I Returned as a Student to the Sorbonne in Paris

I'm 86 and I discovered that sometimes you can go back to a former life with a new perspective

By Irvina Lew April 30, 2025

Scrolling through my daily emails last November, I lingered when I noticed the word: Sorbonne. I might as well have tasted Proust's madeleine for the way the name triggered memories of Paris 1958, when I studied French there at age nineteen.

The announcement invited me to participate in the school's first l'Université d'hiver en Sorbonne, winter courses about French culture, taught in English, or French literature, philosophy or language, in French. For un petit moment, I considered filing the idea to a bucket list; but it was weeks before my 86th birthday and it seemed foolhardy to postpone the opportunity. Happily, my ten-years-younger — and five-times-fitter — Francophile friend was equally enthusiastic; we enrolled in Classics of French Literature, Monday to Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

For un petit moment, I considered filing the idea to a bucket list; but it was weeks before my 86th birthday and it seemed foolhardy to postpone the opportunity.

Although my former rooming house at 6 rue Gay Lussac had transformed into Elysa Hotel Luxembourg and upgraded with private bathrooms (they replaced the shared W.C. in the hallway that I remembered), I suggested staying at Le Grand Coeur Latin because it was brand new and closer to school. We arrived early, deposited our luggage and boarded a bus to the Bastille market, where we ate Sunday brunch — a ham and cheese-stuffed crêpe while standing – and bought bread, cheese, fruit and wine for our room.

Remembering a Snazzy Car

On Monday morning, we walked three minutes to the main door of the university building on rue de la Sorbonne, which was completed in 1901. As we approached, my thoughts meandered back to registration sixty-seven years earlier, and my discomfort that morning.

My schoolmate's uncle was so influential at General Motors that he arranged for a chauffeur to drive his niece the few short blocks to school. As passengers in the back seat of that space-age, boat-length, fin-adorned vehicle, on the narrow, medieval cobblestone streets, we were face-to-face with students perched on motocyclettes and, when we stepped out of the car into a crowd, they were staring intently. I worried: were they denigrating us as "rich Americans?" In retrospect, they were probably just admiring the shiny, oversized automobile at a time when French kids idolized everything "American," especially snazzy cars.  

Learning Felt Good

Fast forward to January 2025 when my major concern was understanding French teachers who spoke faster and softer than I was accustomed to hearing. The second challenge was to focus for ninety-minutes, both before and after a short break. My 42-minute attention span had been established as a student, ingrained during a thirty-year teaching career and had considerably diminished.

The 86-year-old me was far more engaged than the college student me ever was.

Nevertheless, the 86-year-old me was far more engaged than the college student me ever was. It helped that I had skimmed through the books, and Wikipedia posts, beforehand, albeit in English, because I had a superficial sense of the plots and characters. I noticed that the unfamiliar 16th century female poets and Madame Sevigné's 17th century letters fascinated me and that pertinent information about Voltaire, Rousseau, Stendhal and Flaubert still lingered in the distant depths of my memory. Learning felt good. I had gotten back on the bike, so to speak, and was pedaling smoothly.

I related most to the last lecture. While speaking about 20th century literature, the teacher referred to Simone de Beauvoir whose book "Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter" was published in 1958, the same year that I attended the Sorbonne. I imagined myself as a fly on the wall at Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, just a fifteen-minute walk away, eavesdropping as the writer debated freedom with Jean-Paul Sartre. I wondered: had I been aware of those intellectual icons, at nineteen, would it have influenced me to consider ideas beyond myself? Would it have changed my future?

As a child of the 50s, I was so preoccupied with daydreams about marrying my boyfriend that
I collected baby books in French that summer.