The Fox and the Geese

Fox once came upon a meadow where a herd of lovely fat geese was sitting. He laughed and said, "I have come at the right time. You are sitting together so nicely that I can eat you up one after the other." The geese quacked with affright, leapt to their feet, and began to wail and plead piteously for their lives. Fox, however, refused to listen to them and said, "There will be no mercy here! You must die." At last one of them took heart and said, "If we poor geese are to lose our lives in the flower of youth, grant us one favour and allow us a prayer, so that we do not die with our sins upon us; and afterwards we will even set ourselves in a row so that you may always choose the plumpest." — "Very well," said Fox, "that is fair and it is a pious request. Pray; I will wait that long." So the first started a pretty long prayer, always "Gah, gah," and because she refused to stop, the second did not wait for her turn, but also started: "Gah, gah!" The third and fourth followed her example, and soon they were all quacking together. (And when they have prayed themselves out, this tale shall be told further; but they are still perpetually praying on.)

Original text: "Der Fuchs und die Gänse," Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Bayreuth: Gondrom Verlag, 1982)

THE END

An Avian Abattoir in Covent Garden

With thanks to the commenter angelinterceptor of the Guardian website, from the article "Royal Ascot's dress code aims to banish the commoner within" by Sarah Ditum (June 19, 2012). A quick web search revealed that this is one of George Bernard Shaw's letters to the Times of London.

***

July 3, 1905

Sir,

THE OPERA management of Covent Garden regulates the dress of its male patrons. When is it going to do the same to the women?

Swann in Love: Liveblog, Partie Deux

Reading Marcel Proust's Un amour de Swann, from his Remembrance of Things Past series. It is still extremely early (the first 3%) in the book.

Film Clip: Francis Planté (1839-1934): Chopin - Etude op.25 no.2 Fmin
Put up on YouTube by d60944.

11:17 a.m. To impart a proper mood to the proceedings, I have put up one of Francis Planté's recordings from YouTube, since he is mentioned in the first page of Swann in Love, is French, lived at the right time, and generated very zeitgeisty photographs.

11:34 a.m. Swann apparently pulls all his strings to wriggle into the company of women who have awoken his interest. The narrator complains that his grandparents confounded one such attempt to pull strings:

Et soit méfiance, soit par le sentiment inconsciemment diabolique qui nous pousse à n'offrir une chose qu'aux gens qui n'en ont pas envie, mes grands-parents opposaient une fin de non-recevoir absolue aux prières les plus faciles à satisfaire qu'il leur adressait, comme de le présenter à une jeune fille qui dînait tous les dimanches à la maison

Not only did they not introduce Swann to their young lady acquaintance, they also pretended that she didn't visit them so that he wouldn't continue pestering them. How horrific.

Why this type of bratty insistence on believing that the rest of the world exists to satisfy one's acquisitive whims is supposed to be charming or amusing I don't understand. A person over the age of ten who mopes over the meanspiritedness of thwarted pleasures without feeling some self-aware sense of shame for the lack of dignity at the time is also a little of an oddity. I think that the enjoyments of life are finer if they are withheld for a while, or completely — until the right moment and right motivation and the acquiescence of other interested parties delivers them, and we are certain to appreciate them according to their worth. The Epicureans believed, if I learned it correctly, in the role of moderation in heightening enjoyment. (Grumble, grumble.)

Altogether it annoys me when book protagonists take their life so seriously that the same earnestness which one character may rightfully devote to earning enough to subsist, another character absurdly devotes to being anxious as to whether his friends really admire him (a very, very special individual of sensitive soul, luminous talent, and ultrarefined, soaring aspirations) as they ought, etc. The graveyards are full of people who thought they were indispensable, and so on and so forth.

12:02 p.m. We get an insight into Swann's daily life now. He visits friends and trawls for mistresses, who can be a cook or anyone really; if his current mistress is performing at the opera he will 'hang' there; and he plays poker and goes to weekly dinners. There is a really hilariously dandyish passage here:

chaque soir, après qu'un léger crépelage ajouté à la brosse de ses cheveux roux avait tempéré de quelque douceur la vivacité de ses yeux verts, il choisissait une fleur pour sa boutonnière et partait retrouver sa maîtresse à dîner chez l'une ou l'autre des femmes de sa coterie; et alors, pensant à l'admiration et à l'amitié que les gens à la mode, pour qui il faisait la pluie et le beau temps et qu'il allait retrouver là, lui prodigueraient devant la femme qu'il aimait, il retrouvait du charme à cette vie mondaine sur laquelle il s'était blasé, ainsi dont la matière, pénétrée et colorée chaudement d'une flamme insinuée qui s'y jouait, lui semblait précieuse et belle depuis qu'il y avait incorporé un nouvel amour.

Good lord. If the alternative is having nothing to do but to admire one's self in the mirror of how one supposes other people see one's self, just. get. a. job. Besides the léger crépélage (snortle) is the kind of detail which 'can be properly interesting' only to the person who has it on his head and to his barber.

This kind of thing is why I find Oscar Wilde a little of the reverse of his own façade. Wilde, purportedly a dandy and an obsessive about superficialities and an apostate to the bourgeoisie, appears to have had far more observation, far more imagination and the ability to think outside of himself, and far more of an interest in thinking about morality than most of his most bienpensant contemporaries. His aesthetics are a very complex thing and are not that far off from reality; an Old Master expends a great deal of work to construct a painting and the moment we see it we know it's not real, but this same painting has as much or more to say than a true scene would. Swann, however, seems to be a little what Oscar Wilde was worried that he was, without facing the same constant prospect of abysses, moral and emotional etc., opening up at his feet to fatally swallow him. On the other hand, I probably admire Wilde too undilutedly to represent him very accurately.

Anyway, so M. Swann meets Odette de Crécy and, having heard of her before, is kind of prejudiced against her. This colours his perception of her charms, so that we are given a leaden portrait of her which runs very much along the unflattering lines of "My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun" (the sonnet). But, despite his anathematic attitude toward 'settling,' for some reason he decides to 'settle' for a flirtation with her and to sort-of fall in love for the duration of said flirtation as per his usual modus operandi. Hypocrite, I say!

1:18 p.m. According to my philistine calculations, we are nearly 5% of the way through the book.

Proust helpfully informs us that men are clever enough to fall in love, as they become older and accustomed to it, through short-cuts: they can convince themselves, or stumble across a thread of feeling which they recognize from past passions, and then make a whole fabric out of it which suffices for the time. Women, on the other hand, those slow-minded creatures, go the whole hog. *Snore*

Moving on from the Pavlovian responses inherent in worldly masculinity, Odette de Crécy continues to chase down Swann and worry away at him like a golden retriever with the bone his master has thrown to him; and Swann continues to think he is God's gift to women, even as he is nattering away in his mind whenever she visits that he wishes she were a little prettier. Quel grand âme, as the French might say.

There follows a long defense of her haggish state, which is (I guess?) supposed to indicate an openminded spirit:

Il faut d'ailleurs dire que le visage d'Odette paraissait plus maigre et plus proéminent parce que le front et le haut des joues, cette surface unie et plus plane était recouverte par la masse de cheveux qu'on portait alors prolongés en "devants", soulevés en "crêpés", répandus en mèches folles le long des oreilles; et quant à son corps qui était admirablement fait, il était difficile d'en apercevoir la continuité (à cause des modes de l'époque et quoiqu'elle fût une des femmes de Paris qui s'habillaient le mieux), tant le corsage, s'avançant en saillie comme sur un ventre imaginaire et finissant brusquement en pointe pendant que par en dessous commençait à s'enfler

. . . This description goes on and on, so I've cut it short here. I can read about peplum dresses in Vogue and W and Elle and look at photos of ready-to-wear runway shows for hours, but this is incredibly tedious.

Then she leaves and Swann is mighty tickled (to borrow from the western vernacular) that she is so insecure about when she can visit him again or if he could visit her. She is worried that she ain't interlectual enough for him or his friends. She doesn't know who on earth Vermeer is, which is so adorable. Swann, who really wants to get around to writing an essay about the abovementioned painter even though he spells him Ver Meer for some reason, declines her offer to visit him by saying that he is afraid of forming new friendships.

Rather than punch the obnoxious idiot in the nose for exploiting her frailties to feed his insatiable vanity, she discovers in him a Wounded Soul. She gushes that she is desperate for new friendships and perpetrates this horrible clichéd balderdash: [Epic Nausea Alert]

Vous avez dû souffrir par une femme. Et vous croyez que les autres sont comme elle. Elle n'a pas su vous comprendre; vous êtes un être si à part. C'est cela que j'ai aimé d'abord en vous, j'ai bien senti que vous n'étiez pas comme tout le monde.

Which, to translate it into modern English and sacrifice the rules of punctuation, amounts more or less to: "A woman must have made you suffer, and you think that the others are like her. She couldn't understand you, you're a person who is so unique. That's what I liked about you first, I really felt that you weren't like everyone else."

Mon. Dieu. quel. horreur.

This is the kind of situation where I think the lady would be better served by going on an Eat, Pray, Love tour of self-gratification and 'discovery' than by lolling about at home and being around this type of 'guy.'

Swann in Love

"This is a Shell Leines or a pearl oyster shell-shaped
madeleine, which was made by Blanca."
Photo by Miyuki Meinaka, April 2010
(via Wikimedia Commons, License CC BY-SA 3.0

Having browsed the bookshelf, or rather looked at it and taken out a random book, I have decided to live-blog my attempts to read a portion of Proust's The Remembrance of Things Past, entitled Swann in Love or Un amour de Swann. Since I've got it, I'll use it: I'm reading an original French edition from Gallimard (1977), which is presumably in our bookshelves by grace of Omama. I haven't read anything by Proust, and know little beyond the famous detail that he bit into a biscuit once and it reminded him of something; please excuse my ignorance. For the sake of context: according to a certain online encyclopaedia, The Remembrance of Things Past was written from 1908ish to 1922. [Let's not mention what happened to my last live-blog, of War and Peace.]

10:47 p.m. It irritates me as a classical music aficionado and detail-obsessive when fictional pianists play pieces (e.g. a Haydn symphony) which are not composed for the piano. While Wagner did write pieces for the piano — which I had never heard of until a few minutes ago, when I conferred with Wikipedia's 'List of compositions' by him — Proust lends the pianist a repertory of extracts from The Valkyrie and Tristan and Isolde.

Anyway, the portraiture of high society begins at once; the little tiffs over favoured musicians, doctors, etc. oneupmanship between hostesses of salons and parties, and the bothers of patronage. Oddly enough these details remind me a good deal of Maria Edgeworth.

In terms of characters we are introduced to M. Verdurin and Mme. Verdurin, the lady being 'virtuous and of a respectable bourgeois family, excessively rich and entirely obscure, with whom she had ceased, little by little and voluntarily, any relations.' In her salon she welcomes Mme. de Crécy, a lady of ill-er repute; the wife of her favourite doctor Cottard; and the aunt of her favourite pianist (he of the Wagner repertory), among the ladies. Her pianist is permitted to appear — and play if he considers that the spirit is moving him — and so is her favourite painter. They talk, play charades, indulge in ladylike valetudinarianism (Mme. Verdurin), and listen to the music.

By this point I realize that my French is not up to the standard of reading Marcel Proust, so Le Petit Robert ('petit' inasfar as a brickbat which encompasses 2949 numbered pages can be considered 'petit') in a 2003 edition and Follett Publishing Company's Classic French Dictionary (1962) have appeared on the scene.

faribole - idle story, trifle
esclaffer - [etym. used early as 1534, from Provençal esclafa (éclater), revived 19th cent.] bursting into loud laughter ("éclater de rire bruyamment")

This society sounds incredibly boring.

We have reached 'Page 9,' which is really Page 3.

11:43 p.m. The society dissolves in the course of time, as very pressing obligations take its members elsewhere. (A slow dignified exit out the door, followed by a reckless thumping run down the carpeted hallway, shoes clattering down the stairs, footman cut off mid-polite-inquiry, door slamming, pause, horse-drawn carriage or automobile tumbling away . . . one presumes.) Mme. Verdurin is shocked that her guests have lives outside her salon. She wonders why the doctor would want to bother his patients by promptly tending them upon their request.