Doubling the line

When driving between Pont-en-Royans and St-Marcellin [some ten kilometers], you have to cross the train line between Grenoble and Valence. There are several itineraries, most of which include a level crossing over the railway line. Now, whenever I cross that line, my brain recalls a certain anecdote, automatically and systematically. This is a boring nuisance, because it's always the same anecdote, and I would like to be able to say to my brain: "Hey, why can't you recall something else, something new, instead of that same old anecdote?" To be perfectly honest, it's not a bad anecdote at all... which is probably why it always reappears in my mind. Here's the story:

François Marty, a gentle native of south-west France who spoke with a quaint regional accent, was the archbishop of Paris from 1968 up until his retirement in 1981. As a farewell gift, his parishioners at Notre Dame de Paris got together enough cash to purchase an old-fashioned 2-horsepower Citroën: the vehicle that Americans named jokingly "basic automobile".

Upon receiving this gift, the delighted cardinal exclaimed enthusiastically: "This vehicle will take me to Paradise!" Then he drove off into retirement in a Dominican convent in the village of Monteils in south-west France. In 1994, at the age of 90, François Marty attempted to drive his automobile across a level crossing in the vicinity of his village. Before he reached the other side, a train smashed into him, carrying the cardinal and his sweet chariot home to God.

A few days ago, when setting out for the return trip after shopping at the supermarket in Chatte, I was surprised to discover that a familiar level crossing was blocked.

I got out of my vehicle to see what was happening, and I discovered that workers were installing a second set of rails.

I recalled that, a few days earlier, in nearby Vinay (when I was visiting the Danisco factory), I had already viewed work being carried out upon this vast project: doubling the existing railway line between Grenoble and Valence.

Alongside the blocked level crossing, a light-hearted publicity panel announced that, in 2009, we should think about taking the train on this line between Grenoble and Valence.

We see passengers from an automobile, blocked in a traffic jam on an overhead bridge, sliding down a rope to catch the train.

It's perfectly true. I really must get around to taking the train at St-Marcellin, from time to time, to visit Grenoble or Valence. It's such a pleasant and convenient solution, and far less tiring than the automobile. Besides, in Grenoble, there's a fabulous tram system to take you everywhere. When the double line speeds up the train service, there'll be no excuse for not adopting this solution. With such interesting destinations as Grenoble and Valence (pleasant provincial atmosphere, shops, restaurants, cafés, museums, etc), it might be said that trains on this line will surely take us to Paradise!

Mother and daughter, respective obsessions

Although her snout is a fragile high-tech smelling device, Sophia is perfectly capable of using it like a shovel to move stones and gravel in order to bury a precious piece of fresh meat [in this case, a chicken's head] that needs to spend a few days in the soil to make it soft, smelly and tasty.

In her Brittany home, Sophia's daughter, Gamone, now disposes of a lovely lawn on which to pursue her favorite pastime: playing with her soft red rubber ball. People get fed up being expected to toss the ball as far as possible, enabling Gamone to exhibit her talents as a footballer. Click on the following image to see a delightful demonstration of a sophisticated electronic gadget for launching tennis balls:

Sophia is now accustomed to the daily ritual of my billy-goat Gavroche calling in for a handful of cereals, served up in a silver dog dish.


I often say to myself that I should give Gavroche away to somebody with a few female goats, because I'm sure that my poor frustrated beast would like to get into action in the sexual domain. On the other hand, Gavroche has truly become part of the furniture at Gamone, and I would be sad to see him go. I'm currently looking into the idea of either hiring him out [free, of course] for procreative services, or maybe even accepting female goats here [in a small electric-fenced yard] for casual short-time encounters with Gavroche.

To catch a thief

This can only be described as a beautiful Macintosh story, almost a fairy tale in crime detection.

A burglary was committed in the New York apartment of a woman who happens to be an Apple store employee, and the thief got away with TVs, iPods, DVDs and two laptop Macs. The lady had subscribed to the .Mac online service, which included a tool named Back to My Mac that enables you to use a second machine to get in contact with your home Mac, and to operate the latter in a remote fashion, just as if you were sitting in front of it. Realizing that the robber was using her stolen Mac, the lady used Back to My Mac to take control of the machine, whereupon she was able to use its built-in camera to take a photo of the robber, staring at the screen, and to receive an email copy of this portrait. She showed the photo to friends who had been to a party in her apartment, and they instantly recognized the robber, and supplied his name and address. The lady then wandered into the local police station and supplied the startled cops with a complete description of the crime, including an excellent portrait of the culprit. She immediately recovered nearly all her stolen stuff. As for the robber, if ever he were to find himself behind bars for a short spell, he might look into the idea of using his spare time to do a bit of reading about the advanced possibilities of the Macintosh.

Places and people named Beaufort

In France, at least a dozen towns or villages are called Beaufort. Literally, Beaufort means "beautiful fortress", and there was a time when France was studded with countless fortifications. So, it's not surprising that this name has survived, often associated with an ancient castle.

This weekend, representatives from many of these places named Beaufort were gathered together, a little like members of an international clan, in the tiny village of Beaufort in the Isère department, an hour's drive away from my homeplace. It's a superficial but amusing pretext for an international gathering, a little like the twinning concept. In a dynamic little community, like that of Beaufort in Isère, local citizens house the visitors in their homes, which makes the whole process simple and friendly. Meanwhile, the gathering is a platform for touristic promotion of the various Beaufort places.

The French name has been widely exported. There's a Beaufort Castle in Scotland, in Luxembourg and even in Lebanon. Towns named Beaufort exist in the USA (South Carolina) and in Australia (Victoria).

Yesterday afternoon, some groups of representatives organized stalls with specimens of their local products.

As for the Australian delegates, who brought along piles of photos and leaflets concerning their town, they got interviewed on regional TV. They told me that they had been inundated, since their arrival in France, by questions from French people about tourism in Australia.

Now, why would I personally be interested in places named Beaufort?

Well, in the course of my genealogical research concerning the Skeffington family, I discovered an ancestral line that descends from John of Gaunt and his children named Beaufort. [Click the image to download an article on the genealogy of Lewis Carroll.] The four children were so named after a castle in France where they were born.

In what part of France was this Beaufort Castle located? Most English-speaking authorities [Dictionary of National Biography, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia, etc] indicate that it was in the Anjou region of western France, in the village now known as Beaufort en Vallée [see the photo of their stand, earlier on in this post]. This sounds like a reasonable suggestion, in that there were ancient links between English royalty and this region through Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou [1113-1151], patriarch of the Angevin dynasty, between the Normans and the Plantagenets. In fact, two centuries later, the Beaufort Castle associated with John of Gaunt had nothing to do with Anjou, for it was located in a quite different part of eastern France, in the tiny village of Champagne now known as Montmorency-Beaufort, whose representatives were also present at the gathering this weekend.

It's really quite remarkable that such a geographical error should continue to exist in the context of British royalty, which is surely one of the most highly-documented domains in the history of the English-speaking world. Maybe this error persists for the simple reason that the provincial facts would appear to be written, for the moment, solely in French. [I intend to publish an article on this question in the near future.]

Before leaving the festivities at Beaufort yesterday afternoon, I took this photo of a charming old stone house on the outskirts of the village.

Uninhabited for a century, this was the birthplace of Joseph Vacher [1869-1898], often referred to as France's Jack the Ripper, a notorious serial killer who was no doubt responsible for more than two dozen heinous cases of rape and murder.

As far as I know, the visitors at the Beaufort gathering were not taken on a touristic visit to this house.

A new story every day

Nicolas Sarkozy appears to be running France in much the same way that I write this blog. One tries constantly to imagine new themes, to tell new stories. Apparently, Sarko's communications specialists have convinced him that this is a good approach for a president of France who needs to convince the people that he's perpetually active, and doing something new. When I was a child, adults used to tell us: An apple a day keeps the doctor away. For Sarko, it's a story a day. Every 24 hours, with the help of his advisors, he invents a new tale to tell.

His latest theme is the history of slavery, as far as it affected France and her overseas territories. The president has decided spontaneously that this subject must be included in school curricula, and that the abolition of slavery will be commemorated annually, henceforth, on May 23.

French people recall the publicity of a celebrated department store in Paris: "A tout instant, il se passe quelque chose aux Galeries Lafayette." (At every moment, something happens at the Galeries Lafayette.) Nicolas Sarkozy behaves in the same spirit. But it's not at all certain that this behavior has made him popular. Nor is it certain that the challenges of France can be tackled ideally in this style.

Comfortable hollow for Sophia

I've known for ages that there are spots, in front of my house, where it's an exaggeration to speak of soil, because the ground is composed of dust and gravel, and nothing can grow there. So, I decided to intervene by scraping up the stony stuff in order to replace it by good soil.

This morning, in the middle of my work, Sophia made it clearly known to me that there was no point in pursuing the job any further, because she found that the dusty rocky hollow I had created was a perfect place for a dog who wants to bask in the sun.

Much of a muchness

When I first heard this silly riddle, long ago, I thought it was funny in a subtle way:

QUESTION: What's the difference between a canary?

Listeners will ask, of course: Between a canary and what? But the question must remain exactly as is: What's the difference between a canary?

ANSWER: There's no difference whatsoever between a canary, because it has two legs of exactly the same length, the right one a little bit more than the left.

In the political domain, when two individuals seem to be advocating identical strategies, observers often say: bonnet blanc, blanc bonnet, which might be translated as "the bonnet is white, it's a white bonnet". In everyday English: "six of one and half a dozen of the other".

In colloquial French, there's a neat way of saying that two things are the same: C'est kif-kif. Apparently, kif is a Maghrib term meaning "the same", and French people have doubled the syllable in the belief that kif-kif sounds more Arabic.

Now, if you want to be long-winded about saying that two things are the same, you can add on a popular term for "donkey": C'est kif-kif bourricot. And what's the role of the donkey in this verbal construction? Well, it would appear that, in North Africa, to indicate that two things are the same, people often say that they're kif-kif... like a donkey. Like a canary, for that matter.

Victory in Europe Day

Paris had been liberated from her Nazi oppressors during the second half of August 1944. Eight months later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin. Then, on 8 May 1945, the official act of Germany's unconditional surrender meant that Europe could at last celebrate victory. In London and the USA (where Franklin D Roosevelt had died a month earlier), these victory celebrations were massive.

Recently, when my daughter Emmanuelle purchased a flat near the Place de la République in Paris, she obtained a couple of old photo albums that belonged to the lady (deceased) who had lived there. Among these amateur snapshots, there are three interesting images of Paris on May 8, 1945, which are no doubt published here for the first time. [Clicking a blog photo displays an enlargement.]

Five huge flags are suspended from the Arc de Triomphe. [Paris historians might be able to tell us whether the habit of flags under the arch dates from that epoch.] The army truck on the Place de l'Etoile has a white five-pointed star on the door. Is the Jeep a US or a French vehicle? There's a French policeman on a bicycle, surrounded by a couple of civilian cyclists and a midget automobile. On this 8 May 1945 at the hub of France, the ambiance is calm.

On the Place de la Concorde, the atmosphere is subdued. I have the impression that the couple in the foreground were the proprietors of Emmanuelle's flat. The man is wearing some kind of decoration in his lapel, whereas the woman seems to have purchased a poster. They appear to me as Gaullist patriots, happy to realize that Paris is once again their familiar City of Light. Everything in this photo indicates calm and sunny relief.

This photo was taken from the balcony of my daughter's flat in the Rue Oberkampf. The lady is probably the same person seen in the photo on the Place de la Concorde. The building is bedecked with five flags, including those of France, the USA, Great Britain and Russia.

The overall impression gleaned from these images is that Victory Day in Europe, for Parisians, was a solemn and subdued affair.

Poisonous books

Often, on the Franco-German Arte TV channel, an entire evening is devoted to a particular theme. Last night, a pair of excellent documentaries, aired for the first time, tackled the theme of two poisonous books: Hitler's notorious Mein Kampf and an abominable fake entitled Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was a good idea for Arte to deal with the two books, one after the other, because they can be thought of as complementary specimens of poisonous trash. In a nutshell: Hitler's opus was a terribly veridical document, in that it offered a precise account of all the horrors that were about to be enacted. But retrospectively, one has the impression that the world at large failed to take the book or its author seriously... otherwise, steps would have surely been taken to curb Hitler's demoniacal dreams. On the other hand, the ugly thing called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is exactly the opposite of a veridical document, since this book is a mindless fable. Curiously, though, hordes of silly people would still appear to be taking it seriously.


Once upon a terrible time, Hitler's My Combat was indeed a best-seller. Up until 1945, some 12 million copies had been in circulation. Today, the heritage of this literary and societal muck is characterized by two disturbing observations. First, the book is banned in Germany, as if the authorities were afraid that Hitler's ravings might still stir up Fascist enthusiasm. Second, it would appear that this antiquated book still has a significant readership in a nation that would like to become a member of the European Union. I'm referring to Turkey.

Click the image to see what Wikipedia has to say about this extraordinary and obnoxious fake document, which develops the crazy idea that planetary Jewry has been conspiring to take control of the world. Indeed, the Protocols might be considered as the grandaddy of all the conspiracy theories of the 20th century, right down to all the rubbish that has circulated concerning the events of 9/11.



A recent article in the excellent New York Times [display] drew attention to the fact that Putin has been favoring the Russian Orthodox church as a kind of unique Christian faith, at the expense of all others, particularly Protestants. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm quite happy to see that Putin's state apparatus aims to create a nice official kind of old-fashioned religious phenomenon, starring primarily, if not uniquely, the Orthodox church. Why not? This quaint time-honored image of saintly Russia will be good for tourism and public relations, not to mention foreign affairs of a political kind, and might help us to forget about Stalin. But things get more disturbing when we learn that the new generation of Russian ecclesiastics would appear to believe in, and propagate, the anti-Semitic shit promulgated by the Protocols... once authored by a Russian faker named Matvei Golovinski [1865-1920]. The circle is ignominiously closed.

Charming little town called Chatte

My favorite Leclerc shopping center is located on the municipal territory of a tiny town called Chatte (meaning a female cat in French), alongside St-Marcellin.

At first sight, Chatte appears to be a village, but the visitor soon discovers that it has all the trappings of a little town... such as a post office, for example, on a corner of a small square with a republican fountain with a tricolor-waving Marianne.

The town hall is currently decked out in German and Italian flags, because Chatte is twinned with towns in these two countries. Yesterday, the town received a bus load of Italian visitors. On the narrow pavements of Chatte, there's no room to swing a female cat, so I had to step onto the equally narrow road (where automobiles travel at twice the legal speed) whenever I ran into tourists.

It was sunny in Chatte, and the leafy trees around the church provided shade for bikers at lunch. As for the church, in spite of the influx of visitors, it remained shut.

Chatte was the abode of a future Catholic saint, who lived in a charming stone house across from the church.


The plaque informs us that Pierre-Julien Eymard [1811-1868] was the local priest for three years. [Click the portrait to visit a rich website concerning Eymard's ecclesiastic achievements.]




At the center of the town, a café is called, appropriately enough, the Café du Centre. A nearby place is marked hotel/restaurant, but I'm not sure whether it's operational. The only major tourist attraction at Chatte is a small park with a collection of model railways... but I've never been motivated enough to go there.

A tiny stream meanders gently through Chatte, past stone-walled yards of fruit trees and drooping wisteria. It surely has a source and a name, but I ignore these details.

Nearby, the imposing façade of a former spinning mill evokes an epoch, long before our modern age of outsourcing and globalization, when the villages and small towns of France hummed with industrial activity.

Up on a hill above the township, a nondescript stone building is referred to, by local people, as le vieux château [the old castle].

From this vantage point, the view extends across the rich plain alongside the Isère, with fields of walnut trees and colza, to the nearby Vercors mountain range [where my Gamone homeplace is located].

The town might appear to be somewhat drowsy, but it is actually quite a prosperous and progressive little community, with modern facilities such as this media library for young people.

Last but not least [in fact, the main reason why I've been drawn recently to Chatte], behind this children's playground on the central square of the town, there's an excellent service in physical education, equipped to take care of prostatectomy patients.

Christine and I once knew a lady who, whenever she traveled through French villages, would immediately search for the boutique of the local photographer who handles weddings, because she claimed that there's no better way of understanding the culture and general mentality of a community than to see how they get themselves photographed at marriages. Personally, whenever I discover a relatively out-of-the-way place such as the tiny town of Chatte, I'm always intrigued to know whether certain interesting individuals might have grown up there, because I take pleasure in trying to imagine how the environment might have modeled them, as it were, for their future prowess. This is a relatively straightforward exercise in the case of famous residents of a great city such as Paris, but one has to adopt a more subtle approach when you attempt to decide what influences might have been exerted upon adolescents in a place such as Chatte, motivating their later adventures and achievements.

Two local heroes are represented by bronze busts in alcoves in the façade of the town hall.


To the left of the main portal, we find an effigy of Clément Adrien Vincendon-Dumoulin [1811-1856], a hydrographer [map-maker] who sailed to Antarctica on the Astrolabe with Dumont d'Urville during the period 1837-1840. It's amusing to imagine a young man from Chatte in the following antipodean predicament:


In an identical alcove to the right of the portal, a bust depicts Alexandre Collenot [1902-1936]:

He was a daring aviation mechanic who flew constantly with the great pioneer Jean Mermoz before disappearing from the face of the Earth somewhere between Brazil and Senegal.

All in all, I like to think of Chatte, both past and present, as a typical small country town, with a little bit of everything. In saying this, however, I'm aware that the place I've just been describing, through a series of images and terse descriptions, exists primarily as a virtual entity in my head. To get to know the true town, you would have to stroll around there for an hour or so on a sunny afternoon, as I did yesterday.

Boot story

Computer users are familiar with the verb boot, meaning to restart the machine. The full term is bootstrap, which is a noun designating the small leather loops at the back of boots, enabling you to pull them on.

There's an old metaphorical expression in English, "pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps", which means to take care of oneself, or get oneself out of dire straits, without the help of anybody else. It is said that the absurd image of pulling on your bootstraps in order to raise your whole body (into the air, say) was used for the first time in the apocryphal tales of Baron Munchausen, who apparently employed this technique to save himself from drowning in a swamp. I haven't been able to find any precise extract in the 1895 edition of the novel in English by Rudolph Erich Raspe, so I imagine that the anecdote appeared in one of the numerous literary remakes of the alleged adventures of Munchausen.

Meanwhile, I take this opportunity of pointing out that a new and complete edition of Terry Gilliam's fabulous film will be coming out shortly on DVD [I'm awaiting my copy from Amazon] to mark the 20th anniversary of its production.

Talking about boots, my room-mate at the La Parisière clinic in February used to operate his own shoe-manufacturing business in Romans, and he gave me the address of one of the only surviving small firms in this domain, started by an Armenian family in 1945.

Their tiny boutique is located on the river front, a few hundred meters up from the great church called the collégiale Saint-Barnard, where the Dauphiné province was handed over officially to the king of France in 1349. My friend had warned me that the range of shoes made by Tchilinguirian is narrow. But, if you come across a suitable model and size, you're able to purchase a product whose quality is likely to be far superior to what you find in ordinary shoes shops. I was lucky, for I found an ideal pair of boots:

Let's get back to the bootstrap metaphor, as used in computing. To understand what it's all about, we should think of a system that exists in one of two states. At the beginning, it's turned off, like an unlit lamp. Later, it's turned on, and ready to perform tasks. The general idea is that the system moves itself, as it were, from a state of total inactivity, to an operational state. And that transition is what we refer to as a bootstrap process.

Somebody suggested an easy-to-understand illustration of the bootstrap concept in the context of bridge construction. Imagine a ravine in the jungle, over which we would like to build a sturdy footbridge. How can we use a bootstrap approach to take us from the no-bridge state to the sturdy-footbridge state? The demonstration works most effectively if we imagine two men, on opposite edges of the ravine. One of them uses a bow and arrow to shoot the free end of a piece of string across the ravine. Once the string is secured, a lightweight pulley is attached to it in such a way as to make it possible to drag a rope across the the ravine. Then the rope is used in a similar fashion to drag a steel cable across the ravine. And so on, using increasingly heavier and stronger cables, up until there's a full-fledged footbridge across the ravine.

These days, one has the impression that a computer is turned on just like a light switch, so the notion of the machine "pulling itself up by its own bootstraps" doesn't really come across explicitly, let alone vividly. In the early days of commercial computing [in the late '50s and early '60s, when I worked as a programer with IBM in Sydney], we were truly obliged to understand the bootstrap concept, because the computer's memory would be totally empty, and we had to invent techniques for coaxing the machine to "swallow" fragments of code up until there was a complete executable program in its memory. In those days, the piece of string to be shot across the ravine took the form of a primordial instruction that we would spell out using switches on the machine's console. That instruction would ask the computer to read in, say, a punched card, containing further instructions, and so on. We could even sympathize with the poor machine straining to acquire a sufficiently rich stack of code to make itself useful.

Today, the bootstrap metaphor is often used in an unexpected context, of a far more profound nature than footbridges across ravines or programs in the memory of computers. The fundamental philosophical question posed by Leibniz—Why is there being rather than nothingness?—is essentially a bootstrap enigma. In the beginning, long before Darwinian evolution got into swing, what kind of a bootstrap process might have occurred to make possible the transition from apparent nothingness into somethingness? One thing is certain. In accordance with the bootstrap concept, this transition must have started in an amazingly simple fashion... because there isn't room for much complexity in the state we refer to as nothingness! So, this process couldn't possibly have been inaugurated by an infinitely complex entity of the "God" kind. That last sentence doesn't say much, and yet, for an atheist such as me, it says everything. In the beginning, "God" was certainly absent.