French Lessons

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….

 

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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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Silly Season

Two weeks ago, before leaving Antibes on a trip that navigated Europe’s old-new divide, I’d hoped to write about spring. 

 

The advent of spring – that hopeful juncture each year – was blossoming along la Côte d’Azur.  There were sun-drenched signs of it everywhere:

 

·         Strawberries tumbled over stands in the outdoor produce marchés.  Signs posted above the heart-shaped berries competed to the nearest centime, while ruddy-handed vendors tempted Pierre and me, two regulars, with their new stock – crimson and juicy and sweet. 

 

·         The local boulangerie – “our” boulangerie, as we call it – returned to its tous-les-jours schedule.  No more Mondays off.

 

·         People came back to Antibes’ sandy beaches.  They picnicked and tossed balls.  A few brave souls broke out swimming costumes and soaked in those early rays.

 

·         The four snack shacks returned to our beaches, too.  Back came a steady supply of ice creams, Nutella-slathered gauffres (waffles), and chip batties (buns – or here, baguettes – stuffed with French fries, a staple of the Brits).  A couple huts even sell salads.  (This is France.)

 

In short, it was spring and our section of the world started to hum again.  There was a little kick in its gait.

 

Spring was cause for great celebration this year.  In the past our little family had bypassed Côte d’Azur winters altogether.  (I know, winter on the French Riviera sounds like an oxymoron.  Trust me, it wasn’t.) 

 

This year we changed our routine.  We endured endless months of blustering, seasick-inducing drama while locals and commentators searched their record books.  The fact that we inhabited a town and a house constructed for the sunshine months, with front row seats along a seething Med, made the experience all the more memorable.

 

But forget winter.  And now forget spring.  It sprang two weeks ago.

 

Summer is now flooding into Antibes.  Thankfully these are early days.  So far our city remains far from its Côte d’Azur apex, a ghastly month starting around mid-July when Antibes’ 70,000-strong population doubles – in almost 911-inducing style – and packs itself within the existing, well-stretched framework. 

 

But still, compared with our tempestuous winter and its floods – erupting both outside and inside our home – even summer along la Côte d’Azur is worth celebrating.  These are my telltale signs it has arrived:

 

·         There’s a renewed bump-bump-bumping of luggage rolling along Antibes’ sidewalks.

 

·         The bump-bump-bumping brings an influx of exceptionally pale skin to town.

 

·         English and Italian conversations spring up all over the city, particularly in streets lined with gift shops.  Now why, exactly, did I toil all winter through the hair-tearing French subjunctive?

 

·         With the foreign-tongued, pale-skinned influx, the beach road near Bellevue clogs to a standstill, particularly on sunny Sunday afternoons.  The progress of traffic is punctuated by clueless motorists, and Brits (in their right-hand-drive vehicles) cruising the center line.

 

·         The influx of vehicles invokes some curious street regulations.  For example, a side street near Bellevue – one that we nip up every morning running Laurelle to school – has become one-way. Or at least it’s one-way some of the time.  (That reminds me of the joke about the EU deciding to harmonize the driving code in all member countries so that vehicles navigate the right-hand side of the road – starting with small cars first.) 

 

·         And let’s not even discuss Antibes’ summer parking.

 

·         At Bellevue we have a flurry of new residents, and lunch and dinner guests.  Frankly, our visitor book is flat out.

 

·         We have new neighbours, too:  Pleasure boats anchor in the bay beneath Bellevue.  Looking across the water toward Antibes’ immense Port Vauban, Paul Allen’s 413-foot mega-yacht Octopus occupies an entire dock, challenging the whole of Antibes’ Old Town for size.

 

·         So out come Pierre’s binoculars, an almost embarrassingly efficient set of magnifying lenses.  (I still cringe over purchasing this gift at Christmastime, explaining to an assistant at the telescope shop that, no, my husband wanted a very strong paire de jumelle NOT for l’observation céleste but rather for l’observation terrestre.)  What better way to inspect every detail of subdivision-sized Octopus and her competition? 

 

In short, all sense of real-life normalcy in our lives has cleared out in one, sunny poof.  La Côte d’Azur’s silly season has well and truly begun.  There is no going back. 

 

It is true that summer – in all of its sunny and infuriating and silly ways – pounces on each of us differently.  I was reminded of this a couple days ago.

 

As Pierre and I ate lunch on Bellevue’s terrace, our so-called “loggia of life,” he suddenly announces with great flourish, “Well look at that.  Summer has truly arrived.”

 

My eyes dart across the bay toward Antibes’ beaches.  What, a game of volleyball in the sand?  A bunch of folks actually in the water? 

 

Pierre’s gaze is closer to our home.  He looks down at the small, pebble-covered beach just beyond Bellevue’s terrace.   “Our topless bather has returned,” he says with a grin.

 

I trace his line of vision.  Oh.  Great.  And since when is she “ours,” I wonder?

 

I can’t help myself.  “How do you know it’s her?”

 

He can’t help himself either.  “Just wait until she rolls over.”

 

Then Pierre remembers I’m his wife.  He suddenly recognizes the sunbather because, of all things, her jet-jet black hair.  (It’s not that jet.) 

 

And the way she pulls back her jet-jet black hair.  (Totally unremarkable.)

 

And, he says, “because she has a tattoo on her right shoulder.”

 

Yep, there it is, that tattoo.  I can see it.  And the jet black splodge on her shoulder isn’t exactly small. 

 

“What’s the tattoo of?” I ask Pierre.  I’m thinking of his well-exercised set of binoculars.

 

The silly season leaps momentarily back into Pandora’s Box.  Pierre’s face is flat.  “I have no idea,” he says.