7.20 Daudet — Le Petit Chose — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the first chapter of Alphonse Daudet's novel Le Petit Chose , complete and in the original: a childhood in a southern factory, the family's ruin, and a boy who plays Robinson Crusoe in the empty workshops. Follow a narrator who tells his own childhood in the first person, mixing the perfect of memory with the literary past of the story. Recognise the tone of the book: the sadness of the events and the humour of the telling, often in the same sentence. Notice the spelling of 1868, such as très-malheureux with a hyphen, which modern French has dropped. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Cela dura ainsi pendant deux ans ; pendant deux ans, la fabrique agonisa. It went on like that for two years; for two years, the factory was dying. qui faisait à cette époque le commerce des foulards who at that time was in the scarf trade En somme, pour Jacques comme pour moi, notre ruine avait son joli côté. All in all, for Jacques as for me, our ruin had its good side. Ce perroquet remplaça Vendredi. This parrot replaced Friday. mais il nous accompagna jusqu’à la diligence de Beaucaire but he came with us as far as the Beaucaire coach je courus m’enfermer dans une de mes cabanes I ran to shut myself up in one of my huts Prerequisites : 7.19 — this reading follows 7.19 Reading . You know Daudet from La chèvre de M. Seguin in 7.15 Reading , and the literary past from 3.15 Conjugation . About this text Le Petit Chose , published in 1868, is Daudet's first novel, and it draws closely on his own life. Like the narrator, Daniel Eyssette, Daudet was born on 13 May in a town of Languedoc, Nîmes , the son of a silk manufacturer who was ruined and moved his family to Lyon. The rest of the novel follows Daniel as a poor, small, short-sighted boy at school in Lyon, as an underpaid supervisor in a provincial school, and as a would-be writer in Paris, supported by his devoted older brother Jacques. At school he is given the nickname of the title, le petit Chose , little What's-his-name . This first chapter, La fabrique , tells the boy's early childhood in his father's factory, where scarves were printed. A client in Marseille vanishes with a fortune on the very day Daniel is born, and from then on everything goes wrong. As the factory slowly dies, Daniel turns its empty workshops, its garden and its water tanks into Robinson Crusoe's island, with the concierge's son as his Friday, until the factory is sold and the family leaves for Lyon. The text here is the complete first chapter of the first part, about 2,900 words, in the first edition published in Paris by Hetzel in 1868, as transcribed in French Wikisource. Reading Daudet Memory and story. The adult narrator looks back: C'est là que je suis venu au monde , in the perfect, because it is part of his life now. When he tells a scene, he moves to the literary past: ma naissance ne porta pas bonheur à la maison Eyssette , je pleurai . Sad events, light telling. Daudet tells the ruin of his family with a smile. The boy finds that the ruin has son joli côté , because he can play everywhere; his brother Jacques cries all day, not from grief but from habit, and the family's distress is a godsend to him: now he can sob for whole days without anyone asking what is wrong. The humour never hides the sadness, and the chapter ends with a farewell. Speaking to the characters. Like the narrator of the goat story, Daudet sometimes turns to his characters or to the reader: Il fallait pleurer, mon bon monsieur Eyssette ; Hélas ! Mon pauvre abbé, que je ne devais plus revoir ! The second sentence also announces a death to come. Old spelling. The edition of 1868 writes très-malheureux and très-ému with a hyphen, as was usual then. Modern French writes très as a separate word. Reading it a second time, part by part The birth. The town, the factory with its plane trees and garden, and the day of Daniel's birth, which is also the day a client in Marseille disappears with forty thousand francs. The decline. Disasters follow: two fires in one year, a strike, a quarrel with Uncle Baptiste, a costly lawsuit, and finally a revolution. Monsieur Eyssette rages against everything, and the whole family weeps as soon as he leaves the room. For two years the factory dies, workshop by workshop. The island. In the silent factory, Daniel reads and acts out Robinson : the workshops are his island, the tanks his ocean, and little Rouget, the concierge's son, plays Friday, the savages and the mutineers. An uncle's parrot replaces Friday, though it refuses to speak. The strangers. One morning, strange men visit the island and measure everything. That evening at supper, Monsieur Eyssette announces that the factory is sold. The departure. Daniel says goodbye to the trees, the tanks and the pomegranate tree, and the family leaves for the coach, with Annou, Jacques, the parrot, and the elder brother, the abbé , whom Daniel will never see again. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. The Factory I was born on 13 May 18…, in a town of Languedoc where one finds, as in all the towns of the South, plenty of sun, a good deal of dust, a convent of Carmelite nuns and two or three Roman monuments. My father, Monsieur Eyssette, who at that time was in the scarf trade, had, at the gates of the town, a large factory, in one wing of which he had made himself a comfortable home, shaded all over by plane trees and separated from the workshops by a vast garden. It was there that I came into the world and spent the first, the only good years of my life. And so my grateful memory has kept an undying remembrance of the garden, the factory and the plane trees, and when, at my parents' ruin, I had to part from these things, I truly missed them as if they were l