Foreign Language Scholarship - 1st Place & Fellowship

Question: What single figure or event in the history of your host country has most contributed to your desire to study a foreign language?

"Des yuex qui font baisser les miens. Un rire qui se perd sur sa bouche. Voilà le portrait sans retouche de l’homme auquel j’appartiens” or “Eyes that caress mine. A laugh that loses itself on his lips. This is the unaltered picture of the man to whom I belong.” These are the first four lines to the song “La Vie en Rose” performed by the legendary French chanteuse Édith Piaf. Piaf is the soul of France. The mere strength and pronunciation of Piaf’s voice has made my desire clear to not only improve my fluency in French but to also be a confident and powerful speaker.

Piaf’s life was from rags to riches, literally. The Sparrow was born in the year 1915 in Belleville, France and started her singing career at the age of fifteen after she decided to part from her father and street performances. While performing on a Paris street corner, Piaf, age twenty, caught the ear of her future director, Louis Leplée. Leplée owned the cabaret named Le Gerny’s on the Champs Elysées and guided Piaf into the spotlight. With her raw and emotional vocals, Piaf immediately won the hearts of many Parisians and Frenchmen. However, her stardom brought upon unavoidable criticism to Piaf’s personal relationships and life. Piaf managed to move past the stories in the paper, the pictures, the comments and focused on her passion. As her life was moving toward the end of the tunnel, Piaf had performed on numerous occasions throughout all of Paris and the United States. Since her death of liver cancer on October 10th, 1963, Édith Piaf has been remembered and honored in countless ways in countless places. The song, “La Vie en Rose”, has been implanted in movies such as La Môme to WALL-E, to novels such as Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale and John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Piaf once said, “I like to think of myself as an instrument to serve the song, that way I can win people’s hearts.” And she did precisely that when I was eleven years old.

For nine years I have been studying the French language. As I learned the basics of French in middle school, I became more accustomed how the language was structured, spelt, read, and spoken. As I approached high school, I became motivated to learn more about the language since there were three French teachers rather than one. I can honestly say through my high school career French was my only class that I truly loved. Aside from book work, a normal class consisted of listening and translating music and at times watching French movies. In my spare time I would search songs on the internet and one day I randomly chose "Piaf, Édith". I listened to her song, “La Vie en Rose” and fell in love as she did with the man whom she sang about in the song.

For this essay I could have chosen to write about Monet or Napoleon or even Marie Antoinette. However, I chose Édith Piaf to connect her passion with music and France to my passion with the French language. “Il est entré dans mon cœur une part de Bonheur dont je connais la cause” or “some happiness has come into my heart of which I know the cause” and the cause to me, c’est la langue Français.

<< Return to previous page