Flirting With French by William Alexander Read Free Book Online Page B

determination to learn it? Let’s pick up the story after college, in a tale I call
    The Boy, the Girl, and the Cow;
    or, A Little French Is a Dangerous Thing
    In 1975, a year after graduating, jobless (thanks to my degree in English) and aimless but debt-free, as most college graduates were in those days, I bought an international youth hostel card and a student Eurail pass, stuffed a backpack, and spent the next several months traveling alone throughout Europe. My journey took me from Norway to Greece, a wonderful adventure when you’re young and single and have no agenda or timetable. The title of a popular guidebook of the era was
Europe on $10 a Day,
and back then it was possible, particularly if you slept mostly at youth hostels.
    Doing the hostel circuit, you tend to cross paths with people more than once, sometimes several countries and weeks apart, and you may even do a little traveling together, as solo travel can get lonely. Thus when I parted with Judy, a young Canadian whom I’d met in Norway and again by chance in Germany, we’d agreed to meet up once more in a few weeks to share a gustatory fantasy that it turned out we’d both secretly been harboring: one haute cuisine meal in a fine, white-tablecloth French restaurant before returning home. Judy and I had each saved up enough money for this by eating cheaply in cafeterias and sleeping on trains during our journeys.
    Lyon made for a convenient rendezvous and, as one of the culinary centers of France, not a bad place at all to have our ultimate French dining experience. The stakes were high: three months of travel, just one chance, one splurge. Everything had to be perfect. We carefully selected the restaurant, made a reservation, and put on the best clothes we could dig out of our backpacks. For me that meant a ratty light brown corduroy jacket and shiny vinyl shoes (the first rainfall had washed the faux-leather coating off these lightweight, backpackable shoes); for Judy, a red-and-white checkered skirt that—she shrieked with horror when she put it on—made her look like a walking Italian tablecloth. Dressed for puttin’ on the ritz, we headed out to dine at the very unfashionable hour of 7 p.m.
    Things were going swimmingly until I opened the menu and realized that I’d left my pocket French-English dictionary back at the hostel. No matter; I figured I remembered enough French from high school to at least order dinner, and besides, I already knew what I wanted. My heart soared when I recognized
veau
on the menu. Although for some reason it was only served for two. “Come on, we’ve got to get this,” I told Judy, repeating what I’d read in a guidebook. “Veal is a specialty of this region. The calves are milk-fed and killed very young. You can’t get veal like this at home at any price.”
    “But what’s this
rognons
part?” The full name of the dish was
rognons de veau.
    “I don’t know. What’s the difference? It’s veal
something.
It probably describes the sauce or the way it’s cooked. I’ll ask the waiter.”
    Even at twenty-two I knew better than to ask a Frenchman—especially a French waiter—if he spoke English, which is considered rude and insulting. You should attempt to speak in French, no matter how bad your French might be, and hope you get a reply in English, but in this fancy restaurant, with the stakes high, the prices higher, and the mustachioed waiters straight out of central casting, my nerves got the better of me, and to Judy’s alarm and mine alike, I blurted out, “Do you speak English?” The only explanation I have for the reaction that followed was that the poor non-English-speaking fellow must have thought I said, “Do you sodomize your mother?”
    “Now you’ve done it,” Judy said, half laughing after he’d brusquely left the table. “Nice work.” Still, I was able to coax her into joining me in
rognons de veau
for two.
    “Something else?” Central Casting had asked in French when I placed