The reason was to show the educated people of "our class’ can read that- 
just like putting latin in, like my Dad did for his Masters thesis (he knew his prof would like it).
I commonly say I speak English – plus menu Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, and Japanese.
My brother learned enough Chinese characters to read newspaper headlines. Where he started though, was with his other main interest and exposure: Chinese restaurant menus, and enough spoken numbers to be able to order “#27” (or whatever) in Mandarin 
Yesterday I saw an episode of Columbo and he went into an auction. He made a gesture to his suspect and the auctioneer interpeted it as a bid. I don’t know if that happens in real life, but I’ve seen it before on TV shows.
Agatha Christie never translated any of the French in her novels, even when it was a paragraph, but she always translated other languages. I wondered about that. Josephine Tey did the same-- left French in her novels untranslated. Vera Brittain, who was a contemporary, albeit she wrote autobiography, also left French, but not other languages, untranslated in her books.
Not to mention, that when I went to embassy school in Moscow in the 1970s, to a school co-sponsored be the UK and US embassies, we had to study a language, and had the the choice between Russian (of course) and French (???)-- but if French was still compulsory in many UK schools, it made a lot more sense.
I always wondered about it.
Any British dopers old enough-- or who remember conversations with parents or grandparents old enough-- who can confirm that French was a required subject in schools, or at least so common, that people who grew up c. 1885 - 1975 could be expected to understand it?
I’ve heard, how accurately I don’t know, that at one point French was the default “international” language at least for Europeans.
^^
That was true, at least from the early 18th century until WWII, when English took over because of American influence/dominance. French was also the predominate language of diplomacy.
Once when I was a kid, my parents dragged me to an estate sale/auction. I was so nervous about an accidental bid that I literally sat on my hands.
This may help-
Or not. Anecdotes.
So French was the lingua franca?
At least one modern language has been a compulsory part of the secondary school curriculum for decades. Up to the late 90’s pretty much all schools offered French as the default language with other options available for advanced students.
There’s been some diversification since then with more schools offering Spanish or mandarin as the default option now. But French is still the number 1 foreign language taught in the uk.
I thought that a compulsory foreign language in secondary school had been abandoned (sadly) a few years ago in the UK. I could be wrong. British people generally don’t do well with other languages. We are very lazy because everyone else speaks English. It should be taught much earlier but I think a lot of kids only start at secondary school i.e. at 11 years old.
Anyway, just on French, I think it is still used as the main language in the Olympic Games? Everything at the ceremonies has to be read out in French and the native language of the host city?
My Russian professor said that in pre-revolutionary Russia, the upper classes all spoke French. Russian was for the peasants.
All the Olympics I’ve seen over the last 30 or 40 years make announcements in three languages: the host country language, French, and English.
Man accidentally loses his wedding ring.
Proceeds to hide from his wife to cover this up.
Wife suspects something is going on because of him now constantly hiding.
Confronts him over it, sees he doesn’t have a wedding ring and immediately assumed he’s cheating.
I avoid that situation by wearing mine and my dad’s after he passed away. It had been just sitting on my desk when I tried it on. It fits real well on my pinkie next to my actual wedding ring. It looks a little weird since it’s mostly a plain 18K white gold band and mine is a 14K yellow band with some white gold features. But every time I see it, I smile and say “Hi Dad.”
Here’s two preposterous situations you’d never see in real life.
Truck with a bomb is detonated on a highway bridge, a train of fuel tankcars just happened to be adjacent on the rail bridge. Both bridges knocked out for a considerable time.
A bomb is detonated underneath a highway bridge bringing it down on a train passing below. Incredible timing, no?
A bonus; drones erupt from parked trailers and destroy a significant portion of a nation’s nuclear triad. Comical, like science fiction.
For the drone stuff here’s what fiction claimed would happen
There are long passages of War and Peace that are written in untranslated French. Tolstoy could safely take it for granted that everyone likely to read the book would understand it.
Not only do extremely shadowy black ops government organizations exist they also have massive firefights in public spaces quite frequently and yet somehow the public isn’t the wiser.
One explanation I heard (not defending it or dissing it, just reporting) is that everybody in The Walking Dead is already infected with the zombie virus (this was actually confirmed at the end of season 1) so no matter how you die, unless your brain is destroyed you WILL be a zombie. So getting splashed with zombie-virus infected blood doesn’t kill you.
The zombie bite kills you because of all the other pathogens happily breeding away in the zombie mouth. Once you’re dead from that the zombie virus activates and you stand up again (or crawl, or writhe around helplessly depending on how intact your body may or may not be).
That’s also why if, say, your foot gets bitten and you get an immediate amputation at the thigh you might not die, because that eliminates the new infection before it can kill you.
Well, I suppose it makes as much sense as anything else once you accept the dead walking.