| Friday, September 4, 2020

Dear Friend, 

C’est la rentrée ! Autumn begins to slant the rays of morning sun, touching the stubble in the fields with gold, enriching the bright colors of garden flowers, and reddening the glossy coats of the cattle in the pastures.
 
C'est la rentrée...Yes, It's time to go back. Henry has returned to Paris, where the familiar bustle of going back to school and work quickens the footsteps of passersby on the sidewalks and fills the boulangeries at noontime as customers buy lunch or a baguette to take home.
 
In Paris, little children walk home from school for the midday meal, wearing tabliers, the smock that covers up school clothes, and chattering with their petits camarades. Jean-Pierre broke his arm last summer! Marie-Constance has glasses! The maîtresse has promised a quiz for Friday! The messe de rentrée is tomorrow! (At least, in Catholic schools, where a mass is celebrated for the opening of the school year.) For each generation, all is new and fresh, even the Pokemon cards that seem to be as eternal as the bags of marbles toted by little boys in France. 

And of course, there are some petit bout de chou, little tips of cabbage, that cling to their mother’s hand with a look that implores, “Don’t send me back there!”
 
Our own littlest one showed his teeth to his other little camarades during those early days of maternelle, as French nursery school is called.  It broke my heart to leave him there, but how else was he to learn proper French? Social pressure played a role, too, although we were living in stately isolation in the country at that time. Our vacher, the cowherd, seeing the little fellow playing under the trees on the lawn, asked,

"T'as attrapé un rhume, mon petit gars?"
 
“He’s not sick! He’s only two,” I explained. Francois permitted himself to shake his head in kindly admonition. The idea of keeping a child at home, when he could be benefiting from French national education, smacked of anti-Republicanism. It was almost subversive. François himself had left school at 12. Like his father and grandfather, like his brothers, he had worked on the farm ever since.
 
A French poem of the 1840s tells the story of a reluctant schoolboy. He asks a bee and a swallow if he can join them. No; too busy. He then comes across a dog, who tells him:
 

Allez donc à l'école; allez, mon petit ange!
Les chiens ne lisent pas, mais la chaîne est pour eux:
L'ignorance toujours mène à la servitude...

Go to school; go, my little angel!
We dogs don’t read, the chain is for us:
For ignorance leads to servitude…

The boy races off to school and -- dans le mois des fruits, il lisait courrament -- by late September, the “month of fruits,” he was a good reader.

Perhaps François had this poem in mind. Much later and retired, he told me, with a kind of wondering regret, “I was a good student. But in those days, we never thought of college.”
 
A few years later, after we had moved to Paris, and he was three years older, our petit gars was gai comme un pinson, happy as a chaffinch, dancing along on the way to school tout franchouillard -- completely Frenchified -- in his navy blue tablier, his sash tightly belted, and swinging his book bag like a mace. Did he know his conjugaisons irréguliers? Had he memorized his tables de multiplication? Pas sûr! But he had cards to trade, blagues à raconter (jokes to tell), and schoolyard feats to learn.

His brother Henry was more serious. His notes were excellent; he absorbed knowledge like a well-disciplined and highly expansive sponge. He was elected to the school council. He wrote essays with a fountain pen, like everyone else, but hardly ever had to use white-out. And he thrilled us all when his poem was published in the weekly school newsletter. Ah! Ce petit Américain!

The older children adapted to the rigors and peculiarities of the French system each in their own way, absorbing the culture and mores of their adoptive country -- although they never developed the flowing script of their younger fountain pen-trained siblings.
 
"C'était le temps des fleurs," as the song “Those were the days, my friend” was translated into French…
 
How delightful it was to be a mère de famille! In France, being a mère de famille, or mother of a family, is considered an actual occupation. You check it off when you fill out official forms.
 
Every September at the rentrée des classes, the doors of the neighborhood papeterie swung open to les mamans armed with lists of fournitures scolaires. There, waiting or rather shrinking behind the counter, was our dyspeptic libraire, with his usual pinched smile, guarding the ink cartridges and the cash register. There was his melancholy red-nosed assistant, who frequently disappeared into the basement to search for missing items and, it was suspected, to fortify his spirits with liquid refreshment. Their other colleague hovered around the bookshelves to help gather up required reading. He was the intellectual of the trio, prompt with comments on the rentrée littéraire, the literary prizes that are the other important autumn event in France. 
 
On the shelves of the papeterie were luxurious sets of Caran d’Ache colored pencils, a wide selection of stylo plume Waterman and le stylo Bic, and stacks of Clairefontaine cahiers in various colors. The thick, creamy pages of these French-made notebooks are divided with fine horizontal and vertical lines in blue and red. The tiny squares keep penmanship within limits and math sums in neat rows. There were carefully arranged displays of the indispensable ardoise, a black slate for doing arithmetic in class, with chalk.  And, of course, rulers, scissors, compasses, glue, and rolls of rubbery clear plastic for covering books. 
 
The sweetish odor of book wrap pleasantly rose from the dining room table for the next week, as I sat down after dinner and wrapped textbooks and cahiers for five children. I, who had always been in a hurry, gave myself up to this seemingly mundane task with pleasure. Despite all the mistakes one makes as a parent, at least my children’s school bags held the correct supply of writing implements, measuring instruments, and neatly labeled notebooks and textbooks, carefully covered with clear plastic wrap.
 
Yes, the rentrée was exciting, stimulating, and exhausting for all.
 
Come the weekend, and after an early supper, we piled into the car, school bags loaded with homework, heads nodding. And what joy to awake the next morning in the country, and find that summer had not really ended after all. To inhale the sweet smell of the green grass, to hear the familiar cackle of the hens as they pecked over kitchen scraps, to feel the warm sun on bare arms. 
 
September at the Chateau brings blackberries ripening in the hedgerows, and pears hanging like golden lanterns against the Orangerie wall. The apples in the orchard are ripe for picking. Those few remaining tomatoes just won’t turn red. The evening falls a little sooner; the late afternoon air is a trifle fraîche. But it’s still "le temps des fleurs." Out in the garden, the dahlias and roses are in full autumnal flower.

And while it’s a little cold to sit outside and watch for shooting stars, with an earlier sunset, we can get out our telescope and look for Saturn and Jupiter…nicely visible throughout the autumn in the skies above Chateau de Courtomer. 
 
And as we go inside to the warmth of the Chateau’s library fire, we recall with tender amusement the childish rhyme:

En septembre, c'est la rentrée!
Il va falloir travaillé
On retrouve ses cahiers
Et sa maîtresse adorée!

In September, the rentrée!
We will have to work away
We will find our notebooks here
And discover our teacher dear! 

Au temps des fleurs, et à bientôt,