Flirting With French (3 page)

And what a fortress. The massive stone structure, begun in medieval times and rebuilt and enlarged throughout the centuries, sits on a tiny island that is accessible from the mainland via a sandbar when the tide is low, and protected from invaders and infidels when it is not. As the difference between low and high tide can be as much as forty-six feet (!), more than one soldier (or tourist, and that’s no joke) has drowned by mistiming the crossing. The famous Bayeux Tapestry, which illustrates the story of the Norman invasion, depicts Harold Godwinson (not yet King Harold) rescuing two of William’s Norman knights from the tidal flats back in happier days.

The contemporary visitor need not risk his life to visit the abbey; today the island can be reached safely via a causeway and a car park. It is, I will warn you, a touristy, touristy place—the French seem no better at avoiding that fate than Americans—but to a pair of wet bicyclists the citadel offers comforting fish soup and a welcome break from bicycle seats and rain. After a tour, before remounting the bikes, we score some plastic bags to put between our shoes and socks from a friendly shopkeeper, because I remember the word
sac
and I fake (correctly, as it turns out) “plas-teek.”

Two more phrases I know:
il pleut
(it’s raining) and
il pleure
(he’s crying), although I tend to mix them up. I remember them because of what, I explain to Anne between raindrops, is the poetry of it, rain as nature’s tears. Or vice versa.
Il pleut
plenty and we’re so tired we’re on the verge of
pleure
when we finally reach our destination, the town of Pontorson. As we pedal past a bus stop, a young woman who’s just gotten off a bus asks us for directions to the train station.

“
Là-bas,
” Anne says, before I can answer
.
“
À gauche.
”

“
Merci.
”

“
De rien. Au revoir!
”

I could not have been more shocked if my bicycle started talking. “Two questions,” I say. “We don’t know where
we’re
going. How can you give her directions?” Anne shrugs. “And when did you learn French?”

“I’ve just picked a little up along the way.”

Not from me she hasn’t. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or rain.

I IMAGINE NEITHER did
my namesake, William the Bastard (that’s namesake as in “William,” not as in “Bastard”), in August and September of 1066 as he waited in vain, week after week, for the contrary Normandy winds to shift. Across the channel in England, King Harold, growing equally frustrated with the wait, decided finally that if William hadn’t come by now, he wasn’t coming—surely, no one in his right mind would start a war on foreign soil as winter approached. So Harold disbanded his restless army to allow the men to get back to their fields in time for the fall harvest. That was on September 8. On September 27 the wind direction shifted to the south and William set sail for the coast of southern England with 696 ships. Meanwhile, nearly simultaneously, yet another claimant to the throne, the Norwegian king Harald III, had landed in York, in the northern part of England, with fifteen thousand men, one of whom was Harold’s estranged brother. (This kind of intrigue demonstrates why Shakespeare was able to make a living off writing historical plays.)

King Harold-with-an-
o
quickly reassembled his force and rushed to York to defeat to the death King Harald-with-an-
a
and Harold’s no-good brother in a furious battle, and the victorious troops were just catching their breaths and celebrating when a courier arrived with the news that William had landed on the undefended southwest coast of England, which he was undoubtedly surprised to find deserted. Harold raced south with his exhausted forces in one of the great marches in military history, but William had already gained a crucial foothold. Harold’s tired and weakened troops were defeated, and Harold was killed in the Battle of Hastings. William continued his brutal conquest of England—he was by all accounts not a gentle man—and on Christmas Day, 1066, just shy of a year since King Edward’s death, William the Conqueror (né William the Bastard), a Frenchman, was crowned king of England.

The Normans made French the official language of England, bringing it first to the English royal court, then beyond, to the schools, courts, and commerce, as the tongue evolved into Anglo-Norman, which was French with an English twist. A thousand years later, some of our legal terms betray this uneasy Anglo-French alliance. Ever wonder why a court orders you to redundantly “cease
and
desist”? Aren’t those two words synonyms? They are, but the English word “cease” was coupled with the official French verb
desister
to make sure everyone knew what the court was talking about. Same for “null and void.”

England wouldn’t be ruled by a king whose native tongue was English until 1399, an astounding three centuries later, when King Henry IV took the throne. The English that Henry spoke, though, would be far changed from the Old English in use before the Norman invasion. As we know, countless French words had by then become part of Standard English. Some of these, such as
plege
and
remaindere,
are no longer used in French, although their English forms persist. Others, while we understand them, are used only in formal English. We might
commence
firing, but we begin everything else.

It can be revealing to look at the origins of some of our French-derived words. Millions of Americans finding their homes being foreclosed might be interested to know that “mortgage” literally means “death contract.” Another favorite of mine is “curfew,” which comes from the French
couvre-feu,
the time when everyone must cover his fire. At the same time, some, but not nearly as many, English words made it into French (including, rather ironically, considering how this whole thing started, “boat,” which returned across the English Channel to become
bateau
).

ANNE AND I COULD
use a
bateau
on the second day of our trip as we cross from Normandy into Brittany in the pouring rain, looking for a place to have lunch, which is more difficult than we’d expected, for the small, picturesque villages the route takes us through are often so small that they don’t even have a restaurant, only a
boulangerie
and sometimes a
charcuterie,
which sells cold meats such as sausages and pâtés. Together these would make a fine lunch—except that all the shops close down at lunchtime, including the ones that sell food. I wonder how long my local deli would survive if it closed every day for lunch. But at a small, nearly deserted café in a small, nearly deserted village somewhere in Brittany—we’re not exactly sure where—the proprietor takes pity on us, and even though they serve food only on weekends, at the urging of one of the regulars he warms up some soup. I don’t know where this notion of the French being rude comes from. Probably from rude Americans. Only a few days into our trip, young men have helped us put air in our tires with the unfathomable French pump supplied with the bikes, a shopkeeper has given us bags for our feet, a café owner who doesn’t serve lunch has prepared us lunch, and everyone has been eager to give us directions, which is giving me a chance to practice my French, although what I mainly practice saying is
nous sommes perdus—
we’re lost.

Sure enough, after lunch we are
perdus
once again, although at least the rain has stopped for a bit. “Let me ask this man getting his mail,” I say to Anne as we brake to a stop. He looks like a classic French pensioner, with his shot-glass-thick glasses and walking cane, a man with all the time in the world to help us find our way.

“Billy, I don’t think he’s—” Anne starts to protest, but too late. I am confident, in the mood to speak French, and off.

“
Excusez-moi, monsieur,
” I say with a smile. “
Bonjour! Nous sommes perdus.
”

He asks where we are going. Dinan, I tell him.

“
Ah, bon?
” We must be on the right track.

I show him the map and point to a spot. “
Est-ce que nous sommes ici?
” Are we here? As with the previous men, he seems never to have seen a map of his own neighborhood. I point to the road I think we’re on and ask if we’re here, on the D34. He frowns, consults the map, flips it top to bottom, and points to an entirely different spot. “
Non,
non,
nous sommes ici.
”

I give the news to Anne, who expresses grave doubt. “He lives here,” I argue. “He ought to know.” Twenty minutes and a few miles later, it becomes clear that he doesn’t know. And that I don’t know that
Ah, bon?
when inflected as a question means not “Oh, good” but (as with
j’ai un petit problème
) the opposite: “Oh, really? (That’s what you think!)”

“I can’t figure out the French,” I fume to Anne as we backtrack in the rain, adding yet more precious miles to the already long day. “How can they not know the name of the road they live on?”

“Well, maybe next time you might not want to ask a blind man.” Oh,
that’s
why she was trying to stop me.

We reach the walled medieval city of Dinan, built high on a hilltop in order to defeat foreign invaders and tired cyclists, long after dark, having traveled some fifty miles, by far the longest (and wettest) bike trip we’ve ever done in our lives, but the French penchant for dining late plays to our favor, our reward for the long day being a memorable meal in a cozy and dry seventeenth-century inn.

The next morning we are back in the wet saddles for several more days of riding in the rain, but the sun finally breaks through as we return to the Brittany coast, riding past half-timbered cottages and atop seaside cliffs, the waves crashing below. Biking is a wonderful way to see a country. True, in a car you could cover ten times the distance as on bikes, but while you might see more, you wouldn’t see as much. Zooming by at forty or sixty miles an hour, even if you traveled the back roads we are traversing, which would be unlikely, you might glimpse the cottages but not notice the gardens or where new construction has almost seamlessly joined old. You might’ve seen the ducks in the yards but would’ve missed the old woman coming out and grabbing one by the neck.

We roll into the final stop of the trip, the seaside resort town of Dinard (not to be confused with nearby Dinan), which is somewhat incongruously overseen by a larger-than-life statue of a famous Brit, Alfred Hitchcock. Local legend has it that Hitchcock based the spooky house in
Psycho
on one he saw in Dinard, giving the town a convenient excuse for an annual film festival that brings in millions of euros. At the hotel, my rehearsed, once-memorized sentence asking where we should store the bicycles is nowhere to be found, and I fumble with some inadequate replacement phrases before it finally comes to mind. Yet even then, it turns out to be useless, because my pronunciation is so bad as to render my French unintelligible. Finally I just shrug and ask, “
Les vélos?
”

The clerk has us follow her outside, where she tries to tell us something of apparent great importance, without success. She says something, I say something in return, she shakes her head and says something else. This goes on for several minutes, both of us growing increasingly exasperated—wait a minute, I don’t have to describe the scene; it’s a virtual replay of the one in
Th
e
Return of the Pink Panther
where Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau is trying to check into a hotel, his preposterous French accent (
I
should talk . . .) pulling the
r
in “room” from somewhere between his larynx and his liver.

CLOUSEAU:
Do you have a rgghum?

CLERK:
A . . . “rgghum”?

CLOUSEAU:
What?

CLERK:
You said, do I have a “rgghum”?

CLOUSEAU [IMPATIENTLY]:
I know perfectly well what I said; I said, do you have a rgghum!

CLERK:
You mean, do I have a
room
.

CLOUSEAU:
That is what I have been saying, you fool!

This fool is saved by Anne, who finally figures out from the clerk’s sign language that she is asking if we have a lock for the bikes. Like Clouseau, my greatest challenge is the French
r
. In English, we pronounce words with a leading syllabic
r
—“ready,” “arrive,” and, of course, “room”—with what is called the alveolar approximant, with the tip of the tongue slightly rolled back, safely out of the way, while the teeth touch lightly on the lower lip. In French, however, the
r
sound is produced using the uvular rhotic, a guttural sound that is produced by placing the back of the tongue firmly against the back of your throat with an open mouth, the result being a sound so different from our
r
that it ought to be represented by a different letter of the alphabet.

Anyway, my Clouseau impersonation over, we lock up the bikes, take turns soaking in the tub, and then head out for a walk and a drink. Speaking of movies, we’ve had the outfitter alter the standard tour to include this stop in Dinard solely because of the effect that Éric Rohmer’s film
A Summer’s Tale,
which was shot in Dinard, had on me years ago. It is your typical French movie, meaning that there’s not much of a plot, but there are plenty of long, talky walks featuring teenagers in existential angst discussing the meaning of life; in this case the walks occur on the trails cut into the cliffs surrounding Dinard, and ever since seeing those dramatic paths I’ve wanted to vacation here with Anne. Go ahead and snicker, but yes, I have based our vacation on a few scenes from a fictional movie filmed thirty years ago.

It never rains in
A Summer’s Tale,
but despite the sunshine we are enjoying now, the heaviest rain yet is forecast for tomorrow. Not a day for walking the trails, which we’ve been looking forward to for years. “Let’s do them now,” Anne says cheerily, and we spend what’s left of the afternoon in our own Rohmer movie, except
our
existential crisis is how to escape the rain of Brittany.