French Lessons

La Vie en Rose . . . Fades Away

The moose is calling.

 

Canada’s national animal symbol is actually the beaver, I hate to report, but I can’t work out how a beaver might sound.  And frankly, do I really want to advertise that sort of symbol being attached to my new country of residence?

 

After a full year rooted to France’s good soil, our final few days have slammed into my little family, full-throttle and without warning.  They’re a bit like that pool of rainwater that accumulated on Bellevue’s terrace last February and crested onto our balcony’s shuttered doors – those first, overflowing droplets that seeped through giving way to a magnificent, three-story cataract within our home’s cylindrical, marble stairwell. 

 

Yes, it’s exactly like that.  Our last few days in la Côte d’Azur (until we return next year, that is) have plastered us all of a sudden, out of the blue.  With twinklings of glory, magnificent send-offs, and a whole lot of clean up afterward.

 

Yet the closure of this chapter also has come at a gradual, even agonizing, pace. 

 

·         In May I began outlining which blogs I should write before putting French Lessons on an extended holiday.

 

·         I started calculating the number of cantine tickets to buy for Laurelle’s school lunches – whether the carnet of 10 was worthwhile, or if I should spring for single vouchers.

 

·         I’ve dumped oodles of agonizing hours into address changes.

 

·         I’ve noticed that the expiry date on our long-life milk is in August. 

 

And then a crushing realisation:  The milk will last longer here than we do.

 

So I’ve taken time ahead of time to organize our life here, hoping that a bit of pre-planning will achieve some semblance of normality for our family in these last, cherished weeks and days.

 

My attachment to life here wasn’t always so intense.  February, for example, had brought the midterm exam.  A pop quiz of sorts. 

 

Pierre and I met our Denver-based, culture-hound friends Jay and Emily in Paris for a couple days.  One night over a mound of salt-encrusted, roasted beets, Emily popped the question:  How did life in the feted Côte d’Azur stack up to our original hopes and aspirations?

 

Emily’s was an obvious question in many ways, but my brain shimmied like the bubbles that sprang from my glass of champagne.  Yes, I was enjoying my time immensely, thank you – what’s NOT to like about life in the south of France? 

 

But as my thoughts multiplied like those dancing champagne bubbles, I knew the full answer wasn’t quite so simple.  Folks here were nice enough, I said, but I wasn’t making real, life-long friends.  Not that I’d ever set out to do so, mind you.  I always knew language would be a barrier.

 

A francophone himself, Pierre’s response to Emily’s pop quiz dealt with his brain.  Sure, life in France was fabulous, but he missed the intellectual stimuli he knew in North America – the business deals, the broker chats over cups of coffee, the budding prospectors who’d waltz through the office with sparkling drill results.  Not that Pierre would change history, no ma’am, but he already was stir-crazy.

 

Never one without two.  Shortly after the first inquest, I went for coffee with a new Welsh writer friend Lynne, who’d recently settled in Antibes.  She popped her question. 

 

Could I live here?  Lynne asked.  Meaning, could I live here forever?

 

No, no I don’t think so, I said.  I blamed the language thing.  (Lynne’s French is far superior to mine.)  Living in Antibes was great and all – and here I trod carefully to respect my friend’s own recent choice of residence – but I knew I could never stay forever.

 

The month of May began our jam-packed visitors’ book – a standard feature for Côte d’Azur households.  May also brought a new onslaught of questions.  First up was Kathy’s.

 

An effervescent connector who’d just jetted in from Utah, Kathy enthused over us, our sunshine, our view, our geraniums, our lettuce.  Life was perfect here, she declared.  Exuberantly perfect.

 

Which, yes, sometimes it is.  But my enthusiasm didn’t exactly match hers at that moment.  So Kathy asked me:  Had this place lost its magic?

 

No, no!  I’d replied a bit too quickly, a bit too passionately.  And that made me muddle over the issue more enduringly.

 

There were the daily realities of life in the south of France that well-meaning visitors didn’t get, I later explained to the enthusiastic Kathy.  They didn’t know how awful it was to get things fixed.  They didn’t appreciate the travails of parking in a city having certainly twice as many cars as slots.  They didn’t endure the weight of my grocery bags that I dragged while searching for my illegally parked car.  Those were the headaches that troubled only folks like us, les habitués. 

 

But there was something more.  It was I who’d made a valiant effort to downplay the cute stuff in town.  To not remain in continual awe of la Côte d’Azur’s crooked streets and the poetry of its restaurant menus.  Magic, after all, wasn’t real, and in staying here a full year, I needed to live in whatever real world I could create. 

 

A few weeks later it was Doctor Laurent who launched the inquisition.  His invitation to dinner chez nous was long overdue.  Now, seated on Bellevue’s terrace – outside his small cabinet on Boulevard Albert 1ere and stripped of his usual white coat – the good doctor was more gregarious than ever.

 

Dr Laurent wondered:  Now that I’d enjoyed life here for nearly a straight year – the beauty of this magnificent place and goodness of its food – could I live here?  Again meaning, could I live here forever?  

 

I could hardly answer his question.  The doctor’s soliloquy continued.  After all, he pleaded with my husband Pierre, his wife’s background was so European.  She loves Europe.  She IS, in fact, European!  He couldn’t take me away to frigid Canada!

 

Dr Laurent is right in many ways.  At the pivotal age of 24, after a single year in London, I’d fallen in love with the place so enduringly that I ended up staying for 12½ years.  If not exactly European, I’d love to be considered international.

 

Dr Laurent was Welsh Lynne to me all over again:  a local, or newly proclaimed local, who wanted me to share the love.  But get this:  Just three months after Lynne had posed the same question, my response felt different.  My French had gone up a notch.  I’d become more engrained in life here.  I had more friends – even the notion that I’d work to keep some of them after heading across the Pond to that howling moose. 

 

Yep, you know, Dr Laurent, I’d happily stay on a bit longer in la Côte d’Azur.

 

But I can’t.  We can’t.  It’s not just about me anymore.  And anyway, the French taxman’s bite is just too horrifying for those Francophiles who fail to push off in time.  We can (and will) return next year, but for now, well, there’s no other way.  And I’ve always known it.

 

School is out, and I’ve begun counting the things I’d “meant” to do when we first arrived in Antibes, the list I’d begun when life was awash with possibility and a whole year spanned before me.  I won’t be taking that pottery class, or the painting one.  I won’t learn guitar.  I won’t improve my sailing.  (“You have only so many hours in a day,” I can hear Pierre telling me.  Again.  Even Dr Laurent had begun telling me to drop the to-do list and go wander along the beautiful beaches.)

 

Tackling life more positively, I also start measuring what our little family HAS accomplished in this year.  Each of us has achieved something toward his or her basic goal in living here:

 

·         Four-year-old Laurelle survived a year at maternelle, emerging with the tongue (if not the manners) of a little French girl. 

 

·         I’ve survived a year surrounded by foreign language, even extracting a quite undeserved “excellent” from my French teacher, Madame Sire, who, when I speak, still gives me the LOOK (that thing French folks do when they tense their eyebrows and jut out their necks as they strain to figure out what some Anglo might be saying). 

 

·         And Pierre, well, there’s Pierre.  He managed to actually be here.  His goal sounds the simplest among ours, and it is – but it was tough enough for him to fulfill.  (He has just returned from a three-day jaunt to Nova Scotia for a game of golf.  And hey, why not?  (Okay, the full story is that it was with Tiger, but the principle of his itchy feet carries on.))

 

Our outbound flight taunts me through the barrel of a gun.  My to-do list screams.  The suitcases!  The address changes!  The rental cars!  The suitcases!  The toiletries inventory!  The blog!  The suitcases!  Those wretched suitcases!

 

As Antibes’ sandy beaches begin to pack in the sun worshippers, in that proverbial, south-of-France fesse-à-fesse fashion (that’s to say, butt-to-butt), I try to silence the to-do list and soak in my dream of life in la Côte d’Azur:   

 

·         The beauty Monet understood when he painted our very view:  Antibes’ medieval city jutting into a blue, blue sea – these days their waters spotted with the latest luxury yachts and sailing vessels; 

 

·         The stream of white-grey clouds that hover low behind Old Town Antibes on turbulent days, with the seas beneath Bellevue’s terrace churning a chalky teal hue against deep, angry skies; 

 

·         The peach, rose, goldenrod and indigo sunsets that ignite our nighttime sky on clearer eves; 

 

·         The goodness of French soil and what it produces – even as I dwell a little longer at market stalls, heavy bags dragging me down, just to choose the ripest, fattest cherries from one vendor and the most succulent cœur de bœuf tomatoes from another.

 

And what better way to recapture the very magic I’d purposely bulldozed those few months ago than to use new eyes?  Like those of my younger brother Steve, who visited from the US last month.  He’d gone out for a stroll one late afternoon and returned to Bellevue with a crusty baguette wrapped in our local boulangerie’s paper.

 

“I just walked to a real French boulangerie,” he said almost incredulously, his face alight like I’ve rarely seen it, “and I bought real French bread!”

 

Ah, the simple things.  We must remember.

 

Now fireworks explode up and down the Rivieran coastline.  ‘Tis the season.  Bastille Day ushers in the silliest part of France’s silly summer.  And our supply of long-life milk is running dry. 

 

I hear the moose.  I must pack.

 

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French Lessons is cruising along the Croatian coast this week. 

 

À bientôt until next week’s post, the final one in this series.

 

French Polish: Part 2

In writing last week’s post, French Polish:  Part 1, I unearthed a vein so rich in material that I simply had to divide it into two.  Mining the storyline of my own North American kid attending a French maternelle was simply chock-a-bloc with us-versus-them run-ins and a few sublime ah-ha’s.

 

Last week we established exactly how Pierre’s and my then-three-year-old, English-speaking daughter ended up at a French maternelle this year – how we chose to follow this course despite the fact that French instructors, in a style that’s ultra shocking to North American parents, sometimes call their pupils “nulles” (zeroes).  We discovered École St-Philippe Néri.   We met the teacher of la Petite Section and her aids, and the 33 kids in their charge.  We learned about la consigne (directions) and how Laurelle refused to follow them.  We emerged from an episode of strangulation (with Laurelle playing the brute).  We discovered jewels.  And then Laurelle discovered the French language, unlocking both her tongue and layers of built-up, school-imposed frustration. 

 

Finally, a long month and a half after the school year had begun, it was time to get on with real life inside a French maternelle.

 

What was most striking to Pierre and me about schooling in France was the uniformity.  Again, had I read Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow’s Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong before arriving in the country last summer, I wouldn’t have been so surprised at what I found. 

 

“All pre-university education in France has three common features:” Nadeau and Barlow write, “national standards, uniformity of education, and authoritative teachers.”  They flesh out their statement with observations and statistics, like:

 

·         “The French education system is specially designed to serve the interests of an extremely centralized country…A good basic education is available to all....”

 

·         “About 20 percent of the twelve million pre-university students attend private schools, but four private schools out of five are actually subsidized by the State and follow the national syllabus, which is controlled closely by the State.”

 

Indeed, Laurelle’s St-Philippe falls into this category, being described as “un établissement privé sous contrat” (a private establishment “under contract”).  That’s to say St-Philippe follows the French national syllabus and its teachers are paid by the State.  The happy upshot is that our annual – ANNUAL – bill for sending our kid to private school amounts to a mere EUR 500, after refunds from the State toward meals taken in the school’s cantine.

 

·         “[France’s 950,000] teachers and professors belong to one single system called the French Ministry of Education.  The main objective of the Ministry is to dispense education uniformly throughout the French territory.  There is no concept of local needs or particularities.  Teachers are theoretically interchangeable….”

 

Pierre and I actually figured out this point about uniformity on our own.  Cold weather had crept into the area early last winter, and so all 33 kids in Laurelle’s maternelle class needed to learn how to put on their coats, all by themselves. 

 

Laurelle demonstrated the three-step process with glee one afternoon in our family room.  She laid her long, bulky winter coat on the floor, unzipped and face up with the hood at her feet.  Next she knelt over the coat and put her arms into the sleeves.  And then in one final flurry, she stood straight, lifting her coat and flipping it over her head and onto her body.

 

The first few times she did this I got whipped in the face. 

 

Then we noticed something peculiar – at a local restaurant.  We’d finished our meals, and while Pierre occupied himself with the bill, I gathered markers and other sanity-saving tools.  Neither of us had noticed Laurelle placing her coat on the restaurant floor – in close proximity of an older couple seated nearby.  One, two… – before we could warn the couple, they had lurched away from the flying coat.  They already knew.

 

What made the incident clearer to Pierre and me was one of Laurelle’s picture books.  La Maternelle dealt with life at a French preschool.

 

La Maternelle fascinated Laurelle.  It captivated us, too.  One page demonstrated how kids learn to put on their coats.  One, two, three.  Another page showed a hallway outside the maternelle classroom, little coat hooks beneath each child’s name and photo – just like the hallway outside Laurelle’s classroom.  Another page showed napping arrangement with little beds lined up in a big room, each child hugging one special doudou (stuffed toy) brought from home – just like during Laurelle’s sieste. 

 

The more we read La Maternelle, the more we got it.  This book was St-Philippe.  It was EVERY maternelle in France.

 

If the kids’ days evolved in cookie cutter-fashion, we soon learned that their subject matters did, too. 

 

In these early months Pierre and I never received written feedback about Laurelle’s progress.  We’d relied on patched-together, (verbal) Daily Reports and the occasional smiley or straight faces that appeared on a particular item of work.  Laurelle’s life was mostly smiley and occasionally au coin.

 

From Christmas break onward, through, parents joined the scholastic circle.  We could review our child’s progress every few months on the Grid. 

 

The Grid (my name for it) was an impressive, eight-page list of competences that each student was to acquire during his three years in maternelle – the instruction before primary school.  Next to the list of attributes were three columns that indicated which lessons the child would learn during Petite Section (as Laurelle attended), and which were designated for the following two years (Moyenne Section and Grande Section).   The competencies were subdivided into seven sections and then further into subsections, with these sorts of goals targeted for la Petite Section:

 

ü  Acquiring language (speaking, understanding, vocabulary and courtesies)

ü  Discovering writing (listening to stories, recognizing names and numbers)

ü  Preparing to read and write (learning rhymes and correct pronunciations)

ü  Becoming a student (speaking, responding, not interrupting, following rules, cooperating)

ü  Using the body (running, jumping, sliding, rolling)

ü  Discovering the world (five senses, comparison, organization of the day, right vs left)

ü  Feeling, imagining and believing (singing, listening for pleasure or movement)

 

A blue “X” appeared in each box for a competency acquired during Petite Section.  The same report would follow each pupil through Moyenne and Grande Sections, with green and yellow “X”’s, respectively, appearing in these later years.

 

Sometimes Pierre and I shook our heads at the maternelle’s rigidity.  At the slowness of its pace.  The kids didn’t even start holding crayons until January! 

 

At the same time, we marveled at the balance and well thought-out corridors of teaching, ensuring that no one was left behind (without meaning to sound political.)  Gone – well gone – was America’s over-effusive praise for scribbling.

 

The system’s effort in teaching manners deserves a separate note here – if only for its charm.  Listed on the Grid’s required competencies for la Petite Section were salutations (bonjour, au revoir); courtesies (s’il vous plaît, merci); rules of politeness (not interrupting); and rules of behavior (respecting other people and their belongings, following rules).  What’s more, Laurelle’s teacher Aurore taught her students to greet her each morning with a kiss on the cheek – a rule that our daughter sometimes actually remembered! 

 

As the year moved on, Laurelle’s Grid became populated with gorgeous blue X’s.  Then lo and behold, in mid-February, the end of Term 3 (in a school year that divided neatly into five parts on account of long school holidays), parents received their first, personalized, written feedback.

 

“Laurelle,” Aurore began her note in French, your first language isn’t French, but you have found your place at the heart of the class, making friends and progressing enormously to rapidly acquire vocabulary that allows you to share at school.  Bravo!  You are brillante…. 

 

Brilliant!  My girl was brilliant!  She was hardly a nulle!  I could hardly hide my delight – and relief.  I brushed over Aurore’s last sentence about Laurelle needing to follow the rules better.

 

Daily Reports improved – that’s my memory of them anyway during this period of brilliante work – with the most enduring hiccup relating to naptime.  Laurelle hadn’t exactly reverted to her Term 1 antics during la sieste (one time jumping on her canvas bed with such barbarity that she broke it in a mighty crash), but she was hardly sage during this period of enforced quiet. 

 

So we adjusted our rules:  If she couldn’t actually sleep during naptime at school, then she needed to rest – and do so quietly.  No talking.  No singing.  No tapping.  No chirping.  And no jumping.  No good sieste meant no jewel.  (We’d added a new, nap-related rule to our reward system outlined in French Polish:  Part 1).

 

Laurelle’s pink and purple crystal jewel pile mounted.  Jewels became a pillar of our family life.  One winter Sunday during the children’s sermon – we attend an Anglican church in Cannes – the speaker drew parallels for the kids between God, their Heavenly Father, and their fathers here on earth. 

 

“What does your father give you when you make him happy?” the leader asked a group of 15 gathered children at the front of the church.  A good 200 folks in the congregation listened in.

 

Laurelle was the first to answer the question.  Her little voice rang clearly in the large hall, “He gives me jewels!”

 

Term 4 at St-Philippe ended in mid-April.  Aurore again dispersed the Grid and a new note.  But before reading it, I learned that I had a talker.  Aurore explained that it’d become necessary to separate the big talkers during group work, interspersing them with the quiet ones.  It was the only way to get anything done in a classroom of 30-some preschoolers.

 

Here’s why she sought me out with this little bit of organizational theory.  Not only was my daughter one of the talkers.  She was THE talker of all the talkers.  Talking was hardwired into her personality.

 

Great, I thought, Laurelle is getting the language.  Term 4’s note explained more fully.

 

“Laurelle,” Aurore had written, I wish that you would participate more because often you prefer to talk with your neighbours!  I congratulate you for all the progress you have made in French as well as for the excellent work that you’ve done!  Continue your efforts and understand that I am interested in you but that I also have to occupy myself with 31 other students.

 

Pierre’s colleagues often refer to him – jokingly, respectfully and, I fear, truthfully – as a “shit-disturber.”  It’s obviously hereditary.

 

The end of the school year came quickly for Aurore.  She went on medical leave for a scheduled surgery.  Losing a teacher for the last month of school is hardly ideal – sad, even, when you’ve lucked out with a devoted one like her. 

 

Given France’s policy of uniformity, though, teachers are imminently replaceable.  That’s the theory anyway.  Clémentine, Aurore’s stand-in, looked like she just graduated from school herself, but we ran with it.

 

The final weeks have been good ones for Laurelle.  She has taken her stuffed killer whale Orquebella in the car every morning, instructing the beast to have a good day at school, to listen to la consigne and to sleep – and noting that she wants a Good Report after school.  Once at school, Laurelle has swept into the classroom, bestowing kisses and hugs on whichever classmates she favours that moment (neatly circumventing a kiss to Clémentine’s cheek as the new teacher doesn’t reinforce Aurore’s set greeting).  My little socialite then has led a bevy of girls (not boys, who are often “scary”) by the hand to make up rules for some new game.  Hardly a dull moment. 

 

And Laurelle has returned home in the afternoons with Good Reports.  “Mommy, mommy,” she has called to me, spinning into the house like a Tasmanian Devil.  “I had a good day!  I was sage and I dormed!”  Which is perfect franglais for saying she was good and that she slept.  A two-jewel day.

 

Either things have improved wholeheartedly at the tail end of school – or else Clémentine is a bit of a softie.  (Laurelle has since confirmed that her new teacher doesn’t have so many rules.) 

 

My little one recently brought home her Term 5 and Year-End report, written by Aurore from afar.  The letter had a familiar ring:

 

“Laurelle,” Aurore wrote, “all your competences are practically acquired, bravo!... Really good progress the whole year with the acquisition of a new language and several other competences, congratulations!  Just a little more attention to following the rules!”

 

Looking through Laurelle’s final blue X’s on the Grid, there was no difficulty figuring out exactly what Aurore meant.  My daughter has absolutely no problem with the head stuff.  But the yawning holes in her trail of blue X’s were these: 

 

ü  Saying bonjour and au revoir, s’il vous plaît and merci

ü  Not interrupting others

ü  Respecting other people and their things

ü  Following rules dictated by adults

 

Again, Nadeau and Barlow had been right.  French kids do learn their manners much earlier than their peers.

 

Sending Laurelle to a French maternelle – giving her the chance to pick up a second language and culture at a time they’d sink in – had been one of our central motives for living in France this year.  At this juncture, I’m considering a gambit to stay on a second year.

 

 

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French Polish: Part 1

Would you do it all over again?  I asked Pierre a couple days ago.  Our year in France is winding down, and before our heads turn completely back overseas, it seemed a worthy question.

 

Yes, he would.  And the most worthy reason for having been here, he said, was Laurelle’s year at school.

 

Sending our then-three-year old to a French preschool, giving her a proper, full year at maternelle, was one of our key reasons for coming to France this year.  Or that’s what we’ve been saying anyway. 

 

Truth be told, our original purpose was hardly so visionary.  We’d just wanted to experience life in France for a year.  Then we caught hold of a more decent aim:  to bestow a second language and culture on our three-year-old daughter when her brain’s synapses could best take them in.  That motive was easy to explain to the rest of the world, and so Laurelle’s year at maternelle shortly became the reason we’d come to France.

 

Whatever the history, Laurelle has nearly survived the whole year at maternelle.  And while it hasn’t always been pretty, July 2^nd will mark her final day in la Petite Section, the youngest group, at École St-Philippe Néri in neighbouring Juan-les-Pins.

 

I’ve managed to survive the school year, too.  Before we even arrived in France last summer, I was fairly terrified about putting my sweet little jewel into a maternelle.  It was the teachers’ attitudes that tortured me.

 

My own French language instructor at l’Alliance Française in Denver, a woman who’d grown up in France, once explained that French teachers hardly encourage pupils with the confidence-building, you-can-do-it, just-pull-up-your-bootstraps mentality that I gained from American education.  That rah-rah spirit had made me pull up my bootstraps even higher.

 

In France there are no carrots.  There are sticks.  A French teacher’s pat line for a difficult child, my Alliance Française instructor explained, is “Tu es nulle.”  You are nothing.

 

Never, not ever, would anyone – ANYONE – label my lavender-scented angel as a zero.  Even at times when she wasn’t so sweet smelling.

 

Don’t worry, my instructor had told me. The label only starts in grade school. 

 

Terrific.  All I knew was that our family was embarking on something completely foreign to me – and we were using our beautiful treasure as a lab rat. 

 

Perhaps I should’ve read Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow’s Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t be Wrong before returning to France last summer.  Or maybe I’m lucky I didn’t.  In their effort to explain French culture to Anglos like me, the authors devote a fair chunk of the book to French schooling. 

 

Here is their most telling line:  “…the point of school in France is not to develop personalities.  Teachers see their objective as the transmission of knowledge.  Education is theoretical and formal.”

 

And formal education begins at la maternelle.  I had a baby girl coming from an American preschool where she’d received jubilant praise for picking up a crayon and making it scribble.  She could speak perfect, preschool English but could hardly make her way in French – not even to ask for la toilette. 

 

Yep, she was ready for theory and formality alright.

 

But most all French three-year olds get onto the bandwagon.  “Kindergarten is mandatory at age five but optional at age three,” Nadeau and Barlow explain, “and 88 percent of French children are placed at la maternelle at this early age.  So French children learn to adapt to social norms very early in life.”

 

The bandwagon is full-on, too.  It is true that most young schoolchildren in France have Wednesdays off.  But they work hard the other days.  St-Philippe disallowed half-days for preschoolers from late October, and so even their youngest pupils rack up 33 hours at school each week (assuming there are no public holidays or strikes – something one mustn’t assume in France).  This French pre-school statistic outshines the average US school week of 32 hours – and that number includes American students who can drive and buy cigarettes.

 

I’ve already written a bit about Laurelle’s school year.  In early September last year, she’d joined a class of 33 pupils – none English-speaking except for her – under the careful (but obviously restricted) surveillance of a single head teacher and two aids.  Aurore, the head, was a vivacious thirty-something, her French words rolling out of her mouth as quickly and authoritatively as the tight curls that sprang  from her scalp.  Maria, the primary aid, cast an older, somewhat gentler disposition, seeming happy to follow Aurore’s lead.  Manon was une stagiaire, a young trainee.  (Manon would leave at Christmastime with no replacement, leaving the large preschool class to two adults.)

 

The actual bricks and mortar of St-Philippe hardly jibed with my early childhood memories.  True, I grew up in the US Midwest where space is more abundant, so I could accept the squeeze within Laurelle’s classroom.  Too, there were no lunchboxes; St-Philippe operated a separate cantine with hot food cooked on the premises.  (It’s France, after all.)  La sieste was taken in yet another hall, where each child kept a small canvas bed.  This was how the French did preschool.

 

But in selecting St-Philippe for Laurelle, one of its bigger strengths – in addition to its educational reputation – was the courtyard.  Not that it was particularly fancy.  There wasn’t a single patch of grass to temper its sprawl of gravel and asphalt.  There was no sandbox.  There was no rambling jungle gym (though the youngest pupils did have rights to a plastic slide occupying their private corner).  What St-Philippe did have was space.  Its courtyard was a good half-city block in size.  And a handful of large, leafy trees peppered its greyness.  At least my daughter could breathe – and that mattered to a mother from the US Midwest.

 

The beginning of Laurelle’s school year was tough – the weeping and wailing at drop-off – and then the routine got generally better (Cry Me A River, dated 5 September 2008.)

 

I’d meant to write something about strangulation next but never got around to it.  The short story:  Maxime, a small, wiry boy in Laurelle’s class with fine facial features, had parked himself at the crest of the slide (the one and only) during recreation time one day, and he wouldn’t budge.  Laurelle wanted to go down the slide.  Without knowing how to use the French language, she could hardly ask Maxime to move.  So being the bigger of the two, she tried to strangle him.

 

After school that day, Laurelle’s teacher Aurore told me in fast French about this most frightful incident.  I quickly learned the French word étranglement.  It sounds similar.  The inward grasping motion of Aurore’s hands confirmed my theory. 

 

I, the American mother of the American girl, was horrified.  I tried to explain – with a polite smile – that in fact, we were a family of sauvages who’d shacked up on France’s good soil.

 

Just then Maxime’s father came to the door, the young stranglee in his arms.  Aurore retold the étranglement story, this time to both parents.  The second go around really suited me because at last I could grasp the finer, more terrifying details of the matter. 

 

I apologized profusely to little Maxime and his father on account of my young sauvage.  I began scouting for Maxime’s bodily injuries and conjuring up dormant mental ones. 

 

Maxime’s father shrugged his shoulders.  No big deal.  And he was off home with his boy.

 

That’s the way many French parents seemed to deal with misbehavior.  On the other hand, we – this being Jennifer (our nanny), Pierre and I, all of whom are Canadian or American – normally asked Aurore for a quick, verbal, Daily Report on Laurelle’s behaviour at each collection time.  Did she follow la consigne that day? 

 

La consigne, or directions, had become one of my new vocabulary words.  It actually had become one of my new focuses.  Unlike my offspring, I’d always been a rule-follower.  I still remember my humiliation during naptime one afternoon in kindergarten when I didn’t get a gold star sticker on my forehead.  Now la consigne is a feat I’ll never forget. 

 

Few, if any, parents of Laurelle’s classmates seemed to enquire about their kids’ antics during the day with the firm intent of correcting misbehaviors.  The mother of Eléonore put the idea succinctly as we lunched one autumn day.  When her kids were at school, she said, they were the teachers’ responsibilities.  Clack.  End of story. 

 

Nadeau and Barlow already had figured this out:  “French parents are, on the whole, quite authoritarian about child rearing,” they wrote, “and they teach their children to respect rules from a young age.  Parents’ work isn’t lost when kids go to school because the same authority is granted to teachers.  French children generally exhibit good manners and speaking ability at a very young age.”

 

We, however, are North Americans.  We couldn’t help but intervene with problems (étranglements and otherwise).  We introduced jewels. 

 

After a particularly nasty patch at school, Jennifer helped Laurelle agree a list rules for good behavior.  Good behavior could be a Good Report from school regarding la consigne; it could be no fussing at bedtime; it could be no instances of hitting or talking back.  Good behavior meant  Laurelle could put a jewel into a special glass jar.  Bad behavior meant no jewels were awarded.  Particularly bad behavior – like extreme tantrums or lying – meant jewels were removed.

 

Over time Laurelle’s earned jewels – pink and purple plastic crystals straight from Maxi Bazaar – would create a sparkling mound.  Amassing 20 of them meant she got a prize – a new colouring book or a princess snow globe or perhaps paddles and balls for the beach.   

 

It’s a simple concept, but the jewels seemed to help.  One week arrived when Aurore actually described Laurelle as sage.  Good.  Well-behaved.  For the first time in her career at St-Philippe, Laurelle managed a full week when she hadn’t end up au coin (in the corner).  She hadn’t succumbed to her usual classroom craze:  While the good little French children helped out during clean-up, my daughter would avoid work altogether and demand (in English?) that everyone watch her perform a song and dance.

 

What really made a difference in Laurelle’s life, though, was the French language.  In October, just six weeks after the school year had begun, Laurelle began speaking French.  It was a revelation.  It wiped away layers of frustration.  Daily Reports improved significantly.  We heard the phrase au coin with less frequency (not that it ever went away completely), and the notion of étranglement evaporated.  (More on Laurelle’s language acquisition in Çe n’est pas juste, the blog dated 5 June 2009.)

 

Having battled the early blazes, we could now focus on the wonders of real life at a French maternelle. 

 

French Polish:  Part 2 will appear in next week’s posting of French Lessons.

 

www.frenchlessons.typepad.com

All in the Family

Over the weekend I was flipping through The Riviera Reporter, the Côte d’Azur’s English-language, what’s-on rag.  Inside was an interview with an American living in the area, a guy called Robert Adelson, the curator of musical instruments at Nice’s Musée du Palais Lascaris.

 

The Riviera Reporter had a simple question for Mr Adelson:  How does he like living here?

 

The American answered like a diplomat.  He called his experience “transformational.”  There were good things, and there were bad things. 

 

People don’t really get to know their neighbours, he said.  That was his bad thing.  (Same here, as I’ve already noted on this site:  A Most Charitable Neighbourhood, posted 15 December 2008.  No one baked chocolate chip cookies when we moved in either.)

 

Adelson’s good thing about living here was his chance to slow down a bit.  The French cherish their personal time.  They burn less midnight oil at work.  A lot less.  And instead they invest their hours with their families.

 

Put into enlightened phraseology, the French work to live – not the other way around.

 

This is all good stuff, Mr Adelson, I agree.  But let’s talk about reality. 

 

It’s bad enough that everything closes on Sundays around here.  Sunday is, after all, not an uncommon day for shops to close in some parts of the civilized world. 

 

It’s bad enough that there are no grocery stores or cafes open 24/7.  In the early days, I admit I was hopeful.  I’d seen a few shops advertising their hours as “non-stop.”  But that’s hardly 24/7.  “Non-stop” simply means attendants don’t skive off each day for a two-or-three-hour lunch break.

 

But in the south of France, it’s worse than that.  Much worse.

 

Here, most places close for a long lunch and on Sundays – AND on Mondays, or maybe Wednesdays, or maybe Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and then whenever the moon is full or the barometer falling, and if an inkling for some free time should strike.  It’s the sort of thing that really bugs a modern person. 

 

And while there is some reprieve from this French regime during the feted “season” (which is basically now through August), I’ve spent hours contemplating how on earth businesses can make a go of it.  At one point I began to fear that our little family of three had moved from a properly functioning, world-class city to some old-fashioned, backwater, seaside resort.

 

But then, our time here has unfolded.  The longer we’ve stayed, the more we’ve become part of the place.  There’s a great cohesiveness to the whole machine and – I hesitate to say it – I think I might actually begin to get it. 

 

“Family time”:  It’s not just that Europeans like to go on holiday.  Holidays alone, I fully agree, are a terrifically admirable cause.  Work hard (or as hard as you can in a 35-hour French work week) and play hard.  It’s a terrific motto.  We all recognize the two-week-a-year American holiday phenomenon is shear torture.  (I’ve had upstanding college friends who would regularly quit jobs just to take extended, overseas holidays, and then return to the US to pick up something new.  I, myself, holed up in London for most all my banking career with five-plus weeks of holiday each year.  At one point, I shunned a perfectly good job offer because the holiday allowance would slip by a week.)

 

No, this concept of “family time” is more than holidays.  I’ve begun to twig that it actually forms a fundamental link with some basic customs in French society:

 

1.     Families stick together.  There’s a lot less of the far-flung family thing here, with parents stationed in Indiana, sister working in New York, father once-a-month in London, and brother taking an NGO job in Uganda.  Folks stay put.

 

In fact, things are so local in the south of France that they redefine the meaning of the word.  A while back I was visiting with some members of our local port, la Port de la Salis, asking questions about the neighbourhood’s history.  One chap, a retiree with a gift of the gab, told me he had no idea what had happened here.  “C’est pas mon quartier,” he said.  It’s not my neighbourhood.

 

So where are you from?  I asked. 

 

He pointed backward toward Antibes’ own Fort Carré.  Over there, he said.  On the other side of the peninsula.

 

Ah, of course.  Foreign, very foreign, indeed.

 

That family units stay in one place is highly practical when it comes to children.  With our own four-year old in tow, we’ve figured out this message with clarity.  Extended family allows Rules Two, Three and Four to exist in French society:

 

2.     Many (most?) French schools – such as Laurelle’s – operate on a four-day week:  Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.  Wednesdays are off. 

 

Try floating that one in Manhattan.

 

But here in la Côte d’Azur, it’s no problem.  If Mom and Dad are tied up during the work week, there are inevitably grandparents and aunts and uncles nearby to fill in with the kids on Wednesdays.  Andrea, a cute, four-year-old boy in Laurelle’s class, gets dropped off and picked up at la maternelle by such a variety of extended family that I’ve stopped trying to keep the relationships straight.

 

This prompts a corollary to Point Two:

 

2a.  French children enjoy serial school breaks.  We’re not just talking about two weeks off at Christmas and one at Easter.  No, sirree. 

 

In France, there are ten days off at Toussaint (All Saint’s Day, November 1^st).  There are two weeks off at Christmas, another two weeks in February for les vacances d’hiver (winter break – why not?), and yet another two weeks off at Easter (a break which, this year, didn’t actually coincide with Easter, but heh, who’s splitting those hairs?).

 

Who deals with the kids on these extended breaks?  I think you know.

 

3.     The French love striking.  We all know this.  Les grèves are a national right in France, and the people use them quite adeptly, as featured in En Grève, my blog dated 26 November 2008.

 

Generally speaking, the ripple effect of une grève should be enormous on daily lives.  But not here.  Les grèves are part of the fabric, and there are ways to deal with them.  Schools shut while teachers strike?  Parents can’t get home from work because the trains have stopped?  No worries.  Extended family fills in. 

 

4.     Ditto for les jours feriés. National holidays have hit France with a vengeance lately, wiping out nearly every attempt at industriousness during the month of May.  Same thing for the so-called ponts, or bridges – the extra national holidays that creep in on a Friday when Thursday is a public holiday, or on a Monday when Tuesday is a day off. 

 

Take l’Ascension.  This year the public holiday fell on Thursday, May 21.  Friday, the 22^rd, naturally formed un pont, creating a sweeping four-day weekend – at least for the region’s children.  Families – often generations of them – bought ice creams and spilled out onto the local beaches.  Meanwhile I ask myself who had the vaguest idea behind that holiday weekend that everyone celebrated with such glee.  

 

But again, hiccups to the normal week are no problem.  There are relations. 

 

These breaks from normality are, in short, one reason why foreign folks like us – those who truly are not from le quartier – have a tougher time in France.  We have no in-bred (literally speaking) support system.  First we have to figure out the place, and then we have to figure out how to deal with it.  (And thus there’s one good reason we employ a nanny.)

 

5.     Families work together.  Mom-and-pop shops here are hardly getting wiped out by French Wal-Mart.  A full 93% of French businesses have less than 10 salaried employees, garnering enough popularity to deserve their own acronym in French economic statistics:  les TPE, les très petites enterprises (very small businesses).  To be fair, it’s la PME, la petite et moyenne enterprise (small and medium businesses, those with 10 to 250 salaried personnel) that are the country’s workhorses; they create a full 2/3 of French jobs.  But the mom-and-pops remain a vital organ in the functioning of the French system.

 

“Our” boulangerie, for example, the one just down the road, is owned by a family.  A sister café opened recently down the street – and is run by the brother of the boulangerie owner.  Several blocks away, Café Kanter, our favourite Antibes bistro, is linked with a restaurant of the same name in neighbouring Juan-les-Pins.  A mirror-image, mile-high millefeuille dessert was our giveaway:  the two Cafés Kanter are owned by branches from the same family tree.  Meanwhile in nearby Cannes, Bernadette and Cathy, a mother and daughter team, own Dimension, my favourite women’s clothing shop.  Bernadette’s two sisters have similar shops with their own daughters in Antibes and St Tropez.  These are a tiny smattering of what’s out there – and represent places our family frequents.

 

Which brings us back to that beloved issue of shops closing at lunchtime – or any other time that darned well pleases the owner.  The excuse may be food.  It may be a doctor’s appointment.  Or – and I pull this one out of reality as I’ve often marveled at the daredevils who jump waves off Antibes’ beaches on gusty days – the kiteboard may be calling:  The wind has kicked up, the waves are surging, and a go on the sea is simply a predestined right. 

 

No worries.  You own the shop?  You’re the boss.  Just shut the doors – without explanation or notice. 

 

Sometimes folks schedule days of closure midweek, every week, because it suits the family structure.  Like the husband and wife team who run Le Coquelicot, another of our favourite bistros.  They keep the lights off every Wednesday.  School’s out and, what else?  The owners have a kid.

 

French business has priorities.  They aren’t necessarily profits.

 

Family businesses, generations in one place, Wednesdays off school, grèves and an endless series of public holidays – all these elements work together in unexpected harmony.  I’m not sure who’s the chicken and egg here – it’s all a tangled web really – but the pieces seem to fit together.  And, as we’ve witnessed firsthand, the whole mess is something you only truly appreciate only after living here.

 

So family time it is.  Mr Adelson has a point – and his thought becomes stronger once we unpack it.

 

If I’m honest, it still bugs me when I find half the local shops closed on Mondays or for a few hours every midday, but I’m beginning to understand why it happens.  I am also getting used to the helter-skelter.  I shop in the mornings now and fully expect, beforehand, that I’ll get about half as much accomplished on Mondays.  And I thrill in watching the kiteboarders, admiring their courage and their lust for freedom – and the fluidity of the system that allows them out onto the surging waters.

 

Shortly our family will leave the haphazard, strapped-together madness of la Côte d’Azur.  Once resituated in Toronto, Canada’s big smoke, will I rejoice in my life’s newfound efficiency? 

 

Or will I wonder what happened to all those things the world loves to hate about France?

Postscript 4: Madoff's Legacy

Just inside the doorway of VIP, our local estate agent’s offices – smack in view of whomever cares to see – stand five large containers of personal effects belonging to one of the world’s most infamous people:  Bernie Madoff.

 

One of these containers is a large, black suitcase, zipped tightly shut.  The others are sturdy moving-house-style boxes, two of which lie open at the top.  A few stray papers poke out of one.  Another reveals a straw hat and bag and a pair of white sandals that belong to Bernie Madoff’s wife Ruth.  Visible, too, is a pair of men’s navy canvas Lacoste loafers, the little alligator lying face-up in the box. 

 

Those shoes were for the boat, Angela tells me in French. 

 

“The boat” would be the Madoffs’ (ever-so-aptly named) Bull, one of their Cap d’Antibes assets that Angela hasn’t yet managed to sell.

 

Angela is equally well-known around here.  People know her as Angela, just Angela – like you talk about Celine or Madonna or Cher.  I make this observation to her.  She grins and nods vigorously.

 

Following on from Lunching on Nuggets (my blog dated 22 January 2009), I can now report that the Madoff home on Cap d’Antibes has SOLD.  Despite the wretched economy and trail of bankruptcy proceedings, our local real estate agents – the very same folks who sold us Bellevue and who watch over the house in our absence – these good folks have returned a bit of revenue into the vast, black hole that surrounds the Madoff legacy.

 

“It’s my legacy,” Angela says of the boxes.  She seats herself behind one of VIP’s antique wooden desks.  I sit across from her.  The thick files stacked between us relate to Madoffs’ property. 

 

I’m still wondering what else is inside the boxes.  It feels wrong to touch them, voyeuristic even to get too close, and so I’m considering how I might get a casual, closer look.  Angela notices my curiosity.  “There’s nothing special inside,” she tells me.

 

Angela was the kingpin – or the queenpin – in the transaction that closed May 19, the Madoff property being offloaded to some Russians.  She sold the place furnished, books and all – except for the so-called legacy stuffed into cardboard boxes and a big, black suitcase. 

 

I detect some sadness in Angela’s voice.  She had links with these people.  She draws a page from her files and shows it me.  It’s a clipping from a glossy magazine, a photo of her clients, Bernie and Ruth, decked out as celebrities in their cocktail best – the same friends she has known and dined with over the past 15 years on the Cap d’Antibes.  It was Angela who had sold them the now-offensive property (in Ruth’s name).  It was she who Ruth Madoff had phoned last December, unsure whether the queen of property was willing even to talk to her.  (The queen was.)

 

The day I visit Angela in VIP’s offices, she’s decked out in her usual get-up.  Not that there’s anything usual about it.  Today’s selection is a lavender knit, short-sleeved dress, adorned by six necklaces (at least that’s the number I can count) bearing an array of bobbles.  One necklace is large enough to count for three; it’s encrusted with large chunks of turquoise.  She wears five bracelets (of the glittering and hardly-small variety), two rings (an amazingly modest number, although each ring has the square acreage of six), and big, rhinestone hoop earrings.  Turquoise eyeshadow lines her lids.  Turquoise-green swirled reading glasses perch on her scalp, which is squeezed tight by a long, turquoise-and-hot pink floral scarf tied at the nape of her neck.  Later I unearth a turquoise encrusted hairclip sunk within her pile of hair. 

 

This is Angela, and there is nothing unusual about her dress today – relatively speaking for Angela anyway.

 

The fact that she was happy to have that year-end chat with Ruth Madoff would’ve seemed a coup for the newly ostracized woman.  From informal Cap d’Antibes research, I’ve learned that no one in Ruth’s family is communicating with her – not her children, not Bernie.  No, her husband is dressed up in an orange jumpsuit these days, tucked away in a nine-square-foot cell (including shower and toilet) that’s situated in the terrorist section on the 13^th story of a Manhattan building, with an elevator that only reaches the ninth.  Access to each and every floor above nine requires clearance through an air-locked chamber.

 

But someone went to visit Bernie recently, and that’s his bankruptcy lawyer.  Angela flashes me a copy of his passport page from her files.  He’s in his early 40s and bears a crop of dark curly hair and olive skin.  Angela describes him as gentil, or kind, adding that he fell in love with Cap d’Antibes, the see-and-be-seen Pom Pom bar in Juan-les-Pins, and the celebrated Eden Roc restaurant.

 

This gentil lawyer visited Bernie in his orange jumpsuit.  Their conversation centered on the sale papers for his pad on the Cap.  Angela takes a copy of the document from her files.  There, in the bottom left-hand corner, is Bernie’s jagged signature, a condensed, photocopy-gray scrawl centered within the seller’s box on the form.

 

The speed of the whole transaction is one that has astonished onlookers.  First the court had to approve Angela as sales agent for the property.  She signed stacks of legalese from the New York State Attorney General’s office, agreeing not to talk to the press and such.  

 

Then, once she had the job, it took Angela only 47 days to get a deal and a firm contract on the property.  The bankruptcy lawyer, frankly, couldn’t believe it.  He and Angela had developed a sort of rapport during the short period, with the Cap d’Antibes sales agent emailing the New York lawyer almost every day to report showings and conversations over the estate.  But the fact that Angela had maneuvered the extra hurdles of an overseas jurisdiction and the property’s connection with a well-followed bankruptcy case made her feat even more astounding. 

 

I was up until 1:00 a.m. faxing papers, Angela says.  The New York lawyer emailed her wondering how ANYONE in France could be awake at such an hour and WORKING.  “You must be crazy,” he wrote.  As she replays the scene for me, she enjoys this description of her as folle.

 

Angela told the lawyer that, in fact, she was German.  That should explain everything.

 

The reputed industriousness, yes, perhaps, but not the speed of the sale.  And taken from a New York lawyer’s perspective, probably the long distance of the transaction, and possibly even the name of the reality office – VIP – stepped beyond the usual bookwork, too.  Everything seemed just a little off-kilter.  So the New York bankruptcy lawyer finagled a quick trip to the French Riviera to check out the legitimacy of Angela’s deal.

 

Angela met the curly-haired lawyer at the airport.  She grins at me even more broadly in telling this part of the story.  The lawyer took one look at her, she says – and here she gestures subtly toward her attire, referencing whatever multi-layered, swirly, hot pink and turquoise outfit and bangles she’d chosen for the day – and the chap said, “Now I know you’re crazy.” 

 

Angela relives those days and finishes on a high note, her eyes twinkling with the fact that the lawyer declared her as even more folle on the day he left the Cap.  But he knew one thing for sure.  The Madoff sale, crazy or not, was real.

 

Angela has sold the Madoff home.  She has sold the Madoff car as well.  One of the thick files on her desk holds these papers.  She opens its front cover and waves a set of car keys and a Peugeot ownership card.

 

Now she’s moving onto Bull, the boat.

 

At this rate, I reckon you should keep your eyes peeled in the local markets.  While the contents of the four cardboard boxes and suitcase are meant to ship overseas to their rightful owners, the freight costs are not insignificant.  And who knows where that money would come from. 

 

There are the Madoffs’ former housekeeper and a boat captain, Angela reminds me.  They could inherit the legacy. 

 

But, if only for a good dinner party story, I think I’ll keep my eyes open on market days for a smart pair of navy canvas Lacoste loafers.

Ce n'est pas juste

Lately I’ve been recalling a conspiracy that was launched one evening a few years ago, while Pierre fed Laurelle from a glass jar of mushed-up peas. 

 

My husband and baby daughter were seated at our kitchen table in Denver, Laurelle like toy sentry stationed squarely in her Eddie Bauer high chair.  As he spooned, Pierre babbled away to my baby in his Quebecois French about who-knows-what. 

 

Then I overheard a sentence I could understand.

 

Papa’s voice was all cutesy and engaging.  He spoke in English.  “Pretty soon you and I will be able to talk about things,” he told Laurelle, “and Mommy won’t be able to understand!”

 

Ha!  Never, I thought.

 

Never, I vowed.  And so I’ve plugged away at the French language.  Seven-some years later I’ve ended up with a working knowledge of Anglophone French, as I described in The Beautiful Language (my blog dated 15 May 2009).  I can get the technical bits of the language, but try as I might, I fear I’ll never sound like a local.

 

Today’s post, on the other hand, could be called The Beautiful Language 2.  Or better yet, French for Four-Year Olds.

 

Now four years of age, Laurelle has been gathering her command of the French language for precisely four years.  Put one way, that’s a lifetime.  Put another way, her efforts are only half of mine. 

 

In short, I’ve been struggling at French nearly twice as long as Laurelle has been ALIVE.

 

Worse, Laurelle’s French – unlike mine – is perfect.  As my child plays with schoolmates on the playground after school or makes friends with other pint-sized swimmers at the beach, she’s my little French girl.  It’s as if no one suspects she has an ounce of English-speaking blood in her. 

 

Until her mother swoops in and opens her big, smiley, American mouth, that is.  Until I try to fit into the conversation and completely blow her cover.

 

“Ce n’est pas juste,” I say to the local parents.  It’s not fair.  The other adults often find this comment funny.  I do, too – but I don’t.

 

The world is even less fair when you consider that the French language actually underpins a couple of our family’s “life goals” (if I may use such an inward-reaching term) in living here this year.  And we’ve fairly turned our lives inside out to achieve them: 

 

For Pierre it’s straightforward.  He’s taking a first stab at living abroad. 

 

For me I get a first stab at living abroad in a foreign language.  Ah, the language thing. 

 

And for Laurelle, well, it’s a chance to attend maternelle, French preschool, and learn a second language with the same fluency as her first.  There’s that wretched language thing again.

 

I shouldn’t be competitive with my own daughter.  Honestly!  But if Laurelle accomplishes her “life goal” in a single year, I don’t know whether I should punch the stars out in hearty, romping joy or in a self-centered funk.

 

The language thing is just so darned easy for little ones.  Too darned easy.  Ce n’est pas juste.  They enter a foreign land with blank slates, their minds free of all preconceptions about whether French is easy or difficult to learn – even whether the language is beautiful.  French just IS.  It is the way people around here communicate.

 

By the time we reached France last summer, Laurelle was three, and she at least understood the language.  Pierre had spoken French to her over the changing table, her backside thrust into the air awaiting a clean diaper.  He’d explained, as only a Frenchman can, that this jar of yellow mushed-up food tasted like juicy mango while that beige paste was organic chicken and rice.  He’d read French-English picture dictionaries (think “dog – chien, tree – arbre”) and storybooks with real plots (think Elmer flying in the wind). 

 

So last summer Laurelle understood the language.  Or at least she understood the bits she heard over and over again – like stuff about diapers, strained foods, and flying patchwork elephants.  What’s more, while her English language vocabulary was quite stellar (and I’m not just being her mother speaking, promise), my child spoke exactly no words of French. 

 

In September last year, on entering her first day of maternelle, Laurelle went from being the classroom’s original chatterbox, the one with the greatest command of language – to the pupil in a class of 33 three-year olds who said the least, who knew nothing.  She couldn’t even ask for the loo.

 

My precious, precocious baby soon learned – as did I – that the phrase French schoolteachers bellow to misbehaving subjects is “au coin.”  Go to the corner.  But I’ll write more on Laurelle’s school experiences in another blog.

 

And then, voilà.  My daughter began to speak the beautiful language.  By mid-October, a month and a half after school had begun, her little, button mouth began to form French words.  Her first words were those she picked up at school.  She mingled them with evident pride into her usual English conversation, often on school nights when our family convened at the dinner table:

 

 Ecoutez!  (Listen!) 

Arretez!  (Stop!) 

Regardez!  (Watch!) 

Regardez-moi!  (Watch me!) 

Vas-y, Papa!  (Let’s go, Papa!)

 

I quickly realized that Laurelle’s new French vocabulary was made up of verbs.  Verbs – those wretched, impossible, French verbs!  Her every use was conjugated into the imperative form (commands), always choosing the second person plural vous, just as her teacher would in addressing 33 three-year olds. 

 

But now, of course, I am speaking like an adult trying to learn French.  Three-year olds don’t worry about first- or second- or third-person anything.  They don’t conjugate verbs in their heads.  They just talk.  They launch themselves straight off a ski jump and never look back.

 

But what impressed me most about Laurelle’s acquisition of language – other than the fact that she’d managed to do it at the ripe age of three – was its perfection.  Her pronunciation of the beautiful language was, well, beautiful.  Hers was perfect, local pronunciation.  That’s not exactly Parisian French, it should be said, and it’s certainly not Quebecois.  No, Laurelle’s is good “06” French.  French with a sing-song, southern softening that comes from the sunshine lifestyle in Département 06, basically the French equivalent of “State Number 6.”

 

Take the letter R.  The Chinese characteristically have trouble with all Rs that crop up in our English language.  Anglophones barely look twice at the consonant.  Single R, double Rs.  Never mind, it’s all the same sound.  Rrrr.

 

The letter R is not so easy in Romance languages.  The Rolled R gave me years of trouble in high school Spanish classes – both the long-rolling Double RR and the more subtle Single R, its short-form cousin.  After years in front of a mirror, I could finally get my tongue to flutter behind my front teeth in the fourth year of class.

 

The French R is doubly cumbersome.  First off, there’s a fundamental question:  Do I pronounce the letter, or not?  If so, there’s the second issue of how. 

 

In the south of France, locals attack the R – at least in my view – with a rather German bravado.  They throw a throaty, phlegm-like sound into the middle of their words.  That’s supposed to be an R.

 

Soon, my pronunciation-perfect Laurelle soon began tossing the phlegmy R into her own conversation.  The first time I heard my rose-scented jewel utter such a guttural sound, I nearly coughed out my own phlegm.  I don’t know what it is about kids, but their accents – whether British or French or Texan – are stronger than those of adults.  Same with the phlegm-y thing.  Laurelle, like her peers on the playground, executes her Rs with terrific prowess.  They even muddle her name:  Lau[phlem-y thing]-ELLE.

 

Of course there are those famous French vowels, too.  I still struggle with them.  I write flashcards with music notes in their corners to indicate words where I’m working not on their meanings but on their pronunciations.  Invariably, correct pronunciation involves getting my vowels right. 

 

Vowels are all theory to a four-year old.  (Mommy, what’s a vowel?  What’s a flashcard?)  The sounds that little ones can form in their mouths are distributed along a much less punctuated scale than the adult version.  They are like musicians without a home country.  They can be fluent in the Western tonality made up of flats and sharps (so-called half-tones).  And they can jump straight to a Middle Eastern scale, intertwining new sounds between half-tones to create quarter-tones.  But kids never worry about what half-tones or quarter-tones might be.

 

So let me illustrate how this anti-Mommy conspiracy has blossomed over the past year.  Take Laurelle’s first friend at school.  Her name is Clotilde.  Early in the school year, I suggested to Laurelle that we might invite Clotilde over for a playdate.

 

“It’s not Claw-TEELD, Mommy,” Laurelle told me strictly.  “It’s Clo-TILD.”

 

My baby began correcting me.

 

Things got worse.  One morning shortly thereafter, Laurelle was watching a morning episode of Dora la Exploratrice.  To be fair, to be juste, I wasn’t actually engaged the cartoon, just listening in.  Dora was outlining her journey in the day’s episode:  forêt, lac aux crocodiles, le grand buisson bleu.  Forest, crocodile lake, the big, blue – what?

 

“What’s le grand buisson bleu?”  I called to Laurelle.

 

Her voice was that of a teenager rolling her eyes.  “It’s the big, blue bush, Mommy.”

 

My baby began teaching me.

 

Recently when Laurelle and I walked toward our car after school one day, she said with some urgency, “Key-ma-pel-AY?”  Then again, “Key-ma-pel-AY?”

 

I hadn’t a clue what she meant.  The sounds mushed together, just like French had sounded to me at the very beginning – one, continuous sound stream devoid of discrete words.    

 

So I had to ask my daughter.  “What are you saying?”

 

She replied quite simply, “Who called me?” 

 

Of course.  Qui m’appelé?  Key-ma-pel-AY.  She had said it perfectly.

 

And thus, my baby began translating for me.  The mushy-peas-in-an-Eddie-Bauer-high-chair experience came slamming back into my face.  The conspiracy had come to fruition.  Father and daughter actually could enjoy their own, perfectly pronounced, Mommy-protected conversation.

 

It seems that Laurelle, my little Laurelle, has two language boxes in her brain.  It is true.  Granted, at times they do get confused.  A couple months ago I overheard her breathless explanation of the English board game Candyland to Anitou, our occasional, French sitter.  Laurelle taught the game to Anitou in French English.  That’s to say, in English with a French accent. 

 

Et voilà, she said.  If you get the card with the kahn-DEE….  Or else there’s the card with the ice CREEM…

 

Poor, sweet-souled Anitou.

 

There are times, too, when Laurelle amalgamates her languages.  “I want to explique you,” she tells me.  She wants to explain something to me.  (So here’s one good reason for me to continue French:  to translate, on occasion, my daughter.) 

 

Or she sometimes says, “I want to pleasure you.”  (Now where’d she pick up THAT phrase?)  Fortunately my own studies of the French verb plaisir (to please) have revealed that it’s more cumbersome for Anglos to use correctly.  I get what Laurelle is saying – and why she’s saying it that way.  The rest of it we can fix later.

 

But most of the time Laurelle’s two brain boxes remain segregated.  We drive to school in the morning chattering away in English.  I walk her to the building and up to her classroom door, arrange her coat and backpack on the allotted pegs – and do it all in English.  Laurelle then crosses the threshold of the classroom door, and she shifts brain boxes.  She greets her teacher with a perfect “bonjour” (often kissing her cheek as good French schoolchildren do) and then joins up with the nearest flock of girls (boys are bad – we’re at that age).  My baby shifts language gears like I do a car’s clutch – unconsciously, innately.

 

Genius, I think.  Pure genius.

 

So today, literally this morning, Laurelle attains language-learner nirvana.  Pierre and I bring Laurelle to our pilates class this morning; a low-grade fever keeps her out of school.  As we finish the last minutes of our workout, the next client arrives.  A pretty, forty-something blonde in sports gear, she stows her belongings and joins Laurelle on a small balcony that overlooks the pilates studio. 

 

I hear the two of them chatting as I finish my leg pumps.  The blonde woman is learning that Laurelle is four, that she is missing school today, that Dr Laurent is coming to dinner tonight and Kaiya coming for a tea party tomorrow, that her stuffed dolphin doudou comes from Marineland – and then Laurelle’s cross-examination begins.  Has she ever been to Marineland?  Does she know that there are orques (killer whales) at Marineland?  And that the dolphins do a show, too, but only in the afternoon?  Kind, patient woman.

 

As I reclaim my chatterbox, the woman reveals that she, too, has a little talker.  But yours, she wonders, which is her first language?  Is it French or English?

 

Ah, if only someone would ask such a question of me.  Just once.  Ce n’est pas juste.

In Aid of Mozart

My first clue that I was onto something big came last Friday afternoon from Rachael. 

 

She’s my osteopath friend here, a Brit with unbelievably strong hands, a wicked sense of humour, and an abiding love of mojitos. 

 

As Rachael pummeled my lower back on her patient table, she rattled off a handful of Cannes Film Festival parties she’d managed her way into this year.  The music, the men, the champagne….  She’d just mentioned that she was a judge for this year’s Mr. Gay Cannes competition (“I’m an expert in physique, you know”) when I dropped my own news.

 

Pierre and I had last-minute tickets to the Palme d’Or.  The closing ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival.  In short, the French Oscars.

 

The pummeling on my back slackened momentarily.  Rachael – even Rachael – searched for a comeback.

 

I barely noticed her pause.  This was my therapy session, after all, and I had a problem.  Male invitees received a single clothing rule for the Palme d’Or:  Wear a tux.  Women weren’t so lucky.  We had no guidelines.  What on earth was I going to wear to such a glam fest?  And, I reminded my therapist, the whole crisis was climaxing in two nights’ time – with only a single shopping day in between this therapy session and the red carpet.

 

Rachael picked the obvious choice among my few clothing options:  a black dress.

 

What about shoes?  I asked.  I was worried my existing black ones were unfashionable.

 

Rachael’s advice was more basic.  She simply wondered whether the shoes were clean.  In the end we decided I should buy a new pair of shoes at Minelli and be done with it. 

 

Pierre’s and my last minute tickets to the Palme d’Or came – in quite indirect fashion – through the precociousness of a new Montreal-based film director.  The 20-year-old Xavier Dolan had scooped three prizes in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight competition, a side ceremony in Cannes, for his film, the charmingly-titled J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother).  Now Dolan was tipped to bag the Caméra d’Or, the final night’s prize for the best first film.

 

The whole of Quebec, it seemed, was supporting its young son’s debut at Cannes.  Last week, as my Quebecois husband met on a wholly different topic with the province’s Minister of Culture and Communications, Christine St-Pierre, one thing led to another.  Pierre ended up with this pair of tickets to the closing ceremonies – and with a mandate that we provide home-grown support to, as Mme St-Pierre put it, the new “Mozart”.

 

But let us not get sidetracked.  I still needed new shoes. 

 

On Saturday afternoon Antibes’ Minelli shop did a bustling trade.  Three or four attendants circled for shoe requests as I picked out a couple black patent models with teetering heels – one dainty pair of pumps and another set of strappy sandals. 

 

At last an attendant took my request and brought me a couple boxes, juggling a more elderly customer’s wishes alongside mine.  We competed for the attendant’s attention – until I asked for some much needed advice.

 

“The shoes,” I began in Anglophone French, tottering around with one of each on my feet and trying to engage anyone who would listen.  “They’re for tomorrow night.  Could you give me some advice on what’s correct for the occasion?”  I hesitated.  The attendant and my competitor waited.  “In Cannes,” I said.  “For the Palme d’Or.”

 

The shop assistant forgot the other customer.  A second shop assistant swooped to – er – my feet.  My customer-competitor even became a new confidant. 

 

Both shoes were beautiful, they all agreed.   But the pumps were classy.  My jury’s decision was unanimous.  Go for the pumps.

 

Which I did.  And the sandals, too, skipping out of the Minelli shop on a shoe-happy cloud.

 

Swinging my bag with two boxes nestled inside, my mind drifted to Brangelina.  To the Cannes Film Festival two years ago when Pierre and I joined the premier of Angelina’s film, A Mighty Heart (see blogs dated May 22 and 23, 2007).  Among that star-gazing crowd we were nearly neighbours with the handsome couple – or at least our seats within the Grande Théâtre Lumière were in neighbouring sections.  I could watch Brangelina’s every move through the dimmed light.  

 

This year’s invitation was even bigger.  We would witness the culmination of the entire Cannes Festival.  Brad and Angelina were in town; yes, indeed, their photos were stamped on front pages and local websites.  So were Penelope Cruz, Hilary Swank, Eric Cantona, Eva Longoria Parker . . . and the A-list continued. 

 

Reality was sinking in and shooting me skyward.  These passes to the closing ceremonies were absolutely ginormous. 

 

Pierre and I soon learned from our local ticket contact that traffic between our home and Cannes would be “infernale” on the big night.  And the theatre doors would close at 6:30pm sharp, she warned. 

 

The rigour of this deadline should’ve been our first sign that the You-Have-Arrived barometer had begun spinning in a counter-clockwise direction. 

 

Pierre and I dress to our nines – I in my sausage-tight, long-sleeved black cocktail dress and new, black patent pumps, he in an ever-trusty tux – and we tackle the Cannes-bound traffic in the heat of the day.  We dally a bit in the back streets – good to be early but not too early – and then hit Cannes’ celebrated seaside boulevard, La Croisette. 

 

Iron fences push back city blocks of crowds.  A few hopeful folks call out for available entry passes.  As Pierre and I move toward the mouth of a cordoned-off corridor, the celebrated walk toward the Grand Théâtre Lumière and its red carpeted runway, two professional photographers jump in front of us, their cameras poised directly into our faces. 

 

Look here!  Smile!  They call.  A flurry of popping flashes. 

 

Ah yes, the cameras.  We know the gig from last time.  The photographers push business cards at us.  Sud Photo.  Imaging Photograph.  Here’s your reference number!  Call us for your shots!  they say.  (Just don’t look at the prices.)

 

An artillery of handlers check, double- and triple-check Pierre and my coveted tickets.  A full block of cleared roadway stretches before us.  On the opposite side of the iron fences, the crowds grow more and more dense. 

 

And then, there it is.  That wide sheath of ruby red carpet.  Photographers – the real photographers, often stacked four layers deep along the edge of the walkway – scout the arriving invitees.  But their unwieldy image-making machines remain unlit, uncocked and unimpressed as the users wait for the real stars to arrive.

 

Undeterred, I whip out my own camera, a nifty pocket model, and snap pictures back at the photographers.  And the gathering onlookers.  And the rest of the ticket holders.  And the double lines of pale pink tutu-adorned ballerinas that grace the red carpeted steps leading into the theatre.  And honestly, the red carpet itself.  I have no couth to lose.  

 

Until we’re corralled inside the theatre building and yet another ticket handler forces me to surrender my offending picture machine to le vestiaire, a cloakroom tucked quietly into the side of the entry hall.  I may retrieve it at the end of the evening. 

 

Pierre and my seats, oversized lounge chairs covered in red velour, are positioned in the front row – of the top balcony.  The furthest right section of the top balcony, to be exact.  Never mind, I have a clear view of the stage if I perch at the edge of my seat.  Brangelina’s old spot, the big-ticket section I knew from two years ago, is three stories down, completely obscured by intervening balconies of tuxedos and silks.

 

The scene below is nonetheless captivating.  Banks of spotlights cling to both sides of the arena walls.  The famous red carpet continues from the entryway, presumably running straight through the big-ticket section, before climbing up onto the stage.  It divides the platform into left and right halves, the red line then disappearing through a backdrop of wide, white columns that create a postcard-like view from the balcony of a Greek villa.  TV-bright set lighting bathes the two podiums that populate the stage.  A bank of nine white seats occupies stage right, while a row of jumbo zoom lenses punctuates the front edge of the stage, their photographers obscured from my view.  At the far left an elongated, mechanical arm sweeps a movie camera over the crowd.   

 

The people are striking, too.  The dozen rows above me, and the balconies beneath, form a sea of variable glitz, glam and fashion disasters.  There are sequins and silks.  Vibrant colours, pastels and tried-and-true black.  Necks crusted in jewels and those left bare (in vogue sympathy with the times).  White skin, black skin and a strong dose of Asian.  Those folks in their late teens, and others tottering alongside bent elbows. 

 

My favourite fashion disaster belongs to a 40-something woman with perfectly buffed, baby giraffe legs.  They undulate gracefully beneath what looks like blood red, silk draperies that cascade gracefully over her rack-flat frame in four bunches.  The bottom splashes of the two back panes form gentle cups around fat-free butt cheeks.  The look is ever-so-subtly embellished by red, stilt-like sandals and fire engine, double-Botoxed lips. 

 

A large screen entertains the drop-dead-6:30pm-deadline crowd with the leisurely arrival of the post-6:30pm crowd.  Now the heavy artillery flashes.  As the stars stroll the red carpet, they lavish smiles and pouts on attentive lenses.  Sparkling shoes and handbags, glittering wrists and necklines.  Itsy-bitsy, size 0 gowns.  A gorgeous, emerald green silk number on the willowy actress who, we learn from a neighbor in the audience, played Coco Chanel.  

 

Beautiful as the incoming migration may be, Pierre and I are hardly overwhelmed.  We have no idea who these folks are.  Where are those helpful hints you hear from TV commentators as the stars parade in?  Where are the deep, knowing voices that fill in the gossip?  The fashionistas who critique the dresses, note the jewelry makers and drop the scoop on new love?

 

Pierre and I aren’t exactly clueless about pop culture.  It is true that we’re not avid readers of Hello, Paris Match or The National Enquirer, but we do have a vague idea of who has been popular over the last few years.  But this crowd is the future.  We are 80 years old, culturally speaking anyway, surrounded by a bunch of 20s hipsters.

 

 “Who’s that?” I say to my husband a bit too loudly, believing I might recognize one carefully stubbled chin. 

 

The woman seated next to Pierre responds.  I’ve never heard of the guy.  Our neighbor continues her play-by-play commentary, naming the incoming herds, their latest spottings, noteworthy marks, temperamental characteristics and mating exercises. 

 

The woman finally introduces herself as the head of Alliance Française in Cork.  A naturally pretty, middle-aged woman whose round, chestnut eyes reflect warmly above a long, white, sequined gown, the Lady from Cork explains in soft tones that she ought to know these stars because she’s putting on a smaller but similar film festival in her Irish town.  This evening she would become Pierre and my lifeline.

 

By 7:20pm, the flashes and the migration have ceased.  No Brangelina.  No Penelope.  No Eric, Hilary or Eva.  Among the whole herd, I’ve recognized one mug.  Maybe.

 

The opening repartee is made by somebody famous.  Someone from French TV, I think.  He talks about salt.  A lot of people laugh.  I’m pleased to have worked out – all by myself – that his chosen subject matter is salt.

 

The first award happens with a bit of hoopla but not quite enough.  Mr. Famous MC introduces some star.  Wide doors swing open from backstage, and Star #1 struts onto the red carpet to rapturous applause to give the Award #1. 

 

Flashes pop throughout the audience.  (Hey?!  How’d they manage to keep theirs?)

 

It’s all happening too quickly.  Where are the clips of each nominated film?  How about the little pop-up pictures showing each contender’s face as he awaits the big announcement?

 

Clapping.  A little acceptance speech by Winner #1.  A little more clapping, and the good folks associated with Award #1 are ushered stage right.

 

Next up is the Caméra d’Or.  It’s our big one.  It is Quebec’s award to win, the one that has allowed Pierre and me our own grand gallops along the red carpet. 

 

Another famous somebody emerges from backstage.  She’s the voluptuous sort, you can tell, full of hips and all dolled up in a low-cut, white sequined thing.  The Lady from Cork fills us in.  The press calls her “sulfureuse,” she says in a gentle voice. 

 

Pierre translates.  “Like sulphur,” he says.  “You know, smoking hot.”

 

The audience is captivated.  Sulfereuse makes a few witty comments.  (Were they witty?).  And the winner is . . . Sulfereuse flips open a white envelope . . . Somebody Else.

 

Somebody other than Mozart. 

 

“Who’d she say was the special mention?”  Pierre, my francophone, asks me. 

 

Um, I dunno.  (Did Sulfereuse even say anything about another film?  Or, like the audience, was Pierre just too smitten to hear?)

 

Now Mr. Famous MC introduced the judges.  One-by-one they glide through the wide stage doors, acknowledge their applause, and file into the white chairs stage right.

 

Why do the judges only come out now?  I ask Pierre.

 

My evening rolls on in the same blue haze.  Le Prix du Scénario.  Le Prix de la Mise en Scène.  Still consigned to the edge of my seat, my back is starting to kill me.  Le Prix du Jury.  Le Prix d’Interprétation Masculine.

 

Okay, that’s familiar enough.  The Best Male Actor award.

 

“What’s the movie?” I hear Pierre ask the Lady from Cork.

 

Some Tarantino film.  At least I know Tarantino.  The winner arrives at the podium and thanks “Brad” for the chance to work eye level with him. 

 

That’s gotta be Brangelina-Brad.  Et voilà.  This year’s (far-more-distant) Film Festival brush with a star I really know.

 

Le Prix d’Interpretation Féminine.  A Special Jury Prize.  Le Grand Prix. Then the big one.  The Palme d’Or.  Cannes’ Best Film Award.

 

I’m giving a standing ovation only because I can’t see anything if I stay seated.  But the tuxedoed guy next to the Lady from Cork torpedoes any bit of excitement that could have surrounded the moment.  He tells all three of us that the winning film, Le Ruban Blanc (The White Ribbon), is a real zero.  It’ll never make it commercially.

 

Possibly – quite possibly, Pierre and I realize on our late drive home – the big, You-Have-Arrived Palme d’Or tickets were wasted on us.  And so the next day, we try to reconstruct something of what we missed.  We read the newspapers. 

 

Here are the choice revelations:

 

Number 1:   The Cannes Film Festival hardly aims to award commercial filmmaking. 

 

This ranks as Pierre and my best excuse for pop culture ignorance.  It leads us back to an enduring truth that we’ve pinpointed many times in the past months:  In France, art is not business.  Art is Art.  Period.

 

Number 2:  Xavier Dolan already figured all this out.  Our Quebecois hero – the root of our last-minute luck, the source of my insufferable clothing conundrum – had his own plans.  Pierre and I hardly had a chance to support Dolan at Cannes’ closing ceremonies.  Before the festival had ended, young Mozart had flown to Paris to connect with distributors and pitch his new idea. 

 

Commerce matters to young Dolan.  But then again, he’s not French.

French Lessons is off for the week.  I’m checking out what the future has in store….

 

www.frenchlessons.typepad.com

The Beautiful Language

We’ve been based in France for 10 straight months now, and I relish the fact that I can engage in life here in the local language – without heaps of quiet rehearsal before opening my mouth. 

 

Some folks flip between two languages, even four or six, without a flicker of pain in their brain cells.  I missed out on that gene.  But with seven years of French language instruction under my belt, I’m finally getting around.  No more lingering moments of silent contemplation, flicking through my mental dictionary to find words I might know.  Greatly reduced are the premeditated stabs I take at sentence construction and verb conjugation before approaching some unsuspecting Frenchman. 

 

These days I can move around in the language and be understood.  It may not be pretty – but I get there.

 

Still, I hate the LOOK.  That thing French folks do when they tense their eyebrows and jut out their necks as they strain to figure out what I might be saying. 

 

At first, the LOOK made me shut up.  Then I decided to make it easy for my French listeners.  Or so I thought anyway.  I knew which words gave me the most trouble.  I could spell them in my head, but moving the letters out of my lips was another story. 

 

Let me give you a flavour.  The French use fistfuls of vowels.  (Ever looked at their Scrabble game?)  And to make life more interesting, a double-L often sounds like a vowel – but not always.  That’d be too simple.  Consonants, meanwhile, may or may not be pronounced – but we all know that quirk in the French language, francophone or not.  Think of the well-exercised words “faux” and “beaucoup”.  The “x” and “p” are plainly silent. 

 

So how would you say débrouiller (to untangle, to sort out)?  Le seuil (the doorstep, the threshold)?  Moelleux (moist, soft)? 

 

These kinds of words give me problems.  So for a while I attacked them like this:  Say what you see.  I pronounced all the vowels and consonants that appeared in the written words.  That way, at least the French would know how the word I tried to say was supposed to look.

 

Needless to say, I still got the LOOK.

 

The answers to the pronunciation challenge, by the way – and not that I can say these words perfectly myself – are something like de-bru-YEH (no “L” sound), sœy (no “L” again – and happily, we have no such vowel sound in English), and mwah-LUH (a big “L” this time – though my attempt at the vowel sound is a bit dodgy). 

 

When our little family arrived in Antibes last summer for this longer stay, each of us was pursuing some larger goal.  For Pierre, it was his first chance to live abroad.  For our then-three-year-old Laurelle, she was fortunate (whether or not she knew it) to pick up a second language when her brain’s synapses were most fertile. 

 

For me, I was living for the first time in a country where English wasn’t a first language.  Put this way, the opportunity to live in France only heightened the stakes in my quest for its beautiful language.

 

Soon after we arrived in Antibes, my dear, Quebecois husband helped me find a French class.  At a local fair that promoted adult education in the coming year, Pierre explained to one French language rep that my comprehension really wasn’t so bad.  But my accent – well.  Well, indeed. 

 

(Never mind that Pierre’s own accent isn’t exactly français de souche, of pure French extraction, but for some reason the French people around here find his Quebecois pronunciations endearing.  It’s like he’s a long-lost cousin or something.  In such circumstances, of course, Pierre only turns up the French-Canadian volume, smearing it thickly onto his words like cream cheese on a bagel – just as he did in chatting with this lovely French teacher at the local fair.) 

 

No problems, the woman said, she’d be happy to help.  In the end, the damp squib of a French class didn’t improve me one bit – not with pronunciation or much else – and I dropped it before Christmastime. 

 

That was hardly enough to stall the pursuit.  There had to be more French-for-foreigners classes around, I just knew it.  Why?  Because we non-francophones adore the French language.  It sounds so darned beautiful.  And it’s useful, too.  According to Nadeau and Barlow’s bestselling Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, English and French are the only two languages spoken on five continents.

 

Sure, English does work its way into the French word.  Some contraventions are hardly stunning.  In France, golfers drive toward le green.  Our home computer is hooked up to un scanner.  Our nearby water park is called Marineland (pronounced Mah-RIN-lawnd).  The French verb for “to tape”, I learned recently, is scotcher. 

 

But the French guard against an out-and-out invasion.  To them, language is much more than a way to communicate.  It’s a full-blown art form.  Language stands as a pillar of French culture in a similar way that singing possesses the Italian soul, and ballet the Russian.  Central to the whole picture is l’Académie Française.

 

Way back in 1635, nearly 150 years before the birth of the United States, Cardinal Richelieu established this venerable institution to guard the beautiful language.  L’Académie Française continues today, governed by 40 elected immortels who rank among France’s most celebrated intellectuals.  It is charged with publishing an official dictionary and advising the Government and public on all matters linguistic.

 

The French Government gets in on the act, too.  It produces a wide range of Journaux Officiels, one of which fixes proper pronunciations.  Words are big stuff.

 

Closer to home is l’Alliance Française.  The name of the organization tripped off my tongue long before I connected it with the bigger picture.  L’Alliance Française has taught me French.  Moving from Britain to the US caused no problems:  I found the same class structure, teaching methodology and workbooks.  L’Alliance encouraged my learning – while teaching me that there are so many exceptions to the rule that the rule itself is probably the exception.  Then I learned the organization’s raison d’être.

 

L’Alliance Française is the evangelical arm of the French language.  Louis Pasteur, Jules Verne and a handful of other noteworthies formed the organization in 1883 as a means to promote French language and culture outside France.  Subsidized by the French Government, today l’Alliance has spread to something like 160 countries.  The man who’d enlightened me to this truth – the former head of l’Alliance Française in Denver – was himself a délégué from France.

 

Put simply, there is a French mafia supporting their beloved language.

 

So there I was, book-smart(er) but still carrying around my wretched accent, and still pursuing enlightenment.  Having dropped that drab French-for-foreigners class, I quickly found the more lofty-sounding Polytechnique d’Antibes.  And now the French Government is actually paying me to learn its beautiful language.

 

Here’s how I work out that math:  For the right to enroll in a class at Polytechnique, a bare-bones, stone-cold workshop that one friend nicknamed “the tunnel”, I paid a princely EUR 10.  That’s basically the price of 10 words at a US university lecture.  For EUR 10 I also get an orange student card that grants me (often whoppingly reduced) student prices at movies, museums, aquariums, and a whole cast of events in France – and elsewhere in the European Community.  (Who says there’s no free lunch?)

 

Unfortunately the language lessons linked to this orange card don’t come quite so easily.  First thing Monday mornings I’m treated to two hours of Madame Sire’s old-fashioned French class.  It’s dated for a lot of reasons. 

 

Start with our workbook.  The texts within Français BEP relate, in unrepresentatively high proportion, to the lives of WWI and WWII soldiers.  Or perhaps in choosing our readings, it’s Madame Sire’s own bias that tips the scales this way.  Whatever the cause, I know my Alliance Française workbooks rarely (possibly never?) mentioned the World Wars.  They contemplated fashion, modern professions, even the worldwide web.

 

The second bit that’s old-fashioned at Polytechnique is my instructor herself.  Not that this retired teacher stares at us with eyes in the back of her head while beating a ruler against the blackboard.  No, Madame Sire is genuinely delighted to see us dozen-or-so pupils who show up, some diligently and some erratically – whether we arrive on time or three-quarters of the way through class.  (One morning when I arrived late, cautiously swinging open the tunnel’s steel door, Madame Sire welcomed me with a firm-but-pleasant “Entrez!” and immediately brought me a copy of the old-fashioned workbook – along with a box of Maxim’s dark chocolates that toured our classroom that morning.) 

 

We students come from Colombia and Poland and Switzerland and Italy and China and the US.  We have no common language – just French.  And so the lessons are taught in French, just French, and this delights Madame Sire.  Her watery, shockingly blue eyes twinkle from a well-creased face.  Her fine, grey hair is pushed into a thin, straggly ponytail, the same way every week, with frizzy wisps flying free at her temples.  And with the tunnel’s heat proving erratic at best, her clothes reflect the outside temperature, the common stylistic thread being a spherical pendant that dangles midway down her well-covered breasts.  Old-fashioned perhaps, but her spirit, as you will see, is absolutely timeless.

 

Seated in rows of squeaking wooden chairs along formica tables, our international coterie begins most classes with une dictée.  Rarely (maybe twice in seven years) did I encounter la dictée at l’Alliance Française.  But strict dictation is how French students of old learned their language.  Points are subtracted for every slight misspelling and missing accent mark. 

 

Madame Sire enunciates the words of the day’s dictée with the utmost clarity, her eyes sparkling at our challenge.  From its slight quaver, you’d know her voice belonged to an old person, even if she rang you on the phone.  But she speaks with great precision and purpose, emphasizing important words and pronouncing each syllable with care.  You actually can hear, for example, the first “l” in her pronunciation of s’il vous plaît. 

 

Old-fashioned or not in its methods, good French is still good French.  And thanks to l’Académie Française, les journaux officiels and organizations like l’Alliance Française and this polytechnique, it will stay that way.  I hunker down.

 

La dictée du jour is a couple lines related to the extract we studied the week beforehand, a scene from Shakespeare’s Comme Il Vous Plaira (As You Like It).  (What irony!  Shakespeare is, of course, English.  We work in translation!)  Madame Sire’s voice rises and falls within each phrase.  She pauses at appropriate places to say “virgule” (comma) and “point-virgule” (semi-colon) and “point” (period).

 

Then we correct la dictée together and our teacher surveys the number of fauts we each made.  My two weren’t a bad showing.  The studious Pole next to me fared worse after his extended holidays.  “Il faut travailler plus fort,” Madame Sire says in gentle rebuke, still smiling at her dear pupil. 

 

After la dictée we dive into tantalizing topics like les relatifs, la transformation infinitif and recently, le subjonctif imparfait.  (Does that verb tense even exist in English?)  Every week Madame Sire crisscrosses these main subjects as conversation leads with mini-lessons on word etymologies, the use of accents, and grammatical favourites like la métaphore and l’oxymoron.

 

Honestly, it is English 101 (or rather 401) all over again, but in French.  Yet there is something more to it, sometime deeper than a typical, college-level course.  At the core of Madame Sire’s passion lies the Academie Française-inspired love of language, the very root of France’s culture. 

 

This week in Madame Sire’s class we launch into written eloquence:  how to write a contraction de text versus a résumé versus an analyse de text versus a compte rendu.  For practice, we summarise that bit of Shakespeare.  Unsurprisingly, the extract we read from the BEP book is about being a soldier.  In her own written résumé of the verse, Madame Sire described the military man as un véritable soudard.  He’s a real, er, something. 

 

No one in the class knows what soudard means.  It’s not in my dictionary.  Our instructor tries to describe what she means – a soldier who swears and is fat and dirty.  Pretty brutal, I think to myself, but the word could prove useful sometime. 

 

But where on earth does soudard come from?  Madame Sire has to find out.  She locates the fat Larousse dictionary in the tunnel’s back closet and carries it to the front of class.   Narrow specs perch on the end of her pointed nose as she thumbs its pages. 

 

Ah, yes, soudard.  The first thing she reads aloud is the note alongside its definition:  Ancien français. 

 

That the word is out-dated surprises Madame Sire.  “It’s a good word,” she says, “maybe just a bit old-fashioned.”

 

Me?  I file soudard in my “give-it-a-miss” category.  I simply don’t share this unquenchable zest for language.  I am, after all, not French.

 

And honestly, getting back to basics, it’s pronunciation that drove me into French classes this year.  Or at least it was my Quebecois-tongued husband’s steering that pushed me there.

 

I fear I’m still back at basics.  And here’s why.  After her gentle telling-off of the Pole and his dictée disaster, Madame Sire encourages each student to participate in standardized French language exams.  We all could succeed on DELF B1, she says, maybe even B2 in a favourable wind. 

 

Still sailing high on my good dictée showing this week, I’m encouraged by these words, even if I don’t know exactly what DELF results would get me.

 

In an instant the favourable wind stops puffing.  Madame Sire is addressing me.  Not the Pole, not the Chinese woman or the Colombian one, but me.  She’s smiling, of course, but she’s almost giving me the LOOK. 

 

I would have problems passing the tests, she tells me, because of my accent.

 

I sit motionless, hoping I misunderstand.  After all, don’t I pronounce things so much more clearly than the other nationalities that surround me?  Surely the Italian still sounds like an Italian?  And the Chinese woman like a Chinese woman? 

 

I must be giving Madame Sire my own LOOK in return.  She soon explains to me – no, to all of us:  It’s the Spanish and the Anglo accents that the French find most difficult to grasp. 

 

I can hardly argue.  I know no differently.  And anyway, now I’m afraid to speak.

 

Madame Sire continues, her voice lilting gracefully, by mentioning a case where a bunch of Anglophones took a French dictée exam that was delivered by a mother-tongued English speaker.  (Yes, that’d be a leg-up, I think, recollecting the morning’s TV episode of Dora-the-Explorer.  Dora’s mother speaks French the way I do.  She is a delight to hear over a bowl of Special K.)  In this dictée examination, Madame Sire says, the native English speakers scored no fauts.  They got perfect marks! 

 

Or at least I think that’s what Madame Sire said.  It’s difficult for me to understand her accent.  

 

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