“Fifty-eight.”
During what verb conjugation did that happen? “Fifty-eight. Do I really want to spend the rest of my life running on three cylinders?”
Anne thinks for a moment, and the physician in her replies, “Actually, it’s two.” Both atria are fibrillating.
The French have a saying: Le cœur qui soupire n’a pas ce qu’il désire. The heart that sighs does not have what it desires. In the morning I book a seat on Chinitz’s plane, which doesn’t depart for another few weeks. And distract myself by trying to focus on French.
Et Tu, Brute?
The tu is generally used to insult a fellow automobilist and always used when talking to oneself or to death.
—International Herald Tribune, February 19, 2000
“Yes, Bill, you can tutoyer.”
Woo-hoo! My twenty-something glam-rocker part-time-model French pen pal, Sylvie, has given me the green light to use the familiar tu form with her. I feel très français.
Following protocol, or my understanding of protocol, I had first formally asked permission to use the familiar tu, and trust me, I agonized over the timing of this a good deal, because, well, a negative answer (“I think it’s a little premature for that, Bill”) would’ve been nothing short of humiliating. So I exhaled in relief when I received her reply, although something a little more positive, say, “Of course!” or “By all means—I thought you’d never ask!” would’ve been preferable to an answer that could just as easily be read as “[Sigh] If you must.”
Even most non-Francophones know that the French use two pronouns for addressing a second person. That is, there are two ways to say “you”: the formal (or polite) vous and the familiar tu. When to use which can be baffling to a foreigner, although to be fair to the French, they didn’t make this business up. Blame the Latin that Julius Caesar brought to Gaul and that formed the basis of modern French. Thus it should come as no surprise that variations of tu and vous are also found in the other Romance languages, such as Italian, Spanish, and Romanian. Now, I don’t know how it’s handled in, say, Romania, or even other francophone countries, but in France the usage of vous and tu is less about grammar than about social position and how one views oneself and one’s place in the world.
When I say that Caesar brought the formal vous to France, that’s not strictly true. In the Latin of Caesar’s day, everyone from your emperor to your dog was just tu. The Latin vos was strictly reserved for the plural (“you all”). The use of vos (which would become the French vous) to refer to a single person didn’t appear until the fourth century, and came about almost by accident. Its first use was to refer only to the dual Roman emperors, both of them, because by then the empire had split into an eastern empire ruled from Constantinople and a western empire overseen from Rome. Politically, however, the two emperors ruled with one joint voice, and to hammer home the point they began to refer to themselves as nos, or “we.” (This may be the origin of the royal “we” that today one tends to associate with English queens.)
Once the inevitable confusion that must have resulted was cleared up—I have this image of the western emperor sitting alone on his throne telling a puzzled page, “We’d like some coffee,” and the page returning with two cups and being called an idiot—the emperors’ people had to deal with a touchy issue of protocol: how to address someone who refers to himself as “we.” They wound up deciding that if the emperor was going to refer to himself in the plural, they’d damn well better address him likewise, so they began to address each individual emperor in the plural, vos.
So far, so good. But the next thing you knew, the pope was demanding parity (there is written evidence of Gregory I referring to himself in the plural in the late sixth century), and this vos thing started to mean something other than a double-headed emperor; it had become an honorific title bestowing status. Kings started insisting on being addressed as vos, then nobles, and then not-so-nobles, as the custom filtered, top-down, through the social strata of Europe, until it reached the point where French peasants had their children calling them vous. Naturally, people who expected to be addressed as vous reciprocally addressed that person as tu. This is what linguists call the power semantic: the use of tu and vous to convey superior (or concede inferior) power or status.
Well, what about people of the same social stratum? What were they to call one another? Back in the good old days, everyone was just tu, but now with all these power games going on, a new set of rules was needed. The upper crust considered themselves the elite and referred to one another as vous, even husbands and wives. Peers of the lower classes, meanwhile, stuck with tu, often as a point of pride, a show of solidarity, a syntactic sneer at the upper classes. For that reason, the reciprocal usage of tu or vous among people of similar classes is called the solidarity semantic.
The French nearly managed to do away with all this during the French Revolution, with the Committee for Public Safety condemning the usage of vous as a feudal vestige. Robespierre even addressed the president of the Assembly as tu, an act that could’ve bought you a ticket to the guillotine just a few months earlier. But cooler heads—or rather, warmer heads, those still attached to bodies—prevailed, and as republican ideals went out the window in the Restoration that followed, vous was restored along with the Crown.
A scenario similar to the events of 1789 played out during the May 1968 student uprisings, when protestors, like the sans-culottes of two centuries earlier, threw off the shackles of the oppressive vous, although as they have aged and entered the workplace and mainstream society, many have lost their tutoyer principles along with their long hair. Meanwhile, although we no longer address waiters as tu and expect them to call us vous, it is still common to have such a relationship with your boss at work or your teacher in school. In the 2008 French movie The Class, a student is dragged to the principal’s office for having committed the offence of using tu with a teacher.
The solidarity semantic is going strong as well. If anything, the lines between vous and tu have blurred and the unwritten rules have become more inscrutable. Take, for example, my dilemma with Sylvie: At what point does someone become enough of an intimate to be called tu? And for that matter, who makes the first move? Not to worry: the French have developed an entire formal protocol for how it’s done, even going so far as to invent a verb (tutoyer) that means “to address each other with the tu form.”
Here’s how it works: When you first meet someone, you generally address each other as vous, unless your relationship comes under one of the three dozen or so overriding rules (adult/child, etc.). You and your new acquaintance might see each other again and continue chatting, even have a coffee together. And at some point, when it feels right, one of you will say to the other some variation of On se tutoie? meaning, “Shall we use the tu form with each other?” And with any luck the other will agree.
Gulp. To me, this little mating dance holds all the risks and none of the rewards of asking a girl to the senior prom, a prospect I found so terrifying that I confess I never actually got around to it. Indeed, I felt my gut tightening when I asked Sylvie “On se tutoie? ” via e-mail. What gave me the courage to try was Sylvie’s use of the intimate greeting, “Coucou, Bill!” in her recent notes.
Coucou? When I told her in my response that my dictionary defined it as a bird or a clock, she explained, “It is like the American word ‘hi,’ it’s very familiar and mostly used for friends and family :)” Okay, I figured, I’ve made it to tutoyer-ville, especially with that smiley she tacked on (which raises a whole other set of questions about the relationship of emoticons and the formal second person, which I am not prepared to go into here, or anywhere, or ever), and the time seemed right to, well, propose.
Now, had I been more familiar with these protocols, I would’ve known that because I’m old enough to be Sylvie’s father, I should’ve used the tu form with her from the get-go. She, on the other hand (had she been writing in French, not English), would properly have called me vous, whic
h would have been more than a little weird, a reminder in every sentence that “you’re old enough to be my father,” so I in turn would have invited her to tutoyer. This is ignoring the fact, of course, that the Internet, informal by nature, must have its own set of rules. Oy vey!
IT’S DATE NIGHT IN the Alexander household, meaning a French dinner that includes my to-die-for pommes Anna* (the only dish I know of that’s named after a prostitute—you can look it up), followed by a well-reviewed French movie I’ve picked out, in turn followed, with any luck, by a little French kissing.
We’ll have to do our smooching in English because, remarkably, the French do not have a term for “French kissing.” I mean, nothing at all! Therefore the 2014 Petit Robert dictionary, perhaps concerned about the impact this might be having on the already low French birthrate, has just proposed one—a very odd concept for Americans, who kind of just wait for a new word to arrive naturally—coming up with the verb galocher, which is derived from the word for an ice-skating boot, the idea apparently being that a French kiss is kind of sliding around on the ice, but with your lips and tongue. Okay. You can like it or hate it, but as we know, Petit Robert is not the final arbiter. What I wouldn’t give to be in the room when the Académie française takes this up!
Back at date night, we were up to the French movie part. It’s been my observation that about 90 percent of French films fall roughly into one of just two plotlines. The first is of the man-loves-woman-loves-another-man-loves-another-woman variety, with luscious scenery and exquisitely worn scarves.
The second category consists of movies that leave you despairing about the futility of existence, the folly of love, and how the hell you could have chosen this movie for date night! Tonight’s feature, Les herbes folles (Wild Grass), by the acclaimed director Alain Resnais, belongs, regrettably, to this group. Everyone ends up dead in the end, including, I suspect, no small number of viewers who watched it all the way through, but it isn’t a total loss because of a didactic moment that crystallizes for me just how powerful, and meaningful, this tu business is.
Georges, who is about sixty, is opening a bottle of champagne, surrounded by his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, Jean-Mi, who has apparently been in the family for some time, long enough to have given Georges two grandchildren. As everyone sips champagne, and the laughter and good times roll, Jean-Mi figures the moment is right for the tutoyer gambit.
JEAN-MI: We could use tu now.
GEORGES: I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. Do you mind?
JEAN-MI: No, no, I was just asking.
GEORGES: Use tu to say what? We’re fine like this, aren’t we?
At which point I turn to Anne and say, “Wow, now that’s using the power semantic!”
She says, “How much longer do we have to watch this?”
“But this is amazing! They’re having a whole discussion on tutoyer! We have nothing like this in America!”
“No, sir, we don’t.”
“Cute.”
But outside the military and the South, even “sir,” which, of course, isn’t quite the same thing, has become rare. However, I did get an intriguing lesson in how things might have turned out had American English retained a version of vous/tu when during my first hospital stay I read, in French (with the help of a dictionary and a translation), the 1946 Jean-Paul Sartre play The Respectful Prostitute, which takes place in America’s Deep South. The play opens with a knock at the door and a man addressing a prostitute with vous, while she returns a tu. This confused me greatly. Who would be addressing a hooker in the formal, while receiving the familiar?
A Noir, or a black man, that’s who. (As it happens, in a few decades Mexicans will appear on the scene and an American Noir will have someone to call tu.) By the way, you might expect that a prostitute, on the (almost) lowest rung of society’s ladder, would use vous to address the man who appears later in the scene, her distinguished and wealthy client, but in fact they address each other as tu. There’s a saying in Spanish that “prostitutes are women who smoke and treat you with tú.” It makes sense, if you think about what you’re really paying for.
By the way, tu is not forever. Should the need arise to go back to vous—say, if you catch your best friend in bed with your wife—the French, bless ’em, who didn’t have a word for “French kiss” until ten minutes ago, do have a word you can use here: vouvoyer.
WHAT MAKES THIS ALL so difficult is that there are no hard-and-fast rules. In a piece published in the International Herald Tribune, the English-language newspaper based in Paris, Mary Blume wrote that foreigners “cannot hope to master the intricacies of the tu and vous forms of address, because the French can’t either.” Still, I’ve been able to glean some rules, which I’ve put into a simple flowchart (see next page) that I recommend you take with you on your next trip to France.
SO HOW DID WE English speakers manage to avoid this curse? After all, English is the offspring of Old French and German, another language that has formal and familiar terms of address (Sie and du, respectively). In fact, for a while English did have both forms, but unlike gender, which vanished entirely, vestiges of the formal and familiar are still found today, mainly in church, where “thou” is frequently used in prayer, but not, as you might think, as a formal, respectful way of addressing God. Quite the opposite: “thou” is the early modern English equivalent of tu; it is “ye” that corresponds to vous. (Speaking of God, in the French translation of the Bible, everyone just calls everyone else tu. Apparently, French Jesus does not expect his disciples to vouvoyer him, even as they refer to him as “Master.”)
By the seventeenth century, “thou” was falling into disuse, even becoming a form of contempt, used the way the French might pointedly tutoyer a rude shopkeeper or a dishonest mechanic. Certainly no one living in England in 1603 would have missed the highly insulting use of the term in Sir Edward Coke’s famous attack on Sir Walter Raleigh: “I thou thee, thou traitor!” Yet by the end of the seventeenth century, “ye” had become “you” and was used to address everyone: familiar, formal, and plural.
It’s interesting to note that just as “thou” was fading from common usage in English, the Académie française was being founded to codify such things in France. Vive la différence! There is no denying that the French have a fondness for formality and do keep their distance (and their vous) until they feel they really know you, though circumstances can hasten the transition. A study conducted in 1950 found that mountaineers used the vous form with each other until they reached a certain critical altitude, at which point they switched to a mutual tu. As the researchers write, “We like to think that this is the point where their lives hang by a single thread.”
I wouldn’t feel right tutoyer-ing Dr. Chinitz, who in the morning will be holding my life in his hands, playing Pac-Man inside my heart. I’m fine conceding the power semantic, for as far as I’m concerned, tomorrow morning he’s emperor, pope, and king all rolled into one.
A Short Guide to Using Vous and Tu
* Slice 4 potatoes very thinly on a mandoline. Clarify 4 tablespoons of sweet butter by melting and skimming off the milk solids that float to the surface. Layer potatoes with plenty of salt and pepper and the clarified butter into an 8-to-10-inch oven-safe, nonstick pan. Cover with foil and cook on stovetop over high heat for 90 seconds. Transfer to 425-degree oven and bake for 45 minutes, removing foil after 30. Place platter on top and flip, like an upside-down cake.
Baby Jesus in Velvet Shorts
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
—MARK TWAIN
“Vingt, dix-neuf, dix-huit . . . ” To see if I’ve made fanny—that is, suffered any cognitive damage—during the procedure, the first thing I do when stirred awake in the recovery room is to start counting backward from twenty in French, a totally spontaneous, unpremeditated act that must’ve been subliminally planted by the exercise in my Meetup.com class. Alt
hough it’s something I’m lucky to accomplish on my best days after two cups of coffee, I make it to zéro and relax a bit.
“How do you feel, Mr. Alexander?”
I’m surprised to hear Dr. Chinitz use “mister” with me. Maybe no one addresses you as vous in an American hospital, but everyone does call you “mister,” which is close enough. So even though I’m freezing, my back is absolutely killing me, my heart hurts (literally), and my mouth and throat feel like I’ve been gargling with ground glass, I mumble, “Great. How’d we do?”
“Just fine. You had quite a bit of activity in there, so we were in surgery a little longer than we’d planned.”
“How long?”
“Eight hours.” It’s four in the afternoon.
Zut alors! No wonder my back is killing me. And I have to stay flat, without moving, for another excruciatingly long four hours, until the catheter entry points are clotted. Chinitz orders some pain meds and a heater for my death-rattle chill. The temporary discomfort, as great as it is, seems a small price to pay, for when I feel my heart singing lubb-dupp, lubb-dupp, for the first time in months, it’s a chanson—the sweetest song I’ve ever heard.
I’M UNDER DOCTOR’S ORDERS to stay home and take it easy for a week, which solves a scheduling issue I’ve been having. A couple of weeks earlier, I’d received another bonjour from the language-networking site MyLanguageExchange, this one from a Frenchwoman who wants to skype (that is, talk), but with her job, my job, and the six-hour time difference, we hadn’t been able to find a mutually good time—until now.
Catherine is a woman in her fifties living with her two dogs in the trendy Montmartre neighborhood so beautifully evoked in Amélie, the whimsical 2001 film that made Audrey Tautou an international star. We talk for over an hour, but Catherine, who is fluent in English, mainly just wants someone to talk to in English. I ask if we can speak in French. She says something unintelligible.
Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart Page 11
