Another half-week has now come to a close; as there is no school for small French children on Wednesdays, what for other people is the darkest mid-week hump is for me a semi-weekend. This particular subspecies of four-day week produces some charming effects: on Tuesday afternoons, teachers wish each other bon mercredi!; my attempts to teach my students the words “week” and “weekend” founder on their inability to comprehend a world in which schoolchildren go to class for five days in a row; and the government frequently cites as an achievement the fact that the children of France are no longer tired.
Monday and Tuesday also saw the small French children at their Socratic best. The linguistic naivety of my charges, I now realize, is but one manifestation of their larger to understand what it means that I am Canadian. Just as the students at École L’Arlesienne have difficulty reconciling being Canadian with speaking French, some students at École Rex believe that being Canadian is incompatible with living in France: one eight year-old asked me on Tuesday whether I returned home of an evening to Canada or to Beauvais.
Not quite as adorably befuddled as this question, but more satisfying to my latent megalomania was the remark of her classmate in response to my valiant attempts to coral the class into orderly participation: Le maître est grand! Il faut l’obéir!
A monument more lasting than bronze.
i In case you’re thinking of making a pilgrimage to see this rolling wonder of the modern world, at time of writing it runs on line 3, stopping at Délie on the way towards Saint-Lazare at 16h33 from Monday to Saturday.