NONFICTION - April 30, 1995

THE PHILOSOPHER’S DEMISE by Richard Watson (University of Missouri Press: $22.50; 152 pp.) Finally, helpless victims of the French language have their very own self-help book. At age 55, after a 25-year career as a Cartesian scholar, having translated the work of Descartes and researched original materials in French, having reviewed French books, Watson is invited to give a paper at a conference in Paris on the 350th anniversary of Descartes’ “Discours de la Methode.” All papers to be presented in French. Watson cannot speak French, in spite of the fact that, he writes, he “could be reading a book consciously unaware as to whether it was in French or in English.” Ever so endearingly, Watson lists the genetic heritage that should make it perfectly simple for him to learn how to speak French within the few months before the conference: Father was a teacher, 13 aunts and uncles, teachers, wife, brother, cousins, all teachers. Thirty years of education. Ph.D.s all over the place. Twenty-five years as a college professor. An edifice that crumbles before the irony, exclusivity and charming elusiveness of spoken French. Why bother? Watson remembers a 20-mile hike as a Boy Scout that he and some friends, by cutting corners, sculpted down into a 17-mile hike and still earned their merit badges. “I never felt right about it. That is why after being a Cartesian scholar for more than 25 years, I now had to learn to speak French.” He gives the paper; he tries desperately to “hang out” with the famous French Cartesian scholars who snub him and his French (we like him more and more). He stays in Paris and takes classes at the Alliance. His favorite class is taught by a beautiful, flirtatious teacher named Claire, in which he is surrounded by beautiful, flirtatious women. “I liked this class,” he writes. He learns slowly. He takes other classes that less closely resemble Fantasy Island, including one in which the teacher frequently loses her temper in his direction “ ‘Im-be-cile,’ she hissed. ‘Idiot!’ . . . To be sure, she called others in the class the same as the days went on, but I was the first. I, who had been a professor in charge of my own classes for 25 years. . . . Once, the professor said deliciously, ‘Do not have fear, Ree-shar.’ ” Watson is liberated, in this Est-like experience, by the realization that he doesn’t really like the French, and that the French, for the most part, “are not interested in what other people do.” They are not picking on you because, he writes, “they don’t notice that it is you.”