English lessons

I had to give an English lesson to M once. I was teaching him how to pronounce certain words of a mass by Handel in which he was singing. Over the course of our intimate tutorial at the conservatoire, I chanced upon the discovery of the intrinsic sexiness of the English language, that I had hitherto never noticed. French is traditionally thought of as the language of lust but English has its charm too. Bizarrely, the French find that a hint of an English accent is seductive in exactly the same way as English people are turned on when they hear the Gallic softness oozing and whispering over our latin-germanic consonants. I rolled them round in my mouth with my tongue contemplatively, like a rose flavoured bonbon. It reminded me of the famous scene where Lauren Bacall tells Humphrey Bogart that 'you just put your lips together and blow'. I slowly leaned over the desk and, smiling, gazed straight into his eyes:

"To pronounce 'the', you must place your tongue between your teeth, like this...then place ever such slight pressure on your teeth and breathe."

"Tu as une langue efficace, ma belle." ("You have a skilful tongue, my beauty.")

"That depends on what I do with it."