4.17 The pluperfect and the past conditional — Epoché
What you will be able to do Build the pluperfect, plus-que-parfait , from the imperfect of avoir or être and a past participle. Use it for what had already happened before another past event, and see where French uses it and English does not. Build the past conditional from the conditional of the auxiliary and a past participle. Express regret and reproach with j'aurais dû , tu aurais pu and j'aurais aimé , the French equivalents of I should have , you could have and I wish I had . Recognise the future perfect, j'aurai fini , and use it after quand . Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English J'aurais dû épouser ta sœur, plutôt que toi. [1] I should've married your sister instead of you. Je préfère marcher plutôt que de prendre le bus. [2] I'd rather walk than take a bus. Je croyais que c'était réglé. [3] I thought that this was settled. Bientôt tu auras oublié le monde, et bientôt le monde t'aura oublié. [4] Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you. Je te laisse deviner. [5] I'll let you guess. Vous aurez déjà entendu cette histoire. [6] You will have heard this story before. Cela me fait plaisir de pouvoir t'aider. [7] It's a pleasure to be able to help you. Prerequisites : 4.16 — the third kind of conditional sentence in 4.16 Grammar already used both tenses of this lesson. You also need the perfect with avoir and with être from 3.8 Conjugation and 3.9 Conjugation , because everything here is built the same way. French has a family of compound tenses, and you already know its first member, the perfect: the present of the auxiliary with the past participle. Change the tense of the auxiliary and you get a new compound tense. Put the auxiliary in the imperfect and you have the pluperfect. Put it in the future and you have the future perfect. Put it in the conditional and you have the past conditional. The participle, the choice of auxiliary and the rules of agreement stay exactly as they were. English has the same family, built with had , will have and would have . The forms therefore map neatly. Where the languages part is in use: French is stricter about marking that one past event came before another, and English uses its modal verbs should and could where French uses the past conditional of devoir and pouvoir . How English does it English had done is the French pluperfect. The lecture had already begun is le cours avait déjà commencé . The two tenses are built the same way and mean the same thing. English often drops the past perfect when the order is obvious; French usually does not. I told you it was urgent , said about a warning given earlier, has a plain past in English. French tends to write je t'avais dit , with the pluperfect, because the telling came before the moment being talked about. Several English glosses below show a simple past where the French has a pluperfect; that is not a mistranslation but a real difference between the languages. English should have and could have are one French tense. I should have stayed is j'aurais dû rester : the past conditional of devoir followed by an infinitive. You could have told me is tu aurais pu me le dire : the past conditional of pouvoir . Notice that the infinitive stays an infinitive in French, where English puts the past participle after have : should have stayed , but aurais dû rester . English I wish I had is French j'aurais aimé or j'aurais voulu . French has no verb that works like wish with a past perfect. It says I would have liked instead. English uses have done after when for a future event; French uses the future perfect. Call me when you've finished is appelle-moi quand tu auras fini . This is the rule about quand from 4.15 Grammar once more, applied to a compound tense. Building the compound tenses Tense Auxiliary · example with avoir · example with être perfect present · j'ai fini · je suis parti pluperfect imperfect · j'avais fini · j'étais parti future perfect future · j'aurai fini · je serai parti past conditional conditional · j'aurais fini · je serais parti These forms were written for this lesson as a paradigm. Read down the middle column and you have the whole idea: the auxiliary moves through four tenses you already know, and the participle never changes. Verbs that take être in the perfect take it in all four, and their participle agrees with the subject in all four: elle était partie , nous serions venus . Reflexive verbs take être too. Two pairs need careful spelling. J'aurai fini , future perfect, and j'aurais fini , past conditional, sound identical for many speakers, and in writing differ only by the final s . Je serai parti and je serais parti are the same. In speech the context decides; in writing you must decide. The pluperfect: what had already happened French English Quand nous sommes arrivés, le cours avait déjà commencé. [8] When we arrived, the lecture had already begun. Il était déjà parti. [9] He had already gone. La nuit avait déjà commencé. [10] Night had already begun. J'avais déjà entendu une fois cette musique. [11] I had already heard that song once. Il avait laissé le vélo sous la pluie. [12] He had left the bicycle in the rain. J'avais oublié ça. [13] I had forgotten about that. Je pensais que tu l'avais déjà fait. [14] I thought that you'd already done that. Je croyais qu'on avait déjà réglé ça. [15] I thought that we had settled that already. The first sentence is the model. Two past events: we arrived, and the lecture began. The arriving is in the perfect, nous sommes arrivés ; the beginning, which came first, is in the pluperfect, avait commencé . The adverb déjà , already , often comes with this tense because it says the same thing. The second is a verb with être : il était déjà parti . Compare it with il était parti without déjà , which can also mean simply he was gone : the participle of a verb of movement can describe a state, as English gone does. The last two