Carol Artigues

“I knew from seventh grade, when I saw a movie about Mont Saint Michel in Normandy, that I was destined to live in France. It was a black and white film and I remember feeling that at some point in my life I will go there.”

Carol Artigues has lived in Aix-en-Provence, a sun-kissed city of about 150,000 people located 20 miles north of Marseilles, for nearly twenty years, but her journey to France began decades before in New York and then Atlanta.

Born in southern New Jersey and raised on Long Island, Artigues, 73, was heavily influenced by her older brother, Richard, who was a French major at Brown University. Remembering her seventh grade infatuation with France and guided by her brother, Artigues also majored in French, but at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

“My idea at the time was to teach French in elementary school because I knew that the younger you start on language, the more proficient you can become,” Artigues said.

Her first job after graduation was teaching English conversation in a French school in Clermont Ferrand, in the center of France’s Dordogne region.

“It was just for a school year and a great way to get to live in France, earn a little money, work 12 hours a week and travel,” Artigues laughed. “My group was the first to do this type of program.”

She returned to New York City in 1964 and got a job in the French embassy providing information to people who wanted to study in France, from private schools to graduate schools. While there, she married a Frenchman who was working at the embassy.

“Not long after, though, my husband accepted a teaching position in Troy, New York, so we moved upstate,” she said. “While there, I decided to get my master’s degree at Russell Sage College so I could teach K-12 French.”

It was 1977 and by this time her marriage had crumbled and she began teaching as a single mom.

“I wanted to be on the same schedule as my kids,” she said, “so I took a job at their elementary school. The principal asked me to set-up a program and do whatever I wanted. Unfortunately, I was there only one year. I found it very difficult teaching seventh-graders.”