Who the Dickens?

The brilliance of the Internet is again demonstrated. For years, Clare and I have been trying to find the identity of the uncredited and charismatic actor who plays the roadblock official in Ralph Thomas's excellent 1958 adaption of A Tale of Two Cities.

I asked a while back on the Internet Movie Database forum for the film, and got an answer that it was Anton Diffring, but I've never been convinced of this. Finally, however, I spotted a better answer on the forum of Britmovie.co.uk, which has a number of threads in the category of Extras, including this post.

... I was convinced the gatekeeper was Anton Diffring before realizing it was Hubert Noel.
- Dave Wright, post #739, Sighted: Ah, There You Are!

Dave is undoubtedly correct. Born Hubert Paul Luis Nion in Le Havre in 1924, Hubert Noël (aka Hubert Noel) was a French actor with a long career as a stage actor and in French cinema (see the French Wikipedia and IMDb), but who tended to appear in bit parts in rather naff examples of English language cinema.

Right: Hubert Noël as the vampire Count Sinistre
in the 1965 Devils of Darkness (see review).

- Ray

Ratatouille

This is ultimately going to be a bit of a nepotistic post, but Clare and I finally watched - and then almost immediately rewatched - Ratatouille, the Disney/Pixar animated movie about a rat who becomes a great Paris chef.

It's a brilliant film, an example of how Disney have long since moved on from the safe and trite. It works at both a simple level - it's thoroughly heartwarming - but also at a deeper one, with many visual references to classic French movie actors, and even an unmistakable allusion to Proust's classic "Madeleines and Lime Blossom Tea" moment. If you haven't seen it, do check it out.

But this post is just an addendum to one on my wife Clare's blog. One of the central motifs in the film is the creation of a gourmet version, confit byaldi, of the French peasant vegetable dish ratatouille. The film and subsequent Googling made it look so tempting that we just had to try it, and it was ... well, see Clare's blog post Ratatouille.

- Ray

Les Visiteurs

Godefroy and Jacquoille

I've just been rewatching the DVD of Jean-Marie Poiré's 1993 cult comedy Les Visiteurs (The Visitors) and thoroughly wishing I knew more French. As you probably know, it concerns the misadventures of a mediaeval knight and his servant (played by Jean Reno and Christian Clavier) who are accidentally transported by a spell to modern France (see synopsis). It works very well as broad farce (at the level of the mediaeval characters washing in the toilet bowl and trying to roast meat using an umbrella as a spit), and the English DVD credits predictably liken it to Monty Python and Blackadder. But I began to twig that there's a lot more going on at the level of wordplay and social satire, most of which is lost in translation to subtitles. That it's far funnier to French speakers would probably explain how it become one of the highest-grossing French films ever.

In some areas, the subtitlers made a very good effort. For example, the servant's name, Jacquouille la Fripouille, incorporates a pun on "Jacques" and "couille" (a vulgar term for testicle), so it could be interpreted as something like "Jack Bollock the Crook". This was neatly adapted to Jacquasse la Crasse (i.e. readable as Jack Ass the Crass). They also went to reasonable effort to find equivalents for some of the archaic French used by the knight Godefroy: for instance, rendering "fillot" / "fillote" (archaic words for a young boy / girl) as "youngling", and "ça puire" (the archaic form of "ça pue" - "it stinks") as "it stinketh". Nevertheless, not much else remains of the flavour of Godefroy's speech, which is described within the film as "a mixture of Old French and Latin", but was described by one reviewer - see Les Visiteurs: Dinnnnnngue! - as "un mélange de vieux français et de délire des 2 scénaristes" ("a mixture of Old French and the delirium of two screenwriters").

On top of this is the whole interplay of language and social class. Godefroy speaks some flavour of formal Old French, Jacquouille a more robust slang. In the future, they find the classes inverted: Jacquouille's descendant is the nouveau riche castle owner Jacquard, and Godefroy's is the impoverished (at least to opulent middle class) Béatrice, whose aristocratic speech is peppered with franglais and French Yuppie affectations such as "Okéééééé" and "Dingue!" (i.e. crazy / far out *) that Jacquoille enthusiastically adopts. There's also Ginette, a bag lady who speaks in a downmarket Parisian accent.

A number of accounts intrepret this mix of people and circumstances as a very edgy microcosm of French culture and how it reflects through language. There's a particularly good analysis in this light in Lucy Mazdon's  2001 France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema: see page 41, Anne Jäckel, 'Les Visiteurs: a feelgood movie for uncertain times'. The section on language notes that the film became so popular that phrases such as "fillotes", "ça puire" and the closing line "Mais qu'est ce que c'est ce binz" ("But what is this mess?" **) became national catchphrases.

- Ray

* The subtitles translate "Dingue" as "Freaky". I strongly suspect this to be informed by Un vendredi dingue, dingue, dingue, the French title of the 1976 film Freaky Friday - the standard translation of "dingue" appears to be "crazy" / "far out".
** ... to put it politely. The argot term "binz" is more akin to "foutoir" - a bloody mess or shambles, with sexual connotations. In the content of Les Visiteurs - the modern Jacquard finding himself in 12th century France - "But why is everything so f*cked-up?" might be a better idiomatic translation of "Mais qu'est ce que c'est ce binz".

Addendum: I just found Mortecouille et Tudieu! Le vocabulaire médiéval, a glossary of archaic French with its modern equivalents, at Pauline Laloua's blog. Googling some of the phrases led me to the interesting coincidence (if it is a coincidence and not an in-joke by the screenwriters of Les Visiteurs) that the leading 19th century lexicographer of historical French was also called Godefroy.

Part of his multi-volume Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du 9e au 15e siècle is on the Internet Archive (see internal search).The full set is on Gallica (see internal search). It's worth a browse if you like words. One I ran into with a distinct connection to  the above topic was "couillard". It's a siege engine like a trebuchet, but with two weights. A number of online accounts say of it "Quant à son étymologie, Napoléon III remarqua déjà qu'un seul coup d'œil sur sa silhouette suffisait à la comprendre!" ("As to its etymology, Napoleon III already remarked that a single glance at the shape was enough to understand!").

Le Cas de Mademoiselle Suzanne

Suzanne's cryptographic tattoo - not on the back!

In the previous post on Rider Haggard's Mr Meeson's Will, I mentioned Le Cas de Mademoiselle Suzanne (The Case of Miss Suzanne), the story that Rider Hagged was alleged to have plagiarised for its plot concerning a young woman with a will tattooed on her back.  It comes from the pulp fiction writer Charles Aubert's 1883 collection Les Nouvelles Amoureuses (The New Loves). An anthology of tales of sex and seduction, it's online at the excellent Gallica (Identifier: ark:/12148/bpt6k57111708), and Le Cas de Mademoiselle Suzanne starts at page 159.

As far as I can tell (between my weak French and Google Translate) the story takes place in a fictitious town called Bize-la-Rizette at the confluence of the Orge and Rémarde rivers (a location now a suburb of Paris - probably Saint-Germain-lès-Arpajon). It's a slightly bawdy romantic comedy concerning the pretty 18-year-old Suzanne, who was a foundling and evidently the offspring of some liaison conducted at this confluence. She has been brought up by the town notary, M. Glayaux, and is mutually attracted to his young clerk, Laurent.

One summer morning, she becomes the centre of a mystery when the house cook Brigitte, coming to wake Suzanne, sees that her nightdress has ridden up to reveal an "embroidery" of unusual blue symbols on her buttocks. She goes to tell Madame Glayaux, the notary's wife, who also comes to see the symbols on the sleeping Suzanne, then in turn brings her husband. None of them can work out what they mean.

Glayaux questions Suzanne, saying she is keeping some secret from him, but she denies all knowledge. The family tries increasingly heroic measures - water, soap, oil, brushes, chemical bleaches - to wash off the symbols.  Finally the pharmacist, who is a little more intelligent, is brought in, and pronounces that the symbols are tattooed. On continued stringent questioning, Suzanne continues to deny knowing how they got there, and the symbols remain a puzzle to the ever-increasing number of observers who are brought in. There's talk of getting them photographed for the scholars at the Academy, and soon the news is all around town.

Embarrassed, Suzanne flees into the countryside and is about to throw herself into the mill-stream when Laurent comes along, and proves the only one to take a sympathetic interest. He argues that since she has no memory of the tattoo, it must have been done when she was a baby and mean something significant about her birth.  He also reveals that he's a puzzle geek - no puzzle is beyond him - and they go back to his room. At a glance, he recognises the symbols as "Un cryptogramme", and over a night's lovemaking he solves it. Who says men can't multi-task?

Ainsi qu'il l'avait promis, et stimulé, d'ailleurs, par son goût pour les problèmes, M. Laurent s'était appliqué tout de suite à trouver la clef du cryptogramme, ne s'interrompant de temps à autre que pour faire quelque caresse à sa douce Suzanne.

Tout d'abord, il comprit que la lettre K ne servait qu'à séparer les mots; puis il trouva que l'x correspondait à la lettre e; le signe V, à la lettre a; le chiffre 2, à la lettre 1; et ainsi de suite, jusqu'à ce qu'il eût recomposé tout l'alphabet.

The decrypted message gives instructions to take to the notary Glayaux a mysterious phrase "l'Orge est tombée dans la «Rémarde.»" ("The Orge has fallen into the Rémarde").

Puzzling over this, they fall asleep, and are woken much later when Glayaux finds them together. Suzanne is ashamed, but at Laurent's prompting, she says the words. All is revealed: Glayaux is in fact the one who has been keeping a secret. He was entrusted by Suzanne's illustrious mother to keep safe her inheritance (originally 100,000 francs) - we assume until such time as Suzanne could provide the solution to the cryptogram. Now, with interest, it is 250,000 francs; a rich woman, Suzanne is free to marry Laurent.

The story is daft on a number of levels (e.g. that nobody who looked after Suzanne as a baby or child knew about the tattoo, and the impossibility that such detail would last 18 years on a growing child). But I find it interesting that apart from the tattooed legacy, the resemblance to Rider Haggard's novel Mr Meeson's Will seems very slight in both content and tone, and even more so once you know that the tattoos are in very different locations. Critics of Rider Haggard who said Le Cas de Mademoiselle Suzanne concerned a tattoo on Suzanne's back either hadn't read it, or were being coy, or were distorting the details to increase the similarity.

- Ray

Mr Meeson's Will

"Augusta set her teeth and endured in silence"

Department of odd books by well-known writers. I've just been reading the 1888 Mr. Meeson's Will by Henry Rider Haggard (see Internet Archive ID mrmeesonswill00hagguoft) which is unusual for being a combination of romantic melodrama and courtroom procedural - completely out of Rider Haggard's best-known colonial adventure genre - and perhaps the first Victorian novel to focus on a mainstream character with a tattoo.

Voyage into the Deep

Also from Salisbury, a very nice find in a charity shop: a 75p hardback copy of Voyage into the Deep, a graphic novel written by François Rivière and illustrated by Serge Micheli (originally published in French in 2003 as Voyage sous les eaux).

The name derives from Jules Verne's working title for his 1870 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the book is an SF/fantasy exploration of the creation of the novel. It begins in 1866 in the seaport of Le Crotoy, where a mysterious boy - Verne calls him 'Bert' - gives the author a cryptic letter and bottle of green-glowing water "with electric properties". Inspired, Verne begins to write, and the book tells interwoven narratives of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Verne's own adventures; these include acquaintance with an Indian self-styled Princess, Mikah, who is searching for her father; an artist called Daniel Wragg, whose architectural design for his London 'Sarcophagus Club' becomes reflected in Verne's concept for the interior of Captain Nemo's Nautilus; and a Nosferatu-like Margate medium called Robert Lee, whose seance makes direct contact between Verne and Nemo.

Rivière explains in the afterward that the story sprang from his personal fascination with Verne and the character of Captain Nemo, and the book is rich in internal allusions to Victoriana, Verne's life, and his works. Mikah strongly recalls Princess Aouda in Around the World in Eighty Days, and there's reference to Verne's repeated legal issues over plagiarism (both accused of doing it, and being plagiarised from - see Jules Verne: journeys in writing, Timothy A. Unwin, 2005 and Twenty thousand leagues under the seas, Jules Verne, trans. William Butcher, 1998). "Daniel Wragg" is fictitious, but his Sarcophagus Club appears to allude to the architecturally eclectic club of that name in Thackeray's Book of Snobs. (I did spot one anachronism here - Verne likens it to Luna Park, an amusement park near Porte Maillot, Paris, but this didn't exist until two years after Verne's death).

Any graphic novel exploring the mythos of Captain Nemo is bound to fall under the shadow of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; and Rivière's story, while interesting and evocative, is not as tightly plotted, leaving far more loose ends. Who is 'Bert', and why does he closely resemble Verne's wife? Is Mikah Nemo's daughter? What is the vicious aquatic homunculus that makes several unexplained appearances? Is the whole adventure Verne's fabulation in a fever? Some of these questions are probably answered in the second volume, Voyage sous les eaux: L’île mystérieuse, but Voyage into the Deep is nevertheless more than adequately accessible as a standalone work. It's beautifully-drawn, and thought-provoking: a good 75p's worth.

The Wikipedia article on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is worth reading for its account of the personal and bibliographic issues. These include Verne's problematic relationship with his publisher, Hetzel, that necessitated repeated changes in Nemo's back-story to steer clear of political hot potatoes; and the mangling of the book by the 1873 translator, Lewis Mercier. The Mercier translation is online at Project Gutenberg (E-Text No. 164) as are restored versions: the public domain Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by FP Walter, and (as far as I tell can tell, authorised) a PDF version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas translated by William Butcher. The last is especially worth reading for its extensive critical introduction.

- Ray

The Jumart ... and Gallica

While browsing around the concept of unlikely hybrids (a spinoff from a Languagehat discussion - see Tityre-tu), I ran into the picture above. This benign-looking creature is technically a monster: the fabled "jumart".

Etymology: < French jumart, formerly jumare, < Provençal gemerre, gemarre, of uncertain origin.
A hybrid animal, erroneously believed to be the offspring of a bull and a mare or she-ass, or of a horse or ass and a cow.
1690 J. Locke Ess. Humane Understanding iii. v. 216 We have Reason to think this not impossible, since Mules, and Gimars [1714 Wks. I. 206 jumarts], the one from the mixture of an Horse, and an Ass, the other from the mixture of a Bull, and a Mare, are so frequent in the World.
- Oxford English Dictionary

Even among unsophisticated peoples, millennia of livestock farming experience ought to have been enough to dismiss the possibility of such a cross. Nevertheless, even in the 19th century, you find occasional reports of the myth persisting, and of attempts to verify its truth. The jumart, like the Indian Rope Trick, had a habit of never appearing when a reliable observer wanted to see it.

If we may credit the testimony of several persons, the ox too has its mules, the reputed offspring of a bull with a mare or she-ass, or of a horse or an ass, with a cow. These have been called jumarts. They say these monstrous productions, and, they add, extremely rare, are chiefly to be found in the burning climes of Egypt and Barbary: yet, during more than three years travelling in the east, I was never able to obtain the sight of such a creature, though I made all possible enquiry for the purpose.
...
The French settled at Cairo assured me, that a little before my arrival, a jumart was shewn there, said to be the offspring of an ass and a cow. But these popular reports were confirmed by no observation or particularity. I could not even obtain any knowledge of the principal outlines of the sigure of this animal; so that possibly, as well as that described by Shaw, it was nothing more than a particular variety of the ox. Thus, the pretended jumarts of Dauphiny, and the Pyrenees, are nothing but the offspring of the horse and she-ass.
- Charles Sigisbert Sonnini, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, Volume 2, 1799, pages 316-317

Vitality Of Traditions: The Jumart. —The jumart, or hybrid between the bovine and equine race, is still believed in through all the southern countries. There was a reputed jumart at Seidekene, near Smyrna, in Asia Minor, during my stay there, and I heard of another. The jumart came into Smyrna several times, and I had made preparations to get a photograph, but it always escaped me. The description fully conforms to that given in books of natural history of the alleged jumart. This one was said to be the offspring of an ass and a cow; whereas the jumarts recorded in books are said to be the offspring of bulls with mares and she asses. The existence of the jumart is doubted by most naturalists. The alleged jumarts as yet examined have been hinnies.
- Hyde Clarke. Notes and Queries. Dec 21, 1867, page 500.

I initially found the jumart picture at a French image/clipart site, Dessins (Drawings), but it tracks down to plate 199 in Illustrations de Histoire générale des animaux, des végétaux et des minéraux. Partie 1, Les Quadrupèdes de la France, a natural history book published some time in the 1700s with drawings by Jacques de Sève (engraved by  Rousselet, and with text by Buchoz).  The images, in a slightly naive style and in natural and neo-classical settings, are lovely and worth a browse: see The Cat, The Hedgehog, The Garden Dormouse, The Squirrel, The Wild Boar and Boarlets, and so on.

The scans of Illustrations de Histoire générale des animaux... are hosted at the Gallica bibliothèque numérique (Gallica digital library) - an interface to the digitised collections of BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France - the National Library of France). Gallica is a mind-blowing resource that gives free searchable access to, currently, around 1.5 million documents (books, manuscripts, maps, images, periodicals, sound recordings, and scores).  As I have work to do, I've dared only the briefest browse so far; you could get lost in there a long time.

Addendum: While looking for the Locke quotation cited by the OED, I ran into this very nice haiku error message at the University of Sussex Library site:

Server is willing
Alas, the file is crafty
It cannot be found

I did find it elsewhere. Locke had weird ideas about hybridisation; the full paragraph in his 1690 An essay concerning human understanding reads:

...for if History lie not, Women have conceived by Drills; and what real Species, by that measure, such a Production will be in Nature, will be a new Question; and we have Reason to think this not impossible, Mules and Gimars, the one from the mixture of an Ass and a Mare, the other from the mixture of a Bull and a Mare, are so frequent in the World. I once saw a Creature, that was the Issue of a Cat and a Rat, and had the plain Marks of both about it; Marks of both about it; wherein Nature appear 'd to have followed the Pattern of neither sort alone, but to have jumbled them both together.
- see The Works of John Locke, 1722, page 206

- Ray

Batrachian breakfasts

A recent post at Fencing Bear at Prayer - Bear's Frogs - reminded me of an aphorism that has had my attribution-sense tingling for some time. A fairly typical statement of it is this:

Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.
- -Brian Tracy, Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time (2007)

It's a very good metaphor for workflow - a reminder of the necessity to tackle the unpleasant/dull tasks rather than procrastinate - but if it's by Twain I'll (metaphorically) eat a batrachian for breakfast. Twain and frogs are linked thematically via his rather unpleasant 1867 story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, but no such aphorism appears there; furthermore, a quick search of Google Books for "eat * frog" Twain finds no attributions to Mark Twain prior to Brian Tracy's self-help book, so I think it's likely the Twain part started there.

The aphorism comes in variants of what you have to eat - the first version I heard concerned a live toad, and rarely it's a bullfrog - but none of them at first glance seemed very old. For instance:

Above the cash register was a small sign which read, "Eat a live frog for breakfast and nothing worse can happen to you all day."
- Foreign Service Journal, Volumes 56-57, American Foreign Service Association, 1979

Eat a Bullfrog First Thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
- advertisement in Hobbies, Volume 82, Issues 1-6, Lightner Pub. Co., 1977

Upon rising each morning a man should eat a live toad, to be sure that for the rest of the day he will have to swallow nothing more disgusting.
- The thirty-eighth floor: a novel, Clifford Irving, McGraw-Hill, 1965

However, one major lead takes the trail right out of the English language, two centuries back, and to a firm attribution: Cyril Connolly's 1945 The Unquiet Grave ("a collection of aphorisms, quotes, nostalgic musings and mental explorations") contains a discussion of the French writer Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794) and the following footnote:

"All literature might be ransacked in vain for a more repulsive saying than this (of Chamfort): 'A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over.'" — Morley: Studies of Literature, p. 95

Googling "Nicolas Chamfort" crapaud rapidly found the source of this quotation. Although Chamfort specialised in acerbic aphorisms, in this case he's citing an earlier author, who is commenting on high society:

M. de Lassay, homme très-doux, mais qui avait une grande connaissance delà société, disait qu'il faudrait avaler un crapaud tous les matins, pour ne trouver plus rien de dégoûtant le reste de la journée, quand on devait la passer dans le monde.

M. de Lassay, a very indulgent man, but with a great knowledge of society, said that we should swallow a toad every morning, in order to fortify ourselves against the disgust of the rest of the day, when we have to spend it in society.

- pp. 35-336, Oeuvres, Volume 4, Sébastien Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, 1795.
- translation from page 192, Causeries du Lundi, Volume 7, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Routledge, 1851

The M. de Lassay cited by Chamfort is Armand de Madaillan, Marquis de Lassay (1652-1738), a flamboyant character nicknamed "the Don Juan of the Grand Siècle" ("The Great Century" = the 1700s in France) and who was a well-known aphorist.  Obviously Chamfort didn't get the toad aphorism first-hand - he was born three years after M. de Lassay's death - and I haven't been able to find an earlier citation.  Still, tracking it to 1795 is a good result, and it well disposes of the Mark Twain theory.

- Ray

The Alabaster Coast

I knew about this area, but I'd never fully Googled it until today: in Normandy, to the east of Le Havre, there's an 80-mile stretch of coastline called La Côte d'Albâtre (the Albaster Coast), which is the coastal margin of the chalk plateau called Pays de Caux.  The Alabaster Coast is where the familar chalk of English geology continues on the other side of the Channel, and the result is a strikingly similar coast (both in scenery and pattern of settlement) to that of parts of southern England I especially like. I find it fascinating and even a little disturbing: there's a strange 'parallel world' sensation in seeing a landscape so familiar in its features, yet completely unknown.

See Normandy's White Cliffs (Thirza Valloi, France Today, May 20, 2010) for a general description, then check out the cliffs of Étretat (with their natural arches so like Durdle Door in Dorset); the village of Les Petites-Dalles (so like Beer or Freshwater); and the striking coastline at Varengeville-sur-Mer with its scary example of a "valleuse" - another picture here - one of its deeply-cut coastal ravines highly akin to the chines of the Isle of Wight, Dorset and East Devon.

The Alabaster Coast's scenery and handiness for Paris attracted a number of French Impressionist artists such as Renoir, Monet and Courbet, but its semi-Englishness had made it a popular destination for 19th century English visitors even before that, as decribed in Brits Abroad (Julian Barnes, The Guardian, 18 October 2008). Barnes mentions the bizarre encounter between Guy de Maupassant and Algernon Swinburne, when the former had been involved (probably peripherally) in saving the latter from drowning at Étretat. Barnes adds that the now-famous story - The Englishman of Etretat - involving insane paintings, a flayed hand, a monkey, and a violent servant driven from the house at revolver-point, was most likely embroidered by de Maupassant:

Maupassant had had seven years to work up the story, and that it was being both told, and written down, by a fiction writer. At other times he ended the story differently.

Maupassant grew up in the area, and some of his stories and novels feature the landscape, such as the 1882 Le Saut du Berger (The Shepherd's Leap), which tells of a repressed priest who pushes a shepherd's hut over a cliff because he is infuriated by seeing a young couple embracing inside.

From Dieppe to Le Havre the coast presents an uninterrupted cliff, about a hundred metres high and straight as a wall. Here and there that great line of white rocks drops sharply and a little, narrow valley, with steep slopes, shaved turf and maritime rushes, comes down from the cultivated plateau towards a beach of shingle where it ends with a ravine like the bed of a torrent. Nature has made these valleys; the rains of storms have ended with them in the shape of these ravines, trimming what was left of the cliff, excavating down to the sea, the bed of waters which acts as a passage for mankind. Sometimes, a village is snuggled into these valleys, where the wind of the open sea is devoured.
- Le saut du berger 1882

- Ray