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

by William Alexander

  The stalker is revealed over lunch.

  “I’m two months short of being declared a cancer survivor,” Karen tells me in English. She expresses outward confidence that it’s not coming back, noting that all her tests have been encouraging, but her actions say something else. As we pass shops, she shows no interest in going in (“I’ve stopped buying things; I’m getting rid of stuff at this point”), and later she talks about all she wants to do in the next couple of years, finally letting her guard down and admitting, “I don’t know how much time I have.” Karen has made her list, and learning French—for no other reason than to learn French, to conquer something that has eluded her for life, something beautiful and desirable—is at the top.

  Karen is determined to learn French before she dies.

  FRENCH-LANGUAGE BOOT CAMP ENTERS its second week, and the new arrivals—a pair of diplomatic attachés from Slovakia, another pair from Ireland, and three Germans—are a convivial group, but I miss James and the other students. I have to admit, though, that it’s nice being a veteran, showing the new kids the ropes, even joking with the teachers as my French gradually improves. Bicycling during a lunch break on one of the bikes provided by the school, I see two women from class walking down the street. “Bonjour, mesdames! ” I call, waving, as I pass, nearly swerving into a truck and ending my French quest prematurely.

  After dinner, Cécile organizes an activity in the garden, and much to my delight, I’m able to cross one item off my list of French goals: playing pétanque in France. It’s a fun match, I play well, and no one has to kiss Fanny.

  As the week continues, I become increasingly aware that my brain’s processing speed is, as linguist David Birdsong had predicted, slower than that of the younger students. But we all get tripped up, even on what should be the simplest things. Inger Stevens, it turns out, has spent three semesters studying French at the Sorbonne, yet I witness her having trouble with the simple sentence “I went there,” specifically with the placement of the pronoun “there” (y). She insists it should be Je suis y allé, rather than J’y suis allé, which happens to be the same mistake I’d made two hours earlier. Translated literally either as “I there have gone” or, as Inger preferred, “I have there gone,” the phrase sounds wrong either way to the American ear. God knows how you say it in Swedish (actually I asked, and it’s not pretty: Jag gick dit), but in English both versions sound as if you’re speaking mock Amish.

  Inger and the instructors agree that French is difficult to learn, even for the French. On Inger’s first day of French class at the famed university in Paris, she was handed a set of colored pencils, which are employed to help students (of all ages—the same method is used in French kindergartens) ensure that their nouns, verbs, and adjectives agree in gender, subject, and number.

  I ask one of the instructors who speaks English (as well as Spanish) whether she thinks English or French is easier to learn. “Oh, English!” she says without hesitation. It’s a much simpler language, she explains, without all the conjugations and rigidity of French. The grammar was a piece of cake. Her biggest problem in learning English was the strange pronunciation (I imagine she’s referring in part to r’s that don’t originate from your rectum) and the vocabulary. The English language, she says, has many more words to be learned than the French.

  This seems like an opportune time to bring up with the instructor one particular word that I’ve observed the French don’t have. L’affaire DSK has sparked a debate in France—and at Millefeuille—about how women are treated in society. French women may be famed for their seductive powers, but it’s powerful men who seem to benefit the most from the seductions, taking mistresses and perpetuating one of the largest economic gender gaps (another term the French no have equivalent for) in Europe.

  The word that I find conspicuous for its absence is “wife.” The French have a word reserved for “husband” (mari) but not for “wife.” The word for wife, femme, means both “woman” and “wife,” depending on the context. So a man refers to his wife as “the woman” or “my woman.” Maybe this is a stretch, I say to the teacher (with the assistance of some hand motions, because “stretch” is a word I don’t know in French), but do you think there’s a connection between the language and the culture? Put another way, does the absence of a dedicated word for “wife” reflect a French woman’s status?

  She says no, not at all; we do have a word, épouse for the wife and époux for the husband.

  But that’s not the same thing, I argue. Those are just the masculine and feminine forms of the generic word “spouse.” We have the word “spouse” in English, too, I say, but we also have distinct words for “husband” and “wife” that have no other usage, and you have only the one for “husband.”

  She gets it. I can see the change in her eyes, as if a curtain has just been lifted. After a moment of thought she adds that, come to think of it, the same is true for sons and daughters. A son is a fils, but a daughter is, once again, just a girl, a fille. Say fille and you could be talking about either your daughter or the girl who milks the cows. The instructor puts her pen down and sits back with an amazed look. “Never occurred to me,” she says, her voice and eyes full of wonder, and I have a feeling she may well continue the conversation with someone else—perhaps her mari—down the road.

  It is Thursday night, my last dinner at the school, but one I’ve been looking forward to, for tonight’s lecture is on wine, and the speaker has brought along quite a few bottles of local wines for a dégustation, or wine tasting, to accompany his talk. It’s sure to beat the lecture on the French economy. We taste four Côtes du Rhônes, learning how to appreciate them, examining the color, swirling the wine in the glass and again in our mouths, tasting with and without food, before and after aerating. All very serious stuff, yet in the middle of this I notice Karen desperately trying to suppress convulsive laughter, her body literally shuddering. She slides a bottle toward me, its label printed in both English and French. The English reads,

  The vintage is resulting from the assembly from Viognier type of vines and white Clairette 88 years, entirely collected with the hand, in cases. That gives a wine of yellow color pale with flavours of fishings and fruits white. To be useful between 10 and 12°C, with aperitif, with foie gras, cooked fish or white meats.

  By the time I hit “flavours of fishings,” I’m in the same boat as Karen. For Francophones, here’s the original French:

  Cette cuvée est issue de l’assemblage de cépages Viognier et Clairette blanche de 88 ans, récoltée entièrement à la main, en caisses. Cela donne un vin de couleur jaune pâle avec des arômes de pêches et des fruits blancs. Servir entre 10 et 12°C, à l’apéritif, avec du foie gras, des poissons cuisinés ou des viandes blanches.

  Ah, the delicious irony, to be in a language class, struggling to learn French, and to see how badly a commercial enterprise can screw up translating a wine label. It looks as if they either did a word-for-word translation or used an early version of a computerized translation program (the wine was bottled in 2008). You have to wonder why, with all the bilingual Frenchmen around, they didn’t take ten minutes to run it by someone first.

  Out of curiosity, I later bring the not-quite-empty bottle to my room and type the label into Google Translate to see how a contemporary machine translation compares to the vineyard’s. Here’s what it returns:

  This cuvee is a blend of varietals Viognier and Clairette blanche 88, harvested entirely by hand, in boxes. This gives a pale yellow wine with aromas of peaches and white fruits. Serve between 10 and 12°C, aperitif, with foie gras, cooked fish or white meat.

  Not bad. Other than lacking the words “as an” before “aperitif,” the translation is pretty decent. Most importantly, it correctly translated pêches. The winery’s mistranslation stems from the fact that pêche has two different, unrelated meanings: “fishing” and “peach.”

  With only a day of classes left, I’ve allowed myself to get quite drunk at the tasting and the dinn
er that follows. The standard two-week stay at Millefeuille feels like just about the right duration. One week is too short, and after two weeks you’re ready to hang yourself from the nonexistent shower-curtain rod if you have to face one more day. The immersion approach is assumed by everyone in the field to be the best way to learn a language, and it probably is, but there’s a fine line between immersion and drowning.

  Since midway through the second week I’d been feeling the fatigue getting in the way of learning, making embarrassing high-school-freshman errors, saying de le instead of du, for example. I even contemplated cutting class one day and taking a train to the coast for a break, but my conscience (and the substantial per diem investment) kept me in my seat. Karen and I, the oldest two in the group, are struggling the most, but I’ve seen it in the eyes of all the other students as well. Except for James, who, right till the end, was as calm, relaxed, and unperturbed as ever.

  Inside the bubble of this isolated school, it’s hard to tell how much French I’ve learned, speaking only to teachers and other students, but this weekend I’ll get an idea, for, like James, I have my own exam of sorts: dinner in Paris with my French-rocker pen pal, Sylvie. After thirteen months of study, am I capable of holding a conversation with, not another student or a teacher, but a Frenchwoman? This is the acid test, a much-anticipated Paris meeting, and my very raison d’être all rolled into one. As I finish off the Côtes du Rhône, savoring its hint of trout, I check my e-mail, finding a deflating note from Sylvie.

  How are you? I’d like to tell you for the 16th, we can’t come in Paris and I’m so Sad for this because my fiancé and I have a lot of things to pay and my car to repare. If we come in Paris, It will be very difficult to end the month. Please Bill, don’t blame me, we’ll see you the next time :).

  Merde. Now I’m drunk and depressed. No dinner in Paris, no shopping. No conversation! Oh well, what are you going to do? I compose a reply, hiding my hurt, trying to sound casual. Before I can hit the “send” button, I feel a tap on my shoulder.

  “Guy! What the hell are you doing here? I told you, we’re through!”

  “What the hell am I doing? What the hell are you doing, chéri? Giving in as easy as that? I’m disappointed in you.”

  “You see her note. What would you like me to do?”

  “For starters, you could go to Orléans.”

  “No way. This is obviously just a cover story. And if I offer to come down, negating her excuse of the expense, it puts her in an awkward position.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And what’s the problem with negating her excuse? It’s she who’s breaking the date, not you. Go ahead, put her in an uncomfortable position. Make it hard for her to refuse, not easy! This is a exactly how you’ve been approaching French—afraid to take risks, afraid to fail! Take a train down, have a couple of drinks, see if you can actually speak French to a couple of real, live French people, and take the next train back to Paris. You’ve added an extra day to your trip for this meeting; you’ve come four thousand miles. You’re going to just let it vanish?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  But deep inside I know that my swashbuckling alter ego is right. About everything, and some of it stings. I check the train schedule. Sure enough, Orléans is only an hour from Paris. I delete the reply I was writing and start over with my offer, signing the note “Guy.”

  Cherchez la Femme

  RICKY: Honey, you can’t go running around Paris all by yourself.

  LUCY: Why not?

  RICKY: What about your French?

  LUCY: What about my French?!

  RICKY: Well, Paris is a big city, and not knowing the language, you’re liable to get in a lot of trouble.

  —I Love Lucy, 1956

  Paris! Merely to look at the word evokes a visceral response unmatched by virtually any city in the world. Prague, London, Warsaw, Istanbul: beautiful as they may be, do any of them elicit an emotion? Think—no, even better, say—the word out loud: Paris! What do you see? What do you feel? For me, the word conjures up the Eiffel Tower, bridges over the Seine, outdoor cafés, the glistening gold dome of Napoleon’s tomb. Stately monuments and ancient streets. Corner boulangeries from which the smells of freshly baked bread waft every time a customer opens the door.

  Paris! The adopted home of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and countless other writers and artists who have been drawn here for centuries. Just wandering a few blocks from my hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I pass plaques commemorating the former residences of Albert Camus and George Sand, a sundial created by Salvador Dalí. This, I remind myself, is why I’ve been studying French. This is what it’s all about.

  Reclining in one of the comfortable public chairs in the Luxembourg Gardens, which are in full, magnificent bloom, I watch the comedic ballet of solo tourists from every corner of the globe trying to take photos of themselves: balance the camera, set the timer, race into position, view the disappointing result, and repeat. I’ve seen this before, of course, but for the first time it occurs to me why the photographer-models are so reluctant to simply ask another tourist to take a photo: the language barrier.

  As for my own language barrier, the thrill of being in Paris brings out my inner Guy, and I address every waiter, hotel clerk, and shopkeeper I come across in French, even though in this touristy section of Paris virtually all of them speak far better English than I speak French. I’m quite the chatterbox, asking to try on a beret, inquiring about the price of a sweater. Easy stuff, although I know I’m speaking atrociously, but what two weeks of immersion has given me, as much as anything else, is confidence, which is half the game, it turns out, and a self-perpetuating one.

  As I dine al fresco under an awning, I even take a stab at putting together the request, “Can I change my table? The wind is blowing the rain onto me.” It isn’t easy, taking me several minutes to compose in my head before I’m ready to signal the waiter. The biggest stumbling block is, surprisingly, the first two words of the request—“can I”—because I’ve forgotten the conditional tense for pouvoir, an easy, common word that I knew well before I started class two weeks ago but that is now jumbled up with so much other material I can’t locate it in my attic-brain. Totally blanking, I resort to running down the memorized list of conjugations for pouvoir in my head, in order, the way you do when someone asks you which letter comes before s in the alphabet.

  I can’t help noticing that no other tourist in the restaurant is making a similar effort. They just plop down and address the waiter in English, simply assuming that he should speak their native tongue in his country. Now, I don’t expect everyone who wants to spend a week in a foreign country to follow my example and first spend a year studying its language, but, I want to cry out, would it kill you to at least say “hello” and “thank you” in French? Surely, you already know those words! My irritation finally hits a fever pitch on Sunday morning in the hotel restaurant. I am sitting alone with my coffee and croissant when a family comes in.

  “Good morning,” the woman says cheerily to me.

  “Bonjour,” I reply, which provokes an embarrassed bonjour from her. Great, I’ve made my point. Still, I could make it better. I am about to gently chide her by pointing out, in French, “We are in France; we should speak French, no?” but I bite my tongue. Fortunately so, for a moment later I hear the family chatting among themselves—in French. They are a French family visiting Paris and, correctly assuming I was non-French, spoke English to me as a gracious courtesy. Mon dieu, am I becoming an insufferable language snob?

  If so, payback is on the way, for that afternoon I am on a train headed to Orléans to meet, to speak with, Sylvie and her fiancé, Antoine. Yet before I so much as open my mouth, I need to handle a major dilemma that I’ve been dreading for days, one that makes the vous/tu uncertainty seem trifling by comparison. Do I greet Sylvie with a handshake or a kiss?

  And when I say “kiss,” I mean that cheek-to-cheek air kiss, wher
e you touch cheeks and make a smacking sound with your lips as if you were actually kissing, which in most cases you are not, then repeat on the other cheek. And it doesn’t always end there. The French, it seems, are so fond of the kiss that they sometimes go for three or even four, depending on the region. In general they kiss twice in the north, and anywhere from three to a tongue down your throat in the south. As with the formal and familiar terms of address, this is socially important, so important that the French have a protocol reminiscent of tutoyer to assist in resolving any doubt: you ask. That’s right, you say something like, On va se faire la bise?

  On the one hand, I guess it’s nice to have a direct and unambiguous way out of the uncertainty, but under no circumstances are those going to be my first words to Sylvie at the train station! Knowing I had to deal with this, I’d asked Cécile for advice before leaving Millefeuille. She’d taken my conundrum very seriously and, in a process reminiscent of my vous/tu decision tree, had gone down a list of questions to divine the correct protocol: How long have we been corresponding? Are we tutoyer-ing? What valedictions do we use in signing our e-mails? When I was done, she had concluded, “Kiss.” Certainly Guy wouldn’t do anything but kiss, but frankly, I’m not sure which of us is holding the train ticket.

  One thing we are not going to do, by the way, is hug. I’ve observed that the French don’t hug socially. They just don’t. This may be because they don’t have a word for it. They used to—embrasser—but somewhere along the way the terms of endearment all got ratcheted up one level, and embrasser now means “to kiss,” a real kiss, on the lips. Baiser, which used to mean “to kiss,” is now the vulgarity “to fuck,” although it can still mean “to kiss,” depending on the context.