The great easter, p.9
The Great Easter, page 9
29. The Pont de Bercy carries automobile and pedestrian traffic at the same level, while the Paris metro line 6 runs overhead along another arched bridge.
30. The sculpture by Augustin Dumont that sits atop the July Column in the center of the place de la Bastille is actually called Le Génie de la Liberté, which translates as The Spirit of Freedom. The column was inaugurated in 1840, ten years after the July Revolution that it commemorates.
31. “Route de la Révolte” is a common name for Route des Princes, a historic road that connected Versailles, which lies to the southwest of Paris, to St. Denis, directly north of Paris. In plan, a line from Place de la Bastille to Châtelet would eventually intersect it at a more or less a right angle near Porte Maillot.
32. This is likely a reference to Claude Autant-Lara’s 1956 film La Traversée de Paris, in which Marcel Martin, an unemployed taxi driver, is surviving the Nazi Occupation by trading on the black market. In the famous scene, Martin and Grandgil, his accomplice for the evening, are hiding in a bar to avoid the police, but the bartender and patrons are threatening to turn them in. As they leave, Grandgil throws a suitcase full of black-market pork on the floor, and reprimands everyone for frowning upon the black market, while surviving on “blood sausage filled with sawdust”; he then calls them “salauds de pauvres”—the expression Besse uses—and walks out the door.
33. This is a reference to the West End of London, a bohemian and fashionable district in the mid-twentieth century.
34. Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville was the public prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal during the Reign of Terror, and was known for a radicalism that rivaled Robespierre’s. Yolande Martine Gabrielle de Polastron carried the title Duchess of Polignac, and was a close confidante of Marie-Antoinette. Polignac’s family went into exile at the beginning of the Revolution and she died of an unspecified illness shortly after Marie-Antoinette’s execution, so she never appeared in front of the tribunal. However, her beauty was common knowledge across France—as was the rumor that she was Marie-Antoinette’s lover—so Besse might be suggesting that Fouquier-Tinville sent the latter to the guillotine because he desired the former.
35. é di nou: Creole for “and tell us.”
36. The phrase roudou roudou does not have a direct translation, but it corresponds to the sound of thunder, as in the Beninois fable “Toffa et le tonnere” (thanks are due to Benjamin Mahuwanou Boton for helping me track this down). In this context, it might be best understood as stirring up sexual excitement with no intent to satisfy it—as “Jenny” seems to be doing in this situation. Melpomene, the goddess of music and the Muse of tragedy, was the daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne. The weeping mask in ancient Greek drama is symbol of her, while the laughing mask symbolizes Thalia (another daughter of Zeus, the daughter of festivity, and the Muse of comedy). The tragedy is, to Besse’s mind, his inability to love “his” various women.
37. This strange passage contains another short Creole phrase, en li nou, which translates as “in whom we.” A Creole Bible that uses this formulation to translate Ephesians 1:7 reads: “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace” (King James Version). “Her” (Elle) is also capitalized in Besse’s text, clearly elevating the woman without the car to a divine position.
38. This is another reference to Sock and Buskin, the twin masks of comedy and tragedy. I have translated Besse’s word caliguli—perhaps a French rendition that I have been unable to trace or perhaps a mere typo of the Latin caligae, which are the boots worn by Roman soldiers as well as the namesake of Caligula—as “tragic.” Such boots were also worn by tragic actors in Ancient Greek theater, where they were called buskins (the comedic actors wore slippers called socks).
39. La Pergola was at 1 Rue du Four, across Boulevard St. Germain from Le Café Mabillon and the Rhumerie Martiniquaise; its grand, illuminated façade is visible near the end of Jean-Luc Godard’s film Breathless (1960).
40. There is no Pont du Châtelet in Paris but Besse is referring to Pont au Change, which connects Place du Châtelet to l’Île de la Cité, and then links up directly to Place Saint-Michel on the rive gauche, via Pont Saint-Michel. Point au Change is also the bridge from which many mistakenly believe that Inspector Javert hurls himself into the Seine in Les Misérables (he actually jumps from the quai between this bridge and Pont Notre Dame, to the east). The real Pont du Châtelet is a stone arch bridge, completed in 1882, which soars 354 feet (108 m) over the Ubaye River in Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of southern France, near the Italian border.
41. As Zola (Les Rougon-Macquart, 1967) explains, his Rougon-Macquart cycle was intended to be “purely naturalist, purely physiologist” in its treatment of how the environment affected the members of Rougon Macquart family, a theme that Besse is also clearly using to relate his own experience of Paris.
42. Jean Sibelius was Finland’s preeminent composer, and he wrote symphonies, chamber music, tone poems, an opera, and music for plays. Besse may have had one of Sibelius’s most famous pieces, Valse Triste (Sad waltz), in mind.
43. “Hurray for death” or “Long live death” in Italian.
44. Also known as the Furies, the Erinyes are pre-Olympian, female deities of vengeance. Eleusis is famous both as the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were ancient religious rites, and as the birthplace of Aeschylus. I have been unable to track down “Jakbes” in any mythology, so I presume it is the name Jacques Besse, transformed into a mythological name. See following note for speculations on the meaning of “Gélin.”
45. Clearly there is some confusion over the meaning of “Gélin.” One compelling possibility involves two singers named Nicolas Gélin, whose very different lives overlapped. The first, majoritarian Gélin (1726–1810) was “one of the Paris Opera’s most celebrated singers in the second half of the eighteenth century” (Fétis 1881, 371) who retired with a pension of two thousand livres in 1779. The second, minoritarian Gélin (1743–1808) was a singer at the Saint-Pierre Cathedral in Troyes and the Saint-Étienne cathedral in Auxerre, who was “the father of a large family, whose only profession was singing, and who was subject to serious and frequent illnesses” (Philidor, MUSEFREM—Base de données prosopographique des musiciens d’Église en 1790, n.d.). His pension began at one hundred livres per year and was doubled after he and his fellow singers petitioned the church’s administration.
46. Jacques Offenbach was a composer who is best known for his operettas, but he also wrote two less successful operas, a ballet, as well as various other songs. Jean-Philippe Rameau is considered to be France’s greatest eighteenth-century composer of operas and was also an important music theorist.
47. “Mental perfume” is a literal translation of a parfum mental, a rare and poetic phrase that Mario Richter, a scholar of Charles Baudelaire, comes close to defining in his work on Les Fleurs du Mal when he likens it to a “material-spiritual, unknown reality” that “can be the familiar spirit of place” (Richter, Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, 489, my translation).
48. Cantus firmus is Latin for “fixed song” and refers to an established melody that underlies a polyphonic composition.
49. Marsyas was one of Dionysus’s satyrs who challenged Apollo to a musical contest and lost. His punishment was to be skinned alive for challenging the god. See Titian’s painting, Flaying of Marsyas (1576).
50. Boulevard theatre was a style of popular theater that arose on Paris’s grand boulevards and on the Boulevard du Temple in the late eighteenth century. Although it is rich in subgenres, such as realism and vaudeville, its primary difference is that it is not intended for an intellectual audience, but is rather meant to entertain the masses through tales of crime, sex, and so on.
51. Allen S. Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Excess (1989) is instructive here. He writes, “Artaud was caught within a web of conflicting identities, and bound within a quasi-theological, schizophrenic megalomania” (121)—a condition that Besse clearly shares. Even more to the point, Weiss discusses a glossolalia from Cahiers de Rodez et d’Ivry, in which Artaud dissolves and rewrites his own name, transforming TAU to PAU, as in Anthropos (primal man), to MAU, which is homophonous with maux, French for evils, ill-health, pains, aches, sorrows, or miseries (123).
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Jacques Besse, The Great Easter
