One of the things I was determined to do when I retired was to perfect my French. My husband’s parents were multi-lingual, he heard French spoken at home, and he speaks it fluently. But although I studied French in both high school and college, my mastery of that beautiful tongue was poor, and my husband hadn’t the patience to help. (See Parlez-vous francais?) So I enrolled at New York’s Alliance Francaise and took classes there for an academic year. Then as summer...