Цитаты из книги Something to Declare

In My Life and My Films Renoir pointedly makes no mention of the final product, choosing instead to describe a game called “lefoutro” (etymology: from foutre, to fuck) which director and stars played over convivial dinners at Lyons-la-Forêt:

A napkin folded in the shape of the male organ was placed in the middle of the dinner-table, and the rule was that it must be studiously ignored. Anyone who showed the slightest sign of being distracted by it was rapped three times over the knuckles with “lefoutro” while the following sentence was pronounced: “I saw you making advances to your neighbour. You insulted Monsieur Lefoutro. You are hereby punished and your fault is pardoned.” The guilty person could protest— “How could I have insulted Monsieur Lefoutro when I was busy cutting up my chicken?” In this case a vote was taken and the penalty doubled if the sentence was confirmed. Harmless games of this kind did more to prepare us for the next day's work than tedious discourses.

Claude Chabrol lives in Gennes (twinned with Wincanton), a small town on the southern bank of the Loire, upstream from Angers. The river here is sluggish, and shallow enough for high-summer fishermen merely to punt their boats. A basic box-girder bridge, crossing the flow in two leaps, was the site of a famous rearguard action by cadets of the nearby Saumur military academy against the advancing Germans in 1940. On the other side of the Loire lies La Rosette, whose traditional small-town rivalry with Gennes can take strange forms. A few days before I met Chabrol, a woman from La Rosette decided to drown herself by jumping off the bridge. An emergency call came through to the sapeurs pompiers of La Rosette. “None of our business,” they replied. “There isn't enough water on our side for her to drown herself.” So the caller was obliged to hang up and dial the pompiers of Gennes. By the time they arrived the woman was dead.

Flaubert is celebrated as a writer dedicated to research. But what we mean by “research” varies greatly from novelist to novelist. At the simple level of the popular novel there are diligent writers who find out everything they can about a subject—banking, say, or airports or the motor industry—and put this into their work, often in barely assimilable chunks, as proof that they know what they're talking about. More sophisticated novelists pile up research like a compost heap, but then leave it alone, let it sink down, acquire heat, and degrade usefully into fertilizing elements. Thus at the moment of note-taking a novelist may often have no idea how useful his scribble might prove.

A good example of this is found in Carnet 19, where Flaubert makes three successive notes concerning women of flexible virtue. The first is about Mlle X., former chambermaid of a young lorette (a lorette being a woman half-way between a grisette and a femme entretenue on the closely calibrated French sexual scale), who set up next door to her former mistress. Gentlemen leaving the lorette would routinely call on the ex-femme-de-chambre who, after performing her exercices de fellation, would enquire humbly, “Was that as good as Madame?” The second story is about an upwardly mobile bar girl in Algeria who celebrates her risen status by equipping herself with some “ancestors”; surrounded by secondhand pictures of fake relatives, she now plays salon hostess and receives officers she formerly pleasured for 10 francs a go. The third, and briefest note, is about a sixteen-year-old girl waiting in a boudoir to lose her virginity. She is served dinner, only eats the confitures, and then falls asleep on top of a pile of erotic engravings. Of the three, the first is a jolly story, complete in itself, but with something falsely neat about it— often the case in laddish anecdote; the second is a colourful social vignette; the third an unfinished moment (where is the man? did she lose her virginity? what happened to her afterwards?) which could be funny or sad or anything in between depending how it is told. The first two might be called “closed” stories, the third “open”; and it is a version of the third story (initially communicated to him by Suzanne Lagier) that Flaubert used in L'Education sentimentale.

In the mid-Sixties, Brassens visibly lost weight, shrinking from an ursine presence towards comparative gauntness. Journalists informed their readers that the great singer had cancer. Their speculations were true; but though true, none the less intrusive. Brassens responded with “Le Bulletin de santé,” in which he admits that he has indeed left the ranks of the obese, but not for the reasons some impute. No—non, non, non, trois fois non—what has caused him to lose so much weight is not illness but the fact that he has spent a vast amount of time and energy fucking journalists' wives.

Vian, wry and urbane, sang at the world with a cutting edge of sardonic disbelief. Brel, urgent and impassioned, sang at the world as if it could have sense shaken into it by music, could be saved from its follies and brutalities by his vocal embrace. Brassens, intimate and formal, sang at the world as if it were an old lover whose ways are teasingly familiar and from whom not too much is expected. Vian died at thirty-nine; Brel at forty-nine; Brassens, in a final act of non-conformity, just managed to stagger past fifty-nine.

I spent the academic year of 1966–7 teaching as a lecteur d'anglais (the slightly posher term for assistant) at the Collège Saint-Martin in Rennes. My task was to instruct my pupils in “English conversation and English civilization,” which in effect meant devising various strategies to keep them quiet and avoid the glowering irruption into the classroom of the surveillant général, an ex–Algerian War veteran who terrified me even more than he did the boys. I'm not sure how reliably English civilization was depicted in our conversations—I remember being grilled about London night-clubs (I bluffed tremendously) and London girls (ditto).

He was always a good hater, of course. His France—urban, northern, provincial, pedestrian, noisy, unpuritanical, festive—was in contrast to, and predicated upon, another France: bureaucratic, official, suburban, safe, rule-crazy, scared. Cobb had bright scorn for: the Bordelais, the police, bossy women behind guichets, Victor Hugo (“France's National Bore”), Sartre, Le Corbusier (“the Swiss démolomane” “the implacable Helvetian”), Jean-Luc Godard (another implacable Helvetian), Baron Haussmann (“the Alsatian Attila”), the Boulevard Saint-Michel—indeed, the whole of the Latin Quarter—Georges Pompidou (a “visionary vandal” worse than Haussmann), pedestrian precincts, and the scrubbed petrification of buildings restored for people to look at rather than live in.