Lessons in French
A delicious coming-of-age tale set in the most romantic city on earth.On the cusp of the nineties just as the Berlin Wall is falling, Kate is about to pursue her dream and become an artist. But she’s just graduated from Yale and when an intriguing job offer comes her way, to work as the assistant to Lydia Schell, a famous American photographer in Paris, she cannot say no. She will get to live in Paris again! And Kate has not been back to France since she was a lonely nine-year-old girl, sent to the outskirts of Paris to live with cousins while her father was dying.Kate may speak fluent French, but she arrives at the Schell household in the fashionable Sixth Arrondissement both dazzled and wildly impressionable. She is immediately engrossed in the creative fever of the city and surrounded by a seductive cast of characters. Amidst the glamorous, famous and pretentious circle that she now finds herself a part of Kate tries to fit in. But as she falls in love with Paris all over again, she begins to question the kindness of the people to whom she is so drawn as well as her own motives for wanting them to love her.A compelling and delightful portrait of a precocious, ambitious young woman struggling to define herself in a city a million miles from home amidst a new life that is spiralling out of control. Lessons in French is at once a love letter to Paris and the story of a young woman finding herself, her moral compass, and, finally, her true family.
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For Charles, mon grand amour
Table of Contents
one
They say I have no accent and that this is a gift. Sometimes, people can detect a lilt in my voice, which makes them wonder which rural part of France I come from, or maybe which Scandinavian country. But no one can hear that I’m American. And yet, because I am not French, I show almost no signs of belonging to any group or class. In Paris, I am virtually transparent. A gift, perhaps. Un don, so to speak, voilà. But, when you feel invisible, there is no end to the trouble you can get into.
My trouble began in 1989, on a wet September morning at Charles de Gaulle Airport, when I decided to splurge on a taxi into town. The worn smells of leather and tobacco were deeply reassuring, the precise blend of odors I craved at the edge of the unknown.
But I probably shouldn’t have taken that taxi. Mom claimed that you had a much higher chance of dying on the way to or from the airport than you did on the plane. However, you had more say about how you traveled on the ground. You could go by car, bus or subway. You could slow down, look both ways, watch your back. On the ground, you could take responsibility. In the air, worry was nothing but a production.
I had just graduated from college, and was trying to ignore most of what Mom said, but I was secretly proud of her, pretending to be as callous as she would have been to any signs of fear in myself as my plane flew to Paris.
The driver asked me where I was returning from. Where had I been on my vacances?
I told him I hadn’t been on vacation anywhere. I had been a waitress in New Haven all summer. That was a town on the East Coast, near New York.
Ah, New York!
But I was returning to Paris for the first time in ten years. Though I wasn’t French, my grandfather was, and I lived here once, for two years, with cousins, in the Nineteenth Arrondissement.
He laughed. Today, he wasn’t driving me to the Nineteenth but to the Sixth. A much more chic quartier. More central. Mademoiselle was moving up in the world!
We glided through the industrial ring around the city. We had just permeated its first layer when the taxi was rear-ended at a stoplight. There was a shock, a screech, swearing.
I felt so vindicated for Mom that I was strangely overjoyed by this accident, proof-positive of her theories of relative danger. I sidelined the fact that she would have told me to take the Métro because it was cheaper, and safer. I had wanted a driver to be my own personal shepherd into my new life.
This was my moment in the sun. So what if it was drizzling? Experience was going to transform all.
The driver punched the steering wheel—“Merde!”—as I flew into his headrest.
“Ça va?” he asked, rubbing his own forehead. “Are you hurt?”
No, no, I was not hurt, and I would wait uncomplainingly on the sidewalk of this outer arrondissement for him to exchange the necessary information with the woman who had hit us.
We were by a news kiosk. I had forgotten that the news kiosks here were green and suppository-shaped, that the newsprint was denser than ours, that there were Chupa Chups lollipops and Hollywood gum for sale, a magazine called Figaro Madame, headlines about a pop star named Johnny Hallyday, erotic ads for coffee and chocolate, small posters for chamber music concerts in Ste-Chapelle, dog shit. It was all coming back.
Looking hard at the familiar candies and magazine covers, I saw their colors and meanings bleed into lines and shapes. I pulled a sketchbook and pencil from my bag, keeping half an ear to the words between my driver and the offending woman. He wrote down her details. She lit a cigarette.
Because I sensed the conversation wrapping up, I did not put pencil to paper. There was too much to draw in a few moments, and I hated resorting to quick symbols and tricks. I was uncannily good at reproducing what I saw, but only in the fulness of time. If I couldn’t do it right, I would rather simply stare. I slipped my sketchbook away.
