Lovely. So glad you are still posting, even though you are thinking about the chaperone situation.
Thank you! Yes, I'm planning to post all that I have of this story, which includes an epilogue and then go back to add the chaperone to the earlier chapters you've already read. She'll be added in, where appropriate, from part 21 onwards. Hope that won't confuse anyone. :-)
I half expected Lavinia to challenge Cedric on his French after learning that he had a French mother and had spent time in France...she should realise that language skills learned at an early age do not disappear, and having bad memories of France would not mean a bad French accent - only that he would not want to talk about his time there.
I love these discussions and hearing other people's insights! You see, to me, I would think she'd wonder why Cedric's French isn't better when he's had a French man servant all this time. Of course, we have to remember that in the story she's only really starting to get to know Cedric. He was away most of the first two weeks of her stay at Kentham.
But, for Cedric's awkward French I took as my model my husband who was born in the Netherlands, then learned English by immersion in Canada after his parents moved there when Bob was not quite 6. He grew up in the U.S. with Dutch parents who spoke half Dutch/half English at home, but his own Dutch is rather like the level of French that Cedric displays to the world. Bob's older relatives tease him for his "American" accent and when he writes to his aunt in The Hague, he has to use a Dutch dictionary. I'm sure that if he could spend a year in The Netherlands it would come back to him because it was his first language. To hear him speak English, though, you would never know that he wasn't born here. There is no trace of a foreign accent. So I felt that since Cedric was in France less than a year and then was raised in England, it was believable that he would have remained at about the level of a beginning speaker.
Thank you for starting this discussion! :-)
