For Some, a Little Raison D'Être

Perhaps, she says, she has kept the class alive because she has had to. The word she uses is fidelity. "There's a continuum; I've learned that from them," she said. "That life requires patience. Steadfastness. Constancy. All these old-fashioned words. In the business world, people come and go. In my business, you're lucky to have a class last for one month. And yet this piece of my life has been constant. Maybe that's why I keep coming."

En Masse, Divergent Paths

Each of the women studied the requisite two or three years of French in high school, save for Pope, who was born in Austria, learned French at 5 and as a teen escaped to become a dancer in America after Hitler invaded, and Graham, 89, who got her college degree in French. But they all began coming to class for different reasons.

Doris Gilbert was looking for ways to fill her time after she retired as a librarian. Susan Lancaster, 75, the newest member with only 12 years in the class, began coming because she fell in love with the way French sounded when she was a college student in Paris. She loves the elegant turns of phrase, such as "enchanté de vous revoir," "as if they were really enchanted to see you again," she said.

Beahler, 74, who worked as a legal counsel on the Hill and lived all over the world with her State Department husband, learned Swahili in Kenya, Spanish in the Caribbean and a smattering of Italian, and took a Berlitz class here and there. But it wasn't until she sat in on a French class in Tunis under a fragrant orange tree and heard the melodic poetry of Paul Verlaine that she became determined to learn the language and joined the class.

Sixty-six-year-old Mackall, the baby of the class, remembers, at 7, putting her hands over her ears, stomping her foot and yelling at her Louisiana Cajun father that she didn't want to learn French, his native tongue, that none of her friends spoke it. Then, years later, as he lay dying, he began dreaming again in French. He would tell her about his dreams. And she wished she could understand. She joined the class after he died.

The class members say they are a congenial group. That Diamond is an upbeat, gifted teacher. They say they have fun together. Stafford says they are almost like an encounter group, then quickly retracts that. It sounds too hippy-ish and confessional, she says. They are women of un certain âge. They come from an era in which the soul was not something to be bared.

But every week, they must give a presentation about something. So at times, they talk about the news from Paris they heard on the radio or the latest book they have read. Madam Graham spoke the other Wednesday about alternative energy in Europe and global warming.

And at other times, it's the granddaughter who is living with the boyfriend and isn't married. The son who is giving up his job as an optometrist to become a handyman. Or how hard it is to sell the ancestral home. To stop driving. Or to watch old friends die. "You can say things in French that you can't in English," Stafford said.

All Things Must Pass

Poppy Gardener, 85, missed a few weeks last year when her son was shot and her daughter-in-law killed in southern Virginia. She missed more class while she attended the trial. When she came back, she reported in matter-of-fact French what had happened. That was it. No questions. No discussion. The class moved on. And no one broke the cardinal rule: What's said in the classroom stays in classroom. She found herself looking forward to Wednesdays. "It made my life normal," she said. Talking about the case in French gave her distance, she said. "Like watching a French movie. You don't get as emotionally involved because you're concentrating so hard to understand."

And as she struggled to choose the proper noun gender, the right modifiers and verb tenses, the rest of the class listened just as intensely. And perhaps that is why the class has lasted 30 years. Because although there is power in telling your story, there is even greater power in being heard. "You know sometimes when you talk, the people are looking at you, but they're not hearing a word you're saying, or they're looking around the room for someone else who can advance their careers. But when you're talking and they're really listening to what you're saying," she paused. "It makes a great deal of difference."

Which is why Gardener's eyes become misty when she thinks of the class ending, as she knows it must one day soon as they reach what one member calls le dernier âge -- the last age. "We would miss it," Gardener said finally. "It's become terribly important in our lives."

Diamond tried to end the French class in June, but the ladies wouldn't hear of it. The small translation company Diamond started about the same time that the French class began is now a $9 million business with 35 full-time and 800 contract translators. She travels the country constantly on business. She has moved to Winchester and must commute two hours to get to the class. Now, she thinks, is the time for the French class to end.

But she can't bring herself to end it. Not quite yet.