When in French

by Lauren Collins

  The challenge, I’m finding, is figuring out which ones. Is challenge, for example, something else entirely in French, or just a matter of Coopering out a “shal-longe”? Certainly a native English speaker has an easier time in French than one of Mandarin, but the availability of cognates can lull him into a false sense of security, a tendency to imagine he’s making himself clear when he’s not. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. His misplaced confidence throws his interlocutor, who might take more care with someone he recognized to be blatantly out of his depth. As much as I felt for my colleague, having to conjure French out of nothing, I envied her the purity of the blank slate.

  French is not a hospitable environment in which to try your luck. The thing that’s tough about French is the thing that’s exemplary about French, which is that French speakers across the board are language nuts. Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow write, “Debates about grammar rules and acceptable vocabulary are part of the intellectual landscape and a regular topic of small talk among francophones of all classes and origins—a bit like movies in Anglo-American culture.”

  American politicians play golf or sing in barbershop quartets; French statesmen—who cultivate a sort of spiritual innumeracy in contrast to the spiritual illiteracy of their American counterparts—moonlight as men of letters. (Charles de Gaulle was famous for resurrecting obscure bits of vocabulary.) It took Olivier three weeks and a working group of twice as many relatives to settle on the French text of our wedding invitation, which read, in its entirety, “Together with our families, we request the pleasure of your company at a wedding lunch.” The ideas of excellence and failure are so intimately linked in French that what passes for a compliment is to say that someone has un français châtié—a well-punished French. Olivier has fond memories of watching the grammarian Bernard Pivot, a national celebrity, administer the Dicos d’or, a live televised tournament—the Super Bowl of orthography—in which contestants vied to transcribe most flawlessly a dictated text.

  Pivot’s competition was inspired by the dictée de Mérimée, a moment in French history to which you will find no English analogue. On a rainy day in 1857 at Fontainebleau, the royal country estate, Empress Eugénie asked the author Prosper Mérimée to concoct an entertainment. Mérimée gathered the party. He handed out pens and paper, instructing the guests to jot down the composition he was about to read: “Pour parler sans ambiguïté, ce dîner à Sainte-Adresse, près du Havre, malgré les effluves embaumés de la mer, malgré les vins de très bons crus, les cuisseaux de veau et les cuissots de chevreuil prodigués par l’amphitryon, fut un vrai guêpier,” he began, declaiming three more paragraphs.

  The guests handed in their papers, and Mérimée tallied the results. Over the course of 169 words, Napoleon III made 75 mistakes, Eugénie 62, and Alexandre Dumas, 24. The winner of the game was Prince Metternich of Austria, with 3 faults. Dumas, auto-chastising, turned to him and said, “When will you present yourself at the Academy, to teach us how to spell?”

  • • •

  MONDAYS, WEDNESDAYS, AND FRIDAYS, we have Luisa, a stout Venezuelan Frenchwoman with cantilevered gray curls. Luisa speaks quickly and correctly. She does not welcome questions. Every morning, she greets us—she’s a vous woman—with what I come to think of as a Duchenne scowl.

  Class opens briskly. We turn to chapter 2, “Come to My House!” The topic of discussion is cohabitation.

  Luisa zeroes in on Satomi, the Japanese academic, who has yet to utter a word.

  “Tell me about your living situation, Satomi.”

  “I live with my husband,” Satomi says quietly. “He’s American.”

  “Is he an ideal roommate?” Luisa asks.

  “Yes, but sometimes he uses my toothbrush,” Satomi says, daring to elaborate.

  “That’s an intimate violation!” Luisa barks.

  Satomi withdraws like a slap bracelet.

  Luisa turns to Scotty, the Alaskan.

  “Scotty, what are the qualities of the ideal roommate?”

  “They have to be nice,” Scotty replies.

  “And, for you, what is nice?”

  “Friendly?”

  “Friendly seems a little extreme,” Luisa says, her eyebrow jerking up.

  Scotty thinks for a moment.

  “The ideal roommate shouldn’t smoke?”

  Most of the class nods in agreement. But there is sniggering from the corner, where the Italians sit en bloc.

  “Yeah, maybe for you,” one of them says. “You’re not our ideal roommate.”

  Carlos, the Spanish bellboy, chimes in.

  “Not someone bipolar.”

  “No!” comes the cry from the Italian corner. It’s Cristina.

  “I’m an artist,” she says. “This concerns me. One day, I’m happy. One day, I’m not. I was living in Norway. I was a little depressed. I didn’t want to talk to my roommates, and they were the type of person that if they asked, ‘How was your day?’ you had to say, ‘I took the bus, I ate a sandwich.’ After a week, we had to have a discussion about the fact that I wasn’t very communicative. But their view of communication was exaggerated.”

  “Listen, it’s a matter of respect,” Carlos replies, fingering a black cord that he wears around his neck. “If you have a bad day, you don’t have to put it on the other person.”

  Carlos is right, but he’s driving me nuts with his inability to stop actually answering the questions, rather than merely demonstrating his ability to do so. When he’s lost for words, he throws out filler—tout ça, tout ça—until he regains his bearings. He desperately wants us to know what he really thinks: that there is a lot of oriental influence in modern home decor, that bougainvillea is a beautiful flower, that the owners of pit bulls are not well educated. You say tomato, he says the problem these days is that when you ship food, it lacks vitamins. Tugging on his choker, he rambles on about the importance of positive thinking et tout ça until it’s time for our coffee break.

  I walk downstairs to get some air. Cristina is standing outside the building, dragging on a cigarette.

  “I didn’t know Norwegians were that cheerful,” I say, trying to find some common ground.

  “My roommates weren’t Norwegian,” she replies. “It was my half sister and my half sister’s husband.”

  After the break, we resume the discussion. Lana raises her hand.

  “My boyfriend—my ex—and I bought an apartment in Bosnia,” she says. “But the problem was that we never fought. One day, a woman telephoned me and she said that she was with him. I told him about it, and he asked me how did I know it was true. I said that she had described our apartment—right down to the sheets on the bed.”

  Luisa, stone-faced, waits a minute before responding. “C’est la vie, non?”

  • • •

  DOMINIQUE SAYS that we can absorb French by osmosis. We should have the television or the radio on whenever we’re home. I’m militant about following this piece of advice as—in inverse relationship to my daily needs—I can read and write and even speak in French much better than I can understand it when spoken. Bit by bit, the language is taking shape, definite articles and nouns and indirect objects and verbs and prepositional phrases hanging off subjects and predicates and predicate complements like a Calder mobile. Conjugations are coming along. To my delight, I can now distinguish among un éléphant (a male elephant), une éléphant (a female elephant), and un éléphanteau (a baby elephant of either gender).

  English is a notoriously difficult language to pronounce. French—for me, at least—is an exceedingly tough language to hear. Every syllable is accented equally, making it difficult to figure out where words begin and end. I often tease Olivier about the way he says “can’t remember”—“can tree member,” as though he were describing a still life of soup, oak, and penis.

  French words are connected by the liaison system, in which a wor
d ending in a consonant links to the next one, if it begins in a vowel. The sentence “Je suis une étudiante qui n’a aucune difficulté de apprendre où on peut utiliser les liaisons,” sounds, when spoken correctly, like “Juh sweezoonaytoodeeyante keena ohkoon deefeekultayduhprondruhoowon poo ootuhleezay lay leeayzon.” In English, this is known as being drunk. French words are impressionable, a little bit fickle, behaving differently according to whom they’re with. A French word, if all its friends did, would definitely jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Another fiction about learning a language is that you can become fluent by watching TV. But sitcoms and reality shows—with their fast, slangy dialogue and serial plots—are extremely hard to follow if you don’t already know what’s happening. I decide to start with the radio, which makes up for in elocution what it lacks in visual clues. Every morning I turn on Radio France Internationale. At first, I listen to the previous day’s news in “français facile,” following along with the transcript that RFI posts on the Internet every afternoon.

  Français facile is, in fact, quite difficult. In Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, her novel about an Englishwoman who moves to Jeddah with her engineer husband, Hilary Mantel—an Englishwoman who moved to Jeddah with her engineer husband in 1983—describes the protagonist’s efforts to learn Arabic. “Andrew took her to the bookshop at the Caravan Shopping Center,” Mantel writes. “She bought a language tape, and a book to go with it, and during Jamadi al-awal she pored over this book, and set the careful slow voice of the language tutor echoing through [the apartment]. ‘Good morning. Good morning, how are you? Well, praise be to God. Welcome! Will you drink coffee? How are your children? How is your wife?’” Despite her intelligence and industry—she’s a cartographer by trade, with a surfeit of free time—she is strangely impotent. Arabic won’t take.

  Her frustration resonates with me. My efforts at French leave me feeling at once inert and exhausted, as though I’ve been dog-paddling in a pool of standing water. But as the weeks go by, the liaisons begin to sound less murky. I drop the script and start tuning in to the correct morning’s broadcast, the Sept neuf avec Patrick Cohen on France Inter, a public radio station.

  Trying to understand Patrick Cohen is an almost physical challenge—I have to concentrate my mental energy and then push with all my might, straining to make out the words the way one would to lift a dumbbell. Listening to one of Cohen’s guests speak about the need for more women in positions of power at companies, I think how universal that conversation is. As I’m nodding along, the thought occurs perhaps that I’ve missed a feint or a negation that actually renders the entire argument the opposite of what I’ve understood it to be. What if I’ve got the right topic but the wrong stance, and the guest is actually anti female executives? An unreliable auditor, I can’t trust what I’m hearing.

  I let the conversation fade into gobbledygook, a break between sets. Afraid I’ll atrophy if I rest too long, I insert my earphones and then turn on the hair dryer. I will learn French even if I too become half deaf.

  A few weeks later I stumble into the bathroom, pulling the phone out of the pocket of my robe in my usual bleary routine. I put it on the counter, swipe to the RFI app, and press play. First four words: nid d’oiseaux chanteurs. No preamble. Patrick Cohen, I know immediately, is talking about a nest of songbirds.

  That night Olivier’s brother calls. Usually their conversations pass me by—I’ve missed years of ambient commentary, overheard plans—but this time little fragments of dialogue sing out, as though someone has fiddled with the volume knob on the background music to our life.

  “Elle n’est pas très mobile, quoi,” I hear Olivier say.

  I don’t know whom he’s talking about, or why she’s incapacitated. He seems to be saying “quoi” a lot. Even as it dawns on me that I may have pledged lifelong devotion to a man who ends every sentence with the equivalent of “dude,” I’m taken by an eerie joy. Four years after having met Olivier, I’m hearing his voice for the first time.

  • • •

  WE’VE MADE IT THROUGH most of the winter without burning down the building. Downstairs, the iridologue is still shining a flashlight into people’s eyeballs. We don’t have much of a nightlife, but we do have s’mores, constructed with marshmallows I buy at the American store by which I am not employed. After I pass the Nest of Songbirds Test, Olivier and I get into the habit of spending Saturday nights in front of the fireplace, watching the French version of the singing competition The Voice.

  In terms of format, The Voice: la plus belle voix is almost exactly the same as the American Voice, which itself is based on the Dutch Voice: blind auditions, battle rounds, violently swiveling chairs that look as though they’re about to go flying out of their centripetal force. Instead of Adam Levine, Blake Shelton, Pharrell Williams, and Christina Aguilera, the judges are Florent Pagny, Garou, Mika, and Jenifer. Florent Pagny, the seventeenth-best-selling artist in France between 1955 and 2013, is a classically trained singer with a ponytail and a chest tattoo of a fleur-de-lis. The Québécois Garou made his name playing Quasimodo in the French musical Notre-Dame de Paris. Mika, an American-British-Lebanese-French pop star—partial to ascots and suspenders, waistcoats and epaulets—was nominated for a Best Dance Recording Grammy in 2008. Jenifer was on a reality show called Star Academy and seems, from the covers of the tabloids, to have been pregnant for two years.

  The Voice: la plus belle voix is my favorite show because it’s completely predictable. An aspiring star shows up, he talks to the camera about his dreams, he sings a song, his family cries, his dreams are either fulfilled or crushed. All I have to do is listen to a lot of Johnny Hallyday covers and decide whether the judges thought they were pas mal (“not bad,” meaning “good”) or pas terrible (“not bad,” meaning “awful”).

  We get to know the judges. In the manner of the Mr. Men books, they each embody a single attribute. Garou is bland; Jenifer’s nice; Mika’s fun. We love Florent Pagny, who lives in Patagonia half of the year—Olivier because he once dated Vanessa Paradis, and I for his lunar air. Staring into the distance, stroking his goatee, he seems to be listening to the windpipes on some far-off steppe.

  We’re going for Manon Trinquier, a throaty Amy Winehouse lookalike from Narbonne. In the blind audition round, she does an awesomely maximal rendition of the Belgian star Stromae’s hit “Formidable,” turning the final verse into a blood-and-thunder spat-word aria.

  “Si maman est chiante / C’est qu’elle a peur d’être mamie,” I scream along, levitating from the couch as the song reaches its climax.

  “Si papa trompe maman / C’est parce que maman vieillit, tiens,” Olivier joins in.

  I’ve never seen him like this. He’s belting it out, Édith Piaf in a pullover.

  “Pourquoi t’es tout rouge? Ben reviens, gamin!”

  All of the judges except Mika swing around in their spaceship chairs. As Manon finishes in a lacy wail, Olivier and I high-five, collapsing breathless on the rug.

  “Elle était formidable,” Florent Pagny says.

  Jenifer palms her face in excitement.

  “Manon, tu es canon!”

  Manon slays “Wrecking Ball” in the battle round, but she never quite recovers from a shaky “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” It’s becoming clear that “Kendji le gitan”—Kendji Girac, a seventeen-year-old of Roma ancestry—is the crowd favorite. He sings “Mad World,” by Tears for Fears, with a backdrop of barrel fires.

  “It’s the first time he sings in English,” the host says as the camera cuts to the judges, standing. “We have to be aware that it’s extremely difficult to sing this song that you’ve chosen. But to be able to incarnate it with modesty, and at the same time conviction, it’s difficult—and rare.”

  “And Kendji’s done it,” Mika says. “Frankly, he’s done it.”

  Florent Pagny caresses his chin, smiling.

  “Bravo l’artiste.”
/>   • • •

  IT’S A FRIDAY. We’re listening to a Mauritanian folk tale. There is a wise old man. He notices that his daughters have lately been wearing more revealing clothes. He summons them and seats them around him in a circle, then shows them his hands. The right one is open. In it, he holds an ounce of gold. The left one is closed.

  “Choose one,” he tells his daughters.

  Without knowing what’s in it, they all select the left fist.

  “But you see that in my right hand there’s an ounce of pure gold, while you don’t know what’s in the other one,” the man says.

  The daughters still want the one on the left.

  Thus bidden, he opens it. There’s nothing there except a lump of coal.

  “You see, my children,” he declares, “man always prefers that which hides itself from him.”

  Luisa presses stop on the tape deck and scans the classroom.

  “What do you think?” she says. “Lauren?”

  “I think the Mauritanian folk tale is pretty sexist,” I reply.

  “Is that so? But why? There’s a profound philosophical lesson here—that people should have a hidden side.”

  “Why doesn’t he tell his sons that, then?”

  “It’s not sexist to say that a woman should have more mystery.”

  “I think that’s sexist.”

  “It’s not sexist,” Cristina, the artist, says, cutting in. “It’s about tradition versus modernity.”

  Luisa, warming to this interpretation, turns to Cristina and asks her to continue.

  “Too open is not interesting,” she says. “That’s the moral of the story.”

  Carlos can’t help himself.

  “Man and woman are not the same!” he cries. “That’s reality.”

  It’s a pile-on. I know I should probably fold, but sixteen rounds of The Voice have emboldened me to brazen out the argument on my own.