A Breath of French Air (Contributions intended for our cancelled "Members' Evening" on 20 March 2020

Linda McCarthy's contribution:

Weep not for little Léonie
Abducted by a French Marquis.

Though loss of honour was a wrench

Just think how it’s improved her French.

Anon

Lorna Challand’s contribution:

An extract from “The Blessing” by Nancy Mitford.

Grace Allingham has married, a Frenchman, Charles Edouard de Val Hubert in the war. After the war he takes her and their seven year old son, Sigismund, back to his chateau in Provence, where his family live.  Sigismund's English nanny accompanies them. In this extract, Grace, used to rationing in England, has just eaten a delicious lunch and has settled down for a siesta.

“ Alas for the hot, tipsy sleep! Nanny sobered and woke her up all right, her expression alone was a wave of icy water. Grace didn't even bother to say “Wasn't lunch delicious? Did you enjoy it?”  She just stood and meekly waited for the wave to break over her head.

 “ Well dear, we've had nothing to eat since since you saw us, nothing whatever. Course upon course of nasty greasy stuff smelling of garlic – a month's ration of meat, yes, but quite raw you know – shame really – I wasn't going to touch it, let alone give it to Sigi, poor little mite.”

 “Nanny says the cheese was matured in manure,” Sigi chipped in, eyes like saucers.

 “I wish you could have smelt it, dear, awful it was and still covered with bits of straw. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Well we just had a bit of bread and butter and a few of Mrs Crispin's nice rock cakes I happened to have with me. Not much of a dinner, was it? Funny looking bread here too, all crust and holes, I don't know how you'd make a nice bit of damp toast with that. Poor little hungry boy – never mind, it's all right now, darling, your mummy will go to the kitchen for us and ask for some cold ham  or chicken – a bit of something plain – some tomatoes, without that nasty, oily onion dressing and a nice floury potato, won't you, dear?”

   These words were uttered in tones of command. An order had been issued, there was nothing of request about them.

  “ Goodness I have no idea what floury potato is in French,” said Grace, playing for time. “Didn't you like the food, Sigi?

  “ It's not a question of like or not like it. The child will eat anything, as you know, but I'm not going to risk having him laid up with a liver attack. This heat wave is quite trying enough without that, thank you very much, not to mention typhoid fever or worse. I only wish you could have smelt the cheese, that's all I say.”

  “ I did smell it, we had it down stairs – delicious.”

  “Well it may be all right for grown up people if that's the sort of thing they go in for,”said Nanny, with a tremendous sniff, “but give it to the child I will not, and personally I'd rather go hungry.” This she had no intention of doing,

  “Now ,dear,” she said briskly, “just go and get us a bite of something plain, that's a good girl."

Hilary Roome's contribution: 

If our March meeting had gone ahead I would have obtained a copy of Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  I last read this in French lessons at school.  As it is, I haven't yet procured a copy (in French or English) so I can't provide an excerpt for members - though it is very very short- but I intend to put it on my to-read list for this period of social distancing.

Antoine De Saint-Exupéry was born in 1900 in Lyon. In 1921, he began his training as a pilot. By 1926, he had became one of the pioneers of international postal flight. In 1935 he embarked on a record-breaking attempt to fly from Paris to Saigon. Nineteen hours into the flight, his plane crashed in the Sahara desert. He survived the crash but spent three days battling dehydration, limited food and hallucinations. On the fourth day, the was rescued. In part, this experience was the inspiration for The Little Prince. He continued to fly until World War II, during which he took self-imposed exile. On 31 July 1944, he disappeared over the Mediterranean while flying a reconnaissance mission.

Angela Hill's contribution:

The first chapter of LE  PETIT PRINCE written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (See biographical details above, in Hilary's contribution)

Translated from the French by Katherine Woods (slightly edited)

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book called True Stories from Nature abut the primeval forest.  It was  a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal.  In the book it said “Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole without chewing it.  After that they are not able to move and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion.

I pondered deeply over the adventures of the jungle and after some work with a coloured pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing.  I showed this masterpiece to the grown-ups and asked then whether the drawing frightened them.  But they answered “frighten?  Why should any one be frightened by a hat?”.  My drawing was not a picture of a hat.  It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.  But since the grown ups were not able to understand it I made another drawing:  I drew the inside of the boa constrictor so that the grown-ups could see it clearly.  They always need to have things explained.  The grown-ups response this time was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside,  and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic and grammar.  That is why, at the age of six I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter.  Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

So then I chose another profession and learned to pilot aeroplanes.  I have flown a little over all parts of the word and it is true that geography has been very useful to me.  At  a glance I can distinguish China from Arizona.  If one gets lost in the night, such knowledge is valuable.

In the course of this life I have had a great many encounters with a great many people who have been concerned with matters of consequence.  I have lived a great deal among grown-ups.  I have seen them intimately, close at hand.  And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.   Whenever I met one of them who seemed to me at all clear-sighted, I tried the experiment of  showing him the drawing of the boa constrictor I had always kept.  I would try to to find out whether this was a person of true understanding.  But whoever it was would always say “That is a hat”.

Then I would never talk to that person about boa constrictors, or primeval forests, or stars.  I would bring myself down to his level.  I would talk to him about bridge, and golf, and politics, and neckties.  And the grown-up would be greatly pleased to have met such a sensible man.

Rob Mortimer's contribution: 

My choice is a William Boyd short story 'The Dream Lover'.  This is a 16 page account of Boyd's late-teenage adventure in Nice amongst foreigners studying French.

Here is an extract for flavour:

"Monsieur Cambrai welcomes me with his usual exhausting, impossible geniality.  He shakes my hand fervently and shouts to his wife over his shoulder.

  "Ne bouge pas. C'est l'habitué!"

  That's what he calls me - l'habitué. L'habitué de Lundi, to give the appellation in full, so called because I am invited to dinner every Monday night without fail.  He almost never uses my proper name and sometimes I find the perpetual alias a little wearing, a little stressful.  'Salut, l'habitué', Bien mangé, l'habitué?  'Encore du vin, l'habitué?' and so on.  But I like him and the entire Cambrai family; in fact I like them so much that it makes me feel weak, insufficient, cowed.

  Monsieur and Madame are small people, fit, sophisticated and nimble, with spry figures.  Both of them are dentists, it so happens, who teach at the big medical school here in Nice.  A significant portion of my affection for them owes the fact that they have three daughters - Delphine, Stéphanie and Annique - all older than me and all possessed of - to my fogged and blurry eyes - an incandescent, almost supernatural beauty.  Stéphanie and Annique still live with their parents,  Delphine has a flat somewhere in the city, but she often dines at home.  These are the French girls that  I claimed to know, though 'know' is far too inadequate a word to sum up the complexity of my feelings for them.  I come to their house on Monday nights as a supplicant and votary, both frightened and in awe of them.  I sit in their luminous presence, quiet and eager, for two hours or so, unmanned by my astonishing good fortune.

  I am humbled further when I consider the family's disarming, disinterested kindness.  When I arrived in Nice they were the only contacts I had in the city and, on my mother's urging, I duly wrote to them citing our tenuous connection via my mother's friend.  To my surprise I was promptly invited to dinner and then invited back every Monday night.  What shamed me was that I knew I myself could never be so hospitable so quickly, not even to a close friend, and what was more I knew no one else who would be, either.  So I cross the Cambrai threshold each Monday with a rich cocktail of emotions gurgling inside me: shame, guilt, gratitude, admiration and - it goes without saying - lust".

I read this short story some years ago, I loved the way it invoked some of the same sensations I recall from my teenage years - excruciating at the time but funny to me now. When I was 13 my sister was holding a 21st birthday party at our home with some of her university friends staying.  Somehow I convinced myself I was in love with one of her friends and inexplicably managed to engineer her coming to say goodnight to me in bed.  It must have been pretty plain to her what I was playing at, I got a kiss on the cheek and the remark that I 'would be a real smasher when I was a bit older'.  How that hurt! 

Richard Thomas's contribution (A chapter from his draft memoirs)

 THE FRENCH EXCHANGE 

The “French Exchange” was a rite of passage in the mid twentieth century for nicely brought up middle class teenagers.  Both Elizabeth and I were put through it when we were sixteen.  I don’t think she enjoyed hers much.  But I loved mine.

My parents left it to Leighton Park to make the arrangements, doubtless trusting that solid Quaker institution to find me a safe and worthy family, preferably on the dull side, equipped with a clean and proper boy with whom to spend the summer holidays.

I returned home from an end of term archaeological dig in Wales to find Gérard already installed.  He seemed to fit the bill.  He was smallish and almost totally silent.  He appeared reasonably clean, even though not over-keen on abluting – a characteristic that was only to be expected of the French who, according to my father, washed in eau de cologne, whereas we had only soap and water to offer him.

These first impressions soon proved inaccurate, and once he had overcome his initial culture shock Gérard scarcely drew breath.  He even had the occasional bath, generally after thrashing me at tennis.  He wanted to know when we would be setting off for the Edinburgh Festival (we lived in Hampshire), which he had overheard my parents discussing, and which they intended visiting once they had got shot of us to Gérard’s family in France.  To alleviate his disappointment, they took us on an all-day drive round much of south-west England in their Wolseley Six Eighty (a model favoured by the Police, and much admired by Gérard, who judged it almost as good as a Mercedes).  In Gloucester my father, with chauvinistic pride, pointed out the factory where the world’s first jet fighter had been built.  As we hurtled across Salisbury Plain he explained that Stonehenge was the finest prehistoric monument in the world.  And somewhere, no doubt, we had a picnic.

Gérard bore all this stoically.  He must have been bored rigid, because we lived miles from anywhere in a Jacobean mansion in which my parents had started a school, and of course in August the house was more or less empty.  He cannot have met anyone apart from the three of us, and perhaps Elizabeth, who had flown the nest but popped back now and again. Maybe he also caught a distant view of the gardener.  But I made sure that he knew how privileged he was to be spending a few weeks in so magnificent and historic a house.

When the time came to swap countries and families, the two of us caught the overnight ferry to Cherbourg and the train to Paris, where we spent the best part of a day.  Gérard proved an excellent tour guide, and I became uneasily aware that we should at least have taken him to London.  At the Gare d’Austerlitz Gérard suggested a drink and a snack.  At his suggestion I had vermouth and pizza, both of them novel and woozily agreeable experiences, which set me up nicely for a slow overnight train to Poitiers.  Next morning we changed onto a branch line to Montmorillon, where we were met by Gérard’s older sister, Geneviève, with whom I very quickly fell in love.  She must have been eighteen or nineteen, and consequently well beyond my reach.  But she was everything that I thought a girl should be: kind and jolly, efficient without being bossy, and very easy on the eye.  There were also a couple of Gérard’s numerous younger siblings, one of each variety as far as I remember.

We somehow all piled into a minute Simca and set off for Grand’mère’s house, somewhere out in the country.  On the way through Montmorillon I could hear Gérard telling his brother and sisters a story, in French of course, which I thought contained the word Gloucester.  He then switched to English and told me solemnly that we were at that very moment passing the pâtisserie where the world’s first macaroon had been made - an announcement which, though undoubtedly interesting, did not greatly impress me.  It was followed by an explosion of poorly suppressed giggles, quickly shushed by Geneviève.  We did not pass any prehistoric monuments.

A few miles further on we encountered a sign announcing that we were entering a village called Bourg-Archambault, where Geneviève turned smartly right, over a bridge, through a fortified gate and into a courtyard surrounded by towers and battlemented walls, with a grand and turreted house along one side, in front of which we came to a halt.  Either Grand’mère lived in a château, or I was being treated to some more tit-for-tat sightseeing. 

But this was Grand’mère’s house all right, because there she was, the de Peslouan matriarch, greeting her grandchildren and holding out a welcoming hand to me.  She was spherical, roughly four foot six in diameter, and almost entirely encased in black bombazine.  At least, I assumed that it was bombazine – a fabric about which I knew next to nothing – because that was what my parents said French peasant women were generally encased in.  The only flaw in this logical deduction was that, judging from the scale and manner of her dwelling, Mme de Peslouan was clearly not a peasant.

Gérard was told to show me to where I would be sleeping, a draughty attic lit by tall dormer windows, running the full length of the house, four or five storeys up.  It smelled musty and dirtily-sweet.   Dotted around here and there were beds, and this was where the boys slept – Gérard, two or three younger brothers, and me.  There was a wash-stand, with bowls and jugs of water, together, I was relieved to note, with an enormous bottle of cologne, and in a side turret a garde-robe, none too inviting, the origin of the unpleasant sweetish smell.  It gave directly on to the moat, the waters of which twinkled prettily fifty feet below.

It was soon time to go downstairs for lunch.  We gathered in the salon, a grand room full of gilt and fussy furniture.  Gérard instructed me on no account to touch the curtains, lest they fall to pieces.  There were several framed photographs dotted about, mostly of the same severe looking man.  All of them were signed, and I learned that they were of the Comte de Paris.  This meant nothing to me, but Gérard explained that the Comte was the Pretender to the French throne.  The de Peslouans were ardent royalists.  It had not occurred to me that such people existed in France, and I wondered if they had to keep their views under wraps.

Grand’mère led us into the dining room where, as the guest, I was seated on her right.  Someone had laid my cutlery the wrong way up.  I was about to put this right when I noticed that the same mistake had been made right round the table, so I thought it best not to intervene.  Grand’mère had no English, and my French was schoolboy-O Level.  It was enough however to understand, after I had received a painful slap on my left arm, that nice children in France never, ever, put their hands on their laps when seated at table.  Who knows what they might be getting up to?  Hands were to be kept visible at all times.  But after this unpromising start Mme de Peslouan and I got on famously, with the help of a fair amount of interpretation by Geneviève and Gérard.

So far there had been no sign of Gérard’s parents, so after lunch I asked when I would meet them.  The answer was Never.  They were in Germany, where Papa was a colonel in the French army, and they were not due for any leave in the next few weeks.  Grand’mère and Geneviève were in charge, information which suited me well enough.

Several days passed, in agreeable though slightly boring idleness.  Every morning I read aloud from Lettres de Mon Moulin, an improvement on the excerpts from the Readers Digest which I had inflicted on Gérard in England.  He half listened, corrected my pronunciation, asked me a few questions about what I had just read, and then proposed tennis, or boating on the moat.  Swimming was judged inadvisable, owing to the nature of the drainage system from the château’s oubliettes.  Once or twice we went into Montmorillon for supplies.  Mercifully there was no further mention of macaroons.

Then suddenly consternation reigned.  Geneviève had learned that les oncles were on their way.  Not only did this mean that unspecified numbers of tantes and cousins, as well as oncles, would soon be joining us, but also, and in consequence, and more worryingly, there would be intolerable pressure on the tennis court booking arrangements.  There was only one solution: escape.  This was accomplished within a day of the arrival of all the relations, who, true to their reputation, immediately commandeered not only the tennis court but also the moat’s only rowing boat.

Geneviève packed me and as many of her siblings as would fit into the Simca, and despatched the remainder, under Gérard’s supervision, by train.  We were off to the family’s holiday house near Tours, La Ravinière in Rochecorbon, a village a mile or so from Vouvray on the Loire.  And there we remained for the rest of my time in France, a fortnight or so of teenage bliss, unsupervised by any adults apart from Geneviève – and she didn’t really count as she was still technically a teenager herself.

The sun shone every day, we got out of bed when we felt like it, Geneviève somehow conjured up delicious things to eat, very occasionally we had another go at Alphonse Daudet’s improving letters from his windmill, and then in the afternoon we joined a pack of the local kids for swimming in the river, lazing and larking about, with no doubt a little dalliance on the side.

Some or maybe all of our local friends must have had parents in the background, but I have no recollection of any tedious adult interference in our activities, not even in the frequent evening parties held, by candlelight, in the wine caves in the hillsides around Vouvray.  There was wine, and grenadine for the more timorous, and there were cigarettes, and dance music played on wind-up gramophones, and above all - a fascinating novelty - plenty of charming and cheerful girls, so different from the young ladies from the nearest girls’ school who were imported to Leighton Park for the odd debate and the annual Sixth Form Dance.  I had surely arrived in heaven.  I was also, without realising it, learning quite a lot of French.

All too soon it was nearly time to leave.  At the very last minute Geneviève decided that I should be subjected to a bit of culture, and my last day was spent, on my own with her, my idol, on a coach tour of half a dozen Loire châteaux.  I still have a few dim and grainy impressions of Blois and Azay-le-Rideau, and various others, taken on my Brownie Box.  But none of Geneviève.

Alan McKinna's contribution:

Queen Victoria confesses to her mother that she has surrendered to an illicit passion

"Ce n’était pas un prince; ce n’était pas un milord, ni même Sir R. Peel. C’était un miserable du people, in nomme Wordsworth, qui m’a recité des vers de son Excursion d’une sensualité si chalereuse qu’ils m’ont enbranlée  -  et je suis tombée."

Two Poems from Stephen Wrigley:

Crusader

Savage blade across blue Breton eye,

The scimitar has sliced a pilgrim’s path.

One-blinking, his gaze is penance-pure.

In war-worn progress home, wayside

Poppies spill the blood of Saracens,

Confirm his certainty of grace.

The horse stops, spent. Butterflies dance through

Midday dust. A lark climbs high, above

Water skirting gently rising ground.

Saddle-splayed, crusading done, he thrusts

His sword into the earth creating cross,

Conceives, grim faced, a lasting vow.

Chappelle Saint Sebastien. Torn hands

Placed stone on stone. Inside, bare peasant

Peace, mediaeval faith perpetuate.

Croisé, knight or pauper, wounded, pure,

Nine hundred years ago you were received

On gently rising ground above Frémur.

  

La Ville Galopin

Fidel sunbathes on the dirt track

Belly up. She lunched on moules

And mackerel heads. Her master,

Le Collectionneur, rests, caravanned

Between cider apple orchards

And domestic debris. Occasionally,

A deux-chevaux sways by raising dust,

Barks, disturbing hens. Clucking,

The afternoon subsides, succumbs to sleep.

Through blue lucerne, a falling field of corn,

The track turns terracotta, twists

Past buddleia and butterflies to beach.

Evening embraces midnight. Sea-sound,

As effervescent as champagne,

Lifts with a girl’s curved breast called moon.

Geraniums blood the stone walls of the house.

The rise and fall of waves, of night,

Pace the heated breathing of the dog.

Two Limericks from the Fraser-Sampsons 

From Cheryl:

There was a young girl from Kildare

Who did cartwheels with skill and great flair

Her Can-Can amazed

Her kicks garnered praise

Indubitably A Breath of French Air!

From Guy:

There was a young lad from Kildare

Who to Paris one year did repair

With a yell and a whoop

He ate onion soup

And exhaled A Breath of French Air!

Pamela Voice's contribution:

From "The Long Afternoon" by Giles Waterfield,  published by Review, 2000

......................’lovingly recreates the glamour of the jazz age and the beauty of the French Riviera in the shadow of World War II’ Publishing News.

March 1924. ( pages 102-103).

Henry sat down at his desk and considered what he ought to do. There was a meeting of the Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club of Mentone next week. He would be presiding, and the papers lay on his desk. Not many problems here. The club was respectably in the black, and had more applications for membership than it could accept. It was surprising how many English and other foreign people were nowadays coming to Mentone in the summer for holidays, and even staying through the horribly hot months of July and August - as the survivors of the traditional English community, invalids in search of health, believed them to be. Ten years ago, nobody had stayed in the summer. Many of these new visitors were young and active and not particularly interested in the health-giving qualities of Mentone, so that the town had changed from being the outdoor sanatorium of their early days there into a holiday resort. No more threat of malaria, that was the reason. Recalling all those premature deaths among the foreign community in the early years of the century, he doubted it.

Mentone remained quiet, its hill crowned by its cemetery, not at all like the more dashing towns to the west. To these they hardly ever went: though they might venture to Monte Carlo and Nice, they never journeyed as far as Cannes. He and Helen were hardly affected by the changes along the coast, leading the quiet life they preferred at home and returning to England every summer. But they were pleased to be reminded of home, as they still called England. So, if temporary visitors from Britain wanted to join the Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club for a month or two they were heartily welcomed by Henry, even though some members disliked the interruption of their routine by temporary residents.

Contribution from Shirley Hase (nee Wood), currently isolating in Hackney

I have greatly enjoyed doing this as I studied French at school and university. I am going to link two poems by W B Yeats ( late 19th century ) and Pierre de Ronsard ( mid 16th century ).

It was so nostalgic looking them up in the following books:-

Yeats in ‘The Golden Book of Modern English Poetry ‘ Everyman Library which was a prize from my Elocution teacher in 1952.

Ronsard in ‘The Oxford Book of French Verse’ Prize 1953-4 Form 6 to S.Wood at East Grinstead County Grammar School with the school crest and motto on front cover. Motto is Mens Agitat Molem and crest has the Sussex martlets and P of Wales feathers.

Yeats poem called ‘When you are old’ is a 12 line lyric poem and Ronsard’s is fifth in a set of eight sonnets.

Both are about love, sorrow and loss. Interestingly the first four lines are almost a translation so I am going to quote both but after that you are on your own, (but see below).

WHEN YOU ARE OLD by W B YEATS

 

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la  chandelle,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

Assise auprès du feu, devidant et filant,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant:

Your eyes had once , and of their shadows deep;

Ronsard  me celebroit du temps que j’estois belle.

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true;

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars

Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead,

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Ronsard ends his sonnet, (full text below) on a classical theme: "Cueillez dès aujourd’huy les roses de la vie".

I have loved these two poems all my life.

Quand vous serez bien vieille

Pierre de Ronsard

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,

Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,

Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant :

Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.

Lors, vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,

Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant,

Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille réveillant,

Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle.

Je serai sous la terre et fantôme sans os :

Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos :

Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie,

Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain.

Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain :

Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie.

Lawrence Youlten's contribution:

from: "Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames*: The D'Antin Manuscript" (1967)

    Un petit d'un petit

    S'étonne aux Halles

    Un petit d'un petit

    Ah! degrés te fallent

    Indolent qui ne sort cesse

    Indolent qui ne se mène

    Qu'importe un petit

    Tout gai de Reguennes.

Apologies to most (?all) of you who are familiar with this French poem. Don't worry if you find it hard to translate; just read it aloud or get someone with a good French accent to read it to you. 

* Sometimes known as "Ne souris rames " 
If this nonsense appeals to you, here's a link to a web-site where you can find more CLICK HERE