My French affair

I’ve had a thing for the French language for more than 50 years — une affaire francaise.

It started at Graceland College in Lamoni. I had taken Spanish in high school, and I wanted to continue learning a foreign language.

French was sort of a spur-of-the-moment choice. I thought I’d have a head start since Spanish and French are both Romance languages, derived from Latin.

So I took two years of French at Graceland, where the curriculum concentrated on reading rather than speaking it. I enjoyed it a lot, and when I transferred to the University of Iowa for my junior year, I enrolled in third-year French.

That turned out to be a bridge too far — un pont trop loin.

The course was oriented toward conversation, and I was woefully behind the curve in that department. After a couple of weeks, I dropped third-year French and re-enrolled in a second-semester second-year course, which was where I belonged.

The course was taught by Mademoiselle Francoise Guinle, a young Frenchwoman from Paris.

She was beautiful and charming, and short, and I promptly fell in love, as did all the other guys in our class. From time to time — de temps en temps — she would reissue her invitation to come up to her apartment in downtown Iowa City some evening, have a cup of coffee, and practice French.

I never did that, of course, both because I was much too shy and also because it would have been a very quiet evening, since my French was very rudimentary.

But I sure thought a lot about it.

In my mind, I ran through several imaginary conversations, but it’s sort of like chess: you can control what you say or what your move is, but you can’t be sure of what the other party will say or do.

So my tete-a-tetes with Mlle. Guinle remained imaginary. Too bad — c’est bien dommage.

I took no more formal French courses when I got to graduate school. But there, as with most Ph.D. programs of that era, basic knowledge of two foreign languages was a requirement for the degree. The test was to translate a reading of each language into English in an hour, using a dictionary.

I had no problem with the French reading selection. But the other language I chose was German.

Big mistake.

I had had no German. But how hard could it be, given an hour and a German dictionary? So I took a beginning German course one night a week for six weeks, and signed up for the test.

The selection I had to translate was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature,” which had been translated into German. My job was to retranslate it back into English.

I was an American Studies major. That’s mostly American history and literature, and I knew “Nature” from college lit courses. Even so, I got only halfway through it in my allotted hour, even using a German dictionary.

But the American Studies department folks knew that my doctoral research would require very little German. So they passed me through anyway.

Kathy nudges me on occasion now about my supposed German skills.

An aside: Mark Twain had the same difficulty with German as I did. His essay, “The Awful German Language,” is a knee-slapper, and well worth looking up.

As for French, I’ve had little opportunity to speak it since leaving school.

Occasionally, some of the foreign exchange students here will be from a French-speaking country, and I can pass the time of day with them in their native tongue.

The other day, I spent three bucks in a used bookstore for a paperback copy of a novel by the French author Flaubert, and I’m slowly working my way through it.

I’m doing it without a French dictionary, and I gloss over many nouns and adverbs, but I’ve got the gist of it. It’s about a college student who has fallen in love with a beautiful older married woman.

Sounds French, n’est-ce pas?

Kathy and I spent a couple of days in Quebec 1½ years ago, and I enjoyed carrying on conversations in French there. I think we were treated better in shops and restaurants because I was trying to speak the local tongue.

Recently, Chris Henning, the Chamber’s executive director, was able to bring a couple of ag businessmen from French-speaking African countries to the Greene County area for a study mission. The Ambassador group here had an hour-long session with them at Greene Bean Coffee, and I was able to converse with them in my halting French.

It was a real treat, and they diplomatically congratulated me on my ability and my accent.

They were more kind than truthful about that, of course, but I fed on their comments for days afterward. Merci, mes amis.