I admit it-I did it to get back at Paris.
Well, maybe to get back to Paris. Let me put it this way: I loved Paris, but I got awfully lost there. I waited in the dark for trains that never came. In restaurants, I asked for the check and got the menu instead-which was awkward, since I'd already eaten. I wandered wearily through museums I never intended to visit, because I'd taken the wrong bus.
Paris embarrassed me.
So when I got home, I got my revenge: I enrolled in a French class. I'd show Paris.
Our teacher was a lovely, animated woman given to flowing scarves and rapturous monologues about wine and cheese. Each night, she'd introduce a new topic. Most of the time, I could hang in there pretty well. My pronunciation was awful, and my throat always hurt, since I was exercising that hangy-down thing over my tongue for the very first time, the one that I normally only use when I've got a popcorn hull stuck in there, or when I'm teasing a dog. But I fancied I was picking up the language quickly, at least when compared to a few unfortunate students who took to it like a typewriter to water. Every few weeks, seemingly at random, one or two reasonably intelligent people would throw up their hands and sink, never to be heard from again.

With final-exam night approaching, I studied furiously. I practiced until my throat was practically showering sparks. I'd done fine during the semester; I had nothing to worry about.
On exam night, only five students showed up. We sat in a neat little row in front of our teacher. I was at one end. She began with me.
Immediately, I screwed up. She asked me a simple question about a preposition: "How would you say, 'it's in front of me'?" And I blanked. Just blanked. My mind whirred. I kept thinking derrier, but I knew that meant behind, because that's a funny way to say "butt," and it always makes me giggle. I couldn't stop thinking about derrier. I was in brainlock. I sweated. I laughed. I coughed. Finally an eager, annoying student helped me out. Devant, she chirped. I almost slapped my forehead. Of course! We'd said it a hundred times. How could I forget devant?
Then the teacher proceeded down the line of students, drilling each one on a preposition. In. On. Over. They rattled them off like the days of the week, like the ABC's. She finished with the row, then came back around to me. I swelled with anticipation at all the prepositions she hadn't covered yet. I knew them. Ask me anything!
Instead, she asked me to invent a sentence using the past participle of a verb ending in -ir. I stammered. I stalled. She'd changed gears on me. In fact, she'd changed cars on me. My face reddened. This wasn't fair. But I ground through the problem and spat out a workable sentence, my palms dripping. She moved on to the next student. She asked him to invent a sentence using a different verb ending in -ir, which might as well have been the same question. Not fair, not fair, not fair, I chanted silently to myself.
It went on this way for the next three hours, and it wasn't pretty. The professor worked in a neat machine-gun pattern from her left to her right. The people down at the other end of the row had it made-they could see the subject coming a mile away. But poor me, I'd just be getting the hang of giving directions to Versailles, and suddenly she'd ask me if I'd seen any good movies lately. Mon dieu! I was the little engine car, frantically changing tracks while all the others trailed happily behind me.
As the evening went by, le professeur asked more and more questions entirely in French. Suddenly, the subtleties of the language seemed colossal. Did she say óu, as in "where," or ou as in "or"? My ears got tired. At times, I had no idea what she was asking; all the words were beginning to sound alike. All I could do was look at her open-mouthed, as if my brain had been quietly removed by aliens.
I passed the exam. I did not pass with flying colors; they flapped and flapped, but never flew. I did get an A in the class, however. Le professeur, bless her heart, gave us all A's just for showing up.
Stinging from that night, I've developed a theory about French: I am now convinced that the entire language only consists of ten words. Each word can be spelled hundreds-perhaps thousands-of different ways, but is always pronounced the same. For instance, there seem to be hundreds of words that are pronounced "puh," a sound we English-speakers use to express disgust. In French, it means, among other things, "I can" (je peux), "a little bit" (un peu), and "fear" (peur). So my problem with that exam, I now see, was that I was thinking on too large a scale. I should have been sitting there, listening to the teacher's questions, thinking, "Now, in which order did she put the ten words that time?" This would have simplified things.
My goal now is to figure out exactly what the ten words are. If I can do that, I will have cracked the code.
French makes a lot out of a little. There's something to be said for that. Consider Ratatouille, the French stew that's made from whatever vegetable bits you've accumulated over the course of a week. Boil it, spice it up, and it's dinner. It's amazing what you can do with old bean stems and peapods.
And then there's France itself, a relatively small country girded by Moors and Prussians and mountains and seas. Of course they learned to recycle. There were entire centuries when they couldn't get out. No surprise they tinkered with a few words, and improvised a language.
Still, Paris lures me, with its wrought-iron balconies and its strange little sandwiches. I persevere. I go on trying to learn French so that one afternoon, I'll walk into the Musée d'Orsay because I wanted to go there, because I planned to go there, because I took the right doggone bus. Maybe I'm too old to learn, but I'm thinking, how hard can it be? So many buses. So many museums.
So few words.