I have a confession to make: My entire mature life has been devoted in no small measure to avoiding French. I order a French fry and the hives boil up. I fly over France feeling queasy. A French restaurant makes me bristle. I do not drink French wine. This reaction is not the fault of France. It is mine alone.
It happened years ago while living in Nairobi, Kenya. The telephone rang in the middle of the night. NEWSWEEK’s Chief of Correspondents was on the line asking me whether I’d like to live in Paris. Did I speak French? “A little,” I told him (“Oui” and “Non” are a little, no?). And sooner than you can say grenouille, I was perched in an apartment on the Left Bank with a view of Notre Dame. Only problem was, I couldn’t communicate, and that, at the time, was the very essence of journalism.
That was how NEWSWEEK’s stockholders unwittingly transferred the present-day equivalent of $40,000 to the stockholders of Berlitz. Only trouble was, I failed. The lessons did not take. I was an F student from the words “bon jour,” and soon grew truculent in my “total immersion.” My hatred of all things French bloomed like a mushroom cloud. My teacher told me: “Monsieur MacPherson, you must speak!” I glowered at the blackboard. And so it went. I could not see the point. I did not like the French I’d met, and the whole thing about France looked…well, terribly overblown. I was too young to even think of food, let alone cuisine. Wine? No. The culture? It seemed so un-NOW. Women? OK, but mercenary claques, I thought, after I caught one leafing through my check stubs.
But I declared myself conversant and free of Berlitz. I could say “oui,” “non,” and “peut-etre,” and was ready to start work. The first story I was assigned–a medical breakthrough at a hospital in Lyon–required me to interview the chief surgeon. I lifted the telephone. I hated this phone. It had the shape, dimensions, and weight of a cinderblock. Dialing it for a two-minute conversation took three minutes. Sending telegrams across Paris was easier and more reliable. A party answered down the line in Lyon. I asked my questions. I hung up with an unsettled feeling. Suddenly I realized I had not interviewed the surgeon. I had spent the last half hour addressing the receptionist.
From that day forward, my Foreign Editor found stories that required my urgent presence alone in remote parts of equatorial Africa, until a space was found for me in a NEWSWEEK news bureau in a country where they really don’t speak any French–England. And life went on…
Until last week when we landed in Papeete, Tahiti. To my delight, some people even understood what I was saying. Unlimbering my French like a man with an axe, I chopped away; my children gaped at hearing whole sentences in a language they did not know I could speak. I booked a flight to the remote island of Huahine Nui, and reserved at a pension named Chez Henriette. All was set, all in French. We landed on the right island, and were met by a burly fellow with tattooed arms who seemed to be expecting us.
He pointed a thick finger at a pickup truck and we jumped in back. We bounced along a very odd direction on a dirt track at the side of the tiny coral airstrip by the sea, until we reached the end where we disembarked among what looked like Cargo Cult people camping out in tents and whatnot, flimsy shelters of canvas and gaily colored cloth pareus. The propeller airplane we had arrived on now flew low over our heads, saring us. I looked to see whether the others in the camp were on their knees in worship. I was relieved that they were not. I asked our driver in French, “Is this Chez Henriette?”
“There are two Chez Henriettes on Huahine,” he told me; I think he said that. He held up two thick fingers. “This is the motu Chez Henriette.”
“Oh,” I said in French. We stayed the night.
The following morning early we left the Cargo Cult people and went in search of the other Chez. It turned out to be near the island’s main village and port, a lovely and quite untouristy place that was just what we were looking for, and best of all, the islanders were preparing for their annual Heiva i Tahiti, or Bastille Day, with a dance. We found the eponymous Henriette in bed. She is elderly and suffers from rheumatism and a touch of gout and by her own admission was feeling poorly. She waved weakly in a direction. “Take the last bungalow on the right in front on the port,” I think she said, and a minute later we stooped to enter a hut of such charm and perfect ambiance, as we have not really seen since we stayed in Unawatuna, Sri Lanka. Somewhere, somehow, our mistaken French had led us right to paradise.
We soon found a rental car where rental cars are very hard to find; we negotiated the magasin for baguettes, cassoulet, and du vin, and we found a perfect strip of smooth sand under coconut palms with a view of blue waters and the outer reef that soon became our own private beach. We joined the dance, with a whole lot of hula hips and swaying grass skirts and brown-skinned boys shaking their bare knees with youthful vibrancy. Their laughter and common acceptance of the ridiculous were infectious enough altogether for me to take back almost every nasty English word I ever used about the French. From now on, it’s “Vive La France” (or Polynesie, anyhow)!
