rm | LJ Idol, Topic 4: Current Events -- Locks are Simple Things for a Clockmaker

At Miss Hew's French education was required from kindergarten through eighth grade, at which time we had the option of adding or switching to Spanish as its practicality to residents of New York was hard to ignore even if was considered inappropriate to our status.

As you might imagine with a lead-in like that, everything at Hewitt and particularly in French classes, was done with a certain amount of flair or at least an unpleasantly relentless archaic formality. We stood when the teacher entered the room and greeted her. We had to rest our hands on our desks a certain way and could never, ever sit with our legs crossed at the knee -- only at the ankle and then tucked demurely under our chairs.

And so I learned to speak French at five which was, due to all sorts of issues I had with my voice and hearning, not long after I learnt to speak English. Because my mother is Jewish and my parents eccentric, to this day I only know the words to most Christmas carols in French. Our teachers were an odd assortment - at least for the casual racism and classist nature of Hewitt at the time (quite frankly, I have no idea what it's like now, despite having been recently added to the alumni mailing list).

From when I was very small I recall faintly a Black woman (I do not think she was American, but can't remember) who wore peter pan collars and would leave the room and reenter if we all did not stand and greet her in perfect unison. And from what was the equivalent of junior high I remember a blonde woman, who I understand now to have been young and beautiful and the sort who probably smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets and had lovers who rode motorcycles.

She was from Paris, where she had been a Russian teacher, and as such had little patience with our bumbling through a mere second language when she was fluent in three and, like us, well-educated in Latin besides. I remember our classroom, up in the top of the school where the servants quarters had once been (the school building was formerly a private home -- with the library taking up what had been in grander times the formal dining room). That was the year that it was whispered an older girl had been thrown out for getting pregnant and sullying the uniform and the year this woman, whose name I simply can't recall, assigned us endless French essays on "France is Better than America because...."

It was appalling. And I say this not out of any sense of patriotism, but because really, writing papers on things like "France is Better than America because of the Availability of Clean Public Toilets" and "France is Better than America because Bread is Baked Fresh Daily" on a weekly basis was ludicrous. Here was a language of philosophers and philanderers and we were getting the most comically plodding lessons in French civics and grammar imaginable.

As such, it was with a certain roll of the eyes that I read a piece on the Untergunther, a guerilla organization dedicated to the restoration of France's cultural heritage, and their illicit restoration of an antique clock in the Panthéon. It was just so French! Afterall, this is a nation that strictly regulates the evolution of its own language (something I find increasingly less appalling as I watch the English I was raised with decay with a proud and nasty ferocity).

On the other hand, I'd like some Untergunther please. After all, my life it seems is dedicated to the preservation and documentation of dying (or perhaps just rapid subsumed) worlds -- both real and fictional. I study historic dance and have pretty severe problems with modern attire, manners, education and the like despite the fact that I am far more lax with myself in all these matters than I can really stand.

Additionally, I fence. And not olympic fencing, a game of tag. I train with the sword as if preparing for an actual engagement. Currently, I study foil, the training tool for the small sword which I also intend to pursue along with rapier, epée and sabre. When my fencing master screams at us not to engage in one sloppiness or another because we will be murdered that way, it is not so much a metaphor, even if none of us are ever likely to meet a sharp blade. Whether some of us would wish to is a matter of private speculation that all of us have the good sense to keep to ourselves if we have the poor sense to think about such things at all. And we do, we do.

Of course, in my life as this very particular sort of fencer lurks the crux of the conundrum of my existence. I am a gay woman of peasant stock and limited financial means, and in the worlds I wish to preserve and restore, that I think we are as a species the poorer for losing, I would have never held a sword -- barred at least seemingly absolutely from its privileges by gender, finance and class if not also religion and race. I ache day in and day out because of the absurdities of my childhood for a world that would have served me poorly, but yet on some weird molecular level my flesh can't help but recognize as my birth right.

So I wonder about the members of the Untergunter, if they come from nobility that no longer matters or if they are like me, of the social climbing classes -- artists and artisans, bankers and scholars. Perhaps they are merely looking for a good party or a charming story to tell their children when they move far from the teeming city of Paris to have them.

But perhaps they are like me, longing for a return to good tailors, fine language, high manners and better lighting as they plot exactly how they would have lied themselves into the comforts of a dead age. And while I know that women fight, have always fought in once sense or another (that's what it is to be a woman), I know exactly how I would have connived my way out of the confines of my flesh and caste. I would have done as a perhaps surprising number of women of ages past and lived as a man so that both my grace and intellect would have received reward, so that I might have known the surety of a sword, and so that my somewhat ridiculously won use of French would have given me command of far more than a mere drawing room.

And so I raise a glass to the Untergunther and all the champions of our lost worlds, which no matter how cruel possessed a fineness that is worth preserving and extending beyond their once so narrow and harsh boundaries. We are all heroes and liars alike.