Searching for le mot juste I n his judiciously admiring tribute
to Fanny Burney, published soon after the aged novelist's death in 1840, Macaulay takes the opportunity to rap her royal employer, Queen Charlotte, firmly over the knuckles for having exclaimed, 'Oh, it is amazing what good books there are on stalls!', waxing indignantly sarcastic about `the magnificent manner in which the greatest lady in the land encouraged litera- ture'.
Whatever her limitations — she wore poor Fanny, as her lady-in-waiting, to a complete shred — the Queen had a point. Perhaps it is not so much that good books are to be picked out of the boxes and barrows, as that a modest 50p spent on the dingiest, most unprepossessing volume may open a mine of casual enchantment. Thus on a whim, off a Norwich market stall, I bought a bundle of Victorian travellers' phrasebooks. The Queen Charlotte Effect began as the train pulled out for Liverpool Street and by the time we reached Diss I was mesmerised. In these four grubby, decomposing, salt-stained, ink-spotted opuscules lay the raw materials of romance, a chance to hear a dead genera- tion voicing its crotchets and terrors as it roamed Le Continong in the days when Napoleon III and Eugenie were playing charades at Compiegne, the Pope commanded a full-sized army and the Habsburg double eagle hovered every- where from Cracow to Venice.
The extraordinary thing about phrase- books is how little their assumptions have changed over the centuries. Life is still seen, as it was when they were first pro- duced during the late Renaissance, in terms of nervous, potentially dramatic stand-offs between the tourist and what English people abroad:continue, by a pro- cess of quaintly outrageous transference, to Call 'foreigners'. Baedeker's Manual of Conversation in Four Languages, published around 1865, adopts precisely such an edgily confrontational line. Travellers (voyageurs, reisenden, viaggiatori) are viewed as essentially neurotic, obsessive, domineering, exigent and pugnacious creatures, to whom this little red vade- mecum is more likely to act as a provoca- tion than as a simple companion to the basics of living out of a suitcase. The sheer comprehensiveness of the 150- Page vocabulary suggests a reluctance to take even the smallest of chances. Of course we might expect sections like 'Mate- rials for Dress' ((I've at last learned the
Italian word for ticking, traliccio') 'Ser- vants of a House' (including the German governess, die Etzieherin, and the French scullion, le marmiton) and absolutely every- thing you need for sitting down to some monster Victorian banquet, from `rapecole' and 'the turnip-radish' to calf's feet, arrack and filberts. But I say, hang on a bit, what is all this about 'Army & Ammunition', 'the embrasure', 'the gabion', 'the rifled can- non', 'the grenadier's cap'? Why does an innocent vagabond need to know the French for `soap-boiler', the German for 'compunction' (Gewissensbisse) or the Ital- ian for `milk-sister'?
It is the dialogues, however, which give the Manual its unique, ever so slightly dotty fascination, largely because of the way in which the tourist's progress is portrayed as a running skirmish with tradesmen and ser- vants. There are some simply dreadful scenes on the road (`Are the postilions insolent?', The coachman is tipsy', Put on the drag!') The laundress gets a dressing- down for bad ironing, the tailor's nankeen pantaloons are a bad fit, and the restaurant is scarcely up to scratch. 'What! grapes already? They cannot be ripe, they are quite green. Snuff the candles and give me the oil. What is that you are bringing?' A pike', answers_the waiter saturninely, which was 'swimming in the river five hours ago'. As Wellington once said, if you believe that, you'll believe anything.
Doubtless we should be happier journey- ing to Spain with Senor C. Bustamante, How do you like your carbon?'
whose Manual de la ConversaciOn Espariol, eager to get us prattling like born Castil- lians, soars to an empyrean of surreal absurdity worthy of Ionesco (who, after all, based The Bald Prima Donna on an English phrasebook)• To Whom could the tourist who purchased it from Jose Duarte's book- shop in Malaga around 1880 have addressed such sentences as 'Theatrical spectacles are necessary in large towns', 'Having joined in the conversation he revived it by felicitous sallies', 'I like a beef- steak nicely done, but I confess that I have a great liking for the mouse-buttock', 'I will answer your question "do you like spinage?" in the words of another person: I am happy not to like it', or 'It seems that a revolution has broken out at Calcutta'?
To which the rejoinder given is, 'This is perhaps a canard'. As, we might add, is the whole bizarre concept of the phrasebook, however loyally we sustain it (and Senor Bustamante must have had his uses, for my copy has been thumbed to near-extinction). Only one of these works picked off the Norwich stall comes anywhere near the dimension of practicality. In 1853 A. C. G. Jobert published his French Pronouncing Handbook for Tourists, apparently in horri- fied reaction to the sight of an Englishman in Boulogne pointing down his throat to signify a desire to eat. The book was a bit of a come-down for the author of Pure Common Sense Against Pure Immaterialism and The Philosophy of Geology, but at least it might have helped the young man at Podsnap's party in Our Mutual Friend to get further than 'Esker', since every single word has been rendered phonetically in accents which suggest that M. Jobert has no very grand social expectations of his readers.
'Nooz-ahvong daiz ahpahrtemangz-ah looai', Voolai-voo biang me lai mongtrai', `Sairtain'mang, prenai lah pain dangtrai, mosseeu'. By golly, a veritable new lan- guage! Tomorrow, perhaps, as I am indeed travelling to Venice, I shall be bold enough to ask the chambermaid to 'portai-mooah ung teer-bot', the steward to pour me 'ung vair dodvee' and the billiard-marker (for Le Continong is nothing without billiard- markers) to `troovai-mooah d'Iah crai'. Meanwhile, in my best Jobertian, 'Je sweat lay bong vahkawnks a too may lektur'.
Jonathan Keates
Previous page
