On Tuesday, November 10, 1970, I walked into class and found my favourite French teacher, Madame Sotto, in tears. Without knowing why, I gave her a big hug to share her pain.
General Charles de Gaulle had died the evening before, on November 9, of a ruptured aneurysm at his home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. Despite her grief, Madame Sotto composed herself and, with great emotion, gave us a brief history of the man she admired so deeply. Born on November 22, 1890, he graduated from Saint-Cyr in 1912, where his imposing height earned him the nickname “la grande asperge.” He joined the 33rd Infantry Regiment as a second lieutenant, and his quick wit and tireless work ethic soon set him apart. In the 1930s, he warned that France could not rely on the Maginot Line and called for mechanized armoured units. His warnings went unheeded, and France fell in June 1940. To Madame Sotto, he was the greatest president the French Republic had ever known. I understood that day how deeply she loved France, and I shared her sorrow.
Madame Sotto was in her eighties then, yet her outstanding way of teaching made me fall in love with “la langue de Molière.” I still remember her sophisticated Parisian accent, which made my heart vibrate every time she spoke.
She taught us that Molière did not write for aristocrats alone. His comedies made servants and nobles laugh in the same breath, in a language flexible enough to hold both the vulgar and the sublime. This, she said, was the particular genius of French: precise enough for legal treaties and Cartesian philosophy, yet supple enough for farce and seduction.
Through her, I discovered Racine’s tragic verse, tight as a closed fist; Voltaire’s prose, quick as a rapier; Baudelaire, who made even corruption sound like a cathedral; and Proust, whose single sentences could unfurl across a whole page, each clause a room within a room. Although I was a science student and a lover of mathematics, she gave me a lifelong passion for French literature.
Is French the most beautiful language on Earth? That is a matter of taste. Italian singers, Japanese calligraphers and Arabic poets would each make their own case, and rightly so. But Madame Sotto showed me that in French, language itself became a discipline of grace. Ever since, I have felt French in my heart and soul, even far from France.
« Il est temps que la langue française regagne sa dignité et sa véritable raison d’être ! »
— Paul Sinclair, in honour of Madame Sotto
Thank you, my dearest Madame Sotto, for the dignity you gave your language, and the love of it you gave me.
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