I had always been homesick for Europe. Thirty years in the U.S., that’s no small accomplishment for a native of Germany. I was busy: raising children, teaching German. Then my husband retired and the children were all of a sudden grown. My life was changing dramatically, but there was one good thing: we sold our house and for the first time had extra money. Could we fulfill our dream of buying a place in Europe? No more extended visits with family and friends but our own little pied-à-terre. Not in Germany but in France where the sun shines, the language sounds like a love song and the wine is cheap.

Our apartment is located in Entrevaux, a small town in the department Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, 43 miles from Nice, in the foothills of the French Alps. To get there you can take the train from Nice or go by car on the D 6202, both of which follow the winding Var River whose milky, sediment-rich water gushes from the high mountains through steep gorges toward the coast where it empties into the blue water of the Mediterranean. As you get closer to Entrevaux the valley opens onto fields and meadows where the people have long enjoyed the benefits of the Var’s rich minerals that the river deposited during floods on the low-lying land. Gardens and orchards have sprung up on the south side of the river while terraced olive groves cover the hillside on the north. Beneficial as the floods were, they brought with it destruction which was only topped when the Saracens swept through the area in the 10th century. It was then that the citizens decided to relocate from the fertile land by the river to a huge rock that is surrounded on three sides by the Var. On the forth side rises a steep cliff upon which stands a citadel. Nature and man have truly worked together here to create a unique place in a dramatic setting.

The houses of Entrevaux crowd behind a well-preserved wall whose turrets and guard towers speak of a time when France and Savoy battled for its possession. A bridge spans the Var and lets the visitor enter the town through the Porte Royale past the old prison and the new tourist office. The visitor can follow any of the three narrow lanes that meet at the l’Eglise de Notre Dame, which is built into the massive fortification that surrounds the town, more suggestive of a fort than a place of worship. And behind the church is the Porte d’Italie, pointing the way to Italy across another drawbridge and past thick walls with firing slits.

The breath of history clings to these stones because the citizens of Entrevaux have altered little. The fountains, arches, balconies, ancient doors and narrow stairways have not changed over the centuries. They are still used and many houses are lovingly restored. More and more façades are being painted in the pastel colors of Provence, yellow, ochre, pink; and the craftsman, who has carefully returned a house to its former splendor, puts his signature in a corner. But Entrevaux is a living town, not a museum, a town with small grocery stores, restaurants, craft shops and an elementary school; and its inhabitants have succeeded in comfortably living with their long history.

Above the cluster of red-tiled roofs rises the citadel, the masterpiece of Vauban, military engineer under Louis XIV. An impressive rampart with regularly spaced firing slits zigzags up the cliff. Across a drawbridge one enters into the spacious courtyard where once soldiers assembled and practiced the art of war. Steps lead high up into the commandant’s quarters from where the visitor has a spectacular view of the Var valley. Like a thin, silver thread the river meanders towards the sea and gets lost in the delicate haze of blue sky and green hills.
We had found a unique place and were ready for an adventure.

THE FRENCH LANGUAGE
I met a woman from Switzerland who told me that she speaks five languages and finds it impossible to learn French. Nobody who has ever tried to learn French will tell you it’s easy. The problem is the pronunciation, for example: son means his, sans means without, sang means blood, s’en means something, but it’s not translatable, and all these words are pronounced the same way. The French use a lot of different letters for their words, but there is a dearth of possibilities when it comes to the pronunciation. They think nothing of pronouncing five different words the same way. It’s as if the French exerted themselves in the written language and then lost steam when it came to the spoken language. That’s why they don’t pronounce most of the letters in a word. Eau, which means water and has three letters, is one sound when you say it: a long-suffering, pained ooooo. Who would think that has anything to do with water? On second thought it might. Imagine a French man or woman lost in the desert, dying of thirst. All they can think of is water; all they can utter is oooo. Even a non-French speaker coming across them would understand that oooo must mean water in the most urgent sense.

The Académie française, the pre-eminent French institution that deals with the French language, realized that there was a problem with French, but they tried to solve it the wrong way. They dabbled with the written language instead of the spoken one. They added an accent circonflexe here and a cédille there to make the written word conform to the impossible pronunciation of the spoken word. They should have thrown out a few nasals, done away with the liaison and passed a law that punishes everybody who speaks too fast.

I have tried to learn this difficult language for years and have struggled with different techniques: in the classroom—moderate success, with tapes—less than moderate success, submersion in France—no success. I have tried French TV also. As soon as we had our apartment furnished I bought a TV. Of course, Rudi and his German friends frowned upon it because in their view TV is the media for the uneducated, and I thus confirmed their suspicion that I, after having lived in the TV-crazy U.S. for thirty years, had succumbed to the laws of stupidity. But contrary to Rudi, I wanted to learn French and thought that listening to French speakers would help. It didn’t. Night after night my husband and I stared at the news and tried to catch a word here or there. I think my husband once in a while understood a sequence of two or three words while I never went beyond just one. When I asked him: what do they say, what do they say, he never told me, though. He just shrugged his shoulders and answered: I don’t know. Maybe three words here and there weren’t enough to figure out what the catastrophes on the nightly news were all about.

The only person I can understand on TV is Jacques Chirac, the former president. He speaks slowly, enunciates his words, pauses, smiles and gives you time to think about whether he just said sans or sang, and he uses simple words. Maybe that’s why he got elected to different posts for so many years. The French could finally understand one of their politicians. While the others fired away like rapid-fire machine guns he lingered over the French language like a man trying to convince his lover in the sweetest way possible to get undressed and go to bed with him. An approach like that would make an impression on the French. When he is interviewed on TV by one of these crazy reporters who assault him with a string of endless, breathless words he smiles at them indulgently. Then he straightens his posture, leans forward, lifts his hand in a gentle manner and seductively breathes Ecoutez—Listen—into the ear of the journalist. A delightful shiver runs down my spine and I am nearly in love with Chirac because he makes me believe in myself. He makes me believe that I know French!

My neighbor, Monsieur Wagner, doesn’t think that I know French. He is an ex-policeman from Nice and has retired in Entrevaux. I have tried out my French on him but I could tell that he wasn’t impressed. He definitely is not like Chirac, neither looks like him nor speaks like him. He doesn’t make me believe in my dream about speaking French. On the contrary, Monsieur Wagner is out to destroy it. After I had put much effort into learning French for several years, he told some friends of ours that he didn’t think I would ever be good at it. I still try to say the occasional French sentence to him when I meet him in the hallway but I am so nervous that I always have the wrong verb ending or I forget the verb altogether. Once I surprised him when he was nailing a ceramic nameplate on his door and I said doucement—gently. (He had already broken one.) I had converted an adjective into an adverb and had done it correctly. He didn’t expect it.

With other French people I am equally shy and insecure. I might go to the local store and manage to tell the owner, Didier, that I really like his lettuce. Then he throws a long sentence at me of which I might understand the first half but then get nervous again and lose the last half. The next time in the store I’ll just smile and say nothing out of fear of getting another long sentence. That’s why French submersion doesn’t work for me. If I could just get acquainted with Jacques Chirac I am sure I would progress fast!

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