"Vernon Subutex Three" by Virginie Despentes

In this final volume of the epic trilogy, the parallels between Vernon and Jesus become more explicit as Dopalet seeks revenge for the attack upon him.

Vernon is the DJ for a series of 'Convergences' (dance-festivals) organised by his disciples in which the participants experience mystical revelations. But wino Charles has died and his last wish is to leave half his lottery win to Vernon and his followers. The prospect of money causes dissension and accusations and Vernon runs off in anger. Meanwhile Alex Bleach's first manager Max has tracked down Celeste, one of the girls responsible for the attack on Dopalet, who takes his revenge. The whole story is heading for inevitable tragedy. But of course there's a twist in the tail.

There's a little more narrative in this volume compared with the first but the style is still the same: we head-hop and each of the interior monologues is some sort of rant. The energy is unabated but the sense of doom pervades the final chapters. It's almost perfect.

Except for the very last chapter of all, which swirls into the future to provide a sci-fi dimension which I felt totally unnecessary. 

Nevertheless, this is a wonderful final act in a triptych masterpiece.

Selected quotes:

• “This is one of the things that happens on nights when there is a convergence ... A gentle, luminous confusion that makes you want to take time and keep silent. Epidermises lose their boundaries, everybody becomes every body; it is a boundless intimacy.” (p 17)
• “You leave a space for imagination. Kind of like storytelling by leaving gaps.” (p 24)
• “For old Charles, the cold hard truth of humanity was savagery. It was simply a matter of knowing who had the right to be cruel to whom. Everything else ... was poetry - a way of masking the stench of the corpse that follows man wherever he goes.” (p 36)
• “Good things come to an end, usually prematurely.” (p 36)
• “When it came to talking shit, he could open his big gob not once but several times a day.” (p 41)
• “It's amazing how enormous things seem when you’re expected to put them in your mouth. ... When girls give blowjobs, do they feel like they're sucking off the Empire State Building?” (p 55)
• “Human beings were morons. You really had to be two clowns short of a circus to worship a god that could create such a shower of shits. Liars thieves poseurs and predators.” (p 58)
• “The poor invariably resent the rich for succeeding where they have failed. There you have it. It's all about jealousy.” (p 74)
• “No one is solid. ... That is the hardest thing to learn. That we are tenants of a situation, not landlords.” (p 96)
• “Can someone explain to him why clothing manufacturers sew on labels so that they itch around the waist?” (p 119)
• “He loves the heat because it ... poses serious fashion problems: ridiculous hats, hideous sunglasses, short shorts, repulsive footwear.” (p 121)
• “When he was young, common people would walk along the marinas and stop to gaze at rich people's yachts. They were symbols of travel, of the exotic, of true luxury. These days the poor don't stop and stare anymore. Wealth is something they experience like a slap in the face.” (p 121)
• “The left wing refuses to admit that Christians and Muslims can't live together for long without killing each other. That said, deep down, there is a fundamental agreement: exclude the impure, the unclean, prevent them from expressing themselves. Create a category of massacrables. The frontiers might shift but the attitude of the border guards remains the same. You get out. I don't want that sort of thing in my country. The only variable is who gets put in the camps. Who is torturable, exterminable. Who deserves to be excluded.” (p 124)
• “That's the only difference between the sociopath and and the political militant - the sociopath doesn't give a shit about being on the side of the just. He just kills without the foreplay, without wasting time turning his victim into a monster.” (p 124)
• “Fifty years ago, the church should have built cathedrals in the middle of every deprived banlieu. And sent out their best preachers. It wouldn't matter if they cuddled a few choir boys as long as they understood their mission. To help those most in need. To occupy the territory. Instead of which ... the dumb fucking Christians congregated in rich neighbourhoods so they could celebrate the mass in Latin.” (p 125)
• “The root of the problem is that my worth as a white guy is your worthlessness as raghead. My high life makes you lowlife.” (p 128)
• “You’re either the butcher or the cattle.” (p 198)
• “Where men are concerned, ‘to desire’ is conjugated in the imperative.” (p 245)
• “Paris has become a dystopian piece of concept art, a gallery of atrocities, a daily display of all the things man can deny his neighbour.” (p 278)
• “He had that delicate politeness of people who know that evil truly exists.” (p 293)
• “The grenades the AK-47 the bullets. Manufactured objects.... They are churned out in factories for precisely this purpose. To kill dismember burn. ... We know what they will be used for. ... A grenade does exactly what it is supposed to do. Like an AK-47. Like the gun. The only variant in the equation is: did you know the people before they became corpses?” (p 353)

August 2025; 362 pages

First published in Paris by Grasset & Fasquelle in 2017
My English translation by Frank Wynne issued in paperback in the UK by Maclehose Press in 2021

More French books reviewed in this blog may be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Spoiler alert: Chapter by chapter detailed synopsis.

• Vernon has toothache and travels back to Paris for dental work. He stays with Kiko who has plans for writing Vernon's story: “I'm thinking about hiring a female novelist, someone talented enough to knock it into shape, but not too successful, otherwise she’ll do what the fuck she likes and three months down the road she'll be busting our balls with ideas we don't want to listen to.” (p 26) Metafiction!
• Charles is dead. His wife, Vero, also an alcoholic, has discovered that he has left her his lottery win with instructions to share half with Vernon.
• Vernon goes to see Charles, discovers he is dead and learns from Vero about the money.
• Dopalet is having a tattooist cover up the words that Celeste and Aicha tattooed on his back. He wants revenge.
• Vernon returns to the camp, bringing Vero with him.
• Stephanie, a new character, has met Marie-Ange, Sylvie and Penelope at a Convergence. She is going to Barcelona with them for a break; her ex-husband Max is tagging along.
• Xavier, Marie-Ange's husband, is with the girls in Barcelona. 
• Max, who was Alex Bleach's first manager, is trying to pump Xavier for information about the Convergences. Then, by chance, Xavier meets Celeste.
• Pamela, tired of doing the admin for the group, challenges Vernon and asks if he intends to keep the lottery money for himself.
• Vernon, angry and ashamed for his disciples, leaves the camp and, with girlfriend Mariana, goes on tour doing DJ sets.
• In Paris, Sylvie and Emile are going to a Madonna concert in the wake of the Bataclan terrorist attacks. Sylvie has lost all her money.
• Dopalet is having a breakdown. He is unable to work and spends all his time watching zombie movies. Max contacts him and tells him he knows about “Bleach’s confession. Subutex. Celeste. Aicha. The Hyena.”
• Vernon, DJing in Belfast, meets Max and realises that he knows too much. He sends a warning message to The Hyena.
• Aicha is hiding out as an au pair in Germany. She is having an affair with the husband of the family. The Hyena turns up, tells her that her cover may have been blown, and takes her away.
• Celeste is in Barcelona. The Hyena stashed her in Zaragoza but she grew bored so ran away to Barcelona. She works as a sous-chef and lives in a house-share. She has started tattooing again and has made an facebook page to advertise. Some of her previous friends have ‘liked’ it. A man has asked her to tattoo a wolf on his shoulder. He has asked that she comes to his home.
• Max was the man who arranged the tattoo. He took Celeste to a remote house. There things got out of hand. He had hired two thugs who beat Celeste to a pulp and then raped her. She is then put into the cellar and handcuffed to the bed. Dopalet arrives and arranges for one of the thugs, Franck, to inject Celeste with an OD and to dump her body.
• The Hyena has tracked down Celeste to where she lived in Barcelona but she finds that she’s vanished. Pamela has been to see Max, pretending to be interested in his idea of professional Convergences. She has surreptitiously checked his phone and pinpointed the house where Celeste might be.
• Franck didn't kill Celeste but kept her in the cellar as his sex slave, raping her repeatedly. She is rescued by the Hyena and Olga.
• The team have relocated to Paris where there are repeated demonstrations, many led by Olga who has turned herself into a demagogue, in the Place de la Republique. Vernon has returned. Antoine has learned that his father Dopalet ordered Celeste’s kidnap, beating and rape. And that Max was involved.
• They move to a house in the countryside It rains incessantly. Selim has met Aicha in Greece, she's pregnant. The news makes Celeste scream, giggle and attack Vernon: “Celeste turns around, and her smile has transformed into a mask of hatred, she stares into his eyes and says, this is all your fault, all of it, from the very beginning, you were the one who started it.” (p 322) I am the alpha and the omega!
• Solange lives with her binge-watching father and her mother who used to be a postie and a wino but lost her job and became addicted to anti-depressants instead of booze. The only talent Solange has is sharp-shooting. Max gets in touch with her.
• Leonard is in mourning for Antoine, his boyfriend, who was among the dead massacred at a dance in Rennes-le-Chateau. Everyone was killed. Leonard makes contact with Dopalet, Antoine’s grieving father, who, devastated by his loss, proposes that Leonard and he should script a mini-series about the people who were killed.
• Vernon turns up in Paris. Somehow he escaped the massacre. He is living with Marcia who found him sleeping rough. She tells him that a mini-series based on his life, a sort of allegory of Christianity with him as Jesus and Alex Bleach as John the Baptist, is a huge success. The creators, Dopalet and Max, are “the business double-act of the year.” (357)
• Aftermath: Into the future
• Vernon dies, 72, in Greece with Aicha and her daughter Sabra. Holidaymakers who saw him and recognised his remarkable resemblance to the character in the manga series of his life start talking about the “resurrection of the prophet”.
• Convergences have been happening, without him, all over Europe. In 2085 “music was banned from all civilisations administering the Great Territories.” By 2100, “groups gathering for clandestine convergences were persecuted and executed.” Europe is still inhabited in parts despite nuclear catastrophes. The Subutex cult moves off-grid and hides in deep forests and in cellars in cities. Eventually they are forced to flee Europe to move to the Great Territories. The cult of the Convergences grows. “It was not until the development of kinesics and time travel that the phenomenon could be truly understood.” (p 361)
• “People continue to dance in the dark” (p 362)

"Guy Debord" by Andy Merrifield

 A surprisingly readable biography of political thinker and activist, writer and film-maker, Guy Debord who was influential in the 1968 Paris riots. 

I became interested in Debord when reading M John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again which is influenced by the idea of the dérive which this book defines as "drift" and originated as "a dreamy trek through varied Parisian passageways, forever on foot, wandering for hours, usually at night, identifying subtle moods and nuances of neighborhoods.” (Ch 2) Then I was impelled to read this biography after encountering Guy Debord in Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake: I think she bases her character of Bruno Lacombe on Debord. 

I was expecting the biography to be rather dry and not a little hard to understand. How wrong I was. Despite a penchant for lists, Merrifield is a fluent writer so his prose is easy to read, he never delves to deeply into the philosophy and what he does explain is reasonably comprehensible. Add in the fact that Debord had an interesting life, and that the fringe politics of the era was filled with swashbuckling (if brutal) factions such as the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Faction,  and that there is an actual real-life murder mystery in chapter four, and this academic text became a page turner. 

The young Debord was a student at the Sorbonne in the early 1950s but this seems more a rationale for living in Paris, drinking heavily, frequenting the cafes, talking philosophy and becoming involved with Leftist students. He never finished his degree. Instead, he became a leading member of the Lettrists before breaking away to found the Situationist International (which at its founding included a leading member of the London Psychogeographical Association). The Situationists used the technique of détournement to satirise the establishment. 

He began making films and writing books. Presumably somebody sponsored him because he never seems to have had any conventional employment: “Nobody knew how Debord got by. He had no job, didn't want a job, opting instead to reside in a rich and happy poverty.” (Ch 2). He came to prominence with "The Society of the Spectacle" which became a suces d'estime on its publication in 1967 and is thought to have been the catalyst for the 1968 student riots in Paris, in which Debord participated although he was nearly twice the age of many of the other leaders. 

By now he was a celebrity of the left-wing and he continued writing (and making films) while living mostly abroad. Later he returned to France spending summers in rural seclusion and winters in Paris. He died by suicide after suffering from alcohol-induced peripheral neuritis.

He was a fan of the proto-surrealist poems of Lautreamont and a friend of Alexander Trocchi who wrote Cain's Book and invited him to New York where he lived in a barge on the Hudson river. He identified with the romantic bad boy characters from French literature and history, such as the mediaeval poet Francois Villon, the novelists Louis-Ferdinand Celine (author of Journey to the End of Night) and Pierre Mac Orlan and Cardinal Gondi, the 17th century cardinal whose street protests against Louis XIV led to the rebellion called the Fronde. Cardinal Gondi was a colourful character. “The cardinal was an odd mix of Catholic holy man - who never actually believed - and libertine. He was a priest and a duellist,  a courtier and a conspirator. He womanized while he spread the gospel ... he simultaneously incited mob violence and earnestly preached peace. He was duplicitous and conniving, both worshipped and reviled, as he indulged in a life of intrigue and bewildering adventure.” (Ch 3) Debord liked to be called Gondi.

Has he a legacy? Merrifield clearly thinks that capitalism has triumphed since Debord's time and that this make Debord's critique even more important: “History has never seemed so open, so unstable ... wars and terrorism, financial meltdown, ethnic cleansing, religious conflicts, class exploitations, epidemic diseases, irresponsible American imperial might. More than 1 billion people now scramble to make ends meet on less than a dollar a day. Meanwhile, the net worth of the world's 358 richest individuals equals the combined income of the world's poorest 45 per cent - some 2.3 billion people.” (Ch 6)

Selected quotes:

• “As they shifted in and out of public spaces, they were intent on accumulating rich qualitative data, grist to their ‘psychogeographical’ mill, documenting odors and tonalities of the cityscape, its unconscious rhythms and conscious melodies: ruined facades, foggy vistas of narrow, sepia-soaked streets, nettle-ridden paving stones, empty alleyways at 3am, menace and mayhem, separation and continuity.” (Ch 1)
• “If the Sacre-Coeur trampled over the legacy of the Communards, Pompidou [centre built in 1969] did likewise over the soixante-huitards.” (Ch 2)
• "The unitary city would be disruptive and playful ... it would emphasize forgotten and beleaguered nooks and crannies, mysterious corners, quiet squares, teaming neighborhoods, pavements brimming with strollers and old timers with berets sitting on park benches.” (Ch 2)
• “Humans are protean beings, desiring differentiated practice, needing meaningful and fulfilling activity.” (Ch 2)
• “Society has always rewarded mediocrity, always rewarded those who kowtow to its unfortunate laws.” (Ch 2)
• “In leisure time, workers became consumers ... private life became the domain of the advertisement ... of movie and pop stars and glamorous soap operas, of dreaming for what you already know is available, at a cost.” (Ch 3)
• “Mass consumption and commodities fill the frame and pollute the mind ... The diffuse spectacle thrives off the gadget, the gimmick, the fad. ... in accumulation for accumulation’s sake.” (Ch 3)
• “Dramatic weather patterns aren't too dissimilar to storms that break out across the economic and political landscape. Each, after all, takes place when the temperature is hottest, when the pressure dial approaches danger level. Often nobody pays attention to the inclement forecast. In such heat, wealth accumulates, business booms and stock prices grow, until, suddenly, the bubble bursts and the heavens open.” (Ch 4)
• “Truth ... becomes like storytelling; each tale is difficult to adjudicate, because everything has relative plausibility.” (Ch 5)

In the Cafe of Lost Youth, a novel by Patrick Modiano, takes its title from a line in Debord's masterpiece film ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’ (We Wander in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire)April 2025; 153 pages

A beautifully readable book about a surprisingly romantic philosophe.

Published in 2005 as part of their series of Critical Lives by Reaktion Books.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Creation Lake" by Rachel Kushner

A fascinating mixture of thriller and novel of ideas that was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

‘Sadie Smith’, the narrator protagonist, is an agent provocateur for hire. Originally working for the American authorities, she was sacked after a court case in which the jury believed the defence of entrapment; now she is freelance in Europe. Her latest assignment is to infiltrate a commune of eco-activists in a remote and rural valley in France; she is to persuade them to do something illegal. To prepare for this, she has married the childhood friend of Pascal, the commune leader; she also hacks into the rambling emails of Bruno, a cave-dwelling, raw-food eating hermit and philosophe who acts as guru to the commune.

The tension is considerable. Will the communards trust Sadie or will they penetrate her lies? Will her past catch up with her? Will she locate Bruno or will his ideas seduce her so that she betrays her employers rather than her new friends? It all builds up to a nail-biting climax when ... Unfortunately, I found the denouement a bit of a damp squib.

My problems started early. Bruno’s emails. There are a lot of these peppered through the narrative, frequently interrupting the action. This is where the novel becomes a novel of ideas. I think that we’re supposed to see Bruno’s poorly evidenced assertions as profound; to me they seemed naive. There’s all the pseudoscientific nonsense about the Neanderthals, for example, and aphoristic posturings such as “Here on earth is another earth ... A different reality, no less real. It has different rules.” I failed to understand why anyone should be persuaded by this sort of stuff. The communards, perhaps, because they are a bit other-worldly. But Sadie? Cynicism is her middle name. Does the author think this pseudo-science is convincing? Or is this a satire?

Another point at which my belief refused to be suspended was in Sadie’s choice of assassin. She had spent such a long time preparing to infiltrate the commune, from dog-walking in Paris, but when organising an assassination she is careless. She expects the paranoid and suspicious communards to swallow her explanation of how she knows the subminister will be attending the fair. Her grooming of the assassin is perfunctory. When he asks her “Do you think I left my brain in a trash can someplace?” I wasn’t in the least surprised. But she is and I think the author thought the readers would be too.

Yes, I was disappointed by the ending. This was at least in part because the first three-quarters of the book was so good (I thought, then, Bruno’s shallow emails were designed to be exposed). The prose that Kushner writes is exquisite:

• “We’re like the children of a divorce ... It is on account of these two figures that we came here, and in the ashes of their split, we sift to find our own direction.” (Ch 4)
• “The gauzed sensations of toddlerhood” (Ch 5)

Kushner frequently mentions real-life French critical theorist Guy Debord, one of the eminence grises of the 1968 riots in Paris. I presume the character of Bruno is based upon him: Debord too wrote aphoristic theses and spent his final years holed up in the French countryside. My review of a biography of him can be found here.

She also mentions a persecuted minority, the Cagots, whom Bruno suggests are descended from the Neanderthals (given the number of generations this would have taken it seems incredibly unlikely that a pure genetic strain would still exist) and other historians suggest, with more credibility, are descended from the Cathars, or the Visigoths, or Arian Christians.

She also references Celine whose Journey to the End of Night is reviewed in this blog.

I wonder whether her chosen pseudonym 'Sadie' is inspired by the Beatles song 'Sexy Sadie' since it was written as a satire on the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru with whom the Beatles spent some time. In this novel, Sadie is in a rural location reading emails from Lacombe who could be regarded as a guru.

Selected quotes:

• “While the Neanderthal bravely risked his life with a short-range thrusting spear, the Homo sapiens opted for a long-range throwing javelin. To kill from a distance was less valiant. It was killing without engaging in an intimate commitment to mortal danger.” (Ch 1)
• “Look up ... The roof of the world is open. Let us count stars and live in their luminous gaze.” (Ch 1) Foreshadowing.
• “Charisma does not originate inside the person called ‘charismatic’. It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.” (Ch 1)
• “The more education person has, the more scare quotes they seem to use.” (Ch 1)
• “To misunderstand the adult world, and to misuse it, are the precursors to innovation.” (Ch 2)
• “The trick of riding backward is to understand that this orientation of travel is time honoured and classical. It is like rowing a boat: you enter the future backward, while watching scenes of the past recede.” (Ch 2)
• “For all its fame, rosy-finger dawn leaves no prints.” (Ch 3)
• “He looked as if he had been puzzling over some question at the moment of his death, trying to solve an unsolvable math problem, and he would travel into eternity that way, with a thicket of half-tabulated numbers lodged in his mind.” (Ch 5)
• “Hashing out some intrigue or annoyance among the piles of annoyances that would crop up for people attempting to live communally.” (Ch 5)
• “I'd rather be driven by immutable truths then the winds of some opinion.” (Ch 5)
• “Flapping laundry - the international flag for anonymous women's work.” (Ch 5)
• “Rotterdammerung.” (Ch 6)

April 2025; 404 pages

First published in the USA by Scribner in 2024

My edition issued in the UK by Jonathan Cape in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"In the Cafe of Lost Youth" by Patrick Modiano

 Reading this hard on the heels of Modiano's The Black Notebook was a disconcerting experience. Both books revolve around old people remembering when they were young. Both books focus on a young woman who has a number of aliases, about whom there is some mystery. Both books feature a detective, both have an author who narrates some if not all of the book. Both involve an iconic Parisian cafe, and students, and walking the Parisan streets and taking the metro. It is as if Modiano has reworked the material.

Especially since both books include the line: "We live at the mercy of certain silences." 

Whilst The Black Notebook was contextualised by revolutionary politics, this is contextualised by an interest in magic and the occult. It seems that Louki's favourite book is Lost Horizon, which is a potboiler that may or may not reference the earthly paradise known as Shambhala, or to modern ears Shangri La.

The title is a line taken from ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’ [We Wander in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire], a 1978  film by Guy Debord, the revolutionary and Situationist.

Selected quotes:

• "If everything was down in black and white, it meant that it was over, just like tombstones that have names and dates carved on them." (p 73)
• "Intermediary zones existed in Paris, no-man's-lands where you were on the fringes of everything, in transit, or even suspended. You enjoyed a degree of immunity there." (p 112)

September 2020; 153 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here

Other books by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Madame de Pompadour" by Nancy Mitford

“After the death of the great King, beautiful Versailles, fatal for France, lay empty seven years while fresh air blew through its golden rooms, blowing away sorcery and bigotry which hung about the walls like a miasma, blowing away the old century and blowing in the new.” (C 1)

Thus begins this biography of the principal mistress of Louis XV of France, a lady who was a focus of the court of Versailles for twenty years, her 'reign' lasting until her death at the end of the Seven Years War. As a young girl her father was the steward of the Duverney brothers, the Court financiers. At some stage he had to flee abroad to escape a financial scandal. Her mother soon found a ‘protector’ (another rich financier) who became Jeanne’s step-father; when her real father returned the three parents lived together amicably. Even before becoming the first commoner to become maîtresse-en-titre Jeanne-Antionette Poisson was friends with some of the leading philosophes of France including Voltaire, a life-long friend. Late in her life she met the Comte St Germain, the charlatan who claimed to have an elixir which was the secret to eternal life.

As often in such books, it is the throwaway details that fascinate me. Here are some:

• The Palace of Versailles was ‘open house’: “When, at the beginning of the Revolution, a furious mob was known to be approaching, the guards tried to shut the gates in vain, a hundred years of rust having soldered them to their hinges.” (C 1)
• “The lever and the coucher were formal ceremonies; he never slept in his state bedroom. Everybody knew quite well that he had often been up and working for hours before the lever - lighting his own fire sometimes so as not to wake the servants.” (C 1)
• “As for the courtiers ... They could do nothing, not even go to Paris for the day, or be inoculated against smallpox, ... without his [the King's] express permission. Their privileges were enormous and their power non-existent.” (C 1)
• “On their wedding night he [Louis XV] gave her [his new Queen] a proof of his love seven times.”
• The Duc and Duchesse de Chartres “were so fond of making love that they could hardly bear to take any time off; when they dined out they generally asked for the use of hostess’s bed during the course of the meal.” (C 3)
• “Everybody could tell a Court lady from a Parisian by her walk, a sort of gliding run, with very fast, tiny steps so that she looked like a mechanical doll, wheels instead of feet under her panniers.” (C 4)
• “Her three curtseys were impeccable, and masterly was the kick with which she got her train out of the way so that she could walk backwards.” (C 5)
• Voltaire had a room in Versailles and asked that the public privies at the bottom of the staircase should have doors fitted to them. (C 5)
• “Madame de Pompadour ... had the rare capacity of understanding a creative artist; she saw that underneath the grimaces, the pushfulness, the frantic giggles, the pretensions and follies of man like Voltaire lay an inferno of uncertainty and sensibility.” (C 5)
• “ The Comte de Charolais was a ripsnorting oddity; he dressed like a gamekeeper and ordered his coachman to run over any monks he might see on the road.” (C 5)
• “The first boy was born, with one pain, in about ten minutes; very inconvenient as it was absolutely vital that they should be witnesses of the birth. tThe doctor, who was sleeping in the Dauphine’s room, told her she must hold everything, while the Dauphin rushed out in his nightshirt to find somebody. ‘Well then hurry up’, she said, ‘it's kicking me’. A sleepy Swiss guard was very much surprised when the Dauphin seized him by the arm, said: ‘Quick, go in there and see my wife having a baby’, and went on to look for one more witness.” (C 9)
• “Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of human beings thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral: the art of living.” (C 10)
• “Jansenism proper had practically died out under the persecutions of Louis XIV. The plough had been driven over the ruins of Port Royal, the inhabitants of its graveyard been dug up, hacked into suitable joints and removed to some spot where was no danger that they would attract pilgrims.” (C 15)
• One church door contain the graffiti: “By order of the King, God is forbidden to perform miracles on this spot.” (C 15)
• After the Duc de Richelieu took Minorca from the English with a brilliant assault on the fort at Mahon his chef discovered that there was no butter or cream on the island and had to create a sauce using only eggs and oil: the Mahonaise. (C 16)
• “An empire is like a tree’, said Montesquieu, ‘if the branches spread too far they drain the sap from the trunk’.” (C 18)
• The Encyclopedie called Canada “a country inhabited by bears, beavers and barbarians, and covered, eight months of the year, with snow.” (C 18)
• “The Comte St Germain ... has been accused, by French writers, of belonging to the English intelligence service and of being the father of Freemasonry. The English thought he was a Jacobite spy. But his own claim to fame was that he had lived for thousands of years and had known Jesus Christ.” (C 18)

A beautifully written (despite the presence of untranslated French at times, a practice I abhor) and diverting biography of a lady who lived at a fascinating moment in the history of Europe.

Nancy Mitford also wrote The Sun King a biography of Louis XIV, the preceding monarch.

November 2019

"The Judgement of Paris" by Ross King

This is a book about Meissonier, the highest paid artist in the world in the 1860s, whom almost no one knows now, and Manet, who sold almost nothing in the 1860s but is now regarded as the father of Impressionism. It is set in Paris between the years 1863 and 1873 and most of the action revolves around the attempts by the Parisian artists to exhibit their work in the annual Salon, the equivalent of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London.

Whch makes the book sound dry as dust. But the genius of Ross King is that he can take this tiny little bit of history and weave a story which incorporates so many other things. Because this was the Paris of the Second Empire when Emperor Napoleon III ruled over a city which had been transformed by the Boulevards of Baron Haussman; the Paris of cafes, artists, prostitutes (one in six Parisians was a sex worker) and the demi-monde; the Paris of the Universal Exposition, of glamour and glitter and industrialisation; the Paris of the secret police, of censorship, of political repression. And in 1871 it was the Paris which was beseiged as France lost the Franco-Prussian war and the Emperor fled; it was the Paris of the Commune.

This was a fascinating time, a revolutionary time, and art underwent its own revolution. But, as always, the opponents in the revolution were so much more interesting than their stereotypes.

Meissonier painted tiny oil paintings of incredible and exacting detail. He had made his fortune with pictures of Bonhommes (a bit like the Laughing Cavalier) but he longed to do more heroic work. He toiled for years over (slightly) larger works depicting the glories (and the tragedies) of the first Napoleon. He was a studio painter who rarely painted outdoors but his preparations and research were meticulous. He attended the Battle of Solferino for research and he had a train track laid in his garden so that he could move alongside galloping horses and study them precisely.

Manet really wasn't an impressionist and he certainly shouldn't be confused with Monet, who was. Manet's inspiration came from the old masters. His controversial Dejeuner sur l'Herbe featured a riverscape inspired by a Titian in the Louvre, a female nude inspired by Rubens and a clothed man who reclines in the same position as Adam on the Sistine chapel ceiling, albeit reversed. His even more controversial Olympia was a copy of another Titian. But both paintings owed much of their daring and their notoriety from the clever visual hints added by Manet (such as a black cat with an erect tail hinting at pussy); even the name Olympia hinted that the woman was a prostitute and the position of the left hand suggests that she isn't just being modest (and did you know that our word pudenda for female genitalia comes from the Latin pudens which means shame).

Manet must have been a resilient man with enormous self-belief. Year after year he exhibited to howls of derision. People laughed at his paintings, they said he was useless. It must have been hard for his models. Victorine posed naked for Dejeuner sur l'Herbe; many horrible comments were made about her ugliness; it was assumed she was a prostitute; she was laughed at. Next year she posed again, naked again, as Olympia (clearly a prostitute), and again was on the receiving end of ridicule and scorn. It wasn't even as if the pay was good and Manet took hours and hours over his models!

I learned so much from this book, from the controversial career of Napoleon III (two failed coups before he came to power including escaping from a French prison by dressing as a workman and walking out of the door with a plank across his shoulders) to the derivation of pompous (the French called the overblown toga-and-sandals paintings of David and fellows 'pompiers' because the helmets of the heroes resembled the helmets of French firemen) to Baudelaire, notorious author of Fleur du Mal, who so courted notoriety that on a visit to Belgium he pretended that he had killed and eaten his step-father to Whistler who had been expelled from West Point by Robert Lee to Manet who failed his naval training (proved by the fact that on one seascape the flags and sails of one of the boats are being blown in opposite directions) to the fact the landscape painting only really took off after oil paints began to be available in metal tubes rather than the much less wieldy pig's bladders ....

Written in 38 short chapters, this is a very easy read. It is so packed with characters and incidents that it never flags. It is brilliant and deserves a wide readership.

Ross King also wrote (reviewed in this blog):

• The wonderful Leonardo and the Last Supper about Da Vinci's iconic painting
• The even more brilliant Brunelleschi's Dome; the history of the second largest dome in the world atop the Duomo in Florence
• The excellent Michelangelo and the Pope's ceiling about the Sistine chapel, what else?

This is one of a selection of books I am reading to help me understand more about art. Others reviewed on this blog include:

• Seven Days in the Art World by Julia Thornton: a look at the institutions of the art world such as an auction, a fair, a magazine and the Biennale.
• Think Like an Artist by Will Gompertz which includes such insights as 'artists think big picture and fine detail' and 'artists steal'
• Ways of seeing by John Berger which is particularly good at sexism in art
• How art made the world by Nigel Spivey  which proposes that art has changed the way we think and altered our civilisations
• The Story of Art by E F Gombrich, a fascinating historical tour through art

November 2015; 374 pages

"Blow Back" by Peter May

This is a well told story in the thriller-whodunnit genre and it shows all the hallmarks and possesses all the cliches of that genre.

Enzo Macleod, of mixed Scottish and Italian descent working in France, is investigating a set of cold cases made famous in a book written by the ex-lover of the woman by whom he has had a baby who (the author) has just impregnated his older daughter who is not actually his daughter but is the daughter of his ex-wife and her lover, establishing his credentials as a policeman with a horrendously muddled genealogy.

This particular cold case involves the murder of a three-star Michelin chef. Enzo goes to live in the hotel (after placing his younger daughter undercover as an apprentice chef) which gives him ample opportunity to demonstrate his remarkable palate for wines and his own cooking ability.

Another character is the attractive lady gendarme with whom Enzo has an affair and who enables him to show off his knowledge of forensics.

So Enzo is your typical master sleuth, able to fill pages with detail to show off the author's research in an effort to make the whole story seem believable. It's a shame that he himself, the main character, is too good to be true.

There's quite a lot of action: Enzo is shot at twice and his daughter is taken hostage but a surprising dearth of clues. Solving the puzzle is not a major priority for the author.

It is quick and easy to read but it isn't a patch on the other Peter May book I have reviewed on this blog which is Lewis Man.

July 2015; 352 pages

"The Countess de Charny" by Alexander Dumas

This is one of the many historical pot-boilers that Dumas penned. It centres around the attempted flight of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and their children and assorted others from Paris; they were apprehended by common people at Varennes. Dumas wears his historical knowledge like a strait-jacket which he pads out with exclamation marks !!!!  The only obvious addition is the mysterious figure of Count Cagliostro who is the immortal leader of the Freemason club that is agitating for the removal of the monarchy. There is also an episode in which Dr Gilbert uses hypnosis to send the countess of Charny on an astral journey in which she discovers what her son (by the wicked doctor) has been doing.

In short, this is absolute twaddle from beginning to end. I did wonder at one stage whether the indifferent translation was pitting me off and then I decided that the translator must have been as fed up by the bilge as I was.

One central mystery is why on earth is the book named after a character who has a cameo role near the strt and another cameo near the end but absolutely no role in the main story. It did seem that she had been forgotten. Certainly the sub-plot regarding her son is never developed after he is knocked down (but not killed) by a carriage in the street.

It became clear quite quickly that this is the sequel to another book about these characters and I think it would have been very useful indeed to have known about their stories before hand. Madame Nicole who is sometimes called Madame Oliva is a was in point: I has no idea why she was reduced to poverty nor whether it was at all important that she so closely resembled Marie Antoinette.

Dumas had a flair for telling a story which makes one forgive his appallingly romanticised prose and his obsession with honour. But in this book his story telling ability has deserted him. This is a great book for an aspiring author to read and to say: I can do better than that.

"The Sun King" by Nancy Mitford

This is the biography of Louis XIV of France who reigned for 72 years from the age of five and was succeeded by his great-grandson, after three Dauphins died, one after another, in 11 months.

What is unusual in this biography is that Mitford only mentions the momentous historical events that took place during his reign, such as the Fronde and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the War of Spanish Succession, as background to the court life of Versailles. We learn far more about the Sun Kings shifting mistresses and the parade of noblemen through court than we do about the politics of the time. This is a fascinating perspective on history and may indeed reflect the way the king viewed the world through the ritual of courtly life but I found it confusing: there were so many monsieurs and monseigneurs and madame la duchesses and monsieur le ducs. It was also frustrating to have tantalising glimpses of the world outside the palace and never to have anything explained. This was the world of the Musketeers and I have never quite understood about Richelieu and Mazarin and Fouquet and the Huguenots. This book shed no further light on these mysteries of the French.

There were a lot of wonderfully romantic moments. At one stage hundreds of French minor nobility are imprisoned secretly and in solitary using lettres de cachet because they are caught up in a poisoning plot and might, just might, reveal that one of the King's mistresses, Madame de Montespan, was a prime poisoner. Shades of the Man in the Iron Mask (and on almost the last page Mitford claims that on his deathbed Louis told his nephew the Duc d'Orleans who was to be regent to the five year old Louis XV, the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask and that only two other people (Louis XV and Louis XVI) ever knew it (so Mitford obviously can't reveal it)). Louis also romantically married Marie de Maintenon as a second wife secretly and was more or less faithful to her until his death.

So there are some interesting moments but I was disappointed not to learn a lot more about this fascinating reign. June 2014; 242 pages

Nancy Mitford followed this up with the biography of Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, who suceeded Louis XIV.