In my five-and-a-bit years in the British Isles I’d let my
Frenchness (or Swiss-Frenchness) slip a bit. But the ferry that took me from
the shores of Blighty docked in Calais on a windy day in March,
under clouds whipped across patches of royal Artois blue. There must have been
a stray whiff of Gauloise in the air, and there were Renaults and Citroens on
quayside, and there was certainly more than a whiff of Gauloise in the café by
the docks where I called for a demi; and
once again I felt more le coq gaulois than John Bull, he of perfidious Albion. In Paris, a healthful trek in
spring rain from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, pausing for refreshment
at a café here—the Boulevard de Sebastopol—and a bistro there—on the Boulevard
Diderot—and getting squiffy enough to feel happy, as you do when you’re young
and in Paris, whatever the circumstances; then onward to Geneva, dear old
enigmatic ex-hometown of closed doors and muffled courtyards, so
provincial-French in her soul as to make being simultaneously
cosmopolitan-Swiss almost a requirement …
But of course my mother’s new home was the
adjacent town of Ferney-Voltaire, which was entirely French, and a shrine to
one of the greatest Frenchmen, and full of cafes thick with redolent Caporal
and vin de table and bifteck
frites salade, etc., all très
bon, and quite as charmant as an aperitif chez Pierre. But this was not a casual moment among the leisure
classes. It was a year, 1977, that
I think of as my homage to France, the year when I wallowed most thoroughly in la
France profonde—the year when my spoken
French attained the level of native fluency and when it was revealed that I
was, in fact, a foreigner of Hiberno-American origin, disbelief was,
gratifyingly, the most common reaction.
For my travels I needed money, so I
revived my tradition of at-home language tutorials, this time in English, and
enticed acquaintances and acquaintances of theirs to learn English via my unique
method, which consisted of requiring them to listen to music, mostly Schubert,
whose melodic melancholy captured my soul and who, unlike Mozart, evokes the
difficulty of expressing anything in the face of the hopelessness of things
(whereas Mozart, with a facility as great as his courage, tackles the hopelessness
head-on—and loses). I then had them describe the experience in English and to
write an informed commentary on the music, meaningless to most of them (“it is
very pretty”; “it is very sad,” “it is very boring”), so we also watched and
analyzed films on the telly and read and discussed a catholic selection of
materials ranging from the translated, Penguin Classic edition of the Confessions of Rousseau to the short stories of Thomas Hardy,
another great melancholy artist I was besotted with at the time. And I assigned
a translation exercise using the vapid but accessible writings of the
then-President of France, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing; and of course we had much
spoken practice of the everyday sort along the lines of “How does your
dishwasher work?” and “Please give me my change." My mother was willing to
let me live rent-free in the converted kitchen on the second floor as long as I
did my share of the housework and spent my own money on such fripperies as more
LPs of Schubert and volumes of this and that, such as composers’ biographies,
notably of Mozart and Mahler; more works of Hardy, more on and by Voltaire and
Rousseau (the yin and yang of French letters)…and, of course, wine. It was an
Alsatian wine phase I went through in '77. I kept bottles of Gewürztraminer and
Riesling on the windowsill of my room, cool behind the heavy wooden shutters
and readily available for prolonged solo bouts in the small hours.
Occasionally, displaced by an unsteady hand, a bottle would crash into the
street below, but it was easily replaced, wine being cheap in France.
