Studies Abroad

I, too, was once a French major, visiting France for the first time the summer after high school. I was as dazzled by the beauties of Paris as any American teenager could be; I immediately bought a black beret and took to smoking Gitanes (cough), yakking in caf?s, and drinking rough red wine like a native, or so I hoped. But never did I feel that French, or France, was something to escape to, as Kaplan and her subjects seem to have done. My beau id?al for France was to understand French movies and French phrases in English classics. Also, menus. By contrast, Jacqueline Bouvier fled a dull, stultifying upper-class upbringing for Paris; she wanted to be more than Queen Deb. Sontag was apparently feeling pressure to live as a heterosexual, an obligation that promptly deserted her once she arrived in France. The brilliant Angela Davis was always going to leave racist Birmingham, Ala.

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