Thursday morning was spent in a full three hour conversation session at the breakfast table. There’s a French expression ne pas y aller par quatre chemins, which translates literally as “not going there by four roads”, but which corresponds to the English expression “not beat around the bush”. As in English, it’s almost always used in the negative: je n’y vais pas par quatre chemins = “I’m not going to beat around the bush”. Nobody ever declares “I’m going to bea around the bush”. But I feel like I need an expression close to the affirmative y aller par quatre chemins to describe my typical pattern in these sessions (and in the ones I have with my French professor at home). Something like “wide-ranging” in English, or perhaps “spiraling wildly out of control”.
For example, we started discussing how the village of Pezens had fared during Covid, and Éliane recounted how many shops had closed permanently, and the one business that opened just before Covid succeeded only by turning itself into a store that made and sold masks. I in turn related how Newton businesses had fared, and described the odd phenomenon of a coffee shop / flower store that opened right on my corner, some six or nine months after Covid started. This strayed into an enumeration of the several businesses that had operated in that building in the 20 years we’ve lived in the neighborhood, and ended up contrasting the otherwise residential area with the little commercial center half-a-mile further down the road. In that cluster of shops there is a Dunkin’ Donuts.
This lead to a discussion of the best French equivalent of “to dunk” (tremper), and after a brief detour to describe the “Time to make the donuts / I made the donuts” ad campaign of the 1980’s and to work out the best French translation of the current ad campaign “America runs on Dunkin”, an exploration of the multiple other senses of the word tremper. I already knew that in the passive (être trempé) it also means “to be soaking wet”, but before I could get to confirming if there was more to the word, I had to make sub-detour to explore the best way to say “standing out in the rain”. After all, how else does one end up soaking wet ? The problem is, as far as I can tell there’s no great equivalent verb for “to stand”. One can stand up (se lever), one can order a group to stand (debout les garcons), one can be standing (être debout), one can remain standing (rester debout), but there’s no verb with debout as its root. The best translation of “he stood out in the rain for an hour” is «il s’est tenu debout pendant une heure» where the verb tenir is more literally “to hold”. So this is really “he held himself erect for an hour”. After which, if it’s been raining, il est trempé.
Great, back to tremper. Definitely it means “to dunk”, and in the passive “to be drenched”, but central to the concept is liquid. If you’re making chocolate half-covered strawberries, you definitely use tremper to describe dipping the strawberry in the melted chocolate. But if you are making powdered donuts, you can’t use tremper to describe placing the plain donut in the powdered sugar. That’s more simply mettre (“to put”) or poser (“to place”). How about saupoudrer ? No, that’s only if you sprinkle the sugar over the donut. After the fact, is the donut trempé de sucre ? Absolutely not ! Again trempé is only for liquids. The donut is enrobé de sucre. Aha, but what about a breaded fish or veal cutlet ? Simple, there’s a special verb for that: paner (from pain = “bread”). And before you put the fish in the breadcrumbs, you coat it with flour (the action is fariner). So the sequence for breading fish (dip in flour, dip in egg mixture, dip in bread crumbs) becomes fariner, tremper, paner.
Ah, I say, but the verbs fariner and paner feel like they are cheating. They describe the end result, but are vague about the mechanism. Are you simply pressing the fish into the flour / bread-crumbs ? The cooking verb I know in English for this is “to dredge”, where you are physically pulling the fish filet through the powdered grain. Great, now I had to explain “to dredge” in French, which I tried to do by analogy with the other use of that verb in English, “to dredge the harbor” or “to dredge the canal”. But how do you explain what a dredge is ? Well, it’s sort of like plowing a field, right? You’ve got a blade, and you’re trying to cut a channel into the earth. So, what’s the word for “plow” in French ? Oh, oh ! I know this one. Three letters, starts with “SO_” … it’s, it’s… Yeah, that’s right, I’ve been doing French crossword puzzles for a couple years now, and this is a frequent crossword puzzle word. A little more wracking of my brain and I remember: soc ! Woot! … Except Éliane has never heard of the word soc.
So it’s back to the basic explanation of the thing I’m talking about, the tool with the blade that the farmer guides, pulled by a couple of oxen (damn, what’s the word for ox? It’s not vache and it’s not taureau, … oh right, boeuf [actually, it’s probably buffle]), to cut a trench in the ground. Well, it turns out the word for “a plow” is “la charrue”; the word soc is just a particular piece of the plow assembly, a sort of crossbar that turns the earth while cutting. (As an aside, in the afternoon I read the French Wikipedia page about the plow and its really fascinating technology). OK, we got “plow”. Back to dredging the harbor, you know, pulling a plow-like thing behind a boat to deepen an underwater channel. Éliane informs me that the French word for this is draguer, like a dragnet.
Great, I ask, can you use that verb to translate “dredge the fish in the flour” ? «J’ai dragué le poisson en farine» ? At this, Éliane exploded in laughter, and indeed I knew why. You see, the French verb draguer, which indeed literally means “to drag” in the sense of pulling a scoop through the channel or pulling a net through the water to catch fish, is a commonly used verb in the slang expression draguer les nanas or draguer les filles = “to cruise for chicks” or “to chase skirts”. So one would reveal rather particular sexual fetishes if one said «Hier soir, j’ai dragué les poissons dans ma cuisine». Bringing the morning’s lesson to a close, Éliane observed that the verb one uses to describe mollifying an angry lover, attendrir un amant, is also the right verb one uses when softening meat before cooking it. So while draguer les poissons is socially unacceptable, nobody will raise an eyebrow if your preference is attendrir le bœuf.
We took an hour break before lunch, which was a simple penne pasta à la bolognaise.
After lunch Éliane took me to Les grottes Limousis, a network of limestone caves in the nearby Black Mountains. It’s a well-managed national tourism site, as the caves contain many interesting geological formations and paleontological artifacts. There were lots of stalagmites, stalactites, and columns, as well as pools of water and thin streams of water falling down from the ceiling or trickling along the walls. It was all quite extensive and varied, but I wasn’t all that impressed by it first. I saw many similar installations in the Tarn valley region of south / central France back in 1992, as well as some in Israel years later, and so by now I am a bit jaded (no pun intended).
However the deepest part of the cave featured something new and spectacular, a formation known as le lustre d’aragonite (“the aragonite chandelier”). It’s a three-dimensional fractal structure of branching mineral spines, some 10 meters high and 4 meters wide. The largest known structure of its kind in the world, it formed over millions of years through a process similar to stalactite formation, with drops of water from the ceiling running down the structure and leaving behind small mineral deposits that accrete over time. However in this case, the flow was very, very slow, so instead of the simple broad spike growing downward, the microdroplets were somehow borne in all directions and the minerals grew out in all directions, ramifying and sub-ramifying over the years. The curators present this treasure in quite dramatic fashion, guiding groups of visitors into a dimly lit gallery and launching a coordinated music and light show that spot illuminates different parts of the large space in time with the classical organ music. As the show culminates, the lights turn to the lustre d’argonite and the group gets to see it shine out from the darkness without warning. It was quite imaginative and very well executed. Definitely vaut le voyage as they say.
One final coda to the story of the visit to the caves. Afterwards there was a small wine tasting in the gift shop followed by the opportunity to purchase any of the four wines. All four offerings, one red and three apéritifs, were branded with the Grotte Limousis logo and the name La Caverne de L’Ours, and the wine is actually aged in bottles stored in the constantly 14°C caves. The logo is a bear claw, because there are in the caves several preserved markings where ancient bears long ago scratched deep markings in the cave walls. The three apéritifs have irreverent names playing off this theme: Pipi d’ours (bear piss), Coucougnettes (cutesy name for testicles) and Galipettes (on the playground, “somersaults”; but in the adult bedroom, sexual gymnastics).
I tasted the red wine and one of the aperitifs. I won’t say they were terrible, but I’ll let you decide if that is because they were OK or because I am a polite visitor in a foreign country.
I was pretty tired by the time we got home. I walked into the village around 6pm to get cheese, fruit, sausages and pastries for a picnic dinner which I ate later in the evening. Then I went to bed early. I have one more full day in Pezens / Carcassonne / Occitanie, then I leave Saturday morning for Avignon.