Dear Counterfeiters,

We’ve read Part Three, Chapters 1-6 of The Counterfeiters – what are your thoughts? Please do share your impressions in a comment below. Here are mine:

Leave a comment

In this section, when Olivier meets Bernard, Bernard has just finished an exam in which he had to write an essay discussing these lines from La Fontaine:

Papillon du Parnasse, et semblable aux abeilles
À qui le bon Platon compare nos merveilles,
Je suis chose légére et vole à tout sujet,
Je vais de fleur en fleur et d’objet en objet.

These lines come from Fontaine’s ‘Address to Madame de La Sablière’ (1684) and translate as follows:

Butterfly of Parnassus, like the bees
To whom great Plato compares our wonders,
I am a fickle thing and fly to every subject,
I flit from flower to flower and object to object.

Jean de la Fontaine was a seventeenth-century poet, best remembered for his animal fables such as ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’, ‘The Fox and the Grapes’ and ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’.

He wrote twelve books of fables, including such lesser known examples as ‘The Rat Who Retired from the World’, ‘The Crayfish and Her Daughter’ and ‘The Elephant and Jupiter’s Monkey’.

He promoted his own reputation as a scatterbrained dilettante, the ‘Butterfly of Parnassus’ – Parnassus being the mountain home of the Greek muses. For example, he had one son with his wife, with whom he was later estranged, and he was wholly uninvolved in his son’s upbringing. ‘Ah yes,’ he is said to have remarked, when he was introduced to the grown-up boy, ‘I thought I had seen him somewhere.’

The extract in Bernard’s exam comes from the poem that La Fontaine read, in honour of his patron Marguerite de la Sablière, as part of his induction to the prestigious Académie Française in 1684. The poem continues:

With many pleasures I mix a little glory.
I would perhaps climb higher in the temple of Memory,
If in a single genre I had spent my days;
But, alas! I am as fickle in verse as in love.

I suspect Gide was drawn to these lines because they are themselves counterfeit, a form of dissembling: La Fontaine poses as a flighty butterfly, trying his hand first at one thing, then another, never taking himself seriously, flitting from project to project – and yet his form betrays his content, because his writing immaculate. He has written beautifully crafted verse that is clearly the result of deep talent and dedicated craft.

Olivier’s impromptu interpretation of the lines is as follows:

I should have said that La Fontaine, in painting himself, had painted the portrait of the artist – of the man who consents to take merely the outside of things, their surface, their bloom. Then I should have contrasted with that the portrait of the scholar, the seeker, the man who goes deep into things, and I should have shown that while the scholar seeks, the artist finds; that the man who goes deep, gets stuck, the man who gets stuck, gets sunk – up to his eyes and over them; that the truth is the appearance of things, that their secret is their form and that what is deepest in man is his skin.

Olivier is parroting the second-hand views of the Comte de Passavant, so we can assume that Gide does not approve of this interpretation.

As we saw last week, this novel seems to be about the difference between reality and the artist’s attempt to portray that reality. Gide – or at least Édouard, his cipher – would probably argue that the artist is a necessarily a scholar and a seeker too. Truth is not appearance but an understanding of the reality that lies behind appearances.

A true artist is always a butterfly, absorbing everything upon which their attention lights, finding nectar everywhere and transforming it.

This week we’re reading Part Three, Chapters 7-13. I look forward to discussing with you next Friday 6th June.

Share

Here are links to our previous The Counterfeiters posts:

• The Schedule (11 April)

• André Gide (21 April)

• 0. Le Jardin du Luxembourg (2 May)

• 1. Part One, Chapters 1-9 – and Gide’s Journals (9 May)

• 2. Part One, Chapters 10-18 – and Cocteau’s reviews (16 May)

• 3. Part Two, Chapters 1-7 – and Edouard’s Theory of the Novel (23 May)

And if you’re not reading The Counterfeiters with us, remember you can choose to opt out of our conversation. Just follow this link to your settings and, under Notifications, slide the toggle next to ‘The Counterfeiters’. A grey toggle means you will not receive emails relating to this title.