A Mistake

I recently reread Eça de Queiroz's wonderful novella The Yellow Sofa - about which I've written elsewhere - and, finding that I loved it as much as ever, thought I'd seek out some more of his shorter fictions. I soon found a volume, published by Dedalus, titled Alves & Co and Other Stories and, as it was going for a song, I happily snapped it up. Only to discover that Alves & Co is the selfsame Yellow Sofa under a different title.
 If I still had a functioning memory for names, I might have recalled that Alves & Co is the family firm of Godofredo da Conceição Alves, the (less than heroic) hero of The Yellow Sofa. Ah well - at least, by buying this volume, I discovered that Dedalus, an enterprising small press based in Cambridgeshire, also publish translations of many of Eça de Queiroz's other works. I'll be on the look-out for them now, taking care not to repeat my mistake.

Meanwhile...

Here's something I wrote about Strawberry Hill House for superior interior specialists Pooky.

One More, and Back to England

Good news from Dieppe's other historic church, St Rémy, where a wholesale, long overdue restoration is now under way. Among the first fruits is the lady chapel [above], restored to its former splendour. If the rest of the church lives up to that, it will be quite something - and it might well be finished before the seemingly never-ending restoration of St Jacques is complete. But there’s a long way to go, and many of St Rémy’s side chapels have been, er, awaiting attention for some while [below].

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Back in England, we got on the train at Newhaven, that deeply dismal point of arrival, and I took a window seat from which to enjoy the passing scenery. Immediately a burly, stubble-chinned fellow in a below-the-knee floral print cotton dress piped up, informing me, at length, just how ‘rubbish’ the trains on that line are. They should have been scrapped and replaced years ago, he declared - although it would be a waste of time as the replacement rolling stock is rubbish too.
 Moving the conversation deftly along, he asked me what kind of day I’d had, expressing the hope – nay, expectation – that it had been better than his. I mentioned Dieppe and he expressed the hope – nay, conviction – that it was ‘better than this place’. I endeavoured to enjoy the landscape sliding by the window – sheep grazing in the river valley, a horizon of rounded hills, stocky church spires rising among trees – but by the time we got to Lewes he had also assured me that, in fifty years, all that would be gone and there would be nothing but houses. Welcome to England.
 

And

Also seen in a side chapel of St Jacques, Dieppe, awaiting who knows what.

Two Tablets, One Story

In a side chapel (La Chapelle des Noyés) of the magnificent church of St Jacques in Dieppe - a church whose much-needed restoration proceeds slowly - I noticed a tablet in memory of the priest Jacques Hamel. Père Hamel was butchered in his old age by a Jihadist fanatic, while celebrating mass at his church in St-Etienne-de-Rouvray. A few yards to the right of his tablet is one in memory of another priest, Clement Briche, who was guillotined in the public square of Dieppe in 1794, a victim of equally fanatical revolutionaries acting in the name of Reason and Enlightenment. The two tablets make a poignant pairing, and a sad reminder of what human beings are capable of when gripped by an Idea that seems to demand the death of all those who do not share it.
 The name Hamel appears on another tablet in the same chapel, this one celebrating the brothers Jean and Charles Hamel, who in 1656 sailed from their native Dieppe to start a new life in Quebec. Several other families are similarly celebrated, in tablets put up by their present-day descendants in Canada. I used to read such things with interest but no particular emotion, until a visit to Quebec a few years ago - and, especially, a reading of Willa Cather's wonderful novel of 17th-century Quebec, Shadows on the Rock - made me realise just what it meant to leave one life behind and try to establish a new one on an alien shore. Fiction, as ever, tells us far more than history can.

D***** Time Again

Alert regulars might have noticed that it's been a full ten months since I was last in Dieppe - was this going to be that rare thing, a Dieppeless year? The answer is of course no: Mrs N and I are heading that way again tomorrow (after overnighting in Lewes), taking the big lumbering ferry from Newhaven in the early morning.
 It now takes longer to get from London to Dieppe than it did in the later 19th century, when there were boat trains and fast and frequent steam packets delivering les Anglais smoothly into the heart of the old town, within yards of the restaurants on the Quai Henri IV. Even in the 1990s, as I remember, it was still possible to nip over to Dieppe for lunch and return in the early evening... Ah well, at least the ferry - unlike so many others - is still running.
 I might be filing the odd report from Dieppe, but if not I should be back in action some time next week.

God: Certainly a Gentleman

In the closing years of the 19th century, the young Somerset Maugham was befriended by the elderly Augustus Hare and paid several visits to the eminent Victorian's home, near Hastings. Here Hare followed the morning routine that was still standard in the great houses of the time, reading prayers and passages from the Bible to the assembled guests and servants before the hearty breakfast was broached.
 Maugham noted that some of the prayers were not spoken in the familiar form, and discovered that the book used by Hare had been edited, certain phrases being removed. When Maugham asked his host why this was, Hare replied: 'I've crossed out all the passages in glorification of God. God is certainly a gentleman, and no gentleman cares to be praised to his face. It is tactless, impertinent and vulgar. I think all that fulsome adulation must be highly offensive to him.'
 I rather think my father (whose mindset was decidedly Edwardian) would have endorsed the idea of God as a 'gentleman' - though he would surely have added the adjective 'English'.