Dear French Story Listeners,
There’s a beautiful idea from the medieval world that I keep coming back to.
The medieval mind didn’t see the cosmos as silent. Philosophers believed that as the planets rotated, they created a kind of intellectual music, a celestial harmony humming through all of creation.
Christine and the Sybil pointing to a ladder from the heavens, from the Book of the Queen, France (Paris), c. 1410-1414
We earthlings, they thought, had simply become deaf to it. But here’s the hopeful part: they believed we could recover that ability to hear, through study, or through beautiful music that imitates those same harmonic proportions. (This idea comes from Jason M. Baxter’s wonderful book, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis.)
This week’s story made me think of exactly that.
The story 🎥
De la musique pour les nuages, Music for the Clouds, is our new free story listening video, published this Saturday.
It’s a gentle, magical tale about a drought-stricken land where nothing could make it rain… until a group of musicians climbed to the top of the highest mountain and played.
Just like the medievals, the story knows something we sometimes forget: beauty moves things.
Music reaches what words alone cannot.
👉 Watch the story on YouTube: https://youtu.be/mKkaRkuyG6s
A gentle invitation — your commonplace 📖
Charlotte Mason was a 19th-century British educator who believed that children, and really, all of us, learn best through living ideas, beautiful books, and direct experience rather than dry memorisation.
One of her beloved practices was the commonplace book: you copy out a sentence, or even a paragraph, that moves you. Not to memorise it. Simply to dwell in it a little longer.
The medievals did this too. Copying was a form of meditation.
A way of letting beautiful language settle into you, slowly, the way rain soaks into dry ground.
So this week, I’d love to invite you to do just that.
After you watch the story, pick one sentence, or one little phrase, that you enjoyed. Write it in a notebook.
Then ask yourself: why did I choose this one?
You don’t need to answer in perfect French. A word or two in your mother tongue is just fine.
The noticing is what matters.
This is how language grows, not by force, but by attention and delight.
Alice 💕
P.S. If you’ve been wondering where to begin (or where to go next) on your French journey, we have self-paced online courses waiting for you from complete beginner (Baby) all the way to advanced (Senior). You can watch the introduction for free, with no pressure, right here: aliceayel.com/progress/baby-progress — just to see if it feels like the right path for you. 🌱