But I have also left in French a few phrases where the foreign or evocative sound for Russian ears seems to me as important as the meaning, for example: "petite pomme" ("little apple"); Belle Epoque (the era in France before the First World War); "cher confrère" ("dear colleague"); an echo of Flaubert's remark, "Madame Bovary c'est moi" ("Madame Bovary is me"); the opening couplet from La Fontaines fable of the wolf and the lamb, "La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure /Nous Vallons montrer tout à l'heure …" ("The strongest always stand to win/The argument, as shown herein…"), which features in an elocution lesson; and the elusive French "je ne sais quoi" (an indefinable something).
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While still a child, I guessed that this very singular smile represented a strange little victory for each of the women: yes, a fleeting revenge for disappointed hopes, for the coarseness of men, for the rareness of beautiful and true things in this world. Had I known how to say it at the time I would have called this way of smiling "femininity."… But my language was too concrete in those days. I contented myself with studying the women's faces in our photograph albums and identifying this glow of beauty in some of them.
For these women knew that in order to be beautiful, what they must do several seconds before the flash blinded them was to articulate the following mysterious syllables in French, of which few understood the meaning: "pe-tite-pomme. "… As if by magic, the mouth, instead of being extended in counterfeit bliss, or contracting into an anxious grin, would form a gracious round. The whole face was thus transfigured. The eyebrows arched slightly, the oval of the cheeks was elongated. You said "petite pomme," and the shadow of a distant and dreamy sweetness veiled your gaze, refined your features, and caused the soft light of bygone days to hover over the snapshot.