My name is Felix Deschamps. I’m a car thief who’s been elected to the Académie Française. Whether Cardinal Richlieu created this organization back in 1635 to monitor, maintain, and uphold the honor of the French language with the assistance of a car thief in mind, I don’t exactly know.
My maiden speech was making its way up through the pages of my calendar. Its purpose was to serve as both an introduction and an honorarium to the former member who had passed away — the great Tuscon Deneuve — and it was his shoes I was expected to fill. I had commandeered a table — taken it down from a stack of selfsame tables that had been slumbering together on the Rue de Saint Dominique — and set it up before the waiters had even arrived and set to work.
There are forty members of the Académie, each with different strengths. They meet at L’Institut de France, which shares its premises with five other Academies (belles-lettres, beaux arts, etc), though — unlike the others — none are charged with producing a dictionary for their particular area of focus. None are responsible for the entire language. (You know that knock you get on your door when you end a sentence with a preposition in the middle of the night? That’s us.)
I figured I’d give my talk to the assembled crowd — the great educated masses — on the sea. I could talk to them about how I managed to steal a car before it had reached the end of the factory production line or how I managed to pull off a car chase on the ferry between Marseille and Barcelona — which was as much fun as it sounds — but something was pulling me back to the skippers and the skiffs and the creaks and the groans of tied up boats pulling on the docks like they were galley rowers cast deep into the bowels of some haunted house.
I grew up in the waters of the Mediterranean. That was my backyard. That was my garden. Marseille was my city.
I left Marseille for Paris because the local representatives of The Zetas who held figurative court couldn’t fathom how I could be fond of stealing cars, fond of Gide, Balzac, and Henry James, and could not find the emotional capacity within myself to sell drugs. “Don’t you want to be our getaway driver, at least?” they’d ask, and then they’d ask again, and again, and again, and then I had to do it blindfolded in the middle of the night with a gun to my head — “Did you get all the money?” I heard themselves ask each other again and again in an overlapping mixture of Spanish, French, and high-adrenaline shouts — and I only survived because I hummed the theme from “North by Northwest” to myself and knew the streets so well I could watch a balloon pop high above the city and make a winning bet with my friends as to where the thing was going to land. Ker-splat.
I came to Paris shortly after that incident, and as the bus upon which I sat slowly filled with tourists the way in which one slowly stuffs their cheeks with grapes — the goal being some sort of harvesting animal or Dizzy Gillespie-like triumph, I suppose — I looked out the window and watched Paris emerge with a thankful heart. Some might think me to be on the odd side of odd by saying this or figure I’m acting like the trembling lower lip of some octogenarian listening to De Gaulle speak about France — that this was a world closer to films like “Children of Men” and “Contagion” and that I’d be in danger no matter where I happened to be (who — after all — runs from The Zetas?) — but I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I had Paris in my corner and on my side, it would be more than a fair fight.
I had first come to the attention of the Académie — and Tuscon Deneuve in particular — through a small series of pamphlets I had dashed off while sitting in stolen cars — for the habit had returned a mere three days after I had hopped off the bus, when I had made my way to the nearest awning-covered café, noticed the oncoming rain, and then noticed the Delage Torpedo.
And, oh, my: what an apt name — the Delage Torpedo is the kind of car you expect to come with its own set of aviation goggles, an airman’s scarf, and the kind of bomber jacket that made it look like you were wearing a sheep wrapped around your neck. It is a car from an age of black and white films and of grande prix races conducted with all the informality and street-bound cordiality of the Tour de France. No one would give a second thought to wandering across the road to top up someone’s drink or light someone’s cigarette as a string of these things went galloping by. 38,000 Delages were made altogether, a little more than 1200 survive, and yet — of that lot — a Torpedo was across the way from me in the café, a Torpedo with no immediately discernible owner about to be pelted by the rain, and so I was — and let’s make sure we do the air quotes all together — “forced” to take the car and try and find a place for it out of the rain. I thought of taking it to the arcade passages of the 2nd Arronsidement and send shoppers jumping out of the way; I thought of leaving it in one of the tunnels of the Periphrique — that strange highway that encircled the city like a concrete moat; but I ultimately bought a pack of umbrellas, placed them all over the car like a kind of lichen or algae, and left the car on the edge of the Right Bank, looking across the river and towards the café like it was Harpo Marxo aping Groucho in “Duck Soup,” a kind of mirror image thrown slightly off by the virtue of mischievous happenstance.
Pamphlet No. 1 came to mind in the middle of all that. Maybe the exact moment of inspiration struck when I was sitting at a red light and listening to a man defend a television show called “The Circle” to his friends. (“Don’t you see? When the detective says, ‘She was killed because she was beautiful,’ it’s an ironic wink at French clichés.” “ … Is it?”) But whatever the case — whatever the ideological evolutionary lineage (why not talk about Gabonese French, for instance?) — I decided that day that it was high time to trace the expressions “Jarnicoton!” and “Jarnidieu!” and see how the interplay of the two bore out over time.
Here’s what I found after descending into the semi-dystopian bowels of the BnF: “Jarnidieu!” — that is, ‘I deny God!’ — made the fifteenth century its home. One hundred years later, Pierre Coton — the confessor of Henry IV — asked the king to say ‘Jarnicoton’ instead. (“You want me to deny myself cotton? Shall I be banished to silk and velvet for the rest of my life?” “No, your majesty. If you’ll recall the spelling of my last name once again …”)
Why these words, though? Why the great leap back some six hundred years? Why did it announce itself via a series of trumpets as I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic at the Arc de Triumph? That’s where — I knew it was … Probably because of the time I spent as a bairn-sized little duckling stowed away in the back of my parents’s car, self-swaddled in a blanket per their advice to avoid the gaze of police and policing parents, my eyes fixated upon brightly lit clouds that moved less than the traffic, and how I couldn’t figure out the difference between Henry IV and Henry IV — that is, England’s Henry IV and France’s Henry IV: one with a Shakespeare play attached to his name; the other, without, and I couldn’t for the life of me think at the time as to why Billy Shakes hadn’t written a play called “Henry IV and Henry IV, Part 1,” a glowing jellyfish of an idea that had hidden itself behind the kelp of time until I hit the frozen assemblage of traffic and clouds, as if one of the cars had stepped on a creaky floorboard and all had stopped in blind terror to try and figure out who the culprit happened to be. Then the jellyfish re-emerged, “Jarnicoton” and all.
One source suggested that “Jarnicoton!” hadn’t been a suggestion proffered by a friendly priest, but a sarcastic rejoinder from the King. There was a political dimension to briefly power through — that a culture where some had initially insisted the king renounce his Protestantism before becoming King wouldn’t take kindly to someone renouncing God — but that didn’t quite feel like it was all it could be — even though the religious divide was such that some histories say Henry lost half his army upon taking the crown. Then there was the decision to explore the life of Pierre Coton and how his claiming that Popes could depose Kings came to mean that all Jesuits were forever half a breath from committing regicide so quickly. And then there was the temptation to turn the pamphlet into a fruit basket of anagrams, but I held back and didn’t take the plunge.