7.30 Anatole France — Le Livre de mon ami — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the first two chapters of Anatole France's Le Livre de mon ami , about 3,000 words: an adult remembers the monsters of his nights as a small child, and two ladies, one in white and one in black. Follow a narrator who moves between two times: the child who lived the scene, and the man who remembers and smiles at it. Recognise France's style: clear, elegant, ironic and tender, with long, balanced sentences. Understand the gentle irony of the last pages, when the grown man meets the lady in white again. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English et une jolie gravure en couleurs qui représentait and a pretty coloured engraving that showed Bien que le tableau à horloge n’eût pas encore sonné Although the picture clock had not yet struck que des personnages tout à fait étrangers à ma famille se mettaient à défiler autour de moi. than figures quite unknown to my family would begin to march past around me. un menton rasé avec une fossette au milieu a shaved chin with a dimple in the middle dont les rideaux immenses me remplissaient de crainte et d’admiration. whose huge curtains filled me with fear and wonder. et un petit canapé doux et profond, dont je faisais tantôt un bateau, tantôt un cheval ou une voiture. and a little soft, deep sofa, which I made now into a boat, now into a horse or a carriage. Prerequisites : 7.29 — this reading follows 7.29 Reading , another childhood, but a happier one. You need the imperfect of habit and the literary past of 3.15 Conjugation , which this text alternates in almost every paragraph. About this text Anatole France (1844–1924), the son of a Paris bookseller, was the most celebrated French writer of his time: elected to the Académie française , a defender of Dreyfus, and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1921. Le Livre de mon ami , published in 1885, presents itself as the memories of a friend, Pierre Nozière , who is the author himself under another name. It tells his childhood in Paris in the 1840s, from the first memories of a very small boy. In the first chapter, Les Monstres , the narrator remembers the strange figures that marched round his bed every night when he was very small, and understands, decades later, where they came from. In the second, La Dame en blanc , he remembers two ladies who lived in the same house, one dressed in white and one in black; he visited them often; the lady in white, whose husband was far away in China, agreed to make him her little husband at home, and a gentleman with black whiskers began to call. The chapter ends many years later. The text here is the first two chapters of Le Livre de Pierre , the first part of the book, about 3,000 words, in the edition published in Paris by Calmann-Lévy in 1890, as transcribed in French Wikisource. Reading Anatole France Two times. The narrator speaks as a grown man, Hier, en flânant sur les quais , and as the child he was. The adult comments with a smile on what the child could not understand: Ne me demandez pas si elles étaient jeunes : cela passait ma connaissance. Imperfect and literary past. The habits of childhood are in the imperfect: every night his mother placed his bed in the middle of the room, he often went to see the ladies. The single events are in the literary past: Un jour pourtant, je trouvai un monsieur assis dans mon canapé. Notice mon canapé : the child thinks the sofa is his. The child's view. The child names people by what he sees: la dame en blanc , la dame en noir , le monsieur aux favoris noirs . The adult narrator lets the reader suspect more than the child could see about the visitor who keeps coming back. Art and memory. The monsters of the first chapter come from the engravings of Jacques Callot, a seventeenth-century artist from Lorraine, which a print seller pinned on her wall. For France, memory is made partly of images seen and forgotten. Reading it a second time, part by part Les Monstres . The narrator's earliest memories: the room in an old house, his father a doctor and collector, the engraving of Paul and Virginie, the bed placed each night in the middle of the room, and the grotesque figures who marched past without ever coming near. Years later, he finds the same figures in a book of engravings on the quays. The two ladies. The lady in black gives him cakes; the lady in white laughs and scolds; he rolls on their carpet and makes their sofa a boat or a horse. The lady in white, who has a husband far away in China, laughs at his proposal and promises him all he wants: he will be her little husband. The gentleman. A gentleman with black whiskers appears, sits on the sofa, brings a letter from the husband, and keeps coming back. The child takes a dislike to him. Many years later. The grown man, at a ball given by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, meets the lady in white again; she is now the wife of an ambassador. They recall the past, the lady in black, and the gentleman, who happens to pass by with white whiskers. 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. My Friend's Book The Monsters People who have told me they remember nothing of their earliest years have greatly surprised me. For my part, I have kept vivid memories of the time when I was a very small child. They are, it is true, isolated images, but for that very reason they stand out all the more brightly against a dark and mysterious background. Although I am still fairly far from old age, these memories, which I love, seem to me to come from an infinitely deep past. I imagine that the world was then in its splendid newness and all clothed in fresh colours. If I were a savage, I would believe the world as young, or, if you like, as old as myself. But I have the misfortune of not being a savage. I have read many books on the antiquity of