Mothers, A House And Flowers

Other Mothers

Last pizza evening I was talking with friend Dany about broken families of one sort or another and the question of step mothers/fathers/etc came up. To my surprise Dany said that the French have no way of distinguishing in-laws from step whatevers except by context. A mother in law is a « belle mère » and so is a step mother. What I found most interesting, on reflection, was the semantic implications of this.

A semantic gap normally implies that the culture behind the language has had no need to make the distinction and the gap therefore introduces no ambiguity. However, I can think of at least one case in which the distinction is pertinent: French inheritance law; and that has been essentially unchanged since the time of Napoleon Bonaparte. Under French inheritance law a mother in law would not inherit from the birth-mother's estate directly, only through her spouse, and she wouldn't enjoy the rights of usu-fruit that a step-mother would. I wonder how the French have coped with this ambiguity, unless context always makes the distinction clear, which is difficult to believe.

So, effectively, “belle mère” means “other mother”: i.e. other than birth mother. Further precision can only be given by context. That was a new on me.

It's usual to link languages to countries but I prefer to link them to cultures. Belgium and Luxembourg are obvious counters to the language-country link. However, it occurred to me, when walking the dog the other day, that there is a problem with synthetic languages such as Arabic and Indonesian, the latter particularly. There are over 400 languages in Indonesia, which is why Indonesian was created as the official language. But how can it possibly properly encompass 400 different cultures, even if these are closely related? There have to be a lot of semantic gaps. Unfortunately I don't know enough about either the languages or the cultures to have an inkling about what the gaps are or how they are circumvented.

Mana's House

Marijka, a Dutch lady who bought Mana's house, invited me a few evenings ago to have a drink and see what she had been doing to the house. I think I must have commented on Mana's house before. It was built around 1730 and has magnificent old features: many original wooden doors, to large wall cupboards as well as rooms, including a front door with a key so big it would never fit into any modern pocket, original floor tiling upstairs and original windows. It served the village in the 19^th century variously as a school, hospital and Mairie.

I felt it was important (although I could do nothing about it) that whoever bought it should be sympathetic to its original features; they weren't protected any way in French law. Fortunately Marijka has done a very sensitive job of modernising the house whilst keeping, and even in some cases accentuating, these features. In one of the (seven) bedrooms she has painted all the walls white and removed everything except a severely designed four-poster bed imported from China, draped with traditional Chinese red cloth. The doors of the wall cupboards either side of the bed, each over seven feet high, therefore stand out as the features they should be and the whole is completed by the traditional French ceiling beams. The room is modern in its starkness but a show case of the old features. Marijka has also greatly improved access to the roof terrace, taking down a ceiling in the room from which access was obtained through a crawl hole at the top, replacing it with a full-size door, retaining the cross-beams from the demolished ceiling below a higher ceiling.

I was really pleased to see the way the house was being sensitively both modernised and restored

Dipladenias

To keep some colour at the front of the house in late summer I bought a couple of Dipladenia. They're not a plant I have encountered before and not one I like especially; they look a bit “plastic” for my taste but their dark green foliage and deep red trumpet-shaped flowers undoubtedly go well together and they are popular here. A search on the RHS website revealed that they are tropical plants, thriving in an all year temperature of 20 degrees and reaching a height of 10 feet. I want to try to keep them over winter so I'll see if they can survive in my (unheated) terrace room; my lemon tree does, against the odds, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed