French Lessons

     The Applegate Poets' assignment for this week was to write a poem about journeys, so I've been thinking about the significant journeys in my life, of which one of the most important was the semester I spent with Vanderbilt-in-France, in Aix-en-Provence. Those six months in France, February through July, 1966, were a pivotal growing-up experience.

Pont du Gard, 1966

    I was suddenly thrust into a different language. I had studied French for five and a half years before I went to France, and I am a good student and got As in every class, but when I stepped off the airplane, I couldn't understand a word. I was linguistically lost. 

    I was socially lost as well. I was not friends with the Vanderbilt students, but, trying to find a social footing, I joined a group on an excursion to Geneva soon after we arrived. I was painfully ostracized and never tried to be a part of the Vanderbilt group again.

    I was cut off from my family. Before I went to France, family was never more than a long-distance phone call away.  It's hard to imagine now, with our modern communications, how extremely far away I was, living in France. Communication was solely through aerograms, which took weeks to arrive. 

    I also found it disconcerting to be in a country where the dominant religion was Catholicism. I was already in the process of withdrawing from the Methodist church of my childhood, so it seemed odd, even then, that religion mattered, but the prevalent Catholicism intensified the sense I had of being a foreigner. 

    The language was different. The religion was different. The customs were different. The food was different. Living in a centuries-old town was different. I was alone and unsupported. I am not an extroverted personality; I didn't know how to make friends. The first few weeks in France were hard lessons in growing up. 

    But I loved living in France, I was determined to speak the language, and, gradually, I found a place. It helped when I was taken out of Vanderbilt's over-crowded dormitory and sent to live in a French home,  Mme. Sevin's, where I had a good cup of cafe au lait and good French bread for breakfast every day. I had a Swedish roommate, Gunilla von Arbin, whom I liked and who befriended me.

Me (left), Gunilla (right) in our room at Mme. Sévin's

I became a part of a group of pieds-noirs, exiled French Algerians, and the girl friend of one of them, Paul Merlot, so I had a social circle. My French improved to the point that even the French were telling me I spoke "presque sans accent." I loved living in Aix, with its eighteenth-century architecture and good food. I went to concerts; took excursions—to Cézanne's studio, to the Provençal countryside, to the sea; learned to sit in a cafe on the Cours Mirabeau with a tiny demitasse of espresso and watch people greet each other on the street. I bought my first bikini

In my bikini, at a pool in Aix

and swam in the sea at the French Riviera. I did a two-week mountain-climbing school in the French Alps, with a climactic ascent of Le Rateau, 12, 497 feet high. 

Climbing Glacier de la Rose, to summit at Le Rateau, 3,809 meters

    By the time I left France, six months after I arrived, I was thinking that I could live in France, if that's the way my life went. I had found a way to make it my home.