La fin de Cheri by Colette
I’m reminded of this as I begin again to work on one of my life-long passions: learning the French language.
I started without much forethought with a class here that was said to be Intermediate but proved to be barely Introductory, with all those well-meaning U.S.-ers who will soon be blundering through France—where nearly everyone in the big cities speaks better English than we do French:
“Pardonnez, Monsiuer, puis-je parlais avec vous en Francais, meme avecmon accent Americanne affrueze”—or something like that.
Likely to be met these days with a certain froideur as we recognize—whether we will or not—that we represent our country and its cruel tariffs.
Useless to blunder on, “Je n’vais pas voter pour Mr. Trump…”
But I’m wandering off my path. Now as I embark on the Alliance Française genuinely intermediate French classes on Zoom, I’m reminded of how stalwart I was as a tall, gloomy twelve-year-old plunged into a French school in Paris, the austere and inspiring Couvent d’Assumption.
I spoke not a word of French and was not a Roman Catholic and the girls were not nice. They jeered, claiming I spoke what French I could with an accent “Petit-singe,” little monkey, probably assuming I was from one of France’s African colonies (at that time).
None of that mattered. I learned, and now as I relearn, I’m looking admiringly at my first editions of the French writer, Colette—whose work I’ve loved for years, as radical now, as refreshing, as it was when it was first published one hundred years ago.
How humble these little paperback books are, scarcely more than pamphlets, and how astonished Colette would be to find out, many years after her death, that they are collectors’ items.
She learned the hard way, through years of dancing in the music halls of Paris and the countryside, through an exploitative relationship with “Monsieur Willy,” through the difficulties of making even a meager living as a writer.
But she was a lifelong learner, which is the best any of us can say.
My ex was a French teacher. The first day of school each year, a smart aleck (prompted by a prior year;s student) would ask her “What does ‘Phoque’ mean in French?” (It means “seal”.)