I was crossing southern France by bicycle the first time I heard of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The year was 1983, well before the 2015 massacre of the magazine’s staff. The first incarnation of Charlie Hebdo, which translates more or less as Weekly Charlie, had already died by then, and it had not yet been resurrected. But one of its founders, François Cavanna, the son of a French woman and an Italian immigrant, had just written the fourth book of his autobiographical series, and it was lying on a coffee table in a young woman’s living room where I spent some time. I started reading it. In it, I discovered that Cavanna was one of the founders of Charlie Hebdo.

Never had I seen such language. Now, I’m a native English speaker who was becoming fluent in French at the time. Like everybody, I had studied French in school, but my mother loved France, and took her children there, and over time, I became more and more serious about acquiring the language at a higher level. I had read Tintin and Asterix, scanning a two-page spread quickly for meaning, and then reading more slowly with a dictionary to pick up every little nuance of verb tense and connotation. I read classics from Zola, Maupassant, and Balzac after that, and studied with a tutor in Paris to learn when to use the subjunctive. In my best moment, I was able to scream a blue streak of invective late one night at…