Over the past few months, my wife, Culley Jane, the retired professor and novelist, has been working on an academic paper intended for publication in an academic journal. We spend lots of time discussing one another’s current research and writing projects. Mine tend to be about the physical economy, geopolitics and 18th-century European philosophy. Her current project is about a work of French literature. It’s about a short novel called La Chatte, first published in 1933 by the French novelist Colette.

I’d never heard of Colette.

“She wrote Gigi,” the professor emerita informed me. “It was made into a Hollywood movie.”

“With Maurice Chevalier?”

“Yes.”

“Never saw it.”

I was politely informed that in 1948, the year both of us were born, Colette was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature and that in 1953, the year before she died, she was named a Grand Officer of the French Legion of Honor. "She was the first, and as far as I know, the only woman to ever receive a French state funeral,” Culley Jane said.

“And to think that I’ve never even heard of her. A state funeral, wow. I wonder,” I said, “how many women have received state funerals in America? I'm sure there's been lots of famous men, but how many women?”

I knew Culley Jane would soon have an answer. She looks everything up on the internet. With a few swipes of her finger, she quickly located a site that listed all the state funerals ever held by all the countries in the world. Suddenly, she expressed astonishment. “This is amazing,” she said.

“How many?”

“One.”

“One?”

“One.”

“Eleanor Roosevelt? One of the suffragists? The woman who sewed the first American flag… I can’t remember her name?”

“It just happened recently… Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

In all the history of the two countries with the most famous Revolutions, America and France, only two women have ever received state funerals. One wrote legal briefs. One wrote novels. I’d never read any of Justice Ginsburg’s legal briefs, but I’m sure I’ve experienced their effects. I figured it must have been the same way in France.

I like to know what my wife is up to so we have things to talk about other than grocery lists, the yard and my long stories. So I looked Colette up on Wikipedia. What first caught my eye was that her first husband was a Gauthier, Henry Gauthier-Villars. I guess he was an asshole. But he was a Gauthier, like me. That got me excited, like when I learned that the Statue of Liberty had been forged at the Gauthier Iron Works in Paris, or the time I found a bottle of Chateau Gauthier wine at a department store in St. Louis. Last summer, when we were on the A71 4-lane expressway going from Villeneuve-sur-Lot to Paris, I about went off the road trying to get an iPhone picture of a Gauthier Trucking Company semi passing us by.

So, even though I knew nothing about Colette, I felt a familial connection to her, albeit through an ill-fated first marriage to an asshole named Gauthier. Like meeting a distant cousin you didn’t know you had at a family reunion. Their story is part of your roots.

I’ve always been aware of my French roots. I grew up half French-Canadian. There’s something about roots, our heritage, like humans are innately curious about where they come from in the sweep of universal history. I feel the same way about Sweden, where my mother’s father was born before the family emigrated to homestead a farm in northern Wisconsin. Grandpa Wahlstrom loved to tell us kids stories about how we were descendants of Vikings and a Swedish King.

I decided to read the English translation of La Chatte that Culley Jane had on her bookshelf. She, of course, reads it in French and shows me where a writer’s intention can get lost in translation.

I need to explain two things. First, maybe because I might have ADHD and a limited attention span, I’ve never been much into reading novels. And, second, I had never before read a novel written by a woman.

In college, I was required to get into Hemingway and the interwar generation of American novelists – Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the like. All men. In the 70s, I got into Kerouac and the Beats, mostly for philosophical reasons. But since 1979, when I first heard about the biggest story in the world, I’ve pretty much only read non-fiction books about physical economy, geopolitics and 18^th-century European philosophy. From time to time I’d get into a Western novel by Louis L’Amour, but never anything written by a woman.

Then, when I was 76 years old, lying in bed next to my sleeping wife, I read Colette’s La Chatte.

I’ve written here before about what I remember from Schopenhauer’s late 19^th-century treatise on literature, that no matter what we do, like doing the dishes or writing a novel, it will be a perfect reflection of who we are, even if the novel is nothing like the where or when the writer’s living when writing it. Even the “fictitious” characters are a perfect reflection.

Finishing the book, laying it on the bedside table, turning off the reading light, I watched my thoughts with my eyes open like they teach in Zen monasteries. A bright moon cast shadows around the room. Innately, I knew that I had to know this person, this woman, my roots, a missing piece in the mental puzzle of who I am.

Colette was 27 years old when France entered the 20^th century. She was in Paris during the two world wars. She would have been in her late 50s when she wrote La Chatte, her youth slipping into her past, which Culley Jane describes in her academic paper as “turbulent.” Of Colette’s lived life at the time, Culley Jane writes: “Her turbulent youth, which included well-publicized liaisons with men, women, the teenaged son of her second husband and the transgender aristocrat Mathilde de Morny, seems to be behind her.”

My days were soon filled with internet searches into the life of the only woman to ever receive a state funeral in France.

She danced risqué on stage. She remained apolitical in a politically fractured Europe while wars raged. She said she thought with her body. Her abstractions assumed the texture and mystery of flesh and relationships. During the German occupation of Paris, she was criticized by some for not taking a more active role in the resistance. She was concealing and protecting her third and final husband, Maurice Goudeket, a Jew.

I’ve since read the novel on my bedside table more than once. I can feel my French roots growing deeper than the wars of Napoleon or the existentialism of Sartre, colonialism, revolutions, or even the memory of the taste of my great-grandmother Thibault’s French meat pies on a wintry Christmas Eve after Midnight Mass.

Reading the book, I’m looking out through the eyes of Colette, like Jeanne d’ Arc, French, a woman. Beyond beliefs and exegesis, I can smell the Garden of Eden, see its' bursting interplay of shapes and wavelengths, touch it lying next to me or across the breakfast table.

In English, La Chatte means "The Cat."

I think Colette is the real cat in the novel, saying we can jump the fence and land like a cat, and for that, not for a legal brief, the one-time mistress of a transgender was honored by the people of France with a state funeral -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Colette, quite a pair, coloring our universal history.

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(Editor’s Note: Prudy Planet is an old high school friend of the boss of the language department here at Westphalia Publishing. After college, she taught high school Latin for a couple of years at a fishing village on the Pacific Northwest coast. She traveled to Africa where she met a Frenchman who was born in Algeria. They got married and have lived in France ever since. Italicized translations in parentheses are the product of Westphalia’s own language department. The opinions of the writer do not necessarily represent the opinions of Westphalia Publishing, but at the important level there's harmony.)

 Dateline: July 14, 2024

Yesterday was quite a day. At 9:30 a.m., I charged off on the bus to the Assemblée Générale of the orchestra I play with.

Then at 12:30, I grabbed a sandwich in a boulangerie and charged over to my friend Paula's. She's about 95 so she doesn't go out much. Anyway, we chewed the fat and then I had to rush off to demonstrate against the bombing of Gaza. This involved walking round and round the city center of Chambery in the rain while yelling "Israel Assassin!" Nobody paid much attention to us. There were a few cops hanging out for the form, but nothing sinister.

At about 5 p.m. I headed back to Paula's to play scrabble with Paula and my friends Louise and Guy. I won. I managed to catch the bus home.

This morning was run-off election day in France. We voted in a gym. You go in and there was a table with papers for the two candidates who did best in the first round of voting last week -- the Macroniste Marina Ferrari vs. the Rassemblement (formerly the Front) National, the right-wingers, plus a little blue envelope.

We took the papers with the candidates’ names and pictures and the little blue envelopes into the booths, put the one we were voting for in the envelope, and chucked the rest in a large waste basket. I rooted around in the waste basket and was afraid a lot of people had voted for the Rassemblement National. Then we stood in line, showed our ID and voter registration card, and dropped the little blue envelope in a transparent box. The assessor said "a voté!" in a loud voice, and we shuffled out.

The previous week, in the first round of voting, there were about 19 parties, but seventeen were eliminated. A creep named Ciotti from what used to be the Gaullist party, Union pour un movement populaire (Union for a Popular Movement, or UMP), but which Sarkozy renamed Les Républicains because he was a fan of Bush, shocked most people in his party by teaming up with the Le Pen gang and they tried to throw him out, but he said he was the president of the party and he threw them out and locked himself inside the party headquarters. So now his outfit is called les Republicains à Droite (Republicans on the Right) and the Le Pen candidates call themselves that but "soutenu par Rassemblement National" (supported by National Rally).

There were some weird parties in the first election: Europe Democratie Esperanto, advocating the teaching and universal use of the Esperanto language; the Parti Animaliste with their slogan, "Les Animaux comptent, votre voix aussi" (Animals count, so does your voice); Liste Asselineau-Frexit, advocating for a French exit from the EU; l'Europe ça Suffit, starring an ex-buddy of Marine Le Pen; Reconquête with Marine Le Pen's niece, Marion, and a ghastly individual called Eric Zemmour. Another sister of Marine Le Pen's popped up somewhere and her husband, the mayor of Perpignan, also ran in the Pyrenées Orientales. After the vote last week, Marine Le Pen's niece, Marion Maréchal, dumped Zemmour and reunited with her aunt.

There were 5 parties with catchy slogans which claimed to be Green -- Equinoxe, l'Avenir Croit en Nous (the future believes in us); Europe Territoires Ecologie, pour une europe qui nous protège (for a Europe that protects us); Ecologie au Centre (ecology at the center); Ecologie Positive & Territoires, une europe des régions pour le climat, les citoyens et la protection animale (a Europe of the regions for climate, citizens and animal protection); and the main group, Europe Ecologie.

One other weird party is l'Alliance Rurale, headed by a colorful individual called Jean Lasalle along with the president of the National Federation of Hunters and an imposing matron who is mayor of a small town in the South of France as well as President of the Fédération des Communes Pastorales (Federation of sheep-herding communities). 

During the campaigning, twice a day, after the news, came a long series of ads for these different parties.

I realize that I haven't mentioned the European Parliamentary elections, which started this whole mess. 

The election for the European Parliament was June 9. Emmanuel Macron chose the lackluster and unknown Valerie Hayer, who had obviously never taken a high school speech class, to lead his party, which was now called Renaissance. 

Macron had by this time become extremely unpopular. There were 38 parties vying for 81 seats: 6 far left, 6 left-wing, 3 green, 4 far right, 2 right-wing and 1 center, in addition to the Parti Animaliste and Esperanto Langue Commune Europe Démocratie Esperanto. 

As usual, voters on the left voted for a lot of different parties, while on the right everyone was tired of both Macron and Sarkozy's old party, les Républicains. The Rassemblement National won in a big way.

The Rassemblement National group in the European Parliament always voted pro-Russia. They are also Pro Pétain, Vichy, and anti-French Resistance. 

Macron then went into a huff, and without consulting anybody, went on television to announce that he was disbanding parliament and calling new elections. This was a big surprise for everyone including the prime minister and everyone on his team, but it turned out he had told his father about his plan and his father confirmed this on TV.

All parties had only 3 weeks to prepare and campaign. Marion Maréchal Le Pen dumped Eric Zemmour and Reconquête and joined her aunt. Another Le Pen sister crawled out of the woodwork and teamed up with the rest of the family. Eric Ciotti, president of the Republicans, announced that he was teaming up with the Rassemblement Nationale. The other politicians in Ciotti’s party had the decency to be shocked and said that they would destitute (strip of powers) him. After locking himself inside the party headquarters, a municipal court ruled that angered party members couldn't throw him out, so after that, the Le Pen candidates were presented as candidates of "Républicains à Droite" (Right-wing Republicans) as opposed to "Républicains" represented by a weak-chinned, wimpy youth called François-Xavier Bellamy.

Before the final run-off election, the Left managed to smooth over their differences and cobble together an agreement to unite because the Le Pen gang was a threat to democracy and had been financed by Putin.

It’s getting late. Election results are coming in. It looks as though the Gauche (Left) has won! At least we won’t be speaking Esperanto in France anytime soon. Maybe I’ll sleep peacefully tonight.