Winston Churchill remarked he had prepaid all his subsequent sins in life during his early childhood at English schools, where he was made to memorize Greek and Latin, and he was told he was stupid and otherwise terrorized.
I felt the same way about the French.
I had four different French teachers during my school years, none of whom was actually French French. Only one was any good--an Algerian, Monsieur Hassan, who looked delighted whenever we learned anything at all and for whom we all tried hard to learn French.
But then there was a woman from Texas who thought memorizing "dialogues" oral and written every accent and precise spelling was learning French, and ultimately there was a true nightmare from Luxembourg who was over six feet tall and spent most of her time flirting in the back of the classroom with the basketball players, and disparaging the shorter males as not true men, and rhapsodizing about "Le Petite Prince," which she insisted we all memorize.
As many people do, I extrapolated all this to the entirety of French culture, even though I knew this was ridiculous. It was irrational but embedded.
In college, however, they had us read Camus, which I read first in English, then went back through the French and fell in love with my first French crush: L'Etranger, the Stranger.
Finally, late in life, I got to Paris, where, contrary to all rumor, I found French people who were funny, kind, pleasant, sophisticated and generally very cool.
The final stone in the castle of my new found admiration for things French is Bernadette, who walks her dog around 6 AM on Plaice Cove beach. Bernadette is probably 60, and she speaks English with just a trace of accent, is married to an American naval officer (retired) and she always has a treat for my dog, who nearly knocks her over trying to chomp it out of her hand, but she never seems to mind.
Her own dog weighs about 10 pounds but she is un-intimidated by my 65 pound Lab who would bite her hand off to get that treat.
She has been educating me about the French.
For one thing, President Macron.
It turns out it can be a crime in France for a forty something mother of four to have sex with her high school student, but since the parents of that student did not press charges and simply moved the student to a different school, the "offense" was shrugged off. When the student later married the teacher and wound up as President of France, all was forgiven. Thus can Americans be instructed about the value of judging not when we do not know all the facts.
I, for one, am not scandalized by the idea of a 17 year old boy and a 41 year old woman having an affair, ipso facto. I understand the objections, but it strikes me as something Americans could learn from the French, about opening one's mind to the possibility of individual variation. Bernadette informs me when President Mitterrand died and both his wife and his mistress showed up at the state funeral some were scandalized, but again, many were sophisticated enough to shrug it off. Men are not angels and love governs by its own rules and it was not even clear which part of that story was love or what love really means in the individual case.
Bernadette wears a necklace with her name in Arabic.
"Oh," I said, thinking back to L'Etranger, "The French and Arabs."
"Yes," she laughed. "We do have a history."
I told her about how delightful it was watching parents walk their children to school in Paris, where I saw a man with his daughter on the back of his bicycle drop her off with a baguette for lunch.
"This is true. We don't have school buses. But we do have excellent health care and when a woman has a baby, she gets 6 months maternity leave and if she wants to keep her job, she gets another 6 months at half pay. We believe that first year is important for mother and child. Day care is free. Of course, we pay 55% in taxes."
"We paid that much at the higher brackets once, right here in the USA. But then Reagan told us government was the problem not the solution."
"And Americans bought that," she said. "So all the possibilities of what the community could do for the individual went right out the window. I don't think many French would trade what they've got for what you've got. You've got the rugged individual, living alone on the frontier, dying of polluted water from the run off of the factory five miles away, calling that freedom."
"We all have problems," I rejoined, weakly.
"We pick our poisons," she said.
I felt the same way about the French.
I had four different French teachers during my school years, none of whom was actually French French. Only one was any good--an Algerian, Monsieur Hassan, who looked delighted whenever we learned anything at all and for whom we all tried hard to learn French.
But then there was a woman from Texas who thought memorizing "dialogues" oral and written every accent and precise spelling was learning French, and ultimately there was a true nightmare from Luxembourg who was over six feet tall and spent most of her time flirting in the back of the classroom with the basketball players, and disparaging the shorter males as not true men, and rhapsodizing about "Le Petite Prince," which she insisted we all memorize.
As many people do, I extrapolated all this to the entirety of French culture, even though I knew this was ridiculous. It was irrational but embedded.
In college, however, they had us read Camus, which I read first in English, then went back through the French and fell in love with my first French crush: L'Etranger, the Stranger.
Finally, late in life, I got to Paris, where, contrary to all rumor, I found French people who were funny, kind, pleasant, sophisticated and generally very cool.
The final stone in the castle of my new found admiration for things French is Bernadette, who walks her dog around 6 AM on Plaice Cove beach. Bernadette is probably 60, and she speaks English with just a trace of accent, is married to an American naval officer (retired) and she always has a treat for my dog, who nearly knocks her over trying to chomp it out of her hand, but she never seems to mind.
Her own dog weighs about 10 pounds but she is un-intimidated by my 65 pound Lab who would bite her hand off to get that treat.
She has been educating me about the French.
For one thing, President Macron.
It turns out it can be a crime in France for a forty something mother of four to have sex with her high school student, but since the parents of that student did not press charges and simply moved the student to a different school, the "offense" was shrugged off. When the student later married the teacher and wound up as President of France, all was forgiven. Thus can Americans be instructed about the value of judging not when we do not know all the facts.
I, for one, am not scandalized by the idea of a 17 year old boy and a 41 year old woman having an affair, ipso facto. I understand the objections, but it strikes me as something Americans could learn from the French, about opening one's mind to the possibility of individual variation. Bernadette informs me when President Mitterrand died and both his wife and his mistress showed up at the state funeral some were scandalized, but again, many were sophisticated enough to shrug it off. Men are not angels and love governs by its own rules and it was not even clear which part of that story was love or what love really means in the individual case.
Bernadette wears a necklace with her name in Arabic.
"Oh," I said, thinking back to L'Etranger, "The French and Arabs."
"Yes," she laughed. "We do have a history."
I told her about how delightful it was watching parents walk their children to school in Paris, where I saw a man with his daughter on the back of his bicycle drop her off with a baguette for lunch.
"This is true. We don't have school buses. But we do have excellent health care and when a woman has a baby, she gets 6 months maternity leave and if she wants to keep her job, she gets another 6 months at half pay. We believe that first year is important for mother and child. Day care is free. Of course, we pay 55% in taxes."
"We paid that much at the higher brackets once, right here in the USA. But then Reagan told us government was the problem not the solution."
"And Americans bought that," she said. "So all the possibilities of what the community could do for the individual went right out the window. I don't think many French would trade what they've got for what you've got. You've got the rugged individual, living alone on the frontier, dying of polluted water from the run off of the factory five miles away, calling that freedom."
"We all have problems," I rejoined, weakly.
"We pick our poisons," she said.
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