Rouen: 1998 photos, 1972 memories

I'll start this post with photos of a couple of places in Rouen that were really important to me when I lived and worked there in 1972-'73. The first shows the lycée (high school) where I worked. It's the Lycée Corneille, named after one of Rouen's most famous writers, Pierre Corneille, a 17th-century dramatist. The job I had at the lycée was as an assistant d'anglais, meaning I served as a native-language resource for the professeurs d'anglais and the students at the school. Some of the profs didn't seem happy to have an assistant who spoke American English. I heard that they told their students not to pick up my accent. On occasion, some profs made fun of my pronunciation (the way I said butter, little, etc.). The students, however, were motivated by a chance to learn some American vocabulary. I had an interesting year at the Lycée Corneille, and two professeurs in particular helped and supported me in my work. With one of them, I co-authored a book, published in 1975, which was a kind of dictionary of the points of English grammar and vocabulary that French students found particularly thorny.

Meanwhile, I needed a place to live in Rouen, of course. The lycée let me stay in a room in the school, which had dormitories for students who were boarders, for a few weeks at the beginning of the year while I looked for an apartment I could afford to rent. I couldn't afford much.

Finally, a woman who worked in the administrative offices at the school talked to me one day and said her parents had an apartment to rent in a house that was within easy walking distance. It was near the Rouen train station and the Vieux Marché, the city's market square. That's the house on the left. I had the two windows over the garage and the one to the left, which was the kitchen. There were a couple of problems with the apartment. First, there was no bathroom. There was a toilet located on the stairs, halfway up — my apartment was on the second floor U.S. — shared by a tenant in another apartment in the building. I had a sink, a refrigerator and stove in the kitchen, and then a bedroom. That was it. And for the first three months I lived there I didn't have hot water central heat. The owners were having a boiler installed and putting radiators in all the rooms, but from October until January I heated with little butane stove. It produced more humidity than heat, and the walls and ceiling dripped water when I lit it. It was miserable. Because the Lycée Corneille was a boarding school, and I was a part-time employee, I could haul a toilet kit and a change of clothes over there once or twice a week and take a shower while the students were in class.

Here's another view of the lycée, showing the main entrance.


In 1972, before Thanksgiving, one of my students told me after class that his mother wanted to invite me over to dinner at his house. I accepted, of course. When I got there, Mme S. and her husband invited me in. Their oldest son, my student, ate at the table too. He had two younger siblings who were called out in their pajamas to meet me and then say goodnight to everyone. Monsieur S. was a very opinionated man. I remember him asking me to tell him who had actually assassinated our President John Kennedy. It told him I didn't know, and that I didn't think anybody really knew. This was stretching my French. Monsieur S. immediately told me he already knew who killed Kennedy, and he'd be glad to clue me in. I don't remember what his theory was — what he said seemed far-fetched. He also pointed out that even it was what I wanted to drink with dinner, he did not allow Coca-Cola to be consumed at his diner table. I hadn't asked for any, actually, and I far preferred mineral water and red wine with my dinner.

Every time I walked from my Rouen apartment to the lycée, I passed by this old leftover donjon of the long-demolished Château de Rouen. It's called the Tour Jeanne-d'Arc. It's popularly believed to be the tower in which Joan of Arc was held prisoner before she was burned at the stake in Rouen in the early 1400s, but many historians doubt the accuracy of that belief.



At Thanksgiving 1972, Mme S. came to my apartment one day and brought me a turkey. She had heard of the American holiday and knew I wouldn't be able to find a turkey in the markets or shops of Rouen, and probably understood that I couldn't afford one anyway. She had ordered the bird from her butcher. The next time I was invited for dinner, a few weeks later, Mme S. was there but not Monsieur. I learned that they were in fact separated and she had asked him to come for the first dinner just for the sake of appearances. I was sort of glad he wasn't in the picture, and I ended up forming a friendship with Mme S. and her children that included weekly dinners, sessions of card-playing, and trips to places like Deauville, Dieppe, and even Reims (in Champagne), which was her home town. My French started quickly to improve.

I hope this isn't all too confusing, with memories from 1972 along with photos from 1998. I didn't have a camera when I lived in Rouen nearly 50 years ago. However, over the past dozen years, I've posted a lot of photos of Rouen scenes and landmarks on this blog (link).