Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture Read Online Free Page A
Author: Julian Barnes
called a “second identity,” didn't regret the partial loss of Englishness, and loved being asked if he was Belgian (though this is normally a somewhat poisoned compliment from the French to the Francophone). He had either one French wife (if you believe the index to Paris and Elsewhere) or two (if you follow the logic of his widely divergent descriptions of what might theoretically be the same woman), and then an English one; children, too, it seems. Before, and perhaps in between, he acquired a connoisseur's knowledge of prostitution: “Most Paris brothels tended to look like public lavatories—English ones, not French ones.” Cobb's life became so French that French things started happening to him: he used to visit Gaby la Landaise, a prostitute from Dax, every payday for a year (I think we are in the late Forties or early Fifties), until the Friday he learned that she had just put a revolver in her mouth and shot herself, “in one of the sparse bedrooms on the fifth floor, No. 78 .” Another small case for Maigret. Meanwhile, the history Cobb was absorbed in became as French as his identity. Not only was it all about France, specifically the Revolution, specifically its later stages, but it was written and published in French: his first book in English didn't appear until he was fifty-two.
Cobb's France is not that of the traditional English Francophile, who tends to prefer the south, the countryside, the sun, the deceptively original village; who likes things as different from England as possible. Cobb preferred cities (indeed, he scarcely seems to notice the pastoral); he loved the north, which included Belgium; when he went south at all, it was to great centres like Lyon or Marseilles. He was addicted to walking, but walking in cities; it's not clear whether he ever drove; certainly he favoured public transport, with its opportunities for eavesdropping and casual observation. He was in no way a snob—a spell in the British army, he claimed, had divested him of class—except in the sense that he tended not to give the middle and upper classes the benefit of the doubt. (History, you could say, had already given them that.) He preferred les petites gens both in his life and in his writing: small tradespeople, working folk, servants, laundresses, wigmakers' assistants, cardsharps, water-carriers, prostitutes, idlers, semi-criminals; his closest French friend was both a deserter and a thief.
Though a democrat in his social tastes, he saw enough of the French Communist Party to distrust generalized belief systems; he had no appetite for eating off those comradely plates which, as the food disappeared, slowly disclosed Picasso's benign icon of Stalin. He was, by his own description, “a very lonely person”; he was also, by his own evidence, social and convivial, a welcoming fellow drinker. A paradoxical man, then, a solitary with frequent companions; also a paradoxical historian, since in his life he clearly needed order and ritual to keep chaos and brutality at bay, yet he spent his career with one of the most disorderly and violent periods in France's history.
Cobb's social writing is personal and impressionistic, while his history is archival and fanatically detailed. Yet both depend upon the same principles and focus: a very English taste for the particular and the local, coupled with a disregard for theory, scheme, and overarching structure, for century-hopping generalization, let alone “models.” In the middle of a characteristically enormous sentence about the problem, after five years of Revolutionary upheaval, of establishing anyone's true identity, especially at the lowest levels of society, Cobb refers to “the historian like the police and other repressive authorities before him.” Cobb was fond of this comparison in its benign form: the historian as a detective who takes his time, never rushes to conclusions, learns the geography of the crime, walks the streets, takes a pastis, sniffs the air,
Cobb's France is not that of the traditional English Francophile, who tends to prefer the south, the countryside, the sun, the deceptively original village; who likes things as different from England as possible. Cobb preferred cities (indeed, he scarcely seems to notice the pastoral); he loved the north, which included Belgium; when he went south at all, it was to great centres like Lyon or Marseilles. He was addicted to walking, but walking in cities; it's not clear whether he ever drove; certainly he favoured public transport, with its opportunities for eavesdropping and casual observation. He was in no way a snob—a spell in the British army, he claimed, had divested him of class—except in the sense that he tended not to give the middle and upper classes the benefit of the doubt. (History, you could say, had already given them that.) He preferred les petites gens both in his life and in his writing: small tradespeople, working folk, servants, laundresses, wigmakers' assistants, cardsharps, water-carriers, prostitutes, idlers, semi-criminals; his closest French friend was both a deserter and a thief.
Though a democrat in his social tastes, he saw enough of the French Communist Party to distrust generalized belief systems; he had no appetite for eating off those comradely plates which, as the food disappeared, slowly disclosed Picasso's benign icon of Stalin. He was, by his own description, “a very lonely person”; he was also, by his own evidence, social and convivial, a welcoming fellow drinker. A paradoxical man, then, a solitary with frequent companions; also a paradoxical historian, since in his life he clearly needed order and ritual to keep chaos and brutality at bay, yet he spent his career with one of the most disorderly and violent periods in France's history.
Cobb's social writing is personal and impressionistic, while his history is archival and fanatically detailed. Yet both depend upon the same principles and focus: a very English taste for the particular and the local, coupled with a disregard for theory, scheme, and overarching structure, for century-hopping generalization, let alone “models.” In the middle of a characteristically enormous sentence about the problem, after five years of Revolutionary upheaval, of establishing anyone's true identity, especially at the lowest levels of society, Cobb refers to “the historian like the police and other repressive authorities before him.” Cobb was fond of this comparison in its benign form: the historian as a detective who takes his time, never rushes to conclusions, learns the geography of the crime, walks the streets, takes a pastis, sniffs the air,