A STORY OF WATER
I went out into my garden
to pick some rosemary.
Fat chance!
It's the same every February.
"Water, water, everywhere", shout the locals,
rushing to leave before an avalanche of snow from the Alps,
which has melted in the spring sunshine,
comes crashing down on Villeneuve-Saint-Georges
from where I take the bus to Paris every morning.
What a pain this flooding is.
Thank goodness my cousin Bébert, otherwise known as Flat Feet,
was prosaically walking past.
That's how I came to impersonate Blondin.
If you don't know who Blondin is, that's too bad.
I was worried I'd be late for lectures,
so I asked for boots.
Yes, boots, from my second cousin Léon.
Handsome young Léon, the king of the accordion.
I felt the water rush past my legs and watched
as it flooded garages, cellars and living rooms.
I said, "Farewell, my lovelies",
thinking of Raymond Chandler, a writer I admire.
Dressed like Puss in Boots, I felt like the adventurer Arthur Gordon Pym,
whom many a fellow citizen was impersonating.
Father Franju yelled out that the buses weren't running
because of the inundation,
from the Latin "in" meaning on, and "unda" meaning wave.
I stuck my thumb out and this guy stopped.
He wasn't bad, not bad at all.
- We headed... - ...together...
...for Paris.
The main thing was to get through the floods
before the main road, I forget which,
got, or gets - I forget which tense is right too,
cut off.
We kept having to do U-turns
because the water was frequently blocking the road.
So much so that the car,
like a fox merrily trotting along sunken lanes,
ended up with its nose in the flood water, five minutes later.
Did you know that on the Côte d'Azur "after" means "before"?
You're going to tell me not to digress and to stick to the subject.
That reminds me of a story from the Sorbonne.
Aragon was giving a lecture on Petrarch.
Open brackets.
Everyone despises Aragon but I like him.
Close brackets.
So, at the Sorbonne, Louis Aragon was giving a lecture on Petrarch.
He started by singing Matisse's praises for at least three quarters of an hour.
Eventually a student yelled out, "Stick to the subject!"
Brilliantly, Aragon simply pointed out,
finishing the sentence interrupted by the student,
that Petrarch's originality lay in the art of digression.
I'm the same. I'm not straying off the subject.
Straying is the subject,
since the car, thrown off course by the floods,
was forced to drive through fields to reach the main road to Paris.
Instead of chatting me up, telling me I had aristocratic ears, a lovely bust,
the guy beside me talked non-stop about the merits of his car,
in a voice which contrasted artistically with the wind whistling past it.
The Ford Taunus is the best.
The Peugeot 403, Chrysler, Maserati, Lotus, maybe,
but not the Ford Taunus.
Not because it's German. I love the Germans.
Hölderlin, Max and Moritz, Wagner.
But I'm not a fan of the Ford Taunus.
The Fordist asked me what I liked, since there were clearly things I disliked.
I said I'd like to reach Paris before dusk.
- Don't worry. - He said, narrowly avoiding a slug.
It, too, had been wending its way for 20 minutes through the Paris basin,
which was flashing past us in the wing mirror.
Having taken endless detours to reach the main road,
we were going round in circles.
We passed the pool where Léon taught me the breaststroke last year.
We were back where we started.
We bumped into Émile and Gaspard.
They yelled at us to try Villeneuve-le-Roi.
Too late.
We were surrounded by flood water. "It's always the same in France," I said.
"They say you're free but it's not true. This proves it."
"Freedom" is not an empty word for the French.
Take Paris. It's the only city in the world
where you can walk along an avenue called Stalin
and end up on a boulevard called Nicolas Il.
So, France is a free country.
I'm sure if we came back we'd be free to go to Paris.
- Outcome? - We decided to continue on foot.
It might not look like it, but I have a lot on my mind.
The misty air, the sunshine.
Baudelaire is the ideal poet.
It was he who said...
"The misty sunlight of those cloudy skies
"Has, for my spirit, the charms, so mysterious,
"Of your treacherous eyes shining through their tears"
- What can I say to follow that? - Say nothing.
All right, I'll say nothing.
I don't usually care about images. It's words that are important to me.
But this time I can't help it. It's all so beautiful.
No noise, no music, silence.
You're about to witness
how this young girl allows herself to be seduced
by the wolf.
He kissed me.
He caressed me.
All around us the floods continued to wreak havoc.
This was no Degas.
The picture was impressive rather than impressionistic.
"Let's kiss some more," he said.
"No."
"We may as well have fun," he added.
"I'm not in the mood."
"I bet I can make you laugh," he boasted,
forgetting the tragedy of the situation.
I bet him he couldn't. We struck a deal.
If he managed to tell me a funny story, then, OK, I'd let him kiss me.
"Do you know the story about the guy who asked,
"Is that egghead your son?
"You have 12? That's some omelette."
I found it daft.
"Or the Yugoslav scholar who spent his life
"proving The Iliad wasn't written by Homer
"but by another Greek guy who was also called Homer."
What was funny about that? I didn't get it.
Then he came out with a story about two madmen telling jokes.
"Go on," said one. "You start." "18," the other one said.
"Brilliant.
"Your turn now." "23." "Damn. I knew it."
I knew it too, by heart.
He pulled a face, realising how stupid it was.
"Do you know the story about Prince Yusupov?"
"Yes and no."
"Here goes. It takes place in Prince Rachevsky's palace.
"He's hosting a banquet in honour of Rasputin's killer, Prince Yusupov.
"Do you know it?" "No."
"'Right, I'll continue,' he continued.
"Prince Yusupov agrees to come
"as long as there is no mention of Rasputin.
"'My dear friend,' said Rachevsky, 'There'll be no mention of Russia even.'
"But at the end of the evening a guest asks to meet the prince.
"Rachevsky takes him to Yusupov and bows, saying,
"'Allow me to introduce you to Prince Rasputov."'
Was I meant to laugh or cry?
I realised he was kissing me.
His kisses felt like raindrops on my lips, which brought me back down to earth.
As we know, it doesn't take much for raindrops to become a flood.
Back to the problem in hand: how to get to Paris.
We couldn't carry on on foot.
We went in search of a boat to take us to the Ford Taunus,
which was now separated from us by a lake.
I was lost in my thoughts.
"They rose and flitted across my mind like clouds whirled by the wind
"across the grey veil of mist covering the sun."
That was a quote from Balzac's "La Duchesse de Langeais".
- While we passed... - ...straight...
...from one scene to the next, my hapless friend said I wasn't serious.
But the tragedy of our times makes everything serious.
No one whistles any more. People work out of necessity.
Everything's wretched now that art has become serious.
Les Pieds Nickelés were smashing.
Only "smashing" is a word that is scorned today.
It's been replaced by dreadfully vulgar words.
The word "ace", for example. Whereas "smashing" was charming.
There are other words too. It's a shame they've disappeared.
Like "dough" for money
and "dandy" for a man who cares about his appearance.
Dandy was wonderful, but those words have all gone now.
Valéry Larbaud is dead, Paul Éluard is dead,
Jean Giraudoux is dead.
All these ideas kept flitting through my mind
while the Taunus' 18 horsepower galloped along the road to Paris,
which we had finally regained.
The more the Fordist accelerated,
the less my heart would stop racing.
You know how it is.
The less I pedal fast,
the more I go slow.
Or the more I pedal slow,
the less I go fast.
- By the time we arrived... - ...water was lapping the Eiffel Tower.
I was happy.
This guy I had scolded for kissing me,
this dandy,
I was probably going to sleep at his place.
France may be under water
but I'm happy.
This film is by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
Michel Latouche was the cinematographer.
Roger Fleytoux managed the production for Pierre Braunberger
in homage to Mack Sennett for Les Films de la Pléiade,
Board of censors number: 21.696.
That's all, folks.