French Books, Stories, and Flashcards

As I write about the clash between the French and British Navies in 1940, I want to capture experiences and impressions from both sides. The picture below shows a sampling of the French-language books I purchased to enrich my research, (further enhanced by French PDFs, papers, journals, and one timely issue of Paris Match magazine).

The book with the somewhat ornate binding in the middle of the picture (with no visible title) is L'Aventure de La Force X (Escadre française de la Méditerranée orientale) à Alexandrie (1940-1943), by Vice-Admiral René-Émile Godfroy. It’s the pride of my collection … for its content, as well as because it was incredibly difficult to find. It rarely appears in the published inventories of online booksellers (for example, I don’t see any copies available on the day that I write this). After learning about the existence of L’Aventure …I looked online periodically, and one day was thrilled to find this copy for sale by a bookseller in Bécherel, France. With tax and shipping, Admiral Godfroy’s memoir cost $88.93, which – spoiler alert – was well worth the investment, in light of the unique details that appear nowhere other than this book (and, soon, in mine).

One thorny problem I had when I set off on this project was that I could barely read French. I wrote about this hurdle - and how I overcame it - in Everybody Knows a Salesman Can’t Write a Book. If you’re interested, I’ve uploaded a free copy of that chapter to my website.
 
One of the stories you will read about is how I prepared a stack of do-it-yourself flash cards to study French during my business travels. I created individual slides in PowerPoint for the words that consistently frustrated me. Each slide included a translation of the word, as well as the word in use in short French and English phrases. I printed out the slides in PowerPoint’s handout format (six “slides” to a page), and then cut out the individual slides, and carried then in my business backpack. Fortunately I have no aversion to looking like an absolute nerd in public.

There is another chapter in “Everybody Knows …” about Richard M. Watt, who wrote several twentieth-century European history books while working a fulltime sales job – precisely as I was trying to do. To say that he was a key inspiration for this project in an understatement. It was particularly interesting to learn about the parallels in our writing adventures … including that Dick Watt also made his own set of flash cards to study French during his business travels.
 
Merci d'avoir lu,
(Thanks for reading),
Guillaume / Guy / Bill
 
PS – One nice sign of progress is that the words and phrases in the sample slide shown above all now seem very basic. The flashcards evidently worked!