Learning French With Flashy, Sassy Christine

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/education/edlife/christine-eustrade-french-lesson.html

Version 0 of 1.

Like most people, I started studying a second language at the exact worst time in life. Junior high falls just after the period when one might pick up a language easily and right before most people are able to grasp what a valuable skill it is, making it a cruelly perfect sweet spot for frustration. As if dealing with unfamiliar grammar isn’t challenging enough, existentialist works like “Huis Clos” and “L’Etranger” are introduced not long after, in high school — a true philosophy of the absurd.

Were it not for the textbook that changed my life, I would have abandoned the language faster than Marie Antoinette fleeing a mob of angry peasants.

Foreign language textbooks, now as much as then, almost universally portray their characters as robotic simpletons whose lives never become more complicated than a trip to the dentist or a weekend getaway to an alpine village (a broken doorbell provided the most dramatic moment in one French textbook I recently picked up). All but indistinguishable from one another, the characters are relentlessly preoccupied with making correct change, reciting the names of various professions for no apparent reason, and telling each other what day of the week it is. Every boy is “interesting,” every girl is “nice” — no one is ever “mercurial” or “magnanimous.” Every character trait is utterly bereft of nuance. Eternally stuck in la vie quotidienne, trouble and pleasure escape them in equal measure.

In stunning contrast, the characters in my seventh-grade textbook, “Jeunes Voix, Jeunes Visages” (“Young Voices, Young Faces”), were flashy, engaging, passionate, cool, sassy, deep, funny, romantic, restless and sometimes even moody.

Among my favorites was Christine Eustrade, an Audrey Hepburn-esque Parisienne who had the world on a string. Through a series of photographs that looked like something Diana Vreeland might have edited (the book was published by Harper & Row in 1970), the author, Yvone Lenard, chronicled the life of this vivacious, confident student who also happened to be a part-time model.

Decked out in vinyl coats and mod minis, Christine traversed the city, attending her fittings or studies or dates, occasionally staring coquettishly into the camera as she lamented the pressures of maintaining such an active lifestyle. Her boyfriend, the charismatic and handsome Jean-Pierre, waited patiently for her as she tried on outfit after outfit at the boutique where she was a model, sometimes posing along with her. The caption: “Un beau couple, n’est-ce pas?”

Unlike so many educators, Ms. Lenard seemed to understand that education isn’t just about presenting facts. It’s about connection. It’s about a specificity that will yank at some crucial part of you and draw — maybe even charm — you in. You will learn on your own terms.

For my 12-year-old self, a young woman who loved clothes, was frustrated by school pressures and ran around Paris like she owned it was a perfect role model. At that age, I could no more relate to the milquetoast individuals in other French textbooks than I could to, say, someone going through a midlife crisis.

“Jeunes Voix” achieved for me another of education’s primary goals: It opened up an enthralling new world, something to which I could aspire. Yvone Lenard’s characters lived life with all the Frenchness we Americans love to think they do. In her hands, the French-speaking universe seemed coated with fairy dust. So enchanted was I that, years later, I would fly off to Paris to study French at the Sorbonne for my own little Christine moment (I even brought a dress like one Christine wore). There, my French reached a fluidity, if not fluency, and my interest in other worlds led me to pursue a career as a travel writer.

Adult life being what it is, my French went unattended, but recently, with a milestone birthday approaching, I’ve decided to study for and take the French Ministry of Education’s proficiency exam, a horrifyingly intimidating test that certifies you as someone who has at least a respectable grasp of the language. Turning to my old, beloved textbook as a study guide, I started wondering about Yvone Lenard, who she was and how she came up with her characters. Could I even find her, now that the book was almost 50 years old?

An obsessive search through the warps and wefts of the internet yielded an email response within 48 hours:

Dear Ms. Lichterman,

I am deeply touched and appreciative of your kind words about ‘Jeunes voix’ and would be happy to meet you. I think we live close to each other so would you come for a very informal lunch . . . I am sure we’ll have much to talk about.

Yvone

Ms. Lenard, now 96, stood smiling, arms extended, on the walkway of her home, less than nine miles from where I live, in a Southern California city where neither of us is a native (I’m a product of New York City, she of southwestern France) and where each of us happened to move in our adulthoods.

Elegant, perfectly coifed, one of those people who seem lit from within, she greeted me, her perfect English enhanced by a distinctive, silky French accent. “I am so happy to meet you,” she said as she took both my hands in hers and led me to an outdoor table where she, her husband and I would eat courses of French food as I asked questions about “Jeunes Voix,” too shy to speak French.

It was her idea, she said, to focus on young people. “I had been dissatisfied,” she said, “not only with the way existing texts taught French, but with their illustrations, stock snapshots of anonymous people, locations, or the equivalent of tourist postcards.”

Christine Eustrade, I learned, was actually Christine Eustratiades, an 18-year-old French model who they “discovered” in a 1964 Life magazine spread titled “So Young, So Young,” featuring that fall’s collection. Not quite 15 when she first hit the modeling scene, Ms. Eustratiades was a star in the fashion world when Ms. Lenard’s husband, a professional photographer named Wayne Rowe, photographed her in Paris for “Jeunes Voix.”

Dr. Rowe would go on to teach photography at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and Ms. Lenard to write more than a dozen books.

“Perhaps you could come over one afternoon, and we could sit here and speak French?” Ms. Lenard suggested as I got up to leave almost four hours later. And that’s when I realized something about her and, really, about all great teachers: It’s always about the connection. For that reason, “Jeunes Voix” did for me what textbooks seldom achieve: It made me want to learn. It reached me by coming to me instead of asking me to go to it.

Upon leaving, I sheepishly asked Ms. Lenard to sign my aging copy of “Jeunes Voix.” She obliged, signing the page opposite a portrait of Christine. “Thank you, Courtney, for keeping both Christine & me alive and feeling loved. Yvone.”