How was your childhood home? Describe it and its surroundings.

I grew up in a charming village house, unspoiled by a beautiful tree-lined garden. It was all stone, adorned with flowers. The bedrooms were upstairs and overlooked the lavender fields; in the distance we could see a river where, as children, we passed every moment we had free. The house being in the heart of the village, there was a church a stone's throw from our house, and every morning it was its bells that woke us up.

Tell an embarrassing story that you (or a friend of yours) experienced.

At the time, I was dating the man I was madly in love with. We had been together for quite a while when he finally decided to introduce me to his family. These parents invited us to dinner at their house. They were real bourgeoisies, so I was very afraid that it would go wrong. And I was right to worry. As soon as I arrived at their home, I felt that I was not welcome. His mother greeted me with a coldness! And his sister barely spoke to me. He was the type of woman who spoke to you behind the back as soon as you left the room. But they didn't even bother to pretend that meeting me pleased them! I didn't know what to do with myself. Fortunately, it was a big party: the wine was flowing, and I enjoyed it so much that I was ringed long before we started at the table. It was a big deal. Besides, I hadn't eaten all day, and by the time we were going to serve the main course, I fell for it! Shame! Obviously my boyfriend dumped me the next day.

What do you like most about your job? What is at stake? Have your opinions about your profession changed over the course of your career?

I have been working as a French Foreign Language (FLE) teacher for over a decade, and unlike some of my colleagues who feel jaded after teaching for a while, I like my job better and better, which I consider to be one of the most important in the world today. Although poorly paid, teaching work is demanding, exciting and rewarding. At the beginning of my career, I thought that the foreign language was only a communication tool. However, as time went by, I realized that what we were doing in the classroom was much more important than I thought because, in addition to teaching young people to communicate with people from another country, they were also taught to be open to other cultures and to know theirs better. Knowing the other is essential to know yourself. The same goes for language and culture: we understand our own better by comparing them to others. Therefore, language courses are of vital importance, especially in heterogeneous society such as ours.