French Lessons

Here we go again:  Another two-week school holiday. 

 

French Lessons is packing its bags along with the kids.  Its return will coincide with a string of house guests to Bellevue – and a month chockful of four-day work weeks.  Get ready for the Riviera’s silliest season.

 

Un gros merci to all dear readers who’ve decided to subscribe to French Lessons.  For you later bloomers, click the link in the pink.

 

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Postscript 3: Rain, Rain, Go Away

I am quite a positive person.  I smile at people.  I try to remember to smell the lavender, to absorb the sun’s warmth and chew slowly.

 

So if I complained a bit too often during the winter months about la Côte d’Azur’s drippy weather, I am sorry.  At the time, it was a wee bit overwhelming:  the Armageddon thunderstorms; the furious seasick-inducing waters that tore at our coastline, venturing onto Bellevue’s perimeter wall; the endless, mind-numbing sound of living inside a teakettle just off the boil. 

 

Then there was the hailstorm (“First time since 1986!” bleated the locals, who created monstre tailbacks or simply abandoned their cars).  Bellevue’s septic tank crested perilously close to its brim.  And then the majestic, three-story cataract that plunged through the circular, white marble staircase inside our house – all tied up in a pretty little Christmas package by our busted boiler (that’s to say, no heat).

 

Yes, at times the winter weather was just a bit too much to handle. 

 

But the dreariness is fading into the past as swells of beachcombers reassemble along our shoreline.  What’s more, a couple reports now demonstrate that I wasn’t enduring a major character realignment.   

 

A couple months back, there’d been an encouraging piece published by the local Nice Matin rag.  This folksy little number told the story of André Bocchetta, a retiree who lived in the hills above Nice and measures rainfall at 8:00 a.m. every morning using a pluviomètre.  His contraption had gauged 239mm for last November alone – nearly on par with the 263mm it had amassed for the whole of 2007.  

 

January chucked 105mm into Bocchetta’s pluviomètre – a fair monthly whack – and February recorded 93mm by the 10^th, the date of the Nice Matin’s story.

 

In short, we were getting socked.  And soaked.

 

Okay, maybe we French Riviera-types deserved some moisture after four months of solid – by which I mean, completely unbroken – rain-free days, from June to September last year in this bit of paradise.  But as winter set in with unusual vengeance, I couldn’t help wondering why this had to be the year we’d chosen to live along la Côte d’Azur.

 

Now Météo-France, the French national meteorological service, published its annual report for Winter 2008 – 2009.  It makes for somber reading, particularly for us residents along France’s southeast coast – though it does bring the slightly beneficial effect of endorsing my sanity:

 

Météo-France’s report starts out badly, but not too badly:

 

·         « …La température moyenne saisonnière se situe 1,2 °C sous la normale ce qui le positionne au troisième rang des hivers les plus froids de ces vingt dernières années…. »

 

It was France’s third coldest winter in the last 20 years.  Then this:

 

·         « Les précipitations ont été excédentaires sur l’extrême sud, tout particulièrement sur le Sud-Est où les cumuls ont été parfois une fois et demie supérieurs à la normale.»

 

Translation:  Precipitation was 150% worse than normal in our corner of the world.  And to underline our misery, this sunny conclusion:

 

·         « L’hiver 2008-2009 a été particulièrement agité en France métropolitaine. Le mois de janvier a été marqué par une vague de froid sur le pays, un épisode neigeux exceptionnel dans le Sud-Est et une tempête sur le Sud-Ouest d’une intensité rarement atteinte. Février a connu ensuite une seconde tempête, moins sévère mais beaucoup plus étendue, touchant toute une grande moitié nord de la France. »

 

The Southeast, the Southwest, the North – basically winter sucked everywhere in France.  In choosing a single window to experience 12 straight months in the country, our timing had proven perfectly rotten.

 

But I keep smelling those roses.  Surely there are countless Brits and Canadians – even the optimistic ones – who would’ve traded places.

 

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Never Say Never

Pierre and I arrive at our biweekly pilates class yesterday to find the water cooler dismantled, its pieces strewn along the wooden floor of the studio’s small balcony.  It’s hardly the first time the gadget is broken.

 

Kitted out for class, we descend the balcony’s narrow steps and enquire.  Lucile, the olive-skinned former dancer who runs the studio above one of Cannes’ narrow shopping corridors, waits for us. 

 

Qu’est-ce que se passé?  What happened?  we ask of the cooler. 

 

By chance Lucile stopped by her studio Saturday evening, the night before Easter, and discovered a flood.  The drip-drip-drip that I’d mentioned to her last Friday had swollen into something more impressive.  She phoned the company that rents her the cooler.

 

The company rep’s response to Lucile’s flow of problems?  Our willowy instructor flutters her dark eyelashes and splays her long fingers as she recites:  ”Je n’ai jamais vu ça!”  I’ve never seen that!

 

The water cooler’s debacle underlines something I’ve begun to realize about the French.  They are drawn toward expressiveness.  Using their own phraseology, they like to faire la comédie, to make a fuss or a scene.  They employ negotiating tactics with utter mastery.  They adore the technique of hyperbole.  They simply revel in talking – in the whole art of communication. 

 

What’s more, the French – and particularly this subset of French contractors and repairmen – avoid one four-word phrase with the most dogged determination:  “Je ne sais pas.” 

 

The brotherhood never, ever admits when they don’t know something.  It’s far more convenient to lead some pitiful customer down a path of feigned hope rather than to introduce the possibility of appearing ignorant.  (For a prime example, see Cooling Off with the Chauffagiste, dated 15 January 2009.)

 

But yesterday’s indirect run-in with Lucile’s water cooler man teaches me something else.  Our home, our beloved Bellevue, doesn’t actually have des fantômes. 

 

I’d begun to consider – not logically, of course, but allow me this absurdity for my own pleasure of communication – I’d begun to consider that perhaps Pierre and I really DID inherit some ghosts when we purchased the grand, old dame in late 2005.  The purchase contract had included a clause about accepting Bellevue as she was, with or without any of her existing servitudes occultes.  Basically, her ghosts.

 

We’d joshed our French lawyer about this issue of French fantômes, hardly hiding our smirks as we chatted on a speakerphone from Denver. 

 

Our lawyer remained impassive.  The occultes clause was a part of the standard, French housing contract.  The wording remained.  We non-Frenchmen, of course, were hardly able to negotiate.

 

Ah, bof.  Who believes in les fantômes anyway, right?

 

Last year Bellevue’s wide portail, the heavy metal gate that seals her driveway from the street, gave up its own ghost.  The electronic remotes couldn’t make the gate budge.  Instead we dragged it open and shut.  Finally the electrician arrived.  Just a year and a half after we’d installed le portail, its interior, electronic card had broken. 

 

Our electrician’s reaction?  Je n’ai jamais vu ça!

 

Never!  Never ever!  Now weren’t we special?

 

Last month Bellevue’s alarm system conked out.  The keypad in the bedroom malfunctioned, causing the whole system to shut down.  We called the alarm service, with urgency.  The technician arrived and shook his head.  Je n’ai jamais vu ça!

 

Jamais – again!  How perfectly incredible! 

 

A week ago our main television set went silent.  No matter how many buttons we pushed (which, on afterthought, may have deepened the problem), we could not make that box speak. 

 

Eric, the man who’d installed the system years ago, arrived at Bellevue few days later.  The system’s upgraded speaker – a trusty Yamaha strip that boosted sound quality so that non-francophones like me stood a chance at understanding French TV – had shut up shop.  Eric explained in his thickly slurred, south-of-France accent that our speaker must travel to Lyon.  Fixing it vite-vite, the French equivalent of a South African’s “now-now,” meant three weeks.  At best. 

 

And then Eric’s verdict.  You guessed it.  Je n’ai jamais vu ça. 

 

We are nearly a Black Swan.

 

Or so I thought, until Bellevue – and her fantômes – began to swoop into place yesterday morning within Lucile’s mopped-up pilates studio. 

 

Sure, it was possible that Lucile was joining Pierre and me in some big-shot, 12-standard-deviation club of losers.  More likely, we were commiserating colleagues against the art of eloquence. 

 

On further reflection, Bellevue’s fantômes themselves are quite possibly a product of such artistry.  To quote the contract:

 

“L’ACQUEREUR, sauf à tenir compte de ce qui peut être indiqué par ailleurs…souffrira les servitudes passives, apparentes ou occultes, continues ou discontinues, pouvant grever le BIEN, sauf à s’en défendre et à profiter de celles actives, s’il en existe, le tout à ses risques et périls, sans aucun recours contre le VENDEUR…”

 

Just read it.  What eloquence!  What flow!  What rhythm and meter!  Such talk about les servitudes occultes may hark from Sir Gareth and the Knights of the Round Table, its inclusion in French property contracts enduring untold centuries, but this verbiage is sheer poetry. 

 

So, the French legal eagles ask themselves, why delete this little matter about ghosts?  Why let reality get in the way of a beautiful phrase?

Postscript 2: Lending Colour to the Story

This week has caught me out time-wise, “week” being a hopeful amalgamation of seven days that have been squeezed into one-and-a-half by travels on one end and visitors on the other.  Ahhh, the season begins.

 

So a short one in my new series of postscripts:

 

When the Ubers visited last month, we took a jaunt to the Rothschild villa on Cap Ferrat.  Readers may recall this was the weekend when conversation had a way of dividing the global waters along strong national lines (Tell It Like It Is, dated 20 March 2009).

 

As the Ubers and I ambled through the noble-though-fraying corridors of the Rothschild mansion, we noticed another visitor, a neatly coiffed woman holding her Farrow & Ball paint swatch book up to a pale grey door. 

 

Having renovated a handful of homes herself, Caroline recognized the actions of a Brit.  It’s the English, she explained to me – and particularly those renovating more stately homes – who have no qualms about carrying F & B swatch books in their handbags.  They whip out their shades wherever they go, inching forward in never-ending quests to find the perfect wall colours or fabrics. 

 

Caroline moved in to assist the F & B-totting woman.  Now exactly which grey is it, the woman wondered as she compared her palette to the Rothschild’s painted door – “cord” or “savage ground”?

 

End of story.  I’d chosen not to report that swatch books were a way to peg the British population.  And in the end, that was a good thing.

 

You know the odd way that new words or names or ideas often repeat themselves?  That once you’ve learned about something, you suddenly hear about that same something with freakish regularity?

 

For me, it was that not-so-discreet swatch book. 

 

A day or two after the Ubers returned to England, there was a buzz at Bellevue’s street-side gate.  Through the intercom I heard a woman’s voice telling me in broken English that she loved our house. 

 

Nice – if a bit odd.  On the intercom’s screen I could see only tufts of salt-and-pepper hair bobbing as she spoke.   Then the woman asked whether I’d mind if she checked her paint swatches.

 

Quoi?  What?  I’m coming.

 

I opened Bellevue’s iron pedestrian gate to a tiny, pleasant-looking woman in her 50s.  With her was a younger man with perfect, side-parted, chestnut hair.  He wore a snappy, canary yellow sweater. 

 

The man explained.  This woman, his client, was renovating a house on the Cap d’Antibes.  The two of them turned around to motion uphill, toward the interior of the peninsula from our home.  Would I mind terribly if they tried to match the colours of Bellevue – her goldenrod walls and blue-grey shutters – to the colour squares in his swatch book? 

 

Part of me wanted to say ‘yes, I mind a great deal’.  These colours were our personal patent, one of Bellevue’s identifying feature, the results of our own, courageous trials and errors (that, truth be told, were directed from far-off Denver).

 

The other part of me was flattered – and polite.  No, no, I didn’t mind at all.  Go right ahead, I said.

 

The natty dresser fanned his booklet through shades of yellow, asking advice from both the petite, salt-and-pepper-haired woman and me.  Would we call this shade “catamaran” or “sardonyx” or “gilded lily” perhaps?  He flipped some more.  Or even “overjoy”?  We reached a consensus.  He noted it on his iPhone notepad and proceeded toward the greys.

 

It was then that I couldn’t help but ask.

 

Your accent is?

 

Hungarian, he said.  Our English is better than our French, he explained, but we speak Hungarian.

 

Ah.  I smiled at this man and woman with their swatch book in hand.  Maybe borders weren’t quite as definitive as I’d thought.   

Postscripts

Once a long while ago, the BBC ran a story about a shipwreck discovered on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, somewhere off the coast of Denmark, I believe. 

 

The possibilities stirred listeners hearts like mine.  What would divers find?  A cache of diamonds and rubies?  Ferdinand Marcos’ gold Buddha?  Foundational sketching of the Nazca Lines?  The key to Bermuda’s Triangle?

 

Spellbound, we waited for news.  And then nothing. 

 

By which I mean that the airwaves were silent.

 

But I also could mean that nothing was found in the steel wreck either – or at least nothing worth reporting. 

 

It’s just like I learned in one creative writing class.  Don’t write about going to a picnic.  Don’t tell readers that the sun was out, yellow butterflies flitted over your red-and-white-checked blanket, and that everything was perfectly rosy.  No!  There’s no story!  Write about the ants that invaded your outing.

 

What?  No ants?  Ah.  Then you have no story.

 

Often after I publish a blog, something else happens – a postscript of sorts that might highlight or negate the story as I had originally written it.  My vignettes hardly produce the cliffhangers of a newfound shipwreck – I know that – but I’m betting that regular readers would enjoy a few sequels. 

 

And thus, Postscript 1:  Chez Le Coiffeur

 

It’s the women that will get this one:  Changing your hairdresser, at any juncture in life, is a monumental event.  Bonds are broken and new ones are formed.  Advice is taken and received.  A new regime follows.  And that’s before you even consider what happens to your hair. 

 

So finding un coiffeur in another country – using a language you’re still learning – well, that’s practically a death-defying experience.  I finally summoned myself to write about it in Coiffeur et Createur (August 5, 2008) and Missing Link (October 3, 2008).

 

Then I basically shut up.  According to journalistic convention, the silence means I found someone who suits me just fine, thank you.  The ants have retreated from my picnic.

 

Indeed, someone steered me toward a busy Antibes crossroads and into a small shop called Marc Ramos.  (Okay, that this “someone” happened to be my husband is a bit odd, but that’s how it happened.  At least I have a different stylist than he does.)

 

The woman who did my hair that first visit in December last year was called Marine.  She didn’t wear six kilos of silver chains around her neck.  She didn’t line her mouth with an ink smudge.    

 

No, visually-speaking, Marine is a vast improvement over my earliest experiences with the MTV Wannabe.  My new coiffeuse is a naturally beautiful twenty-something with dark, silky hair and chocolate brown eyes.  She dresses modestly in the requisite black and wears next to no jewelry.  

 

And she doesn’t charge the unseemly, national chain price that Snow White did in my most recent hairdressing escapade.

 

The best part is this:  I like what Marine does to my hair.  I like it a lot.  She paints my hair with une mèche – that’s to say highlights – though her method is more akin to the cling film-based balayage given by Snow White.  The outcome is not too dark, not too light, and definitely not at all orange.  And critically, the colour lasts.

 

I’ve stayed with Marine.  I have une carte de fidélité at Marc Ramos’ shop.  Sometimes I even wonder whether I’ll find someone as skillful as Marine when we eventually move to Toronto.

 

And everyone lived happily ever after.

 

But I should report this last bit.  On my most recent salon excursion, Marine commented at how quickly my hair had grown since she’d cut it two visits ago.  Hair, she said, typically grew half a centimeter each month.  Mine had grown four full centimeters in sixteen weeks – over twice the normal rate.

 

This factoid was all the more striking because my highlights didn’t look awful – which is what I’d expect if the light bits started a couple centimeters south of my scalp.  But I digress.

 

I told Marine that the fast hair growth stemmed from my fondness of green beans.  I hardly believed the connection, of course, but that’s exactly how I encourage my preschooler to grow taller.

 

No, Marine told me, the trigger was hardly what I ate.  My hair grew so quickly because of la pleine lune. 

 

Did I hear her correctly?  La pleine lune?  I made a circle with my hands to indicate a full moon.

 

Yes, the full moon, Marine said.  There’d been two of them since she’d last cut my hair.  That’s why my hair had grown so much.

 

And I’d thought she was so nicely normal.

 

Was this observation similar for all the customers she’d seen recently?  I was hoping Marine would make the link:  that all her clients lived under the same number of full moons and that her statement was complete poppycock.  I wanted this coiffeuse who was tied to my sole, wholly positive French hair experience to extricate herself from this bout of weirdness.

 

No, she said, it wasn’t exactly true for everyone.  But that was it.

 

Et voilà.  I’ve hardly met a new best pal in my coiffeuse Marine, but I still like what she does to my hair. 

 

And that, to a woman living in a foreign land where folks speak a strange language, is like discovering the Bermuda Triangle’s impenetrable code.