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.