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teenagers in existential angst discussing the meaning of life; in this case the walks occur on the trails cut into the cliffs surrounding Dinard, and ever since seeing those dramatic paths I’ve wanted to vacation here with Anne. Go ahead and snicker, but yes, I have based our vacation on a few scenes from a fictional movie filmed thirty years ago.
    It never rains in
A Summer’s Tale,
but despite the sunshine we are enjoying now, the heaviest rain yet is forecast for tomorrow. Not a day for walking the trails, which we’ve been looking forward to for years. “Let’s do them now,” Anne says cheerily, and we spend what’s left of the afternoon in our own Rohmer movie, except
our
existential crisis is how to escape the rain of Brittany.
    Over drinks afterward we decide to bail out of Brittany a day early to head to sunny Provence, where we’ll be biking the rest of our trip. This means checking the train schedule, contacting our tour coordinator, finding a room in Avignon, and so on. I’ll need help, and I dread trying to relate all of this to the clerk, who doesn’t speak a word of English.
    “Maybe,” I say to Anne as we devour a towering platter of chilled
fruits de mer—
literally, “fruits of [the] sea,” the incredibly lovely French term for seafood—“someone else will be at the front desk when we return.”
    No such luck. I try to make a fresh start by apologizing for the earlier scene with the bikes, explaining my terrible French by saying that I am
très, très fatigué
from all the biking and rain. It seems I find myself saying “sorry” a lot in France, although only later do I realize that at least half the time I’ve been saying not
désolé,
but
désiré,
and you don’t need your French dictionary to know the difference between those two words. This possibly Freudian slip might be what sends the young clerk, who bears a resemblance to the sexy French actress Ludivine Sagnier, over the edge.
    “Would you prefer I speak English?” she says sweetly.
    “Sure, if you don’t mind—” What?
She speaks English?
Why on earth did she put me through that nonsense with the bike locks? Did she learn English in the past hour while I was eating oysters? This is a communication phenomenon we have already experienced more than once on this trip. So, regaining my composure, I politely ask her why, given my obvious struggle and inability to communicate, and her fluency in English, she let me continue stammering away in pidgin French.
    “You need the practice,” she says with a smile.
    Touché.
    ARRIVING IN SUNNY, WARM Provence, we find a timeless place of Roman ruins, fields of lavender, olive trees, and cobblestone streets, alive with the ghosts of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Marcel Pagnol. And something else I hadn’t expected: street signs in two languages: French and Occitan, the language of southern France, the
langue d’oc.
    Remember that when William the Conqueror sailed for England, there were still two families of very different languages being spoken in France—the
langues d’oïl
(those languages spoken in the north of France, centered around Paris) and the
langues d’oc
(those of the south, centered on Toulouse, in the heart of southern France). It was becoming clear that sooner or later there was going to be one France: which language would it speak? Northern France had the might of Paris, the king of the Franks, and the armies. Southern France had the troubadours and Toulouse. Guess who won?
    The day the music died arrived in 1209, when the troubadours, caught up in a bit of holy war not of their making, fled mostly to Spain, while the king of the Franks saw a chance to double the size of his kingdom, virtually destroying Toulouse in the process.
D’oc
would not expand into northern France. Yet it wasn’t going away quite yet. Despite efforts by Napoleon to make what was now known as French (the language derived from the
langues
d’oïl
) the only language of France, even as late as