Easter and after

After Easter Mornings are lighter, nights are warmer, nobody about. Today it's raining, the first for a month or more. Our neighbour across the road hails us every few days with enthusiasm; but since chatting to people is not a good option, little changes bar the weather, and here in Lunel that does not change much either! Watering is now essential for citrus and other plants in the garden - luckily we are not yet in drought conditions although parts of France are. Muslim burqa is banned of course.  Now, there is a fear of face coverings because they conceal the 'real person', passport photos must be clearly recognisable and so on. I guess many people think masks help protect the wearer, but a moment's thought tells you that the amount of covering doctors, nurses and dentists wear when they need to keep safe is much more than the average face mask, so the ones we see around more and more are really to protect people around the wearer from stray spray, breaths or droplets. Partially covering your face may help with this, but in other circumstance people are very suspicious of face coverings, hiding true identity. Anyway, there is a shower of patterns and ideas for home-made masks, and we've just heard that the Mayor of Lunel is ordering 150,000 masks, three for every person in Lunel and district.

The big news is the reappearance of our large tortoise - s/he emerged from hibernation in a shallow patch of earth yesterday. We now have 2, this one much larger than the relation Tonic who has lived with us for nearly 2 years in a cage under cover, and is not yet old enough to hibernate. Of the original 2, known collectively as Pierre & Charles after friends, but later discovered to be female, one escaped clambering over their enclosure wall, which I belatedly made higher. The other buried herself last autumn to reappear the day before yesterday, muddy but beady-eyed. We are delighted!
Masks are much in our minds, and they have a long and mixed history. What are they for? The word masque (from the French of course) and its related masquerade, have theatrical and musical associations - as musicians we have played 17th century masque dances, and carnivals, and I've just listened to excerpts from the Fairy Queen, a masque by Purcell which supposedly complements the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night's Dream. We have performed the combined work here in France. The term means, perhaps, to disguise, to protect the wearer, perhaps to protect others? The old masque worn by doctors, with other distancing tools, seems to have served a practical function as well as being a disguise. Now, masks which really protect the wearer are in short supply, but even our humble folded hankies at least help stop us spraying our germs everywhere. Still learning French

In our continual quest to improve our French, we wondered about Easter.   I read this in some kind of online guide, which may or may not be entirely accurate.   So for what it’s worth:

Is it Le, La, Les or just Pâque(s) ?

* La Pâque = Passover = feminine singular, used with a “La” before.

* Pâques = Easter (no le, no la, no les = never used with an article)

 But it’s never easy… If we don’t use any article to refer to Easter, we may use adjectives…

The word for Easter is Pâques, masculine singular (even though its written with an S).

* À Pâques prochain = next Easter

* Pâques était venu = Easter came

* Pâques est précédé de la Semaine Sainte = Easter is preceded by the Holy Week

When you talk about events around Easter, so use Easter more like a time than the religious celebration, it’s feminine plural…

* Joyeuses Pâques = Happy Easter

* Pâques pluvieuses = Rainy Easter

You can also say “le jour de Pâques”, “la fête de Pâques”…

Dictionaries disagree whether the P of Pâques should always be upper case or not, but the common usage points to an upper case - Le Lundi de Pâques (Easter Monday) is a public holiday (un jour férié) in France Happy confinement!