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 upper-right-hand corner 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!