The reward for this effort is to find yourself in a silent, extraordinary landscape, sometimes eerie, always beautiful. The cedars are magnificent, and magical when they are draped with great swags of snow. Beyond them, on the south face of the mountain, the land drops away sharply, grey and jagged, softened by the thyme and box that seem to be able to grow in the most unpromising wrinkle of rock.
On a clear day, when the mistral has blown and the air shines, the views toward the sea are long and sharply focused, almost as if they have been magnified, and there is a sense of being hundreds of miles away from the rest of the world. I once met a peasant up there, on the road the forest service made through the cedars. He was on an old bicycle, a gun slung across his back, a dog loping beside him. We were both startled to see another human being. It is normally less busy, and the only sound is the wind nagging at the trees.
The days pass slowly but the weeks rush by. We now measure the year in ways that have little to do with diaries and specific dates. There is the almond blossom in February, and a few weeks of prespring panic in the garden as we try to do the work we’ve been talking about doing all winter. Spring is a mixture of cherry blossom and a thousand weeds and the first guests of the year, hoping for subtropical weather and often getting nothing but rain and wind. Summer might start in April. It might start in May. We know it’s arrived when Bernard calls to help us uncover and clean the pool.
Poppies in June, drought in July, storms in August. The vines begin to turn rusty, the hunters come out of their summer hibernation, the grapes have been picked, and the water in the pool nips more and more fiercely until it becomes too cold for anything more than a masochistic plunge in the middle of the day. It must be the end of October.
Winter is filled with good resolutions, and some of them are actually achieved. A dead tree is cut down, a wall is built, the old steel garden chairs are repainted, and whenever there is time to spare we take up the dictionary and resume our struggle with the French language.
Our French has improved, and the thought of spending an evening in totally French company is not as daunting as it used to be. But, to use the words that were so often used in my school reports, there is considerable room for improvement. Must try harder. And so we inch our way through books by Pagnol and Giono and de Maupassant, buy Le Provençal regularly, listen to the machine-gun delivery of radio newsreaders, and attempt to unravel the mysteries of what we are constantly being told is a supremely logical language.
I think that is a myth, invented by the French to bewilder foreigners. Where is the logic, for instance, in the genders given to proper names and nouns? Why is the Rhone masculine and the Durance feminine? They are both rivers, and if they must have a sex, why can’t it be the same one? When I asked a Frenchman to explain this to me, he delivered a dissertation on sources, streams, and floods which, according to him, answered the question conclusively and, of course, logically. Then he went on to the masculine ocean, the feminine sea, the masculine lake, and the feminine puddle. Even the water must get confused.
His speech did nothing to change my theory, which is that genders are there for no other reason than to make life difficult. They have been allocated in a whimsical and arbitrary fashion, sometimes with a cavalier disregard for the anatomical niceties. The French for vagina is vagin. Le vagin. Masculine. How can the puzzled student hope to apply logic to a language in which the vagina is masculine?
There is also the androgynous lui waiting to ambush us at the threshold of many a sentence. Normally, lui is him. In some constructions, lui is her. Often, we are left in the dark as to lui’s gender until it is made known to use some time after he or she has been introduced, as in: “Demandez-lui,” (ask him) “peut-être qu’elle peut vous aidez” (perhaps she can help you). A short-lived mystery, possibly, but one that can puzzle the novice, particularly when lui’s first name is also a mixture of masculine and feminine, such as Jean-Marie or Marie-Pierre.
And that is not the worst of it. Strange and unnatural events take place every day within the formalities of French syntax. A recent newspaper article, reporting on the marriage of the rock singer Johnny Hallyday, paused in its description of the brides frock to give Johnny a pat on the back. “Il est,” said the article, “une grande vedette.” In the space of a single short sentence, the star had undergone a sex change, and on his wedding day too.
It is perhaps because of these perplexing twists and turns that French was for centuries the language of diplomacy, an occupation in which simplicity and clarity are not regarded as being necessary, or even desirable. Indeed, the guarded statement, made fuzzy by formality and open to several different interpretations, is much less likely to land an ambassador in the soup that plain words that mean what they say. A diplomat, according to Alex Dreier, is “anyone who thinks twice before saying nothing.” Nuance and significant vagueness are essential, and French might have been invented to allow these linguistic weeds to flourish in the crevices of every sentence.