A FRENCH FOURTH

Charles Trueheart

4    Louise and Henry speak French fluently; they are taught in French at school, and most of their friends are French. They move from language to language, seldom mixing them up, without effort or even awareness. This is a wonderful thing, of course. And our physical separation from our native land is not much of an issue. My wife and I are grateful every day for all that our children are not exposed to. American school shootings are a good object lesson for our children in the follies of the society we hold at a distance.

5    Naturally, we also want to remind them of reasons to take pride in being American and to try to convey to them what that means. It is a difficult thing to do from afar, and the distance seems more than just a matter of miles. I sometimes think that the stories we tell them must seem like Aesop’s (or La Fontaine’s) fables, myths with no fixed place in space or time. Still, connections can be made, lessons learned.

6     Last summer we spent a week with my brother and his family, who live in Concord, Massachusetts, and we took the children to the North Bridge to give them a glimpse of the American Revolution. We happened to run across a reenactment of the skirmish that launched the war, with everyone dressed up in three-cornered hats and cotton bonnets. This probably only confirmed to our goggle-eyed kids the make-believe quality of American history.

7    Six months later, when we were recalling the experience at the family dinner table here, I asked Louise what the Revolution had been about. She thought that it had something to do with the man who rode his horse from town to town. “Ah”, I said, satisfaction swelling in my breast, “and what was that man’s name?” “Gulliver?” Louise replied. Henry, for his part, knew that the Revolution was between the British and the Americans, and thought that it was probably about slavery.

8    As we pursued this conversation, though, we learned what the children knew instead. Louise told us that the French Revolution came at the end of the Enlightenment, when people learned a lot of ideas, and one was that they didn’t need kings to tell them what to think or do. On another occasion, when Henry asked what makes a person a “junior” or a “II” or a “III”, Louise helped me answer by bringing up kings like Louis Quatorze and Quinze and Seize; Henry riposted with Henry VIII.

9    I can’t say I worry much about our children’s European frame of reference. There will be plenty of time for them to learn America’s pitifully brief history and to find out who Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt were. Already they know a great deal more than I would have wished about Bill Clinton.