And indeed, while reading isn’t taught at maternelle, speaking definitely is. In fact, it turns out that the main goal of maternelle is for kids of all backgrounds to perfect their spoken French. That booklet for parents says this French should be ‘rich, organized, and comprehensible to others’ (that is, they need to speak it much better than I do). Charlotte, the teacher, tells me that the children of immigrants typically enter maternelle in September speaking bare-bones French, or none at all. By March, she says, they’re usually competent if not fluent.
The French logic seems to be that if children can speak clearly, they can also think clearly. In addition to polishing their spoken grammar, the government’s booklet says French kids learn to ‘observe, ask questions, and make their interrogations increasingly rational. He learns to adopt a point of view other than his own, and this confrontation with logical thinking gives him a taste of reasoning. He becomes capable of counting, of classifying, ordering, and describing …’ All those philosophers and intellectuals I see pontificating on evening television in France apparently began their analytical training in nursery school.
I’m grateful for the maternelle. I haven’t forgotten that my friends in London are battling for places in public or private nurseries. But France is far from perfect. Teachers effectively have tenure, whether they’re any good or not. There are chronic funding problems, and the occasional shortage of places. Bean’s class has twenty-five kids, which feels like quite a lot but isn’t even the maximum. (There’s a teacher’s assistant who helps with supplies, trips to the bathroom and small disputes.)
On the plus side, maternelle is free (lunch is on a sliding scale ranging from 13 centimes to five euros per day, based on parents’ income). It’s an eight-minute walk from our house. And the maternelle makes it very easy for mothers to work. It lasts from 8:20 to 4:20, four days a week. For another small fee there’s a ‘leisure centre’ on the premises that can look after kids until the early evening, and all day on Wednesdays. The centre is also open on most school holidays and much of the summer, when they take the kids to parks, on picnics and on visits to museums. Bean recently spent the whole day on a farm.
Maternelle is clearly a big part of what’s turning my little Anglo-American girl into a French person. It’s even making me more French. Unlike at the crèche, the other parents immediately take an interest in Bean, and by association in me. They now seem to view our family as part of the cohort that they’ll be travelling all through school with (whereas after the crèche the kids scattered to different schools). A few of the mothers from Bean’s class have little babies and are on maternity leave. When I pick up Bean from school and take her to the park across the street, I sit with some of these mothers while our kids play. Gradually, we’re even invited over to their homes for birthday parties, afternoon goûters, and dinners.
While the maternelle brings us all more into French life, it also makes us realize that French families observe social codes that we don’t. After we finish dinner at the home of my friend Esther and her husband, who have a daughter Bean’s age, Esther becomes agitated when her daughter won’t come out of her room to say goodbye to us. She finally marches into the girl’s room and drags her out.
‘Au revoir,’ the four-year-old finally says, meekly. Esther is soothed.
Of course I’d been making Bean say the ‘magic words’ please and thank you. But it turns out that in French there are four magic words: please, thank you, bonjour (hello) and au revoir (goodbye). Please and thank you are necessary, but not nearly sufficient. Bonjour and au revoir – and bonjour in particular – are crucial. I hadn’t realized that learning to say bonjour is a central part of becoming French.
‘Me, my obsession is that my children know to say merci, bonjour, bonjour madame,’ Audrey Goutard, a French journalist with three kids, tells me. ‘From the age of one, you can’t imagine, I said it to them fifteen times a day.’
For some French parents, a simple bonjour isn’t enough. ‘They should say it with confidence, it’s the first part of a relationship,’ another mother tells me. Virginie, the skinny stay-at-home mum, demands that her kids heighten the politeness by saying ‘Bonjour, monsieur’ and ‘Bonjour, madame.’
Other parents, like my friend Esther, insist on bonjours at the threat of punishment. ‘If she doesn’t say bonjour, she stays in her room, no dinner with guests,’ Esther explains. ‘So she says bonjour. It’s not the most sincere bonjour, but it’s the repetition [that matters], I’m hoping.’
Benoît, a professor and father of two, tells me there was a family crisis when he took his kids to stay with their grandparents. His three-year-old daughter would wake up grumpy, and didn’t want to say bonjour to her grandfather until she’d had breakfast. She finally compromised by agreeing to say ‘pas bonjour papi’ (not good morning, Grandpa) to him on the way to the table. ‘He was happy with that. In a way, she was acknowledging him,’ Benoît explains.
Adults are supposed to say bonjour to each other too, of course. I think tourists are often treated gruffly in Parisian cafés and shops partly because they don’t begin interactions with bonjour, even if they switch to English afterwards. It’s crucial to say bonjour upon getting into a taxi, when a waitress first approaches your table in a restaurant, or before asking a salesperson if the trousers come in your size. Saying bonjour acknowledges the other person’s humanity. It signals that you view him as a person, not just as someone who’s there to serve you. I’m amazed that people seem visibly put at ease after I say a nice solid bonjour. It signals that – although I have a strange accent – we’re going to have a civilized encounter.
In Britain and the US, a four-year-old kid isn’t obliged to greet me when he walks into my house. He gets to skulk in under the umbrella of his parents’ greeting. And in an Anglophone context, that’s supposed to be fine with me. I don’t need the child’s acknowledgement because I don’t quite count him as a full person; he’s in a separate kids’ realm. I might hear all about how gifted he is, but he never actually speaks to me.
When I’m at a family luncheon back in the US, I’m struck that the cousins and step-cousins at the table, who range in age from five to fourteen, don’t say anything at all to me, unless I try to pry a few words out of them. Some can only muster one-word responses to my questions. Even the teenagers aren’t used to expressing themselves with confidence to a grown-up they don’t know well.
Part of what the French obsession with bonjour reveals is that, in France, it isn’t accepted that kids can have this shadowy presence. The child greets, therefore he is. Just as any adult who walks into my house has to acknowledge me, any child who walks in must acknowledge me too. ‘Greeting is essentially recognizing someone as a person,’ says Benoît, the professor. ‘People feel injured if they’re not greeted by children that way.’
These aren’t just social conventions; they’re a national project. In a meeting for parents at Bean’s school, her teacher tells us that one of the school’s goals is for students to remember the names of adults (Bean calls her teachers by their first names) and to practise saying bonjour, au revoir and merci to them. The booklet by the French government says that in maternelle kids are supposed to show their grasp of ‘civility and politeness’, including ‘greeting the teacher at the beginning and the end of the day, responding to questions, thanking the person who helps him, and not cutting someone off when they’re speaking’.
French children don’t always succeed in saying bonjour unprompted. Often there’s a little ritual in which the parent urges the child to say it (‘Come say bonjour!’). The adult who’s being greeted usually waits a beat and then tells the parent, in a friendly way, not to worry about it. This seems to satisfy the obligation too.
Making kids say bonjour isn’t just for the benefit of grown-ups. It’s also to help kids learn that they’re not the only ones with feelings and needs.
‘It avoids selfishness,’ says Esther, who dragged out her daughter – an adorable, doted-on on
ly child – to say goodbye to me. ‘Kids who ignore other people, and don’t say bonjour or au revoir, they just stay in their bubble … When will they get the sense that they are there to give, not just to receive?’
Saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ puts children in an inferior, receiving role. An adult has either done something for them, or the child is asking the adult for something. But bonjour and au revoir put the child and the adult on more equal footing, at least for that moment. It cements the idea that kids are people in their own right.
I can’t help thinking that letting an Anglophone kid slink in the door without greeting me could set off a chain reaction in which he then jumps on my couch, refuses to eat anything but plain pasta, and bites my foot while I’m having dinner. If he’s exempt from that first rule of civility, he – and everyone else – will be quicker to assume that he’s exempt from many other rules too, or that he’s not capable of following these rules.
Saying bonjour signals to the child, and to everyone else, that he’s capable of behaving well. It sets the tone for the whole interaction between adults and children.
Parents acknowledge that greeting someone is in some ways an adult act. ‘I don’t think it’s easy to say hello,’ says Denise, a medical ethicist with two girls aged seven and nine. But Denise says it fortifies kids to know that their greeting matters to the adult. She explains: ‘I think the child who doesn’t say bonjour cannot really feel confident.’
Neither can the child’s parents. That’s because saying bonjour is also a strong marker of upbringing. Kids who don’t say these French magic words risk having the label mal élevé – badly brought up – slapped on them.
Denise says her younger daughter had a friend over who shouted quite a lot, and jokingly called Denise chérie – darling. ‘I told my husband, I will not invite him back,’ she tells me. ‘I don’t want my child to play with children who are badly brought up.’
Audrey Goutard, the journalist, has written a book called Le Grand Livre de la Famille, in which she tries to upend some French parenting conventions. But even Goutard doesn’t dare question the importance of bonjour. ‘Honestly, in France, a child who arrives somewhere and doesn’t say bonjour monsieur, bonjour madame, is a child that one rejects,’ she tells me. ‘A six-year-old who doesn’t look up from the TV when you come in, at a friend’s house … I’m going to say that he is “badly brought up”. I won’t say that it’s normal.
‘We’re a society with a lot of codes. And this code, if you don’t follow it, you’re excluded from society. It’s as stupid as that. So you give [your kids] less of a chance to be integrated, to meet people. I say in my book that it’s better that your kids know this code.’
Yikes. I’d vaguely noticed French kids saying bonjour. But I hadn’t realized how much rests on it. It’s the sort of signifier that having nice teeth is in America. When you say bonjour, it shows that someone has invested in your upbringing, and that you’re going to play by some basic social rules. Bean’s cohort of three- and four-year-olds have already had several years’ worth of bonjours drilled into them. Bean hasn’t had any. With only please and thank you in her arsenal, she’s at just 50 per cent. She may already have earned the dreaded label ‘badly brought up’.
I try to appeal to the tiny anthropologist in her. I explain that bonjour is a native custom we have to respect.
‘We live in France, and for French people it’s very important to say bonjour. So we have to say it too,’ I tell her. I coach her in the lift before we arrive at birthday parties, or at visits to the homes of French friends.
‘What are you going to say when we walk in?’ I ask anxiously.
‘Caca boudin,’ she says.
Usually when we walk in, she says nothing at all. So I go through the ritual of, very publicly, telling her to say bonjour. At least I’m acknowledging the convention. Maybe I’m even instilling the habit.
One day while Bean and I are walking to her school, she spontaneously turns to me and says, ‘Even if I’m shy, I have to say bonjour.’ Maybe it’s something she picked up in school. Anyway, it’s true. And it’s good that she knows it. But I can’t help worrying that she’s internalizing the rules a bit too much. It’s one thing to play at being French. It’s quite another to really go native.
Although I’m ambivalent about Bean growing up French, I’m thrilled that she’s growing up bilingual. Simon and I speak only English to her. And at school, she speaks only French. I’m sometimes astonished that I’ve given birth to a child who can effortlessly pronounce phrases like ‘carottes rapées’ and ‘confiture sur le beurre’.
I had thought that young kids just ‘pick up’ languages. But it’s more like a long process of trial and error. A few people tell me that Bean’s French still has an American twang. And though Bean has never lived outside the Paris ring road, thanks to us she evidently radiates some kind of Anglophoneness. When I take her to her Wednesday-morning music class one day (the babysitter usually takes her) I discover that the teacher has been speaking to Bean in pidgin English, though she speaks French to all the other children. Later, a dance teacher tells the class of little girls, in French, to lie down flat on the floor ‘comme une crêpe’. Then she turns to Bean and says, ‘comme un pancake’.
At first, even I can tell that Bean is making lots of mistakes in French, and coming up with some bizarre constructions. She usually says the English ‘for’ instead of its French equivalent, ‘pour’. And she only knows the vocabulary that she’s learned in the classroom, which doesn’t really equip her to talk about cars, or dinner. One day she suddenly asks me, ‘Avion is the same as airplane?’ She’s figuring it out.
I’m not sure which mistakes come from being bilingual, and which come from being three. One day in the Métro Bean leans into me and says, ‘You smell like vomela.’ This turns out to be a combination of ‘vomit’ and ‘Pamela’.
A minute later Bean leans into me again.
‘What do I smell like now?’ I ask.
‘Like college,’ she says.
At home, some French expressions edge out the English ones. We start saying ‘coucou’ instead of ‘peekaboo’, and ‘guili-guili’ when we tickle her, instead of ‘coochi coochi coo’. Bean doesn’t play ‘hide-and-seek’, she plays ‘cache-cache’. We put our rubbish in the poubelle; her dummy is a tétine. No one in our household farts, they make prouts (rhymes with ‘root’).
By the spring of Bean’s first year in maternelle, friends tell me that her Anglophone twang is gone. She sounds like a genuine Parisienne. She’s become so confident in French that I overhear her joking around with friends, in French, in an exaggerated American accent (probably mine). She likes to mix up the two accents on purpose, and decides that the French word for ‘sprinkles’ must be ‘shpreenkels’.
Me: ‘How do you say d’accord in English?’
Bean: ‘You know! [sounding like someone from Alabama] Dah-kord.’
My father finds the idea of having a ‘French’ grandchild charming. He tells Bean to call him grand-père. She doesn’t even consider doing this. She knows he’s not French. She just calls him Grandpa.
At night Bean and I look at picture books. She’s excited and relieved to confirm that, as with ‘airplane’, certain words in French and English refer to the same thing. When we read the famous line in the Madeline books, ‘Something is not right!’ she translates it into colloquial French: ‘Quelque chose ne va pas!’
Although Simon has an English accent, Bean speaks mostly American English. I’m not sure if that’s my influence, or Elmo’s. The other Anglophone kids we know in Paris all have their own accents. Bean’s friend with a dad from New Zealand and a mother who’s half-Irish sounds like a Londoner. A boy with a Parisian mother and a Californian dad sounds like a French chef from 1970s American television. The little boy around the corner with a Farsi-speaking father and an Australian mum just sounds like a creaky Muppet.
In English, Bean occasionally emphasizes the wrong syll
ables of words (like the second syllable of ‘salad’). She sometimes puts English sentences into a French word order (‘Me, I’m not going to have an injection, me’) or translates literally from French to English (‘Because it’s like that!’). She tends to say ‘after’ when what she means is ‘later’. (In French they’re the same word, après).
Sometimes Bean just doesn’t know how native English speakers talk. In a weird appropriation of all the Disney princess DVDs she’s been watching, when she wants to know if something looks good on her she simply asks, ‘Am I the fairest?’ These are all small things. There’s nothing that a summer in London won’t fix.
Another French word that infiltrates our English vocabulary is bêtise (pronounced beh-teeze). It means the small acts of naughtiness that kids do. When Bean stands up at the table, grabs an unauthorized sweet or pitches a pea on the floor, we say that she’s ‘doing a bêtise’. Bêtises are minor annoyances. They’re bad, but they’re not that bad. The accumulation of many of them may warrant a punishment. But just one bêtise on its own probably doesn’t.
We’ve appropriated the French word because there’s no good English equivalent. In English, you wouldn’t tell a child that he’s committed a ‘small act of naughtiness’. We tend to label the kid rather than the crime, by telling him that he’s being naughty, misbehaving, or just ‘being bad’, whatever the severity of the act. There’s a difference between hitting a table and hitting a person. Being able to label an offence as a misdemeanour – a mere bêtise – helps me, as a parent, to respond appropriately. I don’t have to freak out and crack down every time Bean does something wrong or challenges my authority. Sometimes it’s just a bêtise. Having this word calms me down.
I acquire much of my new French vocabulary not just from Bean, but from the many French kids’ books we somehow end up owning, thanks to birthday parties, impulse purchases and neighbours’ garage sales. I’m careful not to read to Bean in French if there’s a native speaker within earshot. I can hear my foreign accent, and the way I stumble over the odd word. Usually I’m trying so hard not to mispronounce anything too egregiously that I only grasp the storyline on the third reading.
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