deux baguettes
Many years ago, we lived for a while in a small town in France. Every day I would walk to the bakery around the corner to buy our daily baguettes. Could life be any better? When it was my turn to order, I would conjure up my finest French: “Bonjour, Madam, je voudrais deux baguettes, s’il vous plait.” To which Madam would reply “Combien”? How many? I would meekly raise two fingers. As this continued over days and then weeks, I asked my bilingual friend why there seemed to be a failure of communication. “When you say deux baguettes”, he said, “the French hear ‘de’. De and deux are not pronounced the same. You need to extend the pronunciation of deux, drawing out the end of the word and lowering your pitch. The proprietress hears you asking for de baguettes”, a grammatically nonsensical request for some baguettes. But I knew that Madam was really just having her way with me, a little fun with l’americaine stupide. And so it went. Until it was time to return to the United States. We did not want Madame to think, if we simply disappeared one day, that we had taken our business elsewhere. So we went to the bakery for the last time and managed to convey to Madame that we were returning home, that we would miss les délicieuses baguettes, and we wished her well. In return, she wished us bonne santé and told us we should revenez bientot, come back soon. And then smiled! Now, these many years later, while I await the magic of flour, water, salt and yeast and its promise of a Proustian feast of deux baguettes fresh from my own oven, I think of Madam. These baguettes, scaled to deux, from DonD’s baguettes a l’ancienne with cold retardation, transport me back to France like no others.