When are we going to return to our ferme? As we pointed out earlier, a language student should master la ferme before he or she moves on to la ville, just as we should all come to the city only in our adolescent years, when nature, or animal life, is no longer as important or interesting to us as it once was.
If you stand in a tilled field at the edge of la ferme, you will hear les vaches lowing because it is five in the winter evening and their udders are full. A light is on in the barn, but outside it is dark and la femme of le fermier looks out a little anxiously across the barnyard from the window of her cuisine, where she is peeling vegetables. Now the hired man is silhouetted in the doorway of the barn. La femme wonders why he is standing still holding a short object in his right hand. The plural article les, spelled l e s, as in les vaches, is invariable, but do not pronounce the s. The singular article is either masculine, le, or feminine, la, depending on the noun it accompanies, and it must always be learned along with any new noun in your vocabulary, because there is very little else to go by, to tell what in the world of French nouns is masculine and what is feminine. You may try to remember that all countries ending in silent e are feminine except for le Mexique, or that all the states in the United States of America ending in silent e are feminine except for Maine — just as in German the four seasons are masculine and all minerals are masculine — but you will soon forget these rules. One day, however, la maison will seem inevitably feminine to you, with its welcoming open doors, its shady rooms, its warm kitchen. La bicyclette, a word we are introducing now, will also seem feminine, and can be thought of as a young girl, ribbons fluttering in her spokes as she wobbles down the rutted lane away from the farm. La bicyclette. But that was earlier in the afternoon. Now les vaches stand at the barnyard gate, lowing and chewing their cuds. The word cud, and probably also the word lowing, are words you will not have to know in French, since you would almost never have occasion to use them.
Now the hired man swings open la barrière and les vaches amble across the barnyard, udders swaying, up to their hocks in la boue, nodding their heads and switching their tails. Now their hooves clatter across the concrete floor of la grange and the hired man swings la barrière shut. But where is le fermier? And why, in fact, is the chopping block covered with sang that is still sticky, even though le fermier has not killed un poulet in days? You will need to use indefinite articles as well as definite articles with your nouns, and we must repeat that you will make no mistakes with the gender of your nouns if you learn the articles at the same time. Un is masculine, une is feminine. This being so, what gender is un poulet? If you say masculine you are right, though the bird herself may be a young female. After the age of ten months, however, when she should also be stewed rather than broiled, fried, or roasted, she is known as la poule and makes a great racket after laying a clutch of eggs in a corner of the poultry yard la femme will have trouble finding in the morning, when she will also discover something that does not belong there and that makes her stand still, her apron full of eggs, and gaze off across the fields.
Notice that the words poule, poulet, and poultry, especially when seen on the page, have some resemblance. This is because all three are derived from the same Latin word. This may help you remember the word poulet. Poule, poulet, and poultry have no resemblance to the word chicken, because chicken is derived from the Anglo-Saxon.
In this first lesson we have concentrated on nouns. We can safely, however, introduce a preposition at this point, and before we are through we will also be using one verb, so that by the end of the lesson you will be able to form some simple sentences. Try to learn what this preposition means by the context in which it is used. You will notice that you have been doing this all along with most of the vocabulary introduced. It is a good way to learn a language because it is how children learn their native languages, by associating the sounds they hear with the context in which the sounds are uttered. If the context changed continually, the children would never learn to speak. Also, the so-called meaning of a word is completely determined by the context in which it is spoken, so that in fact we cannot say a meaning is inescapably attached to a word, but that it shifts over time and from context to context. Certainly the so-called meaning of a French word, as I tried to suggest earlier, is not its English equivalent but whatever it refers to in French life. These are modern or contemporary ideas about language, but they are generally accepted. Now the new word we are adding to our vocabulary is the word dans, spelled d a n s. Remember not to pronounce the last letter, s, or, in this case, the next to the last letter, n, and speak the word through your nose. Dans.
Do you remember la femme? Do you remember what she was doing? It is still dark, les vaches are gone from her sight and quieter than they were earlier, except for the one bellowing vache who is ill and was not let out that morning by le fermier for fear that she would infect the others, and la femme is still there, peeling vegetables. She is — now listen carefully—dans la cuisine. Do you remember what la cuisine is? It is the only place, except perhaps for the sunny front courtyard on a cool late summer afternoon, where une femme would reasonably peel les legumes.
La femme is holding a small knife dans her red-knuckled hand and there are bits of potato skin stuck to her wrist, just as there are feathers stuck in le sang on the chopping block outside the back door, smaller feathers, however, than would be expected from un poulet. The glistening white peeled pommes de terre are dans une bassine and la bassine is dans the sink, and les vaches are dans la grange, where they should have been an hour ago. Above them the bales of hay are stacked neatly dans the loft, and near them is a calf dans the calves’ pen. The rows of bare light bulbs in the ceiling shine on the clanking stanchions. Stanchion is another word you will probably not have to know in French, though it is a nice one to know in English.