 |
| My main inspiration for keeping up French, a glorious three-volume illustrated Dictionnaire Quillet de la Langue Française (Paris: Librairie Aristide Quillet, 1948). I have judiciously opened the first volume (A through E) to the entry for Matériel de Chimie. All three volumes were for sale a few years ago at the St Michael's College library within the University of Toronto, as undesired and lightly water-damaged, I think going for just 0.50 CAD each. Although it will not likely be possible to use French much in Estonia, I entertain the fond hope of in future occasionally chatting in French with our Tallinn prelate (the "Apostolic Administrator of Estonia"), should he prove willing to have Tartu-based laity visit him. (YouTube explorations do reveal that his Estonian is fine, with just a light trace of either his Basque origins or his Parisian (École nationale des ponts et chaussées) pre-ecclesial education. So perhaps he will not wish to use French?) - Further, I have the ambition of getting some big, fat, hardcover Les Misérables, to be read with the help both of Quillet and of an accompanying, as yet unpurchased, (paperback?) English or Estonian translation. I have the impression that Victor Hugo (1802-1885), in his extravagance, his prolixity, his colour, and his love of philosophizing, is a reasonable parallel to our own A.H. Tammsaare (1878-1940). The resemblances may, admittedly, be coincidental: I suspect Tammsaare lacked French, and took instead as his own stylistic mentors Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. - Also shown is a rather duller item, my 1978/1982 Collins English-to-French/French-to-English dictionary.] |
Quality assessment:
On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 3/5. Justification: Kmo had relatively little to say this time (though he did manage to say it without undue skimping).
Revision history:
All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné, a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 5 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 2 hours.
- 20180207T0307Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo finished converting his outline into full-sentences prose. He added an appropriate graphic. - He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, ... .
- 20180207T0045Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo, running now almost 25 hours late, had time to upload a polished point-form outline. He hoped to finish converting this into full-sentences prose over the coming 2 hours, through a series of incremental uploads.
[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]
Trying as usual to be helpful to my readers, I once again post on languages. The "analytical philosophy of perception, action, and subjectivity" is going to have to wait until some later point this February.
Many months ago, I wrote at length on some subtle points concerning the study of Estonian. I am glad to see that my set of Estonian-study guidelines has attracted some interest in Russia. Have I not thereby, as a diaspora Estonian, been helping an ancient enemy? No. Respectable countries like my native Canada (where I am currently still living, as a consequence of the now-remote Hitler war) and my ancestral Estonia (where I hope to be resettling late in 2018) expend diplomatic resources on not having enemies. So I decline to categorize my presumed SVR or FSB case officers as hostile. If they are to be categorized at all, then let them be termed, modestly and simply, "Occasionally Difficult Individuals". If my remarks on language study have been inducing one or two of them to learn more Estonian, international understanding will have been promoted.
I have already made some remarks here at blogspot regarding Biblical Hebrew.
Some day, perhaps soon, I shall have to set down a few guidelines and tips for the study of Latin.
And last week I put down a few ideas that might be mildly helpful for persons striving, as I myself have to be striving this month, to resuscitate their German.
With so many languages already in play here through blogspot postings, it seems now helpful to reproduce a handful of inspirational paragraphs on French, from post-Victorian and interwar British diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson (1886-1968). I am hoping that quite apart from helping my readers within Russian offialdom (French will matter to them, somewhat as Estonian itself does), I will hereby be doing a small service for a few eventual readers in Catholic education - "back home", perhaps at the K-through-Nine private school which is the Tartu Katoliku Hariduskeskus (http://www.katoliku.edu.ee/esileht), and here in Ontario, perhaps at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College. (Progress at the College may be tracked through such things as https://www.seatofwisdom.ca/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_Seat_of_Wisdom_Academy. The recent advancement to "College", from the more humble rank of "Academy", is good news.)
My posting on French, in which my personal skills are nothing special, has to be modest in scope. I seek to raise my readers' sights to the appropriate, distantly shimmering, peaks not through writing in my own person, but through quoting an appropriate authority.
My chosen authority Sir Harold Nicolson is remembered for two things. He was among those in British public life who warned against the Reich when complacency was still fashionable, through supporting Churchill against the Chamberlain faction. Further, he, with his wife Vita Sackville-West, created the gardens at Sissinghurst, now thriving under the National Trust.
But Sir Harold Nicolson deserves also to be remembered as a homourist. By the merest accident, I have in recent months picked up, cheaply, Nicolson's book of faux-memoirs, Some People. In my own battered paperback, this is from Pan Books in 1947. But Nicolson first published his slim, yet in spots still hysterically funny, volume in 1927, at Constable.
The very concept of a faux-memoir is wittily audacious. Nicolson averts that he is writing down things he himself experienced, and yet that he is on occasion departing from strict facts. Indeed I would guess that it was only by writing in this way, with this particular disavowal, that he could satisfy Foreign Office non-disclosure requirements.
Before reproducing what Nicolson has to say regarding the study of French, I will give two short passages establishing in a preliminary way his command of nuance, and with it his command of understated professional humour.
(1) Here is his so-bland description of The Kind of Thing One Is Supposed To Know About Ottoman Personages (from the chapter on "Professor Malone"; this is on pp. 136-137 of the copy in my possession):
I was startled [while in the box at the opera house] by a sudden whispered question from Mrs Lintot [she was worried about protocol, with a worrisomely eminent figure about to join her party]: "Tell me quick, do I courtsey to Essad Pasha?" I have a fair working knowledge of Balkan history, and in general my memory and my associations function with average speed. But I had not been expecting this question: I could scrape up but the foggiest ideas of what had happened to Essad during the War: I had almost forgotten his existence: I wasn't very sure even whether on the departure of the Price of Wied he had or had not declared himself Mpret.
(What on earth is an "Mpret"? I guess this is the kind of thing on which you are supposed to be Duly Briefed, as a matter of mere General Knowledge.)
(2) And here is his projection of British professional diplomatic xenophobia (in a toilet-humour aside from the opening chapter of the book; this is on p. 10 of the copy in my possession):
/.../ in 1919 I spent a whole week in that [Budapest] railway station, being attached to General Smuts' mission to Bela Kun. We were not allowed, while the negotiations continued, to enter the town. We did our work, we held our conferences, in the dining-car of our own train. It stood there inside the station - a brown international object straight from Paris.
In the rather longer passages to which I wish now to draw attention, Sir Harold Nicolson recounts the vigorous preparations he had to make in French, in anticipation, as a fresh Oxford graduate, of his upcoming Foreign Office entry examination. It was not back then as it now perhaps is in Canadian public life, that if one's native language happens to be English, one contents oneself with two years of university French, and thereupon takes one's chances in front of the reporters' none-too-demanding microphones. No: when Nicolson prepared himself for a diplomatic career, French was taught intensively, by private tutors in private boarding establishments, right on the Continent, and quite outside University walls, and with no holds now barred in the ruthless quest for mastery.
In what follows, I will take the liberty of translating [in square brackets, like this], even though many readers will find such translating an affront to their own linguistic attainments. Also, I will take the liberty of underlining, like this, what seem to me specially fine passages, getting to the very core of my current pedadogical theme:
/.../ The flat which [Foreign Office circa-1908 language coach Mlle "Jeanne de Hénaut"] shared, in tolerant but ill-masked disdain, with her mother was on the top floor, the fifth floor, of number 174 rue de la Pompe, Paris, XVIe. On the street level there was a glass door, the smell of beeswax, the concierge Madame Stefjane ("Mais elle exagère, cette femme, On ne s'appelle pas ainsi") ["But she is exaggerating, that woman. One does not refer to oneself in that manner"], and a little lift with the most menacing instructions printed on a card. Coleridge Kennard wrote a prose poem about that lift (it was during his symbolist period), which appeared in the Westminster Gazette. It took one up the five stories with a persistent grunt of protest, and, when one had clanged the iron gate and pressed the push marked "descente", it would sink down with a sudden, and rather pointed, exhalation of relief. The same dutiful hostility was noticeable in the manner of Madame Stefjane herself. In front of the door to Jeanne's flat there was a horse-hair mat under which, on the rare occasions on which any of us dared to venture out after 9 P.M., Jeanne would hide the latchkey. "Je mettrai la clef pour vous sous le paillasson" ["I am going to put the key under the mat for you"], she would say, in the tone of Catherine the Second sending Potemkin on a mission to Vienna.
/.../
We all, in those days, came to work for a month or so at a time under the enigmatic discipline of Jeanne. One could go to Paris for a bit, and then to Hanover, and then to Siena or St. Sebastian, and then back to Paris. But as French and German were the two most important languages, we tended to spend most of those preparatory two years either with Jeanne in Paris or with Lili and Hermine at Hanover. The Foreign Office examination was held in August of every year, and we inclined generally to pass the last three months at rue de la Pompe. There was something in the discipline of that establishment which aided that last summer sprint: besides, one could keep up one's German with Herr Schmidt, and there were Spaniards and Italians also who arrived at strange hours at 174. It was a strenuous existence.
/.../
/.../ the models of what we should, and after all could, become were kept constantly before us: they had been men fashioned in our shape, leading the lives we led, sitting at the very table we then surrounded. And now they were gods: nay more, they were in the Foreign Office. Of course we were impressed: we had never, somehow, seen ourselves and our impending career from so cosmic an angle: and with this sudden realisation of our privilege came a fiery sense of responsibility towards ourselves, towards our country, towards Europe, towards posterity, and predominantly towards Jeanne herself. Deliberately, she exploited the impression thus created: whilst keeping before our eyes the Olympian heights attained by the successful, she would indicate at moments that for those who did not conform there was the Maleboge of failure; there was even the possibility that they might be asked to leave. The dread of such a disgrace, the fear of the dark and voiceless limbo into which the unsuccessful were plunged, fired our nerves and galvanized our muscles into prodigies of endurance. We accepted without a murmur the squalor and discomfort of our surroundings. It never occurred to us to protest or to escape. We would rise at five and drop exhausted to our beds at midnight: and it was in vain that around and below us the delights of Paris glittered to the throb of Circean violins.
The passionate though restrained emotionalism with which Jeanne flug herself into the task of our education produced, as I have said, a phenomenal change of values. We began to share her fakir-like, her hypnotic, powers of concentration; we also began to feel that nothing in this life or after was of any import except the examination: mesmerized by Jeanne's incantations, by the glittering crystal of her own conviction, we abandoned to her our will, our liberty, and our reason. /.../
/.../
/.../ [The "cahier"] was a notebook in which were inscribed the most brilliant compositions of her most brilliant pupils. It was the palladium of the establishment. To be included in the "cahier" became the devouring ambition of us all: in the flare of that aspiration such University honours as we had, or had not, attained waned into insignificance. She kept it in tissue-paper. When one had qualified or almost qualified for inclusion, she would bring it with her to the morning lesson. She would arrive with her crocodile-skin writing-case, her travelling clock, and the little fountain pen with the green ink, and one's ear would catch with greed and apprehension the rustle of the tissue paper which enshrined the "cahier". She would not mention the latter, but put it down on the chair beside her; and, in general, she would take it away with her when the hour was over. But one felt that one had at last been accorded a glimpse of the Holy Grail.
/.../
Her whole life, her whole existence, was concentrated upon her work. She believed sincerely that God had granted to her the mission to coach young Englishmen for the Diplomatic Service, and her flaming faculty of self-deception had invested this mission with a gigantic import. She was an uneducated woman. The foundation of her knowledge was the encyclopaedia of Larousse. She had at one period been through every word in that dictionary and evolved therefrom a little yellow book in which she analyzed (quite inconclusively) the genders of all French substantives. Of literature she knew nothing: "Pour moi," she would announce when the conversation led her into deep waters, "il n'y a que Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Racine - et rien d'autre." ["For me, there is nothing but Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Racine - nothing else at all."] And there was nothing more to be said. And yet with all this she had an amazing sense of the French language, of the frigidity of the thing and its balance. Her intuitions, at moments, amounted to genius. She knew instinctively just the sort of phrasing and idiom which would convey to the examiners the impression that one possessed "toutes les aisances de la languge française" ["the full resources and facilities of the French language"].
And predominantly, perhaps, there was her passionate interest in the examination for which we were working. She could tell one the exact marks which had been obtained in any subject by any given candidate in the last ten years. She believed with an unswerving faith that no one could succeed unless they had been through the mill of the rue de la Pompe. She resolutely ignored the fact that French represented only a tenth of the marks required, or that there were other teachers in other places who could teach, and actually had taught, the language. The brilliant Monsieur Turquet of Scoones she could not absolutely ignore; but she got round him: she recommended to her pupils "une légère couche de Turquet avant de venir ici" ["a light overcoating of Turquet before coming here"], by which M. Turquet was relegated to his place.
I have to end on a rather sad note, reproducing Sir Harold Nicolson's final recollections of his old teacher and her circle, from a time at which Mlle "Jeanne de Hénaut's" civilized European order had begun breaking down:
It was not until after the War that I saw her again. I had come to Paris for the Peace Conference and one of my first visits was to the rue de la Pompe. Jeanne received me in the drawing-room. Her mother had died some time in 1915. She had since the War had no pupils. She was looking ill and underfed. In comparison with the old Jeanne she appeared a little shy and uncertain. The former jet-like glitter was gone. As I was leaving I asked her if she had minded the air-raids. She admitted that she had minded them terribly. "But of course," I said, "you could go down to the ground floor - in a tall house like this there cannot have been so great a danger." The eyes flashed for a moment with their old fire: she drew herself up with the old Theodora manner: "Non, monsieur!" she exclaimed in her resonant baritone, "Non, monsieur! La cousine germaine du Général Mangin couche au cinquième." ["No, monsieur! A first cousin of General Mangin goes to bed on the Fifth."]
I did not see her again: she died soon afterwards; and in 1919, meeting General Mangin at a dinner-party I told him about Jeanne and the air-raids, thinking he would be diverted by the story. He was not diverted. He failed, I think, to observe in it anything of pathos or of humour. He drew himself rigidly to attention. He struck his chest so that all the medals thereon danced like harebells upon the Downs. And then he started shouting "Ah ça!" he shouted. "Ah ça! C'est bien elle: c'est bien la France!" ["Ah that! Yes, that's her, all right: yes, that's France."]
On recovering from my astonishment at this outburst, I reflected that, after all, the General might be right.
[This is the end of the current blog posting.]
My posting on French, in which my personal skills are nothing special, has to be modest in scope. I seek to raise my readers' sights to the appropriate, distantly shimmering, peaks not through writing in my own person, but through quoting an appropriate authority.
****
My chosen authority Sir Harold Nicolson is remembered for two things. He was among those in British public life who warned against the Reich when complacency was still fashionable, through supporting Churchill against the Chamberlain faction. Further, he, with his wife Vita Sackville-West, created the gardens at Sissinghurst, now thriving under the National Trust.
But Sir Harold Nicolson deserves also to be remembered as a homourist. By the merest accident, I have in recent months picked up, cheaply, Nicolson's book of faux-memoirs, Some People. In my own battered paperback, this is from Pan Books in 1947. But Nicolson first published his slim, yet in spots still hysterically funny, volume in 1927, at Constable.
The very concept of a faux-memoir is wittily audacious. Nicolson averts that he is writing down things he himself experienced, and yet that he is on occasion departing from strict facts. Indeed I would guess that it was only by writing in this way, with this particular disavowal, that he could satisfy Foreign Office non-disclosure requirements.
Before reproducing what Nicolson has to say regarding the study of French, I will give two short passages establishing in a preliminary way his command of nuance, and with it his command of understated professional humour.
(1) Here is his so-bland description of The Kind of Thing One Is Supposed To Know About Ottoman Personages (from the chapter on "Professor Malone"; this is on pp. 136-137 of the copy in my possession):
I was startled [while in the box at the opera house] by a sudden whispered question from Mrs Lintot [she was worried about protocol, with a worrisomely eminent figure about to join her party]: "Tell me quick, do I courtsey to Essad Pasha?" I have a fair working knowledge of Balkan history, and in general my memory and my associations function with average speed. But I had not been expecting this question: I could scrape up but the foggiest ideas of what had happened to Essad during the War: I had almost forgotten his existence: I wasn't very sure even whether on the departure of the Price of Wied he had or had not declared himself Mpret.
(What on earth is an "Mpret"? I guess this is the kind of thing on which you are supposed to be Duly Briefed, as a matter of mere General Knowledge.)
(2) And here is his projection of British professional diplomatic xenophobia (in a toilet-humour aside from the opening chapter of the book; this is on p. 10 of the copy in my possession):
/.../ in 1919 I spent a whole week in that [Budapest] railway station, being attached to General Smuts' mission to Bela Kun. We were not allowed, while the negotiations continued, to enter the town. We did our work, we held our conferences, in the dining-car of our own train. It stood there inside the station - a brown international object straight from Paris.
****
In the rather longer passages to which I wish now to draw attention, Sir Harold Nicolson recounts the vigorous preparations he had to make in French, in anticipation, as a fresh Oxford graduate, of his upcoming Foreign Office entry examination. It was not back then as it now perhaps is in Canadian public life, that if one's native language happens to be English, one contents oneself with two years of university French, and thereupon takes one's chances in front of the reporters' none-too-demanding microphones. No: when Nicolson prepared himself for a diplomatic career, French was taught intensively, by private tutors in private boarding establishments, right on the Continent, and quite outside University walls, and with no holds now barred in the ruthless quest for mastery.
In what follows, I will take the liberty of translating [in square brackets, like this], even though many readers will find such translating an affront to their own linguistic attainments. Also, I will take the liberty of underlining, like this, what seem to me specially fine passages, getting to the very core of my current pedadogical theme:
/.../ The flat which [Foreign Office circa-1908 language coach Mlle "Jeanne de Hénaut"] shared, in tolerant but ill-masked disdain, with her mother was on the top floor, the fifth floor, of number 174 rue de la Pompe, Paris, XVIe. On the street level there was a glass door, the smell of beeswax, the concierge Madame Stefjane ("Mais elle exagère, cette femme, On ne s'appelle pas ainsi") ["But she is exaggerating, that woman. One does not refer to oneself in that manner"], and a little lift with the most menacing instructions printed on a card. Coleridge Kennard wrote a prose poem about that lift (it was during his symbolist period), which appeared in the Westminster Gazette. It took one up the five stories with a persistent grunt of protest, and, when one had clanged the iron gate and pressed the push marked "descente", it would sink down with a sudden, and rather pointed, exhalation of relief. The same dutiful hostility was noticeable in the manner of Madame Stefjane herself. In front of the door to Jeanne's flat there was a horse-hair mat under which, on the rare occasions on which any of us dared to venture out after 9 P.M., Jeanne would hide the latchkey. "Je mettrai la clef pour vous sous le paillasson" ["I am going to put the key under the mat for you"], she would say, in the tone of Catherine the Second sending Potemkin on a mission to Vienna.
/.../
We all, in those days, came to work for a month or so at a time under the enigmatic discipline of Jeanne. One could go to Paris for a bit, and then to Hanover, and then to Siena or St. Sebastian, and then back to Paris. But as French and German were the two most important languages, we tended to spend most of those preparatory two years either with Jeanne in Paris or with Lili and Hermine at Hanover. The Foreign Office examination was held in August of every year, and we inclined generally to pass the last three months at rue de la Pompe. There was something in the discipline of that establishment which aided that last summer sprint: besides, one could keep up one's German with Herr Schmidt, and there were Spaniards and Italians also who arrived at strange hours at 174. It was a strenuous existence.
/.../
/.../ the models of what we should, and after all could, become were kept constantly before us: they had been men fashioned in our shape, leading the lives we led, sitting at the very table we then surrounded. And now they were gods: nay more, they were in the Foreign Office. Of course we were impressed: we had never, somehow, seen ourselves and our impending career from so cosmic an angle: and with this sudden realisation of our privilege came a fiery sense of responsibility towards ourselves, towards our country, towards Europe, towards posterity, and predominantly towards Jeanne herself. Deliberately, she exploited the impression thus created: whilst keeping before our eyes the Olympian heights attained by the successful, she would indicate at moments that for those who did not conform there was the Maleboge of failure; there was even the possibility that they might be asked to leave. The dread of such a disgrace, the fear of the dark and voiceless limbo into which the unsuccessful were plunged, fired our nerves and galvanized our muscles into prodigies of endurance. We accepted without a murmur the squalor and discomfort of our surroundings. It never occurred to us to protest or to escape. We would rise at five and drop exhausted to our beds at midnight: and it was in vain that around and below us the delights of Paris glittered to the throb of Circean violins.
The passionate though restrained emotionalism with which Jeanne flug herself into the task of our education produced, as I have said, a phenomenal change of values. We began to share her fakir-like, her hypnotic, powers of concentration; we also began to feel that nothing in this life or after was of any import except the examination: mesmerized by Jeanne's incantations, by the glittering crystal of her own conviction, we abandoned to her our will, our liberty, and our reason. /.../
/.../
/.../ [The "cahier"] was a notebook in which were inscribed the most brilliant compositions of her most brilliant pupils. It was the palladium of the establishment. To be included in the "cahier" became the devouring ambition of us all: in the flare of that aspiration such University honours as we had, or had not, attained waned into insignificance. She kept it in tissue-paper. When one had qualified or almost qualified for inclusion, she would bring it with her to the morning lesson. She would arrive with her crocodile-skin writing-case, her travelling clock, and the little fountain pen with the green ink, and one's ear would catch with greed and apprehension the rustle of the tissue paper which enshrined the "cahier". She would not mention the latter, but put it down on the chair beside her; and, in general, she would take it away with her when the hour was over. But one felt that one had at last been accorded a glimpse of the Holy Grail.
/.../
Her whole life, her whole existence, was concentrated upon her work. She believed sincerely that God had granted to her the mission to coach young Englishmen for the Diplomatic Service, and her flaming faculty of self-deception had invested this mission with a gigantic import. She was an uneducated woman. The foundation of her knowledge was the encyclopaedia of Larousse. She had at one period been through every word in that dictionary and evolved therefrom a little yellow book in which she analyzed (quite inconclusively) the genders of all French substantives. Of literature she knew nothing: "Pour moi," she would announce when the conversation led her into deep waters, "il n'y a que Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Racine - et rien d'autre." ["For me, there is nothing but Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Racine - nothing else at all."] And there was nothing more to be said. And yet with all this she had an amazing sense of the French language, of the frigidity of the thing and its balance. Her intuitions, at moments, amounted to genius. She knew instinctively just the sort of phrasing and idiom which would convey to the examiners the impression that one possessed "toutes les aisances de la languge française" ["the full resources and facilities of the French language"].
And predominantly, perhaps, there was her passionate interest in the examination for which we were working. She could tell one the exact marks which had been obtained in any subject by any given candidate in the last ten years. She believed with an unswerving faith that no one could succeed unless they had been through the mill of the rue de la Pompe. She resolutely ignored the fact that French represented only a tenth of the marks required, or that there were other teachers in other places who could teach, and actually had taught, the language. The brilliant Monsieur Turquet of Scoones she could not absolutely ignore; but she got round him: she recommended to her pupils "une légère couche de Turquet avant de venir ici" ["a light overcoating of Turquet before coming here"], by which M. Turquet was relegated to his place.
I have to end on a rather sad note, reproducing Sir Harold Nicolson's final recollections of his old teacher and her circle, from a time at which Mlle "Jeanne de Hénaut's" civilized European order had begun breaking down:
It was not until after the War that I saw her again. I had come to Paris for the Peace Conference and one of my first visits was to the rue de la Pompe. Jeanne received me in the drawing-room. Her mother had died some time in 1915. She had since the War had no pupils. She was looking ill and underfed. In comparison with the old Jeanne she appeared a little shy and uncertain. The former jet-like glitter was gone. As I was leaving I asked her if she had minded the air-raids. She admitted that she had minded them terribly. "But of course," I said, "you could go down to the ground floor - in a tall house like this there cannot have been so great a danger." The eyes flashed for a moment with their old fire: she drew herself up with the old Theodora manner: "Non, monsieur!" she exclaimed in her resonant baritone, "Non, monsieur! La cousine germaine du Général Mangin couche au cinquième." ["No, monsieur! A first cousin of General Mangin goes to bed on the Fifth."]
I did not see her again: she died soon afterwards; and in 1919, meeting General Mangin at a dinner-party I told him about Jeanne and the air-raids, thinking he would be diverted by the story. He was not diverted. He failed, I think, to observe in it anything of pathos or of humour. He drew himself rigidly to attention. He struck his chest so that all the medals thereon danced like harebells upon the Downs. And then he started shouting "Ah ça!" he shouted. "Ah ça! C'est bien elle: c'est bien la France!" ["Ah that! Yes, that's her, all right: yes, that's France."]
On recovering from my astonishment at this outburst, I reflected that, after all, the General might be right.
[This is the end of the current blog posting.]
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