DR & MRS VANDERTRAMP: the maison d'être mnemonic

There are about seventeen French verbs that take être as their compound-tense auxiliary instead of avoir. Memorizing them as a list is dry and prone to forgetting. Memorizing them as a mnemonic family — Dr. and Mrs. Vandertramp — is dramatically more durable. This page walks through the mnemonic, explains why the verbs cluster as they do, presents the inevitable variations on the list, and gives example sentences for every member of the household.

The goal is not just to recite the list, but to internalize why these verbs are different — so that when you encounter a new verb, you can predict whether it should be on the list or not, based on its meaning rather than blind memorization.

The mnemonic

Read the name aloud, syllable by syllable. The name is meaningless on its own, but the seventeen letters spell out the seventeen verbs:

Dr. and Mrs. Vandertramp

Letter by letter:

That's sixteen. Many lists add passer (to pass / drop by, intransitive) and apparaître (to appear) for a total of eighteen. The reason these two are sometimes left off: their behavior is more variable. Passer takes être in some senses (il est passé chez moi = "he stopped by my place") and avoir in others (il a passé une heure ici = "he spent an hour here"); apparaître sits at a stylistic crossroads where both auxiliaries occur. The fourteen "core" verbs that everyone agrees on are the ones in the table above, minus rester if you're being strict about the motion criterion — so you'll see lists of 14, 16, 17, or 18 depending on the source. Don't worry about the count. Memorize the family, including the borderline members.

The two semantic poles

The maison d'être verbs are not a random list. Almost all of them describe one of two things:

Motion

The largest cluster is motion through space — most often vertical, in/out, or back/forth.

• aller / venir — go / come (away from / toward)
• arriver / partir — arrive / leave (reach destination / depart)
• entrer / sortir — enter / exit (in / out)
• monter / descendre — go up / go down (vertical)
• tomber — fall (downward, often unintentional)
• retourner / revenir / rentrer — return (general, "come back," "go back home")
• passer — pass through, drop by

These verbs all describe the subject changing location. They share a metaphorical structure: at the start of the action, the subject is at point A; at the end, the subject is at point B. Être expresses this as a state change: "I am at the destination."

Change of state

The smaller cluster is change of state of the subject:

• naître — be born (move from non-existence to existence)
• mourir — die (move from existence to non-existence)
• devenir — become (move from one state to another)
• apparaître — appear (move from invisible to visible)

These describe transformations of the subject's being. Same logic: the action transforms the subject from one state to another, and être marks the resulting state.

The outlier: rester

Rester (to stay) doesn't fit either pole. It expresses non-motion — the subject deliberately not moving. So why is it on the list?

The traditional explanation is symmetry: if aller (go) takes être, then rester (its negation, "not go") joins the same family. A more linguistic explanation is that rester describes a chosen state — to stay is to remain in a state, which is what être expresses. Either way, rester is the one verb on the list that you have to memorize against intuition.

Examples for each verb

A representative sentence for every verb on the list. Read all eighteen and feel the family resemblance.

The opposite pairs

Most maison d'être verbs come in pairs of opposites — a useful pattern for memorization.

The pairs make a useful drill: pick any motion direction, name both verbs, conjugate both in passé composé. Je suis monté(e) / je suis descendu(e). Je suis entré(e) / je suis sorti(e). Je suis arrivé(e) / je suis parti(e).

Notice that the pair aller / venir maps onto an English distinction English speakers already know: deictic motion away from versus toward the speaker. Come here and go away are basic directional commands. French preserves this distinction and routes both auxiliaries to être.

Visualizing the maison d'être

The traditional teaching trick is to imagine an actual house. Try this:

You wake up. You are born (naître) into the house. You go (aller) somewhere. You come (venir) back. You enter (entrer) the front door. You climb (monter) the stairs. You go down (descendre) the stairs. You fall (tomber) off the stairs. You stay (rester) in bed for a while. You go out (sortir) again. You return (retourner) the next day. You come back (revenir). You go back home (rentrer). You leave (partir) for good. You appear (apparaître) elsewhere. You die (mourir). And during all this, you become (devenir) different things.

The whole list is the trajectory of one person through a metaphorical house — coming in, climbing, falling, leaving, returning, eventually dying. That's the maison d'être. Each verb is a way of changing your physical or existential position relative to the house.

Past participle forms

Every maison d'être verb has its own past participle. Some are regular, some not. Here are all of them, with their basic agreement (since these all take être, agreement with the subject is required):

Most are regular: -é for -er infinitives, -i for -ir infinitives. The irregulars to watch are venir / venu, descendre / descendu, naître / né (a short, abbreviated form), and mourir / mort (which keeps the consonant cluster — pronounced /mɔʁ/ in m.sg, /mɔʁt/ in f.sg).

Variants and edge cases

A few notes on the periphery of the list:

Compound forms. Verbs derived from list members keep the être property. So parvenir (to reach, succeed at), intervenir (to intervene), survenir (to occur unexpectedly), redevenir (to become again), repartir (to leave again), and similar all take être.

Demeurer (to remain, archaic for rester or to stay residing somewhere). Originally took être; in modern French it more often takes avoir when meaning "to live" (intransitive but transitive-like). Marginal — don't worry about it.

Tomber-derivatives. Retomber (to fall again) takes être. Faire tomber uses avoir because faire is the operative verb. So je l'ai fait tomber = "I made him fall" / "I knocked him over."

Quitter (to leave) is not on the list. It's transitive (quitter quelque chose), so it takes avoir: j'ai quitté la maison. The intransitive equivalent is partir, which is on the list.

This pair (quitter / partir) is one of the most useful diagnostic contrasts in French verb grammar. Partir takes the auxiliary être because it expresses self-motion; quitter takes avoir because it focuses on the object you're leaving. They mean roughly the same thing in English (leave), but French splits them on the basis of transitivity.

What about the transitive switch?

Some maison d'être verbs can take a direct object — at which point they become transitive and switch to avoir. This is a major learner topic and deserves its own page; see the transitive switch for full coverage. The key verbs to watch are monter, descendre, sortir, rentrer, passer, retourner. Each has both an intransitive (être) reading and a transitive (avoir) reading.

Source-language comparison

English speakers come to French with one auxiliary — have — for every compound tense. There is no English equivalent of être in this role. So the maison d'être feels arbitrary at first encounter.

The mnemonic helps because it gives the list a memorable shape. But the deeper insight is that English used to do the same thing. Middle English routinely said the king is come, Christ is risen, the sun is set, using be as the auxiliary for motion and change-of-state verbs. Modern English has consolidated everything onto have, but the older split is still visible in fixed expressions and high-register prose.

So French isn't doing something exotic — it's preserving a split that English mostly threw away. Once you see the maison d'être through that lens, the list stops feeling arbitrary and starts feeling like a careful preservation of an old distinction that maps onto a real semantic pattern: motion and change of state versus everything else.

Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Forgetting that aller uses être.

Mistake 2: Using être for quitter.

Mistake 3: Forgetting subject agreement.

Mistake 4: Treating rester as taking avoir.

Mistake 5: Missing the transitive switch.

Mistake 6: Confusing partir and sortir.

Key takeaways

The maison d'être is the list of about seventeen French verbs that take être as their compound-tense auxiliary. The classic mnemonic — Dr. and Mrs. Vandertramp — encodes the verbs as a fictional family. But the deeper structure is semantic: these are verbs of self-motion through space (going up, down, in, out, away, back) and verbs of change of state (being born, dying, becoming, appearing). Rester is the lone outlier, and you simply have to memorize that "to stay" joins this family by symmetry with "to go."

When a maison d'être verb takes a direct object, it switches to avoir. With être, the past participle agrees with the subject in gender and number. Pronominal verbs (every reflexive) also take être. Together with the maison d'être list and the passive voice, these are the only contexts where French uses être as the compound-tense auxiliary. Everything else — and that means most verbs — uses avoir.