The Child by Jules Valles

(Book Review)

I’m reading these out of order, but this is the first book in the “Jacques Vingtras” trilogy, which is the Roman-a-clef tale of Jules Valles’s childhood from hell.

(The middle book in the series “The Graduate”, which describes the 1848 Revolution, the 1851 coup by Napoleon III, and the struggle of Jules Valles and his friends to keep the socialist movement alive during the repressive period of the second empire, has, as far as I can tell never been translated into English. Or at least my search of the Internet reveals neither current nor used copies available for sale, nor in any library.)

Interestingly enough, although “The Insurrectionist” has long been out of print, and “The Graduate” never translated into English, “The Child” has recently been republished by the New York Review Books in 2005, and should be much more easily available for anyone interested.

Although I hold out some hopes that this may signal a plan to republish all of Jules Valles’s works, the publishers introduction states that they wanted to bring “The Child” to a larger audience because they believed this book, unlike the rest of Jules Valles work, is of interest to everyone whether they are political or not.

The book begins with the words: “I dedicate this book to all those who were bored stiff at school or reduced to tears at home, who in childhood were bullied by their teachers or thrashed by their parents.” Although this story is certainly anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment, it is largely apolitical (except for the last few chapters when Valles becomes interested in the history of the French Revolution).

Because of the excessive misfortunes of Jules Valles (or Jacques Vingtras, his Roman-a-clef counterpart), and the humorous way in which they are related, this work has often been compared to Charles Dickens.

No doubt if Jules Valles had lived today, no one would begrudge him years of therapy after this childhood. As it was, it is small wonder that this man grew up to become a lifelong rebel and outsider. And the tone of the book is set right from the beginning:

Was I breast-fed by my mother? Did I get my milk from some peasant wet nurse? I just don’t know. But whatever breast I may have gnawed at, I don’t remember, when I was tiny, ever being cuddled, made a fuss of, pampered, indulged, given little kisses…I was given lots of beatings.
My mother says: spare the rod and spoil the child. And every morning she gives me a beating; and if she doesn’t have time in the morning, she’ll save it until the afternoon, hardly ever later than four o’clock.
Madame Balandreau…is a kindly old spinster of fifty. She lives downstairs. In the beginning, she was quite pleased: not having a clock, she used me to tell the time. “Slap! Bang! Wham! Whack! Whack! It’s that youngun upstairs getting his walloping, time to make my coffee.”

And from this beginning, Valles continues through the rest of the book to detail every cruelty his parents ever inflicted on him.

As a child who was beat regularly by both parents, some of Valles’s complaints are no doubt valid. But as the book continues, some of the things he chronicles seem to be almost petty, such as the ridiculous clothes his mother sent him off to school in, or how his paranoid mother, fearing for his safety, was always forbidding him to do anything the other children regularly enjoyed.

Especially for a man who, in his adult life, lived on the streets, was imprisoned, shot at, and witnessed the massacres at the end of the Paris Commune, it seems a bit strange that near the end of his life he was still obsessed with chronicling everything that was denied to him as a child. It’s amazing how deep the wounds of childhood can be.

This book could have ended up being a very depressing read, but fortunately Jules Valles keeps his sense of humor with him as he writes it, and so I found myself mostly laughing as the young Jacques Vingtras goes from one childhood misadventure to another. The tone does occasionally darken, such as when Valles describes a childhood friend of his who was beaten to death by her father, and how this incident convinced him the rest of his life he would stick up for the defenseless. But on the whole, it was one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time.

The mother in the book is described by some reviewers as a sadist for all the ways she thinks up to torment her husband and her child. Her stubbornness in the various battles of wills she gets into reminds me a lot of the mother from “Malcolm in the Middle”. Consider this scene from one of the family’s journeys.

“You’re not hungry?” my father inquired on the way.
“Why should I be hungry?” my mother retorted.
I have to tell you that in the course of the previous evening, my father had suggested eating at the buffet in Vierzon, in case we weren’t able to find anywhere to eat later on. My mother had turned down this suggestion and she had no intention of letting her decision be questioned by being asked if she was hungry now….
My father didn’t argue…because his hands were tied; when we left, he acted most unwisely: he handed over all our money to his wife.
My mother had said in an innocent voice, “I’ve got bigger pockets than you, they’ll hold the money better. I can pay for everything on the journey.”
Initially my father didn’t appreciate the full extent of his misfortunes of the seriousness of his error; but at the first change of horses, the blow struck home: he had no money at all, not a single franc, not even a couple of sous. He’d given away all his small change in tips to railway porters and such. Now he didn’t even have enough to buy a glass of currant brandy….

This battle over money continues over the rest of the chapter, with the father and son continually trying to find ways to get some food or drink.

Aside from his parents, Valles’s second target is his education. Valles details all the ridiculous antics that go on during his thoroughly classical education. Some of this seems straight out of Monty Python, like the Latin poem they are supposed to write about the death of a parrot:

We’d been told to write about the death of a parrot. I’d said everything anyone could say when confronted by such a calamity: that I’d never find consolation; that when he saw the cage-now transformed into a coffin-Charon would drop his oars; that moreover I’d be burying him myself-triste ministerium-and that we’d be scattering flowers-manibus lilia plenis.
In one of my ingenious lines, I’d exclaimed: “Now, alas, you can plant parsley on the tomb!”
The teacher compliments me on this last subtle touch, but I’ve come second to Bresslair, who showed even deeper emotion and more sincere grief…He hit on the idea, borrowed from hymn tunes, of introducing a repeated refrain:
Psittacus interrit! Jam fugit psittacus, eheu!-The Parrot has died! It has already passed away, alas!

And my favorite part was the commotion young Vingtras caused in his examination when he stated that there were 8 (instead of 7) properties of the soul.

All in all, a very funny and moving book. Definitely worth reading.

Link of the Day
“Politicizing” events and “exploiting” tragedies

The Child by Jules Valles: Book Review (Scripted)