Il faudra que je cours jusqu'au bout

When you walk into French class and hear that you will be working on a story that everyone but you has read and that you need the book you forgot at home (while attempting to catch up to everyone else), you start the get the feeling french class isn't going to go well that day. It's a pretty valid assumption. It's one I made today about 10 minutes into french class.

"Well why did you come to my class, then, if you did not have your book?" This was the answer to "Miss, may I borrow an extra copy of the anthology please?" (I never did get one). I sat down and instead stared at my feet for 20 minutes (a summer of Birkenstocks means my feet look more like the barnacles on Orli's dad's face in Pirates than parts of my body. That is a whole other story to be told later on. Sounds thrilling, I know.)

Anyway. The point of the exercises was to try, in a fictional court setting, the main character of the story to see if he had committed any crimes (he was in fact the victim of a society that forced him into such situations, but I only learned this later). I was on the defense side. The prosecution was much better organised. The only direction from the teacher was "Use only what is in the text".

Well, the prosecution was enthusiastic, but then stepped all over themselves. They made up witnesses, admitted stealing was ok, and their lead prosecutor didn't speak french. Our side was doing pretty well, aided by me, yelling out random things like "They just said stealing was ok!" and "That's not from the text! I object!" and "That lawyer can't speak french! She obviously has no idea what she's talking about!"

In the end, the judge found the character not guilty on all counts, and listed my various (loud) points as their reasons. So the moral of this story is you don't have to know anything in order to win. You just need to yell louder than anyone else.