Becoming French

On 18 June in 1940 [my year of birth], Charles de Gaulle broadcast a call from London on BBC radio inviting his compatriots to join his resistance movement in England.

On this morning of 18 June 2008, a letter with a tricolor heading is inviting me to the préfecture in Grenoble on Friday 27 June to receive a decree stating that I've been granted French nationality.

The naturalization ceremony will be taking place in the lovely old building on the Place du Verdun that I walk past whenever I visit the archives in Grenoble to do research on the background of Gamone.

I'm moved to think that I'll be naturalized in the Alpine capital where the great mathematician Joseph Fourier was once the prefect. Grenoble is indeed a moving city, through its history (both ecclesiastic and republican) and its achievements in science and technology. It was also the birthplace of the great novelist Stendhal. Strangely, whenever I set foot in Grenoble, I feel calm and reassured, as if I were entering some kind of protective cocoon. This is no doubt an illusion, but I always feel that, whatever might be happening elsewhere in the universe, the people of Grenoble have surely got their act together, and are mastering their destinies. In any case, to my mind, it's an ideal place in which to become a citizen of France.

The symbol of the modern city is this mass of black steel, located outside the railway station. It's a work by the American sculptor Alexander Calder [1898-1976]. Entitled Three Peaks, this huge sculpture was commissioned for the Winter Olympics of 1968.

Revolutionary euphoria

This pompous painting by Jacques-Louis David [1748-1825] provides us with an absurdly kitsch depiction of Leonidas the Spartan who defeated the huge army of Xerxes the Persian at Thermopylae in Central Greece. In David's time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the memory of Leonidas was celebrated in France in much the same way that young people now worship, rightly or wrongly, intelligently or mindlessly, the theme of Che Guevara.

I insist upon this comparison, because we often tend to think of the French revolutionaries as crazy impassioned dreamers, many of whom were destined to soon lose literally their heads. During their brief period of glory, they transformed provincial churches into so-called Temples of Reason, and planted Trees of Liberty.

This morning, at the archives in Grenoble, I was amused to find that births in Year 2 (around 1793) were recorded on thick lumpy and crackly paper (a sensual pleasure for my fingers, not to mention the delicious old inky smell) marked District des Thermopyles.


Bloody hell ! as the local ladies used to say in my uncouth Australia... and still say, I fear. Did the little town of Saint-Marcellin really liken itself to the scene of the great battle of Antiquity between the Greeks and the Persians? Did my humble village of Choranche once become an authentic outpost of a latter-day Thermopylae?

A year later, the revolutionary crackpots of Saint-Marcellin had descended from their ridiculous pedestal, and they got back to labeling their district in the ordinary old way.

In colloquial French (a truly colorful language, largely more inventive and sparkling than any variety of English), a lovely expression can be applied to the citizens of a small French town who suddenly see themselves as reincarnated warriors on mythological battlefields of Antiquity. This kind of pretentious behavior is decried (pardon my Latin) as farting higher than your asshole.

Limits of democracy

Often, in the wake of a revolution, or maybe after a mere political victory, males like to hoist a waving female into the air, as a kind of victory symbol.

I've often felt that this symbolism is inspired, at least in France, by the famous painting by Eugène Delacroix showing a bare-breasted Marianne on the barricades of Paris after the revolution of 1830.





The Irish girl in the referendum photo is hardly a match for Marianne. Her breasts are securely buttoned down, and the object she's waving in her right hand (an Irish flag?) is too small to be identified. And I can't help wondering if she really understood what she had voted against...

To a large extent, the success of the Irish no was based upon ignorance concerning the detailed content of the treaty proposal. There was a referendum slogan: If you don't know, vote no! Well, that's fair enough. If voters are unable to understand what they're supposed to be voting for (or against), this means that the politicians and communications specialists who organized the referendum didn't do a good didactic job. But this observation leads in turn to a more fundamental interrogation: Is it really possible, in the case of such a complex entity as Europe, to expect ordinary folk to master all the issues at stake? My gut feeling is no. There are limits to the familiar democratic process founded upon voting by the people. It's like organizing a referendum to decide, say, what kind of nuclear reactors should be built in France for future energy supplies. As somebody might have said: You can question some citizens all of the time, and all citizens some of the time, but... there are many highly technical questions that cannot possibly be answered intelligently by a referendum. My conclusion on this affair is that the Irish government was naive [like the French government, a few years ago] in imagining that you can ask the people to decide upon the technicalities of our future Europe. So, Ireland has the responsibility of mending this error.

Splendid role model for French youth

As everywhere, far too many adolescents get into a rut these days, here in France, for one reason or another, or often for multiple reasons, before they've got around to organizing seriously, if at all, their future existence. They get bogged down in all kinds of swamps, caught up in all sorts of traps. Maybe their studies have turned out to be useless, in that they don't enable them to get a good job. Some are led astray by the false paradises of alcohol and drugs, which can easily lead to crime. Others are soon ensnarled in vacuous relationships based solely upon sex, with no thought for marriage and the founding of a family. In the most tragic cases, adolescent losers grow up aimlessly in dull but violent environments where unemployment and strife are the rule, and social harmony and happiness an exception. In the context of all these unfortunate situations, we can meditate fruitfully and joyously upon the case of this young man who has steered clear of all the above-mentioned obstacles, while organizing his future existence in a style that can only be described as brilliant, exemplary.

His name is Jean: the French form of the Christian name of the fourth evangelist, John. Don't be misled by the long hair. Jean is neither a beatnik nor a rugby man. Although he's merely 21 years old, Jean has already set out upon a political career in the suburbs of Paris, and he has just got engaged to a girl from an excellent family with home-appliance stores. So it's more than likely that, straight after their marriage, Jean and his wife will have the pleasure of stepping into a cozy little flat with all the basic modern necessities: stove, fridge, dish-washer, etc.

What a pity that there aren't more young men in France today with the same drive and convictions as Jean. The same appetite for success.

New kid on the block

The neighbors' donkey Mandrin has been residing at my place for so long, with my Moshé, that I now consider him as mine. Their horses Bessie and Aigle are still here as guests, because there's not enough feed for them up at Bob's place, and Alison is too busy (working in the Choranche cave restaurant) to find time to look after them.

Yesterday morning, just after Alison's departure on her noisy scooter (which always causes my Sophia to bark), a new member of her family arrived unexpectedly at my place: a marvelous little male dog, a few months old, named Pif.

Pif promptly started to romp around with Sophia, who seemed to appreciate the presence of this tiny animal climbing all over her.

I had the impression that Pif was greatly awed, at times, by the massive stature of Lady Sophia.

In any case, throughout the entire day, the two dogs got on wonderfully well, and Pif was also extremely friendly with me, often snoozing in my arms and licking my nose. I gave him food and organized a comfortable basket for him alongside Sophia's queen-sized model.

I can't be certain, of course, that Sophia approved entirely of this audacious little dog reposing on her master's door mat. But there were never any squabbles.

At times, Sophia would gallop around the lawn to impress her young companion, and demonstrate her weighty Japanese-style wrestling prowess. On the other hand, there were limits to the amount of ear-biting that Sophia would tolerate from Pif's sharp baby teeth, and Sophia would make things clear at this level with a few ferocious snarls.

Towards the end of the day, I was starting to imagine that Pif might have moved in here as a permanent guest.

But I had not bargained on the magic attraction of the spluttering din of Alison's scooter, as she returned home at the end of her working day. Pif recognized the presence of his mistress as soon as she turned off the main road down in the valley, and he immediately shot off home to wait for her. Consequently, it's quite likely that Alison imagined that her disciplined dog had spent the day patiently in front of their house, awaiting her return. On the other hand, it's possible that Alison might have noticed that Pif's jet black fur was covered in sand-colored hairs from another animal... unless, of course, Pif took precautions to shake off all this telltale evidence on the track back home.

My guess is that I'll be able to use the absence or presence of Pif at my place as a means of knowing whether Alison is, or is not, at home.

Exotic bread and Greek cheese

I have fun with my marvelous bread machine. Making exotic bread falls into the category of creative art. For example, on Saturday afternoon, I tackled a new recipe in order to take along a home-baked loaf to a dinner evening at Linda's place. Basically, it incorporated walnuts (not unusual in our corner of France), but it was considerably more complex than ordinary walnut bread. But, before describing the recipe, I must say a few words about our dinner evening, which was great. Besides Linda, there were two other nurses: my old friends Eveline and Lulu. And I met up for the first time with Eveline's companion, René. Although it wasn't exactly a warm evening, Linda organized her dinner (Hungarian goulash and steamed potatoes) on the lawn outside her old farmhouse, beneath the stars. Well, just as we were starting dessert, the valley was lit up by an unexpected fireworks display: no doubt, some kind of a village celebration down around St-Nazaire-en-Royans. As far as we were concerned, it was as if Linda had organized this show for our dinner evening.

Yesterday, I repeated the bread recipe with slight variations, then I tasted the end result with Greek feta cheese. Delicious! The quantities I indicate in the following instructions are for a loaf of 750 grams. Start out with two tablespoons of butter at the bottom of your bread machine (or cake dish, if you're operating manually). Beat an egg with a fifth of a liter of milk, and pour the mixture onto the butter. Sprinkle 375 grams of ordinary white flour onto the liquid. Next, add the following four ingredients: three teaspoons (referred to as coffee spoons in France) of sugar, two of salt, one of cinnamon and two tablespoons of dried milk powder. I then added ten grams of dried granulated yeast, distributed evenly over the surface of the previous ingredients. Finally, the fruit: 170 grams of dried raisins soaked in water, then 50 to 100 grams of chopped walnuts. [Here at Gamone, I tend to be heavy-handed in my use of walnuts, since I've got big bags of them in various corners of the house.] In my bread machine, when the kneading was terminated and the dough was ready to start rising, I covered the surface with a mixture of dried poppy and sesame seeds. The bread was cooked slowly until the crust was dark brown.

The resulting bread, with a rough nutty texture and spicy aroma, can accompany either salty cheese or sweet stuff such as fig jam. Let's give it a name: Gamone walnut bread.

Things that can blow up in your face

When I was a child aged ten or eleven, one of the craziest things I ever did was to play around with the production of gunpowder. I still remember my formula: a mixture of ground-up charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter (potassium nitrate). The best way of making a big bang was to pack the gunpowder into a metal can. The most difficult part of the operation was the creation of a burning fuse, generally made out of a piece of thick string impregnated in saltpeter (if I remember correctly). Often, when the fuse had burned right up to the metal can, the primitive homemade bomb didn't explode, for one reason or another. This was the kind of situation in which the bomb-maker was capable of moving towards his precious work of art, to see what has prevented it from exploding, only to have the whole thing blow up in his silly face.

Today, I cannot of course be considered as an aging extrapolation of the kid who built bombs back in South Grafton. The intervening years have made me a totally new individual, and I'm quite incapable of suggesting what might have been going on in the head of that kid who once played around with gunpowder. In any case, I survived without injuries: that's to say, without any inadvertent explosions. But I vaguely recall the case of a Grafton youth who wasn't as lucky as me. If I remember correctly, he emerged from this kind of fun with a few missing fingers.

A fortnight ago, an explosion occurred around midnight in a flat in the suburbs of Paris, and a thirty-year-old fellow was severely injured. While being carted away by ambulance people, the victim made a spontaneous confession. He said he was a member of an organization whose goal consisted of blowing up roadside speed cameras.

He was injured while manipulating a bomb that was intended for the forthcoming destruction of yet another speed camera. My article of 2 March 2007 entitled The hosed hoser [display] evokes a famous cinematographic case of something backfiring harmlessly. You might conclude that our speed-camera bomber had it coming to him. Poetic justice, as they say.


On the other hand, he wasn't attacking humans with his bombs, merely machines. The idea of a fellow declaring war upon inanimate contraptions and then getting hurt by his own weapons reminds me of Don Quixote rushing in to attack windmills, only to discover that the windmills seem to be able to launch a counter-attack.

Man at the wheel

Like many of my fellow citizens [that's the first time since my naturalization I've ever used explicitly such a phrase], I watched with interest the lengthy TV evening devoted to the French prime minister François Fillon, born 54 years ago in the city that hosts the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans sports car race... which was just won, incidentally, an hour or so ago, for the 8th time, by Audi and the Danish driver Tom Kristensen. In fact, François Fillon himself knows how to handle the wheel of a Le Mans racing car. Apparently, he once took Nicolas Sarkozy for a lap or two on a circuit, and the French president was green when he got out of the automobile.

As easy as it is to be annoyed by Sarko, if not sickened in extreme cases, it's difficult not to admire his friend Fillon, who has a totally different personality and style to the president. He's quiet and unassuming, with no apparent wish to have stories and pictures of himself, his Welsh wife and their five children appearing in people magazines. He's not flashy ("bling bling") in a nouveau riche style, and he speaks calmly but firmly, without twitches or gesticulations.

Although we must assume that Nicolas Sarkozy and François Fillon share identical viewpoints, and are working together with the same political goals in mind, they come through as quite different individuals. And I'll let you guess which of the two I prefer.

My dog's little joys

I've often noticed that Sophia is not interested in strawberries. She doesn't seem to see their red color and, when I put a few strawberries under her snout, she's not inclined to taste them. Cherries, though, are a different affair, including the tiny specimens that fall from one of my rare roadside trees.

Sophia crunches the cherries, seeds and all, before swallowing them.

In the case of walnuts, of course, the process is different. She crunches the nuts slightly, to break them apart, and then she delicately picks out the edible kernel fragments.

One of Sophia's regular preoccupations consists of searching for mysterious creatures, maybe lizards or mice, under the edge of the old concrete footpath in front of the house.

As soon as she detects an animal odor, Sophia barks a little (maybe to warn me that there's an undesirable alien presence at Gamone) and starts to dig a preliminary hole by scratching out soil and loose pebbles. As soon as the opening is big enough, Sophia sticks her snout in and starts to snort. And this activity can preoccupy her for half an hour.

A day or so later, after Sophia has either captured and destroyed the intruder (?) or forgotten about its presence, all that remains for me is to poke the soil and pebbles back in place.

Views from down in the village

The tiny village of Choranche is located about 3 km down from Gamone. I say "down from", but the difference in altitude between the two places is primarily of a psychological kind. The village is located at the bottom of a gigantic bowl, surrounded by cliffs, whereas Gamone seems to be higher in that it is located on grassy slopes above the Bourne River.

At the top of this blog window, there's a picture of the Cournouze mountain, located above the commune of Châtelus, on the other side of the Bourne. This same stone peninsula, jutting out from the Vercors plateau, has a quite different shape and appearance when you're looking up at it from down in the village of Choranche:

The cliffs above the village, towards Presles to the north (which I always think of as the direction of Paris), are vast and ominous:

To the east (which I think of as the direction of Italy), the village seems to be separated from the Vercors by the following gigantic wall of stone:

For me, the panorama from Gamone is "gentler" than views from the village, but this is no doubt a biased outlook, since Gamone is my home place, whereas the village is a relatively alien territory.

I'm always amazed by the fact that, in a mountainous environment, the aerial perspectives change continually whenever you modify—even slightly—your location on the ground.

A fight to remember

Back in the early '80s [before the existence of the Internet], I succeeded in finding this photo of the steamship Marathon, which took my future grandfather from his native London to Australia, when he was 17 years old.

My grandfather once told me that his ship reached Sydney on the same day—December 26, 1908—that a big boxing match would be taking place, between the white Canadian Tommy Burns and the black American Jack Johnson. This detail intrigued me, because I don't recall my grandfather being attracted to boxing [the only sport he liked was tennis], and I've often wondered why the Burns/Johnson fight [which he didn't even see, because he couldn't afford a ticket] would have stayed in his memory. It was only last night that I finally found an explanation, when I watched a French TV version of the splendid film by Ken Burns entitled Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.

Up until last night's TV show, I had ignored the fact that, prior to the match in Sydney in 1908, no white-skinned boxer had ever deigned to defend his world heavyweight title against a black man. In America, at the start of the 20th century, it would have been unthinkable for such a match to take place. This explains why, although the boxers were from Northern America, their encounter of fourteen rounds could only be organized in a faraway land such as Australia. The match had a shameful ending. When it was clear that Burns was about to be knocked out by the giant son of former slaves, Sydney police officers stepped in and stopped, not only the fight, but the filming of the event... because the White Establishment considered it politically incorrect that the image of a white boxer being thrashed by a black man should be handed down to posterity.

From existentialism to evolution

My article of 25 December 2006 entitled The meaning of life [display] was designed deliberately to be misunderstood. All I really wanted to say was a truism: The presence of life in the Cosmos is an outcome of the existence of organisms capable of reproducing themselves. And I wanted to celebrate the work of the mathematician John von Neumann, who had developed a theory of self-replicating automata. At an anecdotal level, I started out that article by saying that I used to be infatuated by the works of French existentialists, whereas I've never agreed with Albert Camus, at any moment in my life, that suicide is a "truly serious philosophical problem".

Today, I would like to correct, or at least attenuate, the false suggestion that I'm no longer impressed by the work of the French existentialists. When Natacha and Alain were driving me through Lourmarin in the Luberon, I was constantly conscious of the fact that this was the place where the Nobel laureate was buried, after his death in an automobile accident in 1960. His Myth of Sisyphus remains one of the major texts of my adolescent years in Sydney, along with English translations of books by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Camus, above all, was a non-believer (from a religious viewpoint) who nevertheless clung to humanistic values rather than falling into some kind of nihilistic and suicidal despair. "I do not believe in God," he declared, before adding: "And I am not an atheist." Today, I would say that the juxtaposition of these two statements is illogical, but I can understand that Camus did not wish to be thrown into the same ballpark as the notorious Roman emperor Caligula, subject of one of his plays, who imagined that, once God was chased off the cosmic stage, only barbarian infamy could remain.

Jumping ahead to the present day, I was thrilled by a recent appraisal of Richard Dawkins by a US psychologist, David Barash, who places the English writer firmly in the domain of the literature of the absurd, alongside Camus and Beckett... not to mention the late great writer friend of Dawkins named Douglas Adams, author of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The vast verbal vortex of half a century from existentialism à la Camus to evolution as explained by Dawkins has been indeed, for me as a reader, a fabulous trip through our Earth-centered corner of the Cosmos. And the only possible name of that fascinating guided excursion, of course, is Absurdity.

Finding the right foodstuffs

In my articles of 30 December 2006 entitled My daughter at Gamone [display] and 15 January 2007 entitled Show me your machines [display], I mentioned that I had purchased a splendid cooking gadget, which might be described as a multifunction grill and griddle, manufactured by a US firm named Cuisinart.

There's no problem in using it to make delicious toasted sandwiches of the kind that Australians often eat for breakfast. Recently, I've also used it successfully as a hot plate to cook a Thai dish, hotly-spiced prawn rissoles. But I had never succeeded in preparing one of my favorite foodstuffs: the flat panini sandwiches that I buy on the street whenever I visit Grenoble or Valence. The problem was that I had never found the right resource: that's to say, the basic uncooked panini bread roll. Employees in food shops don't necessarily know from whom their boss acquires their raw materials, while those who do imagine that it's a professional supplier with no retail outlets. Most often, they tell me that I can surely find the panini rolls I'm seeking in supermarkets. But, when cooked upon my Cuisinart griddle, the texture and taste of the rectangular panini rolls sold in the sliced-bread section of supermarkets simply don't end up tasting anything like the products I buy on the street in Grenoble and Valence.

This morning, I finally got around to solving the panini problem. The following photo shows the tasteless supermarket product at the top and, underneath it, a big authentic deep-frozen panini roll of the kind used by professionals.

Early this morning, I happened to be in St-Marcellin to get my car repaired, and I stepped into an excellent bakery to buy a couple of croissants. Once again, I popped the panini question, and the baker's kind wife supplied me immediately with the name and address of a wholesale supplier near Romans who nevertheless sells to ordinary clients like me. As soon as my old Citroën was repaired, I hurried off to the place in question. The only minor problem was that I had to purchase a big cardboard box of forty deep-frozen rolls, and then I had to dash home as quickly as possibly to put them in my deep-freezer, where they occupy an entire drawer.

With cold turkey and tomato filling, and served up with fresh Gamone lettuce, sliced cheese and a sprinkling of walnut oil, the culinary result exceeds my most optimistic expectations.

PS Natacha, who considers (quite rightly) that many of the Earth's finest products come from her native Provence, will be happy to learn that the manufacturer of my deep-frozen panini rolls purchased in Romans has his factory in Tarascon.

Cult of Mac

Way back in 1984, I wrote a book about the Macintosh, when this machine was as little known as the Internet concept. But it would be wrong to brand me as an elitist Mac cultist. Some of my best friends still use PCs. But this post is not for them.

Dyed-in-the-wool Macnuts are ordinary-looking folk who feel frustrated around noon if they haven't yet heard something new and spectacular from or about our Favorite Computer Company. For us, there's now a website [display] that enables us to view old images of Steve and hear exiting words that made us salivate with Apple lust back in the days when we were losing, for eternity, our consumer innocence.

Obama can now attack his true opponent

It's great that Barack Obama can now, at last, get to grips with his true opponent: John McCain. However, the time lost in wrangling with Hillary Clinton was not really lost in the sense that America has realized that two amazingly novel hypotheses—that of a female president, or that of a black president—have now become recognized as plausible in the US mentality. It was certainly worthwhile losing a bit of time and energy in order to gain this kind of revolutionary awareness.

Flight pioneers

Over the last year or so, there has been some discussion about the claim that the hang glider was invented by John Dickenson in Grafton, but there now appears to be an international consensus of opinion that he deserves this honor.

Click the photo to access a recently-developed and well-documented website on this question.

When his Dickenson-designed wing soared above the Clarence River on 8 September 1963, the pilot Rod Fuller was in fact being tugged by a speed boat. I've often thought that the presence of this noisy aquatic partner may have diminished the impact of these pioneering flights. Observers tend to associate the mythical dream of Icarus with an aerial and ethereal world of silence, devoid of mechanical monsters such as speedboats. We imagine the god of flight as a giant but quiet bird.

In July 2006, this Japanese aircraft powered by dry-cell batteries took off, ascended to an altitude of five meters, stayed in the air for about a minute and covered a distance of several hundred meters.

In April of this year, the Boeing corporation tested in real flight, in Spain, a tiny plane that runs on hydrogen batteries.

The propeller-driven test aircraft flew at a speed of a hundred kilometers an hour, at an altitude of about a thousand meters, for twenty minutes. Later, a spokesman for the manufacturer suggested that aviation power based upon hydrogen batteries could become a feasible technological and commercial possibility within some twenty years. In my imagination, that would be the authentic dream of Icarus.

Autopsy of fake photos

The art of producing fake photos used to be practiced primarily, and more or less expertly, by tyrants such as Joseph Stalin [1879-1953], wishing to remove undesirable individuals from group snapshots.

These days, countless computer users have tried their hand at innocent "Photoshopping", often in a crude fashion, as demonstrated in my fake photo of Marseille's ferry boat scampering around out in the sea as if it were an offshore racer:

On last year's April Fool's Day, my article entitled Stray animal at Gamone [display] wasn't intended to convince anybody that my donkey Moshé really rolled around in the dust at Gamone with a visiting red kangaroo:

Things get a little bit murkier when professional people use Photoshop retouching in a deliberate attempt to pull the wool over our eyes. My article of 23 August 2007 entitled Photoshop surgery [display] indicated a ridiculous case of such an operation:

A much talked-about recent case of falsification was this Chinese image of Tibetan antelopes racing away from a high-speed train:

Observers were amazed that a photographer, Liu Weiqing, could be present at exactly the moment that the train emerged on the viaduct, sending the herd of rare animals hurtling away in fear. Well, he wasn't! It's simply yet another fake photo, obtained by combining the train and the antelopes. The story of how this photo was first acclaimed as a masterpiece, before being revealed as a fake, is utterly fascinating.

Today, I learn [once again from the excellent Scientific American magazine, mentioned in my previous blog article] that there's a clever US specialist named Hany Farid who has developed methods of revealing that such-and-such a photo is fake. I advise you to visit his fine website [display] to see specimens of Farid's art and findings. In his magazine article, Farid offers us this lovely image of Jan Ullrich shaking hands with an attractive female cyclist:

Cautious viewers, discovering this image, might ask semantic questions. First of all: What on earth was this unusual cycling event that brought together Ullrich and a female in a yellow jersey, with long hair and superbly muscular legs? Second: How come the female's helmet appears to be a recolored clone of Ullrich's helmet? Last, but not least: What's that American fire hydrant doing alongside the road? Did Jan Ullrich ever get around to competing in the USA in a mixed male/female event (?) during the brief period in 2003 when he was a member of the Bianchi team? Click the fake photo [or, better still, subscribe to Scientific American] to find answers.

Many observers are anguished when they realize how easy it has become to cheat with photos. Hany Farid's excellent article entitled Digital Image Forensics informs us that the goodies and baddies are at love-all. [Excuse me for borrowing a tennis metaphor... but the final of the French Open is about to start at Roland-Garros.] The image crooks use ingenious techniques to create fake photos, but the cops have a lot of excellent detection tricks up their sleeves.

Blogging is good for you

In the latest issue of my favorite magazine, Scientific American, there's a brilliant one-page article by a New York freelance writer named Jessica Wapner on the therapeutic value of blogging. She starts by declaring that "self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off ". In a nutshell, we bloggers seek to take advantage of "the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings ".

Jessica suggests that creative writing in general, and blogging in particular, provide physiological benefits of many kinds... involving appetite for food and sex, and even cancer treatment!

[If only Nicolas Sarkozy were to read Antipodes, if not Scientific American, I'm sure he would promptly "invent" the idea that blogging expenses should be reimbursed by France's splendid health system.]

Jessica quotes a Harvard neuroscientist named Alice Flaherty who provides us with a word that we bloggers should paint in large letters on the wall above our computer: hypergraphia, designating an uncontrollable urge to write. Maybe it's a viral affliction. Personally, I see it as a genetic thing. You're born with this psychosis, and you simply have to learn to live with it... but it seems to get worse with age.

Gee, I feel so much better since writing the above stuff. I only hope that my words don't sicken any disgruntled readers...

Republican Calendar

French researchers in genealogy or local history inevitably run into a quaint but annoying thing (little known outside France) called the Republican Calendar. Shortly after the French Revolution of 1789, and for a period of fourteen years (from 1792 until 1805), France abandoned the ancient Church-inspired calendar, designated as Gregorian, and replaced it by a rapidly-contrived system with new names for years, months and days. For example, my birthday, on 24 September, is named Chestnut in the Republican Calendar, while Christine's, on 8 January, is Marble. [It's not hard to understand why our marriage couldn't possibly be harmonious!]

The inventor of the new names was a romantic author referred to as Fabre d’Églantine, who joined the revolutionary leaders as a secretary in 1792. [In this concocted name, Églantine designates a wild rose.] An egoistic scoundrel, he was guillotined with Georges Danton on the Republican date of 17 germinal an II [April 5, 1794]. These days, we remember Fabre d’Églantine as the poet who wrote the words of a famous lullaby: Il pleut, il pleut, bergère. It's a love song addressed to a girl who's minding her sheep out in the fields.

It's raining, raining, shepherdess! The singer tells the wet girl that rumbling thunder indicates an approaching storm, and he invites her into the warmth of his house. Recently, in a splendid TV saga entitled Voici venir l'orage [Look, a storm is coming! ], concerning the dramatic flight from Russia of the Jewish ancestors of the French movie directrice Nina Companeez, the words and music of this lullaby symbolized in a moving manner the trials they had to face, first in Bolshevik Russia, and later in Nazi-occupied France.

The revolutionaries of 1789 imagined that their cause and spirit were, not just French, but universal. It's amusing to discover that, in their eagerness to replace the old names of the Gregorian Calendar, they invented terms that are anything but universal, because they're based upon French seasons and agricultural activities. My birthday, for example, falls in the first month of the Republican Calendar, called vendémiaire, which is related to the word vendanges, meaning grape-picking. But Fabre d'Églantine and his friends forgot, or ignored, that, during the month of September in Australia, say, there's not much in the way of grape-picking. All the other names for months are similarly parochial in a naive fashion: October/November is brumaire, evoking autumn mist and fog; July/August is thermidor, evoking hot sunny days; etc. The revolutionaries would have surely been upset by the upside-down maps of the world in which tiny France looks as if it would be crushed if ever the giant African continent happened to "drop down" onto her.

Incidentally, my writer-hero Richard Dawkins refers to the kind of naming anomaly made by Fabre d'Églantine as a case of "unconscious northern hemisphere chauvinism". Here's how he speaks about "consciousness-raisers" in our atheists' bible, The God Delusion:

It is for a deeper reason than gimmicky fun that, in Australia and New Zealand, you can buy maps of the world with the South Pole on top. What splendid consciousness-raisers those maps would be, pinned to the walls of our northern hemisphere classrooms. Day after day, the children would be reminded that 'north' is an arbitrary polarity which has no monopoly on 'up'. The map would intrigue them as well as raise their consciousness. They'd go home and tell their parents — and, by the way, giving children something with which to surprise their parents is one of the greatest gifts a teacher can bestow.

[If only Nicolas Sarkozy were to read Antipodes, if not the books of Dawkins, I'm sure he would promptly "invent" the idea of decreeing that upside-down maps of the world be pinned on the walls of every French classroom.]

Close the Dawkins parenthesis. The Republican Calendar dominates the decade that concerns me in my research about the origins of my property at Gamone. I've always believed that the place once belonged to the Chartreux monks at Bouvantes whose monastery and other possessions were auctioned off between December 1790 and March 1791. It's quite likely that their outlying properties in Choranche were sold during the years that followed, maybe at a time when the Republican Calendar was operational.

In the archives that I've examined already in Grenoble, I was astounded to discover that, in the notes on political events in the Isère department during the three or four years following the French Revolution, there's no serious mention whatsoever of Choranche or even Pont-en-Royans. A possible reason for this curious absence is the fact that, throughout the revolutionary period, this part of the Royans still remained, to a certain extent, under the influence of the ancient Bérenger family, lords of Sassenage. [In medieval times, there was a so-called prince of Pont-en-Royans!] I even came across a parliamentary note about a complaint lodged by the lord Bérenger of that epoch because the revolutionaries had not yet returned various documents that he had apparently lent them. In about 1793, the archives of the commune of Pont-en-Royans were deliberately burnt in the middle of the village. On the other hand, the good lord's precious Sassenage archives concerning the Royans "principality" were saved for posterity in his charming little castle on the outskirts of Grenoble... which means that we're able to consult them today on our computers.