雙語+MP3|美國學生世界地理29 你講法語嗎?(續(xù))

     THERE are two French words which I know you know, even if you don' speak French. One is "Boulevard" and the other is "Avenue." You have probably always thought they were English words, but they are both French words. Paris has many Boulevards and one of the finest Avenues in the World. This Avenue is lined with trees and runs directly toward the setting sun, and was thought beautiful enough to be a street in Paradise, so it was called the Champs-Elysées, which means "The Fields of Paradise."
     In London a square is called a Circus, but in Paris it is called a Place, as if spelled "Plass." The most beautiful Place in Paris is the Place de la Concorde. In the center of this Place is a monument made of one single tall stone standing on end. It is called Cleopatra's Needle. The Place de la Concorde is at one end of the Champs-Elysées and at the other end is a beautiful arch like a huge gateway across the avenue. It is called "L'Arc de Triomphe," which it is easy to guess means The Arch of Triumph. No automobile nor carriage may pass through this Arch of Triumph, however, for underneath it in the pavement is the tomb of the French Unknown Soldier, and from this tomb a flame flickers day and night-a flame to be kept burning forever to the memory of the brave Frenchmen who died in the World Wars.


     The French people love beautiful things. They love beautiful pictures and beautiful sculpture and beautiful buildings, and they know how to make them; so young men and women from our country and from other countries go to Paris to learn from the French how to make beautiful things-to become painters and sculptors and architects.
     But the French love beauty in everyday things as well-in such everyday things as hats and clothes and cooking and manners. French hats and French clothes and French cooking and French manners are famous. Strange to say, the most famous French dressmakers are men. Also, strange to say, the most famous French cooks are men too. We call them "chefs." Our dressmakers go to Paris to study and copy the fashion in clothes and the style in hats, and we get French chefs for our finest hotels and restaurants. Perhaps you have noticed that the bill of fare in many of our restaurants is printed in French. That is because our cooks copy not only the way the French cook but the names of the dishes they cook. The French can make delicious soup out of a piece of bread and a bone. In America soup is just soup, but in France soup is called potage or consommé instead of soup-it sounds better, and anything that sounds better you expect will taste better, too, and it usually does.


     When we eat our meals we almost always do so indoors, where we can see no one else and no one else can see us. But the French often eat outof- doors, on the sidewalk or overlooking the sidewalk, where they can see every one and every one can see them, and that's where many of their most famous restaurants are placed.
     The French drink a great deal of wine with their meals, much as we drink milk or coffee or tea, and there are many great farms in different parts of France where they raise grapes from which they make the wine. These farms are vineyards-called "vinyards."
     Cloth is made out of several things-linen, cotton, wool, and silk; linen, cotton, and wool are chiefly for use, but silk is chiefly for beauty. In Ireland cloth is made out of linen, in England cloth is made out of cotton and wool, but in France cloth is made out of silk for beauty's sake. Linen and cotton are made from plants, wool is made from sheep, but silk is made from a little caterpillar. We call this caterpillar a silkworm, but he is not really a worm at all. A worm is born, lives, and dies always a worm, but a caterpillar turns into a beautiful moth or butterfly if let alone. Most caterpillars, however, we try to kill, for they eat the leaves of trees and other green things. But silkworms are so valuable that people feed them leaves and raise them as our farmers raise chickens. The silk caterpillar likes a special kind of leaf-the leaves of the mulberry-tree. So in the valley of a river in France called the Rh?ne the French people grow mulberry-trees-not for the mulberries but for the leaves, which they gather and feed to the silkworms.
     After the silk caterpillar has eaten, he spins a fine thread of silk almost a quarter of a mile long out of his own body, as a spider spins a spider web out of his own body. The silk caterpillar winds himself up in this thread as he spins it round and round and round until he is completely covered up and looks in his cover of silk thread something like a peanut. Then he goes to sleep inside, and if he waked up he would come out a moth; but they don't let him wake up. They boil him while he is asleep, till he is soft, and then they unwind the thread which he has wound round himself and use it to make silk cloth, silk stockings, silk ribbons, and all the silk things that women love. On the River Rh?ne is the greatest place in Europe for making silk. It is called Lyons.
     The River Rh?ne flows south into a gulf called the Gulf of Lyons, which is a part of the Mediterranean Sea. The chief city on the Gulf of Lyons is Marseilles. It is the next largest city to Paris, but it was a city long before there was any Paris, for it was a port for ships that sailed the sea long, long ago, and it still is one of the great ports for ships. It is near, but not quite at, the mouth of the Rh?ne.
     Another thing that women love is perfume-sweet perfume! The French are famous for making perfume from flowers and from sweet grasses and even from weeds. French perfume is very expensive, because it often takes a whole field of flowers to make but a very few bottles of perfume. A dollar for a thimbleful! It always seemed wonderful to me that both flowers and their perfume come out of the ground-that the beautiful colors and sweet perfume are both made from mud!
     French farmers raise other things, of course, besides grapes and silkworms and flowers for perfume. They raise many of the same things that our own farmers raise. Most of the people in France are farmers, but they don't live in farm-houses on their farms; they live in houses in a village and walk out and back to their farms, which often are a long way off.


     When I was five years old I was given a penny bank, "to save for my old age." When, at the age of twelve, I had a hundred dollars, I felt like a millionaire. The French are very saving. Even a man who earns very little saves some of that little, so that even poor people have money saved up for their old age when they can no longer work.
     A girl saves her money so that when she marries she will have enough to buy furniture and perhaps a house or even more. This is called her "dot." Sometimes her father and mother give it to her, and sometimes the girl earns it herself; sometimes her "dot" is only a few hundred dollars, sometimes it is thousands of dollars, but seldom can a girl marry who hasn't some "dot." "And they lived happily ever afterward."