This Was Not Okay

In the course of my long life, I have met at least one man whose life was deeply impoverished, when he was too young to know what was going on, by the lust of a much older married mother of children. She wasn't in a paid position of trust, this lady, but the effect was the same: a young life blighted, youthful potential wasted.

Thus, I am not overwhelmed with sympathy for female teachers who "fall in love with" or take advantage of the barely-in-control sex drive of adolescent students. Depending on the case in the papers, I may feel a thrill of pity and fear, of course. This increases when the teacher is single and only in her twenties. However, the married women in their thirties... What do they think they are doing? And what do they think will be the long-term effect on their students and their students' families?

Therefore, I am incensed at the idea being offered in this article that the public is disturbed by the relationship between the 39 year old new president of France, Emmanuel Macron, and the 64 year old grandmother who was his drama teacher because of "deeply ingrained" MISOGYNY.

The most poignant part of the article for me was the reaction of the boy Macron's mother:

Realising the affair would not be a passing phase,[Macron's mother] is said to have told the teacher: “Don’t you see? You’ve had your life. But he won’t have children with you.”

Well, no. And I find it curious how a growing number of political  leaders have  no children. Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland--none. Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives--none. (RD is openly lesbian, however.)  Theresa May, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom--none. Alec Salmond, the former First Minister of Scotland--none, But then he is married to a woman 17 years older than himself: she had been his boss at work.

The Salmond case--although considered a tad weird by the electorate, and we did not see the 70-something Mrs S on the campaign trail--is different from the Macron scandal, however, as Alec was in his twenties when they met at the office, not 15 years old. Nevertheless, I can imagine libidinous female bosses contemplating the success of the Salmonds' marriage when checking out the handsome new twenty-somethings who have walked into their fiefdoms.

"He's 6 foot 4, blue-eyed, and I wish we had ten of him," said a female manager at my then-workplace over the phone about my male colleague when he was just outside the door. She treated me like crap; she was the kind of older woman I have sworn I never shall be.

Macron's parents divorced in 2010, apparently. Happily, however, they have two other adult children, so presumably their hopes for grandchildren did not rest in their eldest son.

Teachers should not have affairs with their students. That should go without saying, and I hope the Macron case is far, far from the minds of any other teacher who finds herself pursued by a crushed-out teenager, no matter how brilliant he or she may be. Meanwhile, here's a cheerful little article about the birthrate in France. Macron's mother was clearly worried about the impoverishment of Macron's life; she would have been correct to worry also about the increasing impoverishment of France.

Fasting Against ISIS

I think there is more we can do to fight the scourge of Islamist terrorism than pray and fast, but

praying and fasting may certainly be the necessary conditions, just as keeping fit, hydrated and fed are the necessary conditions for going on a walking pilgrimage.  The French bishops have asked French Catholics to fast today--presumably as a sign of mourning. It would be brotherly if all Catholics who can fasted, too.

The Sublime and the Ridiculous

I have been suffering from a persistent toothache, and to comfort myself for this morning's agonized dash to the dentist's chair, I breakfasted at the café where B.A. and I sometimes have brunch.  I brought with me Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes, my companion when I woke up, in pain, at 3:05 AM.

De Waal is a famous British artist; his trade is in beautiful things. It seems a little unfair that he can write as beautifully as he can cast pots, but as The Hare with Amber Eyes captivated the world of letters in 2010, I was not surprised. Moreover I was shaken, at 3:15 AM, by Yagani Soetsu's suggestion, paraphrased by de Waal, that some objects "express unconscious beauty because they [have] been made in such numbers that the craftsman had been liberated from his ego" (Preface, 3). Could this be applied to writing? Is the secret of de Waal's literary masterpiece a liberation from ego?

When I walked into our brunch café, however, I was thinking only about my toothache--now eased by ibuprofen--and my breakfast. B.A. usually has a "full Scottish", and as I have become a meat-and-eggs devotee, I was looking forward to ordering one myself. I made straight for a table near a window--but not the one in the window, as it could seat six--and was surprised by an obese Englishwoman who greeted me loudly and as if she owned the place. (It turned out that she did .) Startled, I returned the greeting, sat down and examined the menu. When I had ordered my breakfast from the Scottish waiter, I reopened my book.

"One sunny April day I set out to find Charles," writes de Waal.

What beautiful simplicity to that sentence. It frees the author to write a longer second sentence, which he does: "Rue de Monceau is a long Parisian street bisected by the grand boulevard Malesherbes that charges off toward the Boulevard Pereire."

Two verbs make the sentence dynamic, and the conceit that a boulevard "charges off" to another gives the sentence extra force. It itself charges off to the splendidly descriptive third sentence: "It is a hill of golden-stone houses, a series of hotels playing discreetly on neoclassical themes, each a minor Florentine palace with heavily rusticated ground floors and an array of heads, caryatids and cartouches." 

Having set the scene in April, then in a section of Paris, and then on one sloping street, he focuses on a single house: "Number 81 rue de Monceau, the Hotel Ephrussi, where my netsuke start their journey, is near the top of the hill." 

The Hotel Ephrussi has a thrilling neighbour: "I pass the headquarters of Christian Lacroix and then, next door, there it is." Beat. "It is now, rather crushingly, an office for medical insurance."

The paragraph thus ends with a beautifully comic touch that reminds me of Mordechai Richler, in part because de Waal's art-collecting ancestors were Jews, because Canadian Jewish humour is self-depreciatory, and because this is a story about a Jewish family. The Ephrussi family, which originated in Odessa, followed the Rothschilds in setting up branches of themselves in the great capitals of western Europe and becoming as rich as they could. Terrific displays of wealth were a way of asserting their intentions with the unfortunate side-effect of antagonizing their new less-wealthy, non-Jewish, neighbours.

"Well," shouted the owner of the café to her companion, "she's f******g JEW!"

She was talking about a friend who loves Turkey and is always running off to Turkey and managed to do quite well (socially and financially) in Turkey until the friend's son admitted to their Jewishness and then some deal or other, business or social, was doomed. The loud stream of gossip reached me in the rue de Monceau as I waited for my breakfast and became inescapable when my breakfast arrived. Surprisingly, the speaker's companion was male and, if I am not mistaken, a business contact of some kind. Even more surprisingly, for Edinburgh, the speaker spoke with a strong Liverpudlian accent.

My breakfast was a masterpiece of the short order cook's art: soft cooked mushrooms, two halves of a broiled tomato, two sausages, two rashers of back bacon with darkly golden crispy edges, a large spoonful of baked beans, a disk of black pudding, a circlet of haggis. There was no toast, as I had requested, and the dish was not at all greasy. The coffee was black and hot and strong and good.  I put down my book to give breakfast my full attention--or so I thought.

"I told her that if he disappeared, I would hunt her down and kill her," brayed the cook's employer.  As I ate,  I was in some discomfort lest my hostess, as I suppose she must have been, might accuse me of eavesdropping on her conversation with the salesman. Recently I read that the elderly, irascible Graham Greene once denounced a young man in a Capri restaurant for listening to his opinions on Henry James; Greene had apparently noticed the young man had stopped turning the pages of his newspaper and so embarrassed everyone very much by loudly remarking on it. This woman was so loud and so aggressively unselfconscious, she sounded more than capable of such behaviour. Thus, once the immediately danger of staining the book with egg, tomato sauce or bacon fat was past, I took it up again.

But despite de Waal's magic,  I witnessed the end of an altercation between the sitting owner and a standing youngish female employee. I had taken off my glasses to read and so I saw only a slim body and a round, tanned, featureless face. "And by the way you no longer have a job,"  the Liverpudlian was booming.

"I wouldn't work here if you paid me," snapped the girl's Scottish voice, and the slim artistically brown body slid out the door.

"Sorry about that," said the proprietress to the salesman, or whatever he was, and when he was gone, she loudly demanded a phone book so she could call up a locksmith and get the locks changed. "Hello, Local Locksmith," she shouted down the phone.

By the time of this phone call, I had finished my breakfast but had felt the need for a little more coffee. Despite the noisy and shocking manners of three yards from me, Edmund de Waal held me spellbound in Paris. His antecedent Charles, to the disgust of his arch-enemy Edmond de Goncourt, was now having an affair with a married lady named Louise Cahen d'Anvers. They were both passionate connoisseurs of Japanese art.

"Could I please have just a half a cup more of coffee?" I asked the waiter, and the proprietress  motioned him over after he assented.

"Could I please have [whatever it was]," she said in a put-on, mock-posh accent, which I daresay was, despite the cadences, nothing like my own.

"Right away, modom," said the waiter, playing her game.

Okay, class chippiness is something I have come to expect from loud British woman who drop the F-bomb, but this was a woman I could hear from 19th century Paris complaining about competition opening up and down the street! What kind of businesswoman mocks her customers?

Suddenly, I very much regretted my request for extra coffee, and I couldn't wait to leave. Unfortunately, once my coffee arrived, it was some time before I could catch the attention of the waiter again, and by the time I finally did, the owner had loudly engaged the locksmith, loudly informed her other employees how much she distrusted the woman she had just fired, and loudly declared "and I'm taking out a contract on her, and I don't care who knows it."

This, incidentally, was after she had surveyed the two occupied tables and loudly muttered, "Everybody leave now. I want a cigarette."

As soon as I could, I threw down a £10 note and acceded to her wishes. Floreant competitores!

Poor France

Horrible news from Nice this morning.

The next time a Catholic cleric tries to implicate Catholics or Catholicism in Islam-inspired violence (as at Orlando, as in the expression "Catholic Taliban"), I will be really furious.

Meanwhile, my heart aches for the French, especially my friends and acquaintances in the French traditionalist movements.

I noticed from Facebook that (now) majority-Muslim countries that suffer from Islam-inspired violence  (like Turkey) are disappointed when the western world does not express the same grief for them as it does for France. Perhaps they do not understand the role France has played in western history and the western imagination. For one thing, France is the mother of Canada (Britain the father) and of parts of the USA. France is England's closest friend when she is not England's worst enemy and shares a strong bond with Scotland. Western civilization without the contributions of France is hardly to be imagined.

An attack on France is an attack on western civilization, which is no doubt why the jihadi bastards keep attacking France.

Chartres Pilgrimage in CWR

Just in time for Traddy Tuesday, my account of the Chartres Pilgrimage is up at Catholic World Report.

I left out the part where the Irish brought a flag commemorating the centenary of the Irish Easter Rising. It was the only overtly political symbol I saw there. The Scots marched beside a banner of the Queen of Peace.

The Joy of the Pilgrimage

When I woke up at 5:15 AM (French time) in my pricey Paris hotel room, I could not have imagined I'd be writing the words "The Joy of the Pilgrimage." Never mind the physical hardships: quite a lot of the pilgrimage involved an interior battle against silently complaining, against worry, against annoyance at innocent fellow pilgrims. However, there were moments of joy I felt at the time, and there was an overarching joy I can appreciate only in retrospect. It was the joy of being completely out of the modern world of computers, newspapers and TV.

For three days, our lives were entirely concerned with the physical environment, each other and prayer. Apparently Michael Matt of the Remnant--to whom I introduced myself during Saturday lunch--blogged from the field, and I feel sorry for him--unless his blogging was just like writing letters. As I promised, I texted Benedict Ambrose every night to say I was safe, and that was like writing a quick letter. (I have a very basic phone; nothing like a smartphone, I suppose we could call it a dumb phone.) At the time I was unaware that anyone had access to the internet--the Latin Mass Society had sternly told its people in advance that personal electronic devices were forbidden, and our chapter definitely reveal any until someone hauled out his smartphone in Chartres.

It was a purely Catholic life, lived in transit, in which I was delighted when the rosary began again, for that meant singing, thinking about our Lord and our Lady, and distraction from the pain in my feet. To my surprise, I found the very traditional (i.e. conscience-pricking and militant) Catholic meditations fascinating, and people found my meditation--mostly a reading from St. Catherine of Siena's Dialogue--fascinating, too. (St. Catherine, by the way, preached infinite love for God and infinite sorrow for our sins.)

Everyone around---thousands of people--were all tradition-loving Catholics. We were all on the same page. We had all temporarily escaped our (let's face it) blatantly evil times. Although there was occasional crankiness and irony and prickliness towards neighbours while pitching tents (mea culpa), there was no, er, worldliness. I didn't realize that we somehow all had the same unworldly look until I was in the queue at the airport and was taken aback by the facial expression--or general demeanor--of a slender young Canadian (or American) man in front of me talking to his mother. He's not a pilgrim, I thought. Generally I am not given to sudden interior knowledge about people, but the contrast between him and the young men of the pilgrimage was, well, palpable and even a shock. 

One of the most "Catholic" moments for me on the pilgrimage was the sight of a tall teenage Girl Guide helping a tiny child Girl Guide out of a ditch. Chartres Cathedral was visible on the horizon, and so it felt as if we were nearly there. (I think we were probably still an hour away, at least.) Naturally one of the worst privations of the pilgrimage was suffered by the women, who have much stronger inhibitions than men about urinating outdoors and in public. Many a time did I ponder how the women pilgrims of the Middle Ages could not have shared this taboo. In fact, it must have come in with modern plumbing, and Miss Jane Austen herself must have relieved herself in a field or in the woods when needs must. 

Anyway, this ditch, between the road and a field, was so deep and afforded such an opportunity for decent concealment that I had been eyeing it with interest when I saw the bigger Girl Guide leaning over a little Girl Guide in the ditch on the other side of the road and then hauling her out. They had the exact same uniform--blue skirt, blue beret--and the wee one looked abashed to the point of tears whereas the taller one was the very picture of spiritual maternity--compassionate, beautiful, more patient and kinder than a blood sister would be. 

The act of motherly kindness--and the need of the little one for help, combined with the almost military uniforms, the long parade of singing, praying pilgrims, the green and yellow fields, the wide blue sky and Chartres Cathedral on the horizon, struck me as the Most Catholic Thing Ever. 

A Pilgrim Returns Home

I have returned from Chartres full of stories--and blisters. Blisters, aches and pains and weight loss. Sad to say, after three days of prayer and hymns of praise and mortification that you would hardly believe, plus masses in Notre Dame de Paris, in a  field of gravel and in Notre Dame de Chartres, the first thing I did when I got home was see if I fit into my blue Hobbs spring dress. And lo.

A plenary indulgence AND I fit into my Hobbs dress!

Seriously, though, it was an awesome experience. It really hurt, but it was amazing all the same. I learned a lot spiritually, that is for sure. I also learned about the human ability to adapt and survive in pre-modern conditions. Soon I will write a list of what to bring (and what not to bring) on the Chartres Pilgrimage.

Thank you for all your prayers. My cold never worsened, and it mostly went away after Saturday night. Possibly the freezing air of my tent killed it. Thank heavens I paid a little extra to get the (child-size, as I am apparently the size of the largest type of child) sleeping bag that is comfortable to 5 degrees C and keeps you alive at 0 degrees C.

The French revision (review) paid off, too, for this moring I saved myself a long walk on very painful feet by saying to a friendly looking older woman, "Bonjour, madame! Excusez-moi de vous déranger, mais oú est la gare?" (Good morning, madam! Pardon me for troubling you, but where is the railway station?"

The Polish came in handy for making peace with a neighbour who, despite being Polish, addressed me in German during a territorial dispute in the foreigners' section of the campground. It's a long story, but it has a happy ending, which was the Polish lady returning to her tent to tell her daughter all about our subsequent Polish conversation and how nice it was. Their tent wall was right up against my tent wall, so I could hear everything. Goodness, how they giggled.

A French Rosary

Today was another multi-lingual day, beginning with the English of the weather forecast and Mezzofanti's Gift, which I read on the train into town. Mass was in Latin, and my listening skills were good enough to figure out that today is "Pip and Jim" even though my missal-flipping skills are lacking. Then I chatted in English with a German translator in the hallway about Mezzofanti's Gift. Next I was addressed en français by a French Guide/Scout leader in the garden. (I understood everything she said, and my first sentence was fine, but I then I got stuck.) Next the German translator and I discussed language-learning in English all the way to Haymarket Station, where I got on a train and opened Mezzofanti's Gift again.  I went straight to Brew Lab, where I reread a Polish letter and wrote a Polish reply. Finally, I went to St. Patrick's RC to say a rosary before Wednesday noon Mass.

Saying the rosary during a N.O. Mass always runs the risk of being interrupted by a woman who very badly needs to shake your hand during the sign of peace. You could be in such a deep meditation that you feel you have been transported into the seventh heaven, surrounded by choirs of angels, about to see some beloved sacred face, when all of a sudden a hand is stuck in your face. The message is not so much one of peace as "You're praying the rosary on your knees apart from the rest of the congregation during noon mass. How dare you???!"

The memory alone makes me very cranky and uncharitable. Fortunately, the Mary Chapel at St. Pat's is right up at the front of the church, up a marble step, and it would take a very, very determined woman to breach that sanctuary during Mass. Nevertheless, I got to the church  early enough to say my rosary while confessions were still going on (St. Pat's is very good about providing opportunities for confessions) although perhaps my speed was a little bit...er...fast.

However, one new aspect slowed things decently down, and it was that I prayed the rosary in French. This was not as difficult as it might seem, as I learned the dominant prayers of the rosary in French when I was a child in school.

Such is that magic of youthful brain plasticity that foreign language prayers drilled into you in elementary school stick for years and years afterwards. Of "Je vous salue Marie" (Ave Maria), the one word I saw that I had forgotten, when yesterday I copied it carefully from the internet, was 'toutes', as in "Vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes" (Blessed are you among [all] women").  "Et Jésus le fruit de vos entrailles est béni" was just as I remembered, even though last week I was second-guessing that 'vos'. (Surely it was votres? But no. Vos.)

Naturally my accent was that of childhood, which is to say, cent-pour-cent pur-laine anglophone Toronto schoolchild. I might be able to pray "Notre Père qui est aux cieux" with ease, but the Rs are not at the back of my throat where they belong. (Bizarrely, not once in thirteen years did anyone make a serious attempt to teach me how to pronounce French R.) The two stumbles are "que ton règne vienne" (May Your Kingdom come), which hitherto I half-thought was "ta règne" and the real tongue-twister "nous pardone nos offenses, comme nous pardonnons aussi/à ceux qui nous ont offensés." Every school day, for at least three years, my whole class stumbled over "à ceux qui nous ont offensés."  The stumble, along with the other words, has persisted through the decades, even though I rarely, but rarely, pray the Lord's Prayer in French.

Apparently Chartres pilgrims take turns leading the rosary through bullhorns, and so if I am asked to do this in French, I am now somewhat prepared.

Yes, preparing for the pilgrimage takes up most of my time. Thank you for asking. Yes, Benedict Ambrose is coping pretty well. I'll tell him you asked.

Actually, B.A. is being a real brick about it. Of course, he completely approves of the whole undertaking and when it comes to the physical challenges, he very much wants me to come home undamaged. (All the hiking guides I've been read warn strongly against doing a 20 mile hike--let alone 70 miles--without training for it first, something the LMS failed to mention on its website.) He is not as enthusiastic about our new tent as you might think; although he is a hiking person, he is not a camping person. I, however, am very excited about the new tent, and today I will practise putting it up and taking it down again.

The Polish Partitions

Good morning! It is Polski Piątek, so let us contemplate the three Partitions of Poland. Apparently the Nazi-Stalinist pact revealed in 1939 does not count as a partition. "Tylko okupacja!" said my Polish teacher, and who am I to argue, eh? I am keeping my powder dry until she blames the British for something, and then I will suggest the French generals or Roosevelt were to blame. Maybe I should prepare my argument po polsku in advance, so as to sound properly impressive.

It turns out that when my Polish teacher announced we were going to concentrate on politics this term, this was not an excuse to complain about the current Polish government but to teach proper Polish history. This is a great relief to my mind because the current Polish government is just too easy a target in Guardian-reading Edinburgh and my classmates might faint in horror if I mentioned that when it comes to life issues, the Polish Bishops Conference and I are at one.

As there are no Prussians, Austrians or Russians in the class, the Partitions of Poland are controversy-free in Polish 2.6. I recall with chagrin that I got the dates wrong in CWR, but this shall never happen again, for they have been impressed upon my brain by the sheer effort of having to pronounce tysiąc siedemset siedemdziesiątego drugiego roku  ( "the year 1772"), etc.

I Rozbiór (First Partition) 1772 r.   Poland, once a staggeringly powerful country with masses of territory (see exciting video below), was in a state of inner turmoil. Austria, Prussia and Russia drew up a treaty saying, in effect, "Hey,Prussia says we should take advantage of this situation. Let's do it!" So they toddled in and took away a third of Polish territory before the Poles could do anything about it.

II Rozbiór (Second Partition) 1793 r. Austria was busy fighting France, so this time Prussia and Russia drew up a treaty saying they could further annex Polish territory. This totally destabilized the Polish government and destroyed Polish manufacturing and banking. The economy was shot.

III Rozbiór (Third Partition) 1795. The Polish uprising (1794) led by Tadeusz Kościuszko vastly annoyed Austria, Prussia and Russia because of its revolutionary ideals as much as its threat to Prussian and Russian bullying. So they all got together and ended Polish self-rule, which made just as much sense to the Poles as Canada, Mexico and Russia dividing up the USA would make to American readers. (Mexico has the numbers, Russia has the cash, Canadians conveniently look and sound like Americans... Hmm. Hmm. Get back to me on this.) At any rate, there was no more Polish government and therefore no more Polish state for 123 years, but clearly there were still Poles.

Here is an amusing Polish video to illustrate all the above. Stick around for the end to watch Poland swell, shrink and swell again through the centuries:

Speaking highly generally, if your first language was Polish during this period of Polish statelessness, you were a Pole. Some argue that to be a Pole is to be a Catholic or at least a Christian (as well as Polish-speaking), but I am not going there. This is the sort of idea the Guardian wails over with barely disguised glee. Adam Mickiewicz and other Polish writers since 1795 have been very keen on the idea that there have been lots of patriotic Polish Jews, and I'm leaving it at that. Presumably Polish Tatars were also patriotic when they were not in cahoots with the Ottoman Empire.

Now the poor Tatars have to put up with foreign Wahhabist immigrants throwing their weight about--yet another reason why the Polish government is absolutely right to limit Islamic migration. Remember, boys and girls, when you are accused of being Islamophobic before some authority figure, this useful speech: "I like ordinary Muslims. It's the Wahhabist bastards I object to, and their attempts to destroy native Islams, like the faith and way of life of the Tatars in Poland." This should knock your enemy off-guard, as they will have no idea whatsoever that there is an ancient native community of Muslims in Poland, and thus you will have out-sympathized him/her.

By the way, as part of my preparation for my trip to Paris, I have been reviewing in Survival how best to survive a terrorist attack.  (Hint: I'm not fussed about the Huguenots or the Soixante-huitards.) The times we live in, eh?

Welborn Barton Griffith and Chartres

Col. Welborn Griffith

This is a name that should be known by every lover of Christian art, for this American saved Chartres Cathedral. Sadly, the abbey of Monte Cassino (since repaired) was shelled to smithereens. The cost of the war against Hitler and his ideologies was very high, not only in terms of human lives, but in terms of art and architecture. I am not thinking so much of what the Axis Powers did but of what the Allies did (and so don't care to discuss). Occasionally there are stories, on both sides, of this officer or that saving sacred spaces. Valentine Mueller of the Wehrmacht saved Assisi.

My preparations for the Chartres Pilgrimage continue apace. There is still a big blister on my left heel thanks to this week's canal walk. Nevertheless, I will be hiking around Edinburgh's Holyrood Park and up and down Arthur's Seat with B.A. this afternoon.

This morning I made a bowl of muesli according the recipe I think will be useful on the Pilgrimage. Generally I have a bowl of hot oatmeal porridge in the morning, but there will be no fires, no private cooking, and no refridgeration on this journey. Pilgrims are fed delicious French bread with jam, which is what the French generally eat for breakfast, but alas I am off wheat bread until late June. I have also found tiny boxes of almond milk that don't need refrigeration until they are opened; unfortunately they are sweetened with agave. Still a little bit of agave over 3 or 4 days shouldn't undo my efforts.

Apparently some pilgrims eat sugar in massive quantities along the route, which I thought very funny. So far I've been regaled of stories of who fainted when reaching the first camp, and who came down with scarlet fever, etc., and I wonder how much sugar contributes to the sufferings of the pilgrims. In the late Nineties, when I was on a permanent low-fat diet, I came up with opprobrious names for anything full of fat. Ice-cream, for example, was "Frozen Death." Now I think of refined sugar as "Death Powder." I am convinced that I can march down Northern France without consuming the stuff. As a treat in Chartres on the morning after the Pilgrimage is completed, I shall have a croissant.

Another preparation for the journey will be getting my spoken French in order. Wah. I have a mental block against French, possibly because at least one of my younger brothers and one of my younger sisters speaks it much better than me. In fact, Nulli Secundus and Tertia have a high degree of fluency. Also, it is impossible for someone like me to speak French to a francophone in French Canada without the francophone switching to English. No matter what their true intentions, it always feels like a put-down. Yes, I have cultural baggage.  However, contemporary French Catholics in France are innocent of late-twentieth century Canadian politics, and some are going to walk with the Scots, so I shall do some serious revision. (When I graduated from high school, I was capable of expressing my opinions on Anhouil's Antigone.) I am cheered by the memory that my hearing is so much better now, thanks to four years of listening intently to Polish, and by the fact that continental Europeans speak so much more clearly than North Americans. I'll never forget the moment I first heard Florentines speaking Italian. So beautiful, so clear. I think tears of joy actually sprang to my eyes.

Naturally I must work on some spiritual preparation, too. However, I grew up in a  moderately spirit-of-Vatican II community, so I am not really sure how to go about that. Thus, if anyone has "how to prepare yourself spiritually for a 100 km traditional pilgrimage across northern France" advice, I would be happy to read it. I suppose I should go to confession beforehand, and be particularly careful about saying the rosary in the month of May. Maybe going to Daily Mass every day from now until then would be a good move, too, and much more feasible now that the dawn light comes so much earlier.

Advice, please!

Paradoxes

1. Whereas one greatly admires the courage of a certain Toronto newsagent in stocking "Charlie Hebdo", one would never touch that filthy rag oneself.

2. After an afternoon of fruitless attempts to sleep, the jet-lagged person who promised to go to Goth night will have to spend the evening trying to stay awake.

3. It seems strange how many people in Toronto have authentic Canadian accents like me. Two complete strangers speaking Polish behind me on the southwest corner of Dundas West and Bloor made me feel quite at home. The man's accent was a tad strange, however. It may be pre-war.

Mad Props to the Sub-Ed

Fantastic headline to this cinema review. The films look interesting, too.

Spontaneous List of Good Things about France

1. French films
2. French language in itself
3. Croissants because really the British do not understand the recipe
4. Café Les Deux Magots in Paris
5. Sun
6. Mustachioed farmers even, perhaps especially, when they are blocking the roads with their tractors to protest McDonald's. Hi hi hi!
7. Bandes desinée.
8. French music hall singers
9. French fashion until...hmm....
10. Establishment of New France and therefore Canada

Soumission/Submission

Soumission (in English Submission) is a highly celebrated novel by the French writer Michel Houllebecq. It could be deemed the French 1984, so you really ought to read it.

In short, the year is 2020 and to defeat Marine LePen and her Front National party in the presidential elections, the Socialist Party throws its support behind the French Muslim party. The charismatic "moderate Muslim" Mohammed Ben Abbas becomes the president and all non-Muslim (and women) professors at the Sorbonne are dismissed from their posts, albeit with a darned good pension, thanks to our friends the Saudis.

 Soumission does not condemn Islam or Islamism as much as it tears the skin off contemporary, secularist, left-wing, sex-obsessed French academia. Houllebecq's protagonist François, a strangely sympathetic anti-hero, is a depressed professor of French Literature at the Sorbonne (in his case, Paris III), who feels his best days ended when his seven-year doctoral study of Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans, a 19th century French novelist who converted to Catholicism, was completed.

To his surprise, he was one of the chosen few students given a university post after graduation, but the privilege doesn't prevent the growing banality of his existence. An only child, he hasn't seen either of his divorced parents in years, he has no friends, and and he is obsessed with sex, which he has with a revolving door of young women (usually students) who dump him when they "have met someone else."  He loves to eat,and describes what he eats in loving detail, but it is almost always foreign: microwavable Indian or Arab or Turkish delicacies. It is only when women (and he) are about to be fired from the Sorbonne that he gets a decent French meal, cooked lovingly by a Frenchwoman. The connection between his French hostess losing her academic post and her cooking him splendid French food is not lost on the reader.

The protagonist struggles to find meaning in his life, and even gives Catholicism a go. The Catholic reader, while probably wanting to skip the passages describing his sexual encounters, which are detailed, may be charmed by the good showing French Catholics get in this novel. The Catholic young are described as typically having "open, friendly" faces. Catholic monks are depicted as being young or middle-aged, happy, tranquil, friendly and compassionate. Meanwhile, the protagonist's inability to appreciate monastic life is well in keeping with Catholics know of virtue ethics. Grace is a free gift, and Houllebecq's protagonist has not exactly asked for it or made himself capable of receiving it. (Is Houllebecq a Catholic?  Despite the anatomically detailed sex scenes, this well may be a "Catholic novel.")

Of course, Catholics may be taken aback at how many Catholics, and how many French "nativists" (French who want France to stay French), have converted to Islam in this projected France of 2020. Still, at least Catholics are the one non-Islamic group the Islamists respect, even as they sincerely hope to convert them. (The Jews, of course, know they are toast, so they flee to Israel.)

Bizarrely the Catholic reader may even see the silver lining in the cloud of Islamic domination: women are paid a handsome salary if they leave work and take care of their children instead, small businesses are encouraged and fostered, unemployment for men is at zero, the Muslim president is, and always has been, a fan of Chestertonian Distributivism, the protagonist stops thinking about sex all the time because he never sees naked female legs in public: in the shopping walls  all women are wearing trousers paired with a long tunic. And certainly the Muslim way of life (for a man of privilege and pension) seems better than the protagonist's isolation, drinking, eating microwaved instant Indian dishes, visiting whores....

For there are rewards for high-status Frenchmen (like Paris University intellectuals) who convert, rewards a man obsessed with sex and delighted by home-cooking can appreciate. Will the protagonist succumb to temptation and submit?

One thing to remember about this novel is it is written entirely from the point of view of a selfish man who is unable to love his own mother, let alone anyone else. He is interested in women, but only in how they please or displease him. He is surprised when he discovers that his clever older woman colleague is married, for it blows his mind that anyone could ever have desired her frog-like self, and he misses the presence of women at faculty meetings because he finds men standing around trying to talk about anything that is not football awkward and boring.

Therefore, we do not see--and are not meant to see--what is happening to anyone who is not a prestigious male French scholar in this revolutionary Islamic France. The only Jew in the story has left, all the women seem happy with their new lot, the monks are completely untroubled by the regime change and--bizarrely--once the election is over, there are no insurrections. No rebellions. My goodness. In Krakow, in real life, if a migrant mob said Boo, the local men would pour into the streets with baseball bats--or so a well-educated Krakow native told me in a Krakow business in Krakow.

However, one has to admit that white Frenchmen seem very unlikely to be moved to vigilantism--or to insurrection against a Muslim government--in Paris, where the response to the most outrageous anti-European violence is to lay flowers on the pavement and play "Imagine" on a piano in the street.
Houllebecq anticipated the request in the title and wrote a novel that imagines what France will be like in 2020 if the situation in Europe continues as it does--for the lefty French male scholar, that is. There is absolutely no hint of the sexual violence meted out to women in the so-called Muslim world, which apparently now includes Cologne.

Update: The British Prime Minister tries to get rid of purdah in the UK, hoping that once all Muslim women are freed, they will have the power to combat extremism.

Advice for Women in German, French Cities & Edinburgh

After the New Year's Eve attack of 1,000 North African/Arab men on young German women in Cologne, the Mayor of Cologne has given good advice to young women whose cities and towns now suffer from a population of foreign men who rejoice in sexually molesting native women.

Naturally knee-jerk feminists have complained about her advice, stupidly claiming Frau Reker is blaming the victims. However, the mayor's counsel is indeed helpful, as any woman who has been harassed on a German street by a foreigner has reason to know. Germans tend to mind their own business, but they hate disorder, so if you are being bothered by a young man while waiting for a tram in Frankfurt, for example, the best thing to do is to ask the nearest middle-aged to elderly German for help.

As early as 1999, there was a similar (if smaller) crowd of young North African men occupying the steps of the Gare de Sud in Paris at 1 AM, hooting and shouting. The problem of culturally-confident "foreign" men molesting European women is not split-new. Obviously migrants and the children of migrants from deeply misogynist countries should be educated or reprogrammed to understand and believe that such treatment of women--any women--is shameful. But how much work does it take to convince such men?

Obviously it hasn't been done yet, and Europeans should be demanding that it is done.  In the meantime, women should be careful. Groups of migrant men, exulting in the strength of numbers, sometimes take out their resentment of their new circumstances on the local women. Not too long ago, two women in Edinburgh, themselves migrants, were snatched at and even struck by a band of drunken young Eastern European men passing them outside the Balmoral Hotel. Afterwards, the elder prepared for future outrages by  learning "God will punish you" in Polish and has determined to learn this phrase in Russian, too.

Newsflash: Sexism and racism/tribalism go hand in hand. Men treating foreign-to-them women like crap is as old as rape in warfare. Russians (Americans, British, French) yesterday, North Africans today--poor German women.

That said, not all young Scots milling the streets of Edinburgh are Sir Galahad incarnate to the lassies. Generally a Ned (i.e. "Non-Educated Delinquent") will not attack a female stranger in the street, but if he is making rude remarks (e.g. about "poofs") and a girl reproves him, he may very well decide this proof of courage makes her an honorary man and hit her in the face.

The best policy in Central Belt Scotland is to put geographical distance between yourself and the Scottish drunk, and if this is impossible, to respond in a friendly fashion to his (or her) conversational overtures and fake Scottish-style hey-fellow-well-met amiability until you can pay your bill/get off the train.