Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ONE-HUNDRED-PER-CENT FRENCH, by CHARD POWERS SMITH



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ONE-HUNDRED-PER-CENT FRENCH, by                    
First Line: A fellow never understands the french
Last Line: "had learned to smile and ask, ""ca va, monsieur?"
Subject(s): French Language


A fellow never understands the French.
At home we all have systems for our lives --
Molds in which to pour the people we meet;
And when we've poured them in, we like to look
Important at the cast, thinking we've put
"Things in their true relation."
But in France
They have no systems, and they don't fit mine.

I'm in Cote d'Or, on a white-washed plaster farm
That steams with purple clematis and bees.
Madame, still well on this side of an age
You couldn't guess, is an articulated
Statue of Pallas -- marble, with blue-glass eyes
And hair of golden straw. When I first came,
She met me wearing organdie, pink and white,
Framed in the clematis around the door.
I shot a look at her -- not showing it
Of course -- to put her in her proper place
In my ideas. But I'd hardly started
To size her up when with a jerk she turned
Into the house, and shortly reappeared
In a full-length apron, and, with proper smiles
And protestations all about the heat,
Showed me my room. As I recall it now,
I haven't seen the organdie again.
Monsieur the husband, handsome, with blue eyes
That never laugh, yet never cease to smile,
Permits madame to do the work. I asked her
If she was never tired. Her face lighted --
"C'est l'habitude" -- that was the end of it.
But then Monsieur, a hero three times wounded,
Covered with medals, seemed the family symbol,
The link that bound their lives to France. I classed
These people with our own best Yankee farmers --
Steady and moral, practical, yet having
Unconscious idealism. What fools we were
To call the French unstable and erotic!
I told Monsieur my judgment, and his eyes
Almost jumped from his smile, so wide they opened.

The near-by village is a walled-in pile
Of gothic roofs and medieval smells,
Where Madame Morin, a leathern wench of fifty,
Parades the streets of sewage, screaming tales
Of lovers past and future. Back at home
She would be mad, but here she's only drole.
She first encountered me one shadeless noon
Before the main cafe. Her voice went up
An octave, prophesying dire events.
I saw and pitied, and she saw I saw --
At least that was my diagnosis then.
All raving stopped, and since that day my name
Is absent from the legend of her lovers.

In the buvette beside the canal dike,
Where starlings squeak like old signs in a wind
That never comes, and marsh-birds squawk and flop,
Yvette is bar-maid. Her dark beauty seemed
Not the original but the ideal
Of Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks --
Dark eyes, unconscious, conscious power, the power
Of France who works and suffers as she smiles.
The second time I went my neighbor whispered,
"Elle n'est pas mariee," and pointed out
A baby. So I changed my dark madonna
To Mary Magdalen. I hoped I might
Get Yvette's story, but I never did --
The first time I went there she saw me once,
But never looked again.

It was a shock
To learn my host, the gay poilu, the hero,
Was keeping Magdalen. But then, I thought,
I didn't know her story, and that's life,
Most tragic where it is most beautiful.
The thing had been there once, and was there still --
I'd seen it.

Yet, though I refused to judge
Yvette, the ugly knowledge of the fact
Swelled the respect I had for my Madame:
Innocent womanhood, too pure to doubt;
Life consecrated to the ritual
Of an ideal. What if that ideal
Was actually a lie? For all we know
Any of us may live on lies. It is
The ritual that counts.
One day Madame
Was pulling lettuce. I was eating lunch
Under the arbor. Earlier Monsieur
Had gone to town, and something prompted me
To ask Madame if she knew where he was.
She humped a forty-kilo bale of lettuce
Up on her back, and smiled: "Oh, il s'amuse,
Perhaps with that cocotte-de-luxe Yvette,
Perhaps with Madame Morin, or more likely
With both at once. Oh, il est fort," she laughed,
Proud as if showing off her best prize heifer,
"To hold them both so long." She took her load
Around the clematis, into the barn;
And as she passed, the big black Cerberus --
The red-eyed watchdog Madame had chained up
To save my life -- stood up and wagged his tail.
That night on my straw mattress, I recalled
Madame's white organdie, Monsieur's wide eyes,
Madame Morin's original prophecies,
Yvette's first look; but how they all by now
Had learned to smile and ask, "Ca va, Monsieur?"





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