Flirting With French (7 page)

“
Il n’y a pas de . . . de
shortcuts,” she says. She leaves the kitchen and returns with an inch-tall stack of her old five-by-seven-inch index cards from high school, one each for all the regular verbs that end in
-er, -re,
and
-ir,
plus one for each irregular verb. I run down the first card:
je fais, tu fais, il fait, nous faisons, vous faites, ils font
. . . Now the future tense:
je ferai, tu feras, il fera . . .

“
C’est plus difficile que Rosetta Stone,
” I say, not looking forward to this at all.

“
Juste dix minutes chaque jour!
” Katie implores, adding that she usually did her ten minutes at bedtime.

“
D’accord,
” I say, sighing. There’s just one little problem with our little immersion camp, I point out.

“
Ooh! Maman!
”

Anne is going to feel quite left out, if not downright lonely, when Katie and I speak only French for the next month, until Katie returns to school. I haven’t yet figured out how to deal with the situation when Anne comes home from work, but I run to the kitchen to capture her reaction to our decorating job, throwing on every light in the room. This should be priceless. Dropping her bag on the kitchen table, she takes off her coat and asks, “What did you do today?”

Look up, woman! “Um, a little French.”

Hanging her keys on the hook above the steam radiator, she sees the word
radiateur
in Katie’s handwriting. “Oh, is Katie helping you?” Anne then starts to head out of the kitchen, oblivious to the other two dozen notes peppering her kitchen.

“Notice anything?” I practically shout.

Anne surveys the room. Anne surveys me. Just then, Katie comes in.

“
Bonsoir, Papa!
”

“
Bonsoir, Katie! Ça va?
”

“
Bien. Et toi?
”

Anne looks from me to Katie and back to me. “
Maman,
” Katie says, explaining (in French) that she and I are speaking only French for the rest of her winter break. Katie asks if Anne wants to join us.

“
¡Sí—por supuesto!
” Anne chirps enthusiastically.

Hoo boy. Going to be an interesting month.

Die Hard

They are about to be taught a lesson in the real use of power. You will be witnesses.

—
Die Hard,
1988

I study French late into the night, reading a story from a dual-language book of short stories, the original French on the left pages and the English translation opposite. This sounds as if it would be an easy way to learn the language, but I often have difficulty matching the corresponding English to the French. When in the controlled environment of Rosetta Stone and Fluenz, I feel encouraged by my progress; yet one step into the real francophone world, even in print, and the task feels overwhelming.

The book still on my lap, I fade into a restless, jumpy sleep, dreaming again of French—even, I think, dreaming a little
in
French. Then, as dreams are wont to do, the scene seamlessly but inexplicably shifts to a hospital, where no less than six white-gowned doctors and nurses are bent over me as I struggle to hold consciousness. Fragments of conversation drift over me, just beyond my grasp. “Eighty over sixty.” “I can’t get a vein.” “Sixty over forty.” “I need that IV
no
w
!” “I have to ask you to leave the room.” “I love you.”

No, don’t leave the room! Get them a vein; you know my veins! But Anne does leave, and eventually the others, too, and I’m left with a foreign-accented doctor with more than a passing resemblance to the spooky-looking actor Peter Lorre. He asks me a question, but something is amiss: his accent isn’t French. This dream isn’t going right.
Why isn’t this dream going right?

The doctor repeats his question, slowly, looking me in the eye. “Do you have any jewelry or false teeth?” he asks again. What a question! Is he buying or selling?

“No,” I mumble. Interview over. He injects something into my vein. The room goes soft, then black.

“Clear!”

Oh,
merd
e
! Three hundred joules of electricity shoot into my chest, entering my body through the electrode patch positioned on my chest and passing straight through my heart, exiting via the patch directly opposite on my upper back. They haven’t given me enough anesthesia, and the shock jolts me awake. My body twitches violently, nearly levitating, I’m later told by a nurse—you may think you’ve seen this on TV a million times, but trust me, you really haven’t—then settles back down onto the gurney, and I feel my lids closing again. This is the kind of half dream you want to wake up from, and fast. Fortunately, I get help.

“Wake up, Mr. Alexander, wake up,” I hear a voice exhorting me. Of course, this is no dream. I have just been defibrillated.
Lubb-dupp. Lubb-dupp.
Two months after my previous episode, my heart has lapsed not into AFib but into another form of arrhythmia called tachycardia, which, in the cool, cockpit-style prose of my doctor, my body “is not tolerating well.” The electric charge used to jump-start my quivering atria is enough to turn over a car engine, a surprisingly apt analogy, because when I look over my shoulder to see the defibrillation unit, I spot the unmistakable outlines of an automotive battery hidden inside a plastic casing.

“That’s what they use?” I say to Anne when she is allowed to return. “I’ve been defibrillated with . . . a DieHard?” (Note to Sears: I am available for product endorsements. Contact my agent.)

Three hundred joules—the kinetic energy of a tennis ball traveling at 4,200 miles an hour—is not only enough to start your car engine, it’s also enough to give you what feels like the worst sunburn you’ve ever had. Late that night, the skin on my chest on fire, I go into the bathroom to put on some salve. In the mirror I see the outline of the large electrode pad, clear as can be, on my chest. It’s looks and feels as if I’ve been branded with a clothes iron. Hours of hydrocortisone, Tylenol, and Silvadene ointment, an ice pack, and two sleeping pills later, I am finally able to fall asleep. In the middle of the night, I wake up retching violently. None of the doctors knows why.

I do. It’s my body’s way of doing an oil change.

I’M NOT CRAZY ABOUT
the idea of traveling while my heart is behaving like a twenty-year-old Citroën—you never quite know what’s going to happen when you turn the key in the morning—but six months earlier I’d agreed to a speaking engagement in Maine, and a deal is a deal, and a full month has passed since I thought
I
had passed, so after getting a reserved clearance from my doctor (“Can you get back within a day?”), with beta blockers, antiarrhythmics, and the blood thinner Coumadin in hand, Anne and I head up to Maine, one of our favorite places this side of the Atlantic.

I often get the jitters before speaking, and as I prepare to address this gathering of a hundred or so bread enthusiasts, I recognize that familiar tight feeling in my gut. Well, not exactly the gut. A little higher . . . to the left . . . that’s the spot. AFib is often confused with or feels like palpitations, which themselves are often associated with anxiety, so even though there is no hard clinical evidence that anxiety is connected with AFib, whenever I feel anything the least bit unusual in my chest—a little tightening of the gut, a skipped beat, a taco—my left hand flies up to my neck, where I’ve gotten very good at locating my pulse at the carotid artery, and I need only two beats to confirm that I’m in rhythm.

I’ve been doing this probably a couple of dozen times a day since my last impersonation of Frankenstein receiving the high-voltage gift of life (“It lives!!!”), and when I do it in public or even (rather, especially) in Anne’s presence, I’ve developed a technique designed to make it seem as if I’m just casually tending to an itch on my neck. I know this compulsive pulse taking is counterproductive behavior, but I can’t seem to help it, so fearful am I of returning to arrhythmia, to the hospital, to the DieHard. The anticipation of recurrence is almost worse than the AFib. Thus I’ve taken the doctor’s advice to stay off alcohol. No
vin,
no
bière,
no Grand Marnier. How very un-French! And un-fun.

The talk goes well, and my heart, thank God, is none the worse for it. Afterward, Anne and I drive down to Monmouth, a small town whose landmark is Cumston Hall, a wildly eccentric Romanesque / Queen Anne – style building that has been restored for use as a theater. We go there whenever we’re in the area, no matter what’s playing, because the repertory company is good and the theater is amazing, the ceiling adorned with cherubs and intricate plaster carvings, and it is
the
place to be for anyone who’s part of, or aspires to be part of (oxymoron alert), central Maine society.

Tonight’s performance happens to be
Tartuffe; or,
Th
e Imposter,
the French farce by Molière, the seventeenth-century French comic dramatist who is to France what Shakespeare is to England, only funnier. Molière was a fierce satirist of French social manners, customs, hypocrisy, and society in general, as well as of the idiosyncrasies of the still-nascent French language, which especially endears him to me. The plot of
Tartuffe
centers around a holier-than-thou religious charlatan who uses his pious position within a family to seduce both the husband’s wife and his daughter right under the husband’s nose. The play had a run of exactly one performance, at Versailles in 1664, closing after the archbishop of Paris turned in, shall we say, a bad review to King Louis XIV. As the archbishop happened to be Louis’s confessor, the king might have felt a little extra pressure to accede to his wishes.

Religious hypocrisy and seduction of the worst kind being alive and well some 350 years later,
Tartuffe
is still topical, fresh, and quite funny, though the distraction isn’t enough to keep me from occasionally surreptitiously monitoring the beating of my heart. I mentioned earlier that I’ve always felt an affinity to Molière, but the comparison suddenly seems more apt than I’d intended, for in between acts and pulse checks, I learn from the program that Molière spent much of his life in poor health and in the company of doctors, who were unsuccessful in treating his chronic illnesses, which is unsurprising, given that the favored treatments of the day were bloodletting and leeches. As we writers like to say, rotten luck but good material; Molière’s experiences with doctors provided him with enough fodder for several new comedies.

Molière’s final play,
Th
e Imaginary Invalid,
was inspired by his experiences with the medical profession. Here Argan, a healthy hypochondriac, submits to all kind of outrageous treatments from the doctors treating his nonexistent illnesses. One line in particular rings true for me: “Nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses.” Molière, despite his illness, was the original “hardest-working man in show business,” writing, directing, and acting in his own plays while also managing his theater company. He simply refused to allow his poor health to alter his life or slow him down, and learning that, I’m glad I’ve come to Maine, despite my reservations. It’s been good to get away, hopefully to provide some enjoyment to some people, and to receive a good deal more in return, both from the people I’ve met at the bread conference and from the actors on the stage.

Molière played the title role in
Th
e Imaginary Invalid
and during just its fourth performance began to cough up blood. Surely some in the audience must have thought it was part of the act. A trouper in the truest sense of the word, he finished the show and died a few hours later, on February 17, 1673.

He was fifty-one years old.

I think about Molière, about his struggles, about the beauty of France, about life. And I leave Maine more determined than ever to learn French.

Ministry of Silly Talks

VINCENT:
You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?

JULES:
They don’t call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?

VINCENT:
Nah, man, they got the metric system, they wouldn’t know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.

JULES:
What do they call it?

VINCENT:
They call it a Royale with Cheese. . . .

JULES:
What do they call a Big Mac?

VINCENT:
A Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it “
Le
Big Mac.”

—
Pulp Fiction,
1994

The French actually have a national body just for this type of Big Mac problem, the Académie française, whose job it is to keep the language pure, and that includes coming up with French terms for words that wash up on the beaches like so many foreign invaders. Exactly what, you might ask, is the Académie française, and who gave them the right to decide what is and what isn’t French? Even the name is confusing, for the word
française
(or its masculine equivalent
français
), while simply translated as “French,” can refer to the French language, the French people, or a pan sauce of butter and lemon.

There are only two occasions when the academy makes news: the first is when they fulfill their primary duty and complete a new dictionary, which means they haven’t needed a press conference since Hitler invaded Poland; the second is when they issue their list of “disapproved” words—the latest, just released, runs some sixty-five pages—on which occasions they are generally derided and sneered at. But the members of the academy seem not to care; they are out of public view 364 days of the year.

But, my, do they make up for it on the 365th day, usually a day in December, when France harkens back to its glory days of empire, recalling the majesty of the Sun King and the power of Napoleon, the day the forty Immortels of the academy march past admiring crowds on their way into the Institut de France for their annual meeting. Emerging incongruously from taxis while attired in green velvet robes and Napoleonic bicornes, swords at their sides, they look as if they’re itching for a rematch with Admiral Nelson (which may explain why Jacques Cousteau was once a member).

The phrase “venerable institution” almost seems inadequate for a group that has been meeting nearly without interruption since 1635. That was around the time, remember, that modern French was first gaining ground, the various
langues d’oïl
of the north merging into something that was now being called French. It was also around the time of a new, fashionable social institution: the Parisian salon. And in some of these salons, groups of amateur wordsmiths, poets, and social climbers started meeting regularly to discuss their relatively new language, sort of a book club without the book.

One of these soirées caught the attention of Cardinal Richelieu, the chief adviser to King Louis XIII and the first French theologian to have written in French. Richelieu elevated the group to an official French organization (thus bringing it under government control), calling it l’Académie française. Its mission was to define standards of French vocabulary and grammar—to, as the charter states bluntly, “clean the language of all the filth it has caught” and make French “pure [and] eloquent.” And the means by which the Académie would define “pure” French would be to publish an official dictionary. Since written French was still relatively new, and the language sat at the confluence of several linguistic streams, the resulting pool held many of the same fish, but with different names and/or spellings. There was even disagreement on how to pronounce and spell the word for that most French of French foods: cheese.

Printers had already partly taken matters into their own hands by adding diacritics—those little accents of various shapes and sizes, as found in
café
and
Provençal
—to distinguish between similar words and to aid in pronunciation. My favorite diacritic is the
tréma
(as in ö) because it is a diacritic spelled with another diacritic and because the Germans later borrowed it and called it an umlaut, which the
New Yorker
stubbornly continues to use in the word “coöperate,” apparently to ensure that the nation’s most sophisticated readers don’t mistakenly pronounce it “couperate.”

The founding members, or Immortels (so called because they are appointed for life), of l’Académie française got right to work and set out to produce the very first dictionary of the French language. A mere fifty-five years later, the dictionary was officially presented, not to King Louis XIII, who was by then dead and buried, but to his son and successor, King Louis XIV, who received it with the dry understatement, “Gentlemen, this is a long-awaited work.” And because the Immortels are not actually immortal, the project outlived not only Louis XIII and Richelieu but a fair number of the original forty members as well—the first principal author inconveniently died at the letter
l.
And whenever one of them passed away, a new one was inducted, and they had to debate whether to spell “cheese”
fromage
or
formage
all over again.

Design by committee was a problem independent scholars didn’t have, so that by the time the academy’s official dictionary finally appeared in print in 1694, several others were already in widespread use, including one produced on the sly by a member of the academy (and they wondered why he was taking such copious notes during their meetings). The academy’s dictionary was a critical flop, disparaged for its glaring omissions and circular and outdated definitions. Yet it could’ve been worse. As the book was going to press, an alert Académie française member realized just in time that they’d left out the word . . .
académie
. Omissions continued to plague subsequent editions. The most recent edition—that is, the one released in 1935—left out
allemand
(German). Do you believe in karma?

Another of the academy’s responsibilities is to standardize French grammar. The publication of their first grammar book took exactly 296 years. Which, come to think of it, brings us nearly to the present. The academy, whose recent members have included novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, is now working hard on the ninth edition (presumably they’ll not leave out the Germans this time). As of this writing, they’re up to the letter
p
.

The academy relies on specialized terminology commissions of the French Ministry of Culture for keeping French both current and pure, which more often than not means finding French replacements for new words of foreign influence (nearly all “franglais,” a merger of French and English). In theory, the task is straightforward: take a foreign word such as “podcast” and come up with a French equivalent other than
le podcast.
Unfortunately, the tendency of the French to be verbose works greatly to their disadvantage, especially in the Twitter age. The recommended replacement for the seven-letter word “podcast” was
diffusion pour baladeur
(“broadcasting over a Walkman”). For “wi-fi” (which the French pronounce “wee-fee”) they came up with
accès sans fil à l’Internet,
literally “access without wire to the Internet.” Put them together, and a simple “wi-fi podcast” becomes
diffusion pour baladeur d’accès sans fil à l’Internet
. Sorry, but I don’t think the kids are going to go for it. And in the end, when it comes to language, the kids set the rules.

I wonder whether the academy realized that “wi-fi” doesn’t even make sense in English. The term exists only because someone in a manufacturer’s marketing department, having been given the assignment to come up with a word or phrase
short enough for a sticker on a computer
to describe a wireless network connection, was old enough to remember playing his Charlie Parker albums on his spiffy “hi-fi.”

Recently, a reporter from the
Wall Street Journal
was able to sit in on an unintentionally hilarious session of France’s General Commission for Terminology and Neologisms, whose members, working at a pace slower than the slowest Godard movie you never saw, were discussing what to do with the new term “cloud computing.” Now you’d think this would be an easy one: just call it
informatique en nuage,
which literally means, well, “cloud computing.” But no, this seventeen-member group of professors, linguists, scientists, and a former ambassador spent the entire day agonizing over this.

“What? This means nothing to me. I put a cloud of milk in my tea!” one member objected.

“A term that includes ‘cloud’ causes laughter or at least a smile,” protested another.

There was also much hand-wringing over how the expression “in the clouds” means one isn’t paying attention or thinking clearly—exactly as in English, although I doubt that a single American has made that connection with “cloud computing”—so the alternative
capacité informatique en ligne
(online computing capacity) was offered up. This had the advantage of affording the acronym CIEL, which, beautifully, is the French word for “sky”!

Parfait, non?

“Going from ‘cloud’ to ‘sky’ seems a bit far-fetched,” a member complained.
¡Ay, caramba!

Finally, as the setting sun was reflecting off the Louvre across the street, with no viable alternatives and, I imagine, each of the committee members ready to kill all the others, they adjourned without a solution. Only several months later (with the speed at which technology moves, they’re lucky that cloud computing hadn’t by then become obsolete) did they agree to fall back to the original and obvious choice:
informatique en nuage
.

While the French regularly ignore the rulings of the academy (you see signs for “wee-fee” everywhere in France), they do respect it and its mission. The French are far more concerned than Americans, not only with the purity of their language, but with its correct usage and pronunciation. They even have a word for a language error—
faute—
which doesn’t mean just “fault” or “mistake” but carries a moral or judgmental stigma, unlike a mere
erreur.

It’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for the French, whose language, once
the
international language, the language of diplomacy, business, and culture, has become almost irrelevant. As the magazine
Le Point
put it, “Our technical contribution stopped with the word chauffeur.” French attempts to stem the tide of English do have that finger-in-the-dike feel. When the French started
le jogging
and eating
les cheeseburgers
on
le week-end,
the alarmed government, realizing that the academy wasn’t doing all that
super
a job in keeping out “the filth,” founded, in 1970, the Commission for Terminology.

With no enforcement power, the commission was widely ignored, so just five years later the government passed the Maintenance of the Purity of the French Language act, introducing fines for the use of banned anglicisms (TWA received one for issuing its boarding passes in English), which was followed in 1984 by the General Commission for the French Language, which in turn was succeeded by the 1994 Toubon Law, mandating the use of the French language in all official government publications, commercial contracts, and advertisements, and in all workplaces and public schools.

Yet for all the hullabaloo it is estimated that anglicisms account for only about 1 to 2 percent of all French. Undoubtedly, though, English is encroaching. Will France succeed in keeping France French? Or for that matter, keeping
French
French? It’s one thing to legislate, but another thing to get people to give up “wee-fee” for
accès sans fil à l’Internet
. The world has changed greatly since France ruled during the Enlightenment, but one thing hasn’t changed: language follows economic power. Thus I may love French, but when I have grandchildren, and they’re ready to study a foreign language, I’m going to advise them to learn Mandarin Chinese.