The pastor and the dead

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Grandville - Le Curé et le Mort
Oudry - Le curé et le mort

The Pastor and the Dead ( Le Curé et le Mort ) is the eleventh fable in the seventh book of the collection of fables by the French poet Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695). It is one of the few fables by La Fontaine for which he did not use any other fable as a model, but rather told a true story from 1672. In it, La Fontaine satirically criticizes the morality of the clergy and describes shoddily how the hearse and the greedy cleric sitting in it rolled over during a funeral procession and killed him. That it was a real event is evident from two letters from Madame de Sévignéwith whom La Fontaine was friends. In her sarcastic letters, the stereotypical situation “The pastor buries the dead” is reversed.

He connects morality with his fable La Laitière et le Pot au lait , the milkmaid bill .

origin

The Comte de Boufflers, the elder brother of Marshal Louis-François de Boufflers , died a sudden death on February 14, 1672. Madame de Sévigné, a famous letter writer of her time, reported in a letter on February 17, 1672 about the unexpected death of Bouffler and his short marriage, which had only been concluded the previous year. Then she noticed that she had seen his little widow, "who, I believe, is being comforted." On February 26, 1672, she wrote to her daughter that what was special about the incident was that Boufflers killed the pastor after his death, when he accompanied his coffin in the carriage: “On verse et la bière coupe le cou à ce pauvre curé” ([The carriage] overturns and the coffin cuts off this poor priest's neck). La Fontaine took up this anecdote and published his fable Le Curé et le Mort on March 9, 1672, in which he treated the tragic event frivolously. La Fontaine had probably sent a copy of the manuscript to Madame de Sévigné, because she also wrote on March 9, 1672: “Here is a little fable by La Fontaine that he wrote about the adventure of the slain priest by M. de Boufflers [... ] This adventure is bizarre. The fable is pretty, but nothing at the expense of those who will follow. I don't know what this milk pot is. "

In his fable, La Fontaine names the pastor Messire Jean Chouart , which was not his real name, but is taken from Rabelai's novel Pantagruel , where the pubic capsule is referred to by this name. This gives the name a sexual meaning, similar to the English "John Thomas" (for penis). La Fontaine also refers to a niece of the pastor. In the French folk tradition, the expression "la nièce du curé" means a woman who lives with a celibate priest as his alleged relative.

Content and morals

A dead man drove quietly and seriously in a carriage towards his final resting place. A priest with a cheerful mind was sitting at his side in the car and was already impatient to put him in the grave as quickly as possible. The priest said pious prayers and then to the deceased: “Lord dead, don't let it touch you! We give you ecclesiastical honor according to custom; it's all about the fees! "

He did not look away from the dead man and worked out how much money, candles and other sports he would collect from the deceased. The priest wanted to buy with the money some of the best wines of the area, and the new cotillon ( petticoat ) for his niece and also for her maid named Paquette ( Certaine nièce assez proprette / Et sa chambrière Paquette / Devaient avoir of cotillons ). While he was counting on a feeling of well-being, it suddenly hit a tremendous blow and the carriage broke in two. The parishioner's coffin smashed in the pastor's skull and so "both moved away together."

The moral at the end of the fable is "All our life, our senses, it is like the pastor, he counts on his dead head, and that milkwoman with the pot." The milkwoman in another of La Fontaine’s fable spills her milk instead of making money and goes as empty as the pastor.

Parallels to the milkmaid fable

La Fontaine wrote several so-called double fables; the two fables of the milkmaid and that of the pastor and the dead are an example of this. The moral of “Le Curé et le Mort” therefore quotes the milkmaid. Both fables tell of life and death, comedy and tragedy, body and soul, but nevertheless explicitly claim their own textuality and intertextuality . The relationship between the two fables “La Laitière et le Pot au lait” and “Le Curé et le Mort” is a sophisticated network of echoes and correspondences that enrich and problematize the relationship between the two texts. These are different codes such as proper names, clothing, the erotic or body language, the social, the literary and the animal code. For example Perrette, the milkmaid: she is not described from head to toe, but is nothing but head and legs, and she wears a cotillon . Clothing also occurs in the pastor's daydreams, and here, too, clothing is supposed to reveal more than to hide, since he wants to buy petticoats (cotillons) of all things . In the description "The deceased was in a carriage, well and properly packed, and unfortunately wore a dress that we call a coffin ..." (Et vêtu d'une robe, hélas! Qu'on nomme bière, ...) is a " Echo ”recognizable from the milkmaid fable or the slightly and briefly dressed Perrette (Légère et court vêtue…); Using “vêtu” (clothed), La Fontaine expanded the metaphor to turn the coffin into a garment.

The similarity of the names is also noticeable: the milkmaid is called Perrette , while the name of the chambermaid at the parish priest is Pâquette . The French surname Jean also appears in both fables. The milkmaid fable ends with the sentence "Je suis Gros - Jean comme devant" - Gros - Jean is a proverbial name for a farmer; while in the other fable the pastor is called Jean Chouart , as in Pantagruel the pubic capsule of the main character Panurge is called.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Adolf Laun : Fables of La Fontaine . Gebr. Henninger, 1878, p. 27 .
  2. ^ Prosper Menière (ed.): Les consultations de Madame Sévigné . Librairie médicale de Germer-Baillière, 1862, p. 32 .
  3. ↑ a b Stéphane Bikialo, Jacques Dürrenmatt: L'enigme . UFR Langues Littératures, 2003, ISBN 978-2-911044-77-9 , p. 141 .
  4. ^ Arthur Augustus Tilley : Madame de Sevigne Some Aspects of Her Life and Charater . Cambridge University Press Archives, 1936, pp. 126 f .
  5. ^ A b Jean de La Fontaine: Selected Fables . Oxford University Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-150787-8 , pp. 212 .
  6. ^ John Thomas definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary. Accessed April 17, 2021 .
  7. ↑ The pastor and the dead. In: Lafontaine's Fables. 1876, Retrieved April 17, 2021 .
  8. ↑ The pastor and the dead. In: Lafontaine's Fables. 1876, Retrieved April 17, 2021 .
  9. ↑ a b Selected Fables . Oxford University Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-19-282440-0 , pp. 350 .
  10. ↑ a b Michael Vincent: Figures of the Text: Reading and writing (in) La Fontaine . John Benjamin Publishing, 1992, ISBN 978-90-272-7733-6 , pp. 43–52 ( google.com [accessed April 18, 2021]).
  11. ↑ a b Randolph Paul Runyon: In La Fontaine's Labyrinth: A Thread Through the Fables . Rookwood Press, 2000, ISBN 978-1-886365-16-2 , pp. 97-98 .