We were spared language shock by our hotel's owner, Jean Pierre Andrieux, who greeted us on the quay in flawless English. Born of French parents, he grew up on Canada's Prince Edward Island, and is also the Canadian honorary consul, head of the tourist office, local historian and a connoisseur of bargain wines, which he acquires for his guests on annual forays to France.

The Hotel Robert, which had once served as a police barracks, overlooks the harbor, and our twin-bedded room was simple but comfortable with an American-style bathroom. Once we had settled in, Mr. Andrieux invited his new guests into the dining room for a glass of his favorite Bordeaux while he briefed us about the islands.

St. Pierre, Miquelon and Langlade altogether cover 93 square miles, about half the size of Martha's Vineyard. Ninety percent of the inhabitants live on St. Pierre, which is smallest but has the best harbor. The French Government pours millions of dollars a year into the islands, and not purely for national pride. It also wants to assert its right to fishing grounds and potential oil deposits off the Canadian coast.

The heyday of the islands came in the 1920's after the United States ushered in Prohibition. St. Pierre and Miquelon, then still a French colony, readily became a transient stop for whisky and other liquor being smuggled into the United States. Before long, Mr. Andrieux explained, ''every basement in town was transformed into a liquor warehouse.'' The local fish processing plant closed for lack of workers, and large concrete warehouses sprang up along the waterfront to serve American bootleggers like Bill McCoy, whose booze was good enough to become known as ''the real McCoy.'' Under French law it was quite legal, and up to 300,000 cases of liquor a month were loaded into the fast rumrunners tied up alongside the docks.

Because whisky cases made too much noise when they were unloaded, the bottles were wrapped in straw and packed into jute sacks before leaving St. Pierre. The islanders used the leftover cases to fuel stoves and build houses. One red and white cottage on the outskirts of town is still known as the Cutty Sark Villa.

When the United States repealed Prohibition in 1933, the thriving island economy collapsed. The St. Pierrais, as the people here call themselves, held a mock funeral and went back to fishing. Today, some Newfoundlanders admit sailing across to St. Pierre and smuggling back a little liquor or wine to evade the stiff Canadian duties, but Mr. Andrieux disparaged this as ''peanuts'' com-pared to the good old days. His hotel boasts the best collection of Prohibition-era artifacts and photographs in town, including a straw boater that Mr. Andrieux said Al Capone left behind.

The islands enjoyed a resurgence of attention in the dark days of World War II, when three Free French corvettes and a submarine captured St. Pierre from the Vichy Government. Not a shot was fired in the invasion. ''They just sailed in and tied up,'' recalled Mireille Andrieux, the hotelier's mother, who watched the sailors land from her window. ''There was no trouble. Some people clapped. A girl kissed the first sailor who came ashore and later married him.''