For Sure (23 page)

“I never been dis happy to fill in dan I am tonight. I loves it when it gets shockin' crazy like dis.”

Josse too was enjoying herself:

“Don't I knows it? Pete? One Alpine, two Coronas, one Sleeman Cream an' tree Moose Dry.”

Lisa-M. was waiting to give her order as well:

“Don't know 'bout yours, but mine're bending elbows like de devil.”

“Dat's how it always is come pay day. An' it's early yet!”

“I'll be buyin' dat sweater I seen at Champlain Place dis afternoon.”

La Bibliothèque idéale
lists four works each by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, a.k.a. Molière, and William Shakespeare. From Molière the collection suggests his play
Tartuffe
in the category of “Theatre,” along with
The Bourgeois Gentleman,
The Learned Ladies,
and
The Imaginary Invalid
in the “Laughter” section. From Shakespeare, the book retains the
Sonnets
in “English Literature,”
Midsummer Night's Dream
under the category of “The Fantastic and Marvellous”,
Hamlet
in “Theatre,” and
Richard III
in “Politics.” Are the French more prone to laughter than the English?

So The Cripple finally declared:

“Alright den. If dat's de way it is, den dat's de way it is.”

Antoinette wrote her score down in a fresh column, on the specially designed Scrabble score sheet.

“Yer tellin' me I'm de first body to tink of it?”

The Cripple found this difficult to imagine, but:

“Looks dat way . . .”

He sighed deeply the way one might do after a great effort, hoping perhaps to close the surprising if minor incident.

“Now, let's just see wot I can do wid dis, den.”

Most of the works included in “The Ideal Library of the Social Sciences” are by single authors, but there are several collaborations. In addition, although the majority of authors have only one book listed, several have two, but only six have three. The six are Bloch, Freud, Habermas, Ricoeur, Sartre, and Schumpeter. Bourdieu, Braconnier, Katz, Lazerfeld, Levy, Passeron, and Sperber also have three books listed but, in each of these cases, two of the works mentioned are collaborations.

A few days later, Terry had learned more:

“I saw De Cripple today . . .”

“Gawd, I can't get used to dat name.”

“I asked 'im if he knew how many Polaroids ee had up on his wall.”

. . .

“Der's 1,346.”

“Dat's a whole bunch. Who does ee play wid, den?”

“His wife, I suppose.”

. . .

“His goal is to get up to 1,728.”

“On account of?”

“I don't know. I wanted to ask 'im, but ee was in de middle of explainin' sometin' and by de time ee was done I guess I forgot.”

Étienne came in grumbling and wrapped himself around his mother's legs:

“When're we gonna eat, Mum? I'm hungry . . .”

“In a bit. Do you want a slice of apple?”

As the boy didn't reply, Carmen concluded that he didn't really know what he wanted. She held him close, stroking him tenderly, and took up the conversation.

“Wot does ee plan to do after dat? Stop playin', or just stop snappin' pictures?”

“Who? De Cripple?”

Carmen sighed to hear Étienne call him that. Terry answered his son's question:

“Right. I saw 'im again today. Ee was wantin' some books.”

“Ee reads a lot, eh?”

“Looks dat way.”

“I wanna be readin' too.”

Terry bent down to pick Étienne up and toss him up in the air a few times.

“I believe it, you wanna read! An' you know wot? I can't wait 'till you're reading, too. On account of I wanna sell you some books. Wee books and great big ones, dem dat cost an armful and dose dat aren't so dear, an' books wid pictures, an' books wid photographs, an' books wid just words, an' big tick dictionaries in French, English, Chinese, African . . .”

Carmen didn't like the idea that a father would exploit his son.

“At a good price, I hope!”

“Business is business, eh, Étienne? You tell yer mudder . . .”

Étienne roared with laughter as he spun in the air. He'd completely forgotten his hunger.

Between politeness and loyalty on the one hand, and humour and love on the other, Comte-Sponville explores 14 virtues in the following order: prudence, temperance, courage, justice, generosity, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, humility, simplicity, tolerance, purity, genteleness, and good will.

Alice Léger was up in arms:

“Might as well say we's de ones dat're payin' fer de international reputation of Statistics Canada!”

“International?”

“We's pretty much de best in de world . . .”

“Pretty much?”

“An' on account of we's mostly women, de bosses tink we don't mind. Dey don't give a fig dat we's workin' all hours, evenin's an' weekends — on account of you doesn't do dem interviews when you please, you gots to do 'em when dey wants you to.”

“An' are you dat badly paid, den?”

“Less den eleven dollars an hour.”

. . .

“Gettin' bit by dogs an' all!”

But what are virtues? Moral values acquired by humans over time, transmitted by culture and corresponding to a propensity to do good? More or less, yes.

Terry opened the envelope, glanced at the amount of the cheque. Satisfied, he folded the whole thing and stuffed it into the back pocket of his jeans.

“Dad!”

Marianne, who had just spotted him, came running.

“Well, if it isn't me little goose!”

In the arms of her dad, Marianne finally got to see the macaroni collages the children had been making on a large table all afternoon.

“An' where's Étienne got to, den?”

Until today, Étienne had always been first to greet him.

“Let's go an' find Étienne . . .”

Terry wandered from one room to another, nodding a greeting from time to time. Finally, he spotted Étienne in the backyard, playing shooter marbles with some other boys. Something about the situation reassured him. Coming closer, he overheard a bit of their conversation, spattered with English.

“My dad's a
pipefitter
.”

“Mine's a
janitor.”

“Me, 'tis my mudder who's a
janitor
.”

“Me, my mudder
calls
de bingo.”

“How about you den?”

Étienne was ready, nonchalante.

“My dad's got a
store
o' books, an' my mudder's a
Babartender.”

Works by and other characteristics of the six writers who each authored three titles in “The Ideal Library of the Social Sciences”: Marc Bloch (1886–1944), historian of medieval France, twice mentioned under history (
The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England
,
French Rural History
), one essay (
Strange Defeat,
a memoir written in 1940); Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Austrian, founder of psychoanalysis, twice mentioned under psychoanalysis (
The Interpretation of Dreams, Cinq psychanalyses
[Five Case Histories]), one essay (
Civilization and Its Discontents
); Jürgen Habermas (1929– ), German sociologist, twice mentioned under philosophy (
The Theory of Communicative Action, Technology and Science as Ideology
), once mentioned under communication (
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society
); Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), French philosopher, twice mentioned under philosophy (
Oneself as Another
,
Time and Narrative
), once mentioned under history (
Memory, History, and Forgetting
);
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), French philosopher, writer and critic, twice mentioned under philosophy (
Existentialism is a Humanism
,
Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology
), one essay (
Anti-Semite and Jew
);
Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950), Austrian economist, three times mentioned in economy (
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, History of Economic Analysis
,
Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process
).

“Don't know wot's goin' on, I've a cramp in me leg all day since dis mornin'.”

“If it was yer heart it'd be in yer arm you'd be hurtin'. Unless you slept crooked on it or sometin' of de sort. In dat case, you might be tinkin' 'twas yer heart, but 'twould just be on account of you slept
cramped
. Like when you goes campin'. Don' know 'bout you, but I wakes up wid a cramp somewhere's every time I goes
campin'
.
Camp
cramp
, me wife says. Well, I've gotta haul ass or I'll be getting' a
call
. You takes care o' dat leg, now!”

“Ya! An' tanks fer all dat information (dat I didn't really want).”

“Anytime!”

In the above tirade, the speaker switched back and forth between the English and French pronunciations of
camp
and
cramp
. One wonders why. Was it the pervasive influence of English? A degree of embarrassment at speaking French? Just for the sake of variety? Out of nonchalance? A kind of linguistic intuition? A form of complicity?

Comte-Sponville does not claim to have produced an exhaustive and immutable list of the virtues, but he hopes to have included the essential values associated with 30 possible virtues. As for the order in which he presents them, the philosopher explains that it is based more on a combination of intuition and necessity than on a desire to establish a hierarchy.

“Dad, is it true dat crows' eggs are black?”

“Der legs? Yes, sure.”

“Not der legs, der eggs! Dat's wot Chico told me . . .”

“Well, could be. I never heard nuttin' bout crows' eggs. To tell you true, crows aren't me all-time favourite bird. Matter o' fact, dey scares me just a bit.”

“On account of?”

“Don't know, do I. Hard to tink dey's very nice wid dat croaky voice dey got. An' dey're big and black to boot. An' here you are tellin' me der eggs are black as well . . .”

Étienne looked with renewed interest at the three crows gathered around a partially crushed cone of french fries in the parking lot of the A&W.

“Dey don't scare me . . .”

“Well now, dat's a good ting. 'Tis better if we're not scared of de same tings. Dat way we can help each udder out.”

“OK.”

On his mother Anne-Marie Schweitzer's side, Jean-Paul Sartre was the cousin once removed of Albert Schweitzer, theologian, philosopher, musician, musicologist, medical missionary (in Gabon), winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1952, and the man who swallowed an oyster, giving half the bivalve shell to each of the two individuals who were arguing over the mollusc, each claiming he had found it. A bit of trivia we were told in school.

“You won't believe wot he showed me today . . .”

Carmen had given up any doubts she might have harboured over what Terry told her about The Cripple.

“A bucket full of screws is wot, every kind o' screw!”

!

“I'm tellin' you! A whole bucket full!”

The idea that this was a pretty poor system of classification occurred fleetingly to Carmen, but she simply said:

“Must be awful heavy.”

Terry felt this was dwelling on a minor detail.

“Only proves how complicated dey've made our lives wid all der different kinds of screws.”

From a comparison of the titles listed in
La Bibliothèque idéale
and those in “La Bibliothèque idéale des sciences humaines,” we can identify a certain number of essential works for anyone seeking to augment his or her knowledge of the social sciences. A total of 58 titles are recommended by both reference works. For those seeking a shorter list, 14 titles not only appear in both publications, but are considered by
La Bibliothèque idéale
as one of the first books to read on the subject: in politics,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
by Hannah Arendt; in history:
The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England
by Marc Bloch,
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
by Fernand Braudel,
The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980–1420
by Georges Duby, and
The Autumn of the Middle Ages
by Johan Huizinga; in sociology:
Suicide
by Émile Durkheim and
The Civilizing Process
by Norbert Élias; in psychoanalysis:
The Interpretation of Dreams
by Sigmund Freud; in anthropology:
The Golden Bough
by James George Frazer,
A World on the Wane
and
The Savage Mind
by Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Children of Sanchez
by Oscar Lewis, and
Coming of Age in Samoa
by Margaret Mead; and, finally, the essay
The Accursed Share
by Georges Bataille.