For Sure (16 page)

Sixty-one authors of
La Bibliothèque idéale
have names composed of a single word. Eight of them begin with
s,
seven with
p
, six each with
a, c,
and
h,
and five with
e
. Once again we find the popular
a, c, p,
and
s
. The authors in question are: Abélard, Adonis, Alain, Apicius, Apulée, Aristotle, Bashô, Brassaï, Cabu, Chamfort, Cicero, Colette, Confucius, Corneille, Demosthenes, Epictetus, Erasmus, Aeschyles, Aesop, Euripides, Fenelon, Goosens, Hergé, Herodotus, Hesiod, Hitchcock, Homer, Horace, Kalidasa, Lucrecius, Menon, Molière, Novalis, Ousâma, Ovid, Parmenides, Pausanias, Pétillon, Petronius, Pindar, Plato, Plautus, Ryokan, Saki, Sallust, Sempé, Seneca, Shitao, Sophocles, Stendhal, Suetonius, Tacitus, Taillevant, Terence, Thucydides, Vercors, Virgil, Voltaire, Vuillemin, Xenophon, and Zeami. The shortest names are Cabu, author of a comic strip entitled
Le Grand Duduche
, and Saki, author of
L'Omelette byzantine
, listed in the category of “Laughter.” These very short names appear all the more so in Comparison to names like Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais; Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon; Marie-Jean Antoine Caritat de Condorcet; José de Espronceda y Delgado; José Maria Ferreira de Castro; Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle; Hugues Félicité Robert de Lamennais; Félix Lope de Vega Carpio; Hippolyte Prosper Olivier Lissagaray; Oscar-Vladislas de Lubicz-Milosz; Edward Georges Bulwer Lytton; Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis; Honoré Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau; Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.

Leafing through
La Bibliothèque idéale
, Élizabeth cannot believe that the word
inexplicabilité
does not appear in any French dictionary.*

The doors to the psychoanalytic fraternity were opened to Lacan thanks to his theory of the mirror stage. This moment of maturation, which occurs between the ages of 6 and 18 months, when the child first encounters its image in a mirror, leads to the illusion of the self, or the ego, from which speech will emerge. Because the imaginary self corresponds to a speaking subject, the subject being that which arises from an unconscious desire as language. More or less.

In addition to Francis Thibaudeau — Terry's distant cousin? — who drew up the first real classification of typographic characters, Acadian enthusiasts of genealogy will be happy to learn that there exists a genealogy of printing characters. The founding families are the Gothic, Old Style Roman, Italic, Transitional Roman, Modern Roman, Antique, Egyptian, Calligraphic, Script, and Ornamental.

“Der's someting about usin' a word fer de first time. ‘Specially in French.”

“You mean dat it's a bit tricky? On account of you can't be certain yer usin it like yer supposed to?”

“No, more like: Well, now dat's a pretty word! An' why wouldn't I use it?”

“Ya. Dream on.”

It is still too soon to speak of the Other.

Demonstration based on randomly selected numbers: the 32 divisions of the Compass Rose; the 338 entries in the
Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse
(
Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
) by Roland Chemama and Bernard Vandermersch (Larousse), which includes 101 entries under the letters
a
,
b
,
c
, and
d
, or 15 percent of the letters of the alphabet accounting for 30 percent of the entries (2 of the 101 entries actually refer the reader to other entries); and finally, a factor X to be chosen in the heat of writing this:

a) 338 – 32 = 306, a more or less insignificant number;

b) 101 – 2 = 99

99 × 2 = 198, a more or less insignificant number;

However:

c) 12 × 12 × 12 = 1,728

d) 1,728 – 198 = 1,530, which might also be read as 15 and 30 percent.

And finally, selecting the five in the heat of writing, since we're now engaged in the fifth operation of our demonstration:

e) 1,530 ÷ 5 = 306, which brings us back to the result of our initial mathematical operation.

A cerebral hemorrhage, or cerebral vascular accident, was the cause of death of the Italian author Italo Calvino in 1985. He was 62 years old.

Marianne is kind of the clown of the family. Nor does it take very much to arouse her playful nature.

“
Marianne went down to the mill, Marianne went down to the mill . . .
”

Immediately the child's face lit up.

“
She went down to mill her grain, She went down to mill her grain . . .
”

As he sang, Terry watched Marianne in his rear-view mirror.

“
She was riding on her donkey, oh my little miss Marianne . . .
”

Terry' decided to take a ride up by Salisbury, where someone had advertised a trailer for sale.

“
Riding on her donkey Catty, goin' down to the mill.
”

Unfortunately, he hadn't taken into account their ancient jalopy's recent minor mechanical troubles.

“
The miller saw her coming, The miller saw her coming . .
.”

Now here they were, waiting for the tow truck by the side of the road.

Second irritant: books with the page numbers on the inside margin. Often the page number comes close to falling into the gutter of the binding. An error in layout? This is clearly the case of the pocket dictionary
Proverbes et Dictons (Proverbs and Sayings)
published by Robert. It takes a while for one to realize that the more useful numbering in this work is that which identifies the particular saying one is searching for. A tedious process, because of the book's odd system of classification, which in the end confirms the usefulness of numbering pages, if only to facilitate replacing those pages when they inevitably fall out of this bizarrely designed and badly bound book. Ouroboros.

Élizabeth turns the pages. Observation, treatment. Observation, treatment. Bodies, Spirits. Turn the page: ways they are the same, ways they are discordant. Hector Berlioz's
Mémoires
, Erik Satie's
Écrits
.

Blissful blue. Sky blue, lavender blue, nattier blue. Periwinkle blue. Bleu d'Auvergne,
bleu des Causses
,
bleu de Bresse
.
Gros bleu
. Blue note. Blue overalls, blue boiler suit, blue jeans. Blue Bayou. Midnight blue. Blue Blood. Bluebell. Blue pencil.

“
It's raining, Bergère, bring your white sheep in . .
.”

Marianne also liked “Bergère.” She thought the song was about a particular lady named Bergère.

“
Come into my cottage, Bergère, come quick . . .
”

Terry looked at his watch. They'd been waiting for a half hour by now. Should he go back to the little house in the curve of the road to phone the garage again? And call Carmen, too, this time? But she'd want to know what he was doing in Salisbury.

“
I hear the rain afalling, water beating on the leaves . . .
”

In the rear-view mirror Terry could see Marianne was on the brink of sleep. While she slept, could he leave her alone just long enough to go and phone?

“
The storm is coming fast now, see the lightening flashing.
”

The infant, who does not yet know that he or she is a whole being, realizes that she does indeed correspond to the image in the mirror. This recognition allows her to anticipate the eventual conquest of her body, which she does not yet master.

In addition, the following observation:

144 = 1 + 4 + 4 = 9

144 × 2 = 288 = 2 + 8 + 8 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9

144 × 3 = 432 = 4 + 3 + 2 = 9

144 × 4 = 576 = 5 + 7 + 6 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9

144 × 5 = 720 = 7 + 2 + 0 = 9

144 × 6 = 864 = 8 + 6 + 4 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9

144 × 7 = 1,008 = 1 + 0 + 0 + 8 = 9

144 × 8 = 1,152 = 1 + 1 + 5 + 2 = 9

144 × 9 = 1,296 = 1 + 2 + 9 + 6 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9

144 × 10 = 1,440 = 1 + 4 + 4 + 0 = 9

144 × 11 = 1,584 = 1 + 5 + 8 + 4 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9

144 × 12 = 1,728 = 1 + 7 + 2 + 8 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9

Regardless of by which number one multiplies 144, the result of the preceeding operation will always be 9.

Collaborative works by two authors in
La Bibliothèque idéale
are especially numerous in the “Cartoons” category. It also turns out that it often takes two, if not more, to compose music. Familial collaborations, for their part, seem to have been particularly fruitful among names beginning with the letters
g
and
s
. Among the names beginning with
g
, we should note the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's
Fairytales
,
Cheaper by the Dozen
by the couple Ernestine and Frank Gilbreth, and the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's
Journal
. Among those beginning with
s
, are
Bolivar, Le Libertador
by Gilette and Marie-France Saurat,
The
Correspondence of Clara and Robert Schumann
, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's
Monday Begins on Saturday
. As for the brothers Kotek (Joel and Dan), and Pebyre (Pierre-Jean and Jacques), and the Verroust couple (Jacques and Marie-Laure), they respectively tackled, with apparent success, the subjects of Russian agriculture, truffles, and French sweets.

“Ask me, she's gonna end up wid de tennis elbow, she keeps on readin like she does.”

. . .

“Worse ting is de ideas it puts in 'er head.”

“Like wot?”

“Like . . . a women shouldn't 'ave her period but twice a year, an' even den, shouldn't last but twenty-four hours. And wid none of dem cramps neider.”

“Well, can't say I'd be against dat.”

“Children ought to be self sufficient by de time dey's six years old.”

“Well, der again, see . . .”

“I'm not sayin' dey aren't good ideas, mind you. Only der not exactly de sort of ideas'll help a body face up to de real world. I mean, laird in heaven, de girl's naught but tirteen!

The French word
bergère
means not only a shepherdess, but it is also the name in English and German, as well as French, for a relatively comfortable straight-backed enclosed armchair, with upholstered armrests and back.

Élizabeth looks up from
La Bibliothèque idéale
. Sitting on the sofa facing her large living-room window, it occurs to her that traffic on the corner of the avenue and the highway has become much denser since she moved into the apartment. The marsh has also changed: it's now populated with buildings, mostly apartments. Again, for a moment, Élizabeth imagines herself living in one of the lofts on Church Street.

Examination for Commercial Corporate Law Course (DROI 2215): Develop a legal argument for an increase in the number of
B, P,
and
C
tiles in the French version of Scrabble, based on the incongruity that exists between their present number in the game and their predominance as the first letter in the names of true colours on the web site pourpre.com.

While he waited, Terry wondered which would be more useful, a cellphone or a more reliable vehicle. But did he really want to get hooked on the cellphone habit? Wasn't he rather dreaming, as his interest in that camper in Salisbury clearly demonstrated, of getting away to spend more time with Carmen and the kids?

“Sir?”

Terry jumped. He hadn't even noticed the tow truck arrive.

A study of the symbolism of the numerals 9, 6, and 8 reveals that balance is all that separates the heavens, represented by the numeral 9, from hell, represented by the numeral 6. In fact, both offer generous opportunities for abundant joy and regeneration, but only the heavens (numeral 9) are linked to the symbolism of the numeral 8, which stands for balance, meaning the infinite and all encompassing wisdom that prevents us from falling into error, which is one of the forms of evil.

“That your daughter back there?”

The driver of the tow truck was anglophone and clearly in a jovial mood.

“She lookin' for a job?”

!

“No kiddin'. My sisternlaw's makin' a movie with a gang o' kids jest about that age. A fill'em, she calls it.”