Author: M. Miller

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Au Service de la France: Parody and Prejudice

A friend recently introduced me to the TV series “Au Service de la France“, an absurd parody of a French spy agency in the 1960s (“A Very Secret Service” in English). The show debuted in 2015 and has two seasons totalling 26 episodes so far, with a third season in production. It was the first French series picked up by Netflix and marketed as “a Netflix original”, though it was originally developed by Canal (who abandoned it) and then by the network Arte. I’ve watched 3 episodes so far with the original French audio, both with and without French closed captions. It’s available with English subtitles as well.

I’m conflicted about the series. On the one hand, it is hilarious. The writers mock French attitudes at the time about Africa and Africains, Germany, women, bureaucracy, and more. The deadpan humor is well delivered and the skewering of 1960 French Gaullist culture is brutal. By myself I’m not expert enough on French culture to confirm that it lands for a French audience, but the critical reviews in France are positive as well. I am familiar enough with French culture to get the most of the jokes, I think, and they are pretty funny.

On the other hand, in order to mock these bad attitudes, the show puts them on full display. Yes, the characters showing these behaviors are loathsome and stupid. Yes, the show is self-acknowledgedly politically incorrect and generally irreverent. But while the typical French viewer may have seen the thing being mocked enough times that a little more won’t hurt, I’m not in that situation. I feel I am actively picking up 1960s French prejudices (and perhaps modern ones?) from watching the show. I’ve never viewed the American series “Mad Men”, but I gather its treatment of 1960’s American office culture has the same problem of amplifying sexism and misogyny while nominally criticizing it.

The attitudes towards Africa, with the backdrop of empire and decolonization, are really awful. An African delegation that comes to demand independence is first ignored, then laughed at derisively, then handed off to the intern who surprises everyone by producing a full-fledged constitution and administrative transition plan. Can’t have that, it seems, so the higher ups first try to corrupt the delegation with wine and women, then when that doesn’t work arrange for delegation members to be killed one at a time in innocent accidents. They offer heartfelt condolences to the remaining delegates each time, until the final surviving member accepts a much watered down governmental program, grieving and bewildered. The whole thing is horrid, both despite and because of the thick layer of buffoonery that pervades it all.

I had to snapshot these from Netflix. No official promo images for the series bother to include the African characters…

“C’mon, it’s a parody!”, the devil on my left shoulder says. Yes, but I am too suggestible. For example, I have a teenager in the process of learning to drive. For their benefit, I often narrate aloud what I’m thinking while I’m driving. Yesterday at an intersection I said to them: “Even though we have a green light here, pedestrians in the crosswalk always have right of way,” and then stopped myself before I could say “Well, except Algerians”. Yikes! I would never, ever have thought to introduce that topic gratuitously were it not for the constant stream of insulting and dehumanizing mentions of Algeria and Algerians in the show. Now I have to avoid imitating these horrible examples.

Some of the scenes mock safer targets, while making me feel extra good because I know enough to be in on the joke. For example, an interrogation of a captured East German spy includes a beaurocrat reading aloud a multiple choice questionnaire with items like:

Germany's territory is:
  a) big
  b) small
  c) too small

The Third Reich should have lasted:
  a) 1 month
  b) 10 days
  c) 1000 years

I guess this doesn’t strike me as being as hurtful as the insults lobbed at Africa because of my sense that Germany is now prospering, while Africa is still suffering from its experience with France. But what do I know? Maybe raising these tropes of the expansionist and imperialist German serves to fuel ongoing dissension between France and Germany. I’d have to ask French and German viewers.

Unsurprisingly, humor is hard, and rough humor especially so. For now, I’m going to continue watching, as for me the show is a good source of French culture, especially latent attitudes that are no longer allowed to come to the surface much in modern French media. But I’m not so sure I’ll make it to the end of the series before I change my mind on the balance of benefits and harm.

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Vocab list: Pietr-le-Letton, Chapter 11

I’m making lists of unfamiliar words as I read George Simenon’s 1931 Pietr-le-Letton, the novel debut of the famous commissaire Maigret. Here’s my list for Chapter 11 (La Journée des Allées et Venues) with links to definitions from Linguee and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.

In this chapter, Maigret first rails internally against the aloof, polished, Nordic, hyper-intellectual Letton qua Oppenheim, then openly follows him about town a bit. As they approach a bar, he witnesses a remarkable transformation: Oppenheim slips away and is replaced by the rough, ignorant slav Fédor Yourovitch. It dawns on Maigret that these are not simple aliases or disguises, but actual personality shifts that Letton can little control. Eventually, Letton manages to return to his Oppenheim persona, with a crushed whiskey glass and a cut hand in the picture. There’s something blatantly Jekyll and Hyde about the whole thing, with a none too charitable treatment of dissociative personality disorder.

All in all there are 8 pages, 23 unfamiliar words. Mostly about transformations, internal and external features, coming undone, bars, and smells:

expression (root)Frequency in 2010Frequency in 1970Frequency in 1930
racé1 in 30,8001 in 24,5001 in 13,400
briller1 in 37,7001 in 38,5001 in 31,200
abattre1 in 52,4001 in 46,6001 in 51,300
brouiller1 in 83,3001 in 126,0001 in 121,000
trempe1 in 102,0001 in 91,9001 in 80,500
étreindre1 in 105,0001 in 174,0001 in 139,000
coupure1 in 107,0001 in 103,0001 in 138,000
rôder1 in 217,0001 in 276,0001 in 256,000
broyer1 in 250,0001 in 210,0001 in 172,000
écailler1 in 254,0001 in 126,0001 in 99,900
travestir1 in 294,0001 in 384,0001 in 495,000
rebords1 in 302,0001 in 213,0001 in 199,000
truchement1 in 306,0001 in 338,0001 in 1,110,000
renifler1 in 403,0001 in 977,0001 in 1,500,000
décousu1 in 427,0001 in 686,0001 in 707,000
désinvolture1 in 436,0001 in 501,0001 in 632,000
humer1 in 452,0001 in 642,0001 in 607,000
forcené1 in 493,0001 in 530,0001 in 535,000
relent1 in 547,0001 in 934,0001 in 1,350,000
disséquer1 in 583,0001 in 486,0001 in 452,000
exigu1 in 595,0001 in 675,0001 in 685,000
grime1 in 2,230,0001 in 3,960,0001 in 3,110,000
encaisseur1 in 17,500,0001 in 7,940,0001 in 5,940,000

Word notes

  • exigu is my favorite of this bunch. It means “cramped” or “small”. It is not “cozy” or anything positive. I like the word because it fits three syllables into the tight space of just five letters, somehow embodying its own meaning.
  • décousu is the past participle of découdre, which is the opposite of coudre = “to sew”. Décousu is translated as “disjointed” or “rambling”, but literally means something more like “unhitched” or “unraveled”, maybe “frayed”.
  • désinvolture (“casualness”) is the noun form of the word désinvolte (“casual”) we saw in Chapter 10.
  • racé meaning “distinguished” is not really all that common. Google NGram Viewer is conflating with with race meaning race.

Common words, uncommon meanings

  • une coupure de cinq francs: the word coupure just means “a cut”, but here it is used to mean a denomination of currency. Could just as well have used un billet. My research found this sense of coupure being used these days more often in technical monetary discussions.
  • par le truchement de: the word truchement means “intermediary”. But this entire phrase is universally translated as “through”. For example, Les organisations ne peuvent agir que par le truchement de leurs employés ou de leurs agents. = “Corporations can only act through their employees and agents.” But note what happened – the entire prepositional phrase in French gets reduced to just the preposition in English. You see this again and again in the sample of occurrences of truchment on Linguee. I find this remarkable; I don’t know other examples where a noun (as opposed to an interjection or an adverb) is universally dropped in the translation from French to English.
  • un encaisseur de la Compagnie du gaz. By itself, the word encaisseur means “a collector” or “a cashier”. But here, it’s used to describe another patron sitting at the bar. How does Maigret know that’s his job? Was he actively working there? Did folks pay their gas bills not at the office, but at a bar? Fun to spin imaginative tales of how the 1930’s worked. As the word is now one in 17 million, it’s easy to dream up a way of life that has now vanished.
  • fer à cheval is literally “iron on a horse” but more properly horseshoe. Here it’s used in the phrase le bar à fer en cheval = “a horseshoe shaped bar”.
  • grime = “dirt” or “grime”. But by far the most common usage of this word is in the form se grime = “to paint one’s face” or “to make up”. Simenon uses it in the discussion of cops disguising themselves when undercover, while Pietr-le-Letton actually became these persona on the inside. The phrase also appears in the title of a famous print by Georges Rouault created in 1923, “Qui ne se grime pas?”.
This verb form, “se grime”, is by far more common than any other word preceding “grime”.
“Qui ne se grime pas?” a print by Georges Rouault created in 1923.
  • abattre ses cartes = “lay one’s cards on the table”. Abattre is “to slaughter”, and abattu can mean “killed”, or “felled” / “hewn” / “cut down”. More metaphorically, it can mean “depressed” or “down”. An abat-jour is a lampshade – it kills the daylight. So abattre ses cartes is to let the cards fall from your hand face up, revealing what was hidden. And of course un abattoir is “a slaughterhouse”, like this one I photographed 2018 in Roye, France, just casually plunked down a quarter mile from the old center of town:

I’m oddly curious about these cars parked outside the slaughterhouse. Were they there to purchase meat? Do they work there? Did they bring with them chickens, or very cooperative pigs to be butchered? Seems too grim for the cheerful shade of yellow paint.

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Vocab list: Pietr-le-Letton, Chapter 10

I’m making lists of unfamiliar words as I read George Simenon’s 1931 Pietr-le-Letton, the novel debut of the famous commissaire Maigret. Here’s my list for Chapter 10 (Le Retour d’Oswald Oppenheim) with links to definitions and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.

In this chapter there’s not much action, more internal brooding and some reveals. Maigret mourns at his desk, goes back to the tenement on rue du Roi-de-Sicile to confront the woman he interviewed there before, then returns to the hotel to fume as he sits in the lobby. He envisions the body of his dead colleague being taken out of the hotel on a stretcher through the service corridors. He pieces together the fact that his quarry, the villain Pietr-le-Letton, is the same man who plays the role of the elegant Oswald Oppenheim, and also the same man passing as Fédor Yourovitch, the immigrant husband of tenement woman. The chapter ends with him realizing he has no proof of all this as he watches Letton qua Oppenheim enter the hotel lobby resplendent in his finery.

A short-ish chapter, just 16 unfamiliar words. About half of them are interior decorating words as Maigret spends most of these pages sitting in and thinking about the hotel:

expression (root)Frequency in 2010Frequency in 1970Frequency in 1930
remuer1 in 99,6001 in 95,9001 in 73,800
cogner1 in 209,0001 in 397,0001 in 530,000
mat1 in 260,0001 in 210,0001 in 176,000
chapelet1 in 320,0001 in 337,0001 in 248,000
malle1 in 357,0001 in 372,0001 in 264,000
désemparé1 in 374,0001 in 595,0001 in 593,000
haleter1 in 484,0001 in 597,0001 in 537,000
désinvolte1 in 540,0001 in 880,0001 in 1,660,000
osier1 in 647,0001 in 766,0001 in 585,000
clairsemé1 in 988,0001 in 699,0001 in 459,000
vasque1 in 1,100,0001 in 999,0001 in 873,000
civière1 in 1,240,0001 in 1,760,0001 in 1,820,000
limoger1 in 1,430,0001 in 2,880,0001 in 10,700,000
rotin1 in 1,780,0001 in 1,720,0001 in 1,890,000
colimaçon1 in 1,870,0001 in 3,080,0001 in 3,520,000
râblé1 in 4,730,0001 in 6,050,0001 in 5,300,000

A few thoughts I had while looking up these words:

  • limoger means “to fire someone” or “to sack”. This word was virtually unheard of in 1900, and has had a steady rise since, peeking right around 2000. Simenon seems to have caught this wave as it was building.
  • râblé is typically translated as “stocky”. Both words are used almost exclusively in descriptions of people or animals, and it’s not obvious what other words in the language they are related to. Both words were nearly unused in their language before 1800. The word râble (without the accent over the final e ) means “back” or “saddle”, and occurs most often as describing an edible part of a rabbit: râble de lapin, râble de lièvre. Sounds tasty, from the recipe descriptions.
  • colimaçon is a spiral staircase. Good word, that. The architectural feature has been around since about 150 A.D., and the word colimaçon came into broad use around 1760 and held remarkably steady for 240 years. Since 2000, though, it’s usage has shot up inexplicably. I wonder what spiral staircases everyone is talking about suddenly?
  • osier and rotin both describe chairs. osier is “wicker” while rotin is “rattan”. I realized I didn’t know what the difference between these was in English, so I looked it up. Apparently “wicker” is the woven construction method while “rattan” is the fibrous vine that is used as material for weaving. Not sure why Simenon used both in the same chapter. Most people use them interchangeably in English, and apparently in French too, with osier being about three times more popular a word choice:
  • mat is more commonly used as a noun, a synonym for tapis or carpet (i.e. a mat). But here Simenon uses it to describe the sound of somebody spitting down a stairwell at Maigret: “La salive tomba avec un bruit mat …”. The dictionary says “flat” is the translation of this use of mat (like a matte finish of a painted wall or a photograph), but if I were translating this I would not say “with a flat noise” I would write “The saliva fell with a splat …”
  • clairsemé means “sparse”. Another good word to know. Simenon uses it in this short sentence describing the hotel lobby late at night: “Des domestiques clairsemés circulaient.” In my professional life, I often work with matrices: two-dimensional grids of numbers used to represent all sort of things. Calculations with matrices are a lot easier of most of the numbers in them are 0, and there’s a special name for these: “sparse matrices”. Alas, the accepted French term for “sparse matrix” seems to be matrice creuse, and not matrice clairsemé, though you will find this phrase in bad translations.

Onward to Chapter 11 !

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Vocab list: Pietr-le-Letton, Chapter 9

I’m making lists of unfamiliar words as I read George Simenon’s 1931 Pietr-le-Letton, the novel debut of the famous commissaire Maigret. Here’s my list for Chapter 9 (Le Tueur) with links to definitions and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.

In this chapter, Maigret goes hunting for the shooter who winged him in Chapter 7. Maigret doesn’t find the shooter, but does identify the spotter who pointed out Maigret as the target. He visits the spotters apartement, finds it empty, searches it.

My list of unfamiliar words in this chapter is pretty short. Mostly about the random stuff Maigret finds in the ratty apartment of a vaguely unsavory male nightclub dancer:

expression (root)Frequency in 2010Frequency in 1970Frequency in 1930
instar1 in 50,4001 in 222,0001 in 315,000
mondain1 in 103,0001 in 124,0001 in 107,000
broncher1 in 329,0001 in 365,0001 in 235,000
comparse1 in 794,0001 in 970,0001 in 953,000
délester1 in 843,0001 in 2,530,0001 in 3,660,000
escarpin1 in 1,110,0001 in 3,870,0001 in 3,550,000
rapiécer1 in 1,960,0001 in 2,670,0001 in 2,440,000
perdreau1 in 2,840,0001 in 2,430,0001 in 1,580,000
frusques1 in 7,120,0001 in 9,390,0001 in 11,300,000
reps1 in 19,800,0001 in 9,740,0001 in 7,090,000
véronal1 in 45,400,0001 in 5,070,0001 in 3,730,000

A few thoughts I had while looking up these words:

  • reps here means a coarse weave in fabric, usually for upholstery. Also used to describe wire mesh.
  • rapiécer (“to patch up”) uses the prefix ra- to mean “again”. This is also the case in an earlier word from this novel, raviser. I hadn’t known this existed, as opposed to the more common re- prefix. I wonder if there’s a pattern of when each one is used. 
  • comparse means “sidekick”, “accomplice”, or “buddy”, but with a less-than-savory connotation. In researching its usage I’ve sometimes seen it translated as “stooge”, which I really liked and fit the situation perfectly: l’Union européenne ne parvenait à prendre une initiative et à jouer un rôle autre que de comparse des États-Unis, évidemment.
  • The rarest word, véronal, is a sedative drug. Indeed, it was the first commercially available barbiturate, invented in 1903 by a German chemist working in Verona, Italy, and marketed under the name Véronale. The drug became common enough that the brand name turned into a common word. Its frequency in the Google Books corpus jumped when it was invented, grew during the 1930s, peeked around 1938, had a brief resurgence in the 1950s, then faded to near nothingness by 1985 or so. I bet commercial sales followed a similar pattern
The lifecycle of a commercial drug? Véronale came and went.
  • The word délester means “to offload”, “to relieve congestion”, or “to outsource”. It’s had a steady growth over 100 years. Simenon was reaching for an obscure, one-in-3.6 million word when he penned it. Now the word is more common jargon:
Pretty soon all French jobs will be outsourced…
  • The word instar is used almost exclusively in the phrase à l’instar de qqch, an expression that draws a similarity between two things or situations. I had not known this expression, but it’s fairly common today at 1-in-50,000 words. Here are some recent examples from Linguée:
    • Ici, à l’instar d’autres aspects des soins de santé, les gouvernements canadiens ont adopté deux stratégies.
    • À l’instar des années précédentes, la fourniture des statistiques s’est déroulée normalement en 2003.
    • À l’instar de plusieurs artistes de l’époque, il doit travailler fort et même se battre pour imposer ses idées nouvelles.
Est-ce que tout le monde veut être à l’instar de la majorité?

When Simenon used the phrase in 1931, it was leading a boring life, with a stable frequency over decades. Something happened in 1970 that launched this expression on a steady upward trajectory that took 40 years to peak in the 2000s, but had been pretty steadily declining since then. Did “group think” become a thing starting in 1970, and everybody had to showcase how their situations / actions / outcomes were universal? In the words of songwriter Jim Infantino, “Everybody’s trying not to be just like everybody, and I don’t want to be like that.”

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Vocab list: Pietr-le-Letton, Chapter 8

I’m making lists of unfamiliar words as I read George Simenon’s 1931 Pietr-le-Letton, the novel debut of the famous commissaire Maigret. Here’s my list for Chapter 8 (Maigret Ne Joue Plus) with links to definitions and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer (warning: today’s frequency counts are wonky).

In this chapter, Maigret has been shot! Actually, that happened at the end of chapter 7, but I was unclear on the fact; all I had gleaned was that someone was shot in the final sentence of chapter 7, I hadn’t realized it was Maigret. In Chapter 8 he first spends a while stumbling around bleeding, then he makes his way back to the hotel where his officers were staking out the criminals, only to find one of them murdered via chloroform and a long needle to the heart. Finally, he calls in his Chief of Police, cleans himself up, and heads into the field once more to find the bad guys, ‘cuz now it’s personal!

Today’s list is largely words about wounds, bandages, nausea, blood stains, swelling, and lassitude. You know, everyday vocabulary.

expression (root)Frequency in 2010Frequency in 1970Frequency in 1930
fouler1 in 20,4001 in 21,2001 in 17,800
allure1 in 47,6001 in 45,8001 in 33,100
ballant1 in 50,2001 in 66,4001 in 61,300
desservir1 in 74,6001 in 85,9001 in 71,800
plaie1 in 94,5001 in 109,0001 in 67,300
caler1 in 143,0001 in 190,0001 in 161,000
gisait1 in 156,0001 in 194,0001 in 172,000
frôler1 in 183,0001 in 351,0001 in 391,000
béant1 in 226,0001 in 352,0001 in 317,000
dénicher1 in 278,0001 in 1,050,0001 in 1,070,000
pansement1 in 347,0001 in 567,0001 in 260,000
netteté1 in 361,0001 in 157,0001 in 100,000
recroquevillé1 in 404,0001 in 1,110,0001 in 1,610,000
happer1 in 420,0001 in 787,0001 in 811,000
souillure1 in 423,0001 in 501,0001 in 460,000
ahurissant1 in 445,0001 in 596,0001 in 576,000
raviser1 in 531,0001 in 1,130,0001 in 1,010,000
poindre1 in 628,0001 in 814,0001 in 729,000
bourrelet1 in 978,0001 in 259,0001 in 186,000
omoplate1 in 1,080,0001 in 1,350,0001 in 653,000
bougonner1 in 1,130,0001 in 2,310,0001 in 2,450,000
divaguer1 in 1,140,0001 in 1,680,0001 in 1,640,000
boursouflé1 in 1,430,0001 in 1,560,0001 in 1,350,000
tuméfier1 in 1,740,0001 in 2,810,0001 in 981,000
hébétude1 in 2,130,0001 in 3,010,0001 in 3,610,000
tournemain1 in 4,290,0001 in 5,130,0001 in 4,040,000
écoeurer1 in 5,780,0001 in 16,500,0001 in 35,900,000
écoeurement1 in 25,800,0001 in 50,200,0001 in 110,000,000

A few notable things today:

  • The word gisait means “was lying”, as in a dead body sprawled out on the floor. It’s commonly used for bodies, dead or alive, lying on surfaces. But the interesting thing is the infinitive is gésir, but all the conjugations start with gis-. Apparently it is also used only in restricted tenses: présent indicative, imparfait indicative, and present participle. I’ve never encountered this pattern before.
  • The word une plaie means a wound. The frequency of this words usage in books is fascinating:
The word “une plaie” means “a wound”. Any guesses what happened from 1914 – 1918 to cause this spike in usage of the word “plaie” in French books?
  • That spike around 1916? That’s the First World War. I don’t know why there isn’t a similar spike during World War II. All the wounded soldiers died, so the wounds weren’t worth writing about? A different word was adopted to describe these wounds? Nobody had time to write about it? Or maybe these books are just not in Google’s data for some reason.
  • The word écoeurement (disgust, nausea) is the rarest on this list — a whopping 1 in 26 million these days. But it’s not that hard to find on the Web, so I wonder if it’s just not a bookish word? Note that the word is having a resurgence. When Simenon selected it, the word has a prevalence in print of just 1 in 110 million !
  • Google NGram Viewer released a new corpus this week, with data running all the way up to 2019. So I shifted my window to look at the years 1930, 1970, and 2010. Recall the book was written in 1931, so the 1930 data is the environment Simenon was writing in.
  • That said, the frequencies are not entirely trustworthy at the moment. I think the new release does very aggressive pooling. So for example, ballant (dangling) is broken by its conflation with balle (a ball). I’m sure the “dangling” meaning is more rare than 1 in 50,000 words. I’ll work to get these cleaned up before long, but meanwhile I don’t trust the frequencies more common than 1 in 100,000
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La Fête Nationale, now and then

Joyeux 14 juillet! It’s la fête nationale in France today, what we call Bastille Day in English. Turns out nobody calls it that in France. French Today blog has a great run-down of vocabulary and customs for Le 14 juillet, I recommend it.

(It’s also the 108th anniversary of the birth of American folk-singer Woody Guthrie. Happy birthday, Woody!)

Covid-19 has has disrupted the 2020 celebration of quatorze juillet this year, but not as much as I would have expected. France’s daily Covid-19 totals nationwide are down to 800 new cases / 30 new deaths, and are largely having success at re-opening their society. In Paris, they are going ahead with an all-day concert on Champs-de-Mars, a military ceremony on Place de la Concorde, an ariel parade over Chaps Élysée, and midnight fireworks. There are more restrictions than usual on people gathering to view these events, but the Champs-de-Mars concert is definitely open to the public. Sortir à Paris has a full guide of Fête Nationale 2020 events.

My oldest daughter and I were in Paris on 14 juillet 2013, sampling a lot of venues:

We attended a nearby Bals des Pompiers at midnight 13-14 juillet, viewed the morning military parade on the Champs Élysée, went to a movie near Opéra in the afternoon, then took a boat cruise on the Seine at night, watching the fireworks from near Pont de l’Alma

Here’s some of what we saw seven years ago.

A 14 Juillet midnight tradition: Bals des Pompiers. We watched from the outside, didn’t make it into the dance hall.

We watched the défilé militaire from the sidewalk, near the George V metro stop. First there was an aerial display, a parade in the sky of sorts, complete with un drapeau français.

Aerial parade, 14 juillet 2013, Paris

Next came a mechanized parade. First police and fire vehicles…

Mechanized parade, 14 juillet 2013

… and then military vehicles:

Mechanized parade, 14 juillet 2013

After that, a final return to the air:

We took the afternoon off, then went on a bateau-mouche at night to watch the fireworks from the water.

Feux d’artifice, 14 juillet 2013 à Paris.

At the time, I had mixed feelings about the military parade in Paris. On the one hand, it seemed totally authentic, patriotic, clean, and stereotypically French. On the other hand, I imagined the analogous event in Washington, D. C., on July 4th and didn’t like the image at all. Of course, it didn’t take too many years before imagination became reality. I was right: I was not a fan of the July 4, 2019 military parade in D. C.

Maybe some French traditions are best left to the French…

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Vocab list: Pietr-le-Letton, Chapter 7

I’m making lists of unfamiliar words as I read George Simenon’s 1931 Pietr-le-Letton, the novel debut of the famous commissaire Maigret. Here’s my list for Chapter 7 (Troisième Entracte) with links to definitions and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.

In this chapter, Maigret stops briefly at the hotel where a person of interest is staying, then follows them first to the theater and then to a cabaret nightclub. I’m a fan of French theater, so many theater-specific vocab words did not make it onto this list (though some did). The list is largely words about coming, going, dining, and dressing.

I’ve augmented my frequency tables based on a comment from reader F. P., who suggested that I display both modern word frequency and contemporaneous frequency. The most recent data I have from the Google NGram Viewer ends at 2008. Pietr-le-Letton was published in 1931, but I rounded back to 1928 for aesthetics. 1968 falls midway between these two.

To put these numbers in some perspective, a typical novel is 60,000 to 100,000 words long, and real hefty novels top out around 500,000 words. So when you see a word frequency of 1 in 1,000,000 you should think “I could read 5-10 novels and never see this word or its variants.” Recall the frequencies shown pool together various inflections of the word, so the row for matelassé is really all of matelassé, matelassée, matelassées, matelassés, matelasser, matelasse, matelassent, matelassant, and matelassait combined.

expression (root)Frequency in 2008Frequency in 1968Frequency in 1928
ruée1 in 7,4201 in 7,0201 in 5,920
dresser1 in 25,2001 in 18,7001 in 14,200
soulevé1 in 27,4001 in 21,2001 in 18,500
lasse1 in 30,6001 in 31,6001 in 32,400
cerne1 in 64,3001 in 104,0001 in 236,000
cernée1 in 64,3001 in 104,0001 in 236,000
coulisses1 in 238,0001 in 132,0001 in 224,000
affermissant1 in 328,0001 in 200,0001 in 176,000
crispé1 in 418,0001 in 373,0001 in 453,000
corbeille1 in 433,0001 in 431,0001 in 259,000
croquer1 in 518,0001 in 808,0001 in 874,000
Mâcon1 in 606,0001 in 512,0001 in 476,000
vergogne1 in 662,0001 in 754,0001 in 925,000
navré1 in 677,0001 in 564,0001 in 455,000
badaud1 in 818,0001 in 774,0001 in 813,000
blanchâtre1 in 864,0001 in 484,0001 in 293,000
réverbère1 in 886,0001 in 659,0001 in 825,000
bleuté1 in 955,0001 in 919,0001 in 932,000
crépitant1 in 1,010,0001 in 796,0001 in 1,030,000
désaltérer1 in 1,160,0001 in 1,590,0001 in 1,190,000
crotté1 in 1,250,0001 in 1,470,0001 in 1,220,000
piétinements1 in 1,320,0001 in 936,0001 in 1,470,000
hargneux1 in 1,560,0001 in 1,090,0001 in 1,100,000
emmitouflée1 in 2,340,0001 in 3,280,0001 in 3,960,000
péristyle1 in 2,450,0001 in 1,380,0001 in 970,000
débraillé1 in 2,760,0001 in 1,590,0001 in 1,480,000
entrefilet1 in 3,080,0001 in 2,590,0001 in 2,070,000
plastron1 in 3,210,0001 in 2,290,0001 in 1,630,000
lestement1 in 3,630,0001 in 3,880,0001 in 1,450,000
matelassé1 in 7,210,0001 in 5,220,0001 in 6,830,000
contremarque1 in 10,500,0001 in 26,000,0001 in 12,300,000
maigriote1 in 75,900,0001 in 27,400,0001 in 23,400,000
panneau-réclame———

F. P. also suggested that I sort the words by frequency, which I have using 2008 data. Those interested in the details of the data generation can read my code.

Looking down the first column of the table, I see that there’s a few words I was unfamiliar with that are currently more common than 1 in 100,000 words of book text. But the bulk of the new-to-me words are more rare than that, and many are rarer than one-in-a-million. And recall, this statistic pools together various inflections of the word (so matelassé is really all of matelassé, matelassée, matelassées, matelassés, matelasser, matelasse, matelassent, matelassant, and matelassait combined).

Looking across the rows, you can see which words were rare even in Simenon’s time, and which were relatively common then but have since fallen out of favor. For example, blanchâtre is currently a 1-in-864,000 word, though when Simenon wrote it was only a 1-in-293,000 word. Likewise péristyle was a one-in-a-million word then, but has become 2.5x more rare since. On the other hand, lasse was pretty common then and is pretty common now, piétinements was very rare then and now, and maigriote was already off the charts rare in 1928, coming in at a whopping 1-in-23,400,000 (it’s 3x as rare now, but…).

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Watching La Belle et la Bête

A long time ago a French colleague shared with me the rules for his children around watching American films. The first time, they could watch with the French audio track and no subtitles. The second time through, they could watch the film with the English audio track and French subtitles. Thereafter, they could only watch the film with English audio and no subtitles.

Like millions of others, I ponied up $6.99 to Disney+ last week for the purpose of watching the Hamilton movie (it was good). But before canceling the subscription, I decided to get some additional mileage out of it by trying this same trick but in reverse (sort of). Disappointingly, few of the Disney films available have French audio tracks. But at least one does, so I sat down last night and watched La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast). It was neat.

I’ll start off acknowledging that I did not catch all the words (no surprise). But it was far from uniform: a single speaker talking slowly was straightforward; a conversation between two was a little harder, with the castle servants easier to understand than the villagers in the tavern. Singing added a layer of difficulty, and again a solo line was much simpler. The hardest was the chorus songs (mostly the villagers once more).

Of course, I know the lyrics of the songs moderately well, in English. It helps less than I’d imagined. The translations are well done, and therefore don’t hew particularly to the literal. For example, the opening verse of the song Beauty & The Beast is:

Tale as old as time
True as it can be
Barely even friends
Then somebody bends
Unexpectedly

In the French version this is: 

Histoire éternelle
Qu'on ne croit jamais
De deux inconnus
Qu'un geste imprévu
Rapproche en secret

which back-translates into English, as literally as I can manage, as:

Eternal story
That you'd never believe
Of two strangers
Whom an unexpected act
Secretly draws together.

It takes some mental gymnastics to use the original English translation as a guide to understanding the French in real time. I found myself more using my knowledge of the original English lyrics as a source of pleasure at hearing how the French translator handles a passage and smiling at the result – but there were still places where I just couldn’t catch / parse / understand the French.

After finishing my first watch through of the movie with no subtitles and French audio, I went back to see if it was any easier with the French subtitles on. I wasn’t planning to do a full re-watch immediately, just get a taste of how much easier or harder it was. It became clear at once that the French subtitles were not an accurate transcript of the spoken French audio. Here’s the opening:

Audio:

Il était une fois, dans un pays lointain, un jeune prince qui vivait dans un somptueux château. Bien que la vie l’ait comblé de tout ses bienfaits, le prince était un homme capricieux, égoïste et insensible.

Subtitles:

Il était une fois, dans un pays lointain, un jeune prince qui habitait dans un somptueux château. Bien qu’il possédât tout ce qu’il désirait, le prince était gâté, égoïste, et méchant.

The first sentence is different only in one word. The second sentence changes all kinds of things. “… life had lavished him with its blessings …” becomes “… he had all that he could want …”, while “…arbitrary and callous…” becomes “… spoiled and wicked …”.

Not sure what the backstory on this is. Are the work streams of creating French subtitles from English audio and creating French audio from English audio just independent ? Two different crews, different times when they were created, etc? That could explain the skew. Or is it a real creative decision to have the subtitles be something other than a transcript? I can imagine that what the eye reads fluidly and what the ear hears pleasantly are different. But that seems more plausible for whole sentence rewrites or omitting words, less plausible for a simple substitution like “vivait” becoming “habitait“.

Anyway, watching just a few minutes of this convinced me that the skew between what was written and what was spoken would drive me batty, so I’m not going to do that for the whole film. I may try a second run through of the film in the same “no subtitle, French audio” configuration, see what more I pick up on the re-watch.

Of course, someday I’ll have to take the plunge and watch the 1946 film La Belle et La Bête with Jean Cocteau.

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Word frequencies from French Google Books corpus

The Google Books NGram Viewer is a great resource. It has word frequency counts for a large sampling of books spanning hundreds of years and many languages.

I wrote some code (in this Colab notebook) to help me augment my vocabulary lists with frequencies of how often a word, in any of its inflected forms, appears in the subset of French books published in 2007 and known to Google. This lets me post tables like this:

expression (root)frequency
bondé1 in 742,000
détrempé1 in 2,040,000
patauger1 in 1,220,000
ballotté1 in 834,000
pain azyme1 in 10,200,000

According to this estimate, I’d come upon the word have to ready 742,000 words on average before coming upon bondé or one of its forms. As it happens, the usage of this word in books has been becoming (somewhat) more common over time:

I’ve gone back to my earlier vocabulary list posts (Pietr-le-Letton Chapter 5 and Chapter 6) and updated the lists with frequencies. I’ve also pointed out a few false conflations that Google has made (e.g. it thinks étaient is a form of the rare verb étayer. It is, but most of the instances of étaient are conjugations of être.) Take a look at the old list posts, and play around with the NGram viewer if you’ve never seen it before.

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My last 4000 French photos

Google Photos introduced a new feature that allows you to see on a map where the photos in your library were taken. This turns out to be an expressive travelogue summary for me. Since nearly all my photos after 2008 are in my Google Photos library, I can see where I’ve been. Here’s the section of the map for France:

That’s a lot of places to have photographed! It breaks down into a few different trips.

Paris and environs (2013-2020)

I worked in Paris for a summer in 2013, and went back a few times since, most recently with my family over New Years 2019-2020.

You can see there’s some coverage outside of Paris. The spots to the northeast are Charles de Gaulle airport. The spot to the northwest is Conflans Sainte-Honorine, where we had lunch in 2013 at the friend of a cousin. West-southwest is the Palace of Versailles, of course. The spot east of Paris is Bois de Vincennes and the château there, tourist destinations both. The nearer spot to the southeast, just outside Melun, is the Château de Vaux le Vicomte. It’s a tourist site, and one of my favorite – like Versailles but way less crowded, more human scale. Finally, the far southeast spot is Samois-sur-Seine, near Fontainebleau. A co-worker lived there (commuted to Paris every day!), and hosted a summer party for the office once.

Tours (2014)

There’s a small spot on my France photomap just to the east of Tours. In 2014 I worked in Paris for a couple of weeks, took a weekend tour of the Loire valley Chateaux. I confess, it was quite challenging booking the tour on the phone (in French), and trying to comprehend as they told me that the tour started in Tours, and it was my responsibility to take a train from Paris to Tours and get to Tours by 10am to meet the tour. The brochure didn’t mention the meeting site somehow, only said it was a Loire valley tour from Paris, so the existence of a city named Tours was nowhere on my radar. It all worked out though, it was a nice tour, and Tours was nice too.

Dijon and Beaune (2017)

In 2017, I had a work trip that took me to Zurich, Switzerland. I took the occasion to tack on a few days of vacation in Dijon, France, which is only a few hours away by train. It so happens the my wife’s cousin is a French professor at a college, and runs a student exchange program with a college in Dijon. He has spent many months there over the years, and so was able to connect me to his network of friends there. I had a great time getting to know these friends, seeing Dijon, and getting a VIP tour of the wine-producing region of Beaune. It was a short visit, but wonderful.

Roye, Compiègne, Amiens (2018)

In 2018, my daughter and I did a homestay immersion program in Roye, a small town in Somme, about 120 km north of Paris. We studied with our host / teacher each morning, but spent the afternoons being tourists with or without our host. We toured the cathedral in Amiens, the château in Pierrefonds, the palace of Compiègne, and the World War I battlefields around Albert. I took a solo visit to the museum on the site where the November 11 Armistice was signed in 1918. They were busy preparing for their centennial, but the museum was already chock full of photos and artifacts. Overall, the trip was outstanding.

Nantes, Bordeaux, St. Emilion (2020)

  • Loire and Atlantic
  • A map of Bordeaux and St. Émilion with highlighting to indicate where I took 322 photos in January 2020.
    Bordeaux wine country

After welcoming the arrival of 2020 in Paris with my family, I bade them goodbye at the airport on January 2nd and began a 4-day solo road trip. My eventual destination was Aurignac, a small village southwest of Toulouse where I planned to spend a week. But before that, I enjoyed un petit périple down the Atlantic coast. I rented a car, drove the highways listening to French talk radio, stopped at rest areas often. I spent a night and a morning in Nantes on my own, a half-day in Les Sables-d’Olonne with my French teacher’s family, a night and a morning in Bordeaux. From there I hopped over to St. Emilion for a 24-hour stay including a winery tour, a gourmet dinner, and a luxurious stay at the Château Hôtel Spa Grand Barrail – a bargain and a splurge at the same time. I left after breakfast and drove south, arriving in the afternoon at…

Haute-Garonne: Benque (2020)

A map of Aurignac and surrounding areas with highlighting to indicate where I took 477 photos in January 2020.

I enjoyed my 2018 homestay immersion program in Somme so much that I arranged to do a second one in January 2020. I spent a week in the tiny village of Benque (population 162), which is outside Boussan (pop. 213), which is outside Aurignac (pop. 1,200), which is the site of a famous cave. The nearest big city is Toulouse, about 75 km northeast. I had a great time studying and living with my host family, baking bread at a neighboring farm, making lemon tarts in the village shop with the local pastry baker, and rambling the countryside. Beautiful, quiet landscape, my first extended solo vacation in decades.

Carcassonne, Narbonne, Avignon (2020)

A map of southeast France with areas around Carcassonne, Narbonne, Sète, Avignon, and Marseille highlighted to indicate where I took 64 photos in January 2020.

The vagaries of airline pricing meant it was cheaper to fly home from Marseille than from the much closer Toulouse. So I did one final day of long distance driving at the end of my homestay in Benque, ending up at the Marseille airport hotel shortly after nightfall. To break up the drive, and to get in some sightseeing, I stopped in Carcassonne, Narbonne, Sète (outside Montpellier), and Avignon. While in Benque I ordered online a number of books that my host recommended, and arranged for them to be delivered to a FNAC in Narbonne. Separately, I met a board game designer in Aurignac and enjoyed playing one of his games with him. I researched game store locations and visited three that fell along my path to Marseille. It was a fun way to have a reason to visit smaller French cities for 45 minutes at a stretch.

Marseille (202x ?)

I didn’t see much in Marseille beyond the inside of the hotel and the inside of the airport. I slept at the airport hotel following my 10 hour driving day, caught an early flight in the morning. But I should like to go back sometime and visit it properly.

Ah, going back. As of this writing (July 2020), Europe has imposed a ban on travelers from countries with high level of COVID-19 infection, including the United States. When I first thought up the title of this blog post, I meant “My last 4000 French photos” as in “my most recent photos”. But given the way things are going, it’s hard not to worry that these could in fact be the last ones I ever take. That would be make me very sad…

What will the year read the next time I take a photo in France… ?