When in French: Love in a Second Language. Lauren Collins

damper, or welcoming me to the neighborhood. He reached into his pocket, proffering a matchbook and a disc of cork. Then he disappeared.

      Minutes went by as I examined his gifts. They seemed like props for a magic trick. More minutes passed. I launched into a version of rock, scissors, paper: since the cork couldn’t conceivably do anything to the matches, then the matches must be meant to light the cork. Action was required, but I feared potentially incinerating the chimney sweep, who, I guessed, was making some sort of inspection up on the roof.

      Eventually he returned, chirping out some more instructions. I performed a repertoire of reassuring eyebrow raises and comprehending head nods. He scampered away. I still had no idea, so I lit a match, held it to the cork, and tossed it behind the grate. The pile started smoking and hissing. After a few seconds, I lost my nerve and snuffed it out.

      The chimney sweep resurfaced, less jolly. He had appointed an assistant who, it appeared, was actively thwarting his routine. This time he spoke in the supple, obvious tones one reserves for madwomen, especially those in possession of flammable objects. Reclaiming the half-charred piece of cork, he lit a fire and, potbelly jiggling, sprinted back out the door.

      Finally, he returned and reported—I assume, since we used the fireplace without incident all that winter—that everything was in order.

      “Au revoir!” I said, trying to regain his confidence, and my standing as chatelaine of this strange, drab domain. “Hello” and “good-bye” were a pair of bookends, propping up a vast library of blank volumes, void almanacs, novels full of sentiment I couldn’t apprehend. It felt as though the instruction manual to living in Switzerland had been written in invisible ink.

      I HAD MOVED to Geneva a month earlier to be with my husband, Olivier, who had moved there because his job required him to. My restaurant French was just passable. Drugstore French was a stretch. IKEA French was pretty much out of the question, meaning that, since Olivier, a native speaker, worked twice as many hours a week as Swiss stores were open, we went for months without things like lamps.

      He had already been living in Geneva for a year and a half. Meanwhile, I had remained in London, where we’d met. The commute was tolerable, then tiring. In the spring of 2013, as our wedding approached, it was becoming a drag. Finally, that June, a visa fiasco abruptly forced me to leave England. Memoirs of immigration, like memories of immigration, often begin with a sense of approach—the ship sailing into the harbor, the blurred countryside through the windows of a train. My arrival in Geneva, on British Airways, was a perfect anticlimax, the modern ache of displacement anesthetized amid blank corridors of orange liqueur and fountain pens.

      When Lord Byron arrived in Switzerland for an extended holiday in May 1816—fleeing creditors, gossips, and his wife, from whom he had recently separated, after likely fathering a child with his half sister—his entourage included a valet, a footman, a personal physician, a monkey, and a peacock. That summer he wrote The Prisoner of Chillon, the tale of a sixteenth-century Genevan monk, most of whose family has been killed in battle or burned at the stake. “There were no stars, no earth, no time / No check, no change, no good, no crime,” the poem reads. As a description of the local atmosphere, that seemed to me about right. Geneva was unlovely, but not hideous, as though no one had cared enough to do ugly with conviction. The city seemed suffused by complacency, as gray and costive as the clouds that hovered over Lac Léman.

      The main attraction was a clock made of begonias. Transportation was by tram. At the Office Cantonal de la Population, I was given a “Practical Guide to Living in Geneva,” ostensibly a welcome booklet. “It is forbidden and not well looked upon to make too much noise in your apartment between 21:00 and 07:00,” it read. “Also avoid talking too loudly, and shouting to call someone in public places.” The booklet directed me to a web page, which listed further gradations of bruit admissible (acceptable noise) and bruit excessif (excessive noise). Vacuuming during the day was okay, but God help the voluptuary who ran the washing machine after work.

      Geneva had long been a place of asylum, but its tradition of liberty in the religious and political realms had never given rise to a libertine scene. Even though nearly half of the population was foreign-born, the city remained resolutely uncosmopolitan, a tepid fondue of tearooms, confectionaries, and storefronts selling things like hosiery and lutes. Every block had its coiffeur, just as every coiffeur had its lone patroness, getting her hair washed in the sink. It wasn’t as though Genevans enjoyed the advantages of living in the countryside. Many of them, native and nouveau, had means. So why hadn’t some son or daughter of the city, after traveling to New York or Paris or Beirut—to Dallas or Manchester—been inspired to open a place where the bread didn’t come in a doily-lined wicker basket? Was there a dinkier phrase, in any language, than métropole lémanique?

      After a month or so of heavy tramming, we decided to buy a car. We purchased insurance, which included coverage for theft, fire, natural disasters, and dommages causés par les fouines—damages caused by a type of local weasel. I traded in my American driver’s license for a Swiss one. The process took seventeen minutes flat. One sodden afternoon not long after, we trammed over to the Citroën lot.

      Alexandre, a customer service representative, greeted us. He smelled of cigarettes and was wearing a tie.

      “So, voici,” he said. (Switzerland has four official languages—German, French, Italian, and Romansh—and people tended to switch back and forth without warning, with varying degrees of success.) He led us to the car, a used hatchback parked outside the office on a covered ramp.

      It was pouring, each drop of rain a suicide jumper, hurling itself onto the ramp’s tin roof. We circled the car, hoping to project a discerning vibe, as though any painted-over weasel damage would never get by us.

      Olivier stopped on the car’s left side and, because it seemed like the thing to do, opened the backseat door.

      “You will soon have des petits enfants?” Alexandre said.

      “Um, we just got married.”

      “Ah, bon? It was a Protestant or a Catholic ceremony?”

      Our city hall wedding was an unimaginability for Alexandre. I was beginning to understand, only very slowly, that the city’s conservatism was neither an accident of demographics nor an oversight but an enactment of its founding values by conscious design. In 1387, more than a hundred years before the Catholic Church began to loosen its prohibitions on usury, the bishop of Geneva signed a charter of liberties, granting the genevois, alone in Christendom, the privilege of lending money at interest. The elite became financiers. The aspirant became Swiss mercenaries. Famed for their ferocity with the halberd and the pike, they poured cash into the economy in an era when most of the world’s population was getting paid in eggs.

      The mentality had persisted: do your hell-raising—your eating in restaurants without doilies—abroad, and retreat to a place of imperturbable security. Voltaire wrote of Geneva, “There, one calculates, and never laughs.” Stendhal, passing through seventy years later, concluded that the genevois, despite their wealth and worldly networks, were at heart a parochial people: “Their sweetest pleasure, when they are young, is to dream that one day they will be rich. Even when they indulge in some imprudence and abandon themselves to pleasure, the ones they choose are rustic and cheap: a walk, to the summit of some mountain where they drink milk.” Monotony, then, was an economy. So that we could collectively accrue more capital, a curfew had been set.

      Weekends were the worst. All of the shops closed at seven—except on Thursdays, when some of them closed at seven thirty—rendering Saturdays a dull frenzy of provisioning. Sundays were desolate, a relic of the Calvinist lockdown mentality that had sent the young Rousseau scrambling to Savoy. A relocation consultant furnished by Olivier’s company said that there had been talk of easing the Sunday moratorium, but to no avail. “Approximately ninety-nine percent of Swiss people support it,” he said, sounding to us approximately one hundred percent like a Swiss person.

      Geneva had its graces—the trams operated on an honor system; even the graffiti artists were mannerly, defacing the sides of statues that didn’t face the street—but