But before the professors, there was my mother.  My mother, a pianist and singer, a vaudeville singer, each night of my childhood as she tucked me into bed, would murmur to me in French, “I love you like cream, I adore you like gold.”  Often, sitting at the piano, she would play two songs whose words have remained with me and haunted me: “Speak to Me of Love” and “Pleasures of Love”: “The pleasures of love last but a moment, the sorrows of love last a lifetime.”  It is largely my mother’s voice in French that I hear as I recite, as I often do, my favorite verses:

“Death, who ravished me my mistress, I appeal against your rigor” (Villon “Le Testament: Rondeau” or

“What cares this charming head had cost me” (Racine, Phèdre, II.v) or

“But the green paradise of childhood loves” (Baudelaire, “Moesta et Errabunda”)

or my favorite sentences:

“Doubtless one day, faced with arid expanses reconquered by the forest, no one shall ever guess what intelligence man had imposed on the forms of the earth when he raised the stones of Florence amidst the great sway of Tuscan olive trees” (Malraux, Voix du silence).

or these words from the end of “Swann’s Way”:

“It sufficed that Madame Swann did not arrive in the same attire and at the same moment for the avenue to be altered.  The places we have