I was visiting family near Washington D.C. this weekend and took the opportunity to visit Bonjour Books, a French-language book store created by Jennifer Fulton (bonjourbooksdc.com). Jennifer has been running the store since 2013, but I somehow learned of it only in June. I’m so glad I did!
The store comprises two rooms, one for adults and one for children. Jennifer reports that they carry 3500 distinct titles. Nearly all of them are in French, with a smattering of English-language books on French subjects. There is a small amount of language learning material, but the vast majority of the offerings are high quality French books that rival what you would find in any small bookstore in France (I’ve been to many). The collection for adults includes contemporary and classical novels of all stripes (literature, mysteries, romance, thrillers, fantasy, sci-fi); an assortment of B.D. and graphic novels; a range of non-fiction (biographies, history, science, philosophy, business, art); a small selection of plays and poetry; and a small selection of gifts, prints, and novelty items. The children’s room includes board books for the youngest customers, picture books for early readers, plus an assortment of early-teen fiction and adolescent fiction. There are also juvenile B.D. and various non-fiction books. Jennifer also stocks items from the summer reading lists of the French schools in the area, including Lycée Rochambeau and French Academy D.C.
Bonjour Books sells books online as well as in the store, but I had plenty of space in my suitcase so I was free to stock up then and there. I picked out a few titles that piqued my interest and then asked Jennifer to recommend three or for more. She walked me through her favorites, chatting away in French with me the whole time. Here are the new additions to my fall reading list:
I was intensely curious about how a French bookstore could operate in America in the modern day, when so much of the book trade is now done through online merchants. Before turning the conversation to that subject I volunteered that I had started a French theater company in Boston and Jennifer was delighted to learn of our efforts and eager to learn how it came to pass. So we spent some 45 minutes swapping stories about creating small enterprises in America that cater to francophone audiences, and about the differences between for-profit and non-profit businesses. Jennifer was wonderfully forthcoming about her experiences, and gave me some good ideas for ways to develop the French Theater Project.
I’m so glad to have made a new friend, and to have found an American supplier of French books. Bonjour Books DC ships anywhere in the US, and when you factor in shipping their prices are way less than online French merchants like Lireka, Cultura, FNAC, or Amazon.fr. With so many titles in stock, I can get new French books for less money and much sooner than ordering them myself from overseas. An unexpected find – I expect I’ll be making regular visits every time I’m in town.
I fell behind a day somewhere in there, and since I expect to have lots more to do once I reach Avignon tomorrow I figured I’d write a short bulletin covering today in order to be all caught up when I wake up tomorrow.
Friday was my last full day in Avignon. In the morning we had a meandering conversation after breakfast that somehow branched off from yesterday’s visit to the caves with the bear logo. I ended up telling the same story that I told at Franco’s wedding about the poorly-executed 1993 hiking trip to Mount Marcy in which we arrived way after dark and botched the operation of hanging our food packs from a tree to keep it away from bears. A bear had a successful game of pinata during the night and claimed some peanut butter and a bag of hard candy, but thankfully left us the rest of our food. On the way down a park ranger stopped us to confirm we were the folks who’d had a problem with a bear, and then gave us a lecture on the best tool you have to protect your food against bears. That was the set-up for the famous ranger line “It starts with R …” It turns out the ranger was thinking of “rope”, but we had fun coming up with all kinds of other options on the rest of the hike out (“rifle”, “repellant”, “ranger”, etc.)
I had fairly little trouble recounting this story in French, except for the fact that “rope” in French is cord, which starts with C and not R. How do you translate that part of the story elegantly ? The words fusil, bombe and forestier don’t all start with the same letter. Looking at it now I see two out of the three start with F, and so I could use ficeler (to tie up) to tell the rope part of the story and swap out fumée (smoke) for bombe (repellant). But on the fly all I could do was translate everything one-for-one and acknowledge that the alliteration plays better in English.
Other than that, we spent some time on pronunciation of vowel sounds, which is one of my weakest points. No matter how many times one tells me, I forget that the indefinite article un (“a” or the number “one”) is pronounced like the in- of incroyable and not like the -eu of peu probable. I also mangle the distinction between the -en-, -an-, and -on- sounds: menton and montant sound the same to me, both in my ear and in my mouth, and I can never remember how to say meringue or bilingue. Éliane gave me clear demonstrations of vowels made with the mouth in a smile, vowels made with an open, round mouth, and vowels made with an vertically-elongated mouth with the chin dropped.
We cut the morning lesson short to take a day trip to Carcassonne. I was already there Monday night, but it turned out I had gotten entirely the wrong impression of the city. First of all, there’s two halves of the city, on opposite sides of the Aude river. The ancient walled city and fortified castle of Carcassonne, the one featured in the eponymous board game, lies on the southeast bank of the river. The more modern city, called La Bastide, is on the northwest bank (they joined to become one municipality less than 200 years ago). And not only did I visit the modern rather than the ancient city earlier in the week, I somehow missed the more notable parts of La Bastide.
I corrected that on this visit, guided by Éliane and accompanied by Benjamin. We strolled through more interesting parts of La Bastide and they explained to me the history of the two settlements, the cathedral, and the deployment of the massive development grant that the new city received in 2015 to revitalize tourism in the more modern city. Then we drove over the river and up the hill to the medieval Cité of Carcassonne, walked around it a bit and ate lunch in a low-key restaurant. It was a more friendly, social conversation rather than the explicitly pedagogical sessions I’ve had all week with Éliane over breakfast. We joked a lot about their difficulties with certain English pronunciations and found in passing certain fairly common English words that they did not know. Benjamin and I compared return-to-office experiences post-Covid and talked a bit about the value of learning how to craft effective prompts for the ChatGPTs of the world.
After lunch I said goodbye to Éliane and Benjamin for the day and continued to explore the old city on my own. Well, first I went online and found a hotel that advertised having free wifi and rentable coworking space. You see, there was a meeting of the Board of the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, and since it was the first meeting since I was elected to the Board I didn’t want to miss it. The very nice people at the Hôtel de la Cité told me that if all I wanted was to use the WiFi and have a quiet place to sit for my meeting, there was no charge. They escorted me to a good-sized professional meeting room, and I took my Zoom call on my phone for an hour. I’ll have to remember to write a good review for the hotel on the internets.
My meeting successfully concluded (though low on phone battery) I continued my tour of medieval Carcassonnne. It’s the largest walled medieval city in Europe and the towers and ramparts are quite remarkable. Of course, I learned that much of it was in ruins by 1800 as first the shifting of the Spanish border to the south (away from Carcassonne) around 1600 and then the French Revolution from 1789 onwards had diminished the city’s standing, both in political and physical terms. A lot of the old city had been taken apart and carried over the river to serve as construction material for the new city. Napoleon set in motion a multi-decade restoration project directed largely by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who chose a particular period in the city’s thousand-plus year history and decided that was the reference point that should be put back in place.
So much of what I walked today was not original, making the old city as much a stage set as a real historic site. But it doesn’t feel at all tacky, and the style is quite consistent throughout which helps it avoid any Disney sense. I took a self-guided audio tour of the Château and the Ramparts, then wandered the streets of the enclosed city on my own for a while before getting dinner in a pleasant outdoor café. I hadn’t really planned on staying all day when we’d left in the morning, so I didn’t have a book or puzzles with me, and I regrettably passed up a chance to buy one of the handful of Carcassonne inspired real French novels from the Château gift shop. There wasn’t a real bookstore anywhere in the medieval city, and my phone was running low on batteries, so over dinner I had to content myself with reading a free guide to the region I picked up at the Tourism Office. I drank a glass of kir cassis and a beer, and ate a plate of spiced pork brochettes and some french fries.
I took a taxi home after dinner and got back around 8:45pm. I’ve been writing ever since, but it’s definitely time for bed now. I can pack in the morning.
The end of December is a time of personal reflection for many people, as we think back on what happened in this old year and make resolutions for the new. The French expression for self-reflection is se remettre en cause. The same expression, without the reflexive pronoun, is used for the re-examination of any matter, large or small, individual or societal. Indeed, French social and political thought has a strong strain of calling into question subjects that were previously thought of as settled, re-opening discussions that many thought closed. Based on my limited views of both countries, I’d say that France is overall a more radical society, while the United States has become decidedly more conservative over the past 50 years. The spirit of remettre en cause in France lies behind everything from calls to overhaul the retirement system to the alarming percentage of French people who swallow homeopathic remedies. The French constitution was amended 16 times from 1996 to 2008; the US Constitution was amended only once in the last 50 years — to ratify a proposal made in 1789 !
I recently read two contemporary plays built around the theme of remettre en cause. Each one operates at two levels: an event happens within a family that causes them to revisit settled questions in a new light, which allows the playwright to re-examine a larger social issue together with the audience. The first play is Drôle de genre, by Jade-Rose Parker, which premiered at Théâtre de la Renaissance, Paris, in February 2022 (I’ll write about the second, Demain la revanche, by Sébastien Thiéry, in another post).
Drôle de genre has the form of a drawing-room farce. It’s staged in the main room of an upscale apartment and has lots of biting dialogue with witty zingers reliably hitting the audience’s funny-bone without particularly injuring the other characters. There are people trying to stop each other from revealing information and lots of shouting. But all this disguises a more serious tragedy. In the opening lines of the play a woman in her fifties, Carla Dumon-Chapuny, tells her husband that she has cancer of … the prostate. This is her way of revealing, after 30 years of marriage, that she is transsexual and was born Carlos, a man. While the sexual reassignment surgeon did an excellent job on all the observable parts of her anatomy (even in the marital bed), the prostate was left in place.
Carla’s husband François is the mayor, nominally a man of the Left and a strong supporter of LGBTQ people, doesn’t take the news well at all. He’s incensed by the decades of deception, angry at Carla, and concerned for his political career (it’s election season). It turns out he’s more a supporter of other LGBTQ people, not of his own wife being trans. The revelation also forces him to reexamine their whole married life. Does this mean he’s gay? Should this change how he views their choice to adopt a daughter 25 years ago? Carla argues that she’s the very same person François has lived with all this time, so why should one medical letter with a diagnostic result change anything? But François isn’t interested in anything beyond limiting the damage to his political career. He forbids Carla from telling their daughter Louise, as much for his own sake as out of concern for her.
Speaking of Louise, she knocks on the door at the start of act two, come to dinner with her fiancé Rachon and a big announcement: she’s pregnant ! When Carla shares her news («Je suis un homme.»), Louise is lovingly supportive while François is even more angry and alienated from the whole family. But then Louise shares some more news: she’s decided to go in search of her birth parents to discover her origins and why they gave her up for adoption. This drives Carla and François back together in joint opposition, as they insist that they are Louise’s real parents, and she shouldn’t need anything more. In fact, she should be grateful they took her in and provided her with everything for years! Louise accuses Carla of hypocrisy:
Louise: Toi, tu as eu la chance de te trouver et tu as fait en sorte de devenir la personne que tu étais. Moi, je me cherche encore. Et j’ai besoin … Non, je n’ai pas «besoin», j’ai «envie» que vous me souteniez dans ma quête d’identité.
The dialogue gets more and more heated from there, Rachon gets himself in trouble too, and finally they each storm off one by one, to the exit door or the spare bedroom. Act two ends with Carla alone in the relational ruins of her living room, dancing the death scene from Swan Lake in a way «qui traduit à la fois le rejet, le désespoir, et la solitude».
Act three is short, though not sweet. It is an exact replay of act one, right up the point where Carla Dumon-Chapuny tells her husband that she has … un cancer du sein.
Noir. Le lac des Cygnes (thème principal) rugit, déchirant.
FIN
Sleep well, kiddos.
Overall I thought the play was an interesting effort to blend vaudeville farce with a serious treatment of a delicate subject. I think it has limited goals, and it succeeds on its own terms. Playwright Jade-Rose Parker stated «J’avais envie de faire une pièce grand public […] La comédie est un bon média pour cela. Drôle de genre n’est pas une pièce militante, […] mais j’espère qu’en sortant, il en reste quelque chose. Je voulais une pièce qui interroge, qui fasse réfléchir sur le monde d’aujourd’hui, et sur soi». The play is not terribly deep and the characters are barely more than their few traits, but Jade-Rose Parker’s writing is witty. Her jokes stay on the safe side of the wokisme line, though she doesn’t sugar-coat society’s continued failure to allow trans people to live openly without cost. This is her first produced play; should I have the occasion to see her next one, I’ll buy a ticket.
A few final notes, one language and one theatrical. When Carla first says to Louise that she is a man, her daughter at first misconstrues this as an announcement that Carla is biologically a woman who feels herself to be a man. Here’s the lines clarifying the situation:
Louise: Quoi ? Tu veux devenir un homme ? Carla: Non, J’ÉTAIS un homme. (Se reprenant.) J’AI ÉTÉ un homme. Dans une autre vie, il y a très longtemps. Louise: Quoi ? Tu veux devenir un homme ? Carla: Non, J’ÉTAIS un homme. (Se reprenant.) J’AI ÉTÉ un homme. Dans une autre vie, il y a très longtemps.
The capitalization is rendered that way in the script, drawing the listener’s attention to the correction of which past tense to use. The best description I’ve heard yet of the distinction between the passé composé and imparfait is that the passé composé is a bounded tense, while the imparfait is an unbounded tense (another, less helpful phrasing I’ve heard for this is that the imparfait is for actions that were ongoing or continuous in the past). Carla’s first stab at explaining things uses the unbounded imparfait, but she corrects herself to the passé composé to emphasize definitively that her being a man has ended. I don’t know how you would translate that distinction cleanly – “No, I was a man … I used to be a man.” doesn’t cut it. The French version is a neat grammatical trick of dialogue that may not be available in English.
The theatrical note is this: Jade-Rose Parker indulges in a short bit of fourth-wall breaking during act two which I imagine is very effective. At the peak of his rage, François claims that by “passing herself off as his wife” for 30 years, Carla has effectively taken him hostage. When Carla points out this analogy is ridiculous, François asks the audience for validation:
Francois: […] Moi ça fait trente ans que (désignant Carla) cette personne me prend en otage ! Louise: PAPA! Tu ne crois pas que tu exagère ? François: Moi j’exagère ? C’est la meilleure ! Moi, j’exagère ?? (À la régie.) RALLUMEZ LA SALLE !
La salle se rallume.
Rachon: Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites ? François: Un sondage d’opinion ! (Au public.) Qui parmis vous pense que j’exagère ? (Rachon va pour protester, François lui impose le silence avec la main.) Je rappelle pour mémoire que ce monsieur (désignant Carla) se fait passer pour ma femme depouis plus de trente ans ! Carla: TU DÉBLOQUES !!! François: On va très vite le savoir ! (Au public.) Allez-y, allez-y !!! Levez la main ! Carla: Non mais tu vois bien que les gens n’ont pas envie de participer à ton petit numéro pathétique ! François: (à une personne au premier rang) Monsieur, vous pensez que j’exagère ? Exprimez-vous, bon sang ! Rachon: Mais pfff !!! Mais évidemment, vous faites voter le carré or ! C’est du CSP+ ça, c’est votre électorat ! Non, si vous voulez vraiment sonder la France, il faut aller au fond, là-haut, dans les derniers rangs, sur les strapontins derrière le poteau ! Là où les places sont à dix balles, où ça sent le peuple, le chômage, la conserve premier prix ! François: (se retournant vers Rachon) Non mais vous êtes odieux ! Vous entendez ce que vous dites, un peu (À la régie.) Éteignez la salle !
I can envision the uncomfortable tension among the audience as each person tries to calculate whether an actual hand-raising response is expected, or whether they can sit as passive spectator. What exactly does not raising my hand endorse ? And if I do raise my hand, what have I just committed myself to in front of my friends and the community of theater-goers? It’s a microcosm of the real-world situation where we reveal our political convictions through inaction as much as through action. If it is this unsettling to be put on the spot in a theater performance, no wonder it can be so hard for some citizens to wrestle with these political issues in real life.
This holiday weekend I finished reading the novel L’anomalie by Hervé Le Tellier, winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt, one of the biggest annual literary prizes in France. I learned of the book from a New York Times article in late November, 2021, which announced the publication of the English translation of this work. The article noted that the original work had been a smash success in France, selling over 1 million copies despite (because of?) being published in August 2020 amidst the various confinements and disruptions of Covid. I figured it was worth a read and so got a hold of a French copy. It sat on my shelf for a while, but I picked it up early this month and polished off its 327 pages in a couple of weekends.
The book is interesting in and of itself; but after I finished it, I read some reviews, looked up the author’s background, and listened to an interview with the author, all of which gave another dimension to the book that I had missed in my ordinary reading. The book begins with a vignette of a professional hitman: his back-story, his methods, and the double life he leads. In the open he’s a successful entrepreneur with a small international chain of vegetarian restaurants, a wife and two children, and a bourgeois Paris apartment. But behind it all he’s a killer for hire with a second apartment, secret bank accounts, multiple passports, a presence on the Dark Web, and any number of lethal toys. This duality gives us the theme of the book right from the outset, though hardly in a way I expected at the start.
Hervé Le Tellier
The book is divided into three parts. In the first part we meet character after character, one or two per chapter, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Some live in France, some in New York, one in Nigeria, another in New Jersey. What eventually becomes apparent is that they were all on the same Air France flight from Paris to New York in March 2021, a flight which encountered violent turbulents shortly before landing safely at JFK airport. As the first part ends, we learn that a second instance of this airplane – and its full complement of passengers – somehow also appears in June 2021 just after the violent turbulents and tries to land as well. Air traffic control goes nuts at the sudden appearance of the airplane and then they and the military Air Force get very confused as the pilots insist over the radio on their identities and the plane’s designation. All the physical evidence backs their claims, and they are eventually escorted to an Air Force base in New Jersey.
Page 212 of L’anomalie
In the second part of the novel we see a lot of U.S. and then world government officials dealing with this unprecedented situation. There are DoD and NSA and CIA meetings. There are mathematicians and physicists and philosophers. There are religious leaders and world presidents. And of course there are the passengers themselves, whose “March-landing” instances we have already met in the first part, and whose “June-landing” (who are 3 months younger and still think it’s March) counterparts we follow in the makeshift camp / prison that the military has set up in a giant hangar. The experts offer various explanations for what has happened, along with citations of which work of science fiction has already illustrated the phenomenon, but come to no conclusion. Meanwhile global intelligence services coordinate a round-up of the March-landing versions of each passenger and bring them to a separate part of the Air Force base. Finally, word leaks out to the public of what has transpired. In a somewhat unbelievable plot twist, the authorities decide to introduce each passenger to their double, provide them with counseling services and economic assistance, and release them back “into the wild”.
The last part of the novel is surprising in that it drops the whole science-fiction bit entirely. Who knows how these people got here, they are here. Once again we are treated to a parade of episodes, each chapter following another character. We get to see ten different ways that this “meet your double three months in your past/future” plays out. Some meetings are violent, others are venomous, some are blassé, others joyful, and some are painful (the cancer didn’t go away, so now the children have to bury their father twice). There are apartments to be shared – and jobs, and husbands, and children. The situations described are very awkward, though the writing is quite good. There’s some slight surprise twist at the end that is left unexplored, but does a nice call-back to the philosophical and science-fiction aspects of the middle part.
So there you go, a traditional if somewhat intricately structured modern French novel with a lot of American flavors running through it, right ? Not sure why it caught the eyes of the Prix Goncourt jury, but surely a decent book, glad I read it. Come to find out (with an hour or two of post-book web surfing) that I missed some fairly major bits. First of all, each chapter in the first part is not only treating a different character, it is written in a totally different style: noir detective pastiche, hackneyed romance, psychological introspection novel, Africain exoticism, littérature blanche. Sure, I got all the settings and the stories, but the exaggerated stylistic changes went over my head completely. Next, it turns out that the author is a mathematician, linguist, journalist, and since 2019 the president of the International Oulipo Society.
What is Oulipo you ask ? Ah, that could be a blog post all of its own. In brief, a group of intellectuals who liked thinking about pushing the boundaries of creation and expression started meeting regularly in 1960 and subsequently founded a literary / philosophical movement they called L’Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (the Workshop for Potential Literature) or Oulipo for short. Its most famous members have been the writers Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, and Georges Perec. Although some members were authors, their goal wasn’t so much to produce literature as it was to produce new forms that had the potential for yielding interesting literature. It was very meta, and many of the participants had far more interest in the forms than in the actual literature that could come from them.
Getting back to L’anomalie: the author explicitly pitches it as a work of the Oulipo genre, in the tradition of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (I haven’t read it, but there’s a main story involving international book thieves, and then 10 intruding chapters which are the opening chapters of 10 different novels). There’s an obscure final 20 lines of text that are masked versions of some underlying text, with the masking getting more disruptive as the text flows down the page in the form of an hourglass. The last escaping grains of sand spell out «fin» (“End”), while earlier lines have winks to other Oulipo works. And the three major parts of the book are named with lines from poems by founding Oulipian Raymond Queneau (who wrote: “Oulipians: rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”). Needless to say, this was all lost on me, but it helps explain why the Prix Goncourt jury would have been more inclined to take the book seriously: Oulipo has a proud place as an off-beat but home-grown literary genre.
Despite all these hidden oddities, the book is perfectly easy to follow, at least if you are practiced at reading speculative fiction where a situation is revealed little by little. I haven’t read the English translation yet, but I will have no hesitation recommending it to my English-speaking friends. Come to think of it, I think I’ll go out and purchase a copy for that friend who introduced me to Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes …
I’m only about a quarter of the way through reading La Peste by Albert Camus, but I like it very much so far. It’s quite different in style from Les Justes and also from what I remember of L’Étranger (which I last read some 35 years ago). So far it’s got a straightforward narrative style, chronicling the imagined events that follow the return of bubonic plague to Oran (Algeria’s second largest city) in the 1940s. Bubonic plague still exists in the world today, but it is easily treatable with antibiotics if identified early enough. However antibiotics like penicillin were not in widespread civilian used until the mid- to late-1940s, and so far they don’t factor into the story.
La Peste reminds me a bit of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain, though of course Camus got there a couple decades earlier. But where Crichton went for medical techno-babble (which even by the 1980s hadn’t aged very well), Camus focuses on the human reaction to the slow-motion realization that the Black Death has returned. These age very well, I’m afraid, and resonate quite all to accurately with modern human reactions to Covid. I’m also told (though I hadn’t noticed it on my own yet) certain parallels with other calamities that struck the world in the 1940s.
I wrote up some musings on Camus and Covid (700 words) for this week’s French lesson. Here’s the text after some light revisions with my teacher.
Camus, covid, et l’avenir
Je viens de recevoir un email qui annonce les dates du festival d’Avignon 2022, qui a lieu d’habitude les trois dernières semaines de juillet. Je dis «d’habitude», mais en fait les dates précises sont plus aléatoires que prévisibles. Cette année on commence le 7 juillet, mais pendant les derniers dix dernières années le jour J variait du 4 juillet au 7 juillet sans modèle. Quelquefois on commence le jeudi, autres fois le dimanche, le lundi ou le mercredi. Et la date de fin est aussi arbitraire que la date du commencement. Et le festival 2020 a été totalement annulé à cause de la crise sanitaire de Covid-19. J’aurais bien voulu réserver un logement pour le festival il y a trois mois (car les hébergements au centre ville et bon marché sont rares), mais sans savoir les dates c’est trop aléatoire. Maintenant, avec l’arrivée d’omicron, le nouveau variant du virus, c’est encore possible que l’agenda du festival 2022 soit bouleversé. J’oublie quel petit malin a dit «La prévision c’est difficile – surtout quand il s’agit de l’avenir».
Ah, l’avenir, l’avenir. Pour moi, c’est incontournable – au moins, je souhaite accueillir l’avenir dans quelques années, sinon soit lui soit moi serons morts. J’ai passé ma jeunesse à jouer aux échecs, une entreprise ou on reste presque immobile pendant plusieurs heures en ne contemplant que l’avenir, où chaque coup est évalué en fonction des contre-coups possibles. Un peu extrême pour un gamin, j’admets, mais la fascination pourc l’avenir est un trait inné chez tous les humains. Le psychologue Daniel Gilbert écrit dans son livre Et si le bonheur vous tombait dessus : «Ce qui différencie l’homme de tous les autres animaux, c’est qu’il pense à l’avenir.» Pourtant, il y a souvent un manque d’imagination parmi ces penseurs de l’avenir. Mon beau-père, bien muni en adages qu’il estime sages, dit souvent «L’avenir n’est pas simplement une extension du passé». Bien que cela me peine de l’admettre, j’ai peur qu’il ait raison.
La tendance à fouiller le passé pour prévoir est évidente sur la page Wikipédia qui concerne La peste, roman d’Albert Camus qui est paru en 1947. Après les parties typiques pour un tel article (historique du roman, résumé, personnages), on découvre une toute petit note au-dessous du titre Augmentation des ventes en 2020: «En 2020, avec la pandémie de covid-19, le livre connaît un regain d’intérêt, notamment en France et en Italie, en raison de la ressemblance entre ce que le livre raconte et ce que vivent des populations dans de nombreux endroits du monde». Sans doute, l’auteur anonyme de cette page (un Bourbaki moderne) a totalement raison, car il peu probable que j’aurais commencé à lire ce premier chef-d’œuvre de Camus si la pandémie ne s’était jamais passée.
J’ai pris connaissance de La peste pour la première fois cette année après avoir entendu un entretien à la radio avec Marylin Maeso, qui a écrit un livre La fabrique de l’inhumain. Elle revisite La peste et le prend comme un point de départ pour parler des phénomènes sidérants et variés: la guerre, la torture, le terrorisme, etc. Elle constate nos incapacités à les confronter avec l’humanité, et cite les observations de Camus sur le désaccord entre l’échelle humaine et la taille des fléaux:
« Les fléaux, en effet, sont une chose commune, mais on croit difficilement aux fléaux lorsqu’ils vous tombent sur la tête… pestes et guerres trouvent les gens toujours aussi dépourvus. Quand une guerre éclate, les gens disent : «Ça ne durera pas, c’est trop bête. » … Nos concitoyens [étaient] humanistes : ils ne croyaient pas aux fléaux. Le fléau n’est pas à la mesure de l’homme, on se dit donc que le fléau est irréel, c’est un mauvais rêve qui va passer… Ils continuaient de faire des affaires, ils préparaient des voyages… Comment auraient-ils pensé à la peste qui supprime l’avenir … ? »
Albert Camus, La peste
Je trouve ces phrases de Camus, écrites il y a soixante-dix ans, vraiment effrayantes. L’annonce d’Avignon arrive et je me hâte de réserver les billets d’avion, en imaginant que l’achat lui-même pourrait éloigner de la France cette peste contemporaine. Ça ne durera pas, ça fait déjà dix-huit mois. Y en a marre de l’incertitude, je déclare que c’est le Covid qui est annulé pour 2022 et pas le Festival d’Avignon.
«Ce qui différencie l’homme de tous les autres animaux, c’est qu’il pense à l’avenir.» Pas seulement penser à l’avenir, mais défendre l’avenir, insister sur l’existence de l’avenir. Avec mon cerveau de joueur d’échecs, je vois clairement la possibilité de la résurgence de la crise sanitaire. Et je vais attendre quelques mois avant d’acheter les billets pour Avignon. Mais en même temps, je vais identifier les spectacles auxquels j’irai, je vais faire des recherches chaque semaine pour des logements disponibles au centre ville, et je vais informer mon patron de mes dates de vacances en juillet. Je ne suis pas prêt pour que le Covid supprime l’avenir.
I imagine I’ll have more to say once I’ve finished the book. Meanwhile, I spent several hours yesterday planning my trip to Avignon in July. One can hope …
Things I Learned
For the beginning and end of a multi-day event, use la date de commencement and la date de fin. The phrases date initiale and date terminale aren’t strictly wrong, but are clunky.
Speculatif is used for financial dealings or for way-out-there scientific research. For an action taken with a lot of guesswork, the outcome is better described as aléatoire.
Un variant, une variante have subtly different meanings and domains of use. The masculine form is reserved for the context of biology and genetics. The feminine form is for music, art, language, and chess openings. Roughly speaking, une variante corresponds to the English “variation” (“theme and variation”, “Queen’s Indian defense, Nimzowitsch variation”), while un variant corresponds to the English “variant” (“omicron variant”).
Malin can be used as an adjective or a noun. It has a range of meanings along a spectrum from pretty negative (“evil”, “wicked”, or “demonic”) to moderately positive (“smart”, “astute”, “clever”). Ideas like “sly” and “crafty” are in between these two poles. However the phrase « petit malin » is more along the lines of “smart alec”, “wise guy”, or “slick character”.
On passe son temps à faire quelques chose. I would have thought it was en faisant qqch, but that’s not grammatical.
Fascinating: the proper locutions are être fasciné par or avoir la fascination pour. Choosing the right preposition in French is one of my enduring challenges.
Inné means “innate” or “inborn”, and here again choosing the preposition trips me up. In English, a characteristic or ability is innate to a person. But in French, there are multiple possible prepositions following inné. The most common is inné chez qqn, but you can also use inné en qqn, inné dans qqn, or inné à qqn. I haven’t been able to discern if there are rules of when to use which preposition, or if it is purely a stylistic choice.
The prompt asked for 30 lines addressing the question: «Pourquoi selon vous a-t-on besoin de sacrer des personnalités et de les faire entrer au Panthéon?» (“In your opinion, why must we venerate great people and admit them into the Panthéon?”). Here’s my 400-word response:
Version originale
Quand Achilles, le héro grecque, délibérait aller à la guerre de Troi ou rester chez lui, sa mère Thétis lui a dit «Si tu restes ici, tu vivras. Tes enfants t’aimeront et tes petits-fils se souviendront de toi. Mais, tes arrière-petits-fils t’oublieront. Si tu pars pour la guerre, tu mourras. Mais, tu resteras dans la mémoire pour toujours». Pour les Grecques, la mémoire c’est la vie, peut-être la façon de vivre la plus puissante. Et donc Achilles est parti, a gagné sa mesure de la gloire autant qu’une place dans notre connaissance collective pendant deux mille sept cents ans.
L’existence du Panthéon français est une réaction non seulement à la réalité inévitable de notre mortalité individuelle, mais aussi à la crainte que notre société elle-même puisse disparaître. Nous imaginons que nos achèvements et nos valeurs continueront après nos morts, mais comment assurer qu’ils perdureront et ne sont pas au gré de la mode de nos héritiers? Si l’on veut que quelque chose dure, la construisez en pierre! C’est pareil pour une église, un musée, une banque, ou une tombe. Il y a peu de monuments en bois ou en boue qui nous restent d’Antiquité. Mais d’artefacts en pierre, il y en a beaucoup. Donc, on grave les noms des renommés dans les roches de ce bâtiment célèbre.
Version rédigée avec N.M.
Quand Achilles, le héro grecque, délibérait aller à la guerre de Troie ou rester chez lui, sa mère Thétis lui a dit «Si tu restes ici, tu vivras. Tes enfants t’aimeront et tes petits-fils se souviendront de toi. Mais, tes arrière-petits-fils t’oublieront. Si tu pars pour la guerre, tu mourras. Mais, tu resteras dans la mémoire pour toujours». Pour les Grecques, la mémoire c’est la vie, peut-être la façon de vivre la plus puissante. Et donc Achilles est parti, a gagné sa mesure de la gloire autant qu’une place dans notre connaissance collective pendant deux mille sept cents ans.
L’existence du Panthéon français est une réaction non seulement à la réalité inévitable de notre mortalité individuelle, mais aussi à la crainte que notre société elle-même puisse disparaître. Nous imaginons que nos achèvements et nos valeurs continueront après notre mort, mais comment assurer qu’ils perdureront et ne seront pas au gré de la mode de nos héritiers? Si l’on veut que quelque chose dure, construisez-la en pierre! C’est pareil pour une église, un musée, une banque, ou une tombe. Il y a peu de monuments en bois ou en boue qui nous restent de l’Antiquité. Mais d’artefacts en pierre, il y en a beaucoup. Donc, on grave les noms des renommés dans les roches de ce bâtiment célèbre.
Pourtant, la Panthéonisation n’est que pour ceux qui nous suivent en maintes siècles, c’est également pour nous-mêmes aujourd’hui. Nos sélections actuelles définissent notre présent autant que leurs mémoire nous définiront dans l’avenir. On peut évaluer une société par examiner ceux auxquels elle accorde l’argent et la gloire. Admettre Joséphine Baker à ce club exclusif c’est valoriser non seulement son art et sa lutte contre le racisme, mais l’Art et la lutte contre le racisme. Aussi, par extension, la lutte contre le harcèlement sexiste, l’homophobie, et pleins d’autres pestes sociales actuelles. Même si le Panthéon délabre au cours des siècles, même s’il est détruit en quelques années, la choix elle-même est une acte politique qui peut lever des gens privilégiés en affranchissant un peu plus leurs esprits.
Toutefois, on ne doit pas imaginer que sacrer certaines personnalités suffit pour sécuriser une société dans les yeux du futur. Nous pouvons les ériger commes idoles et les vénérer comme les déités, mais si nous ne les honorons pas avec nos actions la société qu’elles représentent va écrouler. Car on doit rappeler les mots de Friedrich Schiller dans Die Jungfrau von Orleans: «Contre la stupidité, les dieux eux-mêmes se battent inutilement».
Pourtant, la Panthéonisation n’est pas ciblée que à ceux qui nous suivrons dans maintes siècles, mais également à nous-mêmes aujourd’hui. Nos sélections actuelles définissent notre présent autant que leurs mémoire nous définiront dans l’avenir. On peut évaluer une société en examinant ceux auxquels elle accorde de l’argent et de la gloire. Admettre Joséphine Baker à ce club exclusif c’est valoriser non seulement son art et sa lutte contre le racisme, mais l’Art et la lutte contre le racisme. Aussi, par extension, la lutte contre le harcèlement sexiste, l’homophobie, et pleins d’autres pestes sociales actuelles. Même si le Panthéon se délabre au cours des siècles, même s’il est détruit dans quelques années, le choix lui-même est un acte politique qui peut remonter le moraldes gens marginalisés en affranchissant un peu plus leurs esprits.
Toutefois, on ne doit pas imaginer que sacrer certaines personnalités suffit pour faire admirer notre société dans les yeux du futur. Nous pouvons les ériger comme idoles et les vénérer comme les déités, mais si nous ne les honorons pas par nos actions la société qu’elles représentent s’écroulera. Car on doit rappeler les mots de Friedrich Schiller dans Die Jungfrau von Orleans: «Contre la stupidité, les dieux eux-mêmes se battent inutilement».
I’ve often heard the advice that it’s a mistake to learn vocabulary words in isolation, either as memorized english translations of French word or as memorized French synonyms of a French word. Better, says the recommendation, to remember a sentence that uses the target word so that you learn it in context. I’ve found this advice hard to implement, as I have difficulty remembering whole sentences, especially for the full range of words I’m trying to learn.
But this technique may be more viable for grammar rules. This morning I was doing an exercice on the words tout, toute, tous, and toutes. One of the examples shown was an excerpt from Césaire de Heisterbach, who chronicled the siege of Béziers (between Narbonne and Montpellier) in 1209. It contains this well known (if often re-attributed) passage:
«Comment distinguer les hérétiques des catholique», se demandait-on lors de la prise de la ville de Béziers où vivaient de nombreux cathares, en 1209.
«Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaîtra les siens», répondit Arnaud Amaury, légat du pape Innocent III.»
“How shall we distinguish the heathens from the catholics?”, they wondered upon capturing the city of Beziers which, in 1209, still housed many Cathars.
“Kill them all, God will know his own,” replied Arnaud Amaury, the representative of Pope Innocent III.
Ah yes, a classic in the annals of tactics. Bloodshed aside, the point of this passage was illustrate that the word tous, when used as a pronoun meaning “everyone, all of them”, comes after an imperative verb, and also after any direct object there may be. Thus «Tuez-les tous» and not «Tous les tuez», «Tuez-tous-les», etc. Moreover, because «tous» is a pronoun here you pronounce the final “s” rather than leaving it silent as you would in «Tous les deux» or «tous les gens» where it is an adjective. That makes this Béziers passage less than ideal as a canonical example. Even if I overcame my qualms about memorizing a passage about killing heathens, there’s no hint to help me remember to pronounce that final “s”.
Fortunately for me, there preamble to the exercise gives a second example that is right up my alley: a Georges Brassens song excerpt!
De Pierre à Paul en passant par Félicien Embrasse-les tous, Embrasse-les tous Dieu reconnaîtra le sien Passe-les tous par tes armes Passe-les tous par tes charmes Jusqu’à ce que l’un deux les bras en croix Tourne de l’oeil dans tes bras
From Peter to Paul, by way of Félicien Kiss them all, kiss them all God will know his own Dazzle them all with your wiles Favor them all with your smiles Til one of them faints in your arms Swept of his feet by your charms
I love the reference that Brassens makes in this song, and I am thankful to the authors of this grammar text for drawing my attention to it. I vaguely knew the “Kill them all and let god sort it out” line, but didn’t know the particular french structure of it, nor did I think of it when I first herd the Brassens song. I thought he was just doing his usual anarchy-and-free-love thing. But it’s a great bit of literary jiu-jitsu to add in his anti-clericalism and turn the Church-inspired slaughter into an endorsement of promiscuity. That said, if you look past the sentimental and nostalgic music, there’s still a bit of misogyny to these American-in-2020 ears
Anyway, from a pedagogical view point I like this example is a better fit for me. It has the advantage that it is a song with music, which makes it easier for me to remember, and also that I can listen to the recording of Brassens singing it and pronouncing the final “s”.
It so happens that I know another Brassens song, even more ribald, which shows the contrasting pronunciation of «tous» when used as an adjective «Tous les gars».
Quand Margot dégrafait son corsage Pour donner la gougoutte à son chat Tous les gars, tous les gars du village Étaient là, lalala la la la Étaient là, lalala la la la
When Margot would unclip her blouse To let her cat nurse from her breasts All the men, all the men of the village Would come hooting and howling Lalala la la la!
If you listen to the whole song, Margot is presented as a simple (but wise?) shepherdess, innocently thinking that the men are there to see a cute kitty-cat that she had adopted when its mother was lost. The men are happy to let her think whatever she like so long as they get their daily peep show. The women of the village are none too happy about it, though, and end up organizing themselves and beating the cat to death. Margot is distraught by this turn of events, takes herself a husband, and from then only shows her charms to him only. Echos of Il était une bergère if you think about it (translation).
And just in case you thought it was only men who sang ribald Brassens songs, here’s a recording of Patachou singing the same song. Recall that Patachou (née Henriette Ragon) is the cabaret nightclub singer who discovered Brassens in 1952, first singing his songs on stage and later getting him up on stage to perform them himself. According to her account, she convinced him to sing because some of his songs were told in the first person by an obviously male character, and presenting audiences with a woman singing them was too much of a stretch.
Finally, I can’t resist including this all-instrumental version of Brave Margot, posted just a few months ago by a classical guitarist
Les charentaises are a particular style of slippers made in La Charente, a department of France some 80 miles north east of Bordeaux. I’ve driven past it, but never gone there. These slippers have been made in La Charente for over 350 years, first by hand and then by machine. They were originally intended for military and rural life, as a comfortable indoor shoe that you could keep on all day long while you donned and doffed your outdoor boots or wooden shoes. A number of charentaises-making factories opened there in the first years of the 20th century, and they started aggressively exporting the slippers globally in the 1950s. At its peak in the 1970s, this French industry was exporting over a million pairs of slippers each year. Together with a beret and a baguette, a pair of charentaises became part of the French caricature.
The global center of shoe manufacturing today is in Asia, as China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia account for 75% of all output. While French production of slippers fell precipitously in the past 50 years, it’s having something of a resurgence, both in La Charente and in Brittany. The French government has been pursuing a “Made in France” industrial initiative for the past few years, and generally has a soft spot for saving culturally iconic production. My French teacher assigned me to watch a documentary about the re-opening of one of the original charentaise factories and write a response about the importance (or not) of preserving industries like this.
Here’s my rather rambling response, after applying corrections suggested by my teacher N.M. In other posts I include both my original draft and the final draft after editing in order to display my errors. But as this post is long enough already, I’m posting only the final draft.
Version rédigé avec N.M.
C’est quoi la forme de la vie? La pomme est ronde, un cristal de sel est cubique, la coquille d’un escargot est spirale. Quelle est la morphologie de la vie? Dans son livre La Maison de joie: Une histoire de la vie et de la mort, l’historienne Jill Lepore constate que de l’Antiquité à la Lumière les peuples de l’Ouest ont imaginé que la vie est comme un cercle. On est né, on reçoit la sagesse et les traditions du passé, on habite dans la maison de son père, on laboure les champs de son grand-père, et on mange les recettes de ses arrières grand-mères. Au cours des années, on grandit, on a des enfants, et on leur apprend à faire comme leurs parents. Finalement on vieillit, on sourit aux petits-enfants, on leur enseigne les comptines patrimoniales, et on meurt conforté par le fait que le cercle recommence.
Pourtant depuis la Lumière, cette notion d’une vie cyclique a été remplacée par la vie linéaire. On utilise la raison pour améliorer les techniques. On progresse. On grimpe vers le sommet, on se hisse à l’échelle. L’arrivée de l’industrialisation et des idées de Darwin au XIXe siècle a accéléré cette réorientation de la conception de la vie. On doit construire, accumuler, foncer plus loin ou plus vite. Regardez les milliardaires de nos jours, messieurs Bezos et Branson, qui se hâtent de se lancer dans l’espace. Ruons-nous vers l’avenir!
Mais faites attention! Parce qu’on ne peut pas être au four et au moulin. En se dépêchant sur la longueur du chemin de progrès, il faut qu’on lâche maintes coutumes du passé. On ne peut pas dire «Rien à jeter» en surchargeant les malles de notre culture actuelle. Nos boulevards sont ou pour les chevaux, ou pour les automobiles, mais pas les deux. Un stationnement au centre ville est ou une écurie ou un parking. Et un travailleur doit choisir un métier, soit fermier, soit ouvrier, soit enseignant, soit avocat. Quel choix fera-t-il?
D’où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?
Ça me rappelle des questions du peintre Paul Gauguin, dont une œuvre est sous-titrée «D’où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?». Parce que la question de «que garder, de quoi se débarrasser» est à son cœur une question d’identité. Pour les circulaires, répondre à ces trois questions est facile. Nous venons d’un chemin déjà arpenté par nos parents; nous sommes des gens qui entournent cette orbite familiale sans aucun souci; nous repasserons les mêmes chemins à nos tours. Mais chez les linéaires, chez les dévots du progrès, les questions d’identité sont plus difficiles. Il faut changer pour s’améliorer, et un changement de mode de vie exige un changement d’identité. Choisir d’abandonner nos pratiques habituelles, de bouleverser nos affaires, c’est choisir de nous laisser mourir un peu pour permettre de faire naître le prochain «nous». Sommes-nous prêts à mourir?
Enfin, au bout de cette route sinueuse, j’arrive au sujet des charentaises. Cette pantoufle particulière est née il y a trois cent cinquante ans. En 1907, Théophile Rondinaud (parmi les autres) à lancé une usine à Rivière en Charente. Dès les années 1950, son fils James Rondinaud exportait ce produit dans le monde entier. Pendant les années 1970, l’usine Rondinaud employait 1300 travailleurs. La Charente était renommée pour ces jolies pantoufles douces. Mais cinquante ans plus tard, c’est la faillite. Les fabricants asiatiques ont surpassé ceux de la Charente, les chiffres d’affaires ont chuté. Même avec une consolidation de quatre fabricants sous le nom «la Manufacture Charentaise» (LMC), et avec la protection inédite du titre d’Indication géographique «charentaise de Charente-Périgord», cette société a dû mettre la clé sous la porte en 2019.
Est-ce qu’il faut être en deuil pour cette industrie française? Il y a deux ans qu’Emmanuel Macron a annoncé son initiative de relocaliser certaines chaînes de valeur pour les produits critiques. La crise sanitaire du Covid-19 a démontré la sagesse de fabriquer les molécules pharmaceutiques intra-pays. Une usine pour faire les semi-conducteurs en France c’est stratégique pour ne pas être dépendant de la Chine pour nos ordinateurs et nos portables incontournables. Mais les pantoufles? Forcément un manque imprévu de chausseurs duveteux ne serait pas une crise nationale. Les orteils patriotiques de la France survivraient.
Ici ce n’est pas une question de nécessité mais d’identité. Si un membre de la famille Rondinaud, comme l’arrière petit-fils Olivier Rondinaud, veut continuer l’entreprise, qu’il y aille. Mais si la rentabilité est insuffisante, on doit poser la question: d’où viendra la subvention? À mon avis, ceux qui s’identifient aux charentaises doivent subventionner eux-mêmes leur fabrication en France. Si c’est Olivier Rondinaud seul, je souhaite qu’il ait une grande fortune personnelle. Si ce sont les travailleurs de l’usine, peut-être qu’ils voudront travailler à des salaires réduits. Enfin, si les habitants du département ou du pays s’identifient profondément avec les charentaises, une subvention nationale serait dans ce cas-là la plus correcte. Pas de problème pour moi.
Mais il se trouvera, peut-être, que les consommateurs de la France préfèrent acheter les pantoufles bon marché, que les contribuables préfèrent renouveler les autoroutes, et que Mais peut-être qu’il se trouve que les consommateurs français préfèreraient acheter des pantoufles bon marché, que les contribuables préféreraient renouveler les autoroutes, et que les électeurs préféreraient revaloriser les salaires des soignants. Évidemment, il y a des limites budgétaires. Donc, qui sont les Français? Un peuple qui donne priorité à ses pieds? Ou un peuple en marche vers l’avenir sur des chemins modernes, avec des soignants correctement payés, mais avec les pieds à la chinoise?
Much has been made of October 2021 as the 100th anniversary of the birth of one famous French Georges, the singer Brassens. But June 2021 was also the 100th anniversary of the death of another famous French Georges, the playwright Georges Feydeau. Feydeau is widely considered the master of French vaudeville, a theater genre we could call “farce” in English (note that this is different from the American “vaudeville show”, which is more a mix of variety acts and short slapstick sketches).
French vaudeville is full of licentious gentlemen, sexually harassed servants, unfaithful wives, and cuckold husbands. There are secret lovers stuffed in closets, hidden under beds or tucked behind drapes. The dialog is witty, double entendres abound, and mistaken meanings («quiproquos») lead to comedy gold. Most of all there is non-stop motion, a frenzy of perfectly timed entrances and exits («portes qui claquent»). The canonical line from a Feydeau vaudeville show is «Ciel, mon mari!», declared by an adulterous woman who has just discovered her husband is about enter the scene where she is entertaining a lover. English language works like “Charlie’s Aunt” or “Noises Off” are direct cultural descendants of vaudeville as elaborated by Feydeau. And of course Feydeau’s work owes much to Molière’s comedy and to commedia dell arte before that.
This framed poster from 1896 hangs in the Théâtre du Palais-Royale, where I photographed it in 2018.
Feydeau enjoyed great success in the Paris theaters for over 30 years. He started writing plays in 1882, debuting his first smash hit Tailleur pour dames in 1886. He continued delivering money-makers for decades, titles like Monsieur chasse!, Champignol malgré lui, Le Dindon, La Puce à l’oreille and Je ne trompe pas mon mari! Feydeau had penned over 40 plays when his final play, Hortense a dit : « Je m’en fous ! », was produced in 1916. Sometime afterward he contracted syphilis. Feydeau spent the last two years of his life in a sanatorium in Rueil-Malmaison, a suburban community west of Paris, where he routinely experienced megalomania, paranoia, and hallucinations according to reports. He was just 58 years old when he died in 1921.
It is this final period of Feydeau’s life that modern authors Thierry Barbeau and Pierre Berriau have taken as their focus for their play Feydeau, Chambre 21. We follow the ailing and addled Feydeau through his delirium and hallucinations as his experience of life plays out in a fantasia of clever banter and hat tips to his greatest works. All of this is superimposed on early 20th century mental hospital treatments, with a healthy dose of fourth-wall breaking to boot. In addition to airing the story of his sad demise, the play is an homage to Feydeau’s style of vaudeville with super witty dialogue and carefully choreographed traffic patterns.
Many actors explicitly play two characters, a common device which the audience is ready to accept until Feydeau-the-character sees through it and calls it out. The other characters have no idea what Feydeau is talking about and treat this as another symptom of his madness. Feydeau nonetheless coaches them on how to be a better character in a Feydeau play, e.g. teaching them to use theatrical asides properly. Some characters are delighted that they can say whatever they like, safe in the knowledge that they won’t be heard, while others protest that they can hear the offending remarks loud and clear.
Here’s an example of the sort of self-awareness that suffuses the whole script:
Scène 5
Feydeau et Adélaïde (fille de Fouquart) sous les draps d'un lit. Des ébats amoureux.
Fouquart entre en trombe dans la chambre.
FOUQUART: Ma femme, Gabrielle, elle a disparu!
FEYDEAU: Quoi? Mais qu'est-ce ...
FOUQUART: Où est ma femme, Feydeau? Elle est là, n'est-ce pas?
FEYDEAU: Mais je ne sais pas.
FOUQUART: Mais si, elle est là, je la sens. (Montrant furieusement le lit dans lequel se trouve Adélaïde.) Ce lit! Il y a quelqu'un à l'intérieur.
FEYDEAU: Mais non, il n'y a personne.
FOUQUART: Enfin, Feydeau, vous n'allez pas voir vos pièces? Quand quelqu'un dit qu'il n'y a personne dans le lit, c'est qu'il y a quelqu'un.
FEYDEAU: Mais je vous assure que non. C'est un lit vide.
FOUQUART: Un lit vide? Depuis quand y a-t-il des lit vides dans les vaudevilles, ils ne sont jamais vides, croyez-moi, il y a toujours quelqu'un dedans. Et je vais vous le prouver.
FEYDEAU: Mais je vous interdis! Pour qui vous prenez-vous, Fouquart?
FOUQUART: Pour le cocu, monsieur, le cocu. Vous savez très bien ce que c'est un cocu, Feydeau, non? Il faut toujours un cocu dans l'histoire et aujourd'hui, le cocu, c'est moi. (En direction du lit.) Gabrielle, c'est toi mon bébé?
FEYDEAU: (s'interposant) Je suis chez moi! C'est ma chambre, c'est mon lit.
FOUQUART: Alors mon ami, d'un, le cocu est cocu mais il a des droits que les autres n'ont pas. Et de deux, (désignant le lit) je vous affirme qu'il ya quelqu'un ici.
FEYDEAU: Mais non, je vous dis «personne».
FOUQUART: Il y a quelqu'un. (Il va au lit, soulève les draps, il n'y a personne. La comédienne est passée par une trappe.) Ah non, personne.
FEYDEAU: Ah bon?
FOUQUART: J'aurais pourtant juré que ...
Scene 5
Feydeau and Adélaïde (Fouquart's daughter) are under the sheets of a bed, making love.Fouquart bursts into the room.FOUQUART: My wife, Gabrielle, she's disappeared!
FEYDEAU: What? But what ...FOUQUART: Where is my wife, Feydeau? She's there, isn't she?
FEYDEAU: Well, I don't know. FOUQUART: Oh yes, she's in there, I smell her. (Gesticulating furiously at the bed where Adélaïde is.) This bed! There's someone inside.
FEYDEAU: No, really, there's nobody.FOUQUART: Come on, Feydeau, don't you go to your own plays? When somebody says there's no one in the bed, there's someone in the bed.
FEYDEAU: But I swear to you, there's no one. It's an empty bed.FOUQUART: An empty bed? Since when are there empty beds in vaudeville? They are never empty, believe me, there's always somebody inside. And I'm going to prove it.
FEYDEAU: Wait, I forbid it! Just who do you think you are, Fouquart?FOUQUART: I'm the cheated husband, sir, the cuckold. You know full well what a "cuckold" is, don't you Feydeau? There's always got to be a cuckold in the story and today, that's me. "Mr. Cuckold." (Turning to the bed) Gabrielle, is that you baby?
FEYDEAU:(jumping between them) But we're at my place! This is my bedroom, that's my bed.FOUQUART: Well my friend, in the first place, Mr. Cuckold may be cuckold but he gets some rights that nobody else has. And in the second, (pointing at the bed) I'm telling you there's someone in there.
FEYDEAU: And I'm telling you "no one".FOUQUART: There is somebody! (He goes to the bed, lifts up the sheets, but it is empty. The actress has exited via trap door). Huh, nobody.
FEYDEAU: Oh, really?FOUQUART: But I could have sworn ...
Broad humor, no doubt.
A set design for Le Dindon, Act II, 1896.
One noteworthy element of the play, possibly standard in Feydeau’s vaudeville, is the foreigner who speaks French with a ridiculous accent (now that I’ve written that, the play “The Foreigner” comes to mind – another show that owes a debt to Feydeau). In this show it’s Le Général-Docteur Azacassasse, a medical quack from Latin America. This bit is far harder to translate, as the phonetic word play doesn’t work outside of French, but the joke is that Azacassasse says «sisse» when he wishes to say «si», which to him is an all purpose “yes”. But the word «sisse» also sounds like «six» (the number 6), while the word «aussi» (meaning “also”) becomes «aussisse», and the phrase “6 also” («six aussi») becomes «sisse aussisse» in the mangled accent, which with elision sounds like «six saucisses» = “six sausages”.
I’ve tried to translate it on the right, taking liberties to preserve some semblance of the wordplay, but it doesn’t really capture the naturalness of the original.
FEYDEAU: Quoi, quoi, «lé ké vou losse»? Ici, il faut parler français.
AZACASSASSE: Ah, sisse?
FEYDEAU: Mais parfaitement. En France, on parle français. Sinon, on ne comprend rien du tout. Vous, c'est quoi votre langue?
AZACASSASSE: L'ouroulouguaille.
FEYDEAU: Ah! bon! eh bien, voilà, chacun sa langue chez soi.
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, ma bien sisse!
FEYDEAU: Ceci dit, je ne suis même pas certain que vous compreniez tout ce que vous êtes en train de dire.
AZACASSASSE: Euh... Nosse, pa to.
FEYDEAU: Ah! vous voyez!
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, y'avousse.
FEYDEAU: Le plus étrange, tout de même, c'est que vous compreniez parfaitement le français que je vous parle.
AZACASSASSE: Ah, ma tresse bienne, tresse bienne.
FEYDEAU: Il y a quand même un petit problème, non?
AZACASSASSE: Ah, sisse, problème?
FEYDEAU: No, pas six problèmes, on vous dit qu'il y a un petit problème, un seul.
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, yé dis sisse.
FEYDEAU: Oui, mais nous, on dit «un».
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, oune.
FEYDEAU: (comprenant) Ah! «sisse» ça veut dire «un» pour vous.
AZACASSASSE: Nosse, sisse é sisse.
FEYDEAU: Quoi, «sisse et sisse», six et six, douze.
FOUQUART: Bon, Feydeau, le général-docteur n'est pas là pour faire des additions.
FEYDEAU: (comprenant) Ah! «sisse», ça veut dire «oui».
AZACASSASSE: Sisse!
FEYDEAU: Mais comment dites-vous «six» alors? Le nombre six?
AZACASSASSE: Euh... Sisse aussisse.
FEYDEAU: Ah, vous dites «six saucisses»?
AZACASSASSE: Sisse. Sisse aussisse.
FEYDEAU: Comment voulez-vous qu'on s'y retrouve si vous dites aussi «sisse aussisse»
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, cé pas no kaille.
FEYDEAU: Ah, c'est le moins qu'on puisse dire, c'est «pas no cailles» du tout.
GABRIELLE: Pour être honnête, c'est vrai qu'on ne comprend pas tout.
FEYDEAU: What's with, «lé ké vou losse»? You must speak french here.
AZACASSASSE: Ah, sisse?
FEYDEAU: Why of course. In France, you speak French. Otherwise, no one will understand you at all. Say, what's your language?
AZACASSASSE: Ouroulouguaille.
FEYDEAU: Ah! Good! Well, there you are, when we're in your country, we can speak that.
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, berry good, sisse!
FEYDEAU: You know, I'm not really sure you understand all the things you're saying.
AZACASSASSE: Euh... Nosse, not all.
FEYDEAU: Ah! there, you see!
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, I sees.
FEYDEAU: The weirdest thing, though, is that you understand perfectly when I speak to you in French.
AZACASSASSE: Ah, me berry well, berry well.
FEYDEAU: But we still have a small problem, right?
AZACASSASSE: Ah, sisse, problem?
FEYDEAU: No, not six problems. I said that there's a small problem, just one.
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, I's says sisse.
FEYDEAU: Right, but we, we say "one".
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, woon.
FEYDEAU: (understanding) Ah! «sisse» for you means "one" for us.
AZACASSASSE: Nosse, sisse eez sisse.
FEYDEAU: What, «sisse eez sisse», six and six is twelve.
FOUQUART: Look, Feydeau, the Doctor General is not here to do arithmetic.
FEYDEAU: (comprehension dawning) Ah! «sisse», that means "yes".
AZACASSASSE: Sisse!
FEYDEAU: But how do you say «six» then? The number six?
AZACASSASSE: Euh... Sisse too.
FEYDEAU: Ah, you say «six two»?
AZACASSASSE: Sisse. Sisse oh sisse.
FEYDEAU: What's a guy supposed to do if he has to say «cease see-sawing at seez oh seez"?
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, tha's nosse eezy.
FEYDEAU: You can say that again. Not easy-peasy in the least.
GABRIELLE: To tell you the truth, even I don't understand what he's saying.
In the end, I’m not a big fan of this play. It has some hilarious, laugh-out-loud scenes, but the concept is not executed all that well. It mostly feels like someone wanted to show off how well they can write Feydeau-style farces, and was taken with the idea of what a manic, drugged out Feydeau must have been like. But I had a hard time getting past the bit about syphilis being a horrible way to die, and how being that disoriented would probably feel pretty scary. I expect it works better as a live spectacle than as a written text to be read. But I’m quite sure that in a live performance with lines delivered at full speed I would have been totally lost.
Feydeau, Chambre 21 was created for the 2021-2022 theater season. Rehearsal photos were taken at Théâtre de la Tour Eiffel, but I’m not sure they have a Paris production nailed down yet. The show poster is for some sort of filmed version maybe? Or a staged version in Nantes? I’m not clear. Either way, I think I’ll content myself with having read the script and move on.
Someone recommended to me the RTL radio show L’Heure de crime, hosted by Jean-Alphonse Richard and available as a podcast. It airs four times per week and each hour-long episode explores some aspect of French crime, prosecution, or justice. I listened to one named L’étrange mort de Marie-France Pisier and learned about the unsavory death of a famous French actor in 2011 and a political pedophilia scandal that followed in 2021.
Marie-France Pisier
Olivier Duhamel
Camille Kouchner
Bernard Kouchner
Thierry Funck-Brentano
Évelyne Pisier-Kouchner
One morning in 2011, the wealthy Mme Pisier was found floating in the middle of her own swimming pool, fully clothed, and with her head lodged between the bars of an iron pool chair. A lengthy investigation proved inconclusive, with suicide, mild drug overdose, and murder all being possible explanations. Autopsy couldn’t even determine if she had drowned or was placed in the water after death. The case was filed away as unresolved and that was that.
Ten years later, her niece Camille Kouchner published dark family secrets in a book La Familia grande that effectively ended the career of Olivier Duhamel (European deputy, political scientist, public intellectual, powerbroker). Duhamel was the second husband of Évelyne Pisier-Kouchner, and was accused of sexual abuse towards multiple adolescents including his step son Antoine (a.k.a. «Victor») Kouchner (Camille’s twin). Marie-France Pisier learned of the abuse before her death and apparently threatened to go public with it if her sister wouldn’t. The non-public already knew of this behavior though: Duhamel’s entourage was aware of it for years and Duhamel himself confessed to his behavior shortly after the book’s publication. He suffered no criminal penalties, though, as Antoine refused to cooperate in filing charges in 2011 or before, and the statute of limitations had run out by 2021.
Meanwhile, the whole family is full of French luminaries. Évelyne’s first husband (and father of one of the abused minors) was Bernard Kouchner (former French foreign minister, minster of health, etc.), while Marie-France Pisier’s husband at the time of her death was Thierry Funck-Brentano, CEO of the 4 billion euro publishing group Lagardère (parent company of Hachette). Given all the wealth and power involved, the never proven suspicion is that foul play caused the death of Marie-France Pisier. Regardless, the accusations, the downfall of Duhamel and the nature of his acknowledged crimes was a major news item for several days this year.
Not a great podcast, but now I know about this important episode in modern French culture.
