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Margaret Munns, 1922 – 2022

Madame Munns, 1988 school yearbook

I learned this week of the death of Margaret Munns, my French teacher for all four years of high school. Madame Munns lived to the age of 100, and was already 66 when I graduated in 1988. I gather she retired shortly after that. She was an outstanding teacher and I was very fortunate to have learned from her for so long. I owe her an enormous debt of gratitude for giving me the foundations for what has become a great source of pleasure to me for many years.

Madame Munns was traditional in her teaching. We students sat in rows of desks facing forward, occasionally turning to our left or right for conversations with other students. I believe her class room was all French all the time, at least at the upper levels. I don’t recall what grammar textbooks we used, but there were daily exercises for homework and chalk-talk lectures to review sticky points. There were weekly vocabulary words to learn as well as irregular verb conjugations to memorize. We had frequent quizzes and tests to study for; we seldom went to the school’s “language lab”, which was little more than a collection of two dozen tape recorders.

But alongside the dryer stuff, we worked with real French texts. We read the 1840 novel Colomba by Prosper Mérimée, which featured rough Corsicans and introduced me to the history of Bonaparte’s Hundred Days return from exile. We read the 1923 play Knock ou le Triomphe de la médecine by Jules Romains. I delighted in Dr Knock’s shyster conman bit even as I was totally lost by the extended Act I description of Dr Parpalaid’s fancy automobile. We read Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Étranger in French class a full year before we were assigned to read it in translation in English class. I didn’t understand the notion of existential epiphany in either language. We read En attendant Godot, whose symbolism I understood better, but whose Russian-named characters I couldn’t keep straight. (We also read Émile et les détectives, which I only later learned was a translation from the German).

Madame Munns did not present as a “warm fuzzy” to her students in my era (though perhaps I wasn’t the most attuned observer of emotional communication), but I have three memories that make it clear she was looking out for me personally. I was a strong student in 9th grade, and so was surprised when some scheduling error caused me to be assigned to Madame Munns’s less-advanced French class in 10th grade. I discussed this with her on the first day of class. She agreed that it was an error that we would get fixed, but that in the meantime I should join the class until it got sorted out.

I listened as she started the first day’s lesson with a review of some basics: colors, days of the week, classroom objects. I confess I was feeling rather superior to these duffers who couldn’t remember cahier or crayon, and I imagine my face showed it when she called on one student to come up to the front of the class to count aloud from one to ten. When the boy had finished, she asked if anyone could count the next ten numbers. My hand shot up, and I strutted to the front, eager to show that I was clearly in the wrong class. No sooner had I started than I realized that after a summer off I couldn’t recall what came after «Onze, douze, treize, … ». «… quarante ?» I ventured. Madame Munns frowned. «Dix-quatre?». Eventually she supplied me the missing «quatorze» and I made it up to vingt without further incident.

Madame Munns didn’t say anything particular that I recall, but I distinctly remember a look she gave me which I interpreted as “Honors class or non-Honors class, I still have things to teach young man”. Did she know that those pesky numbers in the teens range are hard to navigate, and easy to forget over a break? Did she pick me for that item to make a point? I’ll never know, but the incident took me down a peg and stayed with me when my schedule was corrected a few days later.

The second episode I recall came just a few weeks later. Madame Munns had arranged for her AP students, seniors all, to subscribe to a French pedagogical newspaper aimed at an American high school audience. The paper came out weekly and was delivered in bulk to French teachers around the country. I was still in 10th grade, two years off from AP French, but Madame Munns took me aside and asked me if I’d like to subscribe as well. I did, and for the next two years I would stop by her desk once a week at the end of class and quietly pick up my personal copy of the paper. I believe I was on the only non-AP student who did this. I would read it over the course of the week, in class after I had finished a desk assignment, in a free period, at home, whenever. I read basic stories of French politics and culture, stories about happenings in the major cities of France, and news of the wider Francophone world. Even with the language and content tailored for teenagers, this was hard going for me. But I drew a lot of confidence from the fact that Madame Munns had picked me out as a student who was ready for this challenge, and I stuck with it as a weekly habit for three years.

Yours truly in 1988.

The third memory I have of personalized education from Madame Munns took place over several weeks of senior year. It wasn’t part of the AP French curriculum, but somehow I ended up reading Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendahl. I don’t recall our school library having a lot of other French language books, but surprisingly this one was on the shelf, unabridged, in the original French. I read a few chapters each week and buffered up questions to ask Madame Munns about parts I didn’t understand. We met informally once or twice a month and she explained to me the things I was missing, both idiomatic expressions and cultural background. This was well before the World Wide Web of course, so the personal attention was invaluable.

I never spoke to Madame Munns again after graduation. I don’t know why, really, it just didn’t seem like a thing one could do. I was in a hurry to get out of town and put Worcester behind me, and my high school teachers were part of Worcester. I know I felt proud when I learned over the summer, post-graduation, that I’d gotten a top score on my French AP exam, and prouder still of the reaction I got four years later from a French cabbie on my first visit to Paris. I chatted with the driver during a ride, and at some point he asked me what part of Canada I was from. He then absolutely refused to believe I was from America – no Americans spoke French that fluently. I thought of sharing experiences of that first trip with Madame Munns when I got home, but she had retired by then and tracking down former teachers just wasn’t in my lexicon.

I wish I had thought to reconnect with her at some point in these past 10 years of my renewed interested in French studies. Her family says that Madame Munns was intellectually engaged and active right through her 100 years, and I read in her obituary that she did in fact keep up with a number of her former students. I would have enjoyed comparing stories of French travels with her and perhaps doing French crossword puzzles together. As it is, I can only write this posthumous remembrance of her and share it with the world.

Madame Munns inscribed my yearbook with the dedication «David, tu me manqueras. Meilleurs voeux, M. Munns». Even though I have not been in contact with her for the past 34 years, elle me manque aussi. Merci mille fois, Madame Munns.

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Odds and Ends

I’ve read / watched to a lot of excellent English language books / movies / television. I’ve also consumed a lot of ordinary stuff, and more than my fair share of absolute junk: insipid novels, low-brow sitcoms, cringeworthy comic books or comic-book movies. In French, though, I’ve mostly read things recommended to me by someone, and that’s mostly good stuff. The past couple weeks, though, I’ve strayed from the recommendations path a bit, with the predictable result that the stuff I’ve consumed has … a range of quality. But it’s all part of expanding my cultural literacy, so it’s all good.

Le viandier de Polpette: L’ail des ours

Le viandier de Polpette is a quirky but charming volume of bandes desinées by Julien Neel and Olivier Milhaud. I picked it off the shelf of the French Library completely at random. It features Polpette, a former army cook who now runs the kitchen for the adult son of a nobleman in their mountain redoubt, Le Coq Vert. The book interleaves lovingly presented country French recipes with a vague plot about the Count’s father coming to visit. There’s a lot of running gags among the other denizens of the Coq Vert, including a retired British colonel and a stereotypical French proletariat. And there’s also a firebrand of a young woman who walks around with an entourage of unleashed pet ferrets. Oh, somewhere in there we encounter the rather large titular animal who may or may not be a bear, and who seems to have no relationship to garlic. The overall effect is off-beat, shall we say.

I did pick up a number of vocabulary words from this book:

  • capiteux – se dit d’un vin, d’un alcool qui monte à la tête, d’un parfum très fort.
  • la minerai – roche présentant une concentration élevée minéraux utiles (si inutiles, on l’appelle la gangue).
  • châtelain – propriétaire d’un château.
  • chaland (vieux) – celui qui achète habituellement chez un même marchand.
  • gargote (f) – restaurant où l’on mange à bas prix une mauvaise nourriture.
  • amenuiser – rendre quelque chose plus fiable, moins important. réduire, diminuer. Cf la menuiserie, «amenuiser une planche».
  • la guigne – (familier) malchance persistante; déveine, poisse. Avoir de la guigne.
  • ça barde – (populare) cela devient dangereux, en parlant d’une action; cela devient violent, en parlant d’une discussion.
  • être givré – (familier) être fou.
  • couver – entourer quelqu’un de soins attentifs et excessifs de tendresse.
  • d’ores et déjà – dès maintenant.
  • jaja – (populaire) vin rouge.
  • toupet – (familier) audace, effronterie. «Quel toupet !»
  • un encas – repas léger préparé pour être servi en cas de besoin.
  • un fantassin – militaire de l’infanterie.

Balle Perdue

The movie Balle Perdue (2020) is available on Netflix, and is in French, so I watched it. I haven’t seen any films from the Fast and Furious franchise, but I imagine they are similar. There’s a great deal of high speed car chases, various souped up vehicles with enhancements like hardened front grills, turbo thrusters, and sharpened forklift attachments. Inevitably, most of the cars crash, with the exception of our hero’s. It endures one non-fatal collision after another, yet somehow not only keeps functioning, it magically appears without dents or scapes just seconds later during the same chase. Not a great job of film editing. There’s also a lot of shooting, as there’s a lot of (corrupt) police officers involved. The plot, such as it is, involves a brilliant but wayward young car mechanic who enhances cars for a criminal gang, gets arrested and sent to jail, but is then paroled under the sponsorship of a police captain who wants his own fleet of enhanced police cruisers to catch the bad guys.

This works out great, until the police captain figures out too many bad guys are still getting away, and starts to suspect a leak in his department. Naturally, this being a French police movie, large parts of the brigade are corrupt and in the pay of the drug gangs. The police captain is murdered by his lieutenant, who then pins the crime on the wunder-mechanic, who flees and then has to clear his name and expose the corruption. This gives the film an excuse for lots of gun battles and dead bodies in addition to the high-speed car chases.

Not a lot of vocabulary here, but always good to hear rough accents and street language.

Skidamarink

Guillaume Musso is one of the best-selling French authors of the 21st century. He’s written over twenty books, primarily mysteries and thrillers, and sells more than a million copies a year. His first novel, entitled Skidamarink, appeared in 2001 and made very little impression. It sold a few thousand copies and got tepid reviews before going out of print. But it was re-published in 2020 with a new forward by the author, and was subsequently recorded as an audio-book. This is how I came to listen to it — I browsed Audible.com for French mysteries, saw this as a recent publication, looked up the author and found he was widely celebrated in French popular literature and clicked “buy”. Only when I listened to the forward did I learn that it was Musso’s first book and not a recent one.

The forward also had an interesting bit about the book’s place in the Musso canon. Apparently, Musso doesn’t think much of it: it was a first novel, he wrote it while he was teaching school, his editor for the book was his mother. But when his later works became popular, fans went looking for this early work. Prices for used copies skyrocketed on auction sites, and low-quality pirated scans circulated on the web. Musso writes that he held off from republishing the work because he thought he’d revise it first, but then kept prioritizing new works. So in 2020, he finally greenlighted the re-issuance of the book with its original text. In the forward, he notes “the faults in its quality, but also the quality of its faults.” He also notes the similarities with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, but points out that his book was published two years before Brown’s blockbuster.

Skidamarink book isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty shoddy. The mystery is shoddy somebody stole the Mona Lisa painting, cut it into pieces, and sent them to four seemingly unconnected people. The thief also sent literary quotes from Victor Hugo, John Dunne, and the like and summoned the four civilians to a secret meeting in an Italian church. Subsequent events convince the four that their lives are in danger if they don’t work together to decipher a series of cryptic criminal threats that the thief issues through the media, like murdering prominent business leaders and poisoning gated communities. The whole thing is a bit too rococo and (as Musso writes in the forward) romanesque for my tastes.

But the audio book is in French, which is really all it promised to be. Listening is a bit of a challenge, not because of the clichéd expressions, but because of the narrators unfamiliar accents, especially as he tries to differentiate three Americain characters and one Italian.

Glenn, naissance d’un prodige

Glenn Gould was a Canadian classical pianist who lived from 1932 to 1982, dying of a stroke at the age of 50. His 1956 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations was one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time. He had an unusual style, crouching over the keyboard as he played and humming audibly to himself. After a short concertizing career as a young artist, he retreated to the studio where he made dozens of recordings right up to his death. He was a pop icon and a bit eccentric, but recorded interviews make it clear he was quite intelligent and could speak affably about his life and his music without difficulty.

I point this out because Ivan Calbérac’s play Glenn, naissance d’un prodige, paints the title character as far more eccentric, to the point of being paranoid and incoherent. Perhaps Gould was that way in private or in down periods, but there’s enough public footage and interview recordings of him being fairly normal that the play’s presentation rings hollow. The script is otherwise undistinguished, presenting a sequence of biographical sketches that offer little beyond the biography section of his Wikipedia page. There’s a homey portrayal of Glenn’s father, and a depiction of Glenn’s mother as both narcissistic and obsessive, but given the distorted presentation of Gould himself I put little stock in these as accurate characterizations of his parents.

But the play was featured in the September 2022 issue of L’avant-scène théâtre, so I read it. I noted several unfamiliar vocabulary words as I went, which are always valuable to me:

  • un brochet: poisson ésocidé des eaux douces [pike en anglais].
  • écueil (m): (litéraire) tout ce qui fait obstacle, met en péril; danger, piège. Litéralement, une tête de roche couverte par moins de 20 m d’eau.
  • espiègle: personne vive; malicieuse mais sans méchanceté. De Till Eulenspiegel. espièglerie.
  • voilage (m): Grand rideau de fenêtre en voile.
  • limace (f): mollusque pulmoné terrestre sans coquille externe [slug en anglais].
  • décoifant: surprenant; dérangeant les cheveux de quelqu’un.
  • dithyrambique: très élogieux, d’un enthousiasme emphatique, outré. Dithyrambe – cantique consacré à Dionysus.
  • clavecin (m): instrument de musique à cordes pincées et à clavier.
  • parti pris: opinion audacieux; idée fixe a priori.
  • fêlure (f): fracture incomplète d’un os.
  • luxation (f): déplacement des 2 extrémités osseuses d’une articulation.
  • convier: inviter
  • accaparer: occuper exclusivement quelqu’un, lui prendre tout son temps; absorber.
  • larguer: abandonner quelqu’un, quelque chose; s’en débarrasser.
  • foutoir (m): (populaire) endroit où règne un désordre extrême.
  • fiston (m): mot d’affection adressé à son fils ou à un jeune garçon [kiddo en anglais].

Other than that, I’ve been doing French crosswords and collecting vocabulary words from children’s books. But this post is long enough, so I’ll write about that in an upcoming article.

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Les Travailleurs de la Mer, Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo is a giant of French literature, whose mark on the language is rivaled perhaps only by Molière. He was also politically active during the heart of the 19th century, a period I know shamefully little about. Hugo is best known today, especially among Americans, for his two novels Notre Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), each of which has been adapted for the stage and screen many times.

The 30 year gap between these two masterpieces has three explanations. First, during the 1800’s novels were not considered the preeminent literary form. They shared the stage, as it were, with theater and, to a lesser extent, essays. The many modern French prizes for best novel (from Prix Goncourt on down) were originally marketing gimmicks by publishers struggling to get the theater-focused public interested in novels. Although Hugo wrote one other novel between Notre Dame and Misérables (the 1834 Claude Gueux), most of his literary output during that period was in the form of plays, poems, and political pamphlets. The second reason for the publication gap was the death of his oldest daughter Léopoldine in 1843 at the age of just 19. Léopoldine drowned in the Seine river while Hugo was visiting the southwest France, and overcome with grief he stopped publishing entirely for nearly a decade.

The event that pushed him back onto the literary stage was also the third explanation for his 30 year abstention from novel writing: the coup d’état by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851, which brought the end of the Second Republic of France and began the Second Empire. Hugo was serving as a deputy in the Assembly when the coup happened, and organized a failed resistance movement. He fled from France to Belgium in December 1851, and in January 1852 he was officially exiled from France (along with 60 other former Assembly members). Later that year he judged Belgium too precarious a resting place and retreated further to the Channel Islands, which were British protectorates at the time and so relatively safe from French interference. From this remove he wrote scathing critiques of the Second Empire government, including both polemics and poems. Hugo lived on the island of Jersey for 3 years, and then on the island of Guernsey for another 15, until finally returning to France on September 5, 1870, the day after the declaration of the Third Republic (the date of which is immortalized by the downtown Paris metro station named “Quatre-Septembre”).

Quatre-Septembre: I’ve used this station many times, rarely looked up the origin of the name.

All of this preamble is to explain how it is that Hugo came to set his 1866 novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer on the island of Guernsey, an otherwise odd choice for a French literary giant. I listened to Travailleurs in audiobook form after Steven Galante (of the French Library of Boston) recommended it to me as his favorite of Hugo’s work. It’s a relatively short novel, whose unabridged recording weighs in at only eight hours. I finished it in three or four weeks of irregular listening during my commute to work. (Note that most modern paper editions of the book include an 80 page introduction (!) that Hugo wrote for the 1883 edition, and which presents a non-fiction treatment of the island of Guernsey. The audio edition I listened to omits this text).

Illustration by Achille Granchi-Taylor

Les Travailleurs de la mer, the proper novel, also starts off as a portrait of island life and the people of Guernsey. There’s a lot of initial descriptions of landscapes, seascapes, buildings, social classes, and individuals. After this rather slow, extended set-up, we move on to what critic Marc Eigeldinger dubbed “an Iliad of one”. Gilliatt, a 30-year-old sailor, has fallen hopelessly in love with the much younger Déruchette. He is a loner, considered an odd duck by his fellow islanders, but recognized as a polymath who has mastered sailing, fishing, boat-building, and iron-smithing (plus reading and writing). She is the delicate niece of Mess Lethierry, a rough but wealthy steamboat owner, who has vowed to give her every comfort imaginable and to keep her cosseted until the perfect husband can be found. When the prized steamboat aground on a mid-channel rocky outpost (un écueil), Lethierry promises Déruchette’s hand in marriage to anyone who can save the vessel. Gilliatt announces he will go, spends the better part of 4 months completing the task single-handedly, and returns to claim his bride. Alas, he finds that she has fallen in love with another (the Reverend Ebenezer Caudray), and so he selflessly helps the young couple elope before tranquilly drowning himself in the incoming tide off Guernsey. There’s also some stuff about a treacherous captain who sabotaged Lethierry’s boat, which is how it came to crash on the rocks in the first place.

Illustration by Gustav Doré

On the whole, I enjoyed the book greatly, especially hearing Hugo’s rich vocabulary and poetic sentences read aloud. I don’t have statistics for this, but I suspect that the total number of distinct words in this novel is much higher than in contemporary novels of comparable length. There’s all kinds of boat words and waterfront words and words for ropes pulleys and winches and cords and barricades – all the stuff you need to describe meticulously the operation of one man solo freeing an engine from a crashed steamboat and loading it onto a sailboat. To top it off, after the false climax of withstanding the onslaught of a hurricane, we get the real climax of Gilliatt surviving a giant squid attack by means of cutting out its eye and brain with a knife. Prior to Hugo’s book, the French word for squid was «poulpe». But Hugo coined a new word for the monster, «pieuvre» (possibly a blend of two other words from French fishermen, «poufre» and «pouvre». Shortly after Les Travailleurs de la Mer was published, «pieuvre» became the dominant form (according to Wikipedia; however the Google N-gram viewer suggests the two forms are pretty much equally frequent since 1870).

Since I was listening while driving, I did not note unfamiliar vocabulary words or underline memorable phrases. But every few minutes I remarked to myself “now that’s a sentence.” One example that I can recall occurs after Gilliatt has spent countless weeks carefully preparing for the engine-hoisting operation. When the day approaches and the weather turns threatening, he abandons his usual caution and hurries to complete the final steps. Hugo writes: «À ce point d’achèvement et si près de la fin, la hâte est prudence.» Good stuff. I am not usually a fan of poetry, but based on the poetic language of this novel, I went to the French Library of Boston to look for some of Hugo’s most famous collections of poems works (Les Châtiments, Les Contemplations, La Légende des siècles). Unfortunately, they are still unboxing their collection from a multi-year renovation… and the boxes of poetry are last on the schedule to be reshelved. So I guess I’ll just have to wait.

From the Guernsey Museum at Caddie collection, 1863.
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Une idée géniale, Théâtre du Boulevard

L’avant-scène théâtre paused publication during Covid and then published more than 2 issues a month for a while in order to catch up. It’s now reached the point where the date on the cover more or less matches the date on which the magazine arrives in my mailbox. It was impossible for me to keep up with the flow of arrivals when they came 3-4 times per month, but now that they’ve settled down I’m going to make an effort to read each play within two weeks of its arrival. We’ll see how it goes.

The August 2022 issue features the play Une idée géniale. This is a light-hearted work of fluff that is described in the surrounding commentary as théâtre du boulevard. All the classic elements of a 19th century farce are present in modern form. The front matter specifies a familiar set with plenty of opportunities for coming and going (a living room with doors leading to the kitchen, the basement, the bathroom, the front entry, plus stairs up and a window out). The main actor (who as it happens is also the author, Sebastien Castro) plays three separate characters – a pair of twins (one of whom is coincidentally an amateur actor) plus an unrelated man who just happens to be look just like them. And the plot revolves around a jealous husband who tries to derail his wife’s nascent affair with the doppelganger (le sosie) by hiring the actor to impersonate his wife’s lover and act boorishly. All the predictable twists and turns ensue.

Yet for all its familiarity, the play avoids being trite. The characters are sketched out with novel particulars, the writing is clever, and the timing precise. Castro shows that the portes qui claquent form may be well-worn, but if handled deftly it can still provide an evening’s amusement. I read it in two quick sittings and laughed out loud a several times. Sometimes we want theater to have meaning, but sometimes we are happy for it to be a source of simple, goofy pleasure. Here are two examples of the camp-y humor which brought a smile to my face:

CATHERINE [la voisine]: Au fait, j’ai rapporté Schubert à Arnaud.
THOMAS: (prenant le petit sac, intrigué) Schubert ?
CATHERINE: Ah ! mais je suis bête, c’est le match, ce soir. Arnaud est chez son ami.
THOMAS: Ah ben, non, justement, il a pas pu y aller.
CATHERINE: Oh, c’est dommage, il se faisait une joie.
THOMAS: Je sais mais il a eu un accident.
CATHERINE: Qu’est-ce qu’il s’est passé ?
THOMAS: Il était dans sa voiture… Et paf ! Crevé.
CATHERINE: Comment ça « crevé » ?
THOMAS: Ça doit être l’usure …
CATHERINE: Mais vous voulez dire qu’Arnaud est …
THOMAS: (regardant dans le sac et en sortant deux CD) Des CD !
CATHERINE: Décédé ? Mais quelle horreur !

French phonetic word-play (des CD / décédé), gotta love it. Recall that « crevé » is both the expression for having a punctured tire and also a familiar expression dying.

Here’s another excerpt that is all about the delivery:

ARNAUD: Et après on parle de la tenue …
THOMAS: Alors, vous avez de la chance, la costumière de la troupe est une amie et elle m’a prêté deux trois choses pas inintéressantes. Quand on a monté Mary Poppins, j’ai dû reprendre le rôle au pied levé parce que la comédienne principale s’était fait renverser par une voiture deux heures avant la première. C’était horrible. En plus, les mauvaises langues ont dit que j’avais fait exprès de griller le feu.

Comic gold.

Arnaud (José Paul) et Thomas (Sébastien Castro)

Vocabulaire

As is perhaps clear from these two excerpts, the form may be throwback but the register of the language is modern and familiar. Here’s a list of vocabulary words and expressions from the script that were new to me, many of them slang. Definitions largely drawn from Larousse, with some additions from Wiktionary or the like.

  • toucher sa bille: être compétent; connaître bien (familier). «Il touche sa bille en bricolage».
  • une patère: support fixé à un mur, en forme de disque, de boule ou de crochet, qui sert soit à suspendre des vêtements, soit à soutenir des rideaux, des tentures, etc.
  • ahurir: frapper quelqu’un d’un étonnement qui le laisse interdit. «Cette réponse m’ahurit». Souvent comme adjectif «ahuri» = surpris au point de paraître stupide.
  • un coup de bol: un coup de chance.
  • faire un carton: tirer sur la cible; avoir beaucoup de succès; marquer des points; réussir.
  • vétuste: qui est vieux, détérioré par le temps. «Une maison vétuste».
  • mouais: (familier) marque l’affirmatif, forcé ou contraint, ou tout simplement une affirmation de pratique , et non de principe, par «obligation». Exprime un accord réservé, sans adhésion réelle.
  • se barrer: (populaire) s’en aller, partir, s’enfuir. Aussi familier: se tirer, se casser.
  • paf !: (interjection) exprime un coup frappé, une chute, un incident imprévu.
  • enliser: mettre / maintenir quelqu’un ou quelque chose dans un état d’inertie, de stagnation, qui empêche d’évoluer; enfoncer. Souvent «s’enliser», ou avec les sables mouvants.
  • cachet: (m) prix d’une leçon particulière (de piano, de dessin, etc.). Aussi rétribution d’un artiste, d’un journaliste, pour une représentations, une émission, etc. [there are other more common meanings of cachet].
  • au pied levé: sans avoir le temps de se préparer.
  • griller un feu: passer un feu de couleur rouge, sans prêter attention à sa signalisation. Ne pas s’arrêter.
  • un beauf: (populaire) type de Français moyen, réactionnaire et raciste, inspiré d’un personnage de bandes dessinées (voyez le chanson de Renaud).
  • Bouygues: un opérateur de télécommunications, comme Orange, SFR. Fondé par Francis Bouygues dans le contexte de reconstruction de la France après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Société parente du chaîne TF1.
  • frangin, frangine: (populaire) frère, soeur.
  • être à cran: dans un état d’irritation qu’on a peine à maîtriser.
  • avoir le cran: oser, avoir du courage.

  • avoir les crocs: (familier) avoir très faim. Cf croc, croquer et croque-monsieur.
  • changer le fusil d’épaule: changer d’avis ou d’opinion.
crocs d’un chien
  • racaille: (f) populace méprisable; catégorie de personnes considérées comme viles.
  • le trac: (familier) peur ou angoisse irraisonnée que quelqu’un éprouve au moment de paraître en public, de subir une épreuve, etc. «avoir le trac».
  • paumer: (populaire) perdre, égarer.
  • foireux: (populaire) qui fonctionne mal, raté, sans valeur. «une idée foireuse».
  • vénère: (familier, verlan) énervé; en colère.
  • usure: (f) détérioration progressive par frottement, érosion, utilisation.
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Crossword puzzle words

The last few times I’ve been to France, I’ve stopped at a newsstand or airport store and purchased a few books of crossword puzzles. There are a few variants of these, but the ones I’ve gravitated to are called «mots fléchés». Usually I buy a few at different levels 0 – 4, and they go mostly untouched, but this summer I’ve gotten into a good rhythm of doing a puzzle or two every day.

Doing puzzles regularly really helps, as there’s a lot of “crossword puzzle vocabulary”, words that appear frequently in grid-based puzzles because they have a convenient alternation of vowels and consonants, or rare letters in a short word These words often don’t appear much in daily language, but are a puzzle-makers friend (although high quality puzzle makers consider overuse of these lazy). In English these are words like “EMIR” (an Arab prince); “TSAR” or “CZAR” (a Russian ruler); and more obscure things like “ADIT” (the opening to a mine); “ITER” (a Roman road); and “AGORA” (a Roman market). In French there’s a different collection of such words.

As I’ve been solving my daily puzzle, I’ve jotted down in the margins words that are unfamiliar to me, either from the fill or sometimes from the clue itself. There’s typically 5-10 of these each puzzle. Recording them is a good way of highlighting what I don’t know, and makes it easy to flip back a few puzzles later looking for that word meaning a colorful parakeet («ARA»), school gym class («E.P.S.»), or fish ball («ACRA»).

Here’s a selection of words from the last several puzzles I did in the level 1-2 book I’m well into the level 2 puzzles, I hope. Not all of the entries are oddball crossword puzzle words; some are just holes in my vocabulary of everyday things. But solving puzzles is as good a way as any to come upon the holes, and memorializing them here may help me retain them down the road.

  • Puzzle 72
    • lopin: a small parcel of land. Often occurring as «lopin de terre». Was the clue for the answer «are».
    • mimine: a familiar and pediatric word for “hand”. «Donne-moi ta mimine pour traverser la rue.» Was the clue for the answer «main».
    • immonde: religiously impure, filthy, or repugnant. Was the clue for the answer «infecté»
    • bigleux: someone with bad vision or a lazy eye. Familiar and pejorative. Was the clue for «miro», which means the same thing and sits in the same register.
    • fourreau: a sheath or scabbard. Was clued by «gaine» (which I knew as “girdle”) and «étui allongé». I think of an étui as more hard-shelled and hinged / box-like than a sheath, but close enough.
    • traire: to milk, i.e. pull milk from an animal’s teat. Clue was «tirer le lait».
    • rasade: an amount of a beverage that corresponds to a full glass. Analogous to the archaic English “bumper”. Was clued with «grande gorgée», a “big swallow”.
    • requinquer: replenish, recharge, refocus. To restore strength. Often used reflexively «se requinquer» meaning “to perk up”. Was the clue with answer «retaper»
    • retaper: to put back in shape, to fix up. Was the clued by «requinquer»

  • Puzzle 71
    • écu: No, not the old French coin. No, not the fun, abstract “European currency unit” that the economists played with in the 20-year run up to the launch of the Euro. No, this one means “a shield”, specifically the one that was stamped on the old French coins, and from which they take their name. When you remember that the accent over the e indicates a missing s, you quickly get to the English word “escutcheon“. Was clued with «boucliers».
    • preau: the inner courtyard of a school (or prison). Playground. Was clued with «cour d’école».
    • chambouler: to upset, turn upside down. Related to the English “shamble”, as in “they left the place in shambles”. I sort of guessed that (wasn’t sure about the relationship with the walking gait “shamble”), but that was the clue. I had no idea what the answer was. It turned out to be …
    • tournebouler: to upset, trouble or worry somebody. This is very much a 20th century word, with almost no citations prior to 1900. It’s a combination of «tourner» and «bouleverser». Was clued by «chambouler».
    • oisif: someone who is idle, without a profession, or inactive. A bit pejorative, like “slacker”. Can be a noun or an adjective. Was clued by «désoeuvré».
    • désoeuvré: idle, not working. Pretty much a synonym of oisif.
    • allécher: to entice, attract with a promise of pleasure. Was the clue for «attirer».

  • Puzzle 70
    • Éloi: the name of the patron saint of goldsmiths. This one really confused me, as the clue was «patron des orfèvres». The problem is that there’s a Quai des Orfèvres in the 1ère arrondissement of Paris (Île de la Cité) where the police judiciaire (PJ) were housed for many many years. So lots of French detective novels talk about this place as a stand in for the police themselves, say things like “Orfèvres getting involved” or “the order came from Orvèvres”. So I was trying to figure out who is the boss of the French central police, and getting hung up on words involving law («loi»). Sigh.
    • cric: a jack, i.e. a tool used to lift up a car. The clue was «appareil de levage».
    • gigoter: to wriggle one’s body or appendages. Clue for «trémousser».
    • trémousser: to tremble with small, irregular movements. Clued by «se gigoter»
    • latté: not the coffee drink, but an adjective meaning “composed of thin slats of wood”. The french for these are «lattes», the english is “lath” as in “lath and plaster”.
    • gageure: an old word meaning “a bet”. Was the clue for «pari».
    • démentir: to deny, contradict, or refuse. Was the clue for «nier»
    • édulcorer: to sweeten (literally), to soften (metaphorically). Was the clue for «sucrer».
    • etrier: a horse-rider’s stirrup, or more generally any curved piece of metal (e.g. the handle of a pail, a U-bolt). Clued by «arceau en métal».
    • touffu: thick, dense. Clued by «dense, épaissé».
    • forer: to drill or bore into a rock. Clued by «percer».

So there you have it. 3 puzzles, 27 words. We’ll see what tomorrow’s puzzle brings.

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Un amour de Blum

This afternoon we saw Un amour de Blum, by Gérard Savoisien, at Théâtre du Chêne Noir. Two actors tell (a dramatization of) the real-life story of Léon Blum, a former President of the French Council, and Jeanne Levylier, a long-time admirer of Blum who is 20 years his junior. Both are Jewish, he a socialist politician and she a cosseted Parisian bourgeoise. It is 1940, and we find Blum held as a political prisoner by the Vichy government. Jeanne arranges to visit him frequently, and soon expresses her love for him, leading to an unlikely amorous affair. She follows him from prison to prison, somehow free while he is jailed. Eventually, she makes the decision to join him in his imprisonment in Himler’s hunting pavillion just outside the concentration camp at Buchenwald. The two manage to survive and are liberated by the Americans in 1945.

The plays themes are about finding love in times of great hardship, transmuting fear into courage, and also living life with dignity to the end. The performance was very well acted, but the text is a bit repetitive. I think I understood most of the language, will double check that when I read the text which I purchased after the show. Overall enjoyable, but not hors du commun.

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Sans Tambour

Super weird. Very talented cast of 3 actors who sing, plus 5 musicians who act. Lots of playing with music, soprano doubling one of the actors, advanced techniques. Opened by playing around with record player realized by musicians.

Lots of demolishing the set. Lots of debris everywhere. No clear, coherent plot, many story lines loosely interwoven. Lots of slapstick, which helped when they had to improvise in the presence of very high winds. A piano fell on someone’s head (planned).

Prepared piano.

And then, a whole sequence retelling Tristan and Isolde. Brief full nudity, extended partial nudity (a soprano singing and disrobing while showering in her tears). Lots of German singing, with French translations projected on the side.

Not nearly as well constructed, or even structured, as Le Moine Noir. Still, a very talented cast.

Preceded by dinner with Étienne, Claude, Maurice, et Françoise.

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Hansel, Gretel, et les Autres

Production for kids. Interesting take on the original story, with a focus on the adults. What’s happening back in the village while Hansel and Gretel have disappeared. Not the unrealistic nobody cares, or generic “they were sad”. A detailed cast of police inspector, school teacher, school principal, librarian, etc.

Interesting back story for why the 2 kids went into the woods. Food suddenly stopped growing, everything lost its taste. Science responded by making nutritional pills, 3 a day sufficient. Kids leave because Gretel, age 8, is not happy with what she sees of adult world. Hansel, age 6, follows out of habit/loyalty, but not all that eager to leave. They find gingerbread house and are delighted with real food. Evil witch is nothing of the sort, but is some kind of imagined fantasy. She needs people to believe in her to remain present, adults all forgetting. They all prepare a feast for the villagers, who finally come search the forest and follow first the white pebbles and finally the smell of the food to find H&G.

Most interesting was form factor. 3 actors, wooden shadow puppets, hand/glove puppets (fingers are legs and arms, gloved back of hand decorated with face. Small TV screens show crudely animated version of same characters, allow interactions. News flash from live actors in studio. Also odd head and hands puppet, protruding through backdrop.

Venu = chapelle des pénitents blancs. Inside

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Le Moine Noir

Great review with good photos at https://www.francetvinfo.fr/festival-avignon/ouverture-du-festival-davignon-2022-un-moine-noir-2-000-personnes-une-ministre-et-le-mistral_5244790.html

Enormously talented cast of actors, dancers, and musicians. We met one of the stars (the father) in a sheet music store earlier in the week.

Quite a high concept piece, but with a clear structure. I was able to stay with it the whole time, working to make sense of the theater, not just the words.

Definitely a “knock your socks off” kind of spectacle, worthy of pride of place at a big international theater festival.

Highly recommend to others.