You're listening to Rough Translation from NPR.

Though she has a French passport and the most French of names, Marie-France.

And though she uses the Quaintest French Expressions when she's upset, Opuré, which is like

Oh Fudge, it took Marie-France 40 years to feel truly French.

Marie-France grew up in this public housing project in Mappse in the South of France.

Our reporter is in the story.

NPR's Paris correspondent Elinor Beardsley and her own Marianne McKeown.

So Marie-France, even though she was French and born in France, she says she never really felt French.

People didn't consider her French.

They saw her as African or Muslim from this bad neighborhood.

And she said a teacher told her one time, why bother getting your degree?

Why don't you just...

Drop out and make fables.

She spent the next decade bouncing from job to job, battling depression, raising her daughter alone.

And then something changed. She got a new job.

She pulls out this uniform.

Her first one.

The uniform is a short-sleeved knit shirt with blue pants.

She's planning to save it forever.

She's looking for me to come back.

The job was at a company that Marie-France has just summed up all those grand French values she'd learned in school.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

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