When in French

by Lauren Collins

  “Sorry,” I said when my daughter’s crying became audible in the background. “I’ve got a new baby.”

  “I could not be happier for you and your family!” the operator replied. “Is this gonna be your first or your last?”

  Eventually, he agreed to rescind the block.

  “It has truly been a pleasure and a privilege serving you, and I hope that I’ve done nothing but offer you amazing customer service,” he said. “Have yourself an awesome day, much love to you and your family, and thanks for doing business with American Express.”

  The operator was being friendly, but I was flabbergasted. To my French-tuned ear, his familiarity sounded crazily presumptuous—the ultimate tutoyer. I tried to figure out who was the weirdo: him or me. Was he an outlier, or was this the way my countrypeople now spoke? Or had they always spoken like this, and I was only beginning to notice?

  At breakfast the next morning I grabbed the local section of the Morning Star. “New Castle Hayne Intersection a Circle of Confusion,” the headline of the lead story declared. A roundabout had been constructed in Castle Hayne, a nearby community. Local drivers were having trouble figuring it out. The article gave an eyewitness report on the confusion and then turned to a question-and-answer format:

  “What are roundabouts?”

  “What do drivers in Castle Hayne think?”

  “How do I drive in one?”

  “Are there others around here?”

  • • •

  WE WENT TO THE BEACH almost every afternoon, always at the same spot, in front of a club we belonged to. It was a delight to take up my old summer routine, playing Ping-Pong and eating Oreo ice cream sandwiches. En route to the snack bar one afternoon, I saw a thirtysomething woman chasing an adorable little girl in a smocked dress and Velcro sneakers. She was one of a set of identical twins who were a couple of years older than I and—along with their first cousins, a set of identical twin boys—had pretty much run the place in our youth.

  The little girl was eating some chocolate. The mother scolded her, not harshly.

  Turning to me in mock frustration, she moaned, “Can you believe she ganked my Reesie’s Cups?”

  It’s Reese’s Cups, I wanted to say, the fourteen-year-old pedant in me reawakening. Hearing “ganked” was as stirringly embarrassing as hearing a song you used to like come on the radio without warning. In the argot of our adolescence, the word had meant taken, swiped, stolen, snagged. I was at once jangled by and a little envious of the blitheness with which my old acquaintance deployed it. The audacity of using a bit of slang that had enjoyed a minute of fame twenty years earlier, and assuming that everyone would understand! But she had earned it. This was the prerogative of those who stayed: to never have to consider their audience.

  It wasn’t just other people’s speech that struck me. Olivier and I had always been careful to avoid mixing our languages—a phrase we’d once come across, triste sabir (sad pidgin), haunted us both. But there, in my parents’ kitchen, in Toys “R” Us, in the living rooms of my oldest friends, the French words came spilling out. Sucette: I reached for it before “pacifier.” Téter, a verb purpose-built for recounting the habits of a nursing infant, whereas in English I never knew whether I was supposed to say she had “eaten” or “drunk.” I had acquired an entire maternal lexicon, the legacy of those early days in the clinic, that came to me first in French. The word nourrisson touched some tender spot in me. Its little-used English equivalent, suckling, emphasized the draining qualities of a newborn, made one seem like a job, but when I heard nourrisson, I focused on what I could give rather than what she was taking, remembered that to care for her was my privilege. Willing myself out of bed in the dark, small hours, I thought, Ma petite nourrisson.

  People didn’t quite know what to make of us. We might have been human roundabouts. Melissa, my sister-in-law, told me that she had been down at the courthouse, filing some motions.

  “Are you going to the bar association meeting?” one of the clerks of court had asked.

  “I can’t,” Melissa said. “My sister-in-law’s in town.”

  “Oh,” the clerk replied. “Is she the one that married a prince?”

  Once I would have been mortified, but now I found the story amusing. I was proud of the alliances I’d forged, the mongrel family we were making, the happy gobbledygook that we spoke. Wilmington had even gotten a wine bar. One of the appetizers on offer was a plate of tuna, mixed greens, potatoes, egg, and green beans: “Salad Niçoise (nee-suaz),” the menu read.

  • • •

  PER THE COMMAND OF THE Consulat Général de France à Genève, I presented myself at room 18 of the Lycée Rodolphe Töpffer at precisely two o’clock to undergo an assessment of my acquaintance with la langue française et des valeurs de la République. I had spent the past twenty-four hours cramming, mostly on websites for Moroccan brides, even though the woman at the consulate had told us that she doubted I’d have any problem.

  “The questions are, for example, ‘Can a woman divorce her husband in France?’”

  “Yes!” I’d replied.

  “No!” Olivier had shouted.

  He thought it was hilarious that I had to prove my mastery of the values of his civilization, kept teasing me while I was studying.

  “Name three acceptable breakfast foods,” he’d say.

  “How much perfume must one put on before leaving the house?”

  “In France, is a woman allowed to wear yoga pants when she is not doing yoga?”

  I was more nervous than I had been in years. At the Lycée Rodolphe Töpffer, I swallowed a tickly laugh. The soles of my feet broke into a sweat. This was it, the ultimate French test, the stuff anxiety dreams were made of. The fact that the school was styled as a Swiss chalet, with potted geraniums and lace curtains, didn’t help. What if I never got out of this place? What if I turned on the French faucet and nothing came out? I almost threw up in a birdbath.

  We took our seats at wooden desks. Next to mine hung a child’s poster illustrating the Battle of Verdun. The examiner, a well-put-together woman with frosted hair and bows on her shoes, handed out worksheets. I understood when she said that we had ten minutes to complete them. The first part of the test was simple enough. I gave my name, my date of birth, my place of birth; I filled in the blanks of a dialogue set in a consulate; I reshuffled demande, son, de, renouvellement, le, il, and passeport to read “Il demande le renouvellement de son passport.” Composing a noun-heavy thirty words about what I put in my suitcase when I travel, I even managed a little furbelow about not forgetting to pack a book.

  We handed in our papers and left the room, waiting to be called back, one by one, for the oral evaluation. This was the gut-roiling portion, the road test to the theory quiz. I knew that I could speak coherent if not faultless French, but I didn’t know whether I could do it under conscious observation. I sat on a bench, surrounded by concrete cherubim, thinking about all the decisions I’d made that had led me to this particular faux-alpine garden on a sunny Saturday afternoon. The test felt less like a scholastic drill than a referendum on my life choices.

  The woman who went before me had offered, by way of small talk, that she was a professional interpreter. I watched her through the classroom window, confidently nodding her head.

  “Madame Collins?” the examiner at last called out.

  I entered the classroom.

  “Bonjour, Madame,” I said, in the punctiliously stilted manner of a driver being sure to honk before she backs out.

  “Bonjour. Et vous venez d’où?”

  I was American, I told her. My husband was French. We had a daughter. I stuck to the script, but I talked as though I were writing. Whenever I made a mistake, I tried to go back and fix it, to verbally wield a red pen.

  “Nous sommes déménagés—pardon, nous avons déménagés—à Genève de Londres—il y a presque trois
ans,” I said, explaining, with more emphasis on auxiliary verbs than content, that we had been in Geneva almost three years. I pronounced semaine like semen. I swapped an encore for a toujours. But my small talk evidently sufficed. We would move on to the values section, the examiner announced.

  Hit me, I thought. I could name the eight presidents of the Fifth Republic; tell you the significance of July 14, 1789. I knew that polygamy didn’t fly in France.

  “If someone promulgates hatred, can this be punished by the law?” the examiner began.

  I wasn’t really sure what she was saying. “Free speech!” the American on my shoulder said, grabbing at key words. “No, inciting racial hatred!” the French person countered.

  “Sorry, could you repeat the question?”

  “If someone incites racial hatred, makes a hate speech, can he be punished by the law?”

  I paused for a second.

  “Yes?”

  The examiner, I saw, marked my response correct, and continued to the next question.

  “Do men and women have the same rights?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can a foreigner be president?”

  “No.”

  “When you pay taxes in France, do they support museums?”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “Name three well-known French people.”

  “Jean Dujardin, Gad Elmaleh . . .”

  For some reason, all I could think of were celebrities, the covers of Closer and Voici, the trashy French magazines that Olivier always bought before a flight.

  “Marion Cotillard!”

  The examiner regarded me over lime-green bifocals.

  “Americans always say Marion Cotillard.”

  Five days later I arrived for my appointment at the consulate. The woman behind the desk handed me a large white envelope. Inside were two certificates, issued by the minister of the interior, attesting that, per Article L.411-8 of the Code de l’Entrée, I had demonstrated sufficient familiarity with the French language and the values of the Republic. I opened my passport. The woman pasted a visa on an empty page, papering over a bald eagle. I could still see a clipper ship, racing toward the shore under a John Paul Jones quote that read, “It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win.” She indicated that I was free to go. It was official. We were moving to Paris.

  Acknowledgments

  MAYBE THE GREATEST PLEASURE of writing is reading. So many brilliant books informed (and, in many cases, formed) my understanding of the subjects at hand in this memoir. The following works made my thinking sharper and my memories more meaningful. I’m grateful to their authors.

  In Chapter One: Byron and the Romantics in Switzerland, by Elma Dangerfield; After Babel, by George Steiner; Passing Time, by Michel Butor; and Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner. (Bonus reading for Switzerland skeptics: Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party, Graham Greene’s novella about a toothpaste baron who throws a series of grotesque dinner parties at his lakeside villa.)

  In Chapter Two: Grammar and Good Taste, by Dennis E. Baron; Bilingual Public Schooling in the United States, Paul J. Ramsey; Language Loyalties, edited by James Crawford; Hold Your Tongue, by James Crawford; When the United States Spoke French, by François Furstenberg; The Tongue-Tied American, by Paul Simon; Letters from an American Farmer, by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur; The German Element in the United States, by Albert Bernhardt Faust; An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, by Friedrich Ungerer and Hans-Jorg Schmid; The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume VI, edited by John Algeo; and The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a Web-based resource whose principal editor is Edward N. Zalta.

  In Chapter Three: French Ways and Their Meaning, by Edith Wharton; Jean Racine, by John Sayer; White House Interpreter, by Harry Obst; Found in Translation, by Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche; The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation, by Francesca Gaiba; Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov; The Smile Revolution, by Colin Jones; and my trusty Larousse for help in deciphering secondhand love letters.

  In Chapter Four: Flaubert and an English Governess, by Hermia Oliver; Victoria & Abdul, by Shrabani Basu; Jigsaw, by Sybille Bedford; Romance Languages, by Ti Alkire and Carol Rosen; Empires of the Word, by Nicholas Ostler; Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, by Hilary Mantel; When the World Spoke French, by Marc Fumaroli; and Anne of the Island, by L. M. Montgomery.

  In Chapter Five: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, by Mark Twain; Language, Thought, and Reality: The Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited by John B. Carroll; The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought, both by Steven Pinker; What Language Is, by John McWhorter; Parlez-vous franglais?, by Réné Etiemble; Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, by Geoff Dyer; Studies on Hysteria, by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud; The Language of Food, by Dan Jurafsky; Rules of the Wild, by Francesca Marciano; and Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin.

  In Chapter Six: Daughters of the King and Founders of a Nation: Les Filles du Roi in New France, a master’s thesis by Aimie Kathleen Runyan; Language in Canada, by John Edwards; The Fish People, by Jean E. Jackson; and Granite Island, by Dorothy Carrington.

  The insights of several books suffuse the entirety of the one I ended up writing. I’m indebted to The Bilingual Mind, Aneta Pavlenko’s groundbreaking study of language and thought; Umberto Eco’s dazzlingly synthetic The Search for the Perfect Language; and The Story of French, an indispensable history of the language, written by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, a Canadian couple (he, French-speaking; she, English-speaking) whose harmonious output gives the rest of us hope. Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation is a beautiful memoir about exile, from home and language. Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons is one of the most beautiful memoirs of them all.

  I’m grateful to a number of experts who took the time to answer my very basic questions about very complicated subjects. I profited tremendously from the erudition and generosity of Arif Ahmed, Lisa Barrett, Guy Deutscher, Jean Jackson, Graham Jones, Dan Jurafsky, Richard Kieckhefer, Anthony Lodge, Peter Maslowski, and Aneta Pavlenko. Whatever mistakes or misunderstandings I am certain to have committed are mine alone. Liam McNulty at the London Library was kind enough to identify Hermes of Praxiteles and to double-check a quote. Katia Zorich translated the section of Drugie berega in which Nabokov describes his childhood home into English. Andy Young performed a masterful and possibly even enjoyable fact-check of the manuscript. Alice Mahoney cleaned up my many fautes in French.

  Ann Godoff has been a dream editor: curious, decisive, crazy-responsive. Casey Rasch, her assistant, is exceptional. I’m also beholden to Sarah Hutson, Juliana Kiyan, Matt Boyd, Caitlin O’Shaughnessy, and Will Heyward for all their work on my behalf.

  I am lucky to have Elyse Cheney on my side. And she’s lucky to have Sam Freilich, Alex Jacobs, and Adam Eaglin. Natasha Fairweather is outstanding in every way.

  David Remnick: I may have to resort to box-set Italian to thank you for being the capo di tutto capi, and, beyond that, a real friend. I’m beyond privileged to work with Dorothy Wickenden, Daniel Zalewski, John Bennet, Susan Morrison, Nick Paumgarten, Ben McGrath, Lizzie Widdicombe, Mary Norris, Leo Carey, Betsy Morais, Emily Greenhouse, and Jiayang Fan, who have given me, in addition to help on this book, years of encouragement, counsel, and companionship. I’m also grateful to have had the opportunity, in my work at The New Yorker, to begin playing with some of the ideas that I’ve developed more fully here. In a few spots, I’ve used fragments—sometimes reworked, sometimes verbatim—of pieces I’ve written about language.

  Ed Caesar read this book, in all its incarnations, as attentively as if it were one of his own. Lila Byock, my other secret weapon, is the friend I wanted all my life. Silvia Killingsworth, Charlotte Faircloth, Hadley Freeman, and Guillaume Gendron improved what I wrote as much as they do life in general. Helen Walsh, Spruill Haye
s, Amy Campos, Amelia Boisseau, and Christina Chandler have been there for everything. The women of It’s Friday transformed Geneva and I miss them.

  The love and effort of Jhenny dela Rosa, Cherry Rodrigo, and Let Let Mallari have made it possible for me to work.

  Violeta, Teddy, Jacques, Hugo, Fabrice, et Anne-Laure—merci mille fois pour votre affection et votre soutien tout au long de ce projet; merci de m’avoir accueillie dès le début, cafetière comprise; merci d’être ma famille. Matt and Melissa—I couldn’t ask for better. Please come visit soon. Dad, those times with you made me who I am. Mom, you are extraordinary, my bedrock. I know it now more than ever. Olivier! I don’t know if I said it all, but I tried. C’est à tes côtés que je me suis épanouie. Je t’aime, et je l’aime, notre petite abeille.

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