devin

Several soothsaying chaises, looking into the future... in Ste. Maxime.

un devin (deh-vuh) noun, masculine
  diviner; soothsayer, seer; fortune teller

Devine, si tu peux, et choisis, si tu l'oses.
Guess, if you can, and choose, if you dare. --Pierre Corneille
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           On ne sait jamais ce que demain sera.
          We never know what tomorrow will be.

I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would one day share the French word for "soothsayer" with you. But then, I never divined I'd one day speak French either. The truth, or sooth, if you like, is that much of what I think will happen in the future just never does. Sweat, fret, and toil as I may, things are never as grim (or glitzy) as I make them up to be.

So when I told you last month that, come Valentine's Day, I would be hacking my way through fields of grapevines, I might have first paused to cast an eye through the window of experience. Instead of a tangled jungle of vines, I might have seen a fuzzy ray, a glimmer, of what could be. Forget poetry--yonder, and through that foggy window, I might've perceived the number 48!

"How about Madrid?" Jean-Marc offered, tossing a guidebook my way and suggesting I read up on our neighbor west of the Pyrenees. "But I thought you needed help pruning this weekend?" I inquired, to which my husband informed me that, thanks to the help of Jérôme, another vigneron* in a nearby village, all 21 acres of vines have almost been pruned.

When Jean-Marc informed me that a roundtrip ticket from Marseilles to Madrid was running 48 euros and a hotel room in the city center was the same amount, 48 euros, it didn't take 48 seconds to agree to the impromptu trip. Coincidentally, we'll spend exactly 48 hours in Spain and, come to think of it, 48* also represents my home state of Arizona. As my mind conjures up images of a nickel-plated "'48" on the door of our Spanish hotel room, I am reminded that I can't tell the future; devineresse* I am not. And while I could look for coincidences galore and even think up 48 ways to have fun in Spain this weekend, the sooth is, I don't have time for guessing games--I've got a plane to catch!

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References: un vigneron (une vigneronne) = wine grower; 48 = Arizona is the 48th state in the Union; une devineresse (un devin) = fortune teller

Audio Clip : Download Deviner.wav
Listen to Jean-Marc pronounce today's quote:
Devine, si tu peux, et choisis, si tu l'oses.

Related Terms & Expressions:
  deviner = to divine; to guess, predict
  devinable = guessable, foreseeable
  une devinette = a conundrum, riddle, guessing game
  poser une devinette à quelqu'un = to pose a riddle to someone
  deviner la pensée de quelqu'un = to read somebody's thoughts
  arrête de jouer aux devinettes = stop playing guessing games

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