Sir Michael Edwards, the first and only Englishman at the French Academy, invited me to a teatime rendezvous last summer at his home near Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The tea, though, never arrived. It was one of those stiflingly hot Paris days when the thermometer temperature exceeds one hundred; perhaps the French part of my host’s mind simply didn’t consider it to be tea weather. Too polite—too English—I dared not suggest otherwise. I thought delicious thoughts about the milky cuppa I did not drink.
No matter. We talked, now in English, now in French, in the book-filled salon till late in the evening; I had so much to ask him about. At seventy-seven, Sir Michael’s life and career had been long and rich. A scholar and author of verse who works in a French he learned as a British schoolboy, he had become one of the language’s forty Immortels, its undying defenders and overseers, two years earlier. In the four hundred years since Cardinal Richelieu dreamed up the Academy, soldiers and clerics, chemists and numismatists, admirals and hotel-keepers, an African head of state, and—beginning in 1980—even a few women, had all been admitted. But never, before Sir Michael, had an Englishman.
His election made headlines; the French papers were particularly generous. The daily Liberation enthused, “England has sent us a beautiful gift.” The reaction was different across the Channel, in London. The reporters there did not know quite what to make of the news. A fellow from Blighty refining French’s official dictionary! They did little to conceal their surprise. “The academy is famous for its tireless battles against ‘Anglo-Saxon’ invasions of French, offering Gallic equivalents to Anglicisms, such as courriel instead of email,” noted the Telegraph. Explaining himself to his country’s press, Sir Michael said, “This is a moment of crisis for French, and it makes sense, I believe, for the academy to choose someone who comes from, as it were, the opposite camp but has become a champion of the special importance and beauty of the French language.” In one of his many interviews for the French media he was reported as saying that his favorite word was France.
“Actually, I don’t know where that came from,” Sir Michael told me. “I remember someone pushing a microphone to my mouth and asking me for my favorite word. My favorite French word, of course. The answer just fell out of me. Come to think of it I much prefer rossignol (‘nightingale’).”
The surprise at his election—and not all of it was British—surprised him. But he could entertain the surprise, up to a point. England and France, after all, had a history. Each, to the other, had once been an invader. Each, against the other, had gone to war. On the fields of Agincourt, thousands from both armies had been turned into arrow fodder. So the brows raised at Sir Michael’s ascension to the Academy was, from a historian’s point of view, understandable. From a linguist’s, however, the surprise was unfounded. Surprise—the origin of the word is French. Like election and history and armies and origin. According to one estimate, one out of four English words was imported from France: to speak British English is to speak a quarter French. (United States English is another matter. Americans pump their trucks with gas, not with petrol (pétrole); cook zucchinis and eggplants, not courgettes and aubergines; shop at the drugstore, not at the pharmacy (pharmacie). Leaf-yellowing autumn (automne) in New York or San Diego is fall.)
For Sir Michael, the queen, with whom he had an audience on her 2014 state visit to Paris, symbolizes the close relationship between the two languages. A descendant of William the Conqueror, the monarch (whose motto is Dieu et mon droit—“God and my right”), has a reputation for fluency in French. “The Queen always speaks first. She complimented me on my living here: ‘A very beautiful city.’ That’s about as much as I can tell you. Conversations with her Majesty must remain confidential.”
On a shelf stood a framed photograph of their meeting.
“Did you converse in English or in French?”
“In English. But at the state banquet later that evening, she spoke in French.”
The banquet took place in a chandeliered hall of the Élysée Palace. In the bright lights, the queen, in white, sparkled with diamonds, and the red riband over her right shoulder told all that she belonged to the Legion of Honour. As she spoke, she turned the pages of her speech with white-gloved hands. Banquet etiquette—it is the royal custom to read from notes—but I was curious. What was Sir Michael’s opinion of the queen’s linguistic performance? Suddenly, predictably, diplomacy came to him. He would only say, “very good.” I remembered then that the speech had been televised live in France (the queen is as popular as ever with foreign republicans), as had others she had given in the past, and recordings of them could be watched online. I found several, some days after the meeting with Sir Michael, and listened. No, Sir Michael did not speak the Queen’s French. His pronunciation was even better, his accent even smoother. And later still, reading up, I learned that the queen had picked up her second language not in France but within the walls of her father’s palace; it turned out to be a by-product of her cloistered upbringing, the work of a Belgian governess—proof, paradoxically, of her unworldliness.
(And, reading further, I came upon a contemporary account of the French spoken by the queen’s namesake, Elizabeth I: “She spoke French with purity and elegance, but with a drawling, somewhat affected accent, saying ‘Paar maa foi; paar le Dieeu vivaant,’ and so forth, in a style that was ridiculed by Parisians, as she sometimes, to her extreme annoyance, discovered.”)
Sir Michael—though he now moves in high circles, an easy converser with queens and presidents and prime ministers—is of humble beginnings and had to learn French the hard way. No Belgian governess for him! “I was born and raised in Barnes, in southwest London. Very English, the pubs and parks and street names: Cromwell Road, Tudor Drive. Modest, too.” His father, Frank, a garage owner, worked in car parts. Sir Michael’s aspirations were his mother’s doing. “As a girl she had written a play. Of course, nothing ever came of it, but it stayed with her, this dream of making a living out of words.” Her son was able to cultivate his ambition at an Elizabethan all-boys secondary school, Kingston Grammar. (Grammar, another French word, meaning “book learning,” is a cousin of glamour.) “I fell for French. I was eleven. I opened my textbook—A Grammar of Present Day French with Exercises, by J. E. Mansion—and there they were: oui and non. Such magic in so simple words. Yes and no. But how important! It was the same with other French words. They possessed an aura.” To the garage owner’s boy, the words seemed bright and shocking with unfamiliarity. “A new world opened to me: new ways of naming, of seeing, of imagining.”
And taking in Sir Michael now, the embroidered red lion on his navy-blue tie, his black leather slippers; looking into the ingratiating eyes behind the metal-rimmed spectacles; attending to his studied clubability, his professorial way of speaking (“Bother,” “Vivat!”)—so dapper in dress, so clerkish in manner—you can see how the British grammar school, at a remove of sixty-plus years, had laid the foundation for his present role. Had he always enjoyed his school lessons?
“No. I remember finding the textbooks dry, cold, unfriendly. Probably they put off many of my classmates. I was never put off, but then somehow I knew that French was so much better than its textbooks.”
He recalled his French schoolmaster. “Dr. Reginald Nicholls. He had a spastic jaw. Quite the disadvantage for a language teacher.”
Dry textbooks, a teacher with a spastic jaw—and when, after seven years at Kingston Grammar, Sir Michael went to Cambridge, he was taught French “as though it were dead.” All reading, no speaking. Taught only to decipher Montaigne and Voltaire and Racine. Once again, education might have thrown him off French forever. But Racine enchanted. Sir Michael went on to write a thesis in Paris on Racine. And flexing his memory, Sir Michael recited a little Racine to me:
Moi-même, il m’enferma dans des cavernes sombres,
Lieux profonds et voisins de l’empire des ombres.
The citation is from Phèdre. And while we were on the subject of the play, Sir Michael said, “French and English writers don’t think and write alike. Racine taught me that. For instance, an English author would never write, as Racine does, à l’ombre des forêts (“in the shadow of forests”); he would write ‘in the shadow of a cedar’ or ‘in the shadow of an oak tree.’”
“Interesting. So the two languages configure reality differently. Could you tell me a little more about this difference? How would you characterize it?”
“I would say perceptions in French are more abstract—like hovering over an experience in a Montgolfier. It’s the reason why French thoughts tend to be holistic, and the texts homogenous. Whereas English perceiving is earthier, detail-led, full of quirks.”
“What do you mean by texts that are ‘homogenous’?”
“Racine wrote many plays, but he wrote them with few words: two thousand. Shakespeare’s contain ten times more. That gives you an idea of how few Racine needed. In French, a same word can be made to say several different things. Consider attrait—a typical Racine word. Applied to a woman it means ‘charms’; but use it to describe something vaguer, like the unknown, and you have to translate it as ‘lure’: l’attrait de l’inconnu, the lure of the unknown. The ‘attractiveness’ of a town or city, an ‘interest’ in some topic, feeling ‘drawn’ to this or that—all meanings that merge in attrait. It’s this quality in French that helps a text cohere.”
Out of modesty, perhaps, Sir Michael didn’t mention Racine’s links to the Academy. The subject of Sir Michael’s thesis, the author of Phèdre, the model of the French language’s “purity” and “eloquence” (the terms are Richelieu’s), Racine, born less than four years after the Academy, joined its ranks at the age of thirty-three. So in Racine, Sir Michael also has an illustrious predecessor.
Racine took him to Paris. And in Paris he met and later married Danielle, a Frenchwoman. “My children and grandchildren all have French citizenship. I would have become a French citizen myself much sooner had I known that it was possible to keep both nationalities. You see, I didn’t want to lose my British passport.” With his French wife and British passport, Sir Michael taught French, English, and comparative literature for many years in Warwick, Essex, and Paris (with stints in Belfast, Budapest, and Johannesburg). In addition to his career in academia, he reviewed French and English poetry for the Times Literary Supplement.
“I was sent a book of poems by Yves Bonnefoy to review. Later we became firm friends. A quintessentially French author. It was he who gave me the idea to write in the language.”
Sir Michael has gone on to write many books, in both languages, including a study of Samuel Beckett, another favorer of French over his native English. In Paris Aubaine, a recent verse collection, Sir Michael even mixes the two together, sometimes within the same sentence: “Inspecting her woodcuts, I thought the Seine too sinewy, turmoiled and yet, l’eau grise, sous la haute pierre, s’anime de guivres, se trouble là-bas, dans les remous de sa présence unearthly.”
Guivre, a heraldic term for “serpent” (perhaps Sir Michael, composing his verse, had in mind the Serpentine River in London’s Hyde Park), was, I thought, just the sort of classical and “quintessentially French” word of which the Academy approved. But guivre had, in fact, been given no entry in the first edition of the Academy’s dictionary, published in 1694. Lack of space—the work stretched to only 18,000 entries—was one explanation. A likelier explanation could be found in the early academicians’ curious attitude toward words. Claude Favre de Vaugelas, a nobleman whose influence among his colleagues ran high, championed a vocabulary that avoided anything the tiniest bit provincial, vulgar, or technical. Keep French gentlemanly—such could have been his motto. Gentlemen in France had seemlier things to talk about than serpents.
The silliness in the dictionary’s making was exceeded only by the slowness. Nitpickers expended weeks on the definition of a word like bouche (“mouth”). After fifteen years at the dictionary, Vaugelas and his fellow academicians had only gotten as far as the letter I; dying prevented him from reaching je or jovial or jupe. Years later, in a moment of crossness, Antoine Furetière complained about the energies wasted on pointless arguments:
Right is he who shouts loudest; everyone harangues over the merest trifle. The second man repeats like an echo what the first has just said, and most often they speak three or four at a time. When five or six are present, one will be reading, another opining, two chitchatting, one dozing.… Definitions read aloud have to be repeated because someone wasn’t listening.… Not two lines’ worth of progress is made without long digressions.
Furetière was also at work on his own dictionary. When the others at the Academy found out, they told him to stop. He refused; he had put the best years of his life—over thirty—into the project. For this refusal he was thrown out. The subsequent back-and-forth between the Academy and its former member came to be known as “the quarrel of the dictionaries.” The Academy’s, fifty years in the writing and still incomplete, was a mess. Furetière revealed that many of its entries weren’t in alphabetical order; that a word as common as girafe (“giraffe”) was nowhere to be found; that the arguers could not decide whether to list a as a vowel or as a word. That the academicians reduced their dictionary to an exercise in dilettantism was bad enough; their dropping whole parts of the language for being less tasteful than others was to Furetière incredible. “An architect speaks just as good French, talking plinths and stylobates, and a soldier, talking casemates, merlons, and Saracens, as a courtesan who talks alcoves, daises, and chandeliers.” Admirers of Furetière published his dictionary (containing an entry for guivre) in three volumes in Holland in 1690, two years after his death and four before the Academy at last presented its own, much sparser, to the court of Louis XIV. The Sun King preferred Furetière’s.
Furetière’s achievement threw into relief the Academy’s shortcomings as a dictionary maker. One man had done what scores, over sixty years of fits-and-starts labor, had struggled—and failed—to do. As a parable of individual endeavor—one head better than a hundred—it is compelling. Even more compelling, and embarrassing for the academicians, was the publication in 1755 of the Dictionary of the English Language, by Samuel Johnson. “Without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow,” Johnson wrote of the seven (some accounts say eight, others nine) years it had taken him to define some forty-two thousand English words. Johnson had had to work fast to pay back the local booksellers whose commission money kept him in ink and paper. The speed had come at the expense of sleep and temper, but not—it was his pride—of quality. Critics, at home and abroad, were impressed. What quill power! Johnson, feigning modesty, called himself English’s “humble drudge.”
They were the remarks of a man looking back, separate from the past, now at ease in his accomplishment. At the start of his labor, though, Johnson’s ambition had been much wilder. Having looked at a copy of the Academy’s third edition (published in 1740), his thoughts, like the thoughts of the academicians in Paris, turned to fixing his language, making it exempt from the corruption of workers and foreigners. Johnson’s initial aim wasn’t, therefore, to record every word employed in England. His dictionary was to be selective; in compliance with his patriotism, the author would leave out many French words, or at least discourage the reader from using them. He didn’t want his countrymen to “babble a dialect of France.” Of ruse, he wrote, “a French word neither elegant nor necessary.” Finesse he also deemed “an unnecessary word which is creeping into the language.” Spirit used in the French sense, to mean “a soul” or “a person,” was, Johnson added, “happily growing obsolete.” Instead of heroine he recommended that Britons say and write heroess. But in the course of his long toil, Johnson’s snobbery softened. Some words were simply too beautiful or too useful to care much about where they came from. Like paramour, which Johnson conceded is “not inelegant or unmusical.”
Johnson, though he began his dictionary with an academician’s cast of mind, closed it with quite another. The very idea of a language needing fixing struck him in the end as nonsense. Academies like the French one, he asserted, could never work: sounds are “too volatile and subtle for legal restraints”; syllables cannot be put in chains, nor speech “lashed” into obedience. “The edicts of an English academy would, probably, be read by many,” he noted wryly, “only that they might be sure to disobey them.”
The year after his election, Sir Michael was honored with a ceremony welcoming him to the Academy. In keeping with an old tradition, the members attributed to him a word and definition from their dictionary (now on its ninth edition and counting some sixty thousand entries). They chose universalité:
n. f. Ensemble, totalité, ce qui embrasse les différentes espèces. L’universalité des êtres, des sciences, des arts. En termes de Jurisprudence, L’universalité des biens, La totalité des biens.
UNIVERSALITÉ signifie aussi Caractère de ce qui est universel, de ce qui s’étend à un très grand nombre de pays, d’hommes. L’universalité de la langue française…
(In my translation: “a set, a totality, that which subsumes the different kinds. The universality of beings, of sciences, of arts. In jurisprudence, the universality of goods [entirety of assets], the totality of goods. Universality also refers to the condition of that which is universal, of that which extends to a very great number of countries, of people. The universality of the French language…”)
It is on such definitions that Sir Michael and eleven of his colleagues on the dictionary commission work. “Thursday is dictionary day. The twelve of us sit around a long table for three hours in the morning, going through the latest revisions to be debated one by one. It might be a definition that needs tweaking. Or an entry’s example that needs replacing. Or a neologism of some sort. We probably get through around twenty or thirty words a week. It sounds like a sinecure, but we take our duties very seriously. The atmosphere in the room is pretty solemn. You have to ask permission to speak.” He raised his arm, as if he were looking at the commission’s chairman, and lowered it again.
“At the same time there’s a camaraderie. All those hours together, we become real buddies, on se tutoie [meaning that they address each other with the familiar form of you—tu].”
The commission was currently scrutinizing the possible meanings of rude. Unlike the English rude, the French has many uses: it can mean “rough,” “unpolished,” “unsophisticated,” “harsh,” and “severe.”
“Not long to go before we’re finally out of the R’s.” He smiled. “Ars longa, vita brevis.” An academician’s joke.
It was not only the R’s that kept Sir Michael and his colleagues busy. Responsibility for answering usage queries from the public rests with the commission. In the old days, the queries arrived in envelopes and fussy handwriting. Now, they come typed in emails. Courriel. Not “e-mail.” The commission’s answers appear on a dedicated page of the Academy’s website. To Edwin S., who inquired whether one should say Quand est-ce que tu viens? (“What time do you arrive?”) or Quand viens-tu?, a commission member replied that the latter was better, even if—it had to be admitted—the former was far more common. A certain Shiraga wrote in to query the French pronunciation of bonzaï; in its native Japanese, she remarked, the word is pronounced “bonssai.” The French should always pronounce it with a z sound, the commission said, and added sternly “It is not a Japanese word, but a French word that has been borrowed from Japanese.”
Sometimes the responder is Sir Michael. He also contributes to the Academy’s style guide (published, too, on the website): Dire, Ne Pas Dire (Say, Do Not Say). According to the guide, for instance, “we don’t say” il est sur la short list (“he is on the shortlist”); shortlist, too English, is out. “We say,” instead, il est parmi les derniers candidats susceptibles d’obtenir tel prix (“he is among the remaining candidates capable of obtaining such prize”). A roundabout way of putting it, to say the least. And on and on, in the same convoluted vein, the guide goes.
We don’t say une newsletter; we say une lettre d’informations.
We don’t say une single; we say une chambre pour une personne.
We don’t say éco-friendly; we say respectueux de l’environnement.
So many proscriptions! Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. It made for rather unpleasant reading.
But Sir Michael said I had gotten the guide wrong. The guide isn’t anti-English. Many in the Academy he called Anglophiles, admirers of British and American novels, the words of Wordsworth and the like. No, he said, it is a matter of clarity. Many English words confuse. The “artificial English,” bizarre and stunted, that globalization peddles. On posters in the Paris subway, on billboards near Notre Dame, in loud radio ads that resound along boulevards: Just do it! Nespresso, What Else? Taste the feeling! This is Her! This is Him! Sir Michael sees all around him landscapes disfigured by these meaningless slogans. “It is something my colleagues have long and rightly bellyached about. The health of a nation,” he said, as if reciting, “depends on the health of its language.”
Thus the aesthetic defense of French has given way to the ethical. No longer is the Academy protecting French for gentlemen; it is preserving French for the common man. But behind the ethical posture, as behind the aesthetic, the same anxieties, the same obsessions. A kind of language panic. In 1985 in a public speech to the Academy, Sir Michael’s predecessor, the author Jean Dutourd, denounced “the murder of syntax, the genocide of the dictionary” being committed by the boorish purveyors of “Atlantic pidgin.” They had the “rapacity of real estate developers,” Dutourd warned, who, given half a chance, would demolish the “palace” of the French language to build a super-luxury high-rise over it. He wanted the French government to take action. He told his genteel audience he wanted to see a “linguistic inquisition” in France. He urged the finance minister to create a grammar inspectorate whose task would be to comb the press, books, and ads for bastardized words. Anyone who published nominer (“to nominate”) instead of nommer (the older French form), or who, under the influence of English, mixed up sanctuaire and refuge, would have to pay a fine of twenty francs. A tax on words!
Admittedly, Sir Michael is no Jean Dutourd (whose books, before coming to the Academy, Sir Michael had never read). He is a moderate. He does not believe in taxing words. Like the Academy’s website, his moderation is a concession to the twenty-first century. “French is changing, France is changing. I’m part of the changing face of France.” Behind his gray head, the frilly orange-red lampshade was distracting. “Of course the language needs to be fixed to some extent, to remain readable one hundred years from now,” he continued, “but we mustn’t try to stop the future” (“We mustn’t be Jean Dutourds,” he could have said). “Can we really expect any human institution not to have its share of boring old farts?”
“We mustn’t try to stop the future.” But I couldn’t be sure Sir Michael meant that. I couldn’t understand why the Academy considers, for example, jazzman and blackout and fair play and covergirl all acceptable French words, but thinks shortlist too English, or degenerate English. Blackout turns up in several novels by Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. J. M. G. Le Clézio, France’s other living Nobel laureate (he won in 2008), uses covergirl in his novel Désert. What is to stop either of them writing shortlist into a future work of French literature? Certainly not the Academy’s style guide. Neither writer—I note in passing—has shown any interest in joining the Academy.
It was getting on—with all the talking, we had forgotten about the clock—but before leaving Sir Michael, I asked to see the famous books and rooms at the Institut de France that he and his fellow academicians use during their conclaves. He said that could be arranged. The Academy would sit again in the autumn; I should send him a reminder then.
I did. And Sir Michael was as good as his word. After summering in Burgundy, he replied with a date, Thursday, November 12, and an address, 23 quai de Conti. (The assembly’s address was superfluous. My apartment was little more than a stone’s throw away: I walked past the pillared façade every time I crossed the Pont des Arts.) On the twelfth, at an hour when the afternoon séance was winding up, I presented myself to the young lady at the reception. I said I was there to see “Michael Edwards.” The receptionist looked blank. I tried again. I said, pronouncing his name as if it were a Frenchman’s, “Michelle Edooar.”
“Ah, Monsieur Edooar!” She handed me a security badge, let me through the electronic turnstiles, told me where to go to sit and wait.
Across the cobbled courtyard was the door, closed, forbidding.
I tried the door. It creaked, then opened. Busts, tapestries, chandeliers. Presently Sir Michael came down a staircase. The setting’s pomposity stiffened his gait. The academicians had been “inside” for their weekly one-and-a-half-hour plenary session, he explained, during which the dictionary commission’s suggestions were mooted. Thursday afternoons at the Academy often went smoothly, but this one had been more difficult. He was about to tell me more, but apparently thought better of it. He changed the subject. “Let me show you the library.”
The Mazarin library: the seat of French letters. Six hundred thousand volumes wall to wall. Here, amid the smell of vellum, musty leather, and millions of pages steeped in centuries, Sir Michael’s 1965 thesis on Racine rubbed covers with the original plays; with a 1580 copy of John Baret’s Alvearie, a multilingual dictionary—English, Latin, French, and a sprinkling of Greek—“newlie enriched with varietie of wordes, phrases, proverbs, and divers lightsome observations of grammar,” which Shakespeare, in composing his own plays, is thought to have consulted; with Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo, who became an Academy member only after being turned down thrice; with the collected poems of Baudelaire, whose sole candidacy, in 1862, went nowhere.
Sir Michael said, “I believe that’s because he’d had a run-in with the law.” The Academy had also rejected Molière (whose name has become forever associated with French: la langue de Molière), Pascal, and Zola at one time or another.
About his own candidacy, Sir Michael said, “You handwrite a letter to each academician. And each letter has to be personalized. You’re advised not to write too much. I may have gone over to a second page.” He admitted to having been unfamiliar with the names of several of the academicians; he’d had to mug up the titles of their books, their themes, and their styles beforehand.
Walking me through long corridors from the library to the Academy’s assembly room, Sir Michael showed me a statue of Jean de La Fontaine, beside which, on his first day, as the “new boy,” he had been made to wait until called. Inside the stuffy assembly room, below the gilded portrait of Richelieu, forty plush red seats were laid out in an oval. Each academician’s seat is numbered. Sir Michael’s is Seat 31. Cocteau once sat there, as did the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand.
It was here, one Thursday afternoon, in seat 29, that the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss gave his definition of boomerang. And it was here, on another Thursday afternoon, that Lévi-Strauss persuaded his colleagues to modify the dictionary’s entry for rance (“rancid”). According to him, the entry, which spoke of a “disagreeable” taste and odor, betrayed a Western bias. For many cultures, he told the room, rancidity is part and parcel of their cuisine. His complaint was upheld: disagreeable was cut and replaced with strong.
I wondered whether Sir Michael would also leave a mark on the Academy’s dictionary. I wondered whether he would speak up, out of his Englishness, when the time came for the assembly to look again at sandwich, say, or turf.
He read my thoughts. Or perhaps his being back in the place where, only an hour or two before, emotions had flared and words had been crossed, moved him to recount.
“I suppose I bring to the Academy a way of speaking that’s a bit different. I’m not above making a joke. At the same time I’m not afraid to speak my mind. I have opinions.” He stopped, looked around, lowered his voice and said in a confiding tone, “I had a bit of a dingdong with Giscard.” Giscard is Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, nearly ninety, president of France between 1974 and 1981; he was elected to the Academy in 2003. The Englishman’s and ex-president’s dingdong was over how to sum up vamp. “He started it. He claimed it means une belle séductrice. Pure and simple. I said ‘No, it means more than that.’ I said it came from vampire, and therefore suggests a dangerousness alongside the beauty.” Apparently much of the session was taken up with their dispute.
The French penchant for abstract, never-ending debate! After ten years living in France, I know it well. Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, it is widely said, pay little attention to the Academy, and in my experience they don’t have to. A family lunch, lasting hours, is their academy. Sharing a wine with friends on a noisy bistro terrace is their academy. How the French love to talk! And to talk about talk!
Back at the reception the lady helped Sir Michael into his long black Burberry coat. He was off to a Schubert concert; he is an inveterate concertgoer. “Our annual meeting is in three weeks’ time. All the academicians will be there. Dressed up in our uniforms, you know, like a bunch of deposed South American junta generals. I’ll see you’re invited. I’ll be presiding.”
The following evening, Friday, November 13, 2015, two miles from the Academy and my home, one hundred and thirty rockers, bistro diners, and café drinkers were killed in a coordinated attack by radical Islamist terrorists. Hundreds more were wounded. A state of emergency was declared.
Violence has a way of reducing the mundane to a pure ridiculousness. Already it had been hard enough to begin to write about the French Academy—its quaint rituals and pointless-sounding arguments—without making it sound absurd. Now 130 deaths. In comparison with them, what did it matter how a dictionary defined vamp?
But the more I thought about the violence—so ruthless, so flagrant, designed to wow and whet hatred—the less absurd the Academy, its work, its role, began to seem. Violence levels everything, turns bricks, bottles, and bodies indiscriminately into so much rubbish. The academicians, contrariwise, seek to discern, weigh, conserve. Violence silences; the Academy champions words. La mort injuste versus le mot juste.
President Obama, offering American condolences, reached for French words: “The American people draw strength from the French people’s commitment to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. We are reminded in this time of tragedy that the bonds of liberté and égalité and fraternité are not only values that the French people care so deeply about, but they are values that we share.”
And in the days after the attacks, throughout Paris, a book originally written in English, by an American, sold by the thousands: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.
Once again, hearteningly, that close relationship between the two languages.
Three weeks later, with my invitation card, I waited in line at 23 quai de Conti before passing security. December’s Academy was more austere in the chill air. Men in Swiss guard–like costume, all white gloves and red feathers, clanked to attention as we filed inside. We sat under the cupola—a building set aside for such grand occasions—concentrically. In the audience, French household names: a singer, a filmmaker, a telegenic author. And the capital’s bourgeoisie.
Solemnly, the academicians came in and sat together. Each wore a green and black waistcoat, bicorn hat, cape, and épée. They were very white, very old, very male. (About the Academy’s woman problem Sir Michael had told me, “The Academy falls over backwards to elect women; we want women; not enough women apply.”) Sir Michael asked for a minute’s silence in memory of the victims.
After the silence, after the applause for the winners of the Academy’s literary prizes, after a speech on the history of the French novel, Sir Michael cleared his throat and spoke. He spoke of violence. Not the violence of gunmen—the type, exercised by poets, (in my translation) “against conventional perspectives on life and self, against tired clichés.” But the poet’s violence, Sir Michael continued, was that of someone who “cracks a nut, or bites into a fruit.” A “violence of the poetic act,” which is always accompanied by “gentleness in the respect for the real.”
Reality, he concluded, responds to language. “Reality,” he had told me, months before, in his apartment, “is polyglot.”