E finally did it. While vacationing in Provence in the spring of 2003, my husband, Larry, and I decided to rent a house there the following September to study French. 
For decades, usually just after yet another tongue-tied trip to France, we'd been promising ourselves to improve upon what was left of our high school French. We'd get tapes, we'd take a Berlitz course, we'd join a conversational French group. But the moment would pass, usually by the time we were unpacked. It was just like us to wait until we were 65 to try to learn French, when we were already forgetting English.
Even so, the opportunity practically had to hit us over the head. We were taking a walk in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a particularly beautiful Provençal town, known for its Sunday antiques market. As usual, we were talking about how someday it would be fun to rent a house and study French, when a flier on a telephone pole caught our attention: "Cours de Français. Immersion Totale. Monique Desroziers, www.frenchprogram.com."
Nearby, a man with a rakish mustache sat on a chair in the sunshine in front of a house, repairing an antique chest. Larry approached him.
"Avez-vous un crayon, s'il vous plaît?"
The man set down the drawer he was regluing, disappeared into the house, and returned with a pencil. When he saw us copying the e-mail address, he stood up abruptly.
"Ne quittez pas, ne quittez pas, attendez un moment!" he said.
"He doesn't want us to quit, he wants us to attend," I said, proving, as if there were any doubt, that colloquial fluency was not my forte.
The man hurried back into the house. This time he emerged with his companion, Monique Desroziers - destiny in the form of a French teacher.
She invited us to visit her classroom, which was on the third floor of their home. It was here, she explained slowly, in French, that we would study. We could create our own schedule. Other students would join us when their hours coincided with ours. Then, if we liked, for an additional fee, we could continue with conversation over lunch.
Whenever we would interrupt her during this orientation because we didn't understand a word or phrase, she'd answer our question in French. Mon dieu, I thought. The reason her course was called "immersion totale'' was because she didn't, or wouldn't, speak a word of English.
We didn't dare give ourselves time to think. It was now or never. Maybe we wouldn't become fluent the way we would have if we'd had the sense to take our junior years abroad, but at least we wouldn't spend what was left of our lives trapped in French circumlocution, feeling inept and groping for nouns and idioms until les vaches came home.
We arranged to rent a house for the month of September in nearby Saumane de Vaucluse, a tiny hill town of about 600 residents and no commerce, except for a small cafe. Our huggable little 18th-century shuttered house was near the top of the hill, on a narrow street intended for carriages, and a few steps away from a small Norman church. On top of the town was a partially restored 15th-century chateau, the birthplace of the Marquis de Sade. (He lived there only the first six years of his life, not long enough to confer tourist status on the town.)
L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, where Mme. Desroziers and Ange (the antiques man) lived, was less than four miles down a series of hair-raising switchbacks that would give Lance Armstrong pause.
I immediately began to have second thoughts. So what if I'd wanted to do this for decades? Maybe all I wanted was to keep on wanting to learn French, not to actually learn it. I worried about being disoriented and inarticulate, conditions I had spent my entire adult life avoiding. Being in control was practically the whole point of being a grown-up, wasn't it? Why would I purposely make myself stupid?
Because, I came to understand, by putting myself in the circumstances of a small child, I retrieved what I was sure I had lost forever - the unalloyed enthusiasm a child feels when exploring and mastering the world. The inordinate thrill of learning how to tie one's own shoes, or spell c-a-t, can belong to grown-ups, but only if they are willing to start again in first grade. Youth is not always wasted on the young; it can be well spent on the old.
At 65, we were the same kind of students we had been at 6 - eager, hand-waving, eraser-clapping teacher's pets. From 10 a.m. to noon, four days a week, we'd sing French songs, watch French film, listen to French tapes, decline verbs, write in our workbooks, and converse. Eager for more, we chose the delicious dinner-size lunch and accompanying wine in which we'd find, if not veritas, at least uninhibited fluency. Was "environment" the same word in French? We gave it a shot. It was.
Often Monique and Ange would invite friends to lunch to meet us. Contrary to expectations, strangers bloomed into friends with the speed of flowers in a Disney documentary. This may be because these people are Provençals, not Parisians, but I'm inclined to think it's because Larry and I are a lot nicer in French than in English.
We think carefully before we speak. We have to: We're at a constant, literal loss for words. We listen carefully. We can't afford to interrupt. And, because we don't have the adult vocabulary to be our usual cynical selves, we are as open and earnest as children. Besides, who could resist two old liberal Americans who love France, want to learn the language and happily join in a critique of President Bush's foreign policy.
Yet another unexpected advantage flows from our status as aging toddlers: We recapture our long lost capacity for play. Our favorite game is "Let's pretend we're French." When one of us asks, "Ou est la guerre (war),'' when we mean "la gare," (railroad station), we certainly aren't fooling anyone into thinking we are French, but we don't care. Like two small children at a tea party, pouring pretend tea into pretend cups, we are happy merely to be fooling ourselves.
Everything old is new again. At our local supermarket in suburban Connecticut, shopping is a bore; at the Intermarché in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, it's a scavenger hunt and a game of charades. We carry our list up and down the aisles, matching pictures to names, translating pois chiche into chick peas, torchons into dish towels, and poubelles into garbage cans. When all else fails, as it often does, we take turns acting out sausages or Camembert.
Something as annoying as a broken glass refrigerator shelf launches a literal odyssey: Look up the words for shelf (rayon) and glazier (vitrier) in the dictionary (dictionnaire). Next, locate a vitrier in the annuaire (the phone book) and then drive all over town asking, "Ou est le vitrier?" until you find him. One mission, four new French words, and 24 hours later, we remember only "dictionnaire."
Ay, there's the rub. When it comes to remembering, we are most definitely not like children. If we manage to cram 20 new words into our heads each day, at least 19 fly out. Fluency at this age, we now understand, is an ever-receding grail. More and more we find ourselves identifying with the proverbial frog's nearly doomed, but nevertheless persistent effort to jump out of the well.
We're not giving up either. We went back to the same place this summer, and will go back again, to forget some more.
MARY-LOU WEISMAN is the author of "Traveling While Married" (Algonquin).
