Fresh Water for Flowers

and M. J. Carré. Toward the end of my pregnancy, I heard a primary-school teacher talking about it on the radio. She talked about how one of her pupils had had to redo his first year in primary school twice due to his illiteracy. How he didn’t try to read, but rather to guess. He might say any old thing, or use his memory to pretend to read when he was actually reciting by heart. That is exactly what I had always done. So, the teacher had made him follow this reading method, and in six months, her pupil was reading almost as well as the rest of the class. This old method of reading was entirely syllabic. It didn’t allow word recognition: it was impossible to cheat, to attempt to recognize or guess words or sentences.

For hours, while Léonine was still an infant in her pram, I read words out loud to her, “The street at midday, i ee i i ee ee i ee, feet, pin, beetroot, bin. Christmas holidays. ee o a i o ee a o, olives, hand, dominoes, apples, bottle. Toto tidied the table. To. Ti. Ta. Eric. The peel. The potato. The pram. The pig. Eric was polite at school. Cool. Pool. Stool. Tool. Fool. Wool. Mood i er. Poo dle. Coo ler. Noo dles. Soo ner. The doo dl er. The boo k shop. Sm oo th. Foot step. Ella hears a cuckoo, I look for you, my mother will loop the wool and knit a hood.”

Léonine opened her big eyes and listened to me without passing judgment on the slowness of my reading, the repetition, the pronunciation mistakes, the words I got stuck on, or what they meant. Every day I repeated the same syllables to her, until they just slipped out on their own.

The illustrations were colorful, cheery, and simple. Before long she was putting her little fingers on them. My textbook was stained as soon as Léonine could grab hold of it and crumple it. Spit, chocolate, tomato sauce, felt pen. She even cut her teeth on the cover. She put it in her mouth like she wanted to swallow it whole.

For the first few years, I hid this book. I didn’t want Philippe Toussaint to fall on it by chance. If he’d discovered that I was learning to read properly, it would have been unbearable. It would have meant that I really was the poor, uneducated girl so despised by his mother.

I would take it out again as soon as he went off on his bike. When Léonine saw the reader, she squealed with joy, she knew that reading was about to begin. She would let herself be lulled by my voice, and look at the illustrations that she knew by heart. Little girls with blond hair and red dresses, hens, ducks, Christmas trees, grass, flowers, scenes of daily life aimed at very young children. Simplified, happy lives.

I told myself that I had three years to read fluently, that when she started nursery school, I would be able to do so. I managed much sooner than that. When Léonine blew out her first candle, I was on page 60.

I learned to read properly, without stumbling on words, thanks to this Boscher Method. I would have liked to tell this to the teacher on the radio, to tell her that her story had altered the course of my life. I phoned RTL, told an operator that I’d heard a teacher talking in one of Fabrice’s programmes in August 1986, but the response was that it was impossible to trace if I didn’t have the exact date, which I didn’t.

Learning to read is like learning to swim. Once you’ve learnt the arm movements, and got over the fear of drowning, crossing a swimming pool or an ocean comes to the same thing. It’s just a question of breathing and training.

Very soon, I reached the page before last, and the story told there became Léonine’s favorite. It’s taken from a Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Fir Tree:

“In the forest there was once the sweetest little fir tree imaginable. It grew in a good place, where the sun could warm it, with good friends all around it: fir trees and pine trees. And yet it had but one aim: to be big very soon. The children would sit close to it; looking at it, they would say, ‘How sweet this little fir tree is.’ And the little fir tree couldn’t bear that. To grow, to grow; to become tall and mature, that’s the only happiness on earth, it thought . . . At the end of the year, the woodcutters always came to fell a few trees, always the finest ones. ‘Where are they going?’ the little fir tree wondered . . . A stork told it, ‘I believe I saw them; they were standing tall, heads held high, on splendid new boats, and travelling the world.’ When Christmas came, every year some very young trees would also be felled, selected from among the finest and sturdiest. ‘Where might they be going?’ the fir tree wondered. Finally, its turn came. And off it was carried, into a large and beautiful room with lovely armchairs; on all of its branches toys gleamed and lights twinkled. What brightness! What splendor! Only joy! The following day, the fir tree was carried off to a corner where it was forgotten. It had time to think. Looking back at its happy youth in the woods, and the joyous Christmas Eve, it sighed, ‘Over, all that is over! Oh, if only I had been able to appreciate the fresh air and the warm sun when there was still time!”

I bought some children’s books, some real ones. I read them, and reread them, a hundred times to Léonine. She’s probably had more stories read to her than any other little girl. It became a daily ritual, she never fell asleep without a story. Even during the day, she would run after me clutching books and stammering, “Story, story,”