ve lived my entire life. He must have done some immersion study there.

  I tell Anne, “I want to speak French the way he speaks English.”

  He brings us the check. “Your English is perfect,” I say. “You’ve spent some time in the States, no?”

  “Actually, I haven’t.”

  “Really? How did you learn such good English?”

  “Watching Jerry Seinfeld.”

  A Room with a Veau

  He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.

  —FRANCIS BACON

  Back home, I’ve returned to my routine of watching an hour a day of TV5Monde, the international French-language cable network that rebroadcasts programs from France and other francophone countries. Anne wanders in from the kitchen. “What are you watching?”

  “A sitcom out of Quebec.”

  “Any good?”

  “It’s no Seinfeld.”

  For that matter, it’s no Three’s Company, but I’ve been enduring it for one compelling reason, an oddity that Anne instantly notes.“It’s subtitled in French? Why? It’s in French!”

  “Not according to the French, it’s not. It’s their way of reminding Canadians they don’t really speak French.” Although you could’ve fooled me; to my tin ear it sounds totally French, aside from a few Anglicisms thrown in here and there. But the superfluous French subtitles make a superuseful learning tool for the student of French. And right now I need all the tools I can get. Anne, however, isn’t convinced of my new method.

  “Aren’t there any French classes around?”

  The hairs on the back of my neck bristle. Classes are a sore point with me for a couple of reasons. Back before the richest country in the world decided to start behaving like one of the poorest, you could generally find an evening “adult ed” language class at your local high school or community college. Such programs are an endangered species today, and if you can find any language class at all, it’s nearly always Spanish. Yet it wasn’t that long ago that French was a language that all well-educated Americans spoke, the language of culture and diplomacy, to the extent that treaties were drafted in French even when neither country was a francophone nation. French-speaking Jacqueline Kennedy was adored as the very height of sophistication. By contrast, in recent years unsuccessful presidential aspirants John Kerry and Mitt Romney were both victims of political attack ads based on the accusation that they—gasp!—spoke, as the New Yorker recently called it, “the language that dare not speak its name,” the implication being that they were socialist-sympathizing, snail-eating, effete pansy snobs living in the past, out of touch with the common joe.

  Well, I have news for the political masterminds behind these ads: French is Rosetta Stone’s second-best-selling foreign language (behind only Spanish) among the common joes of America. The official language of twenty-nine countries, it is spoken regularly by some 175 million people, not counting another 200 million occasional speakers and students. TV5Monde ranks behind only CNN and MTV in number of worldwide viewers, and France has the world’s fifth-largest economy. So let’s not count French out just yet. But all that doesn’t make it any easier to find a French course in the Mid-Hudson Valley.

  “The nearest night classes are in the city,” I tell Anne. “That’s a hundred-and-twenty-mile round-trip. For an eight o’clock class I’d be getting home at midnight. And I’ve tried weekly classes before. They just don’t work. Do you know a single adult who’s ever learned a language that way?”

  Anne meekly raises her hand.

  “That was medical Spanish. Doesn’t count.”

  “Sí, cuenta,” she protests. Perhaps it does count, but Anne speaks the most curious flavor of Spanish you’ll ever encounter. She can quite capably conduct a thirty-minute physical in Spanish, but put her in a Spanish restaurant and she can’t read the menu unless they’re serving stiff necks and joint pain.

  The truth is, the reason for my avoidance of a French class may lie less with geography than with psychology. Four decades later I’m still scarred from my classroom experience with . . . I dare not speak her name . . . Madame D—— , my high school French teacher.

  “Ma-dame,” as we called her, was an imposing figure, sporting a prominent mole on one cheek that rooted a single, prominent hair, and a glare that could melt a wheel of Brie. Discipline was rarely a problem in her classroom (a classmate who acted up was once literally dragged out of the room by her ear), and every French class was a forty-five-minute sentence to the Bastille. Her cumulative years of teaching may have done more harm to Franco-American relations than freedom fries.

  I’m sure there was more than one French teacher in the school district, but I always seemed to end up in Madame’s class. This was almost certainly due to some behind-the-scenes maneuvering by my father, who was a guidance counselor in the junior high school and thought he was doing me a favor by making sure I had the “best” French teacher, having himself never been pulled out of Madame’s class by the ear. This favoritism in turn made me a favorite of Madame’s—meaning I was called on a lot—even though I was a poor French student. My occasional stutter, which remained mostly under the surface when answering math- or science-class questions, became amplified to King George VI proportions under the lethal combination of Madame’s torture chamber and the inescapable fact that the main objective in this class was to speak perfectly.

  No surprise, then, that I dropped French after my sophomore year, the moment I’d fulfilled the graduation requirement, to the consternation of my parents, who thought I might be torpedoing my college prospects. Pas de problème: I’d discovered that engineering programs, for which I was otherwise ill suited, generally didn’t carry a language requirement. Which is how I ended up a biomedical engineering major. After a disastrous freshman year largely spent unsuccessfully trying to get a picture on the oscilloscope, the school of liberal arts discontinued its foreign language requirement (while keeping its swimming requirement), clearing the way for me to switch my major to English, to the visible relief of my engineering professors and classmates.

  In other words, I chose a college major primarily on the basis of not having to take French. Then how on earth did I end up trying to make amends forty years later? How did my determination to avoid French become an equally strong determination to learn it? Let’s pick up the story after college, in a tale I call

  The Boy, the Girl, and the Cow;

  or, A Little French Is a Dangerous Thing

  In 1975, a year after graduating, jobless (thanks to my degree in English) and aimless but debt-free, as most college graduates were in those days, I bought an international youth hostel card and a student Eurail pass, stuffed a backpack, and spent the next several months traveling alone throughout Europe. My journey took me from Norway to Greece, a wonderful adventure when you’re young and single and have no agenda or timetable. The title of a popular guidebook of the era was Europe on $10 a Day, and back then
it was possible, particularly if you slept mostly at youth hostels.

  Doing the hostel circuit, you tend to cross paths with people more than once, sometimes several countries and weeks apart, and you may even do a little traveling together, as solo travel can get lonely. Thus when I parted with Judy, a young Canadian whom I’d met in Norway and again by chance in Germany, we’d agreed to meet up once more in a few weeks to share a gustatory fantasy that it turned out we’d both secretly been harboring: one haute cuisine meal in a fine, white-tablecloth French restaurant before returning home. Judy and I had each saved up enough money for this by eating cheaply in cafeterias and sleeping on trains during our journeys.

  Lyon made for a convenient rendezvous and, as one of the culinary centers of France, not a bad place at all to have our ultimate French dining experience. The stakes were high: three months of travel, just one chance, one splurge. Everything had to be perfect. We carefully selected the restaurant, made a reservation, and put on the best clothes we could dig out of our backpacks. For me that meant a ratty light brown corduroy jacket and shiny vinyl shoes (the first rainfall had washed the faux-leather coating off these lightweight, backpackable shoes); for Judy, a red-and-white checkered skirt that—she shrieked with horror when she put it on—made her look like a walking Italian tablecloth. Dressed for puttin’ on the ritz, we headed out to dine at the very unfashionable hour of 7 p.m.

  Things were going swimmingly until I opened the menu and realized that I’d left my pocket French-English dictionary back at the hostel. No matter; I figured I remembered enough French from high school to at least order dinner, and besides, I already knew what I wanted. My heart soared when I recognized veau on the menu. Although for some reason it was only served for two. “Come on, we’ve got to get this,” I told Judy, repeating what I’d read in a guidebook. “Veal is a specialty of this region. The calves are milk-fed and killed very young. You can’t get veal like this at home at any price.”