JE LIT MAIGRET À PARIS

As I mentioned several postings ago, one of my “goals” during our time in Paris was to live up to Ernest Hemingway’s writerly example.  When he moved to Paris in December of 1921, he paid the bills as a correspondent for The Toronto Star.  So I decided to work a variation on that by doing some freelance writing.  Below is a piece that was published in The Milton Times on April 25th over the headline “Katie Conboy and Thomas O’Grady Enjoy Immersion in French Culture.”  (My original headline was “Reading Maigret à Paris.”)

Today, thirty-five years after my last French class in college, I am trying to read a novel in French.  C’est difficile!  Très difficile.

The novel I’ve chosen is by legendary and prolific author Georges Simenon.  Like most of his books (almost two hundred of them), it’s un roman policier: a police procedural.  And like most of his books, it features the savvy police detective Inspector Jules Maigret.  I bought my copy of Maigret se fâche (Maigret Gets Angry) for 2 euros at Le Marché du Livre Ancien et d’Occasion, an open-air used book fair that operates every Saturday and Sunday in a park in Paris’s 15th arrondissement: I didn’t want to make a major investment in a book I might never get through.

But I’m determined to do my best.  On our flight over on Air France, I was reading a Maigret in translation—The Hotel Majestic.  Our flight attendant, a young Parisian, complimented me on my taste and mentioned that Simenon’s writing style is much-loved by the general reader in Paris: it is literate but not too “literary.”  I thought: C’est bon!

So why did I get hung up on the very first page of the novel?  Well, the first sentence is more than sixty words long.  But even the first phrase required a dictionary: “Mme Maigret, qui écossait des petits pois dans une ombre chaude . . .”  It’s about Maigret’s wife shelling green peas in the hot shade--but I had never had prior occasion to learn the verb écosser (to shell) or to know that green peas are called petits pois.  Live and learn!

But why live and learn?  The answer is fairly simple.  Our three daughters went through the French Immersion Program in the Milton Public Schools and all went on to major in French in college.  They’ve also done study abroad programs in Senegal, Morocco, and Cameroon, each of them a Francophone country.  My wife and I were jealous!  So when we got the opportunity to spend two months in Paris, we resolved to make the most of it.

For her part, my wife is taking French language classes daily at Alliance Français, adding vocabulary and grammar to the perfect pronunciation she developed over the past year practicing with Rosetta Stone.  (By the time we left for Paris, she could say Le vélo est blanc—the bicycle is white—like a native!)  I’m trusting that some of the rust will fall off my many years of studying French . . . many years ago.  Reading a Maigret novel is one of the ways I’m trying to help that happen.

But it’s slow going.  The first page took me close to an hour to decode.  The book has 144 pages.  So far I’ve figured out that Maigret is retired.  I’m sure that the action will pick up before long and that the Inspector will find himself deep in a tangled case that will test his skills of deduction.  I hope that I’m able to stick with the novel long enough to figure out the case with him.

Since arriving in Paris, I’ve discovered that romans policiers are among the most popular forms of fiction in the bookstores.  One of the windows into another culture is the national “reading list.”  So I’ve also picked up a copy, in translation, of another popular police procedural, Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas, the nom-de-plume for historian and archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau.  Just to add some literary density to my reading, I’ve also started The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq.

Obviously, my wife and I are not alone as Miltonians with a Francophone interest.  Lots of our neighbors have picked up the same bug from their children.  When we signed up our girls for French Immersion almost two decades ago, we imagined that we were giving them a gift to last a lifetime.  We were right.  Even if I get bogged down in the French of Maigret se fâche, I will still feel that we are now the ones enjoying that gift.  And I will continue to read Simenon’s Maigret novels in translation.

LES AVENTURES DE KATIE ET JANE . . .

At Les Editeurs

Tom has finally gone back to fill in some of the gaps in our Parisian narrative, and it’s a good thing he did, because I have been way too busy to write!  And why?  Because je marchais dans Paris avec Jane!  Yes, my best buddy decided to make the trip to Paris, and we managed to pack her six days full of adventures large and small.

She arrived on my last day of the intensive French class, so Tom went out to Charles de Gaulle airport to meet her plane and travel back on the Metro with her.  When they got off at our local Ségur stop, Jane got her first taste of what has been our daily experience for two months: rounding the corner and having the Eiffel Tower directly in front of us! 

Le Tour Eiffel

And the Tower became part of our daily ritual—each morning (except one, when we needed to get an early start at the Musée d’Orsay) we went for a run (or a fast walk) down the road to the Place des Invalides, waved to Napoleon in his grave, ran back towards École Militaire and then on to the Champs de Mars.  We would run down one side of the Champs, around the Eiffel Tower, back up the other side, and then home—about two and a half miles in all.  What a way to start the day!

All that running meant that Jane and I upped the ante for how many steps we covered each day—and we averaged over ten miles a day!  In fact, Jane bought 10 single-fare Metro tickets and used only 8 because we just walked everywhere.  That way, we were able to see the beauty of ordinary Paris and to take in major monuments just because we walked by them on the way to something else.

"Mona Lisa" men have named her . . .

We tried to do just one or two major things each day.  Tom and I had loved the Chagall exhibit, and Jane is also a big Chagall fan, so she and I spent part of one day at the Musée du Luxembourg for that powerful exhibit. We also passed several very leisurely hours another day in the permanent collections of the d’Orsay—Tom and I had visited there too, but you could never get tired of that museum. 

I had saved one other museum for Jane’s visit: the Musée Nissim de Camondo.  Moïse de Camondo was a wealthy banker who built a mansion on the Parc Monceau to house his extraordinary collection of 18^th century decorative arts.  His son Nissim was killed in WWI, and Moïse named the house after him and willed it to the state of France when he died in the 1930s.  His daughter and her family lived in Paris, but they were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and died there in 1945.  The family line completely disappeared.  But the museum tells their compelling story and remains one of the finest collections of decorative arts anywhere.

We went up to the Camondo museum on Sunday afternoon, after our run and a glorious morning walk through the Luxembourg gardens.  We headed first to the Pantheon, where we could gaze upon all the “great men of France” and eat some crêpes in their shadows on the rue Soufflot.  We met our Irish friend Eavan there, and Jane was so sweet to talk at length with her about the different kinds of psychology she might be interested in exploring.  Eavan actually said, “Is everyone from Boston as nice as all of ye?”  Eavan then joined us for the afternoon at the Camondo, and we all agreed later that night that our legs were on strike from all the walking!

Casting shadows on the Pont de l'Archevêché

La Crêperie near the Pantheon is one of our favorite places for Sunday bunch, and we tried to take Jane out to eat at several other spots we have come to enjoy dining in here.  On her first day, I marched her across the entire city (the Alliance Française, Boulevard St. Germain, Place de la Concorde, Place du Louvre, Notre Dame)—I obviously wanted to be sure she knew she was in Paris!  But we also took her out to Les Editeurs, a restaurant/café in the Carrefour de l’Odeon that we have been to a few times now.  We had a wonderful dinner there and then got Jane back to the apartment for a good night’s sleep. 

Jardin de Luxembourg

A few days later we were shopping in the Marais, and after we met Tom for a drink at Les Philosophes in the rue Vielle du Temple, we discovered a new spot for dinner: Au Bouquet St. Paul.  It’s always fun to try new places.  Jane and I also found the crêperie Le Molière on the rue de Buci for lunch one day as well.  Obviously, we ate out a few times, but we cooked at home several days as well.  I wanted Jane to have the experience of our local market, and we went there on her second day.  We picked up lots of goodies to eat during our daily “happy hours” and we also got the supplies for a few nice dinners here at home. 

Every day we made a trip to the local boulangerie for bread—and sometimes for a sweet for breakfast or a snack.  Le Moulin de la Vierge was founded in 1356, and the bread still comes out of a wood-fired oven.  If I didn’t already know that I spent a lot of time there, Jane’s visit would have reminded me: sometimes she simply announced “Boulangerie!” because she liked to say the word!

“Boulangerie!”

Obviously, daily runs, museums, and eating played large for us in Jane’s time in Paris, but we also just enjoyed many of the sights and monuments of the city; I already mentioned some of them, but I’ll add: Montmartre and Sacre Coeur, the Place de Vosges (in the Marais), the Hôtel de Ville, and shopping in Saint-Germain des Pres.  One day, when Jane and I were walking behind Notre Dame to cross to the Île Saint-Louis, she saw a sign that said “Deportation Memorial.”  We walked through the gate and found an amazing memorial to those tens of thousands of victims, primarily Jews, deported by the French (in cooperation with the Germans) between 1942 and 1945.  Only 3% ever returned.  Jane and I found this so powerful that I took Tom there after we got Jane on the train to the airport for her return trip.

Mostly, it was just wonderful to share our daily life with Jane: our walks, our efforts in French, our visits to places of cultural significance and our time simply visiting with each other in cafés and around our dinner table were reminders of how much Jane is part of our life!  For me, she is une amie très chère, and her visit was a time to treasure!

LA TERRE DES MORTS . . .

In March of 2012 we visited the grave of rock ’n’ roll icon Buddy Holly in Lubbock, Texas.  In April of 2012 we visited the grave of iconoclastic jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker just outside Kansas City.  Last summer I spent a happy hour or so touring UMass Boston students around Glasnevin Cemetery, visiting the graves of James Joyce’s parents, Charles Stewart Parnell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Maud Gonne MacBride, Michael Collins, Brendan Behan . . .

Anyone detecting a pattern yet?

Oscar Wilde's grave

It was thus inevitable that we would spend some quality time in cemeteries in Paris.  There are two that are sites of essential pilgrimage.  The first one we visited was Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, the largest burial ground within the city limits of Paris.  We particularly wanted to pay our respects to Oscar Wilde, who died in Paris in 1900.  Obviously we were not the first to have that impulse.  Wilde was initially buried in a different cemetery on the outskirts of Paris but was reinterred in 1909, and now lies beneath a striking tombstone carved from a twenty-ton block of stone by celebrated sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein.  A nude male “flying demon-angel,” as Epstein described it, the stone was initially deemed indecent by French authorities for its anatomical correctness: they went so far as to cover it with a tarpaulin.  Over the past century it has been vandalized, and in recent years it has been defaced by admirers of Wilde leaving lipsticked kiss marks on its surface.  In 2011, officials at the cemetery constructed a glass case around the gravesite: now the glass is smeared with kisses.  No doubt, the lines from Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” cut as an epitaph into the back of his tombstone, prophesy the nature of some of those who pause at his final resting place:

And alien tears will fill for him

Pity’s long-broken urn,

For his mourners will be outcast men,

And outcasts always mourn.

Jim Morrison's grave

In death, just as in life, peace has not come easily for Oscar Wilde.  But at least he has lots of distinguished company in Père-Lachaise: legendary lovers Abélard and Héloïse, beloved chanteuse Édith Piaf and jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, novelist Marcel Proust and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, American authors Richard Wright and Gertrude Stein, Polish composer Frédéric Chopin and Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani . . . and of course Jim Morrison, iconic singer of the American rock band The Doors.  Morrison’s gravesite may be the only rival to Wilde’s as a place of essential pilgrimage for the hundreds of thousands of visitors that Père-Lachaise draws annually.

Picasso memorial to Apollinaire

Now let me go off on a tangent.  As I mentioned, one of Wilde’s afterlife neighbors is poet Guillaume Apollinaire.  About a decade after Wilde’s death, he emerged as a force of nature in the Parisian literary and artistic scene until his early death in 1918.  Apparently he lived above Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint Germain (we had a bite to eat there a few weeks ago); he is commemorated nearby by a sculpture dedicated to his memory by his close friend Picasso.  The sculpture actually represents the head of Picasso’s lover Dora Marr—not of Apollinaire; coincidentally, it is located in a garden next to Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the church where Oscar Wilde’s funeral was held (Wilde had converted to Catholicism on his deathbed).  Anyway, I had a special interest in visiting Apollinaire’s grave, as one of my first literary exercises after we arrived in Paris was a translation of one of his poems, “‘Le Tzigane”‘ (The Gypsy).  I had read two published translations of the poem, neither of which seemed to work quite right with the facing-page original.  So I decided to try my own hand at translating it:

LA TZIGANE

after Apollinaire

The gypsy foresaw

our two lives

crossed by darkness.

We bid her adieu, then

from that pit

bright Hope emerged:

love, clumsy

as a trained bear,

danced upright

at our command,

though the bluebird

shed its feathers

and beggars forswore

their Hail Marys.

We knew full well

that we were damned.

Still, into the street love

pulled us, hand in hand:

all this the gypsy foretold.

Samuel Beckett's grave

Sartre and de Beauvoir's grave

Now let me come back from that tangent and describe the second cemetery we visited—Cimetière du Montparnasse.  We were most interested in seeing the graves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (still unmarried but still together) and of Samuel Beckett (still together with his wife, with whom he had a very strained relationship—and thus probably still as miserable in death as he was in life).  We found both grave sites quite easily . . .  But two days later I felt the need to return to Montparnasse and immerse myself more deeply (as it were) in its grounds.  So I put together a list of a dozen more names I wanted to track down . . . and spent a fine two hours walking back and forth in the land of the dead.  Among the luminaries I visited were French littérateurs Guy de Maupassant, Charles Baudelaire, Marguerite Duras and Joseph Kessel, American essayist Susan Sontag, and celebrated photographers Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia) and George Brassaï (born Gyula Halász in Hungary).  Clearly, many of these figures still have admirers and visitors, as a number of the gravestones were covered with tokens of remembrance: handwritten notes, flowers, Metro tickets, coins, pebbles . . .

A cemetery may not be the most obvious sites to visit in a city like Paris so rich in art, architecture, and more conspicuous manifestations of “history.”  For us, though, Cimetière du Père-Lachaise and Cimetière du Montparnasse were fascinating places to spend a few hours.

Abélard and Héloïse's grave

Apollinaire's grave

Marguerite Duras' grave

Maupassant's grave

À FLANDERS FIELDS et À VIMY RIDGE . . .

My turn!  Well, Katie has been telling me for a while that it’s my turn to contribute a post to this blog.  My excuse has been that I’ve been trying my best to live up to the writerly model of Ernest Hemingway, who described looking out over the roofs of Paris and thinking: “All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know.”  Those two sentences have been my morning mantra ever since we arrived in Paris—and they’ve worked quite well for my non-blog writing!  But maybe I can apply them now to revisit some of the highlights and sidelights that Katie didn’t engage with in her recent posts.

Let me start with that visit to the American Hospital and that photo of me (of few blog posts back) lying ignominiously on a gurney while waiting for the Cipro prescription that was all I really wanted!  Well, I got the prescription—along with a bill for 475€!  But I also got to claim that I can locate myself in pretty good company.  For a long time, the American Hospital provided free treatment for Americans in Paris.  Thus it became a destination for a number of famous ex-pats: Zelda Fitzgerald had her appendix removed there, and Gertrude Stein died there.  My favorite story, though, involves Hemingway, who ended up there for stitches after, believing that he was pulling a toilet chain in his apartment, he actually pulled the chain for a skylight—which crashed down on him and opened a gash above his right eye!  (Good company, indeed . . .)

Menin Gate, Ieper, Belgium

But I digress.  I guess that one of the highlights that needs to be developed was our “field trip” to some World War I battle sites in northern France and southern Belgium.  I was “commissioned” to write a couple of pieces for my hometown newspaper, the Charlottetown Guardian, recognizing the anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9th and the general role of Canadian soldiers in “The Great War.”

It was a very moving experience for both Katie and me but maybe especially for me, as I grew up commemorating Vimy Ridge in school on P.E.I. . . . without really knowing any details.  So we went in search of details. . . .  The way we got them—or got to them—was an adventure in itself and took up an entire Saturday.  First we took a train from Gare du Nord in Paris to the town of Arras—about a 50-minute trip.  Then—eventually—we managed to rent a car: that took forever to finalize—and the clock was ticking, as the rental office was not open on Sunday and the clerk informed us that we had to return the car by 5:00 instead of the usual time of 6:00. 

Menin Gate interior

Well, we hit the road . . . but not to Vimy.  First we headed to Belgium, specifically to Ieper (known as Ypres in France, as “Wipers” to Canadian and British soldiers).  There, as Katie mentioned in an earlier blog, we spent time at the Menin Gate, an impressive memorial to the 54,000+ British and Commonwealth soldiers who lie in unknown graves in the surrounding countryside of Flanders.  The names are engraved in the gate.  Because of our rental car timing, we were unable to be in Ieper for the playing of The Last Post by the Fire Brigade buglers, who have been performing this ritual at 8:00 each evening since 1928.

After Ieper we headed out to the nearby farming community of Boezinge, in search of the grave and the memorial for Irish poet Francis Ledwidge, who was killed by a German shrapnel attack in 1917.  We found his grave in Artillery Wood Cemetery.  His memorial is at the very spot where he died, a few hundred yards away.

Ledwidge grave

Artillery Wood Cemetery was one of countless (well, more than 900) similar small graveyards all over Belgium and northern France that mark where soldiers (mostly British) fell in battle.  The numbers involved are mind-boggling.  Driving past them, we felt the sadness and the loss of soldiers fighting and dying in foreign fields.  The experience gave very immediate resonance to the phrase “Lest we forget,” as well as to the poem “In Flanders Fields”: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row.”

Ledwidge Memorial

We would have liked to spend more time in Belgium . . . but we had to get back to France and to Vimy Ridge, the site of “arguably the most galvanizing moment in the history of Canada.”  At least that’s what I wrote in my piece for The Guardian.  I also wrote this: “Vimy Ridge became instantly etched in the collective Canadian imagination on April 9, 1917.  For the first time during The Great War—World War I—all four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force fought together, and within a matter of six hours they managed to rout most of the German Sixth Army from its long-held strategic position atop the natural escarpment rising like a fortress above the table-flat landscape of the countryside of northern France.  In the previous fifteen months, the French and the British armies had lost upwards of 150,000 troops attempting the same goal.  For their morning’s work, the Canadians suffered 11,000 casualties, almost 3600 of them fatal.”

Vimy Ridge Monument

Since 1936, that remarkable military accomplishment—along with its sacrifice of many lives—has been commemorated on the site of the battle.  The center of the commemoration is a massive monument—perhaps the most impressive monument we’ve ever seen—comprising two soaring limestone “pylons” mounted on a broad base of steps.  Both the base and the pylons incorporate large carved figures, the largest being of a statuesque woman representing Canada sorrowing over her lost sons; and on the walls of the monument are carved the names of 11,285 Canadian soldiers who, at the time of the monument’s unveiling, were lying unidentified in graves throughout northern France.

Vimy Ridge trench

The Canadian government operates a small interpretive centre on the site and provides free guided tours of the battlefield, including representative trenches and a section of the ingenious system of tunnels dug by Welsh coalminers that allowed the Canadians to move both troops and explosives literally under the feet of the Germans in preparation for the all-out assault.  In the tunnel we had a nice chat with one of the tour guides, who as it turns out hails from my hometown of Charlottetown, PEI.  We worked out that I was just a year or two ahead of her father in high school.  Smallish world . . .

The Flanders and Vimy excursion was our only trip outside of Paris in our whole two months in the city.  The richness of what we experienced makes us want to return for more exploring of the area and the history.  But that will be for another trip to this part of the world . . .

Vimy Ridge tunnel

Artillery Wood Cemetery

LA VIE EN ROSE . . .

This is nominally Tom’s blog, but I think I am more than holding up my end of the bargain.  And before my dear friend Jane arrives tomorrow and we have some whirlwind adventures together (stay tuned!), I thought I would write a quick catch up—if only to make that photo of Tom in the hospital disappear from the opening page of the blog!  I’m sure Tom will write soon about the interesting company he believes he belongs with—previous patients with high name recognition who have been treated at that hospital.  I reminded him that he could have good company over in the Montparnasse cemetery, too, if he doesn’t take better care of himself.

It’s suddenly Spring in Paris, and quite glorious out.  So we have, in fact been walking around in cemeteries, which is how I know about all the good company!  Over at Montparnasse, you can take your rest with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, with Samuel Beckett, and scores of other luminaries.  Or up at Cimitière du Père-Lachaise, you can hang out with Oscar Wilde, Frédéric Chopin, Édith Piaf (of “La Vie en Rose” fame), and others.  But if you are just there to visit, they ring the bells and send you on your way at 5:00 each day.  We were there at closing time at both Montparnasse and Père-Lachaise!

When the temperature went into the high 70s on Sunday and we were almost too hot, it was hard to believe that less than two weeks ago we were freezing our way through northern France and Belgium in search of the extraordinary battle sites and monuments related to Canada’s involvement in WWI.  Tom wrote two articles for his hometown newspaper about that trip, and he swears he’s going to write a blogpost too . . .

Avec Le Chef

This past weekend I had a big day on Saturday when I took a one-day French cooking workshop at Le Cordon Bleu!  Tom gave me the course for Christmas, and when April 13^th arrived, I walked over to the school early and prepared for the demonstration.  The morning involved one of their head chefs giving a demo of a three-course meal.  All the attendees got to taste the dishes.  Then in the afternoon, we made the main course (Breast of Magret Duck) from scratch.  The course was called “cooking for friends,” and you’ll know that you are a really good friend if I make those dishes for you.  They are quite complicated and involve a lot of precise measuring and timing.  Of course, you must be a really good friend—or a family member—if you are reading this at all!

Saturday evening we enjoyed some drinks and appetizers with our landlords at their other Paris apartment in the Marais.  It’s a really pretty place—much more modern in décor than this one, and in the former servants’ quarters of an old building.  It was a nice evening, and we were glad to spend some time with them before they left for a holiday in Spain.

Cordon Bleu

On Sunday we met our friends Freda and Edward for crêpes at the same place where I took the earlier picture of Alina and Aruem, near the Pantheon.  The afternoon flew by, which is how we ended up being kicked out of the Montparnasse cemetery before we’d completed our round of visits!  Tom has already been back . . . and will no doubt continue the story in a follow-up to this quick catch-up . . .

JE PARLE; TU PARLE; NOUS PARLONS . . .

We should never let two weeks go by without writing a blog post!  So much has happened here, and it will be impossible to tell it all!  I will just give a few highlights and lowlights from our recent experiences!

"Dying like a true Frenchman--with my scarf on!" 

We left you with the bells of Notre Dame still echoing for the first time on Palm Sunday weekend.  And if Tom had asked “for whom the bell tolls,” he would certainly have been told, “It tolls for thee.”  That Tuesday, he and I met at Gagliani’s English language bookstore near the Place de la Concorde.  I’d been in French class all morning, and if he wasn’t yet feeling under the weather when we met, there was certainly a cloud on the horizon.  We walked home from Gagliani—about two miles—and he was feeling really tired.  By evening, he went to bed with a fever.  Wednesday he continued to be really sick, running a high fever. unable to eat.  Thursday there was still no improvement, and I insisted that he go to see a doctor.

After checking in with insurance, we headed to the American Hospital in Paris—and that was a bit of a trek.  But they didn’t even hesitate when they saw him—they put him on IV fluids (once they found a vein—that was another adventure, given his dehydration), ran numerous tests, and concluded that he had some kind of bacterial infection—perhaps food-borne, perhaps just something he picked up on the Metro or in his wanderings.  They got him started on antibiotics and sent us off with two further prescriptions, and for our troubles we were allowed to make a substantial contribution to the French economy (in the form of the hospital payment).  And we got to take a cab home at 2:30 a.m.

Aruem and Alina

I was up early the next day to fill the prescriptions and to head off to meet Stonehill College student Alina Favazza and her friend Aruem (Boston College student) who were visiting for the weekend.  They are studying in Grenada, Spain, and are using some of their weekends to trek around Europe!  I took them to our favorite crêperie for lunch, and then we walked from there to the Pantheon, to Notre Dame, and on to the Louvre.  After stopping for coffee and a tarte tatin, I left them at the Louvre to go check on Tom.

Katie & Alina outside Notre Dame

Tom healed pretty slowly—he didn’t leave the house again until Easter Sunday.  And not for long that day, either, since we were inside hosting dinner.  We had invited my friend Maggie for a mid-day meal, and we added our new friend Eavan into the invitation as well.  Eavan is a young Irish student who is studying abroad in Paris.  We met her at the Ambassador’s Saint Patrick’s Day party, and then we ran into her at the Irish Mass at Notre Dame.  We’re not sure if we adopted her or she adopted us, but she is good fun, and we felt reminded of all the care people have given to our daughters as they’ve traversed the globe.  So we asked her to join us.  At the last minute, we added Maggie’s friends Jake and Dorli into the mix, and we had a very nice gathering.  Jake is an American novelist living in Paris, and his wife Dorli is a singer and actress.  We had never met them before, but we all got along splendidly, and we talked and laughed at the table for hours.  (In fact, we were so wrapped up in talking and laughing that we forgot to take any photos!)  And Tom was pretty much back to himself, though his dinner was a blander version of ours!

Easter!

The following week was differently consumed with what has one been one of my principal goals here—getting a handle on the language.

“Regrets, I’ve had a few” . . . and one that I will mention is that I never learned to speak French.  When we were kids, we Conboy girls all learned German because we lived in Stuttgart, Heidelberg, and Berlin between 1966-1970 (and then again in Heidelberg from 1978-80).  I think perhaps I was the only one who kept my German polished up a bit, taking courses in both high school and college. 

My sister Máire majored in French, and she used to amuse herself by teaching me to say preposterous things en français.  I had a very good accent, and she liked the idea that I could say a few sentences perfectly (including Je suis désolé; je ne parle pas franćais!), but then have no more to say when people spoke back to me in French. 

Of course, our daughters are fluent in French and all majored in French in college!  I kick myself that I didn’t begin a course when Mairéad began French immersion in Grade 1.  And, as a Canadian, Tom has lots of French in his head (he took French for 11 years in school!), but he has not put all that language to much use himself.

So one of my personal goals was to get started here in Paris, and I signed up for a class (je m’inscrire en un cours) at the Alliance Française two days after we arrived.  My course was the (beginner) A1-level extensive course—which was scheduled for three mornings a week from 9:00-12:00.  And I had four fabulous weeks—with a great class and a wonderful teacher. 

Katie & her teacher Anne-Lyse

But at the end of those weeks, my teacher recommended that I skip the next four weeks of that course (half of the A1-level), teach myself those four chapters over a long weekend (!?!?), and jump into the A2 level intensive class that meets five days a week (for 4 hours a morning).  So I did it.  But I am kind of drowning in French at the moment (je suis à mon cou en français!). I’m now in my second week of three intensive weeks.  Then I will have two oral workshops in our final week.

All this language study—in the midst of our own “immersion” experience—has made me think a lot about what we encourage students to do: take languages, study abroad, encounter other cultures. I’m an ardent advocate of study away programs, but I have recognized that these experiences are not only exciting; they are also vexing and overwhelming.  It’s alienating to be in a city where so much of what is being said around you is essentially just background music. It’s frustrating to accumulate considerable knowledge—only to find yourself unable to put a sentence together when you need to!  And it’s humbling to be a complete beginner at something when you’ve already figured out how to be good at other things. 

But it’s also exhilarating!  I am amazed and thrilled at how far I’ve come in learning to speak at all (je parle!).  And I am incredibly impressed with how much French Tom knows, and how he has gone out on a limb to use it (il parle!).  We have even made some extended efforts to speak to each other only in French—with our French alter-identities of Sylvain and Sophie (nous parlons!).  After all, we’re here, and part of our mantra is: “when in Paris . . .”