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Later that day, Anjali had another French lesson with Christelle.
“Cherie! I had a marvelous week. Et tu?” she said as she floated onto a red and gold woven café chair. She was dressed in the latest fashion: harem pants, stiletto heels, and a vapor of a white blouse. Anjali felt quite staid next to her in flats and a skirt just below the knee.
“Today, we talk about ze imperative. Not ze aperatif, mind you! Leettle joke. En français, we take the vous form of the verb, like ziz: allez, and we say it with emphasis: ‘Go!’ and écoutez!, which means “Listen!”
She rattled on a bit, and Anjali was thinking. How can you take seriously a language that ends its commands with a “z”? A silent z, no less. Where was the oomph in a command like that? She could only think of Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther, bumbling around as Inspector Clouseau.
“Now we talk about our families,” Christelle was saying. “We have a nice word in common with anglais, ‘cousin,’ spelled the same way, but we say it ‘coo-ZAHN’ with the nasale at the end.”
Anjali tried to say it, and it came at “cwi-ZINE,” a word she’d learned the week before.
“Ooh-la! That’s a kitchen, not a cousin!”
“Oop-la,” Anjali said. She’d heard parents in France use that word when their small children stumbled.
“Really,” Christelle said, “in between our lessons, if there’s anything you don’t remember from last week, you could giggle it.”
Anjali was stumped for a second.
“Oh, you mean Google it!”
Christelle blushed, just as embarrassed as Anjali had been.
The lesson moved on, and as Anjali became too tired to concentrate any more, Christelle ended it with a joke.
“How can you make money?”
Anjali shook her head. She didn’t know.
“Buy a Frenchman in France, take him to Belgium, and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth.”
Christelle laughed heartily at her own joke.
Anjali had noted the supreme self-esteem, what some might call arrogance, of the Parisians. The gap between what they thought of themselves and the reality—people inordinately devoted to paperwork, and very eager to buy a baguette on the way home to dinner—really did invite humor, she thought. If Christelle can laugh at her own countrymen, I can, too.
The French who came from other parts of France were quite lovely. It wasn’t them, it was the Parisians...
