07 February 2019

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).

11 comments:

  1. I'm guessing the professors preferred British pronunciation for the students...or did you have any southern accent at the time? When I left Texas, I definitely had an accent, which depending on the locale I was in, created amusement for many. The apartment you had sounds pretty rough, the bathroom in particular and the heating.

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    1. The teachers at the school were very old-school and their English didn't sound very good to me. But yes, they insisted on British "received pronunciation" as the standard. I might have still had (and surely still do) have some U.S. Southern intonations and habits, but I think I had already lost most of it by 1972. Those teachers wouldn't have recognized it as such, anyway. For them it was just not "the Queen's English". As for the apartment, the next one I rented in France had a full bathroom (though very small) but the kitchen was not equipped with a refrigerator. It was all I could afford on my teacher's salary, however.

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  2. What a great experience that must have been--for you as well as the students. Today, the kids can adopt American accents quite well, thanks to YouTube. Back in the '90s, I visited friends in Amsterdam and their kids spoke perfect English with American accents--learned from TV. In the Netherlands, TV shows are broadcast in V.O. with subtitles, not dubbed as in France.
    When I moved to Brussels in 1998, I saw many apartments with the toilet in the stairwell, outside the apartment AND shared with other apartments. All in old maisons de maître. I managed to find one with architectural details as well as private plumbing.

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  3. What is funny to me is that the time I'm describing, 1972, was nearly 50 years ago already. My first trip to France started in December 1969, so 50 years ago at the end of this year. As for now, I notice that more and more French TV channels are offering movies in English (American or British, not French). Even the "national" channels like France 2 and France 3. Change is slow, but it keeps moving along. And toilets! Well, I lived in a 6th floor walk-up near les Halles in Paris for three years, 1979 to 1982, which had all the modern conveniences except a private toilet. The only toilet was on the landing outside the apartment, and it was Turkish!

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  4. Wow, very interesting, all that, Ken. Hilarious about the Coca Cola restriction--ha!

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  5. love this..my year in Paris in 1969 was really golden...by the luck of the draw I was placed in a very elegant apartment in the tres chic 16th with a comtesse......who had a cook from Hungary (she was very mysterious to us at that time & we grilled her about the political situation there though trying to deal with our combined small vocabulary of common language was difficult) thanks for sharing...are you still in touch with any of the family from Rouen?

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    1. Was this comtesse's apartment near the Arc de Triomphe?

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    2. Must have been several comtesses in Paris taking in students back then.

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  6. I'm loving hearing about your days in Rouen. Lewis' first trip to Europe and my second was in 1969- the summer and we looked like hippies then, but weren't. I love remembering that summer.

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