Category: Media

All manner of French media: books, film, plays, TV, radio, art, etc.

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Vocab list: La Tête d’un Homme, Part 2

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.

See Vocab list: La Tête d’un Homme, Part 1 for the words from chapters 1-5, as well as my musings on the novel itself.

Here’s the list of all 50 unfamiliar words, sorted by modern word frequency.

expression (root)Frequency in 2010Frequency in 1970Frequency in 1930
machin1 in 19,0001 in 12,5001 in 16,100
bergère1 in 85,0001 in 88,3001 in 82,400
timbre1 in 116,0001 in 67,4001 in 29,900
ronger1 in 142,0001 in 171,0001 in 148,000
caserne1 in 177,0001 in 181,0001 in 171,000
infime1 in 183,0001 in 203,0001 in 188,000
cachet1 in 198,0001 in 140,0001 in 113,000
velléité1 in 275,0001 in 446,0001 in 335,000
sursis1 in 279,0001 in 218,0001 in 271,000
apparat1 in 308,0001 in 316,0001 in 333,000
fichu1 in 325,0001 in 617,0001 in 560,000
tare1 in 327,0001 in 253,0001 in 149,000
rafale1 in 332,0001 in 388,0001 in 554,000
épave1 in 346,0001 in 371,0001 in 345,000
piètre1 in 357,0001 in 678,0001 in 691,000
râle1 in 358,0001 in 450,0001 in 339,000
pignon1 in 398,0001 in 386,0001 in 233,000
décousu1 in 427,0001 in 686,0001 in 707,000
délabré1 in 516,0001 in 683,0001 in 650,000
flairer1 in 544,0001 in 450,0001 in 386,000
ployer1 in 634,0001 in 470,0001 in 342,000
tamiser1 in 640,0001 in 1,120,0001 in 896,000
fourvoyer1 in 732,0001 in 1,090,0001 in 1,190,000
boutade1 in 745,0001 in 523,0001 in 442,000
bigarré1 in 773,0001 in 860,0001 in 493,000
démiurge1 in 805,0001 in 1,110,0001 in 2,180,000
à son gré1 in 844,0001 in 391,0001 in 259,000
hécatombe1 in 993,0001 in 1,120,0001 in 1,070,000
tripoter1 in 954,0001 in 1,880,0001 in 2,990,000
bousculade1 in 1,020,0001 in 1,280,0001 in 1,240,000
persienne1 in 1,180,0001 in 1,170,0001 in 987,000
fêlure1 in 1,220,0001 in 2,170,0001 in 2,610,000
penderie1 in 1,430,0001 in 3,580,0001 in 9,600,000
rabrouer1 in 1,460,0001 in 2,740,0001 in 2,540,000
tintamarre1 in 1,750,0001 in 2,110,0001 in 2,340,000
venelle1 in 1,990,0001 in 3,630,0001 in 3,790,000
jambages1 in 2,350,0001 in 1,710,0001 in 1,370,000
bourrade1 in 2,500,0001 in 2,950,0001 in 2,820,000
dégringolade1 in 2,500,0001 in 4,910,0001 in 4,060,000
mercerie1 in 2,510,0001 in 949,0001 in 1,750,000
griserie1 in 2,590,0001 in 1,850,0001 in 1,380,000
polichinelle1 in 2,960,0001 in 4,040,0001 in 2,880,000
à brûle-pourpoint1 in 3,090,0001 in 4,740,0001 in 3,980,000
roulier1 in 3,930,0001 in 3,120,0001 in 2,390,000
veinard1 in 4,010,0001 in 8,270,0001 in 8,520,000
cabotin1 in 4,030,0001 in 2,900,0001 in 2,320,000
brouiller les cartes1 in 6,120,0001 in 7,690,0001 in 13,100,000
bitte1 in 6,460,0001 in 8,610,0001 in 13,300,000
se griser1 in 15,900,0001 in 11,000,0001 in 5,880,000
haut-le-coeur1 in 74,800,0001 in 132,000,0001 in 193,000,000
tache de son1 in 94,500,0001 in 111,000,0001 in 89,600,000

Word notes

  • 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.

    I found multiple interesting treatments of the word un machin while researching, including this French Word of the Day post and this Français Authentique video:
  • 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
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Vocab list: La Tête d’un Homme, Part 1

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. .

expression (root)Frequency in 2010Frequency in 1970Frequency in 1930
écho1 in 29,1001 in 46,5001 in 57,900
rame1 in 144,0001 in 139,0001 in 125,000
cordon1 in 159,0001 in 122,0001 in 74,000
frôler1 in 183,0001 in 351,0001 in 391,000
greffier1 in 237,0001 in 125,0001 in 82,300
soulier1 in 243,0001 in 162,0001 in 143,000
broyer1 in 250,0001 in 210,0001 in 172,000
bribe1 in 266,0001 in 641,0001 in 845,000
broncher1 in 329,0001 in 365,0001 in 235,000
terne1 in 383,0001 in 304,0001 in 252,000
renifler1 in 403,0001 in 977,0001 in 1,500,000
grignoter1 in 437,0001 in 985,0001 in 1,590,000
chanceler1 in 497,0001 in 471,0001 in 392,000
pneumatique1 in 545,0001 in 207,0001 in 307,000
jucher1 in 570,0001 in 833,0001 in 839,000
pétiller1 in 602,0001 in 1,060,0001 in 884,000
éperdument1 in 699,0001 in 988,0001 in 731,000
ornière1 in 730,0001 in 746,0001 in 735,000
blafarde1 in 777,0001 in 967,0001 in 856,000
écroulement1 in 796,0001 in 568,0001 in 507,000
rixe1 in 857,0001 in 875,0001 in 793,000
carrosserie1 in 930,0001 in 757,0001 in 451,000
glabre1 in 1,020,0001 in 432,0001 in 224,000
affaler1 in 1,030,0001 in 2,230,0001 in 3,300,000
loque1 in 1,060,0001 in 769,0001 in 497,000
cuir chevelu1 in 1,330,0001 in 2,410,0001 in 1,100,000
froissement1 in 1,340,0001 in 1,260,0001 in 725,000
douille1 in 1,390,0001 in 995,0001 in 648,000
califourchon1 in 1,580,0001 in 2,480,0001 in 2,400,000
remorqueur1 in 1,660,0001 in 841,0001 in 317,000
débardeur1 in 1,690,0001 in 2,810,0001 in 2,820,000
avachi1 in 1,790,0001 in 4,440,0001 in 7,990,000
potelé1 in 1,830,0001 in 2,580,0001 in 2,220,000
planton1 in 1,920,0001 in 2,170,0001 in 2,010,000
crépu1 in 1,980,0001 in 2,190,0001 in 1,730,000
falot1 in 2,160,0001 in 1,370,0001 in 1,020,000
bosselée1 in 2,610,0001 in 1,830,0001 in 915,000
bock1 in 3,380,0001 in 3,380,0001 in 1,910,000
lorgnon1 in 3,560,0001 in 2,130,0001 in 1,150,000
sidi1 in 4,100,0001 in 8,580,0001 in 10,500,000
coudoyer1 in 4,760,0001 in 1,600,0001 in 779,000
cahin-caha1 in 4,830,0001 in 7,480,0001 in 8,690,000
se morfondre1 in 4,980,0001 in 10,600,0001 in 11,500,000
à portée de voix1 in 6,280,0001 in 13,900,0001 in 28,300,000
rapin1 in 7,260,0001 in 4,310,0001 in 2,510,000
sauterie1 in 9,020,0001 in 13,000,0001 in 8,490,000
triporteur1 in 10,100,0001 in 9,220,0001 in 61,700,000
entre quatre yeux1 in 25,700,0001 in 48,800,0001 in 71,900,000
pot de grès1 in 38,100,0001 in 32,800,0001 in 24,400,000

Word notes

  • 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!
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La Tête d’Un Homme

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.

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Le Sang des Sirènes

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:

expression (root)Frequency in 2010
emprunter1 in 23,500
jurer1 in 41,100
chaussé1 in 58,000
arborer1 in 135,000
ronger1 in 142,000
frange1 in 180,000
fléau1 in 199,000
brider1 in 208,000
jalonner1 in 242,000
toiser1 in 279,000
cribler1 in 328,000
rançon1 in 339,000
retrousser1 in 508,000
compatir1 in 517,000
languir1 in 528,000
gabarit1 in 631,000
tonitruant1 in 672,000
hâle1 in 727,000
déboule1 in 767,000
ogive1 in 771,000
carnassier1 in 1,090,000
bâillonner1 in 1,140,000
lésiner1 in 1,340,000
guimbarde1 in 4,460,000
se morfondre1 in 4,980,000

Word Notes

  • 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».

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Technophile ou technophobe?

This week’s French lesson included an oral comprehension activity pulled from the site Partajon. It features a 6 minute audio clip about attitudes towards technology: love it, hate it, fear it, welcome it (Technophile ou Technophobe?). It’s rated C1, and I had no difficulty understanding the overall arc of the discussion and most of the specifics. When I turned to the accompanying worksheet to test comprehension, I discovered that I had missed a few details like title of a book referenced and some neologisms for new concepts in the intersection between sociology and technology. But on the whole I could listen and understand this clip with «les doigts dans le nez» (a new expression my teacher supplied me today).

I have a knack for remembering English conversation close to verbatim for a short time after I hear it, and it’s always bothered me that my ability to do this in French is pretty much non-existent. I can completely understand what is being said, and I can talk about it confidently afterwards, but I can’t parrot back the exact sentence or use the exact phrase that I heard just a minute or two earlier the way I can in English. But it’s starting to develop bit by bit. And I am getting better at remembering the structure of a wide-ranging radio conversation: what was talked about first, what second, what examples of each point were provided, etc. It feels good.

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Vocab list: Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien

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.

expression (root)Frequency in 2010Frequency in 1970Frequency in 1930
bassin1 in 36,7001 in 25,6001 in 24,700
combinaison1 in 47,0001 in 36,4001 in 30,600
maintes1 in 68,4001 in 45,5001 in 37,200
trame1 in 84,5001 in 110,0001 in 144,000
sanguine1 in 99,0001 in 86,6001 in 52,600
revers1 in 105,0001 in 105,0001 in 108,000
ébaucher1 in 126,0001 in 77,5001 in 74,000
friser1 in 159,0001 in 158,0001 in 124,000
sangle1 in 255,0001 in 264,0001 in 239,000
butin1 in 261,0001 in 267,0001 in 262,000
huissier1 in 263,0001 in 176,0001 in 122,000
éparpiller1 in 266,0001 in 391,0001 in 402,000
âpre1 in 277,0001 in 186,0001 in 122,000
morne1 in 287,0001 in 216,0001 in 148,000
hétéroclite1 in 325,0001 in 621,0001 in 901,000
pignon1 in 398,0001 in 386,0001 in 233,000
échevin1 in 416,0001 in 207,0001 in 159,000
saccade1 in 426,0001 in 554,0001 in 465,000
humer1 in 452,0001 in 642,0001 in 607,000
parvis1 in 532,0001 in 820,0001 in 767,000
boyau1 in 576,0001 in 631,0001 in 427,000
breveté1 in 594,0001 in 487,0001 in 294,000
honnir1 in 622,0001 in 1,000,0001 in 924,000
charnu1 in 632,0001 in 508,0001 in 331,000
encastrés1 in 730,0001 in 549,0001 in 427,000
cambrer1 in 749,0001 in 1,210,0001 in 1,070,000
espiègle1 in 753,0001 in 2,000,0001 in 1,640,000
frileux1 in 759,0001 in 1,490,0001 in 1,250,000
fourgon1 in 787,0001 in 1,010,0001 in 907,000
jonc1 in 892,0001 in 589,0001 in 475,000
taudis1 in 906,0001 in 561,0001 in 529,000
chope1 in 927,0001 in 2,730,0001 in 3,080,000
cramoisi1 in 936,0001 in 1,210,0001 in 738,000
fatras1 in 992,0001 in 887,0001 in 757,000
écheveler1 in 1,010,0001 in 1,060,0001 in 977,000
glaise1 in 1,010,0001 in 821,0001 in 728,000
copeaux1 in 1,040,0001 in 706,0001 in 758,000
quincaillerie1 in 1,180,0001 in 738,0001 in 1,470,000
fusain1 in 1,370,0001 in 1,980,0001 in 1,330,000
sommier1 in 1,400,0001 in 988,0001 in 1,060,000
cabanon1 in 1,450,0001 in 3,710,0001 in 3,590,000
camelot1 in 1,450,0001 in 1,190,0001 in 954,000
astiquer1 in 1,690,0001 in 2,260,0001 in 2,880,000
pègre1 in 1,700,0001 in 2,210,0001 in 4,490,000
canif1 in 1,720,0001 in 1,740,0001 in 1,440,000
miteux1 in 1,820,0001 in 3,910,0001 in 8,080,000
brocanteur1 in 1,920,0001 in 2,290,0001 in 1,880,000
échancrer1 in 1,960,0001 in 644,0001 in 373,000
buriner1 in 2,140,0001 in 2,270,0001 in 2,340,000
s’emballer1 in 2,160,0001 in 11,500,0001 in 11,100,000
pelisse1 in 2,170,0001 in 1,680,0001 in 1,070,000
chalumeau1 in 2,190,0001 in 1,030,0001 in 808,000
ventru1 in 2,200,0001 in 1,550,0001 in 1,010,000
grisettes1 in 2,420,0001 in 2,730,0001 in 1,740,000
fadeur1 in 2,450,0001 in 1,330,0001 in 865,000
ramage1 in 2,520,0001 in 1,680,0001 in 1,160,000
lascar1 in 2,560,0001 in 5,810,0001 in 7,400,000
effilocher1 in 2,730,0001 in 3,070,0001 in 3,900,000
genièvre1 in 2,910,0001 in 3,420,0001 in 2,360,000
lutrin1 in 3,440,0001 in 3,600,0001 in 2,600,000
capharnaüm1 in 3,670,0001 in 26,600,0001 in 25,500,000
rabot1 in 3,770,0001 in 1,770,0001 in 2,070,000
papier de soie1 in 4,540,0001 in 6,740,0001 in 3,870,000
s’amorcer1 in 4,640,0001 in 3,180,0001 in 7,530,000
enchevêtré1 in 6,850,0001 in 6,780,0001 in 5,270,000
rapin1 in 7,260,0001 in 4,310,0001 in 2,510,000
lavallière1 in 12,500,0001 in 12,400,0001 in 13,000,000
empeigne1 in 14,500,0001 in 10,800,0001 in 7,260,000
émerillon1 in 17,300,0001 in 15,300,0001 in 14,600,000
varlope1 in 18,800,0001 in 15,300,0001 in 10,500,000
oxhydrique1 in 67,600,0001 in 36,200,0001 in 13,500,000
T.S.F1 in 97,800,0001 in 311,000,0001 in 104,000,000
gueuse-lambicNone1 in 8,600,000,0001 in 2,270,000,000

Word notes

  • 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.

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Tertullien – a theatrical monologue against theater

Cover photo of Tertullien, by Harvé Briaux, published by L'avant-scène théâtre

For my 50th birthday last month, I received a subscription to the publication “L’avant-scène théâtre”. They produce and mail to subscribers 20 issues a year, in a form factor that is more like a small book than a magazine. Each one is devoted to a show that has recently played on the French stage, and includes the full script as well as some articles, interviews, and tidbits about it. Think of it as an extended program from the theater, but bundled with the script. I have seen them on sale at shows I’ve attended in France, and purchased one or two on site (they are not free, unlike most programs in American theaters). The magazine has an interesting history dating back to 1899.

The first issue of my subscription arrived this week in a quaint airmail envelope from Paris. This number is for the one-man show Tertullien, written and performed by Hervé Briaux. It debuted at Théâtre de Poche-Montparnasse, Paris, in January 2018. I guess with the Covid pandemic keeping Paris theaters dark, there hasn’t been much new material to cover of late, so they are going back to second and third tier productions. Tertullien is a thin volume, roughly 4″ x 7″, with 64 pages of plain paper and black-and-white text. There are no pictures other than the front cover. Inside, there is a 10 page preface article about the show, followed by an unannotated text – an uninterrupted monologue by the sole, eponymous character of the work. It was a quick read that I managed in two sittings.

I saw an unrelated show at Théâtre de Poche-Montparnasse in 2014. A cozy space.

Tertullien the play is actually a modern adaptation of the treatise De spectaculis (“On the Spectacles”) by Tertullien the man. Tertullien was a Roman, born in the 2nd century A.D. into a family of pagans in Carthage. He grew up well educated and became a lawyer before converting to Christianity and becoming a fundamentalist, puritanical zealot. He is known to have written over 40 works, many of which survive to this day. I had never heard of him before, nor read any of his works, but apparently he was unwaveringly severe, an extremely black-and-white thinker.

The play is an attempt to take the argument of De spectaculis and present it in modern terms for the modern audience. The argument is: Theater is demonic, as are horse races, gladiator fights, the Olympic games, and competitive sports. Theatrical productions are the work of the Devil. They corrupt old and youth alike, they feature prostitutes and wastrels, and they reify our basest instincts. They are also idolatrous, because they involve actors pretending to be other people who they are not, and since people are made in the image of God, the actor makes of themself an idol (an effigy of man = an effigy of God). So shun the theater, and instead dream of the glorious day when Christ returns and all involved in the theater — playwright, cast, crew, and audience alike — will be tortured horribly in Hell for eternity. Now that’s entertainment.

Did I mention that this Tertullien guy was a bit extra?

There’s an obvious irony in putting this unbridled denunciation of the theater into the mouth of a character on the stage. But there’s no breaking of the fourth wall here, at least not in the text (a director/actor could add a physical wink, I suppose). No acknowledgement that the listener is in a theater, or the speaker is treading the boards. In an article appearing as a preface in the volume, Daniel Loayza asserts that the play forces us to re-examine why we do go to the theater, why we do find it valuable and rewarding. But there’s nothing about that in the play itself. No second voice offering rebuttals, no self-doubt lurking under the surface of the 40 page diatribe. Nope. Just your routine fire and brimstone.

The closest that you get to a refutation is a strawman that Tertullien-the-character offers (translation mine):

Maintenant, je veux bien admettre, là, devant vous, que parfois, dans certaines pièces de théâtre, on peut trouver des choses simples, douces, agréables, belles même, parfois même honnêtes, parfois même… Mais, inutile d’aller plus loin, j’ai senti, dès mes premiers mots, que quelques-uns d’entre vous ont poussé un soupir de soulagement, mêlé d’une approbation secrète.

Mais au nom du Seigneur! Réfléchissez! Croyez-vous que si je voulais vous empoisonner, je mélangerais mon poison avec de la merde? Non! Je le mélangerais avec des mets savoureux et bien assaisonnés. Je les accompagnerais de liqueurs douces et agréables. Quand on veut empoissonner les gens, on enrobe de douceurs ce qui va les tuer. L’Autre n’agit pas autrement.

Tertullien, par Hervé Briaux

Now, I will readily admit, here, in front of you, that sometimes, in certain plays, there may be found something simple, sweet, pleasant, even beautiful, sometimes even honest, even… Well, no use going on with that: even with my first words, I felt some of you breathe a sigh of relief, mixed with secret agreement.

But good God, don’t you see?! Do you think that, if I wanted to poison you, I would mix my poison into shit? No! I would put it into the most delicious dishes, wondrously spiced. And I’d serve them with refreshing, sweet drinks. When you want to poison someone, you sugar coat the thing that’s going to kill them. The Devil acts no differently.

As an exercise in maintaining my French comprehension, Tertullien was good to read. Beyond that, it’s a bit too didactic for my tastes. It has been 11 months since I last saw a show in the theater, and with Covid still raging it will be many months more until I can go again. When I do, I will relish it greatly, with only a little thought to the possibility that poison lies beneath the overt theatrical goodness. But I do hope the script will be better than Tertullien. Or if not, that it will be in French.

P. S. Literally minutes after I posted this article, the mail brought me two more issues of L’avant-scéne théâtre (the two October 2020 issues, oddly). Guess I better get started on my next blog post…

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Amuse-bouches 2020-09-20

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-Letton I 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

4,40€ well-spent at a news kiosque in Bordeaux

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.

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A Video Potpourri for La Rentrée

(A version of this article is cross-posted on the blog of the French Cultural Center of Boston.)

I grew up here in Massachusetts and studied French in middle and high school during the 1980s. Years later I discovered the French Cultural Center when preparing for a six-month job rotation to Paris. I’ve been a member and continuing student ever since.

Back in the 1980s I didn’t have much access to French video. Today what’s available in the US is staggering: TV series, YouTube shorts, long films, news, you name it. Though the pandemic has closed off many French learning options, there’s no shortage of videos to stream. They offer visual clues that help infer the meaning of speech, which then helps resolve what the words must have been. Many videos have French closed captions which help build listening skills as well. They cover a wide range of vocabulary and speaking styles, often using a more colloquial register than I find in books, newspapers, or even podcasts.

Here are some of my recent favorites. They vary in length, subject matter, and difficulty, but if you have a B1 or better level of oral comprehension there should be something here for you.

Mr Nouar

Mr. Nouar is a YouTube channel of short sketches about life in modern France by comedian Mohamed Nouar. They contain funny, sharp social commentaries on issues of discrimination, unemployment, race, family, dating, incompetence, love, les relations hommes-femmes. He’s been posting videos since 2014. Born in 1988 of Algerian parents in southwest France, Nouar’s work is full of multicultural twenty-somethings who talk fast, chat ironically, use slang, and revel in verbal jousting.

Available for free on YouTube.

Miraculous

https://youtu.be/oLfCpvgsDB0

Miraculous: les aventures de Ladybug et Chat Noir is a TV series for kids drawn in the Japanese anime style and broadcast from 2015 to 2019. Set in Paris, two young teen superheroes together battle the villain of the week. Meanwhile, their alter-egos conduct an awkward middle school flirtation, unaware of the other’s superhero life. The series has wholesome characters, non-stop dialogue, and simple stories whose predictability helps clue the meaning. Each 21-minute episode includes scenes from daily teen life (school, home, babysitting, subway, market, movie theater, etc.) as well as superhero battles. Though the intended audience is French kids ages 8-12, older students of French can benefit a lot from the series.

Full episodes available on Netflix, excerpts on the official YouTube channel.

Chiffroscope

Chiffroscope is a collection of 48 mini-documentaries (2-3 minutes each) that look at big questions of the day using statistics and irreverent animations. It’s an eclectic series, with topics like cannabis legalization, freedom of the press, money and happiness, overfishing, global chocolate consumption and danger from asteroids. The narrator’s delivery is clean but fairly fast, and there are many complicated numbers spoken aloud (e.g. 143,000) – good listening practice. Otherwise, the language is very accessible, as almost everything is in the present tense and the drawings reinforce the words.

Chiffroscope videos are available on YouTube on the channel «l’Effet Papillon».

Au Service de la France

Au Service de la France is a television series that paints an absurd picture of a French spy agency in the 1960s. Though set in the past, the show debuted in 2015 and is a vehicle for rather acerbic criticisms of French society today. It mocks French attitudes towards Algeria, the rest of Africa, the Cold War, women, and class. Fair warning: the series is hilarious, but intentionally shocking. Many characters say and do awful things designed to illustrate how far French society still has to go. Though cringe-inducing, it’s also a goldmine for studying French language and culture. Lots of things are said on screen that won’t be heard in more sanitized media. The language is challenging, but the French closed captions are quite faithful to the spoken French if you want an assist.

Available on Netflix under the name “A Very Secret Service”. Two seasons of 12 episodes, 25-minutes each.

Dix Pour Cent

Dix Pour Cent is another television series that offers a chance to expand your knowledge of modern French language and culture at the same time. Set in a present day Parisian talent agency, it follows four agents as they deal with landing projects for their touchy stable of stars. But there’s a gimmick: each episode features a guest star who plays themself. Famous French film names like Cecile de France and Michel Drucker are written into the scripts and get to poke fun at themselves or play off their established stereotypes. There are also long running plot arcs around the careers, love affairs, and family troubles of the four agents and their assistants. There’s plenty of familiar and colloquial language in the dialogue, including cursing, drinking, and talk of sex, but nothing discomfiting.

Available on Netflix under the name “Call My Agent!” Four seasons (2015-2020) of six episodes 50 minutes each. Select the original French audio, and either no subtitles or the French closed-captions.

Watching French video can be a great way to improve your French, but don’t be surprised if it takes more energy and focus than watching TV in English. Also, don’t be afraid to watch the same segment more than once, or to watch an entire episode with captions on and then again with captions off. If you add 15 minutes a day of French video watching to your routine, you’ll be sure to notice a big jump in your mastery in no time.

Bonne continuation!

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Vocab list: Pietr-le-Letton, Chapter 13

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.

expression (root)Frequency in 2010Frequency in 1970Frequency in 1930
surcroît1 in 66,3001 in 125,0001 in 159,000
pan1 in 91,6001 in 133,0001 in 123,000
refouler1 in 109,0001 in 145,0001 in 113,000
pourpre1 in 236,0001 in 191,0001 in 129,000
houle1 in 472,0001 in 340,0001 in 373,000
galon1 in 581,0001 in 543,0001 in 445,000
saupoudré1 in 723,0001 in 1,320,0001 in 818,000
blafard1 in 777,0001 in 967,0001 in 856,000
exsangue1 in 794,0001 in 1,330,0001 in 1,600,000
affaissé1 in 1,210,0001 in 1,040,0001 in 676,000
trépigner1 in 1,220,0001 in 1,750,0001 in 1,620,000
pitre1 in 2,000,0001 in 1,630,0001 in 1,140,000
érailler1 in 2,050,0001 in 4,090,0001 in 3,200,000
pelisse1 in 2,170,0001 in 1,680,0001 in 1,070,000
écoeurant1 in 4,620,0001 in 12,500,0001 in 23,300,000
bonasse1 in 7,060,0001 in 4,710,0001 in 4,530,000
dépoitraillée1 in 20,600,0001 in 22,000,0001 in 18,900,000

Word notes

  • 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..