that Speaks French

Of all the depressing novels I know, Jude the Obscure takes the prize for sustained doom and gloom. Don’t let the film mislead you; it is far too pretty. All those authentic Victorian sets (not to mention the delightfully authentic Kate Winslet) undermine the exposition of Jude’s law, that Sod and Murphy were incurable optimists, because if anything can go wrong it will, particularly when something might seem just for once to be going almost right. It is not Jude one loses patience with; it is his creator, for being so beastly to him. No wonder the nineteenth-century public hated it.

Jude is a country lad with an ambition to study at the University of Christminster, so he starts to teach himself Latin. He swiftly discovers that there is no one-to-one correspondence between English and Latin words, that a foreign language is not simply an alternative set of vocabulary but a wholly different way of putting thoughts together (something that the users of Internet translation services have not always understood). With characteristic determination (doomed, of course), Jude sets about the systematic exploration of Latin grammar and syntax.

I was thinking of Jude’s experience the other day while being lectured by one of those well-fed wiseacres who like to tell us there is no point learning foreign languages because soon everyone will know English. “What can he know of English who only English knows?” I muttered to myself, sotto voce. Those who do not take the trouble to study languages end up like the Monsieur Jourdan in Molière’s Le Bourgeoise Gentilhomme, who is amazed to learn that what he has been speaking all his life is prose.

More to the point, foreigners who learn English do not ipso facto stop talking Foreign. They may know English, and so understand what we tell them. They can say in English what they would like us to hear. But heaven knows what they are muttering about us in the privacy of their own tongues. I wonder how many people in Washington speak Farsi or read Shi’ite theology (though I have it on good authority that at the time of the Tehran Embassy hostage crisis in 1979, the State Department had a computer programmed to simulate the presumed mental processes of the Ayatollah Khomeini). The trouble with my well-fed wiseacre was that the voice he most liked the sound of was his own.

The swiftest method of learning Foreign is, they say, the Horizontal. It usually involves one-to-one tuition and is, in general, employed only in those colleges and universities that have a hearty appetite for protracted and expensive litigation. That said, I know someone who learned French in six weeks by adopting a suitably unclothed and recumbent posture, though the fact that he had come straight from twelve months learning Coptic in an Egyptian monastery may have whetted his whistle. I must say I have not tried it myself, and if I had, I would not be saying.

Wines, too, have their characteristic syntax. Let me introduce you to a red wine that certainly speaks French. It is the 2004 Côtes du Rhône from the well-known Burgundy shipper Charles Thomas (pronounced, of course, Sharl Tomah in the manner of Peter Sellers asking for a rhoom). It is available hereabouts for not much more than ten dollars.

This wine is constructed not in the languorous language of Proust, pursuing evanescent flavors of madeleine and fancy tea down long, convoluted corridors of memory. Rather, like Edith Piaf, it combines sweetness and husky pungency: “No, nothing of nothing. No, I not regret nothing, neither the well which one has done me, nor the bad, all this is for me well equal” (perhaps something does get lost in translation). The initial fruit leads to the tannins at the center of the taste with the inevitability of a well-made sentence. The weather has a lot to do with it; 2004 was not as spectacularly hot and dry as 2003, which produced astonishingly concentrated wines all across France. In 2004, it rained in August. The result is a wine that has both charm and a mind of its own—and plenty of alcohol. Taken with steak frites, it might even put you back on your feet (even if Hardy and his President of the Immortals knock you back down in the very next chapter). Santé!