My Brush with French
  (from Auckland to Paris)

1 : Mr Body and Toto

Boys of thirteen, asked to learn
French from a textbook written
for younger, British children ....
Every lesson dragged us down
into the life of an enfant
not yet become a garcon,
down into Toto¹s childishness.
ŒOu est toto? Toto est en famille¹,
bourgeois, or at least genteel.

None of us were genteel,
with Dads in trades or retail,
or they taught, or were in
some minor profession.
None knew any French,
unless ŒParlez-vous Anglais?¹
and if they¹d been to the last war
(over just five years before),
ŒVoulez-vous something or other¹.

Mr Body, known for his nose
and his temper, we called Snoz.
He drilled us. Homework was
memorize, memorize ­
easy for some of us.
Colin and I were best.
Reward: free time with an old
lunch-spotted number of
Paris Match, its pictures
bright, its news gone cold.

French, like Latin (only
it was dead), was so orderly:
each week extended our grasp.
We got to like Œe acute ou grave¹
and Œc cedillas¹ were good to have.
Saying French out loud was
difficile, but he drilled us.
Our accents if not francais
were quasi-Snoz-fancy.
He¹d been in France, don¹t forget.
But ooh la la, we were too young
to hear what he¹d seen and done.
The phrase we most liked him to say
was ŒCa suffit pour aujourd¹hui.¹

2 : The Alliance Francaise

was an arm of civilization
reaching even to our tiny
nation, so remote and immatureŠ
vive la Nouvelle Zélande.
In December, should we care,
we¹d visit the university,
our French conversation
would be in competition
with keen French students
from the best schools,
mostly private, mostly girls.

It was a day of freedom,
a half-hour of terror.
The university lecturer
with exaggerated politesse
fixed his eyes on our blushes
and coaxed us through silence.
ŒPardonnez-moi. Merci beaucoup.¹

Everyone must have got a prize.
Colin¹s and mine came in the mail
to school, one year a bronze
medal ­ of, surprisingly,
Francois Rabelais,
another a plain edition of
Eugénie Grandet
(unread to this day).

What more was needed
when we¹d graduated
from secondary to tertiary,
to get us enrolled
in French One at Œvarsity¹?
Nothing, unless a dream of meeting
my penfriend Angélique of Paree
(elegant pen and par avion
stamps engraved so finely),
and finding her complaisant.
But after I posted her my too
honest snap I never heard back.
There would be no rendezvous.

3 : ŒVarsity¹

Tertiary French meant classes
too large to be taught, but bossed
instructed and tested,
and invited to take part
in the annual play, by Moliere.
The Professor was director
and always leading actor.
I, a foolish volunteer,
stammered through the stammerer¹s
part in Malade Imaginaire
so well the prompt kept prompting me.
The high point was at curtain-up,
that ancient signal to hush up:
thump thump thump backstage.
The rest was anti-climax.

Now Dr H. was mysterious
(understood to be Communist),
taught the history of the language
without a hint he was Marxist.
His research took him over summer
to Nouvelle Calédonie.
(Why not Tahiti? we wondered.
Could he prefer Melanesians
to honey-skinned Polynesians,
palm-leaf-skirted fuzzy-wuzzies
to Gauguinesque beauties?)
World expert on their vocabulary,
he spared us it entirely.
Mastering French, we knew,
you could travel and be true
to another idea of yourself:
autre lingue, autre personne.
Perhaps Dr H. in Nouméa
was some grand seigneur.

Auckland seemed to lack French folk.
Someone said: go down town,
browse in Goodman¹s Books
and listen, he¹s the real thing.
Wasn¹t his English crisp? ­
suave, even with that lisp.
And he¹d sell you Mauriac,
Proust and the like, saying:
great book, bad translation.

No-one from France 
taught Aucklanders French.
(No one from Germany
was hired to teach Deutsch.
Virgil was lectured on
by an evangelical Christian,
Plato by a Catholic theologian.

Poetry ­ English ­ by contrast,
was taught by a poet,
but that¹s another story.
A poet-critic, he exposed
bad verse to us freshers ­
U.S. word current then with us ­
while some fresherettes,
rather than note-taking,
got on with their knitting.)

French poets were mentioned
(unless Rimbaud) in lectures
but not Œcompulsory¹.
Flaubert? ­ not the wordy
and scandalous Madame Bovary
but ŒUn Coeur Simple¹, simply.

Friday afternoon all year,
all of French literature
(by authors who were well dead)
was lectured on to all of us
(signing the attendance list
passed round; sometimes
D. Duck, V. Hugo, signed also).
And covered so mechanically,
vacuouslyŠ Was this
how they taught in Paris?

4 : La France Véritable

Colin¹s gift for French lifted
him up out and away; shifted
to France. He wrote ŒCome stay
with us near Marseille.¹
It was Christmas, and frozen,
he and his wife had chosen
(all they could afford)
a farm house without a farm,
in summer all warm charm,
in winter deathly chill.
So, in his care, to town, to find
my Kiwi French so far behind
his, nothing I could voice
made sense to any natives.
Paris, when he took us there,
seemed worse. No-one could want
to help a stuttering hesitant
visitor with an awful accent.

France itself? Magnificent.
As for that second self of mine,
I never found my inner Frenchman.

Max Richards
Doncaster, Victoria
18 July 2007