Coucou mes lecteurs!
My recent purchase of a used book full of day trips in the outskirts of Paris has proved a rich source of escapades, none of which I have yet shared with you. Hundreds of pictures document these excursions, as well as sojourns closer to home and, most recently, a weekend trip to Bordeaux. I even thought of you, dear readers, as I sketched in my mental notes and framed my photographs.
As I contemplate the task ahead, I am reminded of an expression in French:
Alors, t'accouches! Roughly the equivalent of "spit it out," it literally tells the listener to give birth.
Which in turn reminds me of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with my thesis advisor. A beautiful, passionate Frenchwoman with whom my classmates and I all have devastating crushes, she is always telling us
ne vous inquiétez pas, don't worry. She had just finished forbidding me to worry (again) a few weeks ago, when I'd only drafted a page, but I wanted to assure her
quand même that I'd done plenty of research, that I just hadn't yet gotten the chance to transform what I'd gathered into written pages.
C'est comme si j'étais enceinte (It's as if I were pregnant),
I tried to explain. In marked contrast to our first dogged communications, we can now converse fluently and spontaneously, which leads to debates about the feminization of French
métiers and the etymological evolution of spelling. But now and then I still make weird mistakes, and the flicker of confusion in her brow told me she suspected this was one of those times.
Enceinte? she repeated.
Vous ne voulez pas dire... enceinte (You don't mean, pregnant)? She made a hand motion to indicate the shape of a pregnant belly.
Si, I insisted.
Je me suis remplie de pensées, et maintenant il ne faut qu'accoucher (I've filled myself with thoughts, and now I just need to give birth).
Ah, je comprends, she laughed. And after I sent her several pages with translations four days later, she remarked that I'd fulfilled my promise.
Today I found out that Proust used the same metaphor when discussing his novel. A metaphor that's good enough for Proust is certainly good enough for me.
So I promise to you, mes tulipes, very soon, an
accouchement. The labor will be intensive, but I hope the results will be worth all of our trouble.
Meanwhile, here are a few miscellanous Paris pictures to tide you over, with flighty, springtime-appropriate commentary, possessing neither continuity nor cohesion.
