Les Adverbes

He wrote back to Arsenault on a Saturday morning, which was significant only in that he had been composing the email in his head since Tuesday and had finally run out of reasons to delay it.

He thanked him for writing. He said Montpellier was treating him better than he had any right to expect. He mentioned the roast chicken detail, which had stayed with him — the idea that Arsenault had been in this city in the nineties, that it had given him something worth remembering, and that it had given the same city to Julien now, decades later, for different reasons. He said that felt, somehow, like encouragement. He was not sure Arsenault would understand why, but he suspected Arsenault would understand exactly why, which was the thing about good teachers: they knew more than they asked you to explain.

He said he was writing again. Small things, he wrote. But real ones.

He did not mention Elise. He did not promise to return. He did not perform optimism or gratitude in the way that emails sometimes required. He just told the truth in the amount that felt honest without being more than was ready to be said, and sent it before the part of him that revised things could get involved.

Then he made coffee and opened the notebook and wrote for forty minutes without stopping, which was becoming, without his having decided this, a Saturday morning practice.

The new document on his laptop had eleven sentences in it by the end of the week. He had not reread any of them. He would, eventually. Not yet.

The Anne Lamott quote had been in a book Arsenault had assigned in Julien's second year at Concordia, a book about writing that was actually about not writing, about all the ways a person found to avoid the page and call it something else. He had read the quote and thought *yes, that's true* and then continued not writing for eighteen months, which suggested that identifying a problem and solving it were not as closely related as they were supposed to be.

He thought about it again on the Tuesday before his lesson, sitting at the Quantum Café with a Schrödinger and the notebook open, writing a sentence and then crossing it out and writing it again.

The crossed-out version and the written version were nearly identical. He looked at them both for a while, and then he drew a single line through the crossing-out, reinstating the original, and moved to the next sentence. The perfectionism was there. It was always there, the voice suggesting that if the sentence was not exactly right it should not exist, that imperfect language was worse than silence.

He was learning, in a second language, that imperfect language was not worse than silence. It was the only kind available, in any language, to anyone trying to say something real.

He wrote three more sentences without crossing any of them out.

Thursday. November had deepened into something more committed, the days shorter and the light arriving later, the city reconfiguring itself for the season without complaint. Room 7, the familiar table, the familiar window with its view of the Antigone columns standing in the grey morning as they stood in every other kind of morning, patient and slightly absurd and entirely themselves.

Lumière was there. She had a small stack of printed cards today, which she had not brought before, and she set them face-down beside the tablet with the air of someone who has prepared something and is in no rush to reveal it.

"Bonjour," Julien said.

"Bonjour. Comment allez-vous?"

"Je vais bien, merci. Et vous?"

"Très bien, merci." She looked at him with the quality of attention he had stopped noticing as a distinct thing and had started simply receiving. "You sent an email this week. To someone important."

He looked at her. "You cannot possibly know that."

"You have the specific tiredness of someone who has done a difficult thing and is relieved it is done," she said. "It is different from the tiredness of someone who has not slept, or the tiredness of someone who is sad. I have learned to distinguish them."

He considered this. "My old professor," he said. "In Montreal. He wrote to me a few weeks ago and I finally wrote back."

"Good," she said, with the quality she always gave that word. Then her hands flat on the table. "Today: adverbs."

"An adverb," Lumière said, "modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. It tells you not what is done but how, when, where, or to what degree it is done." She looked at him steadily. "In French, many adverbs are formed from adjectives. You take the feminine form of the adjective and add the suffix *-ment.*"

She wrote the pattern on the tablet:

lent / lente — slow. Add *-ment* to the feminine: lentement. Slowly.
doux / douce — soft, gentle. Add *-ment*: doucement. Softly, gently.
heureux / heureuse — happy. Add *-ment*: heureusement. Happily. Also, fortunately.
franc / franche — frank, direct. Add *-ment*: franchement. Frankly.
douloureux / douloureuse — painful. Add *-ment*: douloureusement. Painfully.

He looked at the list. The feminine adjective as the root of the adverb — the same grammatical gender work he had done two lessons ago, now producing a new class of word. The language building on itself, each lesson reaching back into the previous ones.

"The pattern does not always hold," she said. "Adjectives ending in *-ant* or *-ent* produce adverbs ending in *-amment* and *-emment* respectively, both pronounced the same way: *-amment.* Récent becomes récemment. Recent, recently. Évident becomes évidemment. Evident, evidently, obviously." She paused. "And then there are the irregular adverbs that follow no pattern and must simply be known."

"Like everything important in French," he said.

"Like everything important anywhere," she said. She listed them: bien — well. Mal — badly, poorly. Vite — quickly, fast. Beaucoup — a lot, much. Peu — little, few. Très — very. Trop — too, too much. Assez — enough, rather. Déjà — already. Encore — still, again. Jamais — never. Toujours — always, still.

He wrote them in the notebook, the list accumulating down the page. Each one a small modifier, a word that changed the quality of whatever it touched without changing the thing itself.

"Where do they go in the sentence?" he asked.

"In French, an adverb modifying a verb is placed directly after the verb in simple tenses," she said. "Not between the subject and the verb, as English sometimes allows. Il parle lentement. He speaks slowly. Not *il lentement parle.* With compound tenses, short adverbs often appear between the auxiliary and the past participle. Il a bien parlé. He spoke well." She looked at him. "The adverb is loyal to its verb. It stays close."

"Je parle lentement," Julien said. I speak slowly.

"Less so than at the beginning," she said.

He smiled, briefly. "Je marche vite," he tried. I walk quickly.

"Toujours," she confirmed. Always.

She turned over the first of the printed cards. On it was a sentence with a blank: *Il a quitté la ville _______.* He left the city _______.

"Complete the sentence," she said. "With an adverb."

He looked at it. *Quitté* — from *quitter,* to leave, a different verb from *partir,* she noted without being asked: *partir* was to leave in the intransitive sense, to set off, while *quitter* took a direct object, something or someone you left behind. Il a quitté la ville. He left the city. Left it behind.

"Soudainement," he said. Suddenly. He had inferred this from *soudain* — sudden — applying the pattern.

"*Soudainement* is correct," she said. "Though *soudain* alone is also used as an adverb, without the suffix. French occasionally offers two forms and accepts both." She turned over the next card. Another blank: *Elle apprend le français _______.* She is learning French _______.

"Lentement," he said. Then, reconsidering: "Non. Courageusement." Courageously. He had applied the pattern to *courageux / courageuse* without being certain it would work.

She looked at him with the brightness in her eyes. "*Courageusement* is correct," she said. "And more interesting than lentement."

"The person is learning a difficult thing," he said. "That deserves an interesting adverb."

She turned over another card, and he saw that this one was different from the others. It was not a fill-in-the-blank. It was a statement, followed by a question:

Je t'aimais _______? I loved you _______.

Quel adverbe choisirais-tu? Which adverb would you choose?

He was quiet.

The card sat between them on the table with the patience of something that is not in a hurry. Outside, a tram chimed somewhere below. The November light held its grey position over the columns.

"You do not have to answer," Lumière said. She said it evenly, without retreating from the question, simply making space around it.

"No," he said. "I want to." He looked at the card. The verb in the imperfect tense, *aimais* — the ongoing love, not a single completed event but a state that had existed and continued over time, the tense of something that was once true for a sustained period. *Je t'aimais.* I loved you, in the way that means: I was loving you, it was ongoing, it was the condition I was in.

He thought about what adverb was true.

Not *heureusement.* Not *douloureusement,* though that was closer. Not *lentement* or *vite,* not *bien* or *mal,* though all of them were partly true.

"Maladroitement," he said finally.

She waited.

"Clumsily," he said. "I loved her clumsily." He looked at the table. "I didn't know what I was doing. I thought I did, for a while. But I was — I was holding something I didn't understand, and I kept adjusting my grip and getting it wrong, and eventually I dropped it." He paused. "That's not a grammar answer."

"It is an honest answer," she said. "Which is better." A pause. "And maladroitement is correctly formed. Maladroit — clumsy, awkward. Feminine maladroite. Add *-ment.*"

"Of course I had the grammar right," he said, with a flatness that was not entirely humor and not entirely sorrow and was perhaps both at once.

Lumière looked at him across the table. Vivekananda wrote: we are what our thoughts have made us. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far. She offered it the way she offered most things, evenly, without insisting on it. "The adverb you chose lived in you before you had the word for it. It was already the thought."

He looked at the card. *Je t'aimais maladroitement.* I loved you clumsily. The sentence sitting there, complete, grammatically correct, true in a way that made his chest do something he did not examine too closely.

"Is there a French word," he said, "for the feeling of understanding something too late?"

She considered this. "There is tardivement," she said. "Tardily, belatedly. And there is the expression prendre conscience de quelque chose — to become aware of something, to realize it. But the specific feeling you are describing — the lateness of the understanding — that lives more in literature than in single words." A pause. "Which may be why you are writing."

He looked at her. She looked back at him with the calm that was simply her mode, the sapphire light holding its rhythm at her neck.

"I may not be there yet," he said, in English, something he had read somewhere that had come back to him now. "I may not be there yet, but I'm closer than I was yesterday."

"Pas encore," she said. Not yet. "But closer. Plus proche qu'hier."

"Plus proche qu'hier," he repeated. The comparative — plus plus the adjective — a construction she had not formally taught him but which he absorbed now without effort, the language offering itself to him in the moment he needed it.

She worked them through question words before the hour ended, moving with her usual efficiency through the material that remained.

"Questions in French," she said, "can be formed three ways. The simplest: take a statement and raise your voice at the end. Tu parles français? Do you speak French? This is informal and common in spoken language." She continued: "The second: add est-ce que before the statement. Est-ce que tu parles français? Literally: is it that you speak French? This is standard and accepted in most contexts." She paused. "The third: invert the subject and verb, joined by a hyphen. Parles-tu français? This is formal, used in writing and careful speech."

He practiced each form with several verbs, the three structures for the same question sitting side by side like three different levels of register, the language offering him choices about how formal or familiar he wanted to be with any given moment.

"The question words," she continued: "Où — where. Quand — when. Pourquoi — why. Comment — how. Combien — how much, how many. Qui — who. Que / qu'est-ce que — what." She wrote them on the tablet in a column. "Pourquoi es-tu ici?" she said. Why are you here?

He looked at the question. It was a grammar exercise. It was also not only a grammar exercise.

"Je suis ici parce que j'avais besoin d'être quelque part de nouveau," he said slowly, assembling the sentence from its parts, reaching for parce que — because — which he had seen in the notebook and used without formal instruction. I am here because I needed to be somewhere new.

She looked at him. "*Parce que* is correct," she said. "And the sentence is correct." A pause. "It is also more than a grammar answer."

"You said honest answers are better," he said.

"I did," she said. "I stand by it."

He left the library at quarter past three, stepping into a November afternoon that had turned unexpectedly mild, the grey of the morning replaced by a thin, clear light that gave the city a slightly unreal quality, everything a little too sharp at the edges. He decided, without particularly deciding, to go home a different way.

He turned left instead of right out of the médiathèque, away from the tram and into the old quarter by a route he had not taken before, through streets that were narrower than his usual ones, the buildings closer together, the afternoon light arriving in narrow slices between the upper floors. He did not have his phone out. He walked and let the streets arrange themselves around him without consulting anything.

He got lost after ten minutes, which he had expected. He turned several corners that returned him to the same small square, a fountain at its center with a stone figure of ambiguous historical origin and a very definite pigeon problem. He circled it twice.

Then he stopped a woman who was walking with two heavy bags of groceries and the expression of someone who has no time for ambiguity, and he said, in French, with the grammar he had and no more: "Excusez-moi, madame. Je cherche la rue — " and here he gave the name of his street, the pronunciation uncertain, the accent approximate.

She looked at him, made a quick assessment, and answered in French at a pace that was not exactly slow but not unkind, with a gesture toward the left, then right, then left again, and the word tout droit — straight ahead — repeated twice for emphasis.

He understood most of it. He thanked her. Merci beaucoup, madame. Bonne soirée.

She said bonne soirée in return and walked on with her groceries, and he turned left, then right, then left, and went straight, and after four minutes arrived at a street he recognized, and from there to his own without difficulty.

He stood outside his building for a moment in the thin November light. *Tout droit.* Straight ahead. The simplest possible direction, and he had understood it, and followed it, and arrived.

He went upstairs, made tea, opened the laptop. Eleven sentences in the document. He read them for the first time. They were not as bad as he had feared. Some of them were almost good. One of them was true in a way that made him sit back and look at the ceiling for a moment before continuing.

He wrote three more sentences. He reread one of them. He did not cross it out.

*Maladroitement,* he thought. Clumsily. But still. The adverb described the manner, not the outcome. The manner could be improved. He was improving it. *Lentement, mais sûrement.* Slowly, but surely.

He closed the laptop and opened the notebook and wrote the date, and then beneath it, in French:

Je cherche les bons mots. Ils arrivent, peu à peu.

I am searching for the right words. They are arriving, little by little.

He put a question mark beside nothing.

End of Chapter 9