French as you like it and an anglo sing-along

I'll admit it: I am a word guy. I love having le mot juste, the right word or phrase to get the job done with savoir faire. Some of you know that I've been toying with learning French using the Yale University video and audio program "French in Action". It's a program of first and second year French using 52 half hour lessons that follow a young French girl and a young American guy as they meet, get to know each other, and have adventures in Paris and the provinces. It has been fun, but it's a little one-way.

So, while googling some French website or another to find hours of operation of the Louvre or the Musee d'Orsay (the impressionist museum housed in a glorious early 1900s Paris train station), I stumbled upon a google ad for "French as you like it." The proprietress, Marguerite Monnier, shown above, is a twenty-something Frenchwoman with a business degree who worked for 5 years in San Francisco in international marketing before returning to Paris last year. Having evidently listened patiently to a number of Americans (like myself) stumble through a French conversation, she decided to do something about it. She now gets PAID to listen to Americans bumble through a French conversation, forcing us to repeat ourselves until we get it right.

Beth and I met with Marguerite yesterday, and she evidently didn't think we were a total loss, since she agreed to take us on. She did recommend 3 lessons per week, so I think she secretly feels like the project is going to require some very heavy lifting. Since Beth and I are on somewhat different levels, she is starting with the basics so Beth can catch up a little. Beth is such a quick study that I'm afraid she'll pass me up about the fourth lesson or so, and never look back.

After an hour and a half of basic grammar and vocabulary, she assigned us a lesson book, so we set off in search of Gibert Jeune, a bookstore on the left bank near the Sorbonne (Paris' most famous university). We took the same route as I described a few days ago, past the front of Notre Dame and across to St. Germain de Pres and the Latin Quarter. Marguerite told us that the bookstore was on Blvd. St. Michel at the Place St. Michel, so we crossed Blvd. St. Germain and looked. We never found Place St. Michel or Gibert Jeune, but we found Gibert Joseph, a different bookstore with almost exactly the same name, also on Blvd. St. Michel. We took it as a sign that this was in fact a better store for us, and plunged in. The store has five levels and six different buildings, most of which do not interconnect. A veritable ocean of books, textbooks, paper, and supplies. Adding to the feeling of drowning was the fact that it was full to the brim with school children and their mothers, and college students, all scrambling to get school supplies. The air was full of "excuse-moi" and "pardon" and "mon Dieu, quels stupide Americains." Well, I didn't exactly hear the latter, French people being basically polite and all.

We found the textbook we needed, which is "nivel debutant", or rank beginner level. Feeling a little miffed at being debutants at our age, we bought the nivel intermediare as a challenge. Maybe we'll get there, and maybe we won't. We'll see. While at Gibert Joseph, Beth spied an art paper section, and being an artist, bought basically one of each. I had no idea there were so many different kinds of colored paper: metallic, opaque, heavy, light, vellum, corrugated, dimpled, vegetable. Vegetable? Yup. When we got to the counter, the clerk had to unscramble the entire stack into each type of paper, because they were all priced differently. I tried to tell him we were sorry that the papers were all scrambled up, but I think I told him we were from Outer Mongolia and had our Yak waiting outside, based on the puzzled look he gave us.

We window shopped along Blvd. St. Michel while walking back toward the Seine river. Beth's shopping pace is quite a bit faster than the usual French saunter, and was even a tad faster than usual. Finally, crossing Pont St. Louis from the Ile de la Cite to Ile St. Louis, Beth just wigged out when she got stuck between a sauntering couple ahead and a brisk businessman behind. Unable to take any more of the crush, she snapped. I realized later that people of Scandinavian background have a much larger personal space need than French people, and she had been surrounded all afternoon by practically the entire population of Central Paris.

I led her down rue St. Louis, a quiet lane that bisects l'Ile St. Louis, and after reading the menus of maybe five other little restaurants, we picked one called Le Relais de l'Ile. A Relais is a "relay", a kind of roadhouse that used to be used as a rest stop, sort of like those used in the States for the Pony Express. This cute little place had 6 or 8 tables on the main floor in a space smaller than the average hotel room, and 2 tables perched somewhat precariously on a small balcony next to the kitchen. The proprietress was a slender middle aged lady with a very pleasant air who seated us at one of the front tables. The table, as usual in Paris, was a little bigger than a school lunch tray, but it's amazing how many plates, saucers, utensils, and glasses she was able to squeeze onto it. After watching her walk up and down a flight of stairs every time she had a table to serve, I realized why she was so slender: she probably made 200 trips up and down those stairs every day.

A Frenchman was playing jazz piano (think Gershwin, not Thelonious Monk), and knew every Scott Joplin, Gershwin, Charles Trenet, and Edith Piaf song known to man, as well as "Mac the Knife" and practically every other song we requested. The tables were essentially full, but everyone was anglo except the people perched on the balcony, who were French. At the end of the evening there were 3 tables of Americans left (including ourselves), and we had a lovely anglo sing-along to the likes of "Autumn Leaves", "Ain't She Sweet", and, of course, "As Time Goes By" (or "Play it Again, Sam" as most people know it from Casablanca). Evidently the French don't frequent jazz restaurants very much, probably because they like to talk so much (see previous posts) and can't hear well enough with all that music playing.

For you BBC fans, we are sure we spotted Rumpole and "she who must be obeyed" at an adjacent table. He grumbled quite a bit and didn't stay long, so I didn't get his autograph.

Tomorrow: les grands magasins and the Metro...