Motus Mentis

I’ve accumulated an awful lot of books over the past half-century: I can never part with them, and add several each week, it seems. I’ve got lots and lots of books about history and philosophy and science, but there are hundreds of odder ones as well — and one that popped off the shelf into my hand the other day fits that description nicely. It’s just the sort of thing we elitist Northeastern intellectual snobs enjoy: highbrow “inside” humor of a shamelessly Eurocentric sort.

The book is called Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames, by one Luis d’Antin van Rooten. It purports to be a scholarly treatment of some previously undiscovered poetry. The foreword begins:

To detail the exact manner by which “The d’Antin Mss. Mots’ dHeures: Gousses, Rames” came to my hand would be too tedious and of but little moment here. Suffice it to say these curious verses were part of the meagre possessions of one François Charles Fernand d’Antin, retired school teacher, who died at the age of ninety-three in January of the Year of Our Lord, 1950, while marking papers. Some time later, as the only living relative of the deceased, I received his personal effects through the kind offices of Maître Théophile Gustave Pol Ploin, Notaire, of Aix-en-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône, France.

The pitiful little packet remitted to me included a ribbon-tied bundle of love letters from one Luisa Contempré, soprano, who died of tuberculosis while “en tournée” in Athens, Greece; a holograph of Napoleon III, some postcards marked “Vues de Naples et Pompéi”; and a prescription for falling hair. All these I consigned to the eternal discretion of my fireplace. An excellent recipe for turbot in saffron found welcome in my kitchen archives, and the thin sheaf of fragmentary poems here presented soon became the object of intriguing study and speculation.

What are they? Who wrote them? When? These are just a few of the many questions they evoke.

Well! What have we here, indeed? If you have any French, you will find, as you read them, that they have a familiar ring. Here is a sample, with annotation by the author:

Lit-elle messe, moffette,*
Satan ne te fête,
Et digne somme couers et nouez.
À longue qu’aime est-ce pailles d’Eure,
Et ne Satan bise ailleurs
Et ne fredonne messe. Moffette, ah, ouais!**

* Moffette: Noxious exhalations formed in underground galleries or mines.

** This little fragment is a moral precept addressed to a young girl. She is advised to go to mass even under the most adverse conditions in order to confound Satan and keep her heart pure until the knot (marriage) is tied. She is warned against long engagements and to stay out of hayfields, be they as lush and lovely as the Eure valley, for Satan will not be off spoiling crops elsewhere. She must not mumble at mass, or the consequences will make the noxious fumes of earth seem trivial.

Here’s one more:

Myriades évitent lames,
Et nuisent feux lissses.* Où asseoit et sonne haut.**
En aubrevoir dette mairie ointe
Deux lames azures d’Iago.***

* That thousands avoided the sword and spoiled smooth flames is an obvious reference to the Inquisition.

** Here choir stalls are indicated, if the inference above is accepted.

*** To satisfy debts (spiritual?), the mayoralty anoints two blue steel blades of Iago. Without a doubt, Santiago, patron of Spain, is meant. The exact relationship of the Inquisition to the civil courts has long been a matter of conjecture and study. In this case exoneration by a civil authority not only indicates close association between the secular and lay justices, but also hints that the defendant was a powerful and important personage.

You get the idea by now, I hope. This is about as far into a cheek as a human tongue can go.