I always had reluctance to speak of myself and reveal personal secrets I had never told anybody before but I have to expose in detail a few biographical elements so that one can understand how it is possible to pass suddenly from one laterality mode to another and why this occurred.
The small village of a few hundred inhabitants belonging to an administrative department not far from Joan of Arc’s birth place in the East of France where I was born is too obscure to be mentioned.
Being the child of a manual worker is the simplest thing in the world especially in the year when also Yeltsyn and Gorbachev were born.This year is actually not far from the 1914-1918 war against Germany but at that time I never had the impression that the war had just finished.
For me this had occurred in the Middle Age; it was a horrorful period described in an abridged form in the schoolar books as if the author had not enough time to narrate it with details or had not absorbed all its episodes
What would the young think about the stupid colonial wars that followed if they were born afterwards, even one year later ? The same as I thought : inconsequent butcheries for the “honor” of the nation. Colonial wars are still more useless since at the beginning there was no hope to win. How can you refuse freedom to people who ask for it ?
Father is an orphan at the age of three due to a meningitis, I believe. Useless to say that nobody told me anything about this zouave soldier, my paternal grandfather I had no opportunity to make acquaintance with. My mother is roughly from Luxemburg since her father comes from this small country. Her mother is also somehow from Luxemburg although she was born in Paris from a Luxemburg mother.
The love story of my grandparents starts very simply : grandma is a servant at a doctor’s. In these very old times bed sheets are terribly important to the economy of houses. A few sheets had disappeared ! Since grandma had a brother who was supposed to come back from the army (the same who died as a prisoner on one of the last days of the war in 1918 due to the Spanish flu) they accused her for having robbed the sheets so that he could “establish” himself and they fired her without complication or scruples.
Very obviously there was no proof of such crime. They gave her the “sacred” certificate without which nobody can work anymore as a servant but it was drafted in such a way that she could no longer find any such employment.
In the meantime grandpa who was travelling from mill to mill swallowing flour and dust into his large lungs while repairing wooden parts met a sort of marriage woman who then said to grandma : “ One Michel wants to marry”. Tristan and Isold had been devised. This type of romance can succeed.
For me who loved them both or was used to their presence since there was no other person of the older generation I always heard them quarreling but only in Luxemburgish which I never understood.
The wife obeyed her husband and that was all. There was nobody to help him to the works in the fields or the wood carving since they had only three daughters. At least nobody to help him in the way he wanted to since my mother and her sisters have suffered in the fields up to saturation. This agricultural work implied cows but no horses or other tractive means i.e. a miserable occupation to be sure of not starving.
He loved shaping wood, cabinet making actually, without having had any apprenticeship. He was transferring drawings from a magazine, a furniture catalogue perhaps and tried to reproduce a masterpiece. He was good at that. I can still see him hitting the wood carving knife with his big hands (more “sensual “ than with a hammer for carving wood).
I can still hear him shouting in front of his undescribable mess of tools : “One would think the devil hides all these things”. Now I am close to his age, I understand what he meant.
He was telling us stories that happened in the mills, with no movies or TV, the companions surprised at sitting on glue hidden on the chair and all the simple life which can no longer be imagined.
I also remember that he gave the church a catafalque for children since many were dying at an early age at that time.
He was a little more than 80 and took to his bed because of a bronchitis or other pulmonary illness (asthma ?) caused by excess of dust in the lungs produced by flour from old mills.
We tried to call a doctor but grandpa did not want to see him. The doc by surprise made a shot into his skinny buttocks but did not succeed twice because he was fired.
At that period antibiotics had been found, one could have saved him but he said : “I am too old to be able to work anymore, my time has come” (What can we think of the present retirement age known from childhood on ?).
His time came eventually a fortnight later. At his funeral snow fell enormously on the way and the funeral procession walked for two kilometers to arrive at the neighbouring village since he wanted to be buried in a waterproof cemetery. The persons taking part in the ceremony said a bit jokingly : “He often got on our nerves but this time he chose the best day”.
Grandma, Georgette, remained then with no command or directives and left life at about the same age but was nine years younger. Although she was checked from time to time by her younger daughter spaced by 3 kilometers only she actually died more or less of starvation because first she dared not buy much food in view of the new francs and also she was eating hardly anything for lack of appetite (missing vitamin B12 ?).
Both grandparents were of course fervent Christians and grandpa on each Sunday never missed vespers to sing the psalms and I admired a lot his performances.
My mother, the eldest of two sisters spaced by five years each (how were they doing in that period for spacing children ? Big mystery) was less than 20 when she met my father. A probably not very romantic meeting and of which intensity ?
Father was the younger of two brothers and lived with the second husband of his mother, a peasant very often drunk, and also a widower with a few children. My father was rather not at ease with that family which increased by a half-sister, thereby producing six or seven children. Grandfather, seeing that his daughter was “going around” (“speaking” very innocently) with Charles (who was also called Lucien), told her immediately :”It will be this one and not another”. “Yes, dad” replied the obeying daughter. In these old times one was easily “compromised”. Hence the socalled “love” marriage.
Since I was born 7 or 8 months after the marriage, therefore too early, my mother was reproached for this supposed horrorful behavior all her life at least in this village which we left later. I know my mother and my father and I am certain that none of them would have dared, contrary to the present princes and princesses and the stars of the show biz of this time, anticipate anything before marriage. This was not “tendency” as it is now.
There is something strange in respect to the grandparents : they forced their daughters to address them as “vous” the superpolite form. We, as children, addressed them in the usual way without any scruple. It was not out of a “bourgeois” mentality and I do not know why they required this (religious school ?), it was a fact. I remember my mother’s respectful attitude :”Daddy, would you...” This was biblical respect and perhaps fear, both unfamiliar to the youngest, auntie Angela, who was saying “vous” anyhow.
Grandpa had a pragmatic attitude towards cats: they ought to eat mice but he was very surprised at seeing the cat’s behavior when he was threatened by his hat. After all it seems to me that he had not understood cat psychology as they are totally desinterested by the concept of efficiency. Being the eldest of twelve among whom several of them had the same given name he had no time to learn cats.
My father knew very little of reading and writing as the 1914 war had enormously disturbed his scholarship (French teaching and a German teacher). My experience in this respect persuaded me that it is practically impossible to recover the time lost in the primary school years. My mother who was very intelligent, having had a good education (the Sisters in Luxenburg) tried to give him lessons but at the adult age one has no more need for these things since one can manage very well (?) without them.
The perfectly illiterate people who exist even now in France and elsewhere are different from all others : they can manage and are very bold, nothing stops them, especially women. Fortunately for humanity the education or the lack of it has nothing to do with intelligence. Educated idiots with diplomas are a lot.
My father started work prior to 14 in the fields and thereafter in a factory. All his life he was exploited and underpaid because he had not obtained the famous professional certificate (professional aptitude certificate = PAC) which related to any specialized work (wood, iron and so on)
His great extraordinary characteristic in my child’s memory is that he was very lucky in the games of chance : cards, races, lotteries, bowling (he won a big goose in a bowling game, I was 7). Once at the races (tiercé) much later he would have been the only one to win but the difference with a billionaire is that he did not bet since he had already made a lot of tickets for his pals and this was sufficient for his Sunday ! I can swear that this capacity is not hereditary.
My big sorrow and enormous lack of him is that he went as a second-class soldier in 1938 and came back only in 1944. This was the period I needed him most. Due to my deficient eyes I was seeing him in every approaching man. Of course I knew it was not him but I was searching desperately.
As I hear about abandoned orphans who work for years to find their origin I understand that it is very significant and even indispensable to know. Did I think I was adopted ? Probably not.
I had a grudge against father for his absence but how unfair ! And when he came back I did not “recognize” him. Not physically of course but he was not the father I had dreamed up. He had changed, was older in my memory and had to go as ever to the famous factory since there was no other work for him. Anyhow because of this factory he came back a little earlier since Germans found more efficient to have useless prisoners work for them to extract iron.
I felt remorse for being disappointed by him; in fact, he should never have lost the best part of his life for all these important years since he should have been dismissed from the army in view of his distorted vertebral column (ill treatments in childhood).
When I was seeing him smoke as a worker used from his early years (13/14) to show that he was a “man” I was scared of cancer for him especially when I was far away in Paris and during my rare visits I noticed changes for worse. A cardio-vascular illness fell on him and I came one day too late after his third heart attack although I had planned to come earlier but I had so much work.
He was playing cards in a pub with a few old French and Italian workers like him and suddenly said, prior to fall, all blue : I am happy, I won the game...”
He was 65 and so had been retired for one month.
I believe each one is very ungrateful to fathers generally.
My mother was to be a widow for 29 years which surprised her a lot. The enormous asset she gave me is that she had a very quick mind with an original interesting personality. If machos treat women in a shameful manner it is because they were not lucky enough with their mothers. For me this stupid attitude cannot be understood.
Equality is obvious as is also difference. Saying that men or women are more intelligent with respect to one another is wrong as this is a function of the personalities. A woman who says that women are more clever is as stupid as those men who have the same opinion on their own sex. Making children is at least as difficult as initializing them, but anyhow where is the pride one should boast about ? Nature did it for both. It is not a problem of degrees of performance but only of complementary varieties.
I have never been at a kindergarten : these Middle Ages had not thought of it yet. The school was beginning at the age of 7, the “reasonable” age which was imposed upon me, and my mother had already taught me how to read (and write, I presume). I only remember the face of the girl next door who started school with me.
All classes were mixed, with a single female teacher since the man teacher was of course mobilized in the army for the “last” war. In a village of 500 inhabitants how many children were going to school ? I have no idea but this mixture required waiting for the others to finish before the first were taken care for. In these long period of idleness I started to search how to explain to the others the matters of the course. Strangely enough I just remember the teacher’s pronunciation which was not at all our local one. I became later a fan of the pronunciation of foreign languages as will be seen in the following.
In these times of nazi occupation everything was controlled even schools and you had to wait for the age of 14 before passing the famous “study certificate” even if you had the capacity of taking the examination prior to this age. One was losing time for several years or never passed the examination which happened to me actually.
War impresses a lot upon the child who is seven or eight and it lasted five or six years. Absence of father, the defeat and the hunger, three well chosen plagues. The world fell down with me when I heard the bells ringing the armistice : father had gone away, no news from him and no hope at all. The world was never reconstructed entirely for us.
We were in the barn with Biquette our dear goat who was eaten later on. I asked my mother : “ What will become of us. Will they kill us ?
_ No, we are civilians, they are not interested in us. But not everything is finished perhaps : “There is French general in London, his name is de Gaulle, he still resists with the English”.
How can someone forget this moment ? How can anyone imagine this situation if he was born well thereafter ? De Gaulle might have done anything good or wrong later on but those who lived these events cannot forget him. He resurrected hope.
It is not true that a majority of French people were fond of Petain; we knew at once that he was a dead end.
If my story is to be told in the chronological way it can be mentioned that during the 1940 exodus (fleeing before the enemy) my mother has had to take an important decision. We had arrived at our grandfather’s house, at three kilometers from home ! Each had his bag.
“What are you doing ? _ Father, we leave, the Germans arrive, they will kill us”. This time grandpa had a very bright idea which saved our life perhaps. He said ; “It is of no use to run. They will find you 10 kilometers ahead and after that, what ? Stay here, we shall wait for them together. Come what may !”
It is to be said that the famous Germans who came there at once in 1914 had left terrible memories. Only in my father’s family they killed his uncle and the son of his who were there at the wrong period. This time they came undisturbingly enough in such an insignificant village.
The shopkeepers having left (no grandpa with them !), the mayor or any other fleeing authority told us to empty the food stores. We did it shyly enough noting all what was taken. When the traders came back after a small trip to the South they asked for the goods and one of the only ones (the only one ?) who gave the food back was of course mother who since was considered as a highway woman.
From this period on geography has interested us : we bought a large map of the United States (for what purpose ?) and a map of Europe including the (Soviet or not) Russia to follow the events and all nights we were hugging the walls outside to go to neighbours and hear London radio broadcasting cluttered up with spurious mill like musical sounds. All of this happened in absolute darkness because of curfew.
In my memory there was never any moon light in these times. Mrs Mesny with her nephew Courtehoux had a radio, a treasure distant by 400 meters which was hidden like a bomb. We were playing cards, knitting ; I knitted (very badly).
The only money my mother got was what she received (?) from the State because she had a husband, a soldier of last category, whose capture as a war prisoner we were finally informed of. He was in Potsdam near Berlin. Not far from the castle of Sans Soucis ( = No Sorrows !) of the former king of Prussia.
Other resources were a field with various vegetables. I showed my strength by pulling out potatoes. We were starving (in the countryside !) trying to rear rabbits but also porks had difficulties to survive long enough; we were making soap with their corpses. Peasants ate normally but if you have no money there is no other food than the skinny means of sustenance from the ration coupons.
This reminds me of a photograph sent by father from his camp where he is seen in a propaganda film scratching one’s ear in front of sausages to express significant indecision. He was sure then that we had all the necessary food. My mother succeeded sending him a chicken embedded in fat for preservation during transportation, which I was observing with avidity and jealousy but did he receive it or the guards ate it ? I forgot to ask when he came back.
He came at the age of 38 as a worker who could be useful in the factory to increase war potential of the German Great Reich. He was in a bad shape; I remember that the first night he slept on the ground since he was so used to sleeping on planks for four years.
Gradually he resumed his pre-war habits.
They brought him to the factory store the place where they dispose of replacement parts. In this system they always place handicaped people in the store.
All was in order again. War has continued a certain time. V2 and V3 whistled above our ears but they were not intended for us. In the newspapers we saw that Pétain was running away to Germany and that the Americans were near. The village was not a strategic one but they visited it. How strange to see the chewing gum and powder beverages and to listen to their foreign language and observe the small planes flying above the fields.
I remained hours listening to them as if they were producing “music”; what lack of taste ! I understood nothing at first but it came out better slowly and automatically. I adored them, they had saved us.
It was armistice but in the other direction. One morning I learned from the newspaper that they had invented new means for obtaining an absolute massacre; the atomic bomb was born. It inspired terror to those who were on the conquerors side and the more so to the others. I must say that I understood at once the significance of such magnificent creation of the human mind and its inexorable progress to horror without return, and the irremediable final fragility of humanity.
Roosevelt, after giving Europe for nothing with the big Churchill in Yalta to the cunning Stalin, died quickly of cerebral haemorrhage because of the medical ignorances of that time. In Yalta he was actually dying and therefore unable to decide anything.
His successor, considered a “shirt trader” with no wide-ranging mind in the name of Harry Truman, dared use the bomb to shorten the war period and rapidly terminate horrors.
The socalled intellectuals, many of them not being born then, said later that he should not have dropped the bomb, that he would not have done so if victims had been white rather than yellow people, and finally that this action was a serious mistake or a fault. At the age of 14 I thought immediately that his duty was to spare his soldiers’ life and even the opponents’ life and that the bombing could not be a mistake.
The following events confirmed my opinion on a large scale : humanity is so optimistic, thoughtless (childish ?) and insensitive to scientific arguments that one has to prove by facts that the assumed horror is true. If Truman had not launched the bomb we would have received it later undoubtedly in view of the cold war invented by all these stupid old dictators.
We know now that there are radiations, everybody has to take them into account and that they kill in a superabundant manner. Since then humanity is no longer optimistic, they know that the end may come. I have an immense gratitude to Truman. Let us think of the Korea war and MacArthur’s stupidities. He was a very great president who saved the future world. What did the other presidents realize after him ?
( Obviously, others in a larger number are of the opposite opinion but they did not live at that time, so that they are excused).
From 12 to 14, I had normally to wait for the final study certificate as we were blocked by the governmental rules (not before 14 !). As the teacher was in the army and thereafter probably emprisoned we got a young male teacher whom I adored at once since he wanted to press us forward.
“Exceptional” children (at least their problems) could did not exist then but he wanted to push me forward and with him I would certainly have changed my scholar life. I can still imagine him at mass where he was only to check the priest’s speech and find arguments against him.The big tendency was anticlericalism while now everybody cares nothing about it.
The priest a survivor from Verdun (go to and survive Verdun battle, my friend !) had a sort of shivering that would be attributed to alcohol by ignorants but was actually a nerve illness caused by these butchering battles. What was the name of this young teacher ? How can I have forgotten his name or his face ?
On one short holiday he went to his town, called Pont à Mousson, near Nancy, and bombs fell that day. He was the only one killed.
Since he never came back I had to comply with the daily routine of repetitious school or find another issue.
Friday, October 12, 2007
2.Continuation
Sometimes one does not accurately remember some of the childhood years because of accidents, treatments or other more or less traumatizing events. This happened somewhat to me for the years before the age of about nine and for reasons exposed hereinafter.
Moreover, I have to speak of particular ambiances and significant events that happened then or that I lived thereafter. Under the influence of the catholic environment, the priests and the family (and my mother herself) I had very early the idea of becoming a priest for reasons of devotion and positive social attitude.
Whether I had or not a “vocation” is another question which is not possible to decide starting from the manner in which it was presented to me. Roughly, the question was to comply with a sort of requirement from God. How can we perceive this ? I do not know at all but once you have the “vocation” you cannot loose yourself from it and still less refuse it. It is the story of the young man of the Gospels to whom the Master says : “Come and follow me abandoning all your riches”. The young man goes away sadly, therefore it is assumed that he refuses and is condemned to hell.
All these constraints press on the child and he can hardly escape.When does he realize the situation ? Very early, believe me. At that age things are not so clear of course but thinking it over...Had he any “vocation” or not ? What is a vocation of this type ? One can have a vocation of painter or writer, one may want to become a butcher or an engineer, if he is able to but a religious vocation what is it ?
In principle there is no need to benefit from talents since God cares about it. One cannot refuse it as it is the greatest fate if not the most marvelous one. You require anyhow a small disposition which should develop during the future years. I believe now that one should be a little older, as was the case with John-Paul II, to get a less doubtful lucidity on this significant question. Late “vocations” are the best.
Was I more attracted by studies than by the rest of the package ? It is clear that I liked studies but is this a crime ? Many parents would be happy at their children studying seriously. That I could not be a student without that sort of engagement in such a poor family did not disturb me because I thought I would go on to the end of the religious commitment.
A sort of “blackmail” was exerted saying that all people who were giving money to the seminary thought that it was for good reasons of efficiency and that runaways were to pay back later to relieve their conscience. These were highly serious and abusive points of view for children of the poor.
My vicar was delighted and intended to prepare me immediately by teaching me rosa, rosae, the rose. He proposed to push me forward with latin, skipping several classes if possible thereby permitting me to avoid the fifth and the sixth grades. Consequently, he was coming to our home very often. A very nervous person as I told you before and he could not stay motionless because of all the shocks he had in Verdun.
His maid took advantage to send me on errands so as to get “well cooked” bread, waiting for her “white marble grave” which she deserved because she remained “a virgin” all her life. No doubt she got the grave monument she dreamed of. At my age whether she was a virgin or not did not bother me and probably I was not aware of what it was, notwithstanding circumstantial prayers to the Virgin Mary. Even now the fact that Mary was a virgin never made me jump with hilaration and today I still have not understood why it is important or necessary for her to be a virgin as God is capable of any subtleties without complicating things. Furthermore he seems to hate deviations from the laws of fate he created.
These considerations being exposed I must say that latin pleased me and starting from it I could easily understand French grammar and later on other grammars. Before, I had followed all rules and exercises with great facility and very quickly but without any deep work : conjugations, adverbs, substantives, the syntax (which was not called “syntax” in the primary school) were more or less useless words since I was speaking my own language intuitively without any analysis. I was flying over it.
According to my experience of latin students this language is either understood or not. The possibility of understanding latin is often coupled with a taste for mathematics (not always very high mathematics).
I must have followed such apprenticeship for two years or so. As regards mathematics I had a book of algebra the contents of which was leading to the high school diploma (which I would pass later of course !). Being always cautious and not wanting to be late in order to avoid being considered a cripple and bothering others I ate up the book and loved algebra.
At about 14 I entered the first elementary Seminary of Bosserville in the fourth grade. The castle, a former monks abbey comprised long and cold lobbies which I remember well. I can still see myself in the company of two boys coming from the same region : one will go to the Vietnam into the army and was killed at the age of 19 and the other will die young after “a long illness”. As a boy the latter had a sort of head eczema and all the oil ration coupons of the family were spent to treat him and it was hardly sufficient.
My vicar had not helped me in mathematics since he understood nothing in it and was not interested at all. At present a child having such a personal teacher does not permit parents to get financial compensations for children without going to the normal school but in these old days what happened ? Was there any compensation for children ? At a time I had a scholarship aid which was lost later. The addition was very heavy to father since the child had to live on the spot away from the family.
This dormitory life with unnumerable beds (50 ?) and a very bad food (but they could not help, it was just after the war) have changed me a lot but my memory is pleased with it. As regards food it sems we were eating everyday sorts of weaviled peas which all nights required queuing to the rudimentary toilets. I feel we never ate anything else.
The first day I probably also met another boy of my surrouding, with a very red face, the only remembrance of him, but I had no opportunity to know him better since the day after we learnt that he has been fired because he was found in somebody else’s bed where they were making “bad things together”. The Fathers were very severe ! Have they spoken of “homosexuality”. Mystery ! Did I know what it was ?
I remember precisely of the first school day. Only priest teachers. In that time they were too many. World changes. Very big change it was as compared to normal non-religious teachers. If my young teacher killed in the bombing has survived would he have pushed me to the teaching profession ? Very likely : I loved to explain things to people.
Maybe it was not the first lesson but they were dealing with mathematics. The professor, a very skinny priest with glasses about whom they told me at once that he could hardly celebrate mass because of his unsufficient latin (this contredicts what was said before !) had given us a socalled written interrogation based on the famous a + b and a – b. Since this was explained on page 32 of my special book in two or three minutes I drafted the reply and sat idly looking at him. I forgot to say that usually I was on the first bench because of my poor sight. The teacher stared at me so that I wished the ground could have opened and swallowed me up, and I did not know why he acted so.
After having waited for the end of the allotted time and copies being collected I finally understood why he wanted to eat me raw. He thought I had written no sign or word on my copy. Of course everything was correct and I passed directly to the envied (?) status of “genius”. All was not exactly the same for the other metters but for latin, Holy History and literature the vicar had ensured.
With reference to the red face schoolmate it reminds me that they were speaking of “particular” friendships very too often and that they were scared of it. Once I was in the chapel with a friend of mine on the same bench and they made remarks thereon. If they feared homosexuality it is because there were only boys and experience had shown them that certain things may happen; otherwise they would never have spoken of it.
Everybody had a conscience director, an enlightened confessor. Each week or nearly each week there was an obligatory meeting. There was plenty of choice and mine was Father Lévêque (= bishop) but was not one. He was on a wheelchair and his office was in the dark as in an eye doctor’s office. He squinted terribly and had large spectacles. I am unaware of why there was such great build-up.
He was up to his reputation, very honest and of good advice. He did not fail to teach me the small “seed” and the rest. Not everybody receives vital secrets in this way. Another confessor I used also perhaps during the main one’s illness was a father of the urbane type, a literature professor I had the next year I think. He was very correct but much more joyful.
In fact, it was a great honor to meet the first one who had a very good reputation and deserved it.
I am going now to speak of the musical genius who was the manager of the place, a super-fat priest who was composing gregorian music. Alas if he had lived up to now he would have been very disappointed as regards his art since unfortunately all of the gregorian songs have disappeared. Centuries were required to compose and improve them and all was discarded to dustbins under the stupid pretext that people should understand the songs in vulgar language. This is a big mistake since all religions have got an old language which they use to keep mysteries. Moreover the prayers are so simple that it is not necessary to make them clear; they are too common. Monks, they say, still sing them but for them it is the same situation as for known stars who choose an encoded TV channel : nobody can see or listen to them anymore.
I keep two things from him :
At the beginning of the year he was seeking singers (with or without “wood cross”) to exploit his songs. I did not know what practicing scales were. Whether I had a good voice or not is not at stake but when he asked me to go up and down I uttered such sounds that made him send me off. I still protest because if he had shown me what to do I might have understood what he meant and perhaps sing, who knows ?
The second important thing about him I can remember is the race they were making to read their own mass each morning . They each had a ceremony boy who was to wake up earlier but all pupils tried to serve the manager, a champion of quick mass. That is all for him.
Since studies were going well and my shyness forbade me any action outside norms I was considered as kind and exemplar. They called me “the holy man”, nothing less.
Experience has shown that I may please at the beginning but when they know me better their opinion changes much. This first year was spent well enough so that I passed from the fourth grade to the third without any difficulty.
Having stricken no doubt a decisive blow at the start unintentionally I benefited of the following opinion concerning my capacities to study : we see one such pupil every twenty years. I never believed them but this is what they said.
There remained the fact that I was terrified at the idea of being forced later to speak in public and above all to preach and that all these humdrum ceremonies worried me well enough even though I did not want to admit it at that time.
Truly I succeeded with acholar lessons and duties but despite my efforts I was slow in the realization although I was immediately ready to understand problems and solutions. Also I regularly wondered how to explain matters to others. Sport very rudimentary did not go further than simple gymnastics but it was not a passion.
This year I was a boarder and I was going periodically for holidays to parents and grandparents to look after cows. As the field was closed I had the advantage of being able to read a lot of history books and to revise as much as possible for the following year so as to be advanced in my scholarship.
The following year representing the passage into third grade did not leave much precise recollection. I was more used to the situation and ready to go on with studies while apprehending future tasks. I believed they voted for the most “edifying” person : my envied rank was given to someone else that year.
It is difficult for me to describe my exact personal behavior and situation because I forgot a lot of circumstances. However, it is required to look into it a little to understand the following episodes. I still succeeded with this work and was classified among the first students in my category.
This time we had to study German that I hated because of the people who speak that language as well as ancient Greek which I loved for its strange alphabet. One cannot study a language even at school theoretically without liking the people who speak it. This could not the case with the Germans and the nazis which I was putting in the same package.
I am surprised at the utility of a single year of ancient Greek. Sure there were many pleasant mythological stories but the language itself is very useful for appreciating the scientific vocabulary especially the medical one. Ta zoa trekhei : animals run, the first rule of the grammar.
I had still the intention to go on with the intended purpose (sense of duty ! ) although the prospect of total celibacy never stopped tormenting me and youth does not understand compromise solutions. If it was to be the same as I thought regarding girls I could not see how total abstinence was possible. And thereafter I experimented that it was indeed as I had guessed. The story of the small “seed” was known but it was purely theoretical at this phase, not completely integrated in real life.
Moreover, undoubtedly I started (or continued ?) then to have headaches when I was tired and heartburns at the least annoyances. Pathological shyness cut off all possibilities of expressing myself really except in case they were interrogating me on scholar questions.
Shyness for a boy amounts to closing any communication exchange and all expression by words. Hence my terror in view of hypothetic future takings of the floor to speak in public.
At that time I felt unbalanced because I was only an intellectual and not at all manual. Efforts made during the holidays to realize any concrete objects showed my awkwardness. Nobody tried to encourage me to change. My father seeing me pushing in a nail or anything alike told me in a final sentence : “It is not worth it, you are too clumsy, you lose your time”. These words were retained and did not do any good.
This unbalance also found expression in incommensurable absentmindedness. “He is always on the moon” they said. I blushed and I was much bothered. Going to see my grandmother with two shoes of different colors was not significant but such lack of concentration ressembling dr Nimbus pulled me away from reality too much.
Absence or paralysis of speech excludes any normal communication since human beings are substantially talkative. The sequence of the events made me understand that normal evolution of speech and the possibility of using it is the sine qua non condition of development and equilibrium of the personality.
Tiredness can be explained by a bad sight, not sufficiently corrected by glasses, only intended to “amplify” to cope for myopia, without taking into account irregular astigmatism the existence of which was totally ignored. This is not the only cause since migraines (half the head, rather on the right) occurred without warning. If I remember well I was really too slow although I could at once understand the matters of the course. And this happened despite my efforts to do it more quickly.
I am sorry to be unable to describe better what occurred to me and to have forgotten certain significant details useful for understanding the following events.
These headaches were putting myself in a state of disembodiment (paleness and colorless feeling). During this second year I probably disappointed people a lot; generally I pleased at the beginning because they believed certain things in my respect but later these illusions passed out and the blunt reality was there. I cannot tell anything else here since a lot of details have disappeared from my memory.
At the end of the year I fell ill for good : knife stroke in the left side at the level of the hip; big fever and return to parents. In the hospital they diagnose a dry pleurisy “caused by excessive fatigue”. It was supposed to be serious but penicillin was recently introduced into hospitals and they administered it to me in injections.
In these old times they replaced the needle of the seringe after one thousand injections. It was very rejoycing. Camphor shots are also rejoycing. One injection touched the sciatic nerve, I felt it for six years. I can still review all the heads filled with dismay leaning toward me. They had also attributed to me articular rhumatisms (which relate to the heart and have nothing to do with rhumatisms) which did not seem to reassure them.
I was very relaxed as I knew I would survive and was so relieved to have an excuse to do nothing at last. After the hospital they sent me to a resting house, a sort of castle, full of kids sick with lung troubles.
I remember a sister and her servant, a young girl who was supposed to be “hysterical” and also a young Pole who taught me how to pronounce Polish starting from the writing. No doubt the girl was rebellious in this job and wished to meet a prince from her dreams whereas the sister was already married to the Lord. Very good memory of this sister : religious, honest and devoted. As I was supposed to return to the Seminary I was well considered but I did not want to insist on this publicity and above all I refused to tell anything on the following sequence.
Upon returning to the parents a period of short holidays and interruption of scholarship on the new year were in order. As soon as I was trying to study headaches occurred, with tiredness and disinterest to reality. What would I become with an impeded “vocation”.
The family practitioner understanding nothing of the situation, but knowing that teen age is the source of all problems (to parents ?) advised them to send me to a psychiatrist near the city of Nancy. Headaches were real actually, I can testify but they were pleased to think that headaches were psychic and imaginary. Since they knew no cause and still less no remedy it was better to declare that it was a product of the imagination. A present psychiatrist would have thought the load of a more or less announced fate could be the cause of all these phenomena. Did we speak of this to such an old school psychiatrist ? Surely not.
Without hesitation the psychiatrist diagnosed schizophrenia, the fashionable illness from Greek schizo : split and phrenia : spirit. My poor parents were shattered to realize that science had burst in their home. Their son becomes crazy. What a story !
The psychiatric establishment as seen from the inside is composed of “sick” people more or less loaded in the mind and nurses and psychiatrists, among whom many are largely touched. One is mixed with furious people whom it is better to isolate but also in a great majority with joyful characters of the Napoleon type (“Fly in a cuckoo nest”) rather paranoiac and highly mute with grimacing faces. These are really schizo.
The purpose of doctors was always to force people to relax. In Laxou they made insuline injections and after a few hours of coma or sleep one would awake by swallowing liquid sugar, this being to forget the horrorful events which had caused the above mentioned disorders. When one is not crazy relaxation happens, by playing with the circumstances and events of that place.
Many patients undergo electroshocks, i.e. they receive electric shocks into the head thereby producing a sort of epilepsy crisis. I made myself very small since I did not want them to think of me for that ceremony. This is sometimes efficient and now but maybe also at that time the patient is made to sleep before the kill. At that time I do not really know whether they made them sleep but these electroshocks happened in the presence of all others !
I saw a man escaped from a submarine who was completely crazy after prolonged accidental submersion; he recovered remarkably well after a few electric shocks.
There was a piano and musical papers showing the music of a few national anthems. I tried to reproduce those musics exerting my fingers on it and making “harmonious” sounds to satisfy frustrated desires of musical instruments.
In summary I know of no better place worth visiting and as joyful as a psychiatric institution; when one eventually escapes from it of course.
This was done a few months later.
Moreover, I have to speak of particular ambiances and significant events that happened then or that I lived thereafter. Under the influence of the catholic environment, the priests and the family (and my mother herself) I had very early the idea of becoming a priest for reasons of devotion and positive social attitude.
Whether I had or not a “vocation” is another question which is not possible to decide starting from the manner in which it was presented to me. Roughly, the question was to comply with a sort of requirement from God. How can we perceive this ? I do not know at all but once you have the “vocation” you cannot loose yourself from it and still less refuse it. It is the story of the young man of the Gospels to whom the Master says : “Come and follow me abandoning all your riches”. The young man goes away sadly, therefore it is assumed that he refuses and is condemned to hell.
All these constraints press on the child and he can hardly escape.When does he realize the situation ? Very early, believe me. At that age things are not so clear of course but thinking it over...Had he any “vocation” or not ? What is a vocation of this type ? One can have a vocation of painter or writer, one may want to become a butcher or an engineer, if he is able to but a religious vocation what is it ?
In principle there is no need to benefit from talents since God cares about it. One cannot refuse it as it is the greatest fate if not the most marvelous one. You require anyhow a small disposition which should develop during the future years. I believe now that one should be a little older, as was the case with John-Paul II, to get a less doubtful lucidity on this significant question. Late “vocations” are the best.
Was I more attracted by studies than by the rest of the package ? It is clear that I liked studies but is this a crime ? Many parents would be happy at their children studying seriously. That I could not be a student without that sort of engagement in such a poor family did not disturb me because I thought I would go on to the end of the religious commitment.
A sort of “blackmail” was exerted saying that all people who were giving money to the seminary thought that it was for good reasons of efficiency and that runaways were to pay back later to relieve their conscience. These were highly serious and abusive points of view for children of the poor.
My vicar was delighted and intended to prepare me immediately by teaching me rosa, rosae, the rose. He proposed to push me forward with latin, skipping several classes if possible thereby permitting me to avoid the fifth and the sixth grades. Consequently, he was coming to our home very often. A very nervous person as I told you before and he could not stay motionless because of all the shocks he had in Verdun.
His maid took advantage to send me on errands so as to get “well cooked” bread, waiting for her “white marble grave” which she deserved because she remained “a virgin” all her life. No doubt she got the grave monument she dreamed of. At my age whether she was a virgin or not did not bother me and probably I was not aware of what it was, notwithstanding circumstantial prayers to the Virgin Mary. Even now the fact that Mary was a virgin never made me jump with hilaration and today I still have not understood why it is important or necessary for her to be a virgin as God is capable of any subtleties without complicating things. Furthermore he seems to hate deviations from the laws of fate he created.
These considerations being exposed I must say that latin pleased me and starting from it I could easily understand French grammar and later on other grammars. Before, I had followed all rules and exercises with great facility and very quickly but without any deep work : conjugations, adverbs, substantives, the syntax (which was not called “syntax” in the primary school) were more or less useless words since I was speaking my own language intuitively without any analysis. I was flying over it.
According to my experience of latin students this language is either understood or not. The possibility of understanding latin is often coupled with a taste for mathematics (not always very high mathematics).
I must have followed such apprenticeship for two years or so. As regards mathematics I had a book of algebra the contents of which was leading to the high school diploma (which I would pass later of course !). Being always cautious and not wanting to be late in order to avoid being considered a cripple and bothering others I ate up the book and loved algebra.
At about 14 I entered the first elementary Seminary of Bosserville in the fourth grade. The castle, a former monks abbey comprised long and cold lobbies which I remember well. I can still see myself in the company of two boys coming from the same region : one will go to the Vietnam into the army and was killed at the age of 19 and the other will die young after “a long illness”. As a boy the latter had a sort of head eczema and all the oil ration coupons of the family were spent to treat him and it was hardly sufficient.
My vicar had not helped me in mathematics since he understood nothing in it and was not interested at all. At present a child having such a personal teacher does not permit parents to get financial compensations for children without going to the normal school but in these old days what happened ? Was there any compensation for children ? At a time I had a scholarship aid which was lost later. The addition was very heavy to father since the child had to live on the spot away from the family.
This dormitory life with unnumerable beds (50 ?) and a very bad food (but they could not help, it was just after the war) have changed me a lot but my memory is pleased with it. As regards food it sems we were eating everyday sorts of weaviled peas which all nights required queuing to the rudimentary toilets. I feel we never ate anything else.
The first day I probably also met another boy of my surrouding, with a very red face, the only remembrance of him, but I had no opportunity to know him better since the day after we learnt that he has been fired because he was found in somebody else’s bed where they were making “bad things together”. The Fathers were very severe ! Have they spoken of “homosexuality”. Mystery ! Did I know what it was ?
I remember precisely of the first school day. Only priest teachers. In that time they were too many. World changes. Very big change it was as compared to normal non-religious teachers. If my young teacher killed in the bombing has survived would he have pushed me to the teaching profession ? Very likely : I loved to explain things to people.
Maybe it was not the first lesson but they were dealing with mathematics. The professor, a very skinny priest with glasses about whom they told me at once that he could hardly celebrate mass because of his unsufficient latin (this contredicts what was said before !) had given us a socalled written interrogation based on the famous a + b and a – b. Since this was explained on page 32 of my special book in two or three minutes I drafted the reply and sat idly looking at him. I forgot to say that usually I was on the first bench because of my poor sight. The teacher stared at me so that I wished the ground could have opened and swallowed me up, and I did not know why he acted so.
After having waited for the end of the allotted time and copies being collected I finally understood why he wanted to eat me raw. He thought I had written no sign or word on my copy. Of course everything was correct and I passed directly to the envied (?) status of “genius”. All was not exactly the same for the other metters but for latin, Holy History and literature the vicar had ensured.
With reference to the red face schoolmate it reminds me that they were speaking of “particular” friendships very too often and that they were scared of it. Once I was in the chapel with a friend of mine on the same bench and they made remarks thereon. If they feared homosexuality it is because there were only boys and experience had shown them that certain things may happen; otherwise they would never have spoken of it.
Everybody had a conscience director, an enlightened confessor. Each week or nearly each week there was an obligatory meeting. There was plenty of choice and mine was Father Lévêque (= bishop) but was not one. He was on a wheelchair and his office was in the dark as in an eye doctor’s office. He squinted terribly and had large spectacles. I am unaware of why there was such great build-up.
He was up to his reputation, very honest and of good advice. He did not fail to teach me the small “seed” and the rest. Not everybody receives vital secrets in this way. Another confessor I used also perhaps during the main one’s illness was a father of the urbane type, a literature professor I had the next year I think. He was very correct but much more joyful.
In fact, it was a great honor to meet the first one who had a very good reputation and deserved it.
I am going now to speak of the musical genius who was the manager of the place, a super-fat priest who was composing gregorian music. Alas if he had lived up to now he would have been very disappointed as regards his art since unfortunately all of the gregorian songs have disappeared. Centuries were required to compose and improve them and all was discarded to dustbins under the stupid pretext that people should understand the songs in vulgar language. This is a big mistake since all religions have got an old language which they use to keep mysteries. Moreover the prayers are so simple that it is not necessary to make them clear; they are too common. Monks, they say, still sing them but for them it is the same situation as for known stars who choose an encoded TV channel : nobody can see or listen to them anymore.
I keep two things from him :
At the beginning of the year he was seeking singers (with or without “wood cross”) to exploit his songs. I did not know what practicing scales were. Whether I had a good voice or not is not at stake but when he asked me to go up and down I uttered such sounds that made him send me off. I still protest because if he had shown me what to do I might have understood what he meant and perhaps sing, who knows ?
The second important thing about him I can remember is the race they were making to read their own mass each morning . They each had a ceremony boy who was to wake up earlier but all pupils tried to serve the manager, a champion of quick mass. That is all for him.
Since studies were going well and my shyness forbade me any action outside norms I was considered as kind and exemplar. They called me “the holy man”, nothing less.
Experience has shown that I may please at the beginning but when they know me better their opinion changes much. This first year was spent well enough so that I passed from the fourth grade to the third without any difficulty.
Having stricken no doubt a decisive blow at the start unintentionally I benefited of the following opinion concerning my capacities to study : we see one such pupil every twenty years. I never believed them but this is what they said.
There remained the fact that I was terrified at the idea of being forced later to speak in public and above all to preach and that all these humdrum ceremonies worried me well enough even though I did not want to admit it at that time.
Truly I succeeded with acholar lessons and duties but despite my efforts I was slow in the realization although I was immediately ready to understand problems and solutions. Also I regularly wondered how to explain matters to others. Sport very rudimentary did not go further than simple gymnastics but it was not a passion.
This year I was a boarder and I was going periodically for holidays to parents and grandparents to look after cows. As the field was closed I had the advantage of being able to read a lot of history books and to revise as much as possible for the following year so as to be advanced in my scholarship.
The following year representing the passage into third grade did not leave much precise recollection. I was more used to the situation and ready to go on with studies while apprehending future tasks. I believed they voted for the most “edifying” person : my envied rank was given to someone else that year.
It is difficult for me to describe my exact personal behavior and situation because I forgot a lot of circumstances. However, it is required to look into it a little to understand the following episodes. I still succeeded with this work and was classified among the first students in my category.
This time we had to study German that I hated because of the people who speak that language as well as ancient Greek which I loved for its strange alphabet. One cannot study a language even at school theoretically without liking the people who speak it. This could not the case with the Germans and the nazis which I was putting in the same package.
I am surprised at the utility of a single year of ancient Greek. Sure there were many pleasant mythological stories but the language itself is very useful for appreciating the scientific vocabulary especially the medical one. Ta zoa trekhei : animals run, the first rule of the grammar.
I had still the intention to go on with the intended purpose (sense of duty ! ) although the prospect of total celibacy never stopped tormenting me and youth does not understand compromise solutions. If it was to be the same as I thought regarding girls I could not see how total abstinence was possible. And thereafter I experimented that it was indeed as I had guessed. The story of the small “seed” was known but it was purely theoretical at this phase, not completely integrated in real life.
Moreover, undoubtedly I started (or continued ?) then to have headaches when I was tired and heartburns at the least annoyances. Pathological shyness cut off all possibilities of expressing myself really except in case they were interrogating me on scholar questions.
Shyness for a boy amounts to closing any communication exchange and all expression by words. Hence my terror in view of hypothetic future takings of the floor to speak in public.
At that time I felt unbalanced because I was only an intellectual and not at all manual. Efforts made during the holidays to realize any concrete objects showed my awkwardness. Nobody tried to encourage me to change. My father seeing me pushing in a nail or anything alike told me in a final sentence : “It is not worth it, you are too clumsy, you lose your time”. These words were retained and did not do any good.
This unbalance also found expression in incommensurable absentmindedness. “He is always on the moon” they said. I blushed and I was much bothered. Going to see my grandmother with two shoes of different colors was not significant but such lack of concentration ressembling dr Nimbus pulled me away from reality too much.
Absence or paralysis of speech excludes any normal communication since human beings are substantially talkative. The sequence of the events made me understand that normal evolution of speech and the possibility of using it is the sine qua non condition of development and equilibrium of the personality.
Tiredness can be explained by a bad sight, not sufficiently corrected by glasses, only intended to “amplify” to cope for myopia, without taking into account irregular astigmatism the existence of which was totally ignored. This is not the only cause since migraines (half the head, rather on the right) occurred without warning. If I remember well I was really too slow although I could at once understand the matters of the course. And this happened despite my efforts to do it more quickly.
I am sorry to be unable to describe better what occurred to me and to have forgotten certain significant details useful for understanding the following events.
These headaches were putting myself in a state of disembodiment (paleness and colorless feeling). During this second year I probably disappointed people a lot; generally I pleased at the beginning because they believed certain things in my respect but later these illusions passed out and the blunt reality was there. I cannot tell anything else here since a lot of details have disappeared from my memory.
At the end of the year I fell ill for good : knife stroke in the left side at the level of the hip; big fever and return to parents. In the hospital they diagnose a dry pleurisy “caused by excessive fatigue”. It was supposed to be serious but penicillin was recently introduced into hospitals and they administered it to me in injections.
In these old times they replaced the needle of the seringe after one thousand injections. It was very rejoycing. Camphor shots are also rejoycing. One injection touched the sciatic nerve, I felt it for six years. I can still review all the heads filled with dismay leaning toward me. They had also attributed to me articular rhumatisms (which relate to the heart and have nothing to do with rhumatisms) which did not seem to reassure them.
I was very relaxed as I knew I would survive and was so relieved to have an excuse to do nothing at last. After the hospital they sent me to a resting house, a sort of castle, full of kids sick with lung troubles.
I remember a sister and her servant, a young girl who was supposed to be “hysterical” and also a young Pole who taught me how to pronounce Polish starting from the writing. No doubt the girl was rebellious in this job and wished to meet a prince from her dreams whereas the sister was already married to the Lord. Very good memory of this sister : religious, honest and devoted. As I was supposed to return to the Seminary I was well considered but I did not want to insist on this publicity and above all I refused to tell anything on the following sequence.
Upon returning to the parents a period of short holidays and interruption of scholarship on the new year were in order. As soon as I was trying to study headaches occurred, with tiredness and disinterest to reality. What would I become with an impeded “vocation”.
The family practitioner understanding nothing of the situation, but knowing that teen age is the source of all problems (to parents ?) advised them to send me to a psychiatrist near the city of Nancy. Headaches were real actually, I can testify but they were pleased to think that headaches were psychic and imaginary. Since they knew no cause and still less no remedy it was better to declare that it was a product of the imagination. A present psychiatrist would have thought the load of a more or less announced fate could be the cause of all these phenomena. Did we speak of this to such an old school psychiatrist ? Surely not.
Without hesitation the psychiatrist diagnosed schizophrenia, the fashionable illness from Greek schizo : split and phrenia : spirit. My poor parents were shattered to realize that science had burst in their home. Their son becomes crazy. What a story !
The psychiatric establishment as seen from the inside is composed of “sick” people more or less loaded in the mind and nurses and psychiatrists, among whom many are largely touched. One is mixed with furious people whom it is better to isolate but also in a great majority with joyful characters of the Napoleon type (“Fly in a cuckoo nest”) rather paranoiac and highly mute with grimacing faces. These are really schizo.
The purpose of doctors was always to force people to relax. In Laxou they made insuline injections and after a few hours of coma or sleep one would awake by swallowing liquid sugar, this being to forget the horrorful events which had caused the above mentioned disorders. When one is not crazy relaxation happens, by playing with the circumstances and events of that place.
Many patients undergo electroshocks, i.e. they receive electric shocks into the head thereby producing a sort of epilepsy crisis. I made myself very small since I did not want them to think of me for that ceremony. This is sometimes efficient and now but maybe also at that time the patient is made to sleep before the kill. At that time I do not really know whether they made them sleep but these electroshocks happened in the presence of all others !
I saw a man escaped from a submarine who was completely crazy after prolonged accidental submersion; he recovered remarkably well after a few electric shocks.
There was a piano and musical papers showing the music of a few national anthems. I tried to reproduce those musics exerting my fingers on it and making “harmonious” sounds to satisfy frustrated desires of musical instruments.
In summary I know of no better place worth visiting and as joyful as a psychiatric institution; when one eventually escapes from it of course.
This was done a few months later.
3. Crisis
One can get rid of a crisis ; a nervous breakdown remains.
During my two years of absence my parents had the good idea of enlarging the family by giving me a sister. My mother deserved her well since it was not so easy : I can still see her leaning down and lying in bed every afternoon during nearly all of the pregnancy.
The result was remarkable. The fact that my sister is fifteen years younger never disturbed me.
My grandparents let out to my mother one of their houses from my birth on in the village of 500 inhabitants. It was apparently the most expensive rent in the village! This did not happen out of miserliness from my grandfather but rather innocence and lack of information. I wonder how he was doing to make both ends meet.
As regards houses (crumbling places of this old time) it was easier then to buy one or more of them as they were cheaper as compared to financial ressources and provided that you should know how to repair and improved them basically you succeeded in managing the situation. Grandpa was making pieces of furniture for clients and had two or three cows. It implied working in the fields, without any horse, any tractor (!), and only working with scythe.
Age was there and the hypothetical pension being miserable (or absent ?) they succeeded in convincing my mother to return to their home (3 kilometers farther away) so as to help them. Mother being of woman of duty, it is un understatement, and her sisters five and ten years younger being much more indifferent, we went up to Valleroy after 15 years in Moineville.
My father was working in the Joeuf factory at a distance of 17 kilometers covered by bike. Since according to grandpa he had guaranteed wages he was returning early enough in the day to help him since in the factory “one does not do much”. Has had my father something to say ? With his painful back he should not have been very enthusiastic.
Anyhow the parents made the mistake of accepting the old people’s demand.
When I came back at about 16 after the hospital and the resting house, with a lot of existential questions, I witnessed the perpetual confrontation between mother and grandmother. Obviously, my mother had introduced the police at home and was leaning down too much and very uselessly in front of her parents. Let us ignore the “added piece” who was too much tired after his work in the factory and the travel home which was “nothing” as compared to the work in the fields.
My personal status of shameful, depressed boy without remedy, my lack of appetite for life and my little foreseeable future had given more sorrows to father and mother, with father being substantially silent in view of situation that was going beyond his imagination and possibilities.
I observed my mother overburdened by circumstances and the presence of her mother, which was not doing any good to the situation. Therefore, I decided her to move to Joeuf the city in which the factory was, by declaring that my state required such departure to a more medically equipped town. One should never directly annoy the old and even the young when it is possible to do otherwise. The old thus accepted to let us leave after one year.
This town comprised the famous metallurgical factory in which father worked. He was relieved of all these tiring and dangerous journeys by bike. The neighbour who was doing the same journey had just been ran over by a car.
Officially I was an incurable schizophrenic whose fate was very uncertain. My future as a student was blocked out and one did not speak of Seminary anymore although official renouncement to that ambition had not been clearly expressed. I was always scared of any hypothetic public pronouncements and preaches. The prospect of no longer being condemned obligatory to such activity began to peep through. Not being capable anymore of realizing a religious ambition removed all guilt.
As soon as I wanted to start studies again there was this migraine headache and such tiredness. A long time later I watched on the TV a description of schizophrenia which showed that such patients are often totally out of reality and imagine things and words which do not exist. I never was in such situation and the diagnosis of the specialist, very logical according to his medical education, was only a practical way of getting rid of a problem he could not understand.
It is much easier to declare that headaches are imaginary if one does not know how to treat them. There are so many causes and apart the mind-destroying drugs remedies were (are ?) rare or inefficient. Truly it is difficult for me to remember what exactly happened during this period after the hospital, which lasted at least a year.
Insuline treatment had removed part of the memory with a view to improving my psychic state. This was adolescence to be considered as an important and difficult period of time whereas before it was merely the beginning of entrance into the “active” life.
Was it at that time that I started to think that a mystic ambition was nothing if one was not developped as a human being above all ? The fact of being “purely intellectual” without any manual practice seemed to me to derive from a deep disequilibrium. As a worker’s son I had of course a straight mentality of rejection of “intellectual people” who could not work at all with hands.
Therefore, I suffered of headaches which occurred in disorder following intellectual fatigue or without any apparent cause, the stomach burnings of the ulcer type, the heart fast beatings and the pains in the back.
Stomach burnings occurred obviously as anguish crises related to a very developped perception of the real or unreal future. Pain in the vertebral column damages the morale intensely; I was standing wrongly, they said. My left shoulder was supposedly higher than the other but alas my tailor was not the same as Fernand Raynaud’s who was making such beautiful suits to a client of such a clumsy build !
Detailed, exact and complete description of this situation of illness is not only boring but impossible. As a matter of fact one forgets easily when it becomes better. Furthermore such short enumeration has the only purpose of making a rudimentary not clinical description as compared to what followed.
As for all of the very shy individuals, this attitude having relationship with an actual schizophrenia, I could speak only in an atmosphere of confidence because I had the feeling of being penetrated and brought to light by everybody. Not that I believed so really and that it should have bad influence on me, but I did not speak because it was not worth it saying anything which was in my opinion too ordinary and without any interest. The same applied to written statements.
My parents had financial difficulties and I found myself a burden upon them without any positive prospect. My father who was working alone had all the pains in the world to “make both ends meet”. My mother had worked for a period as an independent dressmaker but she was constantly complaining about her eyes. The only clients of hers were the wifes of the engineers from the factory who payed her very poorly, since she was belonging to the raw class without diploma. (She was nevertheless the first of her class in the zone when she passed the final study certificate !).
This is why I abandoned any hope of making further studies and decided to take responsabilities and therefore start working. The only possibility was to join the factory as a clerk or anything of the sort.
In fact, there were two facturies, with one in Joeuf where my father was and the other in Homecourt, the neighbouring village. Both of them were dealing with iron mineral, the Joeuf factory belonging to the famous de Wendel family.
I therefore asked my father whether he knew someone in the factory who could recommend me for employment in the offices. He knew actually a Mr Mayer who was a chief in “High Office” of the management. After waiting for one or two weeks without any results and as there was no reply from such highly placed person, I presented myself to the other factory and was engaged immediately. Usually they never engaged somebody whose father or brother was working in the other factory.
In this blessed place I was spending my time putting invoices in order. Fascinating occupation !
Then when father finally received a positive reply from Mr Mayer I resigned dryly in order to enter the other factory. The wages were less than they were giving me in the first job and Mr Klein of the Homecourt factory threw me out heavily. He said that he had engaged me because I was coming from the same school as his (a refused priest ?) but that it was the last time he had engaged someone from Joeuf.
(Both factories now are definitively closed !)
Therefore I started my “active” life by being less paid (not much less) only because someone had pulled strings for me.
At that time I realized that there was no further possibility of studying anymore or of any ambition and that I penetrated into a cauldron of which the cover was finally closed on me.
My student grant was obviously cancelled.
4.Work
At that time, I presented myself to the High office of the local factory to test the bounties of my father’s close pal. He placed me in the Recrutement Office which is now called in a very modern way :”Bureau of Human Ressources”, which is often an ironic denomination, in view of the method they use now to get rid of such “ressources” without any scruples.
Now, both of the two factories have been destroyed and all the human force was put out of work since the iron mineral had become too expansive for industrial extraction as compared to Mauritania or any other countries of the Third World.
All was going smoothly in the factories in that period and “Human Ressources” which the bosses rather considered as strange tools were composed of a minority of French population and above all of foreigners, namely former German prisoners of war, Italians, Poles and various survivors of the German nazi regime. I myself had a French name but statistically I had normally more chances to be born with a name in SKI or I since the immemorial French were about 20% of the whole population.
In general they place the new-comer at the counter since the office incumbents do not like to do that job and treat the complaining clients of any sort because one has to be present permanently. The office comprised three or four employees among whom the chief, a French Italian who was spending his time typing songs in anticipation of the week-ends, a preferential time of music and balls. I love Italians.
For me it was a matter of luck to be in contact with all sorts of (foreign) visitors as I could develop a “talent” ( = inquisitiveness and much work actually) in foreign languages because as far away I can remember, I had to find explanation to enigmas represented by texts and words from the external world. In fact, and this probably results from the war events, only what was outside France interested me. The 1940 defeat has contributed very likely to my lack of interest for French matters. Or the fact of being in a small lost place made me think only of all what could be agitated elsewhere in the world on the planet and further away.
The identity cards relating to all these foreigners were ill treated because of the strange spellings of name such as Czarnkowski and other Krzyzanowski. The other group comprised : Germans, more or less Slavonic, whose name passed as modified through Germany (Schimanski), and Italians in I and O without neglecting those from Sardinia in U (Puddu) and Sicilians. At this moment instead of rejecting the difficulties to read and pronounce these special names I had a passion for their meaning and the environment of the individuals having such names. Therefore it was very useful for me to work in a Recrutement Office.
This was then a good opportunity to make efforts to learn Italian, to pronounce correctly Polish and take up again German I had hated at school. Another group comprised Hungarians who for the first time in their history were immigrates, enlisted by force into German legions and totally distraught by the conquest of their country by Soviet communism.
This taste for foreign languages never left me. It did not come up by accident : I believe that if one has a deficient sight it is normal to bring a lot of efforts to improve ear capacities. Anyhow at a very early age I was interested in the old Latin and the old Greek as well as the Hebrew letters of the Bible comments; taste for written enigmas is therefore very old by me.
The Hungarian language being renowned as the most difficult in Europe, obviously I had to attack it. Therefore I met for a long while two Hungarian friends to learn the pronunciation and the elements of sentences.
Pronunciation is special for the short A but apart from a few exceptions the groups of consonents are simple conventions and the stress is always on the first syllable. Spelling is merely phonetic. As to the structure of the sentence there are unnumerable word cases and the peculiar syntax. Vowels are abundant, musicality of the sounds is incredible and for this reason Hungarian poets and musicians are so many. It is a pity that the vocabulary is so far from the other liguistic groups.
These two friends eventually left for Australia. I still remember their names : Soltész (= Schulthess = mayor, in German) and Hanvay, and their strange given names : Làszlo and Aladàr. There I learned among other things that the name Attila (a plague in the old times) was very popular in Hungary, where I never went later to avoid killing my old dreams. This name of Attila was a bit like “Napoleon” for us, this world being totally unknown to the city of Joeuf, an unexhaustible reserve of iron mineral.
When they left they asked me in passing to give them my Hungarian-English dictionary which I had all the pains in the world to obtain by correspondence from a Paris bookshop. Without thinking a lot I refused since they were travelling to Paris and procurement of such dictionary was easy for them. If they had insisted I would have given it of course but they were probably annoyed. It is difficult to understand a foreigner; they never sent me a postcard. I still feel sorry for my stupidity.
Most of these workers, often former officers in the various armies of the Reich were living near the factory in the “Bachelors’ Home” in the Street of the Business. I speak of this only because the police often came to see us to track them as they had not paid their income taxes at that address. It was one year after their departure generally. Their address was always the same of course. What a magnificent loss of money for the State and of energy for the police ! I imagine the police has now more significant sorrows.
I never understood how government people did not decide to get the money at the source of their wages, especially in the case of foreigners of this type who were always searching for better living means, and therefore very nomadic. Moreover, the tax collectors are very suspicious in France and I cannot see why they did not install another method.
Work in this kind of office was paid so much for one hour because of our youth they were taken advantage of. There was no question of being paid so much per month as were the employees but hourly as a manual worker. If one was a few minutes late in the morning the guard closed the entrance doors so that we lost one hour.
Moreover, we had to work on Saturday “to prevent workers going to the pubs”. The trade unions were not yet present there. Married women could not work in the factory since they had the (small) pay of the husband.
This stay in that Office was not to last more. Four young had been designated to make thermal controls at the smelting furnaces under the direction of an external engineer belonging to an official organism. I was one of them. We had to walk on the gas pipes of the furnaces to take samples for analysis. The analysing means comprised several bottles with rubber tubes that were to be moved in the vertical direction to detect the composition of the gases. It was of a great interest and we had to make a thematic report under some of the aspects of this work.
It was easy for me to draft the report. I even emitted cranky ideas which the young engineer considered very seriously.Those who could not leave that stage without satisfecit had to return thereafter to a kind of hell place. The fact remains that a few continued to make such analyses and I was sent to the Chemical Laboratory of the factory in order to analyse cast iron and steels. I believe they sent me there because I had said that chemistry was making me sick because of the odors.
At about the age of 18 parents bought a radio, sophisticated enough with short waves. By means of this apparatus I began to learn Russian, listening to radio Moscow with many difficulties in view of the imperfection of the radio and the distance. I started a system consisting of learning the pronunciation of words, trying to pick up in passing what I was listening to and immediately seeking the word in the dictionary. I had quite a lot of work to find such a dictionary by sending letters to Paris. Oviously, the Russian sentence itself was not understandable but after some practice it was possible to detect what and where to search. My ears became used to it. The difficulty with the Russian language, a fascinating enigma, is that the stress very importantly varies in the same word with cases and conjugation.
The living room at home was small and single and my mother had much patience undergoing such recitations of foreign words without any charm or interest for her. The quality of transmission was very weak and from this period on I tried to improve reception of radio waves, later television and finally satellite.
My professional life had not improved. Since my engagement into the chemical laboratory I was working in three shifts, i.e. from 6 A.M. to 2 P.M., from 2 to 10 and 10 to 6, without stop for seven weeks with a single Sunday. Such working hours when I was about 18 permitted me to spend precious hours with my mother in broad daylight.
The first night I worked in the factory I was surprised to be still alive in the morning. Working during the night is bearable under the condition of not doing much, which was not entirely the case with me. I remember someone in the high furnace department who was tired and sleepy and fell into a charge of cast iron. What a disaster for the factory ! They had to empty the wagon and lose the contents since one cannot use this mineral mixed up with worker’s meat. The day after when the policemen came to certify the accident there was a brand new parapet in front of the place of the disaster.
General health was not improving : always the same; as soon as I made projects for studying I was blocked by the various illnesses mentioned above. The hope of getting rid of it being slight I resignated to my fate. There was no student grant anymore in any case.
In fact, it is not possible for me to remember exactly the psychological and physical facts in this period and I do not like to speak of it. They say people like to relate one’s youth; it is not my case at all.
In this laboratory I was working alone since I was a group by myself, the others comprising two or three “specialists”. We had to analyse powder of cast iron and steel that were to be reduced through various manipulations by means of sulfuric and hydrochloric acids. The results of the analyses were used to distribute the iron acording to more finished fabrications.
The problem is that we could not always deliver the desired values and the chiefs of department turned against the chemical employees claiming that they had not well done their job. Hence, the obvious tendency to act in such a way that the clients (chiefs) would be satisfied by the results. How silly they were to push us! The odors of acids and the noise made me sick, the more so because stomach was aching and burning from time to time.
As regards the night shift the system used was the most stupid one can imagine. As a matter of fact during the first shift one had to wake up at 5 A.M., and therefore was tired and thereafter we worked in the afternoon up to 10 oclock P.M. so that the day was thought of as a prison for oneself and the family. Finally the next week we were working during the night from 10 P.M. up to 6 in the morning.
Sleeping in the morning was difficult and only up to midday as there was a school not far. The worst was to restart at 5 o’clock A.M. when little sleep had been used. Therefore one was constantly exhausted.
They spent 20 or 30 years (I was not there anymore, God bless you !) to understand that the shifts should turn in the reversed order, namely, night, afternoon and morning, which was giving a chance of being able to rest a little better. After a night without sleeping much, a morning to recover late and sleep more upon working in the afternoon shift, and then the next week, one could wake up more easily at 5 to work in the morning. It was more logical.
Night and shift work does not favor health and family life, it is the least one can say about it. Easy works or regular checkings are acceptable but work near the high furnaces is very unhealthy. Furthermore one has to stop at least once for breakfast but stomach does not like changing diets.
At night I worked alone and finally I used such solitude first to sleep sometimes and to philosophize. In full day I belonged, if I remember well, to a reduced team. I remember a former soldier from the Vietnam, usually tipsy enough with whom we were singing songs of famous singers in the afternoons, which was not significant as regards music since all was deadened by the noise from the air conditioners. This is for this reason that we were shouting at the top of our voices. He was telling me a lot on Vietnam where he had twins he had abandoned since he was married in France with children. I had much trouble understanding such abandonment but not his behavior generally as everybody knows that contrary characters are mutually attracted.
At this juncture I reached the age of military service. Lost in such a hole without any hope of leaving for a good reason I wanted to take advantage of the army to navigate and see the world. In the face of my mother’s entreaties I showed the medical certificate she had obtained from the ill-treating doctors confirming that I was incurable. I might have not handed it over to avoid the military authorities’ reaction which was foreseeable. They dismissed me at once.
Thinking about it later, I am sure this event spared me all stupid colonial wars in Algeria and Vietnam and if I am still alive it is perhaps for this reason.
The song :”I hate Sundays” applied totally to me. Real efforts I was making to communicate with others resulted in very little success and my only entertainments were movies. As soon as I was seeing a girl who pleased me all was blocked by the feeling that what I could say had no interest at all and literally I did not know what to tell her.
I remember in particular one time when I had succeeded in getting the name of a girl who was on the seat nearby in the movie theater. This was already a miracle but I remained the whole film and intermission without being able to say one word (the girl too !) and at the end I let her go shameful and speechless. It was as two sardine cans remained closed for absence of tool !
I was in a very protective family environment but what would be my next future, how could I escape ? Was there any way out for me ? Was I to remain permanently in this rotten factory without any future ?
Stomach burning which occurred with each emotion, each daring step or anguish preoccupied me a lot, the more so because through examples in the surrounding I knew that all that could lead to more serious ulcers.
I wanted to replace my head by another, more down to earth, more alive and more rational.
And thus, my thirst for reading and perusing women magazines interesting in particular for psychology was to give unexpected results. I hated sports magazines.
Now, both of the two factories have been destroyed and all the human force was put out of work since the iron mineral had become too expansive for industrial extraction as compared to Mauritania or any other countries of the Third World.
All was going smoothly in the factories in that period and “Human Ressources” which the bosses rather considered as strange tools were composed of a minority of French population and above all of foreigners, namely former German prisoners of war, Italians, Poles and various survivors of the German nazi regime. I myself had a French name but statistically I had normally more chances to be born with a name in SKI or I since the immemorial French were about 20% of the whole population.
In general they place the new-comer at the counter since the office incumbents do not like to do that job and treat the complaining clients of any sort because one has to be present permanently. The office comprised three or four employees among whom the chief, a French Italian who was spending his time typing songs in anticipation of the week-ends, a preferential time of music and balls. I love Italians.
For me it was a matter of luck to be in contact with all sorts of (foreign) visitors as I could develop a “talent” ( = inquisitiveness and much work actually) in foreign languages because as far away I can remember, I had to find explanation to enigmas represented by texts and words from the external world. In fact, and this probably results from the war events, only what was outside France interested me. The 1940 defeat has contributed very likely to my lack of interest for French matters. Or the fact of being in a small lost place made me think only of all what could be agitated elsewhere in the world on the planet and further away.
The identity cards relating to all these foreigners were ill treated because of the strange spellings of name such as Czarnkowski and other Krzyzanowski. The other group comprised : Germans, more or less Slavonic, whose name passed as modified through Germany (Schimanski), and Italians in I and O without neglecting those from Sardinia in U (Puddu) and Sicilians. At this moment instead of rejecting the difficulties to read and pronounce these special names I had a passion for their meaning and the environment of the individuals having such names. Therefore it was very useful for me to work in a Recrutement Office.
This was then a good opportunity to make efforts to learn Italian, to pronounce correctly Polish and take up again German I had hated at school. Another group comprised Hungarians who for the first time in their history were immigrates, enlisted by force into German legions and totally distraught by the conquest of their country by Soviet communism.
This taste for foreign languages never left me. It did not come up by accident : I believe that if one has a deficient sight it is normal to bring a lot of efforts to improve ear capacities. Anyhow at a very early age I was interested in the old Latin and the old Greek as well as the Hebrew letters of the Bible comments; taste for written enigmas is therefore very old by me.
The Hungarian language being renowned as the most difficult in Europe, obviously I had to attack it. Therefore I met for a long while two Hungarian friends to learn the pronunciation and the elements of sentences.
Pronunciation is special for the short A but apart from a few exceptions the groups of consonents are simple conventions and the stress is always on the first syllable. Spelling is merely phonetic. As to the structure of the sentence there are unnumerable word cases and the peculiar syntax. Vowels are abundant, musicality of the sounds is incredible and for this reason Hungarian poets and musicians are so many. It is a pity that the vocabulary is so far from the other liguistic groups.
These two friends eventually left for Australia. I still remember their names : Soltész (= Schulthess = mayor, in German) and Hanvay, and their strange given names : Làszlo and Aladàr. There I learned among other things that the name Attila (a plague in the old times) was very popular in Hungary, where I never went later to avoid killing my old dreams. This name of Attila was a bit like “Napoleon” for us, this world being totally unknown to the city of Joeuf, an unexhaustible reserve of iron mineral.
When they left they asked me in passing to give them my Hungarian-English dictionary which I had all the pains in the world to obtain by correspondence from a Paris bookshop. Without thinking a lot I refused since they were travelling to Paris and procurement of such dictionary was easy for them. If they had insisted I would have given it of course but they were probably annoyed. It is difficult to understand a foreigner; they never sent me a postcard. I still feel sorry for my stupidity.
Most of these workers, often former officers in the various armies of the Reich were living near the factory in the “Bachelors’ Home” in the Street of the Business. I speak of this only because the police often came to see us to track them as they had not paid their income taxes at that address. It was one year after their departure generally. Their address was always the same of course. What a magnificent loss of money for the State and of energy for the police ! I imagine the police has now more significant sorrows.
I never understood how government people did not decide to get the money at the source of their wages, especially in the case of foreigners of this type who were always searching for better living means, and therefore very nomadic. Moreover, the tax collectors are very suspicious in France and I cannot see why they did not install another method.
Work in this kind of office was paid so much for one hour because of our youth they were taken advantage of. There was no question of being paid so much per month as were the employees but hourly as a manual worker. If one was a few minutes late in the morning the guard closed the entrance doors so that we lost one hour.
Moreover, we had to work on Saturday “to prevent workers going to the pubs”. The trade unions were not yet present there. Married women could not work in the factory since they had the (small) pay of the husband.
This stay in that Office was not to last more. Four young had been designated to make thermal controls at the smelting furnaces under the direction of an external engineer belonging to an official organism. I was one of them. We had to walk on the gas pipes of the furnaces to take samples for analysis. The analysing means comprised several bottles with rubber tubes that were to be moved in the vertical direction to detect the composition of the gases. It was of a great interest and we had to make a thematic report under some of the aspects of this work.
It was easy for me to draft the report. I even emitted cranky ideas which the young engineer considered very seriously.Those who could not leave that stage without satisfecit had to return thereafter to a kind of hell place. The fact remains that a few continued to make such analyses and I was sent to the Chemical Laboratory of the factory in order to analyse cast iron and steels. I believe they sent me there because I had said that chemistry was making me sick because of the odors.
At about the age of 18 parents bought a radio, sophisticated enough with short waves. By means of this apparatus I began to learn Russian, listening to radio Moscow with many difficulties in view of the imperfection of the radio and the distance. I started a system consisting of learning the pronunciation of words, trying to pick up in passing what I was listening to and immediately seeking the word in the dictionary. I had quite a lot of work to find such a dictionary by sending letters to Paris. Oviously, the Russian sentence itself was not understandable but after some practice it was possible to detect what and where to search. My ears became used to it. The difficulty with the Russian language, a fascinating enigma, is that the stress very importantly varies in the same word with cases and conjugation.
The living room at home was small and single and my mother had much patience undergoing such recitations of foreign words without any charm or interest for her. The quality of transmission was very weak and from this period on I tried to improve reception of radio waves, later television and finally satellite.
My professional life had not improved. Since my engagement into the chemical laboratory I was working in three shifts, i.e. from 6 A.M. to 2 P.M., from 2 to 10 and 10 to 6, without stop for seven weeks with a single Sunday. Such working hours when I was about 18 permitted me to spend precious hours with my mother in broad daylight.
The first night I worked in the factory I was surprised to be still alive in the morning. Working during the night is bearable under the condition of not doing much, which was not entirely the case with me. I remember someone in the high furnace department who was tired and sleepy and fell into a charge of cast iron. What a disaster for the factory ! They had to empty the wagon and lose the contents since one cannot use this mineral mixed up with worker’s meat. The day after when the policemen came to certify the accident there was a brand new parapet in front of the place of the disaster.
General health was not improving : always the same; as soon as I made projects for studying I was blocked by the various illnesses mentioned above. The hope of getting rid of it being slight I resignated to my fate. There was no student grant anymore in any case.
In fact, it is not possible for me to remember exactly the psychological and physical facts in this period and I do not like to speak of it. They say people like to relate one’s youth; it is not my case at all.
In this laboratory I was working alone since I was a group by myself, the others comprising two or three “specialists”. We had to analyse powder of cast iron and steel that were to be reduced through various manipulations by means of sulfuric and hydrochloric acids. The results of the analyses were used to distribute the iron acording to more finished fabrications.
The problem is that we could not always deliver the desired values and the chiefs of department turned against the chemical employees claiming that they had not well done their job. Hence, the obvious tendency to act in such a way that the clients (chiefs) would be satisfied by the results. How silly they were to push us! The odors of acids and the noise made me sick, the more so because stomach was aching and burning from time to time.
As regards the night shift the system used was the most stupid one can imagine. As a matter of fact during the first shift one had to wake up at 5 A.M., and therefore was tired and thereafter we worked in the afternoon up to 10 oclock P.M. so that the day was thought of as a prison for oneself and the family. Finally the next week we were working during the night from 10 P.M. up to 6 in the morning.
Sleeping in the morning was difficult and only up to midday as there was a school not far. The worst was to restart at 5 o’clock A.M. when little sleep had been used. Therefore one was constantly exhausted.
They spent 20 or 30 years (I was not there anymore, God bless you !) to understand that the shifts should turn in the reversed order, namely, night, afternoon and morning, which was giving a chance of being able to rest a little better. After a night without sleeping much, a morning to recover late and sleep more upon working in the afternoon shift, and then the next week, one could wake up more easily at 5 to work in the morning. It was more logical.
Night and shift work does not favor health and family life, it is the least one can say about it. Easy works or regular checkings are acceptable but work near the high furnaces is very unhealthy. Furthermore one has to stop at least once for breakfast but stomach does not like changing diets.
At night I worked alone and finally I used such solitude first to sleep sometimes and to philosophize. In full day I belonged, if I remember well, to a reduced team. I remember a former soldier from the Vietnam, usually tipsy enough with whom we were singing songs of famous singers in the afternoons, which was not significant as regards music since all was deadened by the noise from the air conditioners. This is for this reason that we were shouting at the top of our voices. He was telling me a lot on Vietnam where he had twins he had abandoned since he was married in France with children. I had much trouble understanding such abandonment but not his behavior generally as everybody knows that contrary characters are mutually attracted.
At this juncture I reached the age of military service. Lost in such a hole without any hope of leaving for a good reason I wanted to take advantage of the army to navigate and see the world. In the face of my mother’s entreaties I showed the medical certificate she had obtained from the ill-treating doctors confirming that I was incurable. I might have not handed it over to avoid the military authorities’ reaction which was foreseeable. They dismissed me at once.
Thinking about it later, I am sure this event spared me all stupid colonial wars in Algeria and Vietnam and if I am still alive it is perhaps for this reason.
The song :”I hate Sundays” applied totally to me. Real efforts I was making to communicate with others resulted in very little success and my only entertainments were movies. As soon as I was seeing a girl who pleased me all was blocked by the feeling that what I could say had no interest at all and literally I did not know what to tell her.
I remember in particular one time when I had succeeded in getting the name of a girl who was on the seat nearby in the movie theater. This was already a miracle but I remained the whole film and intermission without being able to say one word (the girl too !) and at the end I let her go shameful and speechless. It was as two sardine cans remained closed for absence of tool !
I was in a very protective family environment but what would be my next future, how could I escape ? Was there any way out for me ? Was I to remain permanently in this rotten factory without any future ?
Stomach burning which occurred with each emotion, each daring step or anguish preoccupied me a lot, the more so because through examples in the surrounding I knew that all that could lead to more serious ulcers.
I wanted to replace my head by another, more down to earth, more alive and more rational.
And thus, my thirst for reading and perusing women magazines interesting in particular for psychology was to give unexpected results. I hated sports magazines.
5. Apple
Newton observed an apple falling from a tree. Instead of eating it immediately or putting it into a basket for later use he lingered over the fact that the apple was attracted by the mass of the earth rather than simply falling, this fact being itself so trivial that nobody ever deduced anything therefrom. It is true that as a scientist he was searching for the explanation of some astronomical phenomena.
Without comparing my modest situation to that of Newton it is true that a piece of luck or bad fortune does a lot to humanity.
I was reading all the magazines scattered around me and particularly women magazines which were advantageous due to their description of health and psychology in addition to the usual feminine subjects. My mother had probably subscribed to the “Small echo of fashion” since she was or had been a dressmaker. Of course I did not care about fashion, being moreover unable to analyse anything in that subject.
This day there was an article therein entitled somehow :”Is your child lefthanded ? What should you do about it ?”
I must say that I had never thought that there was any problem in this respect because I never saw any lefthander in my family or at school. I had heard as everybody else of the great Leonard de Vinci or Michelangelo but these forefathers seemed very far away and without any true interest.
In such magazine they were saying that the hand located on the one side is controlled by the brain hemisphere on the other side, which I ignored probably and that very often the lefthanders have a dominating left eye and that skipping (!!!) tests had to be done to determine which leg is dominant.
Then followed the usual advice of letting the lefthander write with the left while encouraging him to write with the right hand to do as everybody else does because the righthand writing is “easier” since, to be able to write with the left hand, one should turn it as a “hook”.
This article was probably a patchwork of trivial remarks since the author had no scientific ambition and wanted only to reassure mothers who discovered in their nest a lefthander, no doubt an individual related to problems.
Of course I knew that my left eye was a “director” since the other eye could not see much and they always told me that my left shoulder was higher than the other because I was standing badly. Without having the attitude of a dislocated person it is true that I often rested on the righthand side.
In that article despite the style used there was no mention of individuals who would be lefthanded by, and at, birth “without knowing it”.The whole of the article spoke only of twisted people born lefthanded, observed with anguish and surprise by their parents.
Anyhow, I said to myself, on that day, which I could have missed, and not on another day : “Was I or not lefthanded at birth ?” in as much as I was without any hope and means of reconstruction. I did not believe it was true but I TRIED.
As a matter of fact I had no strength or fitness on the lefthand side and all actions were on the right. I remember of one day when my grandmother forced me to sort out potatoes in the cellar. As she saw that I was very slow despite my goodwill she said :” Have you got only one hand ?”. It was true, I had only one hand, the right one.
If someone had told me that I was lefthanded by birth (= righthand brain hemisphere dominant) I would not have believed him. Would I have tried to use the left hand ? Probably not.
I TRIED despite all that. I wanted to renovate my head. I was 22 or 23 and therefore what they call an adult. Each knows that under such designation they mean the individual who learns only painfully without beneficial amplification due to one’s growth and without automatism, with total conscience of each gesture.
The first action I tried was eating with the left hand. Dealing with vegetables was not difficult but cutting the meat ? Should you cut with the left hand and eat with the right in order to prevent changing the rhythm or should you put back down the knife and eat with the hand which cuts ?
Of course logics dictates that one eats with the “first” hand if one eats without mechanical effort and with both hands if there is something to cut (first hand on the knife, waiting for the cutting and the other hand eating). This system had the effect of making me eat more slowly, which was not bad.
My mother saw at once that I was eating with the left hand and said :”One of your extravagances ? What do you manage ? What‘s going on with you ?”
Do I remember a very far away past or did I dream it later with a view to detecting whether I had previously shown lefthandedness characteristics and finding reasons for the inversion of handedness ? A sentence comes out to me from darkness : “Take your fine hand !”. I probably invented that reminiscence.
I replied to mother :”Maybe I am lefthanded !” My mother’s head !
As the results from such activity was not bad I continued. Now I had to do manual work for which I showed only clumsiness despite my previous consciencious efforts to try manual work with the right hand. Therefore I used a hammer to strike unhappy nails with the left hand and a screwdriver to execute rotary motions. What I found most difficult in this new activity was to launch something far away and especially bouncings on the river water.
Being an adult I needed an explanation and justification for all exercises done. I therefore built a theory to justify the difference between both hands. Until now they had said that the first hand is more skilful or powerful or both. It is logical to say so. I found that they were rather an active hand and a passive hand, skilfulness and force being the usual result of exercises, which I can confirm.
I was not long noting that men carry their briefcase full of documents by means of the second hand. In my case I had always carried it with the right hand. Women on the contrary carry the baby by means of the first hand perhaps because he is heavy or precious, hence deserves all the attention afforded by the first hand. Much later I understood that the first hand is related (corresponds) to the individual sex whereas the second hand represents the other sex.
For the time being I was doing exercises which seemed to react positively especially as regards the stomach. The heart beatings of the palpitation type became scarce and the stomach burnings diminished.
After three months I had no more pains of the ulcer type and these pains never came back. The headaches were of the migraine type, i.e. rather headache behind the left forehead and a feeling of emptiness behind the right forehead. Actually I do not remember many details in the development of the events that occurred at that time.
I continued my exercises but I could not believe this was the remedy to all my handicaps. I had a feeling of shame to show publicly what I was doing with the left hand. It was indeed a sort of declaration and a challenge and above all I could not understand why I might be an ignored lefthander. In fact, people have not much of a capacity of observation except for observing the hand used to write and do not care much of the details. I had never heard anything in respect to this type of “handedness ignoring” individuals and I did not dare discuss the situation in order to avoid them believing I was a sort of crazy person.
I had already noted changes in my behavior : before I was always on the moon and I could not concentrate on manual work. Now I no longer dropped objects without reason. I needed these manual exercises since I had considered “pure” intellectuals as incomplete human beings or unbalanced individuals.
After three months of efforts the left arm became stronger than the other though it had not made any real exercise before.
Working on oneself in this manner requires attention of all instants. The problem anyhow was to know what to do with the new “second” hand which has the tendency to act. It became a support or a reinforcement but it is cumbersome !
I realized that I should realize the most difficult exercise i.e. the writing. First, I was shameful considering the obtained clumsy result due to the fact that I could write very well, very quickly and very clearly with the right hand. Moreover writing is a gesture of declaration which is more public and above all official and those who were to see me would not fail to place their ironic and naughty remarks.
The only, very original question, they were asking was :”Are you lefthanded ?”.To complicate the answer I replied :”My righthand is on the left”, which disturbed them and finally was not as wrong. The luck I had is that I was working alone most of the time and during the night or the afternoon. I forced my hand to follow the intended line; it was tiring but healthy without nervousness.
The “difficulty” or better the difference with the righthand writing is that you have to write toward the INSIDE rather than to the OUTSIDE as done by the right hand. Therefore this was a completely different action which did not please me at all since I had constant reluctance to move in the direction of myself and I rather preferred to move to the outside.
At once the image of the “Arabic” writing (from right to left) was imposed upon me. This was not at all my ideal writing. In the rather rare books treating of the lefthand laterality (handedness) which I read later on I never saw anybody explain such situation by concepts of movement toward the center or the exterior whereas, if one observes an inward writing, it can be seen perfectly well why a lefthanded child has the tendency of writing as in the mirror (from right to left, turning the latin alphabet in the other direction) since for him what counts is the direction of movement rather than servile copying of a model. As a matter of fact, writing is a personal act, not a copy.
This problem of inwardly turned writing tormented me for years since I did not want to ressemble those who write toward the inside. This type of writing move is most ancient and only Arabs and Jews (Hebrews) kept it, with a few others.
In fact, there are two fundamental differences between the Arabic writing and the lefthanders writing. First, and this is the most important characteristic, in the lefthanded writing of latin alphabet all vowels are noted equally with the consonents and secondly the writing movement of lefthanders is in the direction of the liver whereas the movement with the right hand ( to the left, in the Arabic writing) goes to the heart. At that moment I had not made any theory on the writing systems and I did not know that any writing (any system) has a distinct (cultural, artistic or social) meaning.
The fact remains that I was writing horizontally, not as a “hook”, or leaning to the left as do most lefthanders writing with the left. I have never been able to write in the downward direction in the sense of motion as some of the lefthanders do. Of course, going to the right direction with the left hand was not a very pleasant prospect as it was the direction in which I could see the least (perhaps twenty per cent of vision with the right eye).
I note that when one is more or less blind in one eye since birth certain connections between vision neurones are not active in the childhood and this has a great influence upon the vision in relief or the feeling of seeing an assembly rather than point by point. Moreover, I did not know that my left eye was looking up i.e. he was seeing higher up than the other, with the remedy being a prism to deviate the vision of one eye.
When I saw correctly for the first time by means of a contact lense it is probable that a few neuronal, formerly absent, connections were actually recovered or produced.
The writing is the most delicate and difficult exercise. During the night at work I was moving my left arm under the water tap to “cool” it after a few exercises.
Headaches disappeared for ever; after how long a time I could not say. Development of the left arm relieved the shoulders and the back. No backache any more. No palpitations any more.
My tongue was liberated; I started to speak; my typical shyness changed and then disappeared. Now I am considered as very talkative. They say : “He does not speak, he thinks aloud.”
All was not paradisiacal; there was always the shame of writing awkwardly in public and above all signing ! At that period I was acting as an ambidextrous but after a “breaking-in” period I understood that I had to choose between both hands because I was becoming very unstable. Therefore I chose the left hand.
One word on the legs : in the article mentioned above they said that one can be righthanded and leftlegged. Obviously such a situation, if it exists, practically results from exercises and not from nature since the dominating brain hemisphere which determines the first hand cannot be on both sides to also control the leg on the other side. This would be stupid. I had such problem myself as the leg did not want to follow but it resulted from the fact that I had acted as an ambidextrous.
I can put everybody at ease : when a hand was exerted even if one does not exert it any more it is acquired for good and at any age such skilfulness is present in the mind; it is memorized and hoarded up once for all. Saying that one CANNOT exert both hands with the same skilfulness is FALSE.
They declare at every opportunity that the centre of speech is in one brain hemisphere only. This appears to be totally stupid; it is probable that such centre is built up by neuronal connections and why should it not be in both hemispheres ? Perhaps a few individuals have only one centre but is everybody the same in this respect ? Anyhow a child not appealed to in an animal group will never speak, which proves a contrario that solicitation produces the “centre of language”.
Later, much later, I tried to go backward and return to the right hand; after two or three days I abandoned all efforts as I was feeling myself “narrowed”. The same sicknesses seemed to come back.
I spoke of my situation to righthanders as well as to lefthanders but nobody understood why, being a so called “lefthander by birth”, I was to exert only the right hand without any memory of another attitude whereas a socalled “frustrated” lefthander remembers the frustration all his life and moreover does not do any effort to return to his birth situation when he is an adult because he is very proud of being able to write with the right hand.
As a matter of fact, the feeling of “not being as everybody else” is intolerable to a child. They succeed in persuading him that it is wrong to follow his nature.
Therefore I abandoned any explanation to the public and thus I made progress by myself (without writing anything on my adventure as I was blocked at that level). In fact, I had no intention to invite people to enter a sort of sect of rectified lefthanders.
Therefore, I tried to understand and found certain things other chapters are going to deal with. I tried not to be influenced by very trivial and disappointing written reports mentioning this question. It is a little normal to avoid being influenced because “who was on the other side of the mirror” and came back ?
I could not have discovered anything if I had not found means to determine through a detection at the eyes level directed to all the body whether someone is lefthander “at birth” without him suspecting that he is observed and if I had not found how one can detect through the voice (based on consonents or vowels as a function of the sex) whether the individual is completely reversed or simply “frustrated” because of his writing with the right.
Detection of the inversion (through the voice) in both cases (completely reversed or frustrated) is the same which means that the writing accounts for a great proportion in all activities even though one does no longer write much with the hand in view of the computers.
As mentioned above exercises and thus skilfulness are inscribed eternally in the brain and therefore characterize the individual on a long-term basis even though he no longer exerts.
Reasons for justifying relateralization are many since inversion of members acts negatively upon the center (brain, torso and sex).
But wherefrom does come a tendency to reverse the right frame of mind given at birth ? Without entering into details now since this chapter is only narrative one can say that inversion happens very early at about the age of two. There are many reasons for it such as an intrusive ambiance, the fact of doing as the others do in order not to be left alone of one’s kind, ignorance of the significance of laterality and the quality of the parents.
If a parent of the other sex dominates will the child have the tendency to imitate him by searching to become like him ? If one prefers one parent because of his value and his presence, does one not neglect the 50% represented by the other parent and therefore the other part of oneself ? Similarly, if one parent is absent or unknown the resulting disequilibrium can have a great influence upon the selected laterality.
My experience told me that a well lateralized individual generally considers both of his parents known or unknown as being of equal value even though he might prefer and cherish one of them for objective reasons. Of course, if laterality should be determined as easily as the sex this would be much more practical.
In all cases it is better to jump to a new development at the age of sixteen rather than at 23 or 40.
My voice had become more firm and low-pitched. It was time for me to change my environment and realize an honest ambition.
Without comparing my modest situation to that of Newton it is true that a piece of luck or bad fortune does a lot to humanity.
I was reading all the magazines scattered around me and particularly women magazines which were advantageous due to their description of health and psychology in addition to the usual feminine subjects. My mother had probably subscribed to the “Small echo of fashion” since she was or had been a dressmaker. Of course I did not care about fashion, being moreover unable to analyse anything in that subject.
This day there was an article therein entitled somehow :”Is your child lefthanded ? What should you do about it ?”
I must say that I had never thought that there was any problem in this respect because I never saw any lefthander in my family or at school. I had heard as everybody else of the great Leonard de Vinci or Michelangelo but these forefathers seemed very far away and without any true interest.
In such magazine they were saying that the hand located on the one side is controlled by the brain hemisphere on the other side, which I ignored probably and that very often the lefthanders have a dominating left eye and that skipping (!!!) tests had to be done to determine which leg is dominant.
Then followed the usual advice of letting the lefthander write with the left while encouraging him to write with the right hand to do as everybody else does because the righthand writing is “easier” since, to be able to write with the left hand, one should turn it as a “hook”.
This article was probably a patchwork of trivial remarks since the author had no scientific ambition and wanted only to reassure mothers who discovered in their nest a lefthander, no doubt an individual related to problems.
Of course I knew that my left eye was a “director” since the other eye could not see much and they always told me that my left shoulder was higher than the other because I was standing badly. Without having the attitude of a dislocated person it is true that I often rested on the righthand side.
In that article despite the style used there was no mention of individuals who would be lefthanded by, and at, birth “without knowing it”.The whole of the article spoke only of twisted people born lefthanded, observed with anguish and surprise by their parents.
Anyhow, I said to myself, on that day, which I could have missed, and not on another day : “Was I or not lefthanded at birth ?” in as much as I was without any hope and means of reconstruction. I did not believe it was true but I TRIED.
As a matter of fact I had no strength or fitness on the lefthand side and all actions were on the right. I remember of one day when my grandmother forced me to sort out potatoes in the cellar. As she saw that I was very slow despite my goodwill she said :” Have you got only one hand ?”. It was true, I had only one hand, the right one.
If someone had told me that I was lefthanded by birth (= righthand brain hemisphere dominant) I would not have believed him. Would I have tried to use the left hand ? Probably not.
I TRIED despite all that. I wanted to renovate my head. I was 22 or 23 and therefore what they call an adult. Each knows that under such designation they mean the individual who learns only painfully without beneficial amplification due to one’s growth and without automatism, with total conscience of each gesture.
The first action I tried was eating with the left hand. Dealing with vegetables was not difficult but cutting the meat ? Should you cut with the left hand and eat with the right in order to prevent changing the rhythm or should you put back down the knife and eat with the hand which cuts ?
Of course logics dictates that one eats with the “first” hand if one eats without mechanical effort and with both hands if there is something to cut (first hand on the knife, waiting for the cutting and the other hand eating). This system had the effect of making me eat more slowly, which was not bad.
My mother saw at once that I was eating with the left hand and said :”One of your extravagances ? What do you manage ? What‘s going on with you ?”
Do I remember a very far away past or did I dream it later with a view to detecting whether I had previously shown lefthandedness characteristics and finding reasons for the inversion of handedness ? A sentence comes out to me from darkness : “Take your fine hand !”. I probably invented that reminiscence.
I replied to mother :”Maybe I am lefthanded !” My mother’s head !
As the results from such activity was not bad I continued. Now I had to do manual work for which I showed only clumsiness despite my previous consciencious efforts to try manual work with the right hand. Therefore I used a hammer to strike unhappy nails with the left hand and a screwdriver to execute rotary motions. What I found most difficult in this new activity was to launch something far away and especially bouncings on the river water.
Being an adult I needed an explanation and justification for all exercises done. I therefore built a theory to justify the difference between both hands. Until now they had said that the first hand is more skilful or powerful or both. It is logical to say so. I found that they were rather an active hand and a passive hand, skilfulness and force being the usual result of exercises, which I can confirm.
I was not long noting that men carry their briefcase full of documents by means of the second hand. In my case I had always carried it with the right hand. Women on the contrary carry the baby by means of the first hand perhaps because he is heavy or precious, hence deserves all the attention afforded by the first hand. Much later I understood that the first hand is related (corresponds) to the individual sex whereas the second hand represents the other sex.
For the time being I was doing exercises which seemed to react positively especially as regards the stomach. The heart beatings of the palpitation type became scarce and the stomach burnings diminished.
After three months I had no more pains of the ulcer type and these pains never came back. The headaches were of the migraine type, i.e. rather headache behind the left forehead and a feeling of emptiness behind the right forehead. Actually I do not remember many details in the development of the events that occurred at that time.
I continued my exercises but I could not believe this was the remedy to all my handicaps. I had a feeling of shame to show publicly what I was doing with the left hand. It was indeed a sort of declaration and a challenge and above all I could not understand why I might be an ignored lefthander. In fact, people have not much of a capacity of observation except for observing the hand used to write and do not care much of the details. I had never heard anything in respect to this type of “handedness ignoring” individuals and I did not dare discuss the situation in order to avoid them believing I was a sort of crazy person.
I had already noted changes in my behavior : before I was always on the moon and I could not concentrate on manual work. Now I no longer dropped objects without reason. I needed these manual exercises since I had considered “pure” intellectuals as incomplete human beings or unbalanced individuals.
After three months of efforts the left arm became stronger than the other though it had not made any real exercise before.
Working on oneself in this manner requires attention of all instants. The problem anyhow was to know what to do with the new “second” hand which has the tendency to act. It became a support or a reinforcement but it is cumbersome !
I realized that I should realize the most difficult exercise i.e. the writing. First, I was shameful considering the obtained clumsy result due to the fact that I could write very well, very quickly and very clearly with the right hand. Moreover writing is a gesture of declaration which is more public and above all official and those who were to see me would not fail to place their ironic and naughty remarks.
The only, very original question, they were asking was :”Are you lefthanded ?”.To complicate the answer I replied :”My righthand is on the left”, which disturbed them and finally was not as wrong. The luck I had is that I was working alone most of the time and during the night or the afternoon. I forced my hand to follow the intended line; it was tiring but healthy without nervousness.
The “difficulty” or better the difference with the righthand writing is that you have to write toward the INSIDE rather than to the OUTSIDE as done by the right hand. Therefore this was a completely different action which did not please me at all since I had constant reluctance to move in the direction of myself and I rather preferred to move to the outside.
At once the image of the “Arabic” writing (from right to left) was imposed upon me. This was not at all my ideal writing. In the rather rare books treating of the lefthand laterality (handedness) which I read later on I never saw anybody explain such situation by concepts of movement toward the center or the exterior whereas, if one observes an inward writing, it can be seen perfectly well why a lefthanded child has the tendency of writing as in the mirror (from right to left, turning the latin alphabet in the other direction) since for him what counts is the direction of movement rather than servile copying of a model. As a matter of fact, writing is a personal act, not a copy.
This problem of inwardly turned writing tormented me for years since I did not want to ressemble those who write toward the inside. This type of writing move is most ancient and only Arabs and Jews (Hebrews) kept it, with a few others.
In fact, there are two fundamental differences between the Arabic writing and the lefthanders writing. First, and this is the most important characteristic, in the lefthanded writing of latin alphabet all vowels are noted equally with the consonents and secondly the writing movement of lefthanders is in the direction of the liver whereas the movement with the right hand ( to the left, in the Arabic writing) goes to the heart. At that moment I had not made any theory on the writing systems and I did not know that any writing (any system) has a distinct (cultural, artistic or social) meaning.
The fact remains that I was writing horizontally, not as a “hook”, or leaning to the left as do most lefthanders writing with the left. I have never been able to write in the downward direction in the sense of motion as some of the lefthanders do. Of course, going to the right direction with the left hand was not a very pleasant prospect as it was the direction in which I could see the least (perhaps twenty per cent of vision with the right eye).
I note that when one is more or less blind in one eye since birth certain connections between vision neurones are not active in the childhood and this has a great influence upon the vision in relief or the feeling of seeing an assembly rather than point by point. Moreover, I did not know that my left eye was looking up i.e. he was seeing higher up than the other, with the remedy being a prism to deviate the vision of one eye.
When I saw correctly for the first time by means of a contact lense it is probable that a few neuronal, formerly absent, connections were actually recovered or produced.
The writing is the most delicate and difficult exercise. During the night at work I was moving my left arm under the water tap to “cool” it after a few exercises.
Headaches disappeared for ever; after how long a time I could not say. Development of the left arm relieved the shoulders and the back. No backache any more. No palpitations any more.
My tongue was liberated; I started to speak; my typical shyness changed and then disappeared. Now I am considered as very talkative. They say : “He does not speak, he thinks aloud.”
All was not paradisiacal; there was always the shame of writing awkwardly in public and above all signing ! At that period I was acting as an ambidextrous but after a “breaking-in” period I understood that I had to choose between both hands because I was becoming very unstable. Therefore I chose the left hand.
One word on the legs : in the article mentioned above they said that one can be righthanded and leftlegged. Obviously such a situation, if it exists, practically results from exercises and not from nature since the dominating brain hemisphere which determines the first hand cannot be on both sides to also control the leg on the other side. This would be stupid. I had such problem myself as the leg did not want to follow but it resulted from the fact that I had acted as an ambidextrous.
I can put everybody at ease : when a hand was exerted even if one does not exert it any more it is acquired for good and at any age such skilfulness is present in the mind; it is memorized and hoarded up once for all. Saying that one CANNOT exert both hands with the same skilfulness is FALSE.
They declare at every opportunity that the centre of speech is in one brain hemisphere only. This appears to be totally stupid; it is probable that such centre is built up by neuronal connections and why should it not be in both hemispheres ? Perhaps a few individuals have only one centre but is everybody the same in this respect ? Anyhow a child not appealed to in an animal group will never speak, which proves a contrario that solicitation produces the “centre of language”.
Later, much later, I tried to go backward and return to the right hand; after two or three days I abandoned all efforts as I was feeling myself “narrowed”. The same sicknesses seemed to come back.
I spoke of my situation to righthanders as well as to lefthanders but nobody understood why, being a so called “lefthander by birth”, I was to exert only the right hand without any memory of another attitude whereas a socalled “frustrated” lefthander remembers the frustration all his life and moreover does not do any effort to return to his birth situation when he is an adult because he is very proud of being able to write with the right hand.
As a matter of fact, the feeling of “not being as everybody else” is intolerable to a child. They succeed in persuading him that it is wrong to follow his nature.
Therefore I abandoned any explanation to the public and thus I made progress by myself (without writing anything on my adventure as I was blocked at that level). In fact, I had no intention to invite people to enter a sort of sect of rectified lefthanders.
Therefore, I tried to understand and found certain things other chapters are going to deal with. I tried not to be influenced by very trivial and disappointing written reports mentioning this question. It is a little normal to avoid being influenced because “who was on the other side of the mirror” and came back ?
I could not have discovered anything if I had not found means to determine through a detection at the eyes level directed to all the body whether someone is lefthander “at birth” without him suspecting that he is observed and if I had not found how one can detect through the voice (based on consonents or vowels as a function of the sex) whether the individual is completely reversed or simply “frustrated” because of his writing with the right.
Detection of the inversion (through the voice) in both cases (completely reversed or frustrated) is the same which means that the writing accounts for a great proportion in all activities even though one does no longer write much with the hand in view of the computers.
As mentioned above exercises and thus skilfulness are inscribed eternally in the brain and therefore characterize the individual on a long-term basis even though he no longer exerts.
Reasons for justifying relateralization are many since inversion of members acts negatively upon the center (brain, torso and sex).
But wherefrom does come a tendency to reverse the right frame of mind given at birth ? Without entering into details now since this chapter is only narrative one can say that inversion happens very early at about the age of two. There are many reasons for it such as an intrusive ambiance, the fact of doing as the others do in order not to be left alone of one’s kind, ignorance of the significance of laterality and the quality of the parents.
If a parent of the other sex dominates will the child have the tendency to imitate him by searching to become like him ? If one prefers one parent because of his value and his presence, does one not neglect the 50% represented by the other parent and therefore the other part of oneself ? Similarly, if one parent is absent or unknown the resulting disequilibrium can have a great influence upon the selected laterality.
My experience told me that a well lateralized individual generally considers both of his parents known or unknown as being of equal value even though he might prefer and cherish one of them for objective reasons. Of course, if laterality should be determined as easily as the sex this would be much more practical.
In all cases it is better to jump to a new development at the age of sixteen rather than at 23 or 40.
My voice had become more firm and low-pitched. It was time for me to change my environment and realize an honest ambition.
6. Eyes
In Europe, America and in white race Countries, eyes are blue, dark or brown. People appreciate colors and attach aesthetic significance thereto.
In Asia and Africa mainly with black and yellow races they never mention the color of the eyes for good reasons since these are more or less dark.
A good sight simplifies life a lot and almost permits any activities and all follies. How do individuals with a correct vision value their luck ? At first sight (?) they hardly know where their eyes are situated. As a matter of fact, it is only when something is wrong that human beings start to wonder what happens and understand that it is a miracle to benefit from a good sight.
As a child I could see only with the left eye, about 6 to 7 tenths (= 60 to 70% of the normal vision) and hardly anything, let us say, 2 tenths with the right eye. I assume that in the school this situation was not very annoying in as much as I was on the first benches. Of course, as is the case with most people, I knew nothing as regards the characteristics of a short-sighted (who can see too well nearby; how can anyone see too well nearby?) and a long-sighted (who can see too well far away), still less an astigmat (unequal vision in different planes and therefore more or less blurred vision) or an emmetropic individual (normal sight).
In respect of the mentioned tenths of vision it is to be noted that they are a practical measure of marking with figures that one can see a certain proportion of the letters from the control blackboard. If you have seen ten tenths you have seen all the blackboard details. In principle you do not need any correction through glasses or other instruments. One tenth then means ten per cent of the admitted normal vision. Plane pilots have frequently more than ten tenths.
To recover a normal sight if possible one must wear glasses having such and such power characterized by dioptries, whether negative or positive. Often this is not sufficent to arrive at a good vision.
As a child I must have had small short-sighted glasses which I hated. I only remember that they gave me headaches and that I was only putting them on to be able to see at a distance as much as possible when needed.
Now if I were in that case I would use them only to watch TV or the movies. To the movies I went very belatedly for the first time. In such remote periods ophtalmologists (from Greek, more stylish) whom we called oculists (from Latin, less stylish) because they were not doctors and the opticians (spectacle manufacturers) had hardly any instruments to permit examination of the eyes and in particular the corneas.
Correcting glasses were placed on the eye as in the Middle Ages, and only those who could read had a chance of showing that they could see or not. I hardly exaggerate.
At about 12 or 13 and the war going to its end I had other spectacles I hated still more but I recall them because they were hurting my nose. My parents were vaguely informed of my astigmatism and myopia but nobody among the patients had the rich idea of checking what the prescription said. Dioptries and axes of astigmatism correction if they were noted by the specialist interested only the optician making the spectacles.
This curse upon the eyes pursued me all the time of pre-adolescence and at the age of sixteen I had to give up higher education as mentioned above because of headaches, the main cause of which was perhaps an “insufficiently corrected vision”.
“Correcting” does not mean eliminating but barely compensating for the defect if possible by prostheses in the form of spectacles or lenses (unknown at that time). Thus, one learns that illnesses or defects were invented prior to doctors and that these always are one or more trains late.
When I came to Paris I decided to go to an optician having many chain stores in the Champs Elysées, the window of which mentioned contact lenses. I entered shyly to ask for a free test. A lady greeted me at once and examined my eyes in an instrument that was probably an ophtalmoscope. She declared joyfully that I had a superb keratoconus in each eye (what a happy finding for her...and for me who finally understood a little of the situation) and placed test lenses in my eyes.
For the first time in my life I could see with the right eye but cried my eyes out. In these ancient times lenses were hard plastics made of plexiglas or about that and the adaptation was more than rough. It is for this reason that I cried a lot of tears. After half an hour I felt a little better but at once I perceived such a transformation not only in my sight but also in my nervous system strained by the eyes that at the risk of causing my ruin I ordered immediately a pair of lenses there.
The price was more than prohibitive for a worker : it was about the quarter of my monthly pay. This lady was enthusiastic about the results afforded by the lenses; nevertheless she sent me to a (the) specialist of the lenses in France, and the keratoconus specialist (in Greek, cornea + cone).
In a way I was relieved that they had detected in me the existence of one cornea and even two corneas evolving to the shape of a cone instead of a regular curve as everybody else. This explained why myopia spectacles with possibly a main astigmatism axis could only produce headaches without remedying ocular defects. This horrorful defect was actually a sickness as it was to develop to worse, amplifying its effects in a more or less slow manner. What flattered me on the contrary is that I had to wear lenses all the time and not spectacles which I hated since glasses cannot correct serious irregular astigmatism produced by defects in the cornea, and these defects were not stable at all. Not only was I unable to see far away but it was difficult for me to sustain lights from the street when darkness came since a light spot was seen as luminous circles with no possibility of a better concentration.
In these ancient times lenses were not made up for eyes but the eyes adapted themselves to the lenses. With more preciseness : after carrying lenses one or two hours (maximum tolerance time, otherwise profusion of tears) I had no need of them for the rest of the day. This did not result from my pilgrimage to Lourdes occurred in the meantime and which would cause such beneficial effects but rather the massage without any pity of the lense upon the cornea which produced an imprint of a more regular type upon the cornea as compared to the distorted form of the natural cornea and permitted me to see as a big chief from one end to the other of the Champs Elysées.
When I spoke of this effect to the optician she was officially pleased but should have thought secretly that these lenses were no panacea since in principle she knew more than me about the eyes. In the shop they were speaking of the (short-sighted) daughter of the duke of La Rochefoucauld who in the same case no longer needed any spectacles or lenses... Very impressed by the lucky fate of this lady I wondered whether all this was bearable and healthy in a long run.
A little period had elapsed and catastrophe : when leaving the movies I was always in a hurry to remove these funny lenses since I was crying a lot. Therefore one day and I never knew how it happened I removed them perhaps on the sidewalk or in a windy place and lost at least one lense and soon the two of them. In view of the excessive price required from my little purse and due to the fact that the duke was not my father I remained some time without lenses.
Doctor C., very tall and impressive, was actually a surgeon and an ophtalmologist. I learnt later that he had made a lot of cornea graftings, first in the old times with rabbit eyes (!) and that he was indeed the specialist of the keratoconus. For me who sometimes dreamt of living in Australia and Canada, and the following years having taught me many things, I wonder how I could have managed there without too many insuperable problems during evolution of the illness.
Now I was in his waiting room with many patients who did not speak to each other. On the wall above the fireplace sat enthroned a superb pair of elephant tusks.
I believe now that it is wrong to neglect to speak with those who wait in the doctor’s waiting room because if you have a rare (orphan) illness (one individual out of ten thousands, officially, but surely much more as the apparatuses progress) there are few specialists and you are very isolated and nobody tells you how you have to manage for example to find a capable and conscienscious engineer (a lot of time is required to make the lenses) who could adapt lenses to the eyes and not the opposite. Many charlatans or simply incompetent people lose patients’ time and money and bring them to desperation.
For the time being, this doctor, after examination in the dark with a small lamp, confirmed the diagnosis already expressed and told me for the first time that evolution to the worst was more or less slow but that one day I would have to envisage grafting. At the age of 23 with the optimism of youth I thought : speak a lot, sir, you will not get me.
The lenses have a curvature corresponding to the general curvature of the eye and a power as measured in dioptries since keratoconus always reveals itself by a bad sight at a distance which also is called myopia, an unavoidable consequence, although in this case the cause is not the same as for the usual short-sighted people. The curvature measured is a compromising solution between several values because the cornea is irregular. The lense as made is therefore in all cases not adapted entirely to the eye. As usual the short-sighted with a good cornea have the best lenses since their eye is externally regular but in practice they may use as before normal glasses with a very good optical result. It is also true that as the image with glasses is smaller they get more tenths with lenses. Those who are in my case, on the contrary, have only badly adapted lenses at their disposal, which are compromises, and they must be changed often to modify the curvature because of the ineluctable evolution of the illness.
Such illness officially is not hereditary but this is false as the future events will show and they think the responsible cause is deficiency in vitamins and food during childhood. I remember that at a time doctor C. told me in a triumphant manner that they knew where keratoconus came from; it is a “zinc excess” in blood. Therefore, I had an analysis made, not easy to do as nobody cares for it and for this reason the insurance does not pay it back, which is ridiculous, because it should not ruin them.
Anyhow the zinc content was less than normality ! Not disconcerted was the good doctor : “We have to check it again”, which was never repeated. This is the only attempt I was aware of to enlighten the origin of the illness but progress has certainly been made, which I do not know. In as much as a good vision is hereditary it appears that a bad sight of this type has also hereditary origins.
All my life whether professional or not was poisoned by such illness; I would not wish my worst enemy to suffer from it.
Therefore, I left the dangerous Mrs K. following the loss of my dear lenses, thereby avoiding more or less final ulcerations in the cornea, although at the age of 20/30 one is stronger. The good doctor C. contented himself with examining my eyes and controlling the (slow but certain) evolution of the trouble. It was not his business to manufacture and adapt lenses and he is right since pure technical matters are involved as applied to suffering people.
No prescription of data can be respected entirely since one must undergo patient and repeated tests to arrive at a compromise of curvature and power. I therefore changed from the lenses and spectacles called Leroy (Mrs K.) to Brothers Lissac where I meet Mr B., a very consciencious and honest man, during the years 1960.
At that period I still had a good enough vision perhaps 7 and 6 tenths with both of the lenses in the eyes. Mr B. made me lenses for a number of years but he was in a rigid structure and very dependent. At the end of the years 1960 probably upon doctor C.’s advice I went to an independent specialist M.BA.
Unfortunately he receives many people and I am forced to take half a day off each time due to the fact that I was working in the suburbs. Furthermore his technique is limited and no longer fits with the evolution of the illness.
In the year 1970 or so I am therefore ready to fall into the hands of a charlatan the more so because I live now in the Seine-et-Marne far from Paris and everyday I have to travel for 2 hours and half in the common transportation means, under the worst conditions with each time two trips by car of 17 km from home to the RER (suburb metro). I have to mention : the lights of other cars moving toward me with an exaggerated speed, the night, the fog and the rain, generally only one lense in the left eye because the other lense is no longer adapted to a right eye which is more and more rebellious and often painful, all such conditions rendering the life horrorful. No question of stopping work for lack of money; the house is to be paid, and I make six persons live with a single pay.
I do not remind anymore how I meet doctor F. who not only receives patients as is usual but also “adapts” lenses, which theoretically would be ideal. In fact, he “makes” very small lenses which I tolerate only after one “heating” hour and for few hours only. As it is impossible for me to work without lenses it is easy to guess that I am in agony.
At that moment (40 years old) I am unable to read without lenses not because of a possible presbyopia resulting from the old age (weak sight nearby, of the old man, in Greek presbyte = old man and opia = vision, who needs positive dioptries to enlarge images) but because of the general sight. Moreover, my terror during this period when I drive in the morning and the evening between home and the RER is to be hit by another car and to be forced to make an official statement of accident under the worst conditions of light and readability.
The lenses from doctor F. not being satisfactory I return to him : appointment, reconsultations, waitings of several quarters or half-hours in his office during which he was supposed to modify the lense. Afterwards I suspected that he was simply smoking a cigar or dealing with his girl since no noticeable change in the plastic pieces was perceptible. This procedure lasted too long.
Fortunately this harmful imbecile had the genial idea of not subscribing to the insurance anymore and this saved me. I ran away since I had not the money for neglecting the insurance. The social security (illness insurance) had recently compromised itself by reimbursing part of these lenses. In all my life I paid entirely these plastic pieces more than the price of two new cars which I never was able to buy.
When one is in the situation in which he must wear hard lenses and not glasses because these are inefficient, nobody understands. They tell me : “Why don’t you wear glasses if the lenses hurt ? Is it for consciousness of your appearence ?”. I remember explaining for a long time how and why to a friend and at the end of the explanation I heard :”Are you sure you would not be better with glasses ? “. It’s enough to make you shoot yourself.
In these years the lense user was supposed to be guided by aesthetic grounds but actually the lense in principle gives better vision, especially to short-sighted. The materials have changed : they tried other plastic materials more permeable to oxygen and therefore softer, not counting the soft lenses for which the adaptation time is very short but nothing was found for the keratoconus since if the material is not hard enough it conforms to the irregularities of the cornea. There result negative efficiency and no correction.
It is the lense of regular geometric shape that fulfils the function of a cornea of good quality, with the interval between the cornea and the prosthesis being filled up by tears (of good quality without blurred components ?).
If the lense is not adapted to the right situation the eye is too dry and does not produce good tears. Worst than that the eye produces a sort of white muddy liquid which comes in between the eye and the lense and drives one mad. As a matter of fact, cleaning of the lense is immediately nullified by new spurious layers of liquid produced non stop.
The good doctor prescribes a collyrium but you have first to remove the lense, which removes the collyrium once the lense is back in place ! Otherwise the lense falls down when collyrium is administered ! Anyhow how could a doctor feel what the patient feels ? About other people, it is better not to talk !
Doctor F. had left me in a deadlock. Saying that I was desperate finding no aid is poorly expressed. Not knowing what to do in that case, I think again of doctor C. who is competent and honest but does not make lenses. I suffer much of this therapeutical isolation without being able to hope for the slightest solution. Furthermore if I see an additional doctor I have not the required money to consult two doctors in the same period. And whom can I meet ?
There was an exception : I recollect having asked for an appointment with a professor belonging to the Medecine Academy. No doubt a very accurate appointment : a beautiful small waiting room in the 7th district of Paris, an elegant old lady (a poor cousin ?) to welcome you. This eminent (?) specialist after an examination of half an hour declared that he could do nothing for me and that I had to continue wearing my actual lenses ! He asked me politely why I came to see him and I replied stupidly that his name pleased me. Among all the foreign names I had read from the phone directory it was one of the few French names I had found, which is not suspicion of virtue and capacity, I admit. He replied in the same style that he was very honored but did not forget to ask for an astronomical sum of money.
Another ophtalmologist, too old to be otherwise than harmful, prescribed very expensive spectacles which I used for half an hour because the efficiency was very low and for preventing me falling down in the street.
One has the temptation to commit suicide when there is no solution to an incurable source of troubles. The fact of believing or not in something or someone in the heaven or of having any obligations to a family, when one suffers without hope and nobody replies, does not make much difference in the decision.
At that moment, by chance or good luck I found, in the same street I was working in Paris, a drug-store in which Jean-Luc D. modified and adapted lenses, on the first floor of such building. At once he proposed to me lenses of a normal size, large enough (11 mm) with very careful clearances the special dimensions of which are one of his secrets and he literally saved my life. This young (perhaps 25 years old then) optometrist is very competent and of an incredible patience and without any appetite for money. Useless to say there is a lot of people in his shop now, rue Sévres-Babylone.
Later, doctor C. formed a partnership with a lense adaptation laboratory. I need doctor C. at least for the official prescriptions of lenses. Therefore, I had a pair of supplementary (and useless) lenses made in the 16th district, which means : consultations, modifications, reconsultations, remodifications, the whole of which with multiple appointments, too slow and inefficent a system, which said doctor had the good sense of abandoning a few months later.
I returned therefore to Jean-Luc only. There was a problem between doctor C. and Jean-Luc : I believe it was an expertise before the Court which did not turn to the advantage of the older. Doctor C. forbade me to have lenses made by Jean-Luc. Each respected the other for his competence and I repect both of them because I know their value and I needed them. Of course I never stopped going to Jean-Luc since he is the best but I never told doctor C.
In 1987 I had come to the end of the road : changing lenses every two months with a very poor result (about 5 to 6 tenths in the better eye with a lense, and pain therein) is a very joyful life. There were repetitive ulcerations in the corneas, a single bad eye instead of two shaky eyes and more and more severe misadaptation to lenses. The cornea was too coniform and its thickness became too small. The risk was to have a hole in it. Grafting was therefore necessary.
Why did I not ask for it before ? Because it could not be realized upon request since it is done at the last minute. In case the operation is missed you become partly handicapped. If the center of the cornea is removed and replaced and the surgeon does not succeed entirely the patient is blind in this eye. They can start again but the grafted area should then be smaller.
In this connection I should rather speak of “not-sighted persons” to be in the wind. As a matter of fact, the word “blind” traumatizes because it is too short and therefore brutal. In all languages what is polite is long, what is short is impolite. Refer in this respect to the Japanese language.
Doctor C. never asked me whether I wanted to be grafted : a sort of mutual code, probably. When one is young he believes this will never happen to him, it is for the others. I remember that in the waiting room with elephant tusks I met once a young girl, the sister of an ophtalmologist. She declared to me that she wanted to be grafted on immediately to eliminate the keratoconus. Since she was wearing spectacles I doubt he did it.
I also remember a plumber who had suffered from cornea piercing since the cornea normally is less and less thick in the center as the cone develops and he remained a time sewed on while waiting for the graft. He told me that there was always later evolution despite the graft. In his situation he was working nearly all the time with one eye only. Be careful to leaks ! Another one had sclerotic contact glasses which covered the whole of the eye and are used for super-short-sighted. Rather die blind ! Although...
The grafting ? You need grafts, i.e. deceased persons who “give” (leave) their eyes. A long week-end of Easter or Pentecost gives many road accidents : “ There will be many grafts !” say cynical specialists. Death is also life.
They sent me to Tremblay-les-Gonesses where doctor C. operated. A magnificent place with a huge park nearby. In an ophtalmological department ambiance is always good because patients are not really sick; they are handicapped but usually leave the operation in a better state than before. The old, suffering from a cataract, become better if they do not lean down at once after the operation, which is very dangerous. Curiously enough they do not very energetically inform the patients in this respect. And others are repaired somehow. Anguish therefore is not present as in the other surgery departments in which they remove pieces of meat to prevent worse effects.
They realize such grafting on the worst eye to prevent any possible damage and the other eye is treated six months later. Before the operation I could not see much : lenses remained useless in the drawer and could no longer be used later at least in their actual shape. The grafting is far from being perfect however; irregular astigmatism remains somehow and lenses or glasses are to be provided. If one is lucky enough he can wear glasses with a much better efficiency and the vision is in principle more stable than before. Keratoconus is blocked.
Dealing with the grafting, I should insist on the fact that I waited only 3 to 4 weeks. Another system required two years (in the Quinze-Vingt Hospital, for instance). Now a minister has worked so well on the graftings (hearts, liver and so on) that you require two or three years to be grafted on, even for a cornea, which is dreadful. In fact, such grafting is simpler since it does not imply problems of incompatibility as is the case with “motors” (heart, liver and so on). According to doctor C. however cornea graftings should occur between individuals of the same race color. If not, rejection may occur. The doctor told me that a few individuals of black race rejected and he had trouble grafting them on again because their “cousins” walk or are on bikes ! It is a question of skin kinship : it is logical that individuals of differing races who are separated by ten thousand or one million generations are more incompatible mutually than those of the same racial origin. In Europe each person is separated from his neighbour by one hundred or one thousand generations at the very maximum.
The grafting “gift” should therefore be made more direct and simple. According to what I heard the young of 20 who drives on the autoroute at full speed must have a letter in his pocket saying clearly that he “gives” organs in case he dies in an accident there. Otherwise nothing of the sort will happen. Who will do that ? Surely, very few people. The result is that surgeons now search for grafts abroad though there is the same number of accidents on the road or elsewhere here as before. Certain individuals want to be cremated but would not accept to leave their organs to others when they know that in all cases they will be destroyed to ashes. Humanity is very illogical !
What people, who are not concerned by that problem cannot realize, is that the patients have to be “ready” during all the time they wait for the grafting (of several years ?). This is true in particular for teeth and any small infection. For nearly no cause the dentist removes all teeth to prevent complications. The big dentist from the Congo who saw me in the hospital wished to remove all my teeth because an isolated tooth moved a bit. Fortunately, my usual dentist gave me a precious paper certifying healthy teeth.
On the day before the operation the nurse brutally insisted upon me taking a shower as if I had slept in the street as a beggar and threw me something that I took for a bath cloth. I used it vaguely and surprise for the nurse this object actually was a sort of operation uniform I had been unable to distinguish from other things. Her silence said a lot on the opinion she had then of my visual “acuteness”.
I went to the operation room singing the national anthem since I wanted to get rid as soon as possible of this sick cornea. I knew that such replacement was irreversible and that in case of error the day after would be still worse than the present one. On waking up one does not try to see as there is a bandaging thereon.
A few days later I could see badly enough but much better since obviously the situation was worse before. When the threads are still present on the eye one can see better since they are tensed thereby contracting the graft. To have a joke I told doctor C. that looking out to the West I was beginning to see the Statue of the Liberty.
I do not remember how long the threads should stay in the eyes before removal. Now they remove them much later to prevent loosening of the graft thereby to keep better acuteness. My younger daughter who is lucky enough to have inherited this horrorful illness (one child out of four !) has already undergone a grafting in one eye (a graft bought in America in view of the time lost in France) at the age of 29, which proves that evolution was very quick for her.
(If someone had told me with proof that it is hereditary I do not know whether I would have decided to have children but they are actually procreated but younger parents and at a younger age one do not believe in all these possible dreadful events).
After one year they had not removed all the threads from her eye and it is possible to treat the graft by laser thereby to remove more of the astigmatism. This was done by the same surgeon, who died very young a little later from kidney disease.
In my case on which I do not want to insist any more I was grafted three months later on the better eye (the left) since the situation was good enough with the first eye. I decided against waiting for six months.
It was also an eye from a woman in the state of brain-dead coma after a road accident, as for the first eye.
The lenses I am wearing now permit me to see nearly normally. They even could be worn out with scratches, which never happened before as they were constantly new upon frequent replacements !
I forget to say that one eye looks upwardly as compared to the other but apart from this supplementary anomaly which is also genetic and can be “corrected” by a prism (one edge thicker in the lower part /by gravity/ of the lense, or an additional special glass with a glass edge of the same type as said), the situation is nearly alright. There are tiredness, fragility, dust particles with wind and unexplained problems.
I also benefit from that dreadful white or grey liquid that appears between lense and cornea because of tiredness or for any other strange reasons (cleaning products ?). However it is rare to be able to see better when one grows older as is my case now since generally everything is worse as years pass.
The only sorrow remaining actually, apart from too dry an eye on one or the other side is the fluid dirt on the lenses (between the eye and the lense as produced by the eyelid) I just mentioned. After an experience of several years I noticed that probably a sort of food (but which food ?) contributes to the formation of such dirty liquid. Obviously, eating fat food is not good but this is very logical.
What is not contestable is that one cannot take any sort of medecines such as additives like calcium, potassium, magnesium (?). It is a matter of luck : one sort of potassium chloride produces such white liquid to the point of having the eyelids nearly stuck on wakening up and another one of another trade mark produces nothing wrong at all. Additional potassium is sometimes indispensable when one has to take diuretics to prevent too great a loss of potassium.
Calcium means the death of an eye equipped with a hard lense. You should try to appreciate.
Another inconvenience is that one eye looks higher up than the other (vertical squinting = double lines when reading) but with a prism on the lense the situation is better although the lense cannot be indefinitely thicker in the lower part.
As to the occurrence of too dry an eye, it is sufficient for me to cry, for instance, by reading again my memoirs !!!
It would be wrong to complain...
At that time I did not know anything about other troubles such as those related to the retina.
In Asia and Africa mainly with black and yellow races they never mention the color of the eyes for good reasons since these are more or less dark.
A good sight simplifies life a lot and almost permits any activities and all follies. How do individuals with a correct vision value their luck ? At first sight (?) they hardly know where their eyes are situated. As a matter of fact, it is only when something is wrong that human beings start to wonder what happens and understand that it is a miracle to benefit from a good sight.
As a child I could see only with the left eye, about 6 to 7 tenths (= 60 to 70% of the normal vision) and hardly anything, let us say, 2 tenths with the right eye. I assume that in the school this situation was not very annoying in as much as I was on the first benches. Of course, as is the case with most people, I knew nothing as regards the characteristics of a short-sighted (who can see too well nearby; how can anyone see too well nearby?) and a long-sighted (who can see too well far away), still less an astigmat (unequal vision in different planes and therefore more or less blurred vision) or an emmetropic individual (normal sight).
In respect of the mentioned tenths of vision it is to be noted that they are a practical measure of marking with figures that one can see a certain proportion of the letters from the control blackboard. If you have seen ten tenths you have seen all the blackboard details. In principle you do not need any correction through glasses or other instruments. One tenth then means ten per cent of the admitted normal vision. Plane pilots have frequently more than ten tenths.
To recover a normal sight if possible one must wear glasses having such and such power characterized by dioptries, whether negative or positive. Often this is not sufficent to arrive at a good vision.
As a child I must have had small short-sighted glasses which I hated. I only remember that they gave me headaches and that I was only putting them on to be able to see at a distance as much as possible when needed.
Now if I were in that case I would use them only to watch TV or the movies. To the movies I went very belatedly for the first time. In such remote periods ophtalmologists (from Greek, more stylish) whom we called oculists (from Latin, less stylish) because they were not doctors and the opticians (spectacle manufacturers) had hardly any instruments to permit examination of the eyes and in particular the corneas.
Correcting glasses were placed on the eye as in the Middle Ages, and only those who could read had a chance of showing that they could see or not. I hardly exaggerate.
At about 12 or 13 and the war going to its end I had other spectacles I hated still more but I recall them because they were hurting my nose. My parents were vaguely informed of my astigmatism and myopia but nobody among the patients had the rich idea of checking what the prescription said. Dioptries and axes of astigmatism correction if they were noted by the specialist interested only the optician making the spectacles.
This curse upon the eyes pursued me all the time of pre-adolescence and at the age of sixteen I had to give up higher education as mentioned above because of headaches, the main cause of which was perhaps an “insufficiently corrected vision”.
“Correcting” does not mean eliminating but barely compensating for the defect if possible by prostheses in the form of spectacles or lenses (unknown at that time). Thus, one learns that illnesses or defects were invented prior to doctors and that these always are one or more trains late.
When I came to Paris I decided to go to an optician having many chain stores in the Champs Elysées, the window of which mentioned contact lenses. I entered shyly to ask for a free test. A lady greeted me at once and examined my eyes in an instrument that was probably an ophtalmoscope. She declared joyfully that I had a superb keratoconus in each eye (what a happy finding for her...and for me who finally understood a little of the situation) and placed test lenses in my eyes.
For the first time in my life I could see with the right eye but cried my eyes out. In these ancient times lenses were hard plastics made of plexiglas or about that and the adaptation was more than rough. It is for this reason that I cried a lot of tears. After half an hour I felt a little better but at once I perceived such a transformation not only in my sight but also in my nervous system strained by the eyes that at the risk of causing my ruin I ordered immediately a pair of lenses there.
The price was more than prohibitive for a worker : it was about the quarter of my monthly pay. This lady was enthusiastic about the results afforded by the lenses; nevertheless she sent me to a (the) specialist of the lenses in France, and the keratoconus specialist (in Greek, cornea + cone).
In a way I was relieved that they had detected in me the existence of one cornea and even two corneas evolving to the shape of a cone instead of a regular curve as everybody else. This explained why myopia spectacles with possibly a main astigmatism axis could only produce headaches without remedying ocular defects. This horrorful defect was actually a sickness as it was to develop to worse, amplifying its effects in a more or less slow manner. What flattered me on the contrary is that I had to wear lenses all the time and not spectacles which I hated since glasses cannot correct serious irregular astigmatism produced by defects in the cornea, and these defects were not stable at all. Not only was I unable to see far away but it was difficult for me to sustain lights from the street when darkness came since a light spot was seen as luminous circles with no possibility of a better concentration.
In these ancient times lenses were not made up for eyes but the eyes adapted themselves to the lenses. With more preciseness : after carrying lenses one or two hours (maximum tolerance time, otherwise profusion of tears) I had no need of them for the rest of the day. This did not result from my pilgrimage to Lourdes occurred in the meantime and which would cause such beneficial effects but rather the massage without any pity of the lense upon the cornea which produced an imprint of a more regular type upon the cornea as compared to the distorted form of the natural cornea and permitted me to see as a big chief from one end to the other of the Champs Elysées.
When I spoke of this effect to the optician she was officially pleased but should have thought secretly that these lenses were no panacea since in principle she knew more than me about the eyes. In the shop they were speaking of the (short-sighted) daughter of the duke of La Rochefoucauld who in the same case no longer needed any spectacles or lenses... Very impressed by the lucky fate of this lady I wondered whether all this was bearable and healthy in a long run.
A little period had elapsed and catastrophe : when leaving the movies I was always in a hurry to remove these funny lenses since I was crying a lot. Therefore one day and I never knew how it happened I removed them perhaps on the sidewalk or in a windy place and lost at least one lense and soon the two of them. In view of the excessive price required from my little purse and due to the fact that the duke was not my father I remained some time without lenses.
Doctor C., very tall and impressive, was actually a surgeon and an ophtalmologist. I learnt later that he had made a lot of cornea graftings, first in the old times with rabbit eyes (!) and that he was indeed the specialist of the keratoconus. For me who sometimes dreamt of living in Australia and Canada, and the following years having taught me many things, I wonder how I could have managed there without too many insuperable problems during evolution of the illness.
Now I was in his waiting room with many patients who did not speak to each other. On the wall above the fireplace sat enthroned a superb pair of elephant tusks.
I believe now that it is wrong to neglect to speak with those who wait in the doctor’s waiting room because if you have a rare (orphan) illness (one individual out of ten thousands, officially, but surely much more as the apparatuses progress) there are few specialists and you are very isolated and nobody tells you how you have to manage for example to find a capable and conscienscious engineer (a lot of time is required to make the lenses) who could adapt lenses to the eyes and not the opposite. Many charlatans or simply incompetent people lose patients’ time and money and bring them to desperation.
For the time being, this doctor, after examination in the dark with a small lamp, confirmed the diagnosis already expressed and told me for the first time that evolution to the worst was more or less slow but that one day I would have to envisage grafting. At the age of 23 with the optimism of youth I thought : speak a lot, sir, you will not get me.
The lenses have a curvature corresponding to the general curvature of the eye and a power as measured in dioptries since keratoconus always reveals itself by a bad sight at a distance which also is called myopia, an unavoidable consequence, although in this case the cause is not the same as for the usual short-sighted people. The curvature measured is a compromising solution between several values because the cornea is irregular. The lense as made is therefore in all cases not adapted entirely to the eye. As usual the short-sighted with a good cornea have the best lenses since their eye is externally regular but in practice they may use as before normal glasses with a very good optical result. It is also true that as the image with glasses is smaller they get more tenths with lenses. Those who are in my case, on the contrary, have only badly adapted lenses at their disposal, which are compromises, and they must be changed often to modify the curvature because of the ineluctable evolution of the illness.
Such illness officially is not hereditary but this is false as the future events will show and they think the responsible cause is deficiency in vitamins and food during childhood. I remember that at a time doctor C. told me in a triumphant manner that they knew where keratoconus came from; it is a “zinc excess” in blood. Therefore, I had an analysis made, not easy to do as nobody cares for it and for this reason the insurance does not pay it back, which is ridiculous, because it should not ruin them.
Anyhow the zinc content was less than normality ! Not disconcerted was the good doctor : “We have to check it again”, which was never repeated. This is the only attempt I was aware of to enlighten the origin of the illness but progress has certainly been made, which I do not know. In as much as a good vision is hereditary it appears that a bad sight of this type has also hereditary origins.
All my life whether professional or not was poisoned by such illness; I would not wish my worst enemy to suffer from it.
Therefore, I left the dangerous Mrs K. following the loss of my dear lenses, thereby avoiding more or less final ulcerations in the cornea, although at the age of 20/30 one is stronger. The good doctor C. contented himself with examining my eyes and controlling the (slow but certain) evolution of the trouble. It was not his business to manufacture and adapt lenses and he is right since pure technical matters are involved as applied to suffering people.
No prescription of data can be respected entirely since one must undergo patient and repeated tests to arrive at a compromise of curvature and power. I therefore changed from the lenses and spectacles called Leroy (Mrs K.) to Brothers Lissac where I meet Mr B., a very consciencious and honest man, during the years 1960.
At that period I still had a good enough vision perhaps 7 and 6 tenths with both of the lenses in the eyes. Mr B. made me lenses for a number of years but he was in a rigid structure and very dependent. At the end of the years 1960 probably upon doctor C.’s advice I went to an independent specialist M.BA.
Unfortunately he receives many people and I am forced to take half a day off each time due to the fact that I was working in the suburbs. Furthermore his technique is limited and no longer fits with the evolution of the illness.
In the year 1970 or so I am therefore ready to fall into the hands of a charlatan the more so because I live now in the Seine-et-Marne far from Paris and everyday I have to travel for 2 hours and half in the common transportation means, under the worst conditions with each time two trips by car of 17 km from home to the RER (suburb metro). I have to mention : the lights of other cars moving toward me with an exaggerated speed, the night, the fog and the rain, generally only one lense in the left eye because the other lense is no longer adapted to a right eye which is more and more rebellious and often painful, all such conditions rendering the life horrorful. No question of stopping work for lack of money; the house is to be paid, and I make six persons live with a single pay.
I do not remind anymore how I meet doctor F. who not only receives patients as is usual but also “adapts” lenses, which theoretically would be ideal. In fact, he “makes” very small lenses which I tolerate only after one “heating” hour and for few hours only. As it is impossible for me to work without lenses it is easy to guess that I am in agony.
At that moment (40 years old) I am unable to read without lenses not because of a possible presbyopia resulting from the old age (weak sight nearby, of the old man, in Greek presbyte = old man and opia = vision, who needs positive dioptries to enlarge images) but because of the general sight. Moreover, my terror during this period when I drive in the morning and the evening between home and the RER is to be hit by another car and to be forced to make an official statement of accident under the worst conditions of light and readability.
The lenses from doctor F. not being satisfactory I return to him : appointment, reconsultations, waitings of several quarters or half-hours in his office during which he was supposed to modify the lense. Afterwards I suspected that he was simply smoking a cigar or dealing with his girl since no noticeable change in the plastic pieces was perceptible. This procedure lasted too long.
Fortunately this harmful imbecile had the genial idea of not subscribing to the insurance anymore and this saved me. I ran away since I had not the money for neglecting the insurance. The social security (illness insurance) had recently compromised itself by reimbursing part of these lenses. In all my life I paid entirely these plastic pieces more than the price of two new cars which I never was able to buy.
When one is in the situation in which he must wear hard lenses and not glasses because these are inefficient, nobody understands. They tell me : “Why don’t you wear glasses if the lenses hurt ? Is it for consciousness of your appearence ?”. I remember explaining for a long time how and why to a friend and at the end of the explanation I heard :”Are you sure you would not be better with glasses ? “. It’s enough to make you shoot yourself.
In these years the lense user was supposed to be guided by aesthetic grounds but actually the lense in principle gives better vision, especially to short-sighted. The materials have changed : they tried other plastic materials more permeable to oxygen and therefore softer, not counting the soft lenses for which the adaptation time is very short but nothing was found for the keratoconus since if the material is not hard enough it conforms to the irregularities of the cornea. There result negative efficiency and no correction.
It is the lense of regular geometric shape that fulfils the function of a cornea of good quality, with the interval between the cornea and the prosthesis being filled up by tears (of good quality without blurred components ?).
If the lense is not adapted to the right situation the eye is too dry and does not produce good tears. Worst than that the eye produces a sort of white muddy liquid which comes in between the eye and the lense and drives one mad. As a matter of fact, cleaning of the lense is immediately nullified by new spurious layers of liquid produced non stop.
The good doctor prescribes a collyrium but you have first to remove the lense, which removes the collyrium once the lense is back in place ! Otherwise the lense falls down when collyrium is administered ! Anyhow how could a doctor feel what the patient feels ? About other people, it is better not to talk !
Doctor F. had left me in a deadlock. Saying that I was desperate finding no aid is poorly expressed. Not knowing what to do in that case, I think again of doctor C. who is competent and honest but does not make lenses. I suffer much of this therapeutical isolation without being able to hope for the slightest solution. Furthermore if I see an additional doctor I have not the required money to consult two doctors in the same period. And whom can I meet ?
There was an exception : I recollect having asked for an appointment with a professor belonging to the Medecine Academy. No doubt a very accurate appointment : a beautiful small waiting room in the 7th district of Paris, an elegant old lady (a poor cousin ?) to welcome you. This eminent (?) specialist after an examination of half an hour declared that he could do nothing for me and that I had to continue wearing my actual lenses ! He asked me politely why I came to see him and I replied stupidly that his name pleased me. Among all the foreign names I had read from the phone directory it was one of the few French names I had found, which is not suspicion of virtue and capacity, I admit. He replied in the same style that he was very honored but did not forget to ask for an astronomical sum of money.
Another ophtalmologist, too old to be otherwise than harmful, prescribed very expensive spectacles which I used for half an hour because the efficiency was very low and for preventing me falling down in the street.
One has the temptation to commit suicide when there is no solution to an incurable source of troubles. The fact of believing or not in something or someone in the heaven or of having any obligations to a family, when one suffers without hope and nobody replies, does not make much difference in the decision.
At that moment, by chance or good luck I found, in the same street I was working in Paris, a drug-store in which Jean-Luc D. modified and adapted lenses, on the first floor of such building. At once he proposed to me lenses of a normal size, large enough (11 mm) with very careful clearances the special dimensions of which are one of his secrets and he literally saved my life. This young (perhaps 25 years old then) optometrist is very competent and of an incredible patience and without any appetite for money. Useless to say there is a lot of people in his shop now, rue Sévres-Babylone.
Later, doctor C. formed a partnership with a lense adaptation laboratory. I need doctor C. at least for the official prescriptions of lenses. Therefore, I had a pair of supplementary (and useless) lenses made in the 16th district, which means : consultations, modifications, reconsultations, remodifications, the whole of which with multiple appointments, too slow and inefficent a system, which said doctor had the good sense of abandoning a few months later.
I returned therefore to Jean-Luc only. There was a problem between doctor C. and Jean-Luc : I believe it was an expertise before the Court which did not turn to the advantage of the older. Doctor C. forbade me to have lenses made by Jean-Luc. Each respected the other for his competence and I repect both of them because I know their value and I needed them. Of course I never stopped going to Jean-Luc since he is the best but I never told doctor C.
In 1987 I had come to the end of the road : changing lenses every two months with a very poor result (about 5 to 6 tenths in the better eye with a lense, and pain therein) is a very joyful life. There were repetitive ulcerations in the corneas, a single bad eye instead of two shaky eyes and more and more severe misadaptation to lenses. The cornea was too coniform and its thickness became too small. The risk was to have a hole in it. Grafting was therefore necessary.
Why did I not ask for it before ? Because it could not be realized upon request since it is done at the last minute. In case the operation is missed you become partly handicapped. If the center of the cornea is removed and replaced and the surgeon does not succeed entirely the patient is blind in this eye. They can start again but the grafted area should then be smaller.
In this connection I should rather speak of “not-sighted persons” to be in the wind. As a matter of fact, the word “blind” traumatizes because it is too short and therefore brutal. In all languages what is polite is long, what is short is impolite. Refer in this respect to the Japanese language.
Doctor C. never asked me whether I wanted to be grafted : a sort of mutual code, probably. When one is young he believes this will never happen to him, it is for the others. I remember that in the waiting room with elephant tusks I met once a young girl, the sister of an ophtalmologist. She declared to me that she wanted to be grafted on immediately to eliminate the keratoconus. Since she was wearing spectacles I doubt he did it.
I also remember a plumber who had suffered from cornea piercing since the cornea normally is less and less thick in the center as the cone develops and he remained a time sewed on while waiting for the graft. He told me that there was always later evolution despite the graft. In his situation he was working nearly all the time with one eye only. Be careful to leaks ! Another one had sclerotic contact glasses which covered the whole of the eye and are used for super-short-sighted. Rather die blind ! Although...
The grafting ? You need grafts, i.e. deceased persons who “give” (leave) their eyes. A long week-end of Easter or Pentecost gives many road accidents : “ There will be many grafts !” say cynical specialists. Death is also life.
They sent me to Tremblay-les-Gonesses where doctor C. operated. A magnificent place with a huge park nearby. In an ophtalmological department ambiance is always good because patients are not really sick; they are handicapped but usually leave the operation in a better state than before. The old, suffering from a cataract, become better if they do not lean down at once after the operation, which is very dangerous. Curiously enough they do not very energetically inform the patients in this respect. And others are repaired somehow. Anguish therefore is not present as in the other surgery departments in which they remove pieces of meat to prevent worse effects.
They realize such grafting on the worst eye to prevent any possible damage and the other eye is treated six months later. Before the operation I could not see much : lenses remained useless in the drawer and could no longer be used later at least in their actual shape. The grafting is far from being perfect however; irregular astigmatism remains somehow and lenses or glasses are to be provided. If one is lucky enough he can wear glasses with a much better efficiency and the vision is in principle more stable than before. Keratoconus is blocked.
Dealing with the grafting, I should insist on the fact that I waited only 3 to 4 weeks. Another system required two years (in the Quinze-Vingt Hospital, for instance). Now a minister has worked so well on the graftings (hearts, liver and so on) that you require two or three years to be grafted on, even for a cornea, which is dreadful. In fact, such grafting is simpler since it does not imply problems of incompatibility as is the case with “motors” (heart, liver and so on). According to doctor C. however cornea graftings should occur between individuals of the same race color. If not, rejection may occur. The doctor told me that a few individuals of black race rejected and he had trouble grafting them on again because their “cousins” walk or are on bikes ! It is a question of skin kinship : it is logical that individuals of differing races who are separated by ten thousand or one million generations are more incompatible mutually than those of the same racial origin. In Europe each person is separated from his neighbour by one hundred or one thousand generations at the very maximum.
The grafting “gift” should therefore be made more direct and simple. According to what I heard the young of 20 who drives on the autoroute at full speed must have a letter in his pocket saying clearly that he “gives” organs in case he dies in an accident there. Otherwise nothing of the sort will happen. Who will do that ? Surely, very few people. The result is that surgeons now search for grafts abroad though there is the same number of accidents on the road or elsewhere here as before. Certain individuals want to be cremated but would not accept to leave their organs to others when they know that in all cases they will be destroyed to ashes. Humanity is very illogical !
What people, who are not concerned by that problem cannot realize, is that the patients have to be “ready” during all the time they wait for the grafting (of several years ?). This is true in particular for teeth and any small infection. For nearly no cause the dentist removes all teeth to prevent complications. The big dentist from the Congo who saw me in the hospital wished to remove all my teeth because an isolated tooth moved a bit. Fortunately, my usual dentist gave me a precious paper certifying healthy teeth.
On the day before the operation the nurse brutally insisted upon me taking a shower as if I had slept in the street as a beggar and threw me something that I took for a bath cloth. I used it vaguely and surprise for the nurse this object actually was a sort of operation uniform I had been unable to distinguish from other things. Her silence said a lot on the opinion she had then of my visual “acuteness”.
I went to the operation room singing the national anthem since I wanted to get rid as soon as possible of this sick cornea. I knew that such replacement was irreversible and that in case of error the day after would be still worse than the present one. On waking up one does not try to see as there is a bandaging thereon.
A few days later I could see badly enough but much better since obviously the situation was worse before. When the threads are still present on the eye one can see better since they are tensed thereby contracting the graft. To have a joke I told doctor C. that looking out to the West I was beginning to see the Statue of the Liberty.
I do not remember how long the threads should stay in the eyes before removal. Now they remove them much later to prevent loosening of the graft thereby to keep better acuteness. My younger daughter who is lucky enough to have inherited this horrorful illness (one child out of four !) has already undergone a grafting in one eye (a graft bought in America in view of the time lost in France) at the age of 29, which proves that evolution was very quick for her.
(If someone had told me with proof that it is hereditary I do not know whether I would have decided to have children but they are actually procreated but younger parents and at a younger age one do not believe in all these possible dreadful events).
After one year they had not removed all the threads from her eye and it is possible to treat the graft by laser thereby to remove more of the astigmatism. This was done by the same surgeon, who died very young a little later from kidney disease.
In my case on which I do not want to insist any more I was grafted three months later on the better eye (the left) since the situation was good enough with the first eye. I decided against waiting for six months.
It was also an eye from a woman in the state of brain-dead coma after a road accident, as for the first eye.
The lenses I am wearing now permit me to see nearly normally. They even could be worn out with scratches, which never happened before as they were constantly new upon frequent replacements !
I forget to say that one eye looks upwardly as compared to the other but apart from this supplementary anomaly which is also genetic and can be “corrected” by a prism (one edge thicker in the lower part /by gravity/ of the lense, or an additional special glass with a glass edge of the same type as said), the situation is nearly alright. There are tiredness, fragility, dust particles with wind and unexplained problems.
I also benefit from that dreadful white or grey liquid that appears between lense and cornea because of tiredness or for any other strange reasons (cleaning products ?). However it is rare to be able to see better when one grows older as is my case now since generally everything is worse as years pass.
The only sorrow remaining actually, apart from too dry an eye on one or the other side is the fluid dirt on the lenses (between the eye and the lense as produced by the eyelid) I just mentioned. After an experience of several years I noticed that probably a sort of food (but which food ?) contributes to the formation of such dirty liquid. Obviously, eating fat food is not good but this is very logical.
What is not contestable is that one cannot take any sort of medecines such as additives like calcium, potassium, magnesium (?). It is a matter of luck : one sort of potassium chloride produces such white liquid to the point of having the eyelids nearly stuck on wakening up and another one of another trade mark produces nothing wrong at all. Additional potassium is sometimes indispensable when one has to take diuretics to prevent too great a loss of potassium.
Calcium means the death of an eye equipped with a hard lense. You should try to appreciate.
Another inconvenience is that one eye looks higher up than the other (vertical squinting = double lines when reading) but with a prism on the lense the situation is better although the lense cannot be indefinitely thicker in the lower part.
As to the occurrence of too dry an eye, it is sufficient for me to cry, for instance, by reading again my memoirs !!!
It would be wrong to complain...
At that time I did not know anything about other troubles such as those related to the retina.
7.Pulling out
After six months of re-lateralization I felt self-confident enough to see my chief of department and ask for a salary increase.
I had succeeded in finding a less chemical activity; we were dealing with electric apparatuses without of course knowing anything of electricity.
My chief, very surprised at someone asking for this extremeness, replied by the usual argumentation, namely, the economic circumstances being very bad they COULD NOT give any increase of salary, the more so because if they supplemented my income the others would know (not by me !) and he would be forced to do the same to them. As I was insisting that I could not remain without ambition all my life and to get rid of me he said he needed electronicians. It was normal and clever to so reply in view of the complicated apparatuses which were being used more and more in the factory. They were however far from the present computers.
He was giving that advice without any risk of realization on my part as I was required to work everyday without stop and anyhow there was no technical evening or day school in the place.
Due to a newspaper advertisement I found a correspondence course to obtain a diploma of electronic sub-engineer or engineer. The school helped to make a few circuits and a radio set and thereafter would find a job (or helped to find, which is a slight difference !) at the end of the course. One cannot realize the respect for the word “engineer” on the part of a worker or a worker’s son. This is why, feeling myself unworthy of that title I subscribed to a course of sub-engineer. I would of course have also succeeded in the engineer course : it was more expensive and a bit longer.
All was based on radio lamps, the transistors appearing only at the end of the course. I welded and screwed to manufacture my radio set. I did not entirely succeed in eliminating the spurious couplings but it fulfilled its functions.
After about a year I went again to see my chief who was very surprised at my following his advice. “Unfortunately, the economical circumstances...there was no job for an electronician (he did not say : by correspondence)”.
Only one thing had to be done : leaving, but for what ? Paris ?
For someone from the Alps immigration to Paris is normal but for an inhabitant of Lorraine which received any sorts of immigrants this is not usual at all. In the primary school as children we had been informed that under our feet there was a reserve of iron mineral for 50 years but they had not thought of Mauritania and world-wide ressources.
In an advertisement I noted that they proposed a stay of wiring worker with, at the end, procurement of the famous professional certificate, in a factory near Paris in the name of Thomson-Houston. This glorious English name designates a purely French enterprise which worked above all for the State.
I therefore applied for that job so as to have means of living and look more quietly for the future. As I have enough common sense I never dared speak of my sub-engineer diploma obtained through correspondence. I got it actually by going two weeks in Paris in that school. The “employment” consisted in giving information for drafting a “curriculum vitae”. I still remember entering a cave of old books to have such curriculum reproduced by an old man but I never used it.
Upon returning to my parents’ home I waited and waited for a reply. Finally, I phoned to the Recrutement Bureau in Paris and with difficulty and reticence they told me that I was accepted as a wiring worker apprentice and upon obtaining this simple piece of information I resigned from the factory after six years of presence. Obviously this was not very cautious in view of my empty purse.
My mother encouraged me saying that I would not do anything worthwhile in that region. She said they would not laugh so often as they would no longer hear me imitate the voices and the singers but that this decision was real life. It is likely that I could have started an “artistic” career in that domain if the place, the ambiance, my defective sight and the family possibilities had been different.
Manual worker’s life is such that when I asked for recovering little pocket money after six years of wages integrally given to my parents they replied that not much remained, which shows how little pay my father had.
I obtained from my mother a small sum to permit me to survive for one month.
At about the age of 23 I left home with all possible wishes from my little dear family and I presented myself to the mentioned famous firm. I always thought later that they told me to come for that stay of wiring worker without great conviction and were surprised at my arrival for taking that wretched job from such a far away place.
The fact remains that I clung thereto after having burnt all my vessels. I remember the factory in Gennevilliers where I rented a room in a hotel for a few nights. They used my bed when I was at work, it was of course a horrorful flea bed and fortunately the factory sent us to Bagneux in the South of Paris. Among my collegues there was one with whom I was more friendly and thanks to his mother who worked as a domestic in a lady’s home in Paris I could rent a room in the 17th district. I was to remain there for nine years in 9 m2, with the toilet on the balcony outside for several such rooms. It was very difficult even with money to find anything else at that period.
Despite my lack of extravagances in the necessary expenses I had to wait for my wages before paying the rent at the last minute. Strangely enough the owner, a lady, was envious of her domestic because “she received” a pay as if the latter would work for pleasure ! Mystery of bougeoisie ! This was my first contact with the 17th and 16th districts of Paris.
This wiring work period of an “ignored” sub-engineer was difficult but I had no choice. What handicapped me the most is obviously my sight since the problem was to make rigid wires straight according to a rapid method. My master pieces were hardly acceptable within the limits and I constantly suspected they would fire me. Fortunately I was a champion for making supple wire assemblies i.e. the “combs” since the significant performance was rapidity and precision rather than presentation. Willingly or reluctantly they granted me the famous certificate and I could be employed into that system.
The following year I managed to be transferred to a technical service as a technical agent number one for research. An enormous step had been covered : passing from a stupid state to a state of slight reflection.
We worked above all for the army trying to manufacture apparatuses to stand severe conditions. I have never seen a research succeed, a lot of money was spent but they always changed the objects of research. In this factory, nice for all that (nothing to do with de Wendel factory and the countryside), I remained six years as in the metallurgical site.
When diplomas are absent you have to change jobs to “improve” your status. An opportunity occurred to travel to Great britain for one year as a sub-engineer to study computers and later return to France in order to maintain these monsters.
The ancestor (dinosaurus) of the computer I am typing on now required a entire vast room with thousands of lamps (no transistors) and consequential noise for cooling the lamps and vibrations. In order to travel to England I would have done anything (for instance paying the room in France when I was absent, which I did) but when I saw the “baby” I thought at once that I should be freed from such contract of one year which had to be followed by several years of maintenance with a client.
The stay in England pleased me because I like the unexpected and contrary to many people I love what is English, the language and the humans. As a matter of fact, nothing can make me forget Churchill (half American) and the English people’s behavior during the war. This standing up for them deprives me of any objectivity. But it does not make me change in this respect. The English cooking was delicious the first week since we went into a castle to be presented to the company called International Computers and Tabulators (ICT). Thereafter we travelled to distant suburbs at sixty kilometers from London called Hitchin and Stevenage (Hertfordshire).
Lodging was provided at a landlady’s and her father of 99 and the food was...terrible. I remember my Vietnamese colleague who arrived at a younger woman’s home. She was, let say, still less interested by cooking than my landlady. The first evening he found three dry meat patties. Since those of his race like flavorsome dishes the shock was rough but he was hungry and so ate two patties. Thinking that she had offered too much the next day she placed two patties : he took one of them but did not wait for the third day to clear off and request his usual Asiatic wife to come to him.
As to my fate, I appreciated fish and chips more than I deserved. As to the breakfast obligatorily with eggs and bacon this is good at the beginning but such routine ends up in completely blocking the individual.
If several recipes can be used to cook an egg or anything else an old English lady unmistakingly uses the quickest to be able to play whist with her friends. In the factory there was a canteen; everybody knows that in France a factory canteen is not the top. At that period in France we were making contests in our canteen to check who could eat more French fries. An English canteen for a Frenchman is literally indescribable. The image that comes up to my mind is that of a pimply Englishman of about 35 who was pouring himself a glassful of black sauce from a huge two-liters pitcher.
Finally, after two days and nearly to the end of the sojourn at lunch time I made do with Danish sausage and Scandinavian smoked salmon which were cheap and good.
The work simply consisted in learning the structure and the operation of the computers of that period. We had to stay for one year and then could spare money because we were paid in France and they had to support us free in that Country.
We went to France two or three times by propeller planes during week-ends.
After a year one of us went to Lille, the other to Strasbourg and the third to the South. I succeeded in reserving Paris for myself near my domicile, my 9 m2.
The enormous lamp fitted machine with cooling fans released torrid heat and since it was situated on the third floor, where the insurance company renting it was, vibrations and noise caused the lights to fall from the ceiling of the other floors and provoked wide-ranging protests.
When the machine broke down what relief for the people there and myself, the responsible for its good operation ! I would have given much so that silence remained but I had to repair it i.e. measuring, replacing, welding and so on... Transistors and miniaturization had just been born but not weaned yet.
After a short period I tried to find a method of escaping that hell. Lenses probably were more sensitive to noise vibrations. Being a son of the 16th district’s residents I would not have done this one-year trip under these conditions but would have taken advantage of father’s money to make a study trip. The extreme contract we had signed stated that in case of resignation we should pay all what was given us as wages for one year; no use to say that this was impossible for me.
Noise obsessed me, vibrations tired me terribly and sleep eluded me until late in the night.
A work not far from the residence does not permit one to make a break; the time spared for not having to travel for two hours as people from the city do generally does not permit to think to something else than recent work and relativize the problems. I hated the proximity of work and domicile.
There were not many methods to break this contract : I had to find a specialist (psychiatrist or other) who would declare that I was unfit to standing noise, heat and vibrations, which was probably very true in view of my eyes corrected by hard lenses and fragilized by the keratoconus. I found an old lady psychiatrist who listened to me in a contradictory way but ended up the examination by granting to me a certificate of unfitness for such work. It was sufficient to let her believe that I was sexually very belated or hopeless. The eye plague was nothing for her and having never been in a factory environment she could not understand what a noisy and torrid situation implies.
Therefore I resigned by producing such certificate but they did not agree and insisted upon my reimbursing all the money spent in England. Fortunately for me they were in such a hurry to send us to England that they neglected the required medical examination before recrutement ! Then they could not argue that I was FIT for that job at the origin of the stay. Phew !
Relieved and freed for the first time in my life I spent a few days questioning myself to decide what I should do, as I could survive a few months without working.
A period of about six months followed, during which I tried to prove that I could manage by using the languages. Since I had some money I went to an adult school in Heidelberg, Germany (the Goethe Institut, I believe) to recover what I previously wanted to forget from the German language and improve conversation.
As I said before one cannot learn a language without at least tolerating those who speak it. Time had passed, I was a little less vindicative in respect to the Germans.
In the afternoon or the evening I was vaguely a waiter in an obscure smoky cellar night club. With my too sensitive eyes, I considered to be rotten, and the unadapted lenses, I had difficulties finding my way around. Moreover, the clients, a few young people, were speaking a sort of slang to disconcert the foreigner.
I remember that in such country considered to be very clean (at least its reputation abroad) they washed all glasses, in a repetitive way, in the same bucket filled with the initial water, without running water. This was true for that cellar of course, not for all. It was a time for it.
I also worked for six months with the American Army, repairing apparatuses but they were speaking American only and at 80% were using only the words “fuck” and “fucking”. This was not a high education in German.
Upon returning to Paris without money and without much more progress in German, I had to decide for work because the reserves were slim. I neglect a short period during which I paid for “current conversation course in Russian by Russian highly qualified professors” in a sort of castle where I was the only student and the professor, a student in Russian, knew less than me. I ran away at once and I needed about one year to be paid back but I did not abandon the case.
The assessment of the situation was not very positive but I had changed my mind.
By studying the advertisements I found a job of technical salesman in a near southern suburb. They wanted to sell apparatuses abroad, an export job at a high level (travels by planes, and so on). They were probably all diplomated engineers and I felt more than weak and full of awful complexes as a sub-engineer having a diploma obtained by correspondence.
Since, they said, I had a strange glance because of my lenses (?) which, let us remember, had the purpose in these ancient times to shape up the eyes instead of adapting themselves thereto, they advised me energetically to wear a pair of spectacles (therefore a sort of wig !) to look more “commercial”. It was starting well !
They waited for the last day of the three months test period to fire me, declaring that I was only capable of translating, which perhaps was true.
A little later, confident in my capacity of technical salesman I entered what they called “a fine” hall filled entirely with people and phone noise where my role was especially to make wait clients, who had ordered a switch or a little component from America. Since I was of their opinion that it was a little long to wait for it I was not long clearing off.
Finally, I read an advertisement relating to a Private Patent Agency, a sort of activity I did not know at all. As I am not the only one in this respect please be informed that they invent nothing there but that as in a notary public’s office they deal with law questions relative to recording descriptions of inventions but also receive inventors. Therefore they help them to describe the invention and the technical questions relating thereto. Written languages are indispensable and without spoken and written English you are of no use.
I was received by a little old man having two sons in the business, who was interested and immediately named me “engineer” (called “home engineer”= without diploma). The fat son accepted me with reluctance but the slim one, very hypocrite, thought that father reduced his benefits by recruting me.
The mother as the “chief” of the employees was spending her time firing and recruting secretaries and in harmony with both of her sons wanted to push off grandpa as being senile. I can affirm he was not.
In this Office with 25 persons I translated into French and was sending letters abroad for the proceedings. This was exactly what I had longed for i.e. languages and engineering were required. I always regretted having missed years before starting in this domain. Translation into French, generally from English or German has the purpose of filing a French text with the French Patent Office. As a matter of fact, the inventor through International Convention has one year available within which to decide, starting from the first filing, to file abroad while keeping the original date.
The little old man was actually favored by an Official from Eastern Germany he had known before the war and had exclusive filing for all patent applications as filed in the Eastern Germany. The purpose of a patent is to fight infringers; one must therefore help the inventor in his attempts to file a law suit. A lawyer receives the technical arguments and adds a legal sauce thereto, namely, inventive merit and so on. You must have some knowledge of the law but this can be learnt.
My little old man liked me much but under the family pressure fired me the day before Christmas...and took me back the next Monday. Never seen anything like that anywhere else ! I remained about six more months there but promised myself to find a job in that branch : the matter pleased me.
To avoid another situation with a trinity of father, mother and sons I retained three names, the most noticeable ones, in the professional list of the phone directory and wrote three letters of application. All of them replied.
The first Office comprised one individual only with a secretary; I paid a visit but there was no follow-up from me.
The second Office was effectively the second larger enterprise of Paris in this business. It was very structured with chiefs of department and so on. They probably wanted a diplomated engineer and the general impression did not please me.
The third Office was the first for the volume of business; they were very keen on foreign countries. I was received by a tall old man whose welcome was unforgettable because of his kindness. He offered me, a poor hopeless young man, the double of my previous wages as is done in a movies and of course I entered his firm immediately.
They entrusted me with all the foreign correspondence (with America especially) under the direction of a former German who went very young to England in 1936 under the influence of Hitler’s theories, then to Australia in a concentration camp during the war as a cumbersome foreigner, thereafter to Los Angeles for studying chemistry and finally to France as the husband of a French girl, a nurse. I was getting on very well with Herr Doktor.
The son of the boss, a partner in the firm, told me at the beginning:”We are going to “take tongue”, which probably means :”We are going to talk” but I spoke to him hardly a few words since I was depending on the other partner. The latter, born in Ajaccio (= lying), Corsica, was and is probably still now a genius in patent matters and an undefatigable worker due to hypermetropia and hyperthyroidism.
He was not long before quarreling with the old man’s son (in the meantime the father, very regretted, had died) and founded his own firm with the other older partner.
I stayed with him. The remainder of my activity in his firm was voluminous and varied but has no significance for the rest of this story.
Of course, not having any valuable diploma I was the least paid among my colleagues of the same degree but was happy with that work and ambiance.
When I retired having reached the age of 60 the day of the beginning of the Gulf War started by Bush senior (Tempest of the Desert) the boss told me between other things that I should have done much more efforts as regards the legal domain. This is a specific boss remark. At the beginning I had so much work to do that I was dictating in English to three secretaries and holidays of fourteen consecutive days during which Herr doktor replaced me for the urgencies required three or four months to cope with the delay in the business. How could I have done more ?
At least at the Office I was not doing more, because at home I translated an enormous amount of technical texts into English since English is the only communication language admitted, in Japan and elsewhere in the world. Even in Italy they write to us in English ! I had fixed a price and was paid so much per hundred words, the wording being typed with an old typewriter and corrected with erasing liquid and thereafter with a primitive computer that could erase and transpose sentences, after recording the wording from a tape recorder.
Recording a vocal translation of a text to be translated and typed has the advantage of not forgetting anything in the translation because if one types as he reads the original text the sentence is not encompassed completely enough and he may miss something. Moreover, the style not being the same in all languages (the order of the words) you must embrace and seize everything before translating. Finally, the typing being a nightmare for me who never could type without watching the keys, this step was less hard after recording.
Therefore I typed these texts, having the sound of the tape recorder in the ears and for lack of place a saraband of movable and noisy kids and adults around me. Concentration of the typist was high !
Patents should not include any errors of language or substance as they are legal books as made by an editor. We had correctors since errors are unavoidable. There is no insurance for errors.
This work being tiring enough for an individual of the normal type with a good sight, it is presumed easily that for somebody equipped with a double keratoconus it was destructive, apart from the fact that the work suited me completely. Without having had the benefit of a double grafting on the corneas, six years before retirement, I would not have continued such work until the required age.
Turning now a little to politics and workers life, I remain persuaded that president Mitterand was elected not because of a large victory of the Left Wing as was pretended but rather only because of future old workers who did not want themselves to work up to 65 years of age. When one has started at the age of 17 in a factory these reasons are perfectly understandable. The difference in votes was not great actually (about 3%) and the influence of those condemned to constant (“forced”) work from the early age was determining. No political man or politologue ever spoke of this.
Herr Doktor took advantage of this election to leave his job and retire as he had been a salaried employee for ten years, as required, in addition to a professional life of the liberal (independent) type complicated a lot by Hitler’s racism. Although a bit thrifty he nevertheless paid me a coffee once !
If this chapter can be terminated with high politics I would say that the fact that in 2002 the first election run was unfavorable to the then Prime Minister thereby eliminating him (by 1% only) has nothing to do with the left or right wing theories. He lost barely because one member of his own party had 10% of the votes in the first run. A few of the left wing must have regretted not to have switched off the revival devices during the coma of said member when he became sick months before, following an allergy under anaesthesia.
Of course this cruel observation is false since not anybody is an official politologue.
Completing an essay proposed recently during the high school examination of this year, one may say that politics requires not only knowledge and technical methods (as proposed therein) but also much luck. Chirac cannot contredict me in this respect.
I had succeeded in finding a less chemical activity; we were dealing with electric apparatuses without of course knowing anything of electricity.
My chief, very surprised at someone asking for this extremeness, replied by the usual argumentation, namely, the economic circumstances being very bad they COULD NOT give any increase of salary, the more so because if they supplemented my income the others would know (not by me !) and he would be forced to do the same to them. As I was insisting that I could not remain without ambition all my life and to get rid of me he said he needed electronicians. It was normal and clever to so reply in view of the complicated apparatuses which were being used more and more in the factory. They were however far from the present computers.
He was giving that advice without any risk of realization on my part as I was required to work everyday without stop and anyhow there was no technical evening or day school in the place.
Due to a newspaper advertisement I found a correspondence course to obtain a diploma of electronic sub-engineer or engineer. The school helped to make a few circuits and a radio set and thereafter would find a job (or helped to find, which is a slight difference !) at the end of the course. One cannot realize the respect for the word “engineer” on the part of a worker or a worker’s son. This is why, feeling myself unworthy of that title I subscribed to a course of sub-engineer. I would of course have also succeeded in the engineer course : it was more expensive and a bit longer.
All was based on radio lamps, the transistors appearing only at the end of the course. I welded and screwed to manufacture my radio set. I did not entirely succeed in eliminating the spurious couplings but it fulfilled its functions.
After about a year I went again to see my chief who was very surprised at my following his advice. “Unfortunately, the economical circumstances...there was no job for an electronician (he did not say : by correspondence)”.
Only one thing had to be done : leaving, but for what ? Paris ?
For someone from the Alps immigration to Paris is normal but for an inhabitant of Lorraine which received any sorts of immigrants this is not usual at all. In the primary school as children we had been informed that under our feet there was a reserve of iron mineral for 50 years but they had not thought of Mauritania and world-wide ressources.
In an advertisement I noted that they proposed a stay of wiring worker with, at the end, procurement of the famous professional certificate, in a factory near Paris in the name of Thomson-Houston. This glorious English name designates a purely French enterprise which worked above all for the State.
I therefore applied for that job so as to have means of living and look more quietly for the future. As I have enough common sense I never dared speak of my sub-engineer diploma obtained through correspondence. I got it actually by going two weeks in Paris in that school. The “employment” consisted in giving information for drafting a “curriculum vitae”. I still remember entering a cave of old books to have such curriculum reproduced by an old man but I never used it.
Upon returning to my parents’ home I waited and waited for a reply. Finally, I phoned to the Recrutement Bureau in Paris and with difficulty and reticence they told me that I was accepted as a wiring worker apprentice and upon obtaining this simple piece of information I resigned from the factory after six years of presence. Obviously this was not very cautious in view of my empty purse.
My mother encouraged me saying that I would not do anything worthwhile in that region. She said they would not laugh so often as they would no longer hear me imitate the voices and the singers but that this decision was real life. It is likely that I could have started an “artistic” career in that domain if the place, the ambiance, my defective sight and the family possibilities had been different.
Manual worker’s life is such that when I asked for recovering little pocket money after six years of wages integrally given to my parents they replied that not much remained, which shows how little pay my father had.
I obtained from my mother a small sum to permit me to survive for one month.
At about the age of 23 I left home with all possible wishes from my little dear family and I presented myself to the mentioned famous firm. I always thought later that they told me to come for that stay of wiring worker without great conviction and were surprised at my arrival for taking that wretched job from such a far away place.
The fact remains that I clung thereto after having burnt all my vessels. I remember the factory in Gennevilliers where I rented a room in a hotel for a few nights. They used my bed when I was at work, it was of course a horrorful flea bed and fortunately the factory sent us to Bagneux in the South of Paris. Among my collegues there was one with whom I was more friendly and thanks to his mother who worked as a domestic in a lady’s home in Paris I could rent a room in the 17th district. I was to remain there for nine years in 9 m2, with the toilet on the balcony outside for several such rooms. It was very difficult even with money to find anything else at that period.
Despite my lack of extravagances in the necessary expenses I had to wait for my wages before paying the rent at the last minute. Strangely enough the owner, a lady, was envious of her domestic because “she received” a pay as if the latter would work for pleasure ! Mystery of bougeoisie ! This was my first contact with the 17th and 16th districts of Paris.
This wiring work period of an “ignored” sub-engineer was difficult but I had no choice. What handicapped me the most is obviously my sight since the problem was to make rigid wires straight according to a rapid method. My master pieces were hardly acceptable within the limits and I constantly suspected they would fire me. Fortunately I was a champion for making supple wire assemblies i.e. the “combs” since the significant performance was rapidity and precision rather than presentation. Willingly or reluctantly they granted me the famous certificate and I could be employed into that system.
The following year I managed to be transferred to a technical service as a technical agent number one for research. An enormous step had been covered : passing from a stupid state to a state of slight reflection.
We worked above all for the army trying to manufacture apparatuses to stand severe conditions. I have never seen a research succeed, a lot of money was spent but they always changed the objects of research. In this factory, nice for all that (nothing to do with de Wendel factory and the countryside), I remained six years as in the metallurgical site.
When diplomas are absent you have to change jobs to “improve” your status. An opportunity occurred to travel to Great britain for one year as a sub-engineer to study computers and later return to France in order to maintain these monsters.
The ancestor (dinosaurus) of the computer I am typing on now required a entire vast room with thousands of lamps (no transistors) and consequential noise for cooling the lamps and vibrations. In order to travel to England I would have done anything (for instance paying the room in France when I was absent, which I did) but when I saw the “baby” I thought at once that I should be freed from such contract of one year which had to be followed by several years of maintenance with a client.
The stay in England pleased me because I like the unexpected and contrary to many people I love what is English, the language and the humans. As a matter of fact, nothing can make me forget Churchill (half American) and the English people’s behavior during the war. This standing up for them deprives me of any objectivity. But it does not make me change in this respect. The English cooking was delicious the first week since we went into a castle to be presented to the company called International Computers and Tabulators (ICT). Thereafter we travelled to distant suburbs at sixty kilometers from London called Hitchin and Stevenage (Hertfordshire).
Lodging was provided at a landlady’s and her father of 99 and the food was...terrible. I remember my Vietnamese colleague who arrived at a younger woman’s home. She was, let say, still less interested by cooking than my landlady. The first evening he found three dry meat patties. Since those of his race like flavorsome dishes the shock was rough but he was hungry and so ate two patties. Thinking that she had offered too much the next day she placed two patties : he took one of them but did not wait for the third day to clear off and request his usual Asiatic wife to come to him.
As to my fate, I appreciated fish and chips more than I deserved. As to the breakfast obligatorily with eggs and bacon this is good at the beginning but such routine ends up in completely blocking the individual.
If several recipes can be used to cook an egg or anything else an old English lady unmistakingly uses the quickest to be able to play whist with her friends. In the factory there was a canteen; everybody knows that in France a factory canteen is not the top. At that period in France we were making contests in our canteen to check who could eat more French fries. An English canteen for a Frenchman is literally indescribable. The image that comes up to my mind is that of a pimply Englishman of about 35 who was pouring himself a glassful of black sauce from a huge two-liters pitcher.
Finally, after two days and nearly to the end of the sojourn at lunch time I made do with Danish sausage and Scandinavian smoked salmon which were cheap and good.
The work simply consisted in learning the structure and the operation of the computers of that period. We had to stay for one year and then could spare money because we were paid in France and they had to support us free in that Country.
We went to France two or three times by propeller planes during week-ends.
After a year one of us went to Lille, the other to Strasbourg and the third to the South. I succeeded in reserving Paris for myself near my domicile, my 9 m2.
The enormous lamp fitted machine with cooling fans released torrid heat and since it was situated on the third floor, where the insurance company renting it was, vibrations and noise caused the lights to fall from the ceiling of the other floors and provoked wide-ranging protests.
When the machine broke down what relief for the people there and myself, the responsible for its good operation ! I would have given much so that silence remained but I had to repair it i.e. measuring, replacing, welding and so on... Transistors and miniaturization had just been born but not weaned yet.
After a short period I tried to find a method of escaping that hell. Lenses probably were more sensitive to noise vibrations. Being a son of the 16th district’s residents I would not have done this one-year trip under these conditions but would have taken advantage of father’s money to make a study trip. The extreme contract we had signed stated that in case of resignation we should pay all what was given us as wages for one year; no use to say that this was impossible for me.
Noise obsessed me, vibrations tired me terribly and sleep eluded me until late in the night.
A work not far from the residence does not permit one to make a break; the time spared for not having to travel for two hours as people from the city do generally does not permit to think to something else than recent work and relativize the problems. I hated the proximity of work and domicile.
There were not many methods to break this contract : I had to find a specialist (psychiatrist or other) who would declare that I was unfit to standing noise, heat and vibrations, which was probably very true in view of my eyes corrected by hard lenses and fragilized by the keratoconus. I found an old lady psychiatrist who listened to me in a contradictory way but ended up the examination by granting to me a certificate of unfitness for such work. It was sufficient to let her believe that I was sexually very belated or hopeless. The eye plague was nothing for her and having never been in a factory environment she could not understand what a noisy and torrid situation implies.
Therefore I resigned by producing such certificate but they did not agree and insisted upon my reimbursing all the money spent in England. Fortunately for me they were in such a hurry to send us to England that they neglected the required medical examination before recrutement ! Then they could not argue that I was FIT for that job at the origin of the stay. Phew !
Relieved and freed for the first time in my life I spent a few days questioning myself to decide what I should do, as I could survive a few months without working.
A period of about six months followed, during which I tried to prove that I could manage by using the languages. Since I had some money I went to an adult school in Heidelberg, Germany (the Goethe Institut, I believe) to recover what I previously wanted to forget from the German language and improve conversation.
As I said before one cannot learn a language without at least tolerating those who speak it. Time had passed, I was a little less vindicative in respect to the Germans.
In the afternoon or the evening I was vaguely a waiter in an obscure smoky cellar night club. With my too sensitive eyes, I considered to be rotten, and the unadapted lenses, I had difficulties finding my way around. Moreover, the clients, a few young people, were speaking a sort of slang to disconcert the foreigner.
I remember that in such country considered to be very clean (at least its reputation abroad) they washed all glasses, in a repetitive way, in the same bucket filled with the initial water, without running water. This was true for that cellar of course, not for all. It was a time for it.
I also worked for six months with the American Army, repairing apparatuses but they were speaking American only and at 80% were using only the words “fuck” and “fucking”. This was not a high education in German.
Upon returning to Paris without money and without much more progress in German, I had to decide for work because the reserves were slim. I neglect a short period during which I paid for “current conversation course in Russian by Russian highly qualified professors” in a sort of castle where I was the only student and the professor, a student in Russian, knew less than me. I ran away at once and I needed about one year to be paid back but I did not abandon the case.
The assessment of the situation was not very positive but I had changed my mind.
By studying the advertisements I found a job of technical salesman in a near southern suburb. They wanted to sell apparatuses abroad, an export job at a high level (travels by planes, and so on). They were probably all diplomated engineers and I felt more than weak and full of awful complexes as a sub-engineer having a diploma obtained by correspondence.
Since, they said, I had a strange glance because of my lenses (?) which, let us remember, had the purpose in these ancient times to shape up the eyes instead of adapting themselves thereto, they advised me energetically to wear a pair of spectacles (therefore a sort of wig !) to look more “commercial”. It was starting well !
They waited for the last day of the three months test period to fire me, declaring that I was only capable of translating, which perhaps was true.
A little later, confident in my capacity of technical salesman I entered what they called “a fine” hall filled entirely with people and phone noise where my role was especially to make wait clients, who had ordered a switch or a little component from America. Since I was of their opinion that it was a little long to wait for it I was not long clearing off.
Finally, I read an advertisement relating to a Private Patent Agency, a sort of activity I did not know at all. As I am not the only one in this respect please be informed that they invent nothing there but that as in a notary public’s office they deal with law questions relative to recording descriptions of inventions but also receive inventors. Therefore they help them to describe the invention and the technical questions relating thereto. Written languages are indispensable and without spoken and written English you are of no use.
I was received by a little old man having two sons in the business, who was interested and immediately named me “engineer” (called “home engineer”= without diploma). The fat son accepted me with reluctance but the slim one, very hypocrite, thought that father reduced his benefits by recruting me.
The mother as the “chief” of the employees was spending her time firing and recruting secretaries and in harmony with both of her sons wanted to push off grandpa as being senile. I can affirm he was not.
In this Office with 25 persons I translated into French and was sending letters abroad for the proceedings. This was exactly what I had longed for i.e. languages and engineering were required. I always regretted having missed years before starting in this domain. Translation into French, generally from English or German has the purpose of filing a French text with the French Patent Office. As a matter of fact, the inventor through International Convention has one year available within which to decide, starting from the first filing, to file abroad while keeping the original date.
The little old man was actually favored by an Official from Eastern Germany he had known before the war and had exclusive filing for all patent applications as filed in the Eastern Germany. The purpose of a patent is to fight infringers; one must therefore help the inventor in his attempts to file a law suit. A lawyer receives the technical arguments and adds a legal sauce thereto, namely, inventive merit and so on. You must have some knowledge of the law but this can be learnt.
My little old man liked me much but under the family pressure fired me the day before Christmas...and took me back the next Monday. Never seen anything like that anywhere else ! I remained about six more months there but promised myself to find a job in that branch : the matter pleased me.
To avoid another situation with a trinity of father, mother and sons I retained three names, the most noticeable ones, in the professional list of the phone directory and wrote three letters of application. All of them replied.
The first Office comprised one individual only with a secretary; I paid a visit but there was no follow-up from me.
The second Office was effectively the second larger enterprise of Paris in this business. It was very structured with chiefs of department and so on. They probably wanted a diplomated engineer and the general impression did not please me.
The third Office was the first for the volume of business; they were very keen on foreign countries. I was received by a tall old man whose welcome was unforgettable because of his kindness. He offered me, a poor hopeless young man, the double of my previous wages as is done in a movies and of course I entered his firm immediately.
They entrusted me with all the foreign correspondence (with America especially) under the direction of a former German who went very young to England in 1936 under the influence of Hitler’s theories, then to Australia in a concentration camp during the war as a cumbersome foreigner, thereafter to Los Angeles for studying chemistry and finally to France as the husband of a French girl, a nurse. I was getting on very well with Herr Doktor.
The son of the boss, a partner in the firm, told me at the beginning:”We are going to “take tongue”, which probably means :”We are going to talk” but I spoke to him hardly a few words since I was depending on the other partner. The latter, born in Ajaccio (= lying), Corsica, was and is probably still now a genius in patent matters and an undefatigable worker due to hypermetropia and hyperthyroidism.
He was not long before quarreling with the old man’s son (in the meantime the father, very regretted, had died) and founded his own firm with the other older partner.
I stayed with him. The remainder of my activity in his firm was voluminous and varied but has no significance for the rest of this story.
Of course, not having any valuable diploma I was the least paid among my colleagues of the same degree but was happy with that work and ambiance.
When I retired having reached the age of 60 the day of the beginning of the Gulf War started by Bush senior (Tempest of the Desert) the boss told me between other things that I should have done much more efforts as regards the legal domain. This is a specific boss remark. At the beginning I had so much work to do that I was dictating in English to three secretaries and holidays of fourteen consecutive days during which Herr doktor replaced me for the urgencies required three or four months to cope with the delay in the business. How could I have done more ?
At least at the Office I was not doing more, because at home I translated an enormous amount of technical texts into English since English is the only communication language admitted, in Japan and elsewhere in the world. Even in Italy they write to us in English ! I had fixed a price and was paid so much per hundred words, the wording being typed with an old typewriter and corrected with erasing liquid and thereafter with a primitive computer that could erase and transpose sentences, after recording the wording from a tape recorder.
Recording a vocal translation of a text to be translated and typed has the advantage of not forgetting anything in the translation because if one types as he reads the original text the sentence is not encompassed completely enough and he may miss something. Moreover, the style not being the same in all languages (the order of the words) you must embrace and seize everything before translating. Finally, the typing being a nightmare for me who never could type without watching the keys, this step was less hard after recording.
Therefore I typed these texts, having the sound of the tape recorder in the ears and for lack of place a saraband of movable and noisy kids and adults around me. Concentration of the typist was high !
Patents should not include any errors of language or substance as they are legal books as made by an editor. We had correctors since errors are unavoidable. There is no insurance for errors.
This work being tiring enough for an individual of the normal type with a good sight, it is presumed easily that for somebody equipped with a double keratoconus it was destructive, apart from the fact that the work suited me completely. Without having had the benefit of a double grafting on the corneas, six years before retirement, I would not have continued such work until the required age.
Turning now a little to politics and workers life, I remain persuaded that president Mitterand was elected not because of a large victory of the Left Wing as was pretended but rather only because of future old workers who did not want themselves to work up to 65 years of age. When one has started at the age of 17 in a factory these reasons are perfectly understandable. The difference in votes was not great actually (about 3%) and the influence of those condemned to constant (“forced”) work from the early age was determining. No political man or politologue ever spoke of this.
Herr Doktor took advantage of this election to leave his job and retire as he had been a salaried employee for ten years, as required, in addition to a professional life of the liberal (independent) type complicated a lot by Hitler’s racism. Although a bit thrifty he nevertheless paid me a coffee once !
If this chapter can be terminated with high politics I would say that the fact that in 2002 the first election run was unfavorable to the then Prime Minister thereby eliminating him (by 1% only) has nothing to do with the left or right wing theories. He lost barely because one member of his own party had 10% of the votes in the first run. A few of the left wing must have regretted not to have switched off the revival devices during the coma of said member when he became sick months before, following an allergy under anaesthesia.
Of course this cruel observation is false since not anybody is an official politologue.
Completing an essay proposed recently during the high school examination of this year, one may say that politics requires not only knowledge and technical methods (as proposed therein) but also much luck. Chirac cannot contredict me in this respect.
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