Marchons, Marchons...

Happy Bastille Day!

In middle school and freshman year high school, I was in "honors French," which meant I was on a fast-track compared to your typical French class. It was the first time the program was offered, and I had basically the same classmates for three years, so we developed deep friendships and lots of in-jokes.

For instance, "C'est chouette, le Guignol!" which means, literally, "It's cool, the puppet!" This was a line in one of our dialogues, and the absurdity of the phrase coupled with the odd sentence structure made it an instant hit with us francobrainiacs. I still say it, and my friends Emily and Lauren love it; when Lauren tries to repeat it, it always comes out "Chez Sweat, le Geen-ole." I've given up trying to correct her. Another was "C'est fromage, mon ami." ("That's cheese, friend.") -- a seventh-grade pun on "C'est domage, mon ami." ("I'm sorry, friend.").

At the end of eighth grade, the French Consulate asked our class to do a series of projects on the French Revolution in honor of the Bicentennaire, which would be filmed and shown on French television. We were giddy at the prospect of being on TV, even in a different country, so of course we hammed it up as often as we could. Part of the deal was we had to sing various revolutionary songs, from the French national anthem, "La Marseillaise," to the more obscure "Ça Ira."

To this day, I remember all the words to the first verse of La Marseillaise. I don't remember much of Ça Ira, other than the repetitious first line and this anecdote: We learned the song (and others) by singing along with a tape. We'd sing it through with the tape, then our teacher would stop the tape and we'd sing it à cappella. However, there was some sort of narration or something in between each song, so right after the song ended some deep-voiced Frenchman would come on and say "Dans..." ("Dans" is pronounced with a nasal n and a silent s and means "in.") After a few times of hearing "Donc" before the teacher could hit stop, we started incorporating it into the song, singing "Magré les mutins tout réussira -- Dans!" ("In spite of the traitors, all will succeed -- In!")

It drove our teacher up the wall, because she was convinced we'd do it during the taping and get her in trouble. Of course we didn't do it, but since we hated our freshman class teacher -- having been unable to convince our middle school teacher to move to the high school with us -- anything that gave her conniptions was just fine with us.

Posted by Andrew Huff at July 14, 2003 01:59 PM