Passé composé: être + maison d'être verbs

A small set of French verbs — about seventeen of them, all describing motion or change of state — refuses to use avoir in compound tenses. They take être instead: je suis allé, elle est partie, nous sommes arrivés. This list is closed and finite, and once you've memorized it, you've solved one of the major auxiliary-choice problems in French.

This page covers the maison d'être verbs (the conventional name for the list, taught with the DR & MRS VANDERTRAMP mnemonic), the past-participle-agrees-with-the-subject rule that comes with être, and the small set of "pivot verbs" that switch back to avoir when used transitively. Reflexive verbs also use être, but they have their own page — see être + reflexive.

The list

These seventeen verbs always take être. They share two properties: they are intransitive (no direct object) and they describe motion or change of state. Both properties matter — once you understand the shared logic, you can almost predict which verbs are on the list.

Plus passer in its intransitive sense ("to drop by, stop in") and the more literary apparaître ("to appear"). Some teachers count those separately, some include them — either way, the practical list is around seventeen.

The agreement rule: subject, like an adjective

With être as the auxiliary, the past participle behaves like an adjective. It agrees in gender and number with the subject of the sentence.

The orthography is consistent: add -e for feminine, -s for plural, -es for feminine plural. As with adjectives, masculine plural wins when the group is mixed — even one man in a group of women turns elles sont allées into ils sont allés.

In speech, the -e and -s are silent, so the agreement is mostly orthographic for these participles. The one audible exception in this list is mort: the masculine ends in a silent /-ʁ/ (il est mort /il‿ɛ‿mɔʁ/), but the feminine morte sounds the consonant /t/ (elle est morte /ɛl‿ɛ‿mɔʁt/). For all the other participles (allé/allée, parti/partie, venu/venue, arrivé/arrivée), the feminine -e is silent and only matters in writing.

Full conjugation: aller in the passé composé

The most common verb on the list is aller. Memorize this paradigm and the rest fall into place.

The vous form has four possibilities depending on whether vous is singular or plural and what gender(s) it refers to: vous êtes allé (one man, formal vous), vous êtes allée (one woman), vous êtes allés (mixed plural or all-male plural), vous êtes allées (all-female plural).

Why these verbs and no others?

The historical answer is that older Romance grammars treated intransitive verbs of motion and change of state as quasi-passive: the subject undergoes the arriving, the falling, the dying. The participle was an adjective describing the resulting state. Je suis arrivé originally meant something close to "I am arrived" (compare archaic English "He is risen" or German ich bin gekommen). Modern French has lost the active intuition behind this but kept the form.

This explains why the rule is "intransitive + motion/change of state" and not just "intransitive": manger is intransitive when you say j'ai mangé with no object, but eating doesn't change your location or your state, so it stays with avoir. Tomber changes your location and your state (you weren't on the ground; now you are), so it takes être.

It also explains why transitive uses of pivot verbs swing back to avoir — see the next section.

The pivot verbs: monter, descendre, sortir, entrer, rentrer, retourner, passer

Six (or seven) verbs on the maison d'être list can also be used transitively — taking a direct object — and when they do, they switch to avoir as their auxiliary. The meaning shifts in parallel: instead of "going up," the verb means "bringing up"; instead of "going out," it means "taking out."

The diagnostic is mechanical: is there a direct object after the verb? Yes → avoir. No → être. Don't get distracted by prepositional phrases — je suis sorti dans le jardin still has no direct object (the garden follows a preposition), so it's être.

Verbs that look like they should be on the list but aren't

A few verbs trip learners up because they describe motion but stay with avoir. The most common offenders:

• marcher ("to walk") — manner of motion, not a change of location per se. Takes avoir.
• courir ("to run") — same. Takes avoir.
• sauter ("to jump") — takes avoir.
• voyager ("to travel") — takes avoir.
• se promener ("to take a walk") — takes être because it's pronominal, but for the wrong reason.

The pattern, roughly: verbs that name a manner of motion (walking, running, jumping, swimming) take avoir. Verbs that name displacement — moving from A to B without specifying how — take être (aller, venir, partir, arriver, sortir, entrer). It's not a perfect rule but it captures the right intuition.

Some additional examples to drill the agreement

A note on on

When the colloquial on means "we" (which it does in informal speech almost always), the participle agrees with the implied plural subject — and with the implied gender if it's known. So on est allés au cinéma (mixed group), on est allées (all-female group), on est allé (formal/impersonal on, "one went"). Strict editors prefer the singular allé for impersonal on; agreed plural is everywhere in spoken French.

Comparison with English and Spanish

English uses have for everything, full stop. So learners hit a real wall the first time they meet je suis allé — it looks passive, and the urge to say j'ai allé is strong. The fix is repeated exposure; the grammar will eventually feel natural, but only after enough hours of listening and producing the construction.

Italian and Dutch keep the same dual-auxiliary system, with similar lists (Italian essere is used for andare, venire, arrivare, partire, nascere, morire, restare, etc.). German is similar (sein with motion verbs). Spanish and Portuguese collapsed the system — modern Spanish uses haber for everything in compound tenses, and ser/estar are kept for other duties. So if you're coming from Spanish, the maison d'être is genuinely new; if you're coming from Italian, it's familiar.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

• About seventeen intransitive motion-and-change-of-state verbs use être as their passé composé auxiliary: the maison d'être (DR & MRS VANDERTRAMP).
• The past participle agrees with the subject in gender and number, exactly like an adjective.
• Six pivot verbs — monter, descendre, sortir, entrer, rentrer, retourner, passer — switch to avoir when used transitively. The diagnostic is whether a direct object follows the verb.
• Manner-of-motion verbs (marcher, courir, sauter, voyager) are not on the list; they describe a way of moving, not a displacement, and take avoir.
• In speech, most agreement endings are silent (-e, -s, -es), but they matter in writing. Mort/morte and a few others have audible feminine forms.