Fo(u)nt of wisdom or whatever
FONT, n. This word came up in conversation this week, as in a set of typographical characters. I thought maybe it was related to fount/fountain, and that the semantic connection was inkwells and liquids, but in fact, “font”—whether you mean a set of printing press characters or a baptismal font in a church—comes from French fonte, which means cast iron, and is related to fondre (to melt, to cast) and English “foundry.” (Also the melted cheese or chocolate that you eat as part of “fondue,” which is just French for “melted.”)
When you say something or someone is “a font of wisdom,” the expression refers to a baptismal font in a church, which also might have been made of cast iron sometimes. (I’ve seen stone ones in cathedrals.) Because “font” sounds identical to “fount” in English, you sometimes also see “a fount of wisdom.” Either image makes a kind of sense, and whether you are dipping into a pool of wisdom or standing under a fall of it, we seem to think of wisdom as water.
Sometimes I try to make the individual words in these newsletters connect to the book reviews, so the whole thing feels more thematically coherent, but let’s be real, most of the time my reading doesn’t have a coherent theme. Also, today I’m writing from an airport hotel outside Paris, after driving through the mountainous Ardèche region and taking the train from Valence to the Paris airport earlier today, so my fo(u)nt of wisdom feels pretty dry.
Happily I am full up on everything else, having spent a lot of time with family and friends during this trip, including a very sweet and heartfelt wedding at a ruined chateau. (What is on theme for this newsletter is that the final ruination of this particular chateau happened during the French Revolution, when people came to knock the walls down and steal all the stones.)
I haven’t read any more capital-R Romance since finishing Les Misérables, but my edition of Les Mis did include, in its annexes, a letter from Alexandre Dumas to his son (also named Alexandre Dumas, and also a writer, for maximum confusion—but Daddy Dumas is the Count of Monte Cristo and Three Musketeers one), and it’s sort of wonderful so I wanted to quote from it.
The letter is from July 1862, and it’s private correspondence, so Dumas spends a little time talking to his son about daily life and family matters, but the bulk of the letter is about his experience of reading Les Mis. He’s clearly in the middle of the book, and not loving it:
I am on the ninth volume of it. I read one every two or three nights. It’s an arduous task. It seems to me as though I am swimming in mercury.
(J’en suis au neuvième volume. J’en lis avec peine un toutes les deux ou trois nuits. C’est un travail laborieux. Il me semble que je nage dans le mercure.) [My edition divided Les Mis into 8 volumes! I wonder what changed?]
Damn, Alex! That’s your good friend Victor you’re talking about. Remember when you helped him sneak out of Paris after Louis-Napoléon put a price on his head? Surely you have something nice to say about his magnum opus.
[Hugo’s style, of which so much is said] strikes me like a city paved with sharp stones, you feel them through the soles of your boots as you walk, and then you suffer from not only the fatigue of the distance you’ve traveled, but also the stones on which you’ve walked.
([La forme dont on parle tant chez Hugo] me fait l’effet d’une ville pavée de cailloux pointus, on les sent en marchant à travers la semelle de ses bottes et l’on a non seulement la fatigue du chemin qu’on fait, mais celle du pavé sur lequel on marche.)
Oh. Ouch!
But it’s pretty, right?
…the work of the style preoccupies you so much that you forget not only the subject of the novel, but the meaning of the sentence. The clinking of the swords, if I can say that, harms the duel.
(…le travail du style vous préoccupe au point de vous faire oublier, non seulement le sujet du roman, mais le sens de la phrase. Le cliquetis des épées, si je puis dire cela, nuit au duel.)
The last one is particularly charming because it’s such a Three-Musketeers metaphor. And in case you were wondering if it’s only Hugo’s style in Les Mis that’s bothering Dumas, there’s also a long passage complaining about “if Fantine really loves her kid so much, why does she leave her with the Thénardiers” or “if Jean Valjean is really so smart, why does he…” etc., etc. So Dumas was having trouble with the content of the plot as well.
I loved Les Mis, but I do understand what Dumas is complaining about. I was down to read one chapter of extremely detailed description of the battle of Waterloo (where, I remind you, no major characters of Les Mis appear), but then I turned the page and there was… another chapter of extremely detailed description of the battle of Waterloo. And another. And another.
Hugo is a great essayist if you’re interested in the subject he’s writing about, but if you’re in a “but what happened to Jean Valjean after he jumped over that wall?!” mood, the essays can feel a little bit like your gym teacher making you run extra laps. And if you’re being made to run extra laps, you definitely don’t want to be running them on sharp stones.
I haven’t read Les Trois Mousquetaires—perhaps a future project—but I have read Le Comte de Monte Cristo, which I bought years ago in two paperback volumes at the giftshop of the Château d’If, the famous (real) island prison outside Marseille where (fictional) Edmond Dantès was kept. I read it a decade ago during the year we lived in France, where we had wifi in our apartment but only one laptop between two people. It seems impossible to imagine that life now that I regularly carry around three different internet-connected devices (phone, laptop, ereader), but somehow we survived. When my partner was using the computer, I read Dumas, and those two volumes sustained me for quite a long time. Reading Monte Cristo doesn’t feel anything like walking on sharp cobblestones, or, say, tunneling into the next prison cell—it’s fun. Even as a person who loves nineteenth-century novels, honesty requires that I disclose that many of them are not fun, so Dumas standing the test of time is remarkable. I highly recommend Monte Cristo and also, if you happen to find yourself in Marseille, the tour of the Château d’If, where some nineteenth-century fanboys dug a hole between two prison cells to make the prison better resemble its fictional version.
In small-r romance, this week I read
The Right Swipe (m/f, both cishet, contemporary) by Alisha Rai. The Right Swipe stars online-dating-app entrepreneur Rhiannon, a brilliant and driven woman who has trouble trusting people, and retired pro football player Samson, a sweet and charismatic man who is adrift after the loss of his career and two family members, both of whom were pro football players who died of complications from CTE. Rhiannon and Samson met a few months ago for what turned out to be a one-night stand. He ghosted her—or so she thinks. They find each other again at a tech conference after Samson becomes the spokesperson for a rival dating app. Like everything else I’ve read by Alisha Rai, this book dealt with serious, emotional issues while still giving each of its protagonists a wry, distinctive voice and also being hot as hell. Rai’s books are one-click buys for me, even when they cost more than a standard ebook. This one was $9.99 and my library had a six-month wait list for it, so I splurged. Worth it.
The Doctor’s Discretion (trans m/cis m, historical) by EE Ottoman. I love a historical romance that teaches me new things. This one is set in nineteenth-century New York, already a fairly unusual setting, and has a lot of details about food and clothing. I especially appreciated the attention paid to historical medicine, since both protagonists are doctors.
Heart of the Steal (gay m/bi m, both cis, contemporary) by Avon Gale and Roan Parrish. Usually I refuse to read any romance that stars a cop or a federal agent of any kind, because yikes, but I made an exception for this book, which is about an art thief and an agent in the FBI’s Art Crimes division, a premise that is like catnip to me. This is light and fun and surprisingly domestic, considering its premise. The characters are over the top in the best way, and it’s enjoyable from beginning to end.
Small Change (het m/bi f, both cis, contemporary) by Roan Parrish. I love a messy, angry female protagonist, and tattoo artist/painter Ginger is exactly that. She’s into the guy who runs the new local sandwich shop—he’s a total cinnamon roll, as the internet would say, AKA a sweetheart—but she’s unwilling to let her guard down for him. This book is cute, but if you happen to know a painter in real life, I strongly recommend against taking that person on a date to one of those Drink & Paint nights, where they will feel either (a) diminished or insulted, like their actual professional career is something for other people to dabble in while drinking and chatting (b) pressured to perform, in public and on the spot (c) like it’s a busman’s holiday (d) all of the above. The character in the book is a good sport about it, but still.
In books that are neither Romance nor romance, I read about half of The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, in an effort to catch up on books with a huge cultural impact that I’ve missed. Chandler’s prose is very good and also exactly as much about women’s legs as I expected after absorbing a lifetime of noir parodies: “The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem.” But overall, The Big Sleep is very stylish and very detached. I wouldn’t say it feels like walking on sharp stones, but it seemed so aimless that I didn’t care what I was walking on. The plot is complicated, but mysteries aren’t enough for me. I kept thinking “why should I care about these people?” and the book hasn’t answered my question, so I’m fine with not knowing the solution to the mystery.
If I could write back to Alex Dumas, I’d give him permission to put down Les Mis, too.
La rentrée (literally “re-entry,” actually “back-to-school” or a single word that means coming-home-from-summer-vacation) always feels bittersweet to me, maybe especially now that I’m not teaching. I love summer so much. Anyway, enjoy this last little bit of August before we all go refill our fonts.
