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.
On my last day of lessons with Virignie we focused on connecting words, les mots de liaison. We studied two texts: an excerpt from the book «Sauvons les garcons» by Jean-Louis Auduc, and an imagined product launch presentation for a fictional sports car. These gave us a chance to see in action expressions that sequence an argument (like d’abord, ensuite, enfin); that juxtapose ideas while asserting a particular relationship between them (d’une part/d’autre part, tant … que); or that qualify or amplify a statement (hormis, mis à part, notamment, à savoir). Finally, we identified some expressions that are rampant in oral argument but sound too familiar when written down (de coup, bref). Good stuff all, well worth my future study.
Separate from this grammar session, we did the usual editing of my latest written output (the promised book review of La Disparition de Stephanie Mailer by Joël Dicker). I wrote the original version in an hour and a half or so, though I had little more than two paragraphs to show for it. Still, this was plenty to drive a good editing / re-writing session. My favorite bit from this was Virginie’s observation that «… des portraits à peine esquissés, vite oubliés.» felt too sudden, too brusque. The simple insertion of a single word suffices to repair this: «… des portraits à peine esquissés et vite oubliés.». “That way the two phrases each have five syllables,” she says (in French). “It swings better: «à peine esquissés (gestures left) et vite oubliés (gestures right)»”. Good writer, that Virginie.
Here’s the full text, before and after.
Version originale
Le quatrième roman de Joël Dicker, lauréat du Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française, a paru en 2018, six ans après son chef d’oeuvre La Verité sur l’Affair Harry Quebert. Comme celui-ci, La Disparition de Stephanie Mailer (Éditions de Fallois) est un roman policier situé aux États-Unis. Comme en Harry Quebert, l’intrigue est compliqué, voire rococo. Encore une fois une femme qui a disparu et le meurtre multiple commis il y a longtemps. Et comme d’habitude, Dicker nous raconte son histoire dans une manière hachée, sautant parmis les années 1990s, 2000s, et 2010s presque aléatoire. Mes ces ingrédients familiers, qu’il a mélangés avec légèrté dans Harry Quebert, sont badigeonnés en couches épaises avec une main lourde et étourdie. Le resultat est un échec littéraire même s’il était une réussite commerciale.
Le roman n’a pas un personnage principal mais plutôt une distribution d’ensemble. Mais c’est un véritable ménagerié (défilé? tribu?) avec plus de trente personnages récurrents, dont une liste apparait à la fin de l’ouvrage. (Peut-être si j’avais su dès que j’ai entamé ce pavé de 800 pages que ce recensement éxistait, je aurais mieux suivi tous les virages en épingle.) Au-delà de la quantité de personnages, leurs caractérisations sont fade. Il nous donne des gens à peine esquisés, dont mes souvenirs flanchent déja.
Pire que son aménagement des personnage c’est rhytme avec lequel il raconte les évenements. …
Version corrigée
Le quatrième roman de Joël Dicker, lauréat du Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française, a été publié en 2018, six ans après la parution de son chef-d’œuvre La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert. Comme celui-ci, La Disparition de Stephanie Mailer (Éditions de Fallois) est un roman policier situé aux États-Unis. Comme pour Harry Quebert, l’intrigue est compliquée, voire baroque. Encore une fois une femme disparue et un multiple meurtre commis il y a longtemps. Et comme d’habitude, Dicker nous raconte son histoire d’une manière hachée, en sautant des années 1990, aux années 2000 et 2010 presque aléatoirement. Mais ces ingrédients familiers, qu’il a mélangés avec légèreté dans Harry Quebert, sont badigeonnés en couches épaisses d’une main lourde et étourdie. Le résultat est un échec littéraire même s’il a été une réussite commerciale.
Le roman n’a pas un seul personnage principal mais plutôt une distribution d’ensemble. Mais c’est un véritable défilé avec plus de trente personnages récurrents, dont une liste apparaît à la fin de l’ouvrage. (Peut-être si je n’avais pas appris l’existence de ce recensement qu’après avoir terminé ce pavé de 800 pages, j’aurais mieux suivi tous les virages en épingle.) Au-delà de la quantité de personnages, leur caractérisation est fade. L’auteur nous présente des portraits à peine esquissés et vite oubliés.
Pire que la construction de ses personnages, c’est le rythme avec lequel il raconte les événements qui/que …
As I mentioned, I didn’t get around to writing about the themes or the plot. But I did get the opportunity to learn from Virginie a very important word in the world of reviewing: «divulgâcher». The word means “to spoil”, as in “to reveal spoilers”. It comes from combining divulguer (to reveal) with gâcher (to ruin). «Divulgâcher» officially entered the language (with the caveat “Québecois”) in 2020, when it was one of 150 words newly added to the prestigious dictionnaire LaRousse. I haven’t been able to verify if it has a noun form, though, so I guess “No spoilers!” must be «Ne divulgâche pas!»
On Day Four of my lessons with Virginie, we stuck with the theme of writing reviews but moved from film to literature (I cheated last time and reviewed a play). We began by reading a review of Dominique Godineau’s «Citoyennes tricoteuses – Les femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française», a non-fiction historical work written in 1988 for a popular audience. We talked about expressing a positive or negative attitude towards something through the connotations of the words one chooses rather than through an overt statement of opinion. Then we identified instances of this technique in the sample text. That lead naturally to some vocabulary study of words and expressions, some familiar to me and some not.
Our grammar lessons for the day covered three subjects: nominalisation, le futur historique (Hari Seldon would be proud!), and the solitary ne. I knew by ear almost all of the adjective-to-noun transformations we reviewed, but hadn’t thought to put them in suffix groups, or that the suffix determined the gender of the resulting noun. As for the solitary ne, the goal of the lesson was for me to understand it when I encounter it, which I already mostly do. It’s good that the goal was not for me to use this technique correctly, because I’m only mostly confident that I would get it right.
Lastly, my turn to write a book review. I thought of choosing one of the Simeon novels I’ve read this summer but opted instead for one of my favorite contemporary French books, La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert. I’ve mentioned it on this blog in passing, but never wrote about it at any length. Now is the time to correct that!
As always, in the columns below my original draft is on the left, and the result after jointly editing it with Virginie is on the right. One oddity, though: I wrote most of the first paragraph this evening, two days after the editing session. In the original I wrote down a few bullet points for the introduction because I wanted to get to the meat of the subject. I meant to come back and flesh them out before the editing session, but ran out of time. For consistency I’ve pasted this new text into both columns, with the result that most of the first paragraph is the same on the left and right because only the final sentence existed at the time of correction. Any glaring faults are entirely my own, not a reflection on Virginie.
Version Originale
On dit souvent que c’est la vie que l’art imite. Joël Dicker, écrivain Suisse, avait 27 ans seulement quand se second roma est paru. La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert était une réussite internationale qui lui a valu le Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française en 2012. Depuis, il a été traduit en 40 langues et a été adapté en série télévisée américaine. De quoi s’agit-il? Par une coincidence presque préconnaisante, il s’aborde les difficultés d’un jeune auteur phare qui s’inquietait d’écrire son second roman, qui deviendront finalement un grand succès. La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert est à la fois un polar non-traditionel, innové, mais également une memoire (peut-être autobiographiqe) sur la formation d’un écrivain, et aussi une réflection sur la peur perpetuel de la gloire inachevé.
Située aux Etats-Unis, l’histore déroule dans trois époque, voire quatre, qui se présent tout au début de roman. Dès la première page, il y a une transcription d’une appelle d’urgence qui date de 1975. Dans la petite ville d’Aurora, dans le New Hampshire, une femme alerte la police qu’elle a vu une jeune fille adolescènte courir à travers le fôret à côté de chez elle, avec un homme en pursuit. Après la transcription, la texte nous announce que la jeune fille s’appellait Nola Kellergan, et que depuis ce jour-là elle est disparu sans trace.
Deuxième vignette, nous sommes en octrobre 2008. Le narrateur se présent à nous comme Marcus Goldman, âge 29, l’écrivain le plus célèbre des États-Unis grâce à son dernier livre l’Affaire Harry Quebert. Il s’agit de la disparition de cette jeune fille il y a 33 ans, qui est pour la première fois, maintenant en 2008, à la une de touts les journaux. Il propose de nous raconter la chaîne des événements qui a donné naissance à ce bouquin que tout le monde s’arrache.
Troisième scène, très courte, c’est une dialogue entre M. Goldman, universitairien maintenant, et son professeur d’écriture Harry Quebert. Il enseigne que le premier chapitre d’un roman et le plus important, parce qu’il piège le lecteur en l’obligeant de suivre l’histoire juste au bout.
Et quatrième, nous faisons un pas de recul (ou peut-être en avance? On est un peut déboussolé après trois rebondissement saccadé) au début de 2008. M. Goldman nous raconte un longue reportage de ses difficultés créatives. Après avoir écrit son premier roman, paru en 2006 avec grand éclat, il souffre d’une crise page blanche. La manque d’un deuxième manuscrit tracasse son agent littéraire et son maison de rédaction, qui lui traque sans cesse. Éyant désespéré, il demande à son ancien professeur Harry Quebert de séjourer chez lui dans le New Hampshire pendant l’été.
Comme ça continue le reste du roman, entremêlant les scènes de la ville d’Aurora en 1975, de la jeunesse de M. Goldman de 1994 à 1998, et de l’été de 2008 à Aurora encore. Évidement Harry Quebert, un trentenaire à l’époque, avait une relation défendu mais discrète avec la jeune fille Nola Kerrigan. Après sa disparition il était dans le petrin, mais a été exoneré grâce à une manque de preuve de n’importe quel délit. Et prévisiblement, l’affaire se réouvre pendant l’été de 2008, qui pousse M. Goldman à fouiller cet épisode sordide et tragique au lieu d’entamer son manuscrit déja en délai. Mais ce qu’il trouve, la vérité sur cette affair, et loin de ce qu’on pourrait jamais imaginer, et en même temps si cohérent qu’il apparait finalement avec une clarité éblouissant.
Point final: c’est la vie que l’art imite. Après ce roman incontournable, le dernier roman de Joël Dicker, La Disparition de Stephanie Mailer est un déchet total.
Version Corrigée
On dit souvent que c’est la vie que l’art imite. Joël Dicker, écrivain Suisse, avait seulement 27 ans quand son second roman a paru. La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert était une réussite internationale qui lui a valu le Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française en 2012. Depuis, il a été traduit en 40 langues et a été adapté en série télévisée américaine. De quoi s’agit-il? Par une coïncidence presque préconnaisante, il aborde les difficultés d’un jeune auteur phare qui s’inquiétait d’écrire son second roman, qui deviendront finalement un grand succès. La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert est un polar non conventionnel mais également un mémoire sur la formation d’un écrivain, ainsi qu’une réflexion sur la peur inapprivoisable de la gloire éphémère.
Située aux Etats-Unis, l’histoire se déroule sur trois époques, voire quatre, qui sont présentées tout au début du roman. Dès la première page, il y a la transcription d’un appel d’urgence qui date de 1975. Dans la petite ville d’Aurora, dans le New Hampshire, une femme alerte la police qu’elle a vu une jeune adolescènte poursuivie par un homme courir à travers la fôret à côté de chez elle. Au dessous de la transcription, le texte nous apprend que la jeune fille s’appelait Nola Kellergan, et que depuis ce jour-là elle a disparu sans laisser de traces.
Deuxième vignette, nous sommes en octobre 2008. Le narrateur se présente à nous comme Marcus Goldman, âgé de 29 ans, l’écrivain le plus célèbre des États-Unis grâce à son dernier livre l’Affaire Harry Quebert (N.B.: pas de la Vérité ici). Il s’agit de la disparition de cette jeune fille qui est pour la première fois à la une de tous les journaux 33 ans après les faits. Il propose de nous raconter la chaîne d’événements qui a donné naissance à ce bouquin que tout le monde s’arrache.
Troisième scène, très courte, c’est un dialogue entre Goldman, à l’époque étudiant à l’université, et son professeur d’écriture Harry Quebert. Celui-ci enseigne que le premier chapitre d’un roman est le plus important, parce qu’il entraîne le lecteur et l’oblige à suivre l’histoire jusqu’au bout.
Et enfin, nous faisons un pas de recul (ou peut-être en avant? On est un peu déboussolé après trois rebondissements saccadés) au début de 2008. Goldman nous raconte un long reportage de ses difficultés créatives. Dix-huit mois après la parution de son premier roman, un grand succès, il a souffert d’une crise de la page blanche. L’absence d’un deuxième manuscrit commence à tracasser son agent littéraire et sa maison d’édition, qui le harcèlent sans cesse. En désespoir de cause, il demande à son ancien professeur Harry Quebert de séjourner chez lui dans le New Hampshire pendant quelques mois.
Le reste du roman continue comme ça, entremêlant les scènes de la ville d’Aurora en 1975, de la jeunesse de M. Goldman de 1990 à 1998, et de l’été de 2008 à Aurora encore. Il se trouve qu’Harry Quebert, trentenaire en 1975, entretenait une relation cachée avec la jeune mineure Nola Kerrigan. Après sa disparition, celui-ci avait été soupçonné, mais les poursuites contre lui ont été abandonnées par manque de preuves. De manière très prévisible, l’affaire se rouvre pendant l’été 2008, ce qui pousse Goldman à fouiller cet épisode sordide et tragique au lieu d’entamer son manuscrit déjà hors délai. Mais ce qu’il trouve, la vérité sur cette affaire, est à la fois loin de ce qu’on pourrait jamais imaginer, et tellement cohérent qu’elle apparaît finalement avec une clarté éblouissante.
The observant reader may not that the last paragraph from the original version was deleted entirely in editing. Fear not! Virginie wanted me to get practice writing negative reviews as well as positive, so she turned my criticism of Dicker’s fourth book into a homework assignment. In my next post you can read my incomplete efforts to pan that novel.
Fun parting thought: my brain continues to switch back and forth between English and French. As I wrote “efforts to pan that novel”, my Gaulic brain shouted «carboniser!»
This is the second (and last) batch of unfamiliar vocabulary words I culled from George Simenon’s 1931 novel La Tête d’un Homme. These words appear in chapters 6- 12. In past vocabulary list posts I included only words and expressions I couldn’t recall even in context. In this list, I’ve included any word I didn’t think I would recognize and know the meaning of if I saw it in complete isolation. So the list is longer than usual.
un machin is a funny, slang word, quite common in modern speech and print. I somehow hadn’t registered encountering it before now. It is a close synonym of the words truc and bidule. The word means a non-specific object, akin to the English “thingy”, “thing-a-ma-bob”, or “what-cha-ma-call-it”. You use it when you don’t know or have forgotten the name for something, or when you refer to a large collection of disparate things. It is also used to refer to a person in a pejorative and dismissive fashion, like “what’s his name” or “somebody or other.” You don’t know the person’s name, but it’s really of no interest or importance. Simenon uses it in a police officer’s description of a run down hotel: «L’auberge est rien de luxueux… un machin pour les rouliers» (“the hotel is nothing fancy… a hole in the wall for truckers.” Note that the word machin should not be confused with une machine, which is more or less exactly the English “machine”: a reputable mechanical object used for sewing, cleaning, manufacture, construction, etc.
taches de son are freckles. They are also called taches de rousseur or simply rousseurs. It took me a good 15 minutes of sleuthing to figure out why this expression aligned with its meaning. It turns out that son has multiple meanings: a third-person singular possessive pronoun; a sound that you hear; and … part of the outer envelope of a wheat kernel, what we call “bran” in english. Turns out this is a readily available product. Moreover, the processes of milling wheat into flour includes an intermediate product before final filtering where you have mostly flour, but with some specks of bran still mixed in. It appears mostly white, with some darker spots of bran. Thus, taches de son.
une rafale is a gust of wind, strong and sudden. Not to be confused with la rafle, which is the stem to which grapes attach. I learned that word during a winery tour in France. Curiously, neither of these seems to be most frequent meaning present in search results for these words. La rafale is also the name of a French fighter jet, while une rafle means a police round-up notably of Jews in World War II (the subject of a 2010 film) and of Algerians during their 1958-62 war for independence.
Une rafle et La Rafle
Une rafale
La Rafale
un haut-le-coeur is a shudder, typically of nausea or disgust. Also what one might experience after gulping strong spirits.
un cabotin is a ham actor, and le cabotinage means “histrionics”. The word comes from M. Cabotin, a charismatic 17th century French actor and charlatan promoter of miracle cures. The word is undoubtedly negative, though was perhaps rehabilitated somewhat by French singer Charles Aznavour in his song Le Cabotin.
Polichinelle marionnette from late 1800s.
Polichinelle is the French name of a character from the Italian commedia dell’arte theater tradition. It is Pulcinella in Italian. The character migrated to the marionnette and puppet theater, and into the English language as Punch (as in a “Punch and Judy show”). In modern French, the word un polichinelle can mean not only the character himself or a marionnette or doll in that form, but also an easily swayed, foolish person. However by far the most frequent use of the word is in the expression un secret de polichinelle, meaning “an open secret”: that which everyone knows but no one is supposed to speak of.
Common words, uncommon meanings
un cachet is a word with multiple meanings. It can be a stamp or a seal placed upon a document. That’s how Simenon uses it here («les pages [de son passeport] étaient couvertes de cachets et de visas»). But it can also mean stylistic originality (which is the meaning of the appropriated word in English). And the first meaning I learned for this word in school was “pill” or “tablet”. All of these derive from the common sense of “to stamp” or “to press”– pills are powder pressed into a form, seals are embossed marks pressed into a document. But there’s one more meaning which I don’t understand. Un cachet can mean a fee for a private lesson, or an appearance fee for a public performer or speaker. Not sure how that ties in with the other meanings.
un timbre has two meanings: the quality of a sound (or the sound itself); or, a stamp applied to a paper to certify a payment (postage stamp, tax receipt, etc.) After using un cachet for a passport stamp, Simenon uses timbre for the sound of a bell.
un pignon is both a pine tree and a small toothed gear in a mechanism (think “rack and pinion steering”). I’m not sure which meaning is more common, but Simenon used it in the tree sense here («un ruban de Seine aperçu entre deux pignons»).
Une bergère (sans Louis)
une bergère is a shepherdess, but was also the name of a popular style of low, spacious arm chair starting in 1725, growing popular under Louis XV. Given he was king for nearly 60 years, it’s quite likely such a chair was literally under Louis XV at some point
Earlier this week I finished reading George Simenon’s 1931 novel La Tête d’un Homme, the fifth adventure of the famous commissaire Maigret. It spans 135 pages in the Tout Maigret edition from Omnibus and took me just 3 days of reading to get through – summer evenings are good for that. I noted 101 unfamiliar words as I read, though I’ve tightened my standards for familiarity. In earlier posts I included only words and expressions I couldn’t recall even in context. In this list, I’ve included any word I didn’t think I would recognize and know the meaning of if I saw it in complete isolation. So the list is longer than usual. In fact it is so long, I’m going to split it into two posts so that I don’t tire of writing and my readers don’t tire of reading. I’ve posted the first batch of fifty below, with links to definitions from Linguee and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.
The novel is pretty good, though it still has that pre-Agatha-Christie style of setting up some exotic and even grotesque situation in advance, and then only revealing it to the reader bit by bit. There’s no puzzle for the reader to figure out, and the whole thing is so contrived as to be unbelievable. Add to that some melodrama and mustache-twirling level cartoon villain, and you’ll know what to expect. Yet with all that, it was a good book. The plot that unspools – an obviously framed man goes to jail protesting his innocence but going silent in the face of incriminating evidence; Inspector Maigret anonymously orchestrates the man’s escape in order to trail him afterwards; the suspect gives Maigret the slip and then re-emerges in unexpected ways; the true villain finally appears and loses to Maigret in a battle of wits – is entertaining and at times original. There’s even a fair number of action scenes that successfully generate suspense and surprise outcomes. And Maigret seems far from infallible, which is an important ingredient for a detective series. So all in all a good direction for the series to be going.
The unfamiliar words are disproportionately about positions body’s can be found in and verbs that change them: avachi (slumped), s’affaler (slouch, sprawl), jucher (perch), bosselé (dented, deformed), califourchon (stradling), un loque (a wreck), coudoyer (jostle, press up against), chanceler (wobble, falter), frôler (brush, nudge), entre quatre yeux (head-to-head).
Here’s the first part of the list, from chapters 1- 5, sorted by modern word frequency. Recall that the value is estimated by counting all words in all French books Google knows about in the given decade. For comparison, the masculine definite article le occurs with a frequency of 1 in 60, while all the union of all articles (le, la, les, un, une, de, des) taken together account for 1 in 8 words. .
un triporteur is a 3-wheeled cycle, with one wheel in back and two wheels in front on either side of a box or trunk for cargo. These were popular for delivering cargo or for peddlers to go around town selling their wares, though the word was super rare in writings of the time. The item and the word are still in common use in modern France.
[Collection Jules Beau. Photographie sportive] : T. 16. Années 1901 et 1902 / Jules Beau : F. 25v. [Course de Tri-Porteurs, 26 janvier 1902];
glabre means “hairless”, either from shaving or from baldness. It was a fairly common adjective in 1930, but has been falling since 1950 and is now a one-in-a-million rarity.
cahin-caha describes a slow, erratic pace of progress; patchy, staggered, or struggling.
un remorqueur is a tug boat. Tug boats were increasingly big in France for about 70 years, reaching their peak mention just a few years before this book was published. Then there was a sudden crash (the Depression?) and things never recovered.
se morfondre is a great verb, meaning to languish or to mope. Apparently folks do that twice as often now as they did 90 years ago.means “hairless”, either from shaving or from baldness. It was a fairly common adjective in 1930, but has been falling since 1950 and is now a one-in-a-million rarity.
sidi is an honorific title for a man from North Africa, but also is an ethnic label: Commissaire! criait le sidi qu’on poussait vers la porte.
Common words, uncommon meanings
un écho is a sonic reflection, of course, but it can also mean a newspaper column dedicated to gossip and anecdotes about politicians, celebrities, etc. Here is was the vehicle for the paper to print a titillating anonymous letter claiming the prison escape was actually orchestrated by the police.
une rame is an oar or a paddle, but less commonly means a train: Des rames de métro ébranlaient un pont proche.
un cordon is a rope or string, typically for a curtain or bell. But it is also an archaic term for a rope used by a concierge to open the door of a building. In that context, «demander le cordon» means “ask to be let in”.
une bribe is a scrap, a snippet, a shred. This is not to be confused with the english “bribe”, a payment to induce an official to act against their duty. In French, the verb to bribe is soudoyer, while the noun for a bribe is the colorful pot-de-vin – jug of wine. Curious that the French bribe has steadily become more common, tripling in frequency in 80 years.
un pneumatique in modern parlance is a tire, usually shortened to un pneu. But in 1931 it referred to a message delivered by pressurized air tube. Paris had an extensive network of pneumatic tubes that remained in operation for over 100 years, from 1868 all the way through until 1984! I am old enough to have encountered such a system in the 1970s in the New England hospital where my father worked. I find the notion of a city-wide network astonishing.
Pressurized air tubes carried message-filled canisters throughout 1880’s Paris, and for 100 years thereafter!
Update 2021-06-21: I finished this 135-page book in just three days, but collected many unfamiliar vocabulary words. It’s taking me some time to enter and research them. Vocab list coming in a post later this week.
I couldn’t sleep last night (2021-06-18), so I started the next Maigret novel in the series, La tête d’un homme (1931). It’s pretty quick going – in 3 hours or so I read 60 pages, which is a little under a half of the novel. I’m noting unfamiliar words and expressions as I go, but I’ll hold off from posting them until I’ve finished the book.
The story has an entertaining setup. Chapter 1 sees Maigret, a judge, and a prison official lurking in the shadows of a prison courtyard while an inmate effects an escape. We learn that, unbeknownst to the prisoner, the escape was arranged by Maigret himself as a way to test his hypothesis that the man is innocent of the crime for which he’s been condemned to death. Something about the evidence in the case has been nagging at Maigret, and he’s convinced the others to go along with the charade in hopes of tracking down the real culprit. Maigret guarantees that all will be well, and offers to resign should something go awry. Naturally, the escapee slips through the police surveillance and Maigret has only 10 days to save his career and find the convicted man… or perhaps the actual criminal instead.
Like many of the early Maigret books, this one has a lot of scenes in bars and a lot of river activity. So I’m dusting off my remembrances of chopine, juché, and acajou, as well as of péniches, remorqueurs, débardeurs and the like.
No, not that débardeur…
…this débardeur
All that’s left of this noble profession seems to be a T-shirt style.
Last week I finished Le Sang des Sirènes, a crime / thriller novel by French author Thierry Serfaty. At 250 pages and fairly large typeface, it was a quick read. I completed it over the course of 10 days in my usual evenings and weekends pattern. The book was published in 2000 and the plot is centered around industrial espionage and immunology research (intrigue around the hunt to find and profit from a cure for AIDS). Some combination of the modern publication date, my history working at a pharmaceutical company, and my having read a lot of French crime literature likely explain the fact that nearly all the vocabulary was familiar to me. I noted 24 novel words in the first 100 pages or so and then decided just to finish the book without pencil in hand.
This is Serfarty’s first novel. Although it won that year’s Prix Polar for best crime novel from the Festival Polar de Cognac and launched Serfarty’s successful literary second career as an novelist and television screenwriter (he originally trained as a doctor), I didn’t think much of the book.
Le Sang des Sirènes starts with an innovative framing. The prologue is a first person narrative where we meet Jan Hellberg, a recently murdered Danish immunologist. He tells us that, as a scientist, he doesn’t believe in reincarnation. Still, the fact remains that he died in a car crash, and then a spirit – named “Life” – came to him and showed him a mysterious hand sabotaging the brakes hours before. So he’s forced to reconsider his views on the hereafter.
Life offers him the chance to relive the last 6 months of his life in order to discover who had arranged his murder. However, he won’t have any power to change the course of events, and he won’t be able to remember the future details of his life as he retraverses those 6 months. He’ll only be able to remember this bargain he’s made with Life, and to pay closer attention to who might have wanted him dead and acted on that motive. Then he can at least die with the solace of knowing who killed him and why.
I really liked the prologue. Witty, introspective, fresh. Unfortunately, everything goes downhill from there. The main character never really gets developed, and the other characters are cardboard at best. There’s an awful lot of telling and not showing. The pacing is erratic, with long science explanations interspersed with breakneck reversals: “person X is good – no wait, they’re evil – just kidding, good after all.” Many of the Dan Brown novels and their emulators (e.g. The Da Vinci Code) suffer from these same flaws, and feel like they are conceived as movies that happen to have been packaged as novels. It doesn’t surprise me that Serfaty went on to write television screenplays. Also, the cellular biochemistry explanations fall wide of the mark. They add nothing for the reader who knows the material, and I can’t imagine they are satisfying or interesting to the reader who hasn’t seen this since high school.
Le Sang de Sirènes had been sitting on my shelf unread for several years. The price printed on the back is «98,00 F TTC» : 98 pre-euro French francs, all taxes included (recall that the Euro was launched in 1999, but existed only as an invisible currency until coins and banknotes appeared in 2002). I purchased it for $1 from the French Cultural Center of Boston at one of their semi-annual book sales. There are no library markings on it, so I conclude that it was a member donation rather than a library de-acquisition. I’m glad to know that the FCC librarians didn’t think this was worth purchasing in the first place. It’s the sort of book one might imagine picking up in an airport before a long flight and being glad of the in-air diversion. Amusingly, I found nestled in the back a boarding pass stub for an Air France flight 062 from Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris, to LAX, Los Angeles. It includes the name of the passenger, but «la pudeur» restrains me from outing them here.
I’m actually being too hard on the book. It was good for reinforcing vocabulary and for practicing automaticity generally. I noticed several words from my previous post on Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien show up in this novel. So I don’t regret starting or finishing the volume. But I won’t be seeking out other works by Serfaty.
One detail remains: how could a book with these flaws win a literary honor like Prix Polar for best crime novel from the Festival Polar de Cognac? For that, I think one needs to understand the French cultural phenomenon of «La rentrée littéraire». Several years ago a teacher shared with me this video from ARTE. It’s worth a watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ4J1oPLkMg
In short, the French seem to love contests and competitions, and there is a tradition of literary prizes that dates back to the start of the 20th century. The earliest and most prestigious of these is the Prix Goncourt, but many others soon followed. Every fall there are a couple of months of closely watched announcements of various books and authors progressing to the next stage for candidate novels for this or that award. The final winners are announced in time to take full advantage of Christmas sales. The winning books are all displayed with red paper bands wrapping them and shouting the name of the award.
Perhaps more so than in the US (or perhaps not), there’s more than a whiff of theater and self-dealing involved with these awards. The judges are typically authors, and frequently select winners that work with the same publishing houses as themselves. But moreover, the whole thing is as much about marketing as it is about merit. As a result, there is a proliferation of awards and everyone is a winner. In the specific field of crime novels, there are some two dozen annual contests, and many give multiple awards.
In the future, I may trust the recommendations emanating from Cognac more for choosing my brandy than for choosing my reading material.
Here’s the list of unfamiliar vocabulary words I noted:
une guimbarde is a rare word with multiple meanings. It can denote a musical instrument (a “Jew’s harp”), an old junky car, a 17th-century two-step dance, or a small plane used by a carpenter (a rabot !). In this book, it meant a car. The word frequency was fairly stable in the Google Books corpus at 1 in 20 million from 1800-2000. Then it experienced a sudden jump in between 2003 and 2012, rising to about 1 in 4.5 million, where it has stayed since. Alas, I don’t know which of the meanings has reemerged.
lésiner means to skimp or cut corners. It’s been getting steadily more frequent for 200 years. I looked into the possibility that it was connected to the English “lazy”, but the etymologies are completely different.
tonitruer is “to thunder”, both in the meteorological sense and in the metaphorical sense of speaking loudly and with anger. Curious that the language has both «tonner» and «tonitruer» with apparently the same meaning. I’m not sure if they carry different connotations.
Common words, uncommon meanings
emprunter means “to borrow”, of course, and is routinely a beginner word for the classroom. But it can also mean to take a route or a path to get around: «J’emprunte les escaliers qui mènent à mon bureau.»
jurer commonly means to swear, either in the sense of “avow” or in the sense of “curse”. But it can also mean “to clash” or “to conflict”: «l’élément qui jure dans un ensemble harmonieux».
la chaussée derives from the word «chaussure», “shoe”. The verb «chausser» means to put shoes on someone or something, like a horse. It can also mean to put tires on a vehicle, which I find a pleasant and consistent evolution of the word. But as a noun, «la chaussée» is a roadway, carriageway, highway, or more generally the pavement. This of course is related to the expression for the ground floor of a building, the «rez-de-chaussée».
I just finished reading George Simenon’s 1931 novel Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien, the fourth adventure of the famous commissaire Maigret. It spans 122 pages in the “Tout Maigret” edition from Omnibus and took me 18 days of occasional bedtime reading to get through. I noted 78 unfamiliar words as I read. I’ve posted them below, with links to definitions from Linguee and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.
The novel is only OK, at best. It’s got a murder, two suicides, extortion, forgery, a secret society, assumed identities, and just a soupçon of anti-semitism. Plus, part of it takes place in Germany, so you get Simenon’s impression of that country in 1931 – an interesting time in Franco-Prussian relations. On the whole it’s not much of a mystery, more like a convoluted tale of Bohemian youth gone wild that Maigret happens to stumble upon long after the fact. There’s no sense of danger and little intrigue. But I still have no hesitation about turning the page and diving into the next novel in the tome.
The unfamiliar words are disproportionately about poverty: worn out fabrics, falling apart shoes, cheap suitcases, dilapidated shacks, dirty neighborhoods, ruffian children, low quality merchants. Also a moderate amount of industry: torches, saws, acid baths, printing presses and workshops. There’s a little bit at the other end of the wealth spectrum: flowery scarves, bribed high officials, fancy cars, banking deals, patented systems, savored brandy. And finally there’s a lot of highfalutin descriptions: chiseled features, fleshy limbs, jerky movements, burnished tables, crimson faces and so on.
Here’s the list, sorted by modern word frequency. Recall that the value is estimated by counting all words in all French books Google knows about in the given decade. For comparison, the masculine definite article le occurs with a frequency of 1 in 60, while all the union of all articles (le, la, les, un, une, de, des) taken together account for 1 in 8 words. I don’t have on hand the estimate of what number of distinct French words have a frequency greater than 1 in N, but I’m interested in finding that distribution at some point.
lambic is a kind of beer that ferments spontaneously. gueuse-lambic is a mix of old and young lambics – two great tastes that go great together, apparently.
une empeigne is the leather upper of a shoe. Turns out there’s a whole lot of parts to a shoe, whose names I don’t know even in English.
un varlope and un rabot are two kinds of planing tools for woodworking. I had some trouble understanding from the definitions how they differed, and apparently it’s subtle. I stumbled upon Rabot ou varlope? , which you can consult for details.
une grisette is a condescending term for a low-class shop girl or other under-employed young woman who is generally considered sexually available. This character and characterization was fairly well established in French culture, art, and literature for a couple hundred years, including learned debates around what did and did not make one une grisette. Ick.
un camelot is a street merchant of cheap manufactured goods. According to Wiktionnaire, the etymology comes from the Arabic word for the animal – “camel”. This is the modern evolution of the itinerant desert trade. I don’t think there’s any connection with King Arthur’s castle. The name Camelot appears in medieval French romances, and there is a Roman ruin named Camuladonum which is thought to be the origin of that.
écheveler is to cause something to become disheveled. We need an English word for that. I guess the best we have is “rumple”, though I suppose you can use “dishevel” as an active verb.
sanguine is a reddish color, but also a sketch made with a crayon of that color.
A sanguine drawing
Common words, uncommon meanings
un bassin means a basin or cistern, but here it was used in the anatomical sense to refer to the collection of bones that make up the pelvis. The Bohemian youth keep a display skeleton around their attic hangout for who knows what reason.
une combinaison is a combination in the mathematical, or a coordinated outfit in fashion, but also means a scheme or an arrangement for accomplishing something vaguely shady.
la trame is the thread that goes back and forth on a loom – the “woof” in English. It is also used to mean a web of activity going on around someone/something. But in this novel it is used in describing someones clothing, so worn that you could see individual threads.
There are only 24 hours in a day («On peut pas être au four et au moulin»), and it turns out that every hour I spend writing about my French activities is an hour I don’t spend on doing those activities. Here’s a collection of brief items about French activities I’ve enjoyed recently but haven’t made time to write up until now.
Chagall: Scandale à l’Opéra de Paris
In a recent French lesson I was assigned to watch the short video named «Chagall: Scandale à l’Opéra de Paris». In 1962, artist Marc Chagall was commissioned to create a new painting on the ceiling of the Palais Garnier opera house. I first visited this building in 2013 and absolutely adored it. The main amphitheater is spacious and restful, and the grand staircase in the entryway is stunning. The Chagall ceiling is OK too.
Fred Vargas: Les Evangélistes
Fred Vargas is a well-known French author of detective novels (polar or rompol). She’s been writing since the mid-1980’s and continues to publish new works (I think Quand sort la recluse (2017) is her most recent work). I first came upon her work in 2013 in a Paris bookstore and like it enough to stock up on a bunch of her books that have sat on my shelf unread. When I finished Pietr-le-LettonI needed a next read, and my daughter randomly pulled Vargas’s Sans feu ni lieu from the shelf. It was super accessible (a big change from the Simenon), and I read it in just 10 days or so. It turns out that it’s the final book in a short trilogy, though they are really only loosely linked. So I went back and read the first book Debout les morts, and am now a couple chapters into the middle book, Un peu plus loin sur la droite. For some reason, the first and second books of the series are harder for me to read than the third: maybe her writing style changed, or something else is at work.
The common thread is a household of three historians and an ex-police officer. The historians are named Matthias, Marcus, and Lucien, and the officer christens them St. Matthieu, St. Mark, and St. Luke, or “the evangelists”. In the first book, these four are the primary protagonists and detectives. In the final book, the detective is Louis Kehlweiler, another former police detective who knows evangelists, who themselves appear only briefly. The start of Un plus loin features Kehlweiler again, so I’m expecting the historians will be scarce again. We’ll see.
Mots Fléchés
I enjoy crossword puzzles and am reasonably skilled at them in English. The New York Times daily puzzle only gets interesting for me on Thursday or so. I figured that French crossword puzzles would be a good way to exercise my brain and build vocabulary. That may be true (though crossword puzzle words are their own odd sub-domain), but I completely underestimated how much command of the language is required to do this task. En français, je suis nul en mots fléchés!
The kind of puzzles I’ve been working on are called «mots fléchés». They look something like this
They come rated in levels 0-7. Level 4 is completely beyond me. I took me months to get past level 0, and I’m now working my way through the booklet shown above, labeled level 1-2, which I picked up in a news kiosk in Bordeaux. I feel like I’m about at the point where it is transitioning from level 1 to level 2, and boy am I struggling. In the heart of level 1 I was was able to get through one or two per night reliably without a dictionary, but it would take me well over an hour. Now I’m at an hour or two to get 75% of a puzzle completed. Here’s my current grid:
The answers are all in the back of the booklet, so I’m only as stuck as I let myself be. Often the problem is not that I don’t can’t think of a word to match the clue, but that I just don’t know what the word in the clue means. Here, I think I know what the clue words mean, but perhaps not all the solution words. My knowledge of gourdes is limited, even in English.
You can find lots of print puzzles like this at https://www.megastar.fr/fleches. If you click into each offering, each title offers a sample puzzle you can download like this, this, or this. They also sell printed booklets individually or by annual subscription. Six issues cost 25€, plus an additional 15€ for mailing to the US. I have enough supply to last me a while, so haven’t tried this yet. You can also play online with, for example, daily new grids at a variety of difficulties from the site Notre temps.
Les Hérietier
The French Cultural Center runs a film club that meets monthly to discuss in French films. I had hoped to attend the September session, which featured the 2014 film Les Heritiers. Not sure how they typically run things when not in the midst of a pandemic, but for this session we were asked to watch the film on our own in advance, then come prepared to discuss it in French. I watched the first 40 minutes of it before learning the Center had to reschedule the meeting for some reason or other. I couldn’t make the new time, so there was no longer any pressure for me to finish the film on time. That was a week ago, not sure if I’ll get back to it. I only understood 2/3 of the dialogue, and I didn’t find it all that engaging.
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 13 (Les Deux Pietr) with links to definitions from Linguee and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.
This chapter is full of dramatic action. First the cliffhanger of the last chapter resolves as Maigret witnesses the Jekyll-Hyde like transformation of the refined, strong Pietr-le-Letton into the crude, weak Fédor Yourovitch. They talk a bit and are briefly interrupted by Le Letton’s wealthy criminal sponsor Mortimer. After he leaves, Maigret realizes that Letton qua Fédor’s mistress Anna is plotting to kill Mortimer from jealousy (recall the revolver in last chapter’s title – Anna wants Fédor to spend more time with her, less time criming). Maigret goes after him, but is too late to prevent the murder. He arrests Anna, but Pietr/Fédor escapes in the confusion.
The chapter spans 6 pages and contained 20 unfamiliar words. The words are mostly about emotional turmoil expressed in the face and body, physical struggle, and garments.
dépoitraillée means “bare-chested” from poitrine. Not only is it the word in this chapter with the lowest modern frequency (and nearly the lowest contemporaneous frequency in the whole book), the word doesn’t show up in Google Books corpus before 1855. Probably a neologism at that point. “A bodice ripper” is a dismissive English description of a sexully explicit romance novel. Maigret isn’t steamy stuff, but Anna’s bodice is indeed ripped as she struggles during her arrest.
bonasse is excessively kind. Some translations make it “goody two-shoes”, “meek”, or “naïve”. Simenon uses it to describe Cain in the biblical story of the two brothers.
écoeurant is “nauseating” or “revolting”. We saw its infinitive écoeurer back in Chapter 8, so I would normally omit this entry. But a reader pointed out to me that in modern Québecois, this word is generally used to have a positive meaning. This happens in English too: “That fastball was nasty. That was a filthy pitch” or “This cake is wicked.” They shared this helpful video lesson on the Québecois écoeurant with me as well.
érailler is “to rub”, “to fray”, “to wear”, “to scuff”, etc. It’s another one of these words that is far more frequent in its past-participle used as an adjective (like crispé and saccadé from last chapter). While normally it means “worn” or “frayed”, it translates better as “hoarse” when describing a voice, which is how Simenon uses it here (une voix trop éraillé). One dictionary translates voix éraillé as “whiskey voice”, which is not an English expression familiar to me.
trépigner literally means “to stamp one’s foot with emotion”, but is mostly used metaphorically. A common expression is «trépignent d’impatience», “bursting with impatience”: Vous trépignez d’impatience d’évoluer? It maps to the English animal-based metaphors “chomping at the bit” and “raring to go”. But also somewhat “milling around”: Simenon wrote «les femmes criaient par surcroît, pleuraient ou trépignaient» in describing a scene of hotel guests in the corridor after a the police arrive to investigate a murderous gunshot.
blafard and exsangue are near synonyms, both meaning “pale” or “sallow”. Exsangue literally means “without blood” or “with the blood removed”. Curiously, livide also means “pale”, with the connotation of being the result of sickness or strong emotion. In English “livid” is more often heard as a description of extreme anger or rage (“He was livid when he learned his son had gambled away the money.”). But in English the color associated with this word is a dark, gray, bluish, purple (“a livid bruise”). From what I can tell, livide is primarily associated with white in French, but does have a secondary meaning of blue-ish.
houle is an ocean swell or a wave. Simenon uses it in the poetic phrase «visage … blafard avec … des yeux couleur de houle». I like that houle is not really a color – it’s the ocean that is colored blue or green or gray – but by using that word the suggestion is that the person is experiencing a forceful swell of emotion, which is covered by the pallor of the rest of the face. Also, the word reminds by of hublot (porthole), though I don’t think the etymologies are connected.
Common words, uncommon meanings
pan is a very flexible word. Un pan can mean “a section”, “a panel”, “a flap”, “a facet”, “a part”, “a face (of a mountain)”, “a branch (of a subject)”, “a segment (of a population)”, or “a framing member (in construction)”. Most of these meanings are actually common, but there are so many of them I thought it noteworthy. In this chapter Simenon uses it to describe «un pan de la pelisse», “a flap of the cloak”.
pourpre is simply “purple”, and is mostly on this list because Simenon used it as a contrast with exsangue and blafard. I was confused, so I added it to research later. But it’s true that out of context, I was not 100% confident that this was just “purple” and not some idiomatic expression..
