French Lessons

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.

 

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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.