When in French (14 page)

It's Lana's turn to introduce me.

“Je vous présente Lauren.”

Lana explains that I come from a village in North Carolina. I like books and traveling. Lana does an impeccable job, except that she says
magasin américain
instead of
magazine américain
, so everyone thinks I work in an American store instead of for an American magazine. “Freedom isn't free!” I imagine myself admonishing shoppers who question the markups on peanut butter and flag pins.

A nice thing about Geneva: the city offers an annual
chèque de formation
in the amount of 990 Swiss francs to anyone who cares to claim it. So the class, which costs exactly 990 Swiss
francs, is populated by a group of citizens who, for one reason or another, want—
need
—to learn French in a less dilatory way than that of your typical adult-education enthusiast. No one is here to check off his bucket list or to prepare for a holiday abroad. The fantasy of the foreigner is a life more banal.

Sonia, a young Galician who delivers newspapers, introduces Jorge, a single Argentinian architect in his forties.

“His hobbies are playing soccer and watching soccer.”

“What else do you like, besides soccer?” Dominique asks.

“Cooking—my mother's dishes,” he responds, reddening from stubbly neck to chubby cheeks. He seems to think that Dominique is hitting on him.

We meet Nino, a bank intern from Lucerne; Claudia, a Bolivian home health-care aide; Carlos, a Spanish bellboy; a Japanese academic named Satomi; and three young Italian women—Cristina, an artist; Giulia, who has followed her husband to Geneva; and Alessandra, who has come with her boyfriend. The only other American in the class is Scotty, an executive at an NGO. She comes from Alaska, which, she announces, is “not really part of the United States.”

Frank, a married German who works in development and likes running, clears his throat and launches into an introduction of the student to his left, in a baseball cap and hooded sweatshirt.

“Vic est canadien,” he says.

“Canadien ou canadienne?” Dominique interrupts, assuming Frank has made a rookie mistake in gender agreement.

Next door, the Bollyrobics class is blasting bhangra. Frank starts again.

“Il est canadien.”

The room falls silent as Frank turns to reassess his partner.

“Elle est canadienne,” he says, recovering quickly. “Elle
aime bien le rugby. Elle est un chef de cuisine. Sa spécialité est poisson
.
”

 • • • 

T
HE FIRST WORDS
we have in what can be called French troth a fratricide. The year is 842: Louis the German and Charles the Bald, grandsons of Charlemagne, are under attack from their eldest brother Lothair, who, as the nominal head of the Frankish Empire, is burning, pillaging, and murdering people in their territories. Louis controls East Francia, which aligns with much of modern-day Germany. Charles rules West Francia, covering parts of what is now France. (The word
Francia
refers to the Franks, the Germanic tribe that established the Frankish Empire.) With their armies, they convene at Strasbourg, pledging to unite against Lothair.

The historian Nithard, also a grandson of Charlemagne, chronicled their accord in
On the Dissensions of the Sons of Louis
the Pious
, a sort of grisly family newsletter. According to him, Louis speaks first, addressing his troops in Frankish, an early form of German. “Let it be known how many times Lothair has—since our father died—attempted to destroy me and this brother of mine, committing massacres in his pursuit of us,” he says. “But since neither brotherhood nor Christianity nor any natural inclination, save justice, has been able to bring peace between us, we have been forced to take the matter to the judgement of almighty God.” Charles follows, making a similar speech in Gallo-Romance, a prototypical French. Finally the brothers swear an oath, each reciting it in the other's language—the ultimate way of signaling their good intentions. (They read aloud from phonetic texts.) “With this completed,” Nithard writes, “Louis left for Worms along the Rhine via Speyer; and Charles, along the Vosges via Wissembourg.”

The Oaths of Strasbourg were kind of like our wedding, at which various participants, in order to bond with the other side of the family, chose to address the crowd in languages of which they did not have an entirely sturdy grasp. Jacques stood up and talked about “a very nice American movie,
Love Story
.” My friend Helen, in from Wilmington, kicked off with a four-syllable “Bienvenue.” Olivier alternated between French and English. So did I, having sent off my speech to a translator I found on the Internet. Fortunately, he was more conscientious than the celebrant who, in the Maldives in 2010, led a Swiss couple in a renewal of their vows. “You fornicate and make a lot of children,” he said in the Dhivehi language as the couple looked on, clasping hands. “You drink and you eat pork. Most of the children that you have are marked with spots and blemishes. These children that you have are bastards.”

Both Frankish and Gallo-Romance were members of the Indo-European language group, meaning that—among some five hundred languages, including English, Spanish, Russian, Sanskrit, and Hindi—they are thought to share a common ancestor, which likely emerged in Eastern Europe and Central Asia somewhere around 3500 BC. Frankish was part of the Germanic branch. (So is English.) Gallo-Romance, on the other hand, derived from Latin, which had dominated the lands that would eventually be France since 50 BC, when the Romans had conquered the Celts.

The meeting was extraordinary, not for what the brothers said, but for the fact that it was recorded in the manner in which they said it. Most contemporary documents of any importance were written in Latin, but the scribes at Strasbourg chose to render the day's events verbatim. The Oaths of Strasbourg thus constitute the first written example of what will eventually become modern French. The next year the Treaty
of Verdun dismantled the Carolingian Empire, dividing the continent among the three brothers from the Atlantic to the Rhine. Monique Fuchs, of the Strasbourg Historical Museum, has written, “Thus began the history of the peoples of Europe, each identifying itself with a specific language and political organization.”

French, at the turn of the first millennium, was coming into its own. Its influences were various. Gaulish, the language spoken by the Celts, had surrendered to vulgar Latin five hundred years earlier, but its traces persisted, most palpably in the vocabulary of botany and agriculture:
alouette
(lark), from
alauda
;
chêne
(oak), from
cassanos
;
mouton
(sheep), from
multo
. In the late fifth century, the Western Roman Empire fell to German invaders. They failed to impose their languages on the continent, but they left their mark in words such as
gant
(glove) and
guerre
(war). Their presence accelerated the fragmentation of colloquial Latin. As the empire splintered, so did its patterns of speech, giving rise to a rustic spin-off of Latin called Romance. Speakers of Romance dropped the inflected cases of Latin, reducing them to the nominative (subject) and the accusative (object). To indicate gender and number, articles multiplied.

Romance itself spawned subcategories, which became the Romance languages. By 1000, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and French were being spoken in recognizable but unstable forms. In the thirteenth century twenty-two varieties of Romance—Angevin, Auvergnat, Berrichon, Bourbonnais, Bourguignon, Champenois, Croissant, Français, Franc-Comtois, Gallo, Gascon, Languedocien, Limousin, Lorrain Roman, Norman, Orléanais, Picard, Poitevin, Provençal, Saintongeais, Tourangeau, Walloon—existed in France alone. Français—the dialect of the Île-de-France region, encompassing Paris—
would eventually elbow out the others, claiming the title of what we now know as French.

In 1539 François I issued the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, requiring that all official documents be written in “the French mother tongue and not otherwise.” The decree institutionalized a reality that had been emerging for several centuries: for pretty much everyone but the priests, Latin was dead. The Académie Française—the world's first national body dedicated to the stewardship of a language—was established in 1635, “to give certain rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and sciences.” Competing with the Italian states throughout the Renaissance, France pursued
rayonnement
—literally, “radiation,” but more generally, standing—via French, its most glorious tool of public relations. The state's linguistic chauvinism justified itself elegantly: so many amazing things were produced in French that it stood to reason that French produced amazing things. In 1782, much of the European elite would have agreed with Antoine de Rivarol, who wrote, “If it's not clear, it's not French.”

 • • • 

“M
ON CONJOINT, MON CONJOINT,
mon conjoint,” I whisper to myself as the tram inches past medical-equipment emporia and a hundred men wearing the same thinly striped cashmere scarf. “Mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint, mon conjoint.”

Dominique has a theory, not scientifically proven, that to memorize a word you have to say it seventeen times. I start at the top of the worksheet she's given us about the family.
Mon conjoint
: “my spouse.” I wonder why the compiler of the list
has chosen to leave out the direct cognate,
époux
, as well as
mari/femme
, the words I've heard more often for husband and wife.
Conjoint
sounds like an army rank, or something you would say at a convention, while wearing a lanyard: “Jerry, shake hands with my
conjoint
.”

My vocabulary is improving. The dictionary app that I use allows you to track the words you've looked up. It reads like a diary, a logbook of my days:

I treasure each acquisition, remembering the exact circumstances—time, place, company—under which it was made. English is a trust fund, an unearned inheritance, but I've worked for every bit of French I've banked. In French, words have tastes and textures. They come in colors and smells.
Ruban
is scarlet and scratchy, the stuff we bought before a costume party to tie a letter
A
around my neck.
Hirondelle
will always be an easy hike on a gray day in May. We're ticking off the stations of the cross, which a Savoyard devout has installed on a rocky slope side. We're scampering up it, Olivier becoming the first man to ascend a pre-Alp while carrying a golf umbrella. “Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps”—One swallow doesn't make spring—he says, citing a typically gloomy French proverb. The sky rips open as we reach Calvary.

I continue down the list. There's a section for
la famille recomposée
, the blended family. The prefix seems a two-letter proof of the French insistence on history versus the American faith in fresh starts. (I later learn that the French, amazingly, call life insurance “death insurance.”) The inclusion of
Ramadan
strikes me as the equivalent of putting
quinceañera
in an English book, but at least it's a gimme.
La belle-mère
is a lovely phrase. I fail to understand, though, how it can simultaneously mean “mother-in-law” and “stepmother.” Even homonymically, does anyone want her husband's mom to be the same woman who married her father?

I finish chanting the sixteen members of the close, extended, and blended families and proceed to the first written exercise. “The relations between members of the family are sometimes complex,” it asks. “What unites them or divides them most often?” The worksheet gives five choices: respect, trust, complicity, jealousy, and rivalry. You're supposed to match them with prompts—“The brothers and sisters _____,” “The mother and her daughter _____,” “The father and his daughter _____”—like some kind of Freudian Mad Libs.

“Open your books to page nineteen,” Dominique says when class begins.

The textbook is
Latitudes 3
, by Y. Loiseau, M.-N. Cocton, M. Landier, and A. Dintilhac. I skim the table of contents. Chapters 9 and 4, respectively, are entitled “Green and Against It All!” and “Are You Zen?”
Mon conjoint
, the eighteenth time around, starts to make more sense.

“Today,” Dominique says, “we are going to make a time capsule.”

We divide into groups. I'm with Jorge, the Argentinian architect, and Claudia, from Bolivia.

“What is the most important event of the past twenty years?” I ask, reading aloud from the lesson. (The time capsule is to consist of our thoughts.)