Madame Berthod has been my hostess for the last ten years at Le Vieux Pommier in Courmayeur on the Italian side of Mont Blanc. She is the last in her family to speak French as a home language; the younger members all speak Italian. From that, I deducted that exactly as much time was needed for French to be almost lost in favor of Italian in the Val d’Aosta as it took for the Savoie patois to be almost lost to academic French—approximately one hundred and twenty-five years.
