Now I often say ‘we’, because I shared his way of thinking for a long time and I can’t remember when I stopped doing so.

The local dialect was the only language my grandparents spoke.

There will always be people to appreciate the ‘picturesque charm’ of patois and popular speech. Proust, for instance, took delight in pointing out the mistakes and the old-fashioned words used by Françoise. His concern was purely aesthetic, because Françoise was not his mother but his maid, and these turns of phrases were not natural to him.

My father saw patois as something old and ugly, a sign of inferiority. He was proud to have stopped using 44certain idioms. Even if his French wasn’t perfect, at least it was French. During the fête in Y—, those who had the gift of the gab would dress up in traditional costume and perform sketches in patois while onlookers roared with laughter. The local paper had a regional column written in a light-hearted tone. When the doctor or some other high-ranking official peppered his speech with Cauchois dialect – ‘she’s healthy as a horse’ instead of ‘she’s bursting with health’ – my father would repeat the sentence to my mother, relishing the thought that such respectable people still had something in common with us, some small ‘inadequacy’. He was convinced that they had let it slip out inadvertently. He found it impossible to believe that speaking ‘properly’ came naturally to some people. Whether a priest or a local doctor, they all had to make an effort to watch their language, even if they lapsed into patois at home.

He was chatty with the customers and with us but in front of educated people he would remain quiet or would pause in mid-sentence, adding, ‘You know what I mean’ with a vague gesture of his hand, willing the other person to finish the sentence for him. He always spoke carefully, terrified of using the wrong word, which would have been as bad as breaking wind.

On the other hand, he hated pompous sentences and new expressions which ‘didn’t mean anything’. At one period everyone had taken to saying ‘Surely not’ at every opportunity. He couldn’t understand why people would use two words which contradicted each other. Unlike my mother, who was anxious to pass for an educated woman and who tried out the idioms she had read or heard somewhere, with only a flicker of hesitation, he refused to use vocabulary that didn’t belong to him.45

As a child, when I tried to express myself in proper French, I felt like I was throwing myself into the abyss.

One of my imaginary fears was about having a schoolmaster for a father, a man who forced me to speak properly all the time, articulating each word separately. You were supposed to speak with the whole of your mouth.

Since the schoolmistress ‘corrected me’, later I tried to correct my father by telling him that expressions like ‘to disremember’ and ‘somewhen’ didn’t exist. He flew into a terrible rage. On another occasion I burst out: ‘How do you expect me to speak properly if you keep on making mistakes?’ I was crying. He felt miserable. Looking back, I realize now that anything to do with language was a source of resentment and distress, far more than money.