14 of My Favourite French Books (pour le 14 juillet)

1. Le Comte de Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

I am not embarassed to say it's my favourite book in any language and one of the books I've read most often. Yes I know how it ends, but my fascination with Edmund Dantes that started with reading Dumas' masterpiece under the covers with a flashlight continues. It's a powerful book disguised as a sort of adventure story. The count is one of the greatest characters to ever grace the printed page.

2. La Dame aux Camélias, Alexandre Dumas (Fils)
Written by the son of the writer Alexandre Dumas (see above), it was good enough of a story that Verdi turned it into an opera the world now knows as La Traviata (the second most performed opera in the world). Based on that information it's obviously a drama and quite a romantic one. Dumas (Fils) really knew how to write about love. Marguerite was based on Dumas' real life lover Marie Duplessis, a famous courtesan who hosted a popular salon. Dumas was dumped for Franz Liszt, and Duplessis died young of tuberculosis with two counts at her side (one from Sweden, the other French). La Dame aux Camélias is widely considered Dumas' best work and has been turned not only into an opera, but there are nearly a dozen films as well.

3. Quatrevingt-treize, Victor Hugo
I am a massive fan of Victor Hugo. He is the only writer that I went so far as to acquire a portrait of (I have his funeral announcement from the newspaper that has been in the frame since the day he died) and I have a massive multi-volume collection of everything he ever did (he was much more than just a writer). Still after all of that Quatrevingt-treize remains my favourite of his works. It was the last book Hugo wrote and in it many of his prior convictions have obviously changed. He is no longer a Royalist. He is obviously on the side of he people and he showed this change in politics by writing a brilliant book. If you want to know the facts about France during this time you can read plenty of books, but if you want to know the heart and soul of the people then you read this book.

4. Les liasons dangereuses, Pierre-Ambroise Francois Choderlos Laclos
Someone I know and who's opinion I trust once told me he thought this was the best example of French literature for its style and form. I didn't have the heart to tell him I loved this book because it was scandalous and quite easy to read even those it's a book of "letters". I've since given it a look and agree the writing alone is reason to read the book, but I prefer my reasons for adoring this masterpiece of French literature.

5. Le Rouge et le Noir, Stendhal
The first volume's epigraph "La vérité, l’âpre vérité" is in itself fiction. Julian Sorel enters into the Church after realising that under the Bourbon Restoration one can't advance one's prospects by pursuing a career in the military. He doesn't care much for religion beyond appearances and eventually through a few protectors he meets along the way does almost get what he most desires, but of course it ends badly.

6. Chéri, Colette
Any one who knows me Colette is in my eyes, perhaps the greatest female writer France has ever known. Not only did she write beautifully, but she achieved what any writer should strive for - to write simply but with great detail. This is in my opinion her real masterpiece. Colette wrote for men about women really and there is no better example than Chéri.

7. - 10. The Poets

Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
Romances sans paroles, Paul Verlaine
Le bateau ivre, Arthur Rimbaud

If you want to read the best poetry France has to offer, you wouldn't be remiss in starting with Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. I would have included Mallarmé on my list, but he is notoriously difficult to translate and is best read in French (although poetry and its translation are subjects well worth debating). I could have as easily swapped Le bateau ivre for Une Saison en Enfer and Verlaine's Romances sans paroles is a must read for any fan of Rimbaud's - but for me personally Les Fleurs du Mal is the great volume of poems ever published. The first poem I remember falling in love with was by Mallarmé, but even he was inspired by Baudelaire. When I told my father of this new poet he immediately pulled down some Baudelaire and from that day no other poet has ousted Baudelaire from his lofty perch in my esteem.

11. Les Fables de la Fontaine
If you want to understand a lot of French jokes and perhaps the soul of the French people, you have to read Les Fables de la Fontaine. As a child I knew it before I barely remember anything else. Read it in poetic form though, Fontaine was a genius.

Now you know that part in the feux d'artifices (fireworks) where the sky lits up like crazy, the finale? Well because I can no longer list books and separate the ones I most love from the ones I truly love here is a finale en livres:

L'etranger/The Stranger, Albert Camus
La vie de Gargantua et Pantagruel/The Life of Gargantua and Pantragruel, Rabelais
Moravagine, Blaise Cendrars (a favourite of Henry Miller & Borges')
La vie de mode emploi/Life a User's Manual, George Perec
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
La Ventre de Paris/The Belly of Paris, Zola
L'amant/The Lover, Marguerite Duras
A la recherche du temps perdu/In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
Voyage au bout de la nuit/Journey to the End of the Night, Celine
Fin du Chéri, Colette
Les Enfants terribles, Jean Cocteau
Rene, Chateaubriand
Les Contes de Charles Perrault
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Contes du jour et de la nuit, Guy de Maupassant

I could keep going, but I have to prepare a nice meal to celebrate le 14 juillet. I've decided to go with some country cooking to keep with the spirit of the day so I'll be preparing a simple feast of crispy skinned roasted chicken rubbed with thyme, old bread stuffing, and some courgettes au gratin with good white wine from Alsace and fondant au chocolat.

Thanks to the brave Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who stormed the Bastille the rights of every French person were born. Joyeux quatorze juillet a tous!

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Dreams and Apartments

I was asked by a friend if I could have any apartment in Paris and I had two answers. One, if I could only have an apartment I'd chose Colette's apartment at the Palais Royal. Two, if I could have a building I'd chose the British Embassy, but then I shouldn't be greedy.

I found this video, which is a close look at Colette's apartment, currently inhabited by Jacques Grange, the interior decorator and artist. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to embed, but you can view it here.

Colette's historic apartment is in the Palais Royal, home of many a scandal when it was occupied by the Duke of Bourbon (by scandal I mean it was a brothel and gambling house). I love that Jacques Grange preserved much of the house and most of Colette's spirit. If you watch the video he even calls her "Madame Goudeket", which is quite some deference for someone who spent most of her life on a first name basis with the world.

I have a number of books full of photos of Colette and inevitably her apartment where, later in life she spent a vast majority of her time due to ill health. What cemented my decision beyond the history of the Palais Royal and Colette herself was she was a woman after my own heart when it came to her desk and a little story of my own.

In Robert Phelps' "Belles Saions, A Colette Scrapbook", there are multiple quotes about Colette talking about her desk. The little pot of pens she kept on her desk and her massive paper weight collection. How she liked to look out her window and when she became ill, the historic society in charge of the preservation of the Palais Royal, even with all their rules replaced the wooden panels on Colette's windows with glass so she could continue this favorite pass time. Later on in life, when she couldn't sit at her beloved desk, she took to writing in bed surrounded by the last of her pets and covered in a mink blanket where she ate cherries and received her beloved friends.

Among the writers I admire, Colette (born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) has a special meaning to me. She was one of the most successful writers of her time and is still one of the most successful female writers of any time. She was bold and brash and theatrical and scandalised conservative French Catholic norms with not only her words, but also her life. This is why I'd chose her apartment over all others no matter how much bigger or how much more grand other apartments might be. I always think if I could just sit in her window with paper and a pot of fresh pens, I might string my sentences together as if each word were its own pearl with the same practiced hands as Madame Goudeket.

Like Colette I grew up reading everything I could get my eyes and hands upon, but unlike Colette I grew up in many countries were women weren't allowed to read. Since reading was already such a taboo pleasure, I talked myself out of the idea that one day I might write a book of my own.

One day there was a rain storm, the kind you can only have in Africa where the rain is so powerful it threatens to cave in the roof in order to get to the ground. There it amasses another type of force entirely. It collects quickly and moves like liquid lightning taking everything that crosses its path along with it. 

That day was no different.  I stood in the window and watched hoping we would have to climb up on to the roof for safety. If only the water would get high enough we could be stranded up there for days. The house would become a sort of island or maybe a ship. I wondered if the house were not actually a ship. I desperately wanted to believe that just before the potential catastrophe would hit that the house would transform into a massive steam ship and kept looking at the chimney for any sign of smoke.

A few hours later life had gone back to normal. I was completely dry having not been allowed to even open the window just enough to put my hand outside to feel the rain fall upon it. The house was just a stupid house and not a ship at all. I became highly suspicious that the chimney was just an ordinary chimney, but why should it be? What was a chimney doing in Africa anyway? 

Discontented I remember going outside into the yard where the earth was already begining to dry. A massive amount of silt and sand had been deposited in the flower bed by the temporary river the rain had caused. Little worms, some bloated and some lifeless and others optimistic and trying to burrow back under the dirt made our yard look like a battlefield and  I hadn't the inclination to save the ones who were merely wounded, though this was a particular favorite game of mine and I considered myself an expert amateur Worm Rescuer and even had a special bucket I used for this sole purpose.

Without thinking I picked up a stick and began to scribble in the dirt. I wrote a story about a ship that could turn into a house, but it was a stupid ship and it'd forgotten how to turn itself back into a ship again. I wrote until I grew bored with scribbling in the dirt and went inside to find my papa.

He was as always in his study, which was a place not forbidden to me as long as I didn't disturb his desk or knock over the tall stacks of leather bound books they give to lawyers even if they have good memories like my father. I navigated them as cautiously as if they were landmines and the softest touch might set them off and all those things my lawyer parents talked about at the supper table would come bursting out of them and then I'd go to jail because as far as I knew lawyers made people go to jail when they did something wrong and upsetting my father's work was considered a criminal offense.

I stared at my papa for a really long time. My feet started to hurt from standing in the same place so long and so I started to sing softly in the hopes of getting his attention. When this didn't work I squirmed my way under his long arms and then stared at him right in the eyes and even though I knew I could be in big trouble I told him that I was going to be a writer one day. Not right away because first I wanted to be a nuclear physicist and then maybe build a robot, but eventually I'd get around to it.

I told him my story and my papa laughed and lifted me up to sit on his desk even though it was full of papers and I knew that he knew I really was going to be a writer.

A few months after my papa passed away I found a letter he'd written me long after our closeness had evaporated like the rain in the heat of the African afternoon. It was sandwiched between pages of Colette's La Fin du Cheri and what it said was almost nothing. It mostly a blank page except for a little scribble near the bottom in my father's handwriting that said "write".

I dream about having a desk like Colette's to write my stories and all the blank pages I will one day fill, but this page remains wedged between the pages where I found it and it's message - no it's command - was enough to inspire me to write.

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More Recent Acquistions

Another good week of book buying...


Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Writings
Leon Uris - Trinity
DH Lawrence - The Plumed Serpent
William Faulkner - The Portable Faulkner (Edited by Cowley), Sound & The Fury
Stendhal - Scarlet and Black
E.N. de C. Andrade - Sir Issac Newton
Arthur Koestler - The Case of the Midwife Toad
Giuseppe di Lampedusa - The Leopard
Michael Tournier - Friday
Francois Rabelais - The Works of Rabelais
The Cid
Paul Verlaine - Selected Poems
Aldous Huxley - Antic Hay
Thomas Mann - Death in Venice and 7 Other Stories
Colette - Break of Day, Gigi and the Cat
Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon
Mark Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Puddin' Head Wilson
Gertrude Stein - 3 Lives
The Journals of Andre Gide: 1889 - 1913, 1914 - 1927, 1928 - 1939, 1939 - 1949
Caesar's War Commentaries
C.S. Lewis - The Problem of Pain
Willa Cather - A Lost Lady
Lillian Smith - Strange Fruit
John Updike - Problems and Other Stories
Louisa May Alcott - A Long Fatal Love Chase
D.M. Hussey - The Byzantine World
Selected Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas
Confessions of Saint Augustine
Graham Greene - The Heart of Matter
Balzac - Drole Tales
Douglas R. Hoefstadter - The Praise of the Music of Language
Yusunari Kawabata - The Master of Go
T.E. Lawrence - The Mint
Richard Wright - Native Son
Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth
Isabel Allende - Of Love and Shadows
Gulot & Lake - The Life of Picasso
Michael Scott - Irish Animal Tales
Morio Kita - The Fall of the House of Nire
E.R. Dodds - The Greeks and the Irrationals
Richard Sullivan - Heirs of the Roman Empire
E.M. Forester - A Passage to India
Henry James - The Bostonians, Turn of the Screw & Daisy Miller
Virgil - The Georgics
Morton Smith - The Ancient Greeks
Solomon Katz - The Decline of Rome
Chester G. Starr, Jr. - The Emergence of Rome as Ruler of Western World
Eramus - The Praise of Folly
Plato - The Last Days of Socrates
Huhm - Kut, Korean Shaman Rituals
Paul Gallico - The Small Miracle
Boccacio - On Poetry
Arthur O. Lovejoy - The Great Chain of Being
Bruno Snell - The Discovery of the Mind
Andre Maurois - Lelia, The Life of George Sand
George Gulls - Biography of Mae West
Radclyfee Hall - The Well of Loneliness
Evelyn Waugh - Men at Arms
The Plays of Oscar Wilde

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