4. La sixième heure: While dough is chilling, watch video of Steve Martin and Meryl Streep making croissants on the spur of the moment in the middle of the night at the bakery owned by Streep’s character. Oh, please! The movie is called It’s Complicated, which certainly does not refer to their making of croissants. They are having a barrel of laughs, but Streep has a sheeter, which does all the rolling, and a good film editor, who cuts out all the chilling. And when it comes to croissants, there isn’t much else. Meanwhile, back in my kitchen I’m wrestling with the dough and not laughing at all. After four folds, or “turns,” my dough, according to Julia, now has fifty-five layers! Which explains the ache in my lower back. Take two more ibuprofen.
5. La septième heure: Into the seventh hour, you may be reminded of the Ingmar Bergman movie The Seventh Seal, which is not, I warn you, a tale of a half-dozen semiaquatic marine mammals, but is about a knight who loses a chess match with Death. Lesser known is the sequel, in which Death develops a strange affinity for viennoiserie. Finally, after seven hours, having shaved four hours off Julia’s most optimistic estimate through judicious use of the freezer, we are ready to bake. As Julia would say, Bon appétit!
THE CROISSANTS ARE DELICIOUS, and ready just as Anne comes home. “You made croissants?” she says, sounding surprisingly incredulous. “I was only joking.”
You don’t say.
“Was it a lot of work?”
“About as easy as learning French.”
She takes a bite. “Oh, God, these are good! Let’s do this every Sunday!”
A Rooster in the Henhouse
Because it is a female and lays eggs, a chicken is masculine.
—DAVID SEDARIS
Katie and I stand back and admire our work. “What do you suppose Mom’s going to think?” Katie asks as we put away the black markers and Post-it notes.
“I don’t know, but I can’t wait to see her reaction.”
“Hey, we forgot one. Do you know the word for this?” Katie asks, pointing to the toaster.
“No idea.”
Katie has taken two years of college French but hasn’t yet had to make toast, so she looks the word up in the dictionary. “Grille-pain. I love it! A bread grill! Can I have a sticky?”
“Masculine or feminine?”
“Masculine.”
Katie writes le grille-pain on a blue Post-it note and sticks it on the toaster. “Fini! ” We have labeled everything in sight, from the dishwasher (le lave-vaisselle), the sink (l’évier), and the garbage (la poubelle) to the plastic lobster (le homard ) on the wall, not to mention the wall (le mur), papering the room in a dazzling mosaic of Post-it notes. It’s taken some time, because we’ve had to look up the gender of nearly all these objects. There is no logic to the assignment of gender in French. Partly because Rosetta Stone gives no guidance in this whatsoever, I have been laboring for the longest time under the common misconception that there was a rhyme and reason to gender assignment, that the object itself held the key to its gender, that girly things were feminine and manly things masculine.
Knowing the right gender is important, for gender affects the article that precedes the noun. Who would’ve thought that of all the words to translate into French, the two that would give me the most difficulty would be “a” and “the.” It’s hard for us English speakers to even wrap our heads around the facts that (1) inanimate objects have a sex, and (2) the sex changes both the article (le/la, un/une, mon/ma) that precedes the object and any adjectives that describe it (un petit problème/une petite robe).
Gender even infiltrates a common phrase like “this one,” which is celui-ci if the thing you’re referring to is masculine—say, a woman’s breast. If it’s a beard, which is obviously feminine (catching on?), it’s celle-ci. Of course, breasts usually come in pairs, so you’d better know that “those” plural masculine breasts are ceux-là, while plural feminine beards are celles-là. This French version of “dem and dose” has at least eight variations to be memorized.
Faced with masculine breasts and feminine beards, masculine arms and feminine legs, a cup of hot water that, once you drop a teabag into her transgenders into him, English speakers look for some kind of logic in gender assignment. This is a mistake. Witness the online language site that posed the pseudo-Freudian rule that objects that are concave (say, a bowl, bol ) are feminine, while those that are convex, pointed, or aggressive (a fork, fourchette) are masculine. This despite the fact that “vagina” is masculine and “necktie,” that most phallic piece of men’s apparel, is feminine. Well, Katie has just set me straight in the kitchen, where, by the way, we have le bol and la fourchette.
“It has nothing to do with the nature of the object, Dad. But sometimes you can tell from the ending of the word.” A quick check of one of her old textbooks confirms that nouns ending in -eau and -age are nearly always masculine, while those that end in -ion are almost always feminine. There are a few other generalizations as well, but for the vast bulk of the language, you just have to memorize it. On rare occasions you can make an educated guess. Hens are females, roosters male, although chickens are, somewhat counterintuitively, male. For some animals you may have to peek underneath; a male turkey is a dindon while a female is a dinde. By the time it winds up on white bread with mayo, your guess is as good as mine.
Historian David McCullough relates the story of a mob from the Paris Commune (yet another in a series of French uprisings, this one in 1871) descending on the estate of an American, Charles Moulton, intending to take possession of every animal on the property and quite possibly to slaughter Moulton and his family. Moulton, a slight man with glasses and an atrocious accent, stepped out to face the crowd. As McCullough writes, “No sooner did Moulton open his mouth to reply than the crowd began to giggle, his pronunciation working its spell. When, raising his voice to an unusually high pitch, he declared they could have the horse, ‘le cheval,’ but not ‘le vache,’ using the masculine pronoun le for cow, it was more than they could bear.”
Convulsed in laughter, the mob departed with the family horse, but left le cow, and more importantly, the family survived.
French is far from alone in having genders. So do Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Hebrew, Russian, German, French, Italian, Punjabi, and Urdu. It’s English that’s the oddball, being the only one of the entire Indo-European family of languages in Europe without gender assignments. (Although, strictly speaking, English does have what is called a biological gender that shows up in words like “actor” and “actress,” that is, those words whose genders have worked themselves directly into the nouns.) But all genders are not created equal. In some languages, such as Italian, where nouns that end in o are masculine and those that end in a are feminine, the genders are a little easier to figure out. After all, that rule covers about half the Italian language right there.
Once you move away from the Indo-European languages, especially to isolated societies, you have a better chance of detecting some method to the gender madness. The misleading Internet post about concave objects being feminine would be fairly accurate if discussing not French but the Manambu language, spoken in Papua New Guinea, where small and rounded things are feminine, and big and long ones are masculine. Or the Australian aboriginal language of Tiwi, where a blade of grass is masculine, but a patch of grass is feminine. I swear, a Freudian could have a field (feminine) day delving into this stuff.
And genders are not restricted to, well, gender. A number of languages add a vegetable gender—his, hers, and eggplant—used to refer to plants and to things derived from plants, like wood. Given that gender is determined by the nature of the object in these long-unchanged languages, it is likely that the Indo-European family of languages also had a more transparent gender system at one point, but that it got corrupted, possibly when it lost the third gender that all the descendants of Latin, including French, Italian, and Spanish, had at one time: the neuter. This was a handy gender that was used for inanimate objects without a clear phallic or fe
minine association, and as it fell into disuse, tables and chairs had to take on either masculine or feminine genders, which is when things got messy.
The neuter survives in German today, resulting in, as linguist John McWhorter puts it, “such user-hostile cases as each piece of silverware in German having a different gender: spoons are boys, forks are girls, knives are hermaphrodites.” And girls are neuter. Go figure: Fräulein (unmarried woman), Mädchen (girl), and Weib (wife or woman) are all neuter. This caught Mark Twain’s attention.
In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print—I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
GRETCHEN: Where is the turnip?
WILHELM: She has gone to the kitchen.
GRETCHEN: Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
WILHELM: It has gone to the opera.
Since English is originally derived from German, it must have had genders at one time, so we have a mystery on our hands. How, and why, did genders disappear from English?
Old English had all three German genders, and it wasn’t until the eleventh century, during the early Middle English period, that their use began to decline, as the neuter gender—our modern “the”—began to be used for all nouns. Did the 1066 invasion of England by a foreign force with their la-di-da les and las and uns and unes hasten the decline? The evidence is sketchy on this, but it has been speculated that when French became the language of the educated class in England, English became stamped as the language of the uneducated class, and the educators—those who make or enforce the rules of languages—lost interest in it, leaving the peasants free to do as they wished.
What they wished was to make language simpler. So, while the English-cum-French speakers of the court were trying to figure out why the French word personne was always feminine, regardless of the sex of the person you were referring to, the peasants just took the French word, absorbed it into English as a neutered noun, and went out to milk the neutered cow. Life was too short and too hard for a peasant to worry about how to address the bloody cow.
Gender, of course, is still going strong in France. And that raises an interesting question: Because a Frenchman must refer to a fork as “her” and “she,” and must think, C’est ma fourchette, when musing about his fork, does he think of it, subconsciously or otherwise, as a feminine object with womanly properties? When he thinks of his beloved cheese, son fromage, is there anything homoerotic going on, or is his use of the pronoun just habit—a second-nature kind of thing that means nothing, a verbal one-night stand? Fortunately, linguists have attempted to answer this question, and the answer may surprise you.
Maria Sera, a psychologist at the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota, devised an experiment to find out if French and Spanish speakers thought of feminine-gendered objects as actually having feminine traits (and the same for masculine objects). French and Spanish have different gender assignments for some common objects (forks, bananas, cars, beds, clouds, screws, and butterflies, to name a few), so Sera recruited native French and Spanish speakers who were told they were assisting in the preparation of a movie in which inanimate objects come to life. The volunteers were shown a series of pictures, without labels, and asked to choose between a man’s and a woman’s voice for each object. When French adult speakers saw their feminine fork, la fourchette, the vast majority of them (twenty- six out of thirty-two) wanted a female voice; when Spanish speakers saw their masculine fork, el tenedor, the majority of them (nineteen out of thirty-two) wanted a masculine voice.
Consider the screw. It would have to be a penis to appear any more masculine, and in Spanish it is in fact a masculine noun. When shown a picture of a screw, only two of thirty-two Spanish speakers gave it a female voice. The French, however, have assigned the screw a feminine gender, and after viewing the same picture, eleven—nearly a third—of the French speakers gave it a feminine voice. The experiment, unfortunately, did not include any biological objects with clearly counterintuitive genders (beards, chickens, or vaginas), but it did include a peanut, the word for which is feminine in French, and to which the majority of French speakers assigned a masculine voice. I’m no scientist, but I’ll humbly suggest that the results were skewed by what researchers call interference—in the guise of that international celebrity Mr. Peanut.
In another study involving German and Spanish, native speakers were asked to ascribe characteristics—strong or weak, big or little—to objects that diverged in those two languages. Here again, the gender of the objects influenced the answers. Bridges and clocks, which are masculine in Spanish, were judged to be stronger by Spaniards than by Germans, who in turn favored their masculine chairs and keys.
It has been suggested that English has lost something by dropping gender, that languages are a little richer, a bit more romantic, when they wax poetically on la lune or la mer, that giving sexual properties to objects enriches the language and the spirit. Perhaps it does. I’ll ponder that the next time I have a fork in my mouth.
ONE BENEFIT OF THIS gender game is that it’s provided some color for our repapered kitchen wall, since I’ve used blue Post-it notes for the masculine objects and pink for the feminine, a touch I’m particularly proud of. Katie and I stand back to admire our work. “Pas mal,” I say. Not bad at all, she responds in French, and I respond back. Actually, there is a term for this: conversation. Katie’s French is far better than mine, but I’m able to sustain a primitive conversation with her, albeit one strewn with so many errors in both directions that we may be speaking something closer to a patois than to real French. Nevertheless the satisfaction of this brief conversation gives me an idea. I suggest—in French, of course—that we continue speaking to each other in French.
“Toute la journée? ” she asks. All day?
“Non, non, ma petite. Tous les jours.” Every day.
She looks as alarmed as if I’d just told her she has to make crêpes Suzette for the French ambassador in thirty minutes. But Katie loves a challenge, and we shake on the deal, although with one caveat. She is a little concerned about my study habits and, it must be said, not unhappy to be able to turn the tables after twelve years of enduring my nagging her about homework. As I’d feared, she is aghast that after half a year of intensive study, I haven’t learned to conjugate even regular verbs. That’s basic to learning the language, she insists, no matter what Rosetta Stone says.
“Il n’y a pas de . . . de shortcuts,” she says. She leaves the kitchen and returns with an inch-tall stack of her old five-by-seven-inch index cards from high school, one each for all the regular verbs that end in -er, -re, and -ir, plus one for each irregular verb. I run down the first card: je fais, tu fais, il fait, nous faisons, vous faites, ils font . . . Now the future tense: je ferai, tu feras, il fera . . .
“C’est plus difficile que Rosetta Stone,” I say, not looking forward to this at all.
“Juste dix minutes chaque jour! ” Katie implores, adding that she usually did her ten minutes at bedtime.
“D’accord,” I say, sighing. There’s just one little problem with our little immersion camp, I point out.
“Ooh! Maman! ”
Anne is going to feel quite left out, if not downright lonely, when Katie and I speak only French for the next month, until Katie returns to school. I haven’t yet figured out how to deal with the situation when Anne comes home from work, but I run to the kitchen to capture her reaction to our decorating job, throwing on every light in the room. This should be priceless. Dropping her bag on the kitchen table, she takes off her coat and asks, “What did you do today?”
Look up, woman! “Um, a little French.”
Hanging her keys on the hook above the steam radiator, she sees the word radiateur in Katie’s handwriting. “Oh, is Katie helping you?” Anne then starts to head out of the kitchen, obliviou
s to the other two dozen notes peppering her kitchen.
“Notice anything?” I practically shout.
Anne surveys the room. Anne surveys me. Just then, Katie comes in.
“Bonsoir, Papa! ”
“Bonsoir, Katie! Ça va? ”
“Bien. Et toi? ”
Anne looks from me to Katie and back to me. “Maman,” Katie says, explaining (in French) that she and I are speaking only French for the rest of her winter break. Katie asks if Anne wants to join us.
“¡Sí—por supuesto! ” Anne chirps enthusiastically.
Hoo boy. Going to be an interesting month.
Die Hard
They are about to be taught a lesson in the real use of power. You will be witnesses.
—Die Hard, 1988
I study French late into the night, reading a story from a dual-language book of short stories, the original French on the left pages and the English translation opposite. This sounds as if it would be an easy way to learn the language, but I often have difficulty matching the corresponding English to the French. When in the controlled environment of Rosetta Stone and Fluenz, I feel encouraged by my progress; yet one step into the real francophone world, even in print, and the task feels overwhelming.
The book still on my lap, I fade into a restless, jumpy sleep, dreaming again of French—even, I think, dreaming a little in French. Then, as dreams are wont to do, the scene seamlessly but inexplicably shifts to a hospital, where no less than six white-gowned doctors and nurses are bent over me as I struggle to hold consciousness. Fragments of conversation drift over me, just beyond my grasp. “Eighty over sixty.” “I can’t get a vein.” “Sixty over forty.” “I need that IV now!” “I have to ask you to leave the room.” “I love you.”
Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart Page 7