My Uncle Roger was an amazing man, a Professor of Anthropology who almost certainly would have published many more books and become a renowned academic, had kidney disease not taken him from us in 1960 (leaving 5 children and a widow.) My mother worshipped her older brother as they were growing up. He was not only smart and handsome, but extremely witty, if his expression of it was sometimes constrained by growing up in a household run by my Grandfather, a good but extremely serious man. Before the war, he used to literally pace in circles around the dinner table, his anxiety about the gathering clouds casting a pall upon the family on a nightly basis. (Having fought in the trenches in WWI, he knew what war was about.)
In 1943, my Grandmother, Jeanne, was in a sanitarium in the country, for tuberculosis in a place called La Chapelle Gralhouse. There she was joined by her son, Roger, who was 20, and her daughter, Francoise, who was 8 (now 72-I'll be seeing her soon.) Roger had health problems of his own, but was also trying to lay low as he was a member of the Resistance and there were fears the Germans were suspicious of his activities. In any case, my mother, Simone, who was 18, remained in Avignon, in the the family aparments above the Chemiserie Chabal, the shirt store owned and run by her father (and his father and Grandfather before them.) My mother went to school and shopped and cooked for her Dad and her, not an easy task during wartime privations.
So this is what my Uncle Roger did. To lighten my mother's mood, he wrote her a letter as if he had just spent the month with a "Grand Duke Alexander" who was madly in love with her, and had proposed marriage to her, through him. In this letter, in which he is breathlessly conveying the marriage proposal, my uncle writes in the style of a 19th-century Romantic novelist--a little Flaubert, a little Tolstoy, a touch of Colette, perhaps.
It was supremely funny and original thing to do, and my mother has kept the letter for 64 years. It's part of the package of writings I am translating into English for this family vacation in Massachusetts starting Thursday. What I did was write the English, in italics, beneath the French--for those of you who might be bilingual and want to read along with the original. Since it's three pages long, I scanned it and you have to click on it to read it, but if it's up your alley I promise it's thoroughly charming. Within the letter, my Uncle quoted the completely ficititious letter from the Duke, and his comments are between [brackets]. When I was a bit unsure of whether I got the translation right, you'll see a {?}.
What an incredible pleasure to feel so creatively connected to the Uncle I never knew. This kind of parody letter is rather up my alley. The apple doesn't fall that far from the tree, indeed.
RogeraSimone
MCO 2007
P.S. Trying to read the letter off the pop-up is a little problematic. At least on my computer, you can't scan down without zooming in to 125%. Here's an excerpt--just the English translation:
\\Right away I want to share with you some of the more important excerpts from
his letter. You will understand my discretion in not communicating the entire letter itself,
as it contains several passages in which His Highness confesses (with a exuberant
lyricism that I found sometimes amusing) the sins of his youth, the nature of which
might be rather shocking to the ears of a young lady In any case, I think we need to close
our eyes to any such adventures, whether real or invented. A man such as he
merits our forbearance. I transcribe herein the principal passages, altering nothing.
Unfortunately you will not be able to savor the mesmerizing Russo-Hispanic accent with
which he would have no doubt made his declarations if circumstances had
lent themselves to such happenstance.\\
