Vous l'avez voulu, Georges ...
John Dean
voulu, Georges Danton, vous l'avez voulu' drifted into my consciousness
recently. I did a little Googling and it seems the proper phrase refers to
Georges Dandin (eponymous hero of a Moliere play with which I am
unfamiliar).
So whence Danton into my febrile imagination?
The only reference I can find to Danton in Google in this phrase is in pages
like :
http://www.imwerden.de/pdf/fowles_magus.pdf
(Warning! This is a large page in pdf format and almost entirely in cyrillic
script and (I think) in Russian)
It seems to be a translation of John Fowles' ''The Magus'' (of which I no
longer have a copy (or, if I do, I don't know where in the house it is))
So, is that where I found the 'Georges Danton' reference? Has anyone else
heard 'Georges Danton' replacing 'Georges Dandin' in any other context?
Does anyone have 'The Magus' and are you able to tell me in what way Fowles
uses the phrase? Is he joking, is he illustrating the literary ignorance of
a character (commensurate, obviously, with my own) or what?
It seems to occur early in the novel, perhaps Chapter One.
--
John Dean
Oxford
De-frag to reply
rzed
Nearly at the end. The narrator has resigned from a boring teaching
post at a minor public school in East Anglia. The headmaster speaks
the line as you have it. The next paragraph reads (in its entirety):
The misquotation was typical.
Fowles may be a skilled writer, and for all I know this was his
masterwork, but when I read his stuff, I feel as though the
atmosphere has become suffused with fungal spores and I can barely
muster the energy to rise from my chair and hurl the book across the
room until the next time.
--
rzed