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

by William Alexander

  “But what’s this rognons part?” The full name of the dish was rognons de veau.

  “I don’t know. What’s the difference? It’s veal something. It probably describes the sauce or the way it’s cooked. I’ll ask the waiter.”

  Even at twenty-two I knew better than to ask a Frenchman—especially a French waiter—if he spoke English, which is considered rude and insulting. You should attempt to speak in French, no matter how bad your French might be, and hope you get a reply in English, but in this fancy restaurant, with the stakes high, the prices higher, and the mustachioed waiters straight out of central casting, my nerves got the better of me, and to Judy’s alarm and mine alike, I blurted out, “Do you speak English?” The only explanation I have for the reaction that followed was that the poor non-English-speaking fellow must have thought I said, “Do you sodomize your mother?”

  “Now you’ve done it,” Judy said, half laughing after he’d brusquely left the table. “Nice work.” Still, I was able to coax her into joining me in rognons de veau for two.

  “Something else?” Central Casting had asked in French when I placed the order. “Non, merci,” I replied. The veal was so expensive we decided to forgo an appetizer. He looked at us quizzically and marched off, I’m sure to have a good laugh in the kitchen, and a half hour later our rognons de veau arrived, looking very lonely on the plate.

  “What’s this?” Judy cried, looking down at a large white china plate that was completely bare save for a handful of what looked like deer droppings, little brown things the size of grapes, rolling around on the naked plate. No potatoes, no vegetable, not even a garnish. The waiter, in repayment for my blunder, had apparently elected not to explain that à la carte in this restaurant meant that the main course did not come with things like vegetables and potatoes; those needed to be ordered separately. Nothing but these mysterious, unappetizing droppings sitting starkly on the white china.

  Judy gingerly poked a fork into one and tasted it. “Kidneys! You ordered me kidneys! The one thing in the world I can’t stand!”

  “That’s impossible. The menu said veau. I know for a fact that veau is veal.”

  She set one rolling toward me with her fork as her eyes welled up. “My one splurge in Europe, and it’s kidneys!”

  The mystery was cleared up that evening when I retrieved my dictionary. Veau is indeed “veal”—I was right about that—but it also has another meaning in French: “calf.” Rognon, as we knew all too well by then, is “kidney.” Thus rognons de veau are literally “calf’s kidneys.” We Americans raise calves but eat veal, I suppose to gloss over the fact that we’re eating a young animal that was adorably drinking milk from a baby’s bottle a few days ago, while the French, who are far less squeamish about their food sources, matter-of-factly and merrily raise, slaughter, and then eat calf. This lack of differentiation between animal and meat applies to other species as well. In America we eat beef, never cows. In France both the meat and the steer are called boeuf. We eat pork, not pigs, while cochon and porc are interchangeably used for “pig” and “pork” alike.

  After my veal error, things were never quite the same between Judy and me, two people whose relationship was fractured by a single translation error. The romance we might have been on the cusp of never developed, and we soon parted ways. Yet before I boarded the plane home, I’d be very much in love. With a country.

  THE LOVE BUG MAY have bitten me in France, but the fever took root after I returned home. Living in New York City, I couldn’t get enough of France. I discovered François Truffaut, then Éric Rohmer and other auteurs of the French New Wave cinema during joyful hours squinting at jumpy subtitles in mostly empty New York art-house theaters, as France revealed itself frame by frame in grainy black and white. I listened to French music, read Camus and Sartre.

  I married and had kids, and when Zach and Katie were in their teens I took the family to Paris, and although I tried to retrieve some of that high school French, my attempts to speak the language resulted in largely unintelligible exchanges with taxi drivers and waiters, during which I would say things like, “It sleeps very cold in the soup.”

  After that first visit, I went back twice more with Anne, who by now was every bit as enchanted with France as I. Strolling the streets of Paris, we’d stop to look at the listings in real estate office windows and drool enviously over photographs of a Latin Quarter apartment or a Norman cottage, although they were far out of our financial reach. More realistically, we dreamt about vacations spent bicycling France’s quiet country roads and canals, peddling alongside vineyards, farms, and streams. Yet we always felt like outsiders, like the tourists we were, because neither of us spoke the language, a decided disadvantage that became quite apparent when I took a week-long bread-making course, without English subtitles, at l’École Escoffier. I did experience my moment of linguistic glory, however, when Anne and I were sitting on a park bench after class one day and a Frenchman asked me, “Quelle heure est-il, s’il vous plaît? ”

  Asking the time happens to be a stock phrase, found in every guidebook, learned in every French course, so I knew what he was saying. But a response? I never really learned my numbers—even up to sixty—so almost certainly I was going to end up shrugging, shaking my head, or inelegantly sticking my wrist in his face to let him see for himself. But when I glanced down at my watch, I realized my extraordinary fortune. It was exactly noon. “Il est midi,” I said as coolly and fluently as a native. He thanked me, and I nodded and tossed off another stock phrase, “De rien,” don’t mention it.

  In my book, that qualified as a conversation, and this brief escape from the tourist’s cocoon had me walking on air for the rest of the trip. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to do that all the time? Wouldn’t it be nice to never again accidentally order organ meats? If so, I’d better dramatically improve my French. Maybe Anne was right; I did need to bury the ghost of Madame D—— and get into a classroom.

  Your French Is Killing Me

  The French . . . always tangle up everything to that degree that when you start into a sentence you never know whether you are going to come out alive or not.

  —MARK TWAIN

  “Quel âge avez-vous? ” the young instructor I’ll call Mademoiselle D—— wants to know. I can see her grainy image in the corner of the computer screen, but she can’t see me. And good thing, because the other question she might logically be asking is, “Why are you sweating like a cochon?” having pretty much covered “How stupid are you?” and “You’re pulling my leg, right?”

  I think that’s what she said, or something to that effect, but no English is allowed in this online immersion class. It’s as if Madame D—— has managed to get reincarnated as a younger, only slightly gentler version of herself in order to torment me once again. At least this time I’m not embarrassing myself in front of the other students. This is because I’m the only student who’s signed up for this 7 a.m. lesson, a huge miscalculation on my part, and Mademoiselle seems none too pleased at having lost her lunch hour in France, where it’s 1 p.m., to a clueless, middle-aged American who can’t even state his age. I can’t state my age partly because the pressure has made the word for “fifty” fly out of my head and partly because French has a numbering system that is only slightly less complicated than the Babylonian calendar. It reminds me of Alice’s encounter with the queens in Through the Looking-Glass:

  “Can you do addition?” the White Queen asked. “What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?”

  “I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.”

  “She can’t do addition,” the Red Queen interrupted.

  The problem with numbers in French is that to count, you must utilize arithmetic—specifically, addition and multiplication. In the United States and most of the civilized world, children learn the numbers first and then learn to use those numbers in mathematics, but in France you need to know some mathematics in order to learn the numb
ers. To count, you must multiply; to multiply, you must count; to count, you must multiply . . . It’s a numerical Möbius strip.

  Things go fairly smoothly until soixante-neuf. If you don’t speak French and that number rings a bell, congratulations: you’ve read your Kama Sutra (or your Joy of Sex, which, to its credit, used the classy French numeral rather than the cruder English “sixty-nine”). Soixante-neuf is the last “easy” number in French. Should you want to turn your lovemaking up a notch to seventy, you’ll find out there is no “seventy” in French. This is undoubtedly due to French frugality. A country that doesn’t have a dedicated word for weather (temps can refer to either time or weather) isn’t about to waste a word on “seventy.” Just add ten to sixty. Thus, after sixty-eight and sixty-nine, there’s “sixty-ten” (soixante-dix), followed by “sixty-eleven” and so on, right up through sixty-nineteen. But they’ve already employed this additive strategy in naming their high teens—nineteen is itself ten plus nine (dix-neuf )—so seventy-nine is sixty plus ten plus nine: soixante-dix-neuf.

  Well, you may be wondering, how far are they going to go with this? Is every remaining number up to a hundred going to be based on sixty? Of course not. We haven’t done any multiplying yet. The next number, eighty, is quatre-vingts, literally “four twenties.” Guess what ninety is: quatre-vingt-dix. That is, four times twenty, plus ten. You continue in this fashion until you hit ninety-nine, the tongue-twisting, five-syllable, SAT-suitable quatre-vingt-dix-neuf.

  We say “ninety-nine.” They say quatre-vingt-dix-neuf. You could get orally injured singing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” in French.

  To recap, the French use a base-ten (decimal) numerical system from one through sixty, after which they switch to a base-twenty (vigesimal) system. There are other cultures, including the Mayans and the Basques, who use a vigesimal system, but to my knowledge, French is the only language that uses a mixture of decimal and vigesimal, probably a result of the unification of several number systems in existence in France after the Revolution.

  By the way, this base-twenty concept shouldn’t be totally foreign to you. Abraham Lincoln harkened back to a vigesimal system when he began the Gettysburg Address, “Four score and seven years ago,” but since Americans are lousy at math, it never caught on as a replacement for “eighty-seven.”

  Think I’m making too big a deal of this oddity? Well, the “four times twenty” stuff was serious enough to split the francophone world. In Belgium and Switzerland—even in Rwanda, where half the population tried to exterminate the other half, sometimes even if they were married to them—they had enough common sense to invent words for “seventy,” “eighty,” and “ninety”: septante, huitante, and nonante. Just don’t say huitante-trois in France, or you risk being taken for either a Belgian or an idiot, and it doesn’t much matter which: in France they are synonymous. But that’s a topic for another day. My problem right now is how do I say I’m fifty-seven when I can’t remember the French word for “fifty”? I sputter for what seems like an eternity. Finally I ask, “Comment dit-on ‘fifty’ en français? ”

  “Ne parlez pas anglais! ” Mademoiselle D—— scolds me, and I almost feel her tugging me by the ear. Jeez . . . how can I ask this question without using one word of English? My mind races.

  Ha! I do remember how to say “forty-nine.” “Quel est le nombre après quarante-neuf? ”

  “Cinquante.”

  “J’ai cinquante-sept ans.” Whew! (Okay, so score one for the immersion approach.) We move on to the future tense. I knew the future tense. Two weeks ago. Problem is, now I’m just getting into the past imperfect, which is quite similar, on my podcasts, and I’m confusing the two. How do you conjugate the future? I don’t know, because Rosetta Stone hasn’t given me the actual rules, only examples that I’m supposed to “absorb.” Everything I say is wrong. Nervous, I start stammering in French as if I’m back in Madame D—— ’s junior high class. What if I just close the program or feign a computer crash? Will I get blacklisted from future classes? Would that be such a bad thing?

  Eventually, mercifully, the class ends, and I’m not sure who’s more relieved. I change out of my sweat-soaked shirt and drive in to work, thoroughly rattled and feeling fifteen again. That very night I wake before dawn, feeling really strange, as if a sparrow has hatched in my chest during the night and is flapping its wings, trying desperately to get out. I put two fingers to my neck but can’t pick up a clear pulse. I wake Anne, who, being a physician, can. It’s over two hundred.

  “AFib,” she says. Next thing I know, I’m being whisked into an emergency room bay. An EKG confirms that my heart is in atrial fibrillation (AFib), a type of arrhythmia where the atria flutter out of rhythm with the rest of the heart owing to a short circuit of sorts in the heart’s nervous system. The fluttering itself will not kill me, but if one of the clots that can form in the blood that’s sloshing around in the atria moves out and reaches the brain, it’s au revoir. Thus the first thing they do in the ER is to start an intravenous anticoagulant in my arm. Meanwhile the doctor quizzes me. Any unusual alcohol consumption? No. Drugs? Don’t be silly. He continues down the list, and I continue shaking my head. No reason for this to have popped up now—none! Finally he asks, “Any new stress in your life?”

  We lock eyes.

  “Well, I am studying French.”

  The Event

  “Suppose I wanted to—have a party?” I said.

  “Like, what kind of a party?”

  “Suppose I wanted Noam Chomsky explained to me by two girls?”

  “Oh, wow . . . You’d have to speak with Flossie,” she said. “It’d cost you.”

  —WOODY ALLEN, “The Whore of Mensa,” 1974

  Unable to sleep in my room in the telemetry ward—with two intravenous lines in my right arm and a blood-pressure cuff and heart monitor connections on my left, I am virtually chained to the bed, unable to turn over or get comfortable—I switch on the TV and come across an infomercial that I have more than a passing interest in. “Learn a language the way you learned it as a child,” the host says. What does that mean, exactly? How did I learn language as a child? As I recall, I picked up English pretty easily without conjugation charts or language tapes. And that’s the paradox that all linguists grapple with: For infants, language comes effortlessly. It is a skill that virtually every child, regardless of his or her intelligence, masters by the age of three or four. Witness this conversation between a three-year-old and Art Linkletter, from his popular 1950s television show People Are Funny. Linkletter has just asked the boy, “And who is in your family, Scott?”

  “My mommy, my daddy, and my brother Henry. Oh, and when Daddy goes away on business trips, Uncle John comes and stays with Mommy.”

  Safe to say that language is acquired before the filters that govern its use are in place. Yet for adults, learning a new language is work, hard work, and we fail far more often than we succeed. How do children manage to do it so easily? It’s an unfair contest because babies are born with a head start on language. With really not much else to do, they’ve been listening to the chatter on the other side of the womb since about the thirtieth week of gestation, and they emerge with a demonstrable familiarity with their mother tongue.

  How do we know what’s going on in babies’ heads? In one experiment, scientists Jacques Mehler and Peter Jusczyk ingeniously fitted a baby’s bottle with a nipple that, when sucked on, would play a tape of either spoken French or Russian. The researchers found that four-day-old French babies suck harder when they hear French than when they hear Russian, and that their sucking picks up in intensity when the tape switches from Russian to French, but not when switching from French to Russian.

  As an unrepentant Francophile, I’d like to think that this is because French is the most beautiful, most melodic language in the world, but if you do the experiment with Russian babies, they show a preference for Russian over French. Interestingly, the experiment yields the same results even if the audio is
muddled so that specific words cannot be distinguished. In other words, after just ninety-six hours out of the womb (and most likely from birth, but there’s a limit to how early you can rip a newborn from its mother’s breast for a linguistics experiment),* babies have already picked up the cadence, the rhythm, and the characteristic sounds of the language.

  And languages do differ greatly in this respect. You can easily tell when someone is using French or Italian even if you don’t speak a word of it yourself. Italian draaaws out and almost sings its syllables, as if every sentence is from an operetta, and is filled with i and o sounds, while French uses hardly any variation in intonation at all and is distinguished by its nasal vowels. Scandinavian languages feature hard g sounds that emanate from the nether regions of the throat. In fact, Belgian scientists have determined that newborn babies cry in their mother’s tongue, meaning, for example, that French babies cry with a characteristically French rising inflection.

  This ability of babies to distinguish and learn the sounds of their native language comes at a price, though, and one that gets to the root of a problem that vexes many adult foreign language learners: our inability to reproduce some of the phonemes (a phoneme is the smallest distinct unit of sound) of that language. We all know the difficulty, for example, that native speakers of Asian languages have with the English letters r and l—the “flied lice” problem of bad Chinese-waiter jokes.

  What is less widely known is that the core problem isn’t that they can’t pronounce these two letters; they can’t pronounce the letters because they can’t even aurally distinguish between them. To the ear of someone who has grown up surrounded by the Chinese or Japanese languages, which don’t employ the r and l phonemes, rice and lice actually sound the same.

  Infant brains, unlike adult brains, can distinguish all the thousands of different sounds that make up human speech, but that skill is short lived. Researchers have found that seven-month-old Japanese babies can easily discriminate the sound of an English r from an English l. Yet by the age of ten months, these same babies can no longer tell the difference. This makes me feel a little better about the fact that I cannot master the French u sound as in tu or the guttural r in rouge because we don’t have anything quite like either in the English language.