Today I had my design class– last week the prof (the one that calls me Mademoiselle Parle-Anglais) told us to meet in front of the Fontaine des Medicis for class, then turned to me and said, in sweetly condescending French, "and does our lovely little foreigner understand? The [here he switched to English] Medici fountain? Over there?" I wanted to tell him I have probably, in my nine months in this country, spent more time at that fountain than he has in the entire 60 years he’s lived in Paris, but of course, since it’s not my language, I just nodded like a deaf-mute.

So this week we meet there, and of course the first thing he does is turn to me and say, in French, "Oh, you are here! The young American! I am so DELIGHTED to have you with us this week!" As though I don’t ALWAYS come to class– I’ve never missed his class. THEN, he switches to English and says, in a thick French accent, "I received your... your... petit... little... words."
A literal translation of the French expression "petit mot," or, in English, "message."
I had to send him an email this week, but since I didn’t want to SIGN it "Mademoiselle Parle-Anglais, I introduced myself in the email as "I am the American student in your design class..." and now he was teasing me about it.
"Oh," he continues in French, "I am just EVER so glad you told me you were American! All this time I thought you came from... from..." here he stops, searching for the word. "Britain?" I suggested, because he did once call me "the British one" to the class while talking about my work.
"No! Of course not BRITAIN!" he responds. "Italy, perhaps, or... or... Marrakesh! With that lovely accent..."
"Oh, yes," I answered, having now picked up on the fact that I was being teased. "I know... I have a terribly Italian accent, but I just can’t seem to get rid of it."

He fell into hysterics, and I knew I had just scored major points. It may take me awhile to pick up on teasing when it’s in another language, but once I do... well, I mean, I wasn’t raised with four rowdy uncles for nothing. Heck, I didn’t work on the Mountain for the craziest boss ever and learn nothing about responding to teasing.

The prof set us up next to the fountain to draw "exactly what we see." I was sitting right behind a huge pot, so that was the center of my design, and when he arrived to check on me the first time I was almost finished with the pot.
He walked up behind me, looked over my shoulder, and burst into hysterics. The first time he laughed at me, the first week of the class, I decided he was a tool. This time I just shook my head, turned to look at him, and asked "Mais quoi!?"
"What’s the problem?" Thinking my design was, honestly, rather good.

"Mademoiselle Upside-Down, maybe I should call you instead..." he sighed. I looked down and realized he had a point– I had turned the pad nearly 180degrees in an effort to get the curve of the base right.
"Is that how they teach you to do it in America?" he asked.
"Yes," I said haughtily, "The curve is never right unless you can use your wrist to make it." He laughed, but didn’t correct my design, and left.

The next time he made it back to me, he crouched down behind me, looked at my design and then at my angle, and said, very solemnly and with great gravity: "Vous, mademoiselle, vous êtes monteuse. Je sais, it’s horrifying, no?"
"You, my dear, you are a CLIMBER. How terrible!"
I was trying to remember the last time I was called a climber, and wondered how he could possibly know anything about it, given that this time I hadn’t moved from my seat for fear of losing my perspective.
As it turned out, he decided I was using two different perspectives, as though my eyes were higher than they actually were. "But," he consoled in French, "it is very [switched to English] picturesque, I think."
"Picturesque!" I scoffed, knowing that this was a completely back-handed compliment, like comparing my work to Thomas Kinkade or some equally frowned-upon artist.
"Oui, picturesque," he confirmed.
"You think so?" I shot back in French. "It’s not too... american? Not too much like, oh, Norman Rockwell?"
"Where do you come from in the US?" he asked.
"Floride," I answered.
"Florida," he corrected me, pronouncing it the English way, then stating, more as a fact than question, "You don’t have fountains like this in FLORIDA."
"No, you’re right. We do have Mickey Mouse, though."
"Mais, cherie! So do we!"

At one point I asked him how he had learned English, because he obviously isn’t fluent, and he has a very obvious French accent, but he knows all the very technical words– vanishing point, skyline, picturesque, etc. He said he had studied at the Institute of Architecture, which is somewhere in the US, I think, and all he remembered is how the professors used to yell when he was doing aquarelles– "C’est-a-dire... ahhh, watercolors," the profs would snap, "MORE SHADOW! USE MORE SHADOW!" And that was how he learned.

I think he’s crazy. But now I kind of like him. He seems like the kind of professor who probably rents out the top floor of his house to college students who also think he is crazy but still kind of like him. I’m also almost positive that if I walked into class late he wouldn’t comment on it, but every time the guys in the class do it, they are always in trouble. I guess I don’t even need ribbons in my pigtails...

In conclusion, I am a climber, the Medici fountain remains one of my two favorite places in Paris, and being from Florida is never a bad thing.
~B

P.S. The last time he checked my sketch before we split up, he looked down at it, then looked at the landscape I had tried to copy, and said, I quote, translated from French:
"Not bad, not bad at all. I mean, you know, in Europe we haven’t really used this kind of split perspective since the 16th century Renaissance, but perhaps our innovations haven’t made it all the way to Florida yet."
Oh, France.