Jacques Dutronc and the Carthaginian Sunrise – Meanderings (I)

In a more prescriptive period of my life I'd occasionally ask people whether or not they preferred a sunrise or a sunset.  Fancying myself as a psychologist I would then ascribe – sometimes privately, occasionally openly – the tag of optimist to those who favoured sunrises, and pessimist to those who valued the setting sun.  Of course, with more experience of life, and of sunsets and sunrises, I look back and decide that the young Mr Barlow was prone to pretentious and affected nonsense, and that his psychology was probably best served with chips, i.e. cod. 

I found myself recalling this youthful quirk after reading the French literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve's trashing of the novel that I'd just finished, Flaubert's impossibly rich and quite magnificent Salammbô.  Amongst many other things in the novel, Sainte-Beuve took issue with one of Flaubert's sunrises.  What seemed to bother him was that it was all rather generic and a poor use of the imagination: the kind of sunrise against a city coming to life that could be found anywhere, such as, say, Athens and the Acropolis: "The panorama of Carthage seen from the terrace of Hamilcar is a landscape of the same school."

J M W Turner's The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (1817)

The critic then took his thoughts off in another direction, and compared Flaubert's description of the actions that take place against the sunrise as something that resembled those images conjured up in a popular song, one called 'Paris à cinq heures du matin'.

After that remark, not only was I still blushing at my younger self, I was also now utterly discombobulated that my favourite French song, Jacques Dutronc's ode to Paris waking up, had anachronistically found its way into a nineteenth-century literary squabble.  I gathered my faculties and did some research.  It turned out that Dutronc's song 'Il est cinq heures, Paris s'éveille' is based upon an 1802 song by the French songwriter Marc-Antoine Madeleine Désaugiers, with Dutronc and his song-writing partner updating the earlier lyrics to reflect Paris in 1969: one replete with strippers, lovers, erect obelisks, bakers making bastards, and the modernised railway stations that are akin to dead pieces of meat (very Charles Baudelaire): 

Et sur le boulevard Montparnasse

La gare n'est plus qu'une carcasse.

It is a lethally catchy song, fizzed along by what should really be the most irritating flute riff ever.  Yet it never palls.  I've said it before, the greatest pop music is never throwaway.  In fact, it was pop music and another insanely catchy song that led me to Jacques Dutronc in the first place.  If the name sounds familiar, it's almost certainly because you've heard it in Cornershop's masterpiece 'Brimful of Asha' where Jacques Dutronc is coupled with the [Marc] Bolan Boogie.  Perfect pop bedfellows, no doubt about that!    

 Jacques Dutronc: "Baudelaire, hold my Absinthe!" 

This all made me glad of Saint-Beuve's churlishness over Flaubert's sunrise, even if he is quite wrong about the sunrise, and about Salammbô as a whole.  Largely neglected in English translations, it is a historical novel that concerns the aftermath of the First Punic War.  Carthage, defeated by Rome, is now under siege by the unpaid and neglected mercenaries that previously fought for them.  There is a romance – of a tenuous, twisted sort – between Matho the leader of the Mercenaries and Salammbô, the probably fictional daughter of Hamilcar (who in turn is Hannibal's dad).  And there are battles, heartbreaking cruelties to elephants, cannibalism, child-sacrifice, and improbable exits and entrances involving aqueducts.  

Its chief glory is an abundant detail and description.  The obsessive research that Flaubert puts into this book is breathtaking.  The author scoured hundreds of volumes on Carthage concerning everything from the vast array of weapons that were used in battles and sieges (including the 'scorpion' that eventually finds its way into Game of Thrones), to Punic cookery and medicinal books that outline dishes and remedies such as 'a ptisan made of the ashes of a weasel and asparagus boiled in vinegar', or, 'hedgehogs with garum, fried grasshoppers and preserved dormice'.  Allied with Flaubert's insistence on visiting the region's ruins and surroundings twice, the second time because he decided that his first draft was awful, is illustrative of the Frenchman at his most obsessive.  Some of his responses to Sainte-Beuve's criticisms, particularly that concerning some of the novel's incredibly singular details, illustrate this painstaking research.  Sainte-Beuve declares ridiculous Salammbô's use of crushed fly-legs as eyeliner:

"She tinged the inside of her hands with Lawsonia, spread vermilion upon her cheeks, and antimony along the edge of her eyelids, and lengthened her eyebrows with a mixture of gum, musk, ebony, and crushed legs of flies." 

How can Flaubert possibly know that, remarks Sainte-Beuve, and how on earth can we take seriously blue stones on the desert floor that are distinguishable by starlight?  Flaubert's answer to the latter is sharp:

"If I put the word 'blue' before 'stones' it is, believe me, because 'blue' is the proper word; and be equally assured that the colour of stones can be very well distinguished by starlight. Question all travellers in the East on this point, or go there yourself and see." 

A brimful of Salammbô on the 45

My favourite passage in the book, though, has got to be Flaubert's description of Salammbô's python, the health of which provides vital auguries:

"Salammbô’s serpent had several times already refused the four live sparrows which were offered to it at the full moon and at every new moon. Its handsome skin, covered like the firmament with golden spots upon a perfectly black ground, was now yellow, relaxed, wrinkled, and too large for its body. A cottony mouldiness extended round its head; and in the corners of its eyelids might be seen little red specks which appeared to move. Salammbô would approach its silver-wire basket from time to time, and would draw aside the purple curtains, the lotus leaves, and the bird's down; but it was continually rolled up upon itself, more motionless than a withered bind-weed; and from looking at it she at last came to feel a kind of spiral within her heart, another serpent, as it were, mounting up to her throat by degrees and strangling her."

   

Sainte-Beuve found the python a vulgar and euphemistic substitute for the heroine's forthcoming visit to Matho's tent. I found the passage as glorious as Flaubert's sunrises and sunsets. 

Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow 

Which brings us, meandering, back to where we started.  Sunsets or sunrises?  It is a question as absurd as the one that Buddy poses to Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar: "Where would you like to live … in the town or in the country?"  Esther's answer - skewering both myself and those ridiculous Facebook quizzes that can supposedly assess your character through a few random choices - of not wanting to choose between town or country is more or less the answer to 'sunset or sunrise?'  It is a ridiculous choice and one that doesn't reveal a single pertinent thing about the person who answers it.  My own answer used to be 'sunset', but rereading the passage in which Flaubert describes the sun rising over Carthage, reveals just how silly the question is: 

"They were on the terrace. A huge mass of shadow stretched before them, appearing as if it contained vague accumulations, like the gigantic billows of a black and petrified ocean.  But a luminous bar rose towards the East; far below, on the left, the canals of Megara were beginning to stripe the verdure of the gardens with their windings of white. The conical roofs of the heptagonal temples, the staircases, terraces, and ramparts were being carved by degrees upon the paleness of the dawn; and a girdle of white foam rocked around the Carthaginian peninsula, while the emerald sea appeared as if it were curdled in the freshness of the morning. Then as the rosy sky grew larger, the lofty houses, bending over the sloping soil, reared and massed themselves like a herd of black goats coming down from the mountains. The deserted streets lengthened; the palm-trees that topped the walls here and there were motionless; the brimming cisterns seemed like silver bucklers lost in the courts; the beacon on the promontory of Hermaeum was beginning to grow pale. The horses of Eschmoun, on the very summit of the Acropolis in the cypress wood, feeling that the light was coming, placed their hoofs on the marble parapet, and neighed towards the sun [...] Everything stirred in a diffusion of red, for the god, as if he were rending himself, now poured full-rayed upon Carthage the golden rain of his veins. The beaks of the galleys sparkled, the roof of Khamon appeared to be all in flames, while far within the temples, whose doors were opening, glimmerings of light could be seen. Large chariots, arriving from the country, rolled their wheels over the flagstones in the streets. Dromedaries, baggage-laden, came down the ramps. Money-changers raised the pent-houses of their shops at the cross ways, storks took to flight, white sails fluttered. In the wood of Tanith might be heard the tabourines of the sacred courtesans, and the furnaces for baking the clay coffins were beginning to smoke on the Mappalian point."    

J M W Turner's The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815)

Finally, and turning our attention - meandering once more - to the two majestic Turner paintings that accompany this piece - the first one illustrating the decline of Carthage with a sunset, the second the ascent of Carthage with a sunrise - I wonder if the artist is intentionally throwing geography to the wind, or at least in the wrong direction.  Carthage faced the east, or allowing for leeway, possibly the north east.  Turner's painting of the decline, the one featuring a sunset then, is flawed.  Does it matter?  If you are an ancient sailor about to embark, yes; if you are a fan of sunsets and sunrises and great art, less so.