Everything's cuter when it's French, part 3

I sincerely regret never having learned French, or any language in which one can actually carry on a conversation (Latin mass doesn't count!). In four years of high school German all I learned was the Chicken Dance. I had one of those teachers who is so well-liked, so crazy-charismatic that no one seemed to notice or care that by senior year we were still translating the same passage about Uwe going for a walk gleich um die ecke that we'd first encountered as freshmen. I'm not at all sorry about the years I dedicated to Latin (and medieval Latin and Middle English and Old English), but it would be nice just to be able to read some of the adorable French books I buy. Here's hoping that by leaving adorable French dictionaries (en couleurs!) lying around, my kids will somehow absorb the language.

Everything's cuter when it's French, part 2

If you say it in French, aspiring to be the "perfect secretary" doesn't seem half bad. Imagine the outfits a parfait secretaire must wear! Doubtless entire chapters are devoted to the art of scarf-knotting but I can't read them because, you know, they're in French. Still, I think this book was worth a dollar just for its flashy cover design.

The French also manage to make umbrella sales seem like a desirable vocation.

Everything's cuter when it's French, part 1

In honor of the Oscar sweep of The Artist, a movie I totally loved, I'm going to devote the next few days to a few French things I have lying about, starting with this series of French classics published by Hachette's Le Livre de Poche (Pocket Books): L'espoir by Andre Malraux, Graziella by Lamartine, Eugénie Grandet by Balzac, La Jument Verte by Marcel Aymé, Claudine a l'Ecole by Willy et Colette, and L'Or by Blaise Cendrars. I initially passed them up at my favorite Goodwill because they seemed a little overpriced for ex-library books, not to mention in French and I don't speak French. But I returned several days later, relieved to find them still there as I'd been obsessing about their covers all week. I can't find a date on any of them, but they've got to have been published in the time of midcentury awesomeness, no?

I came to my Francophilia somewhat late in life; I suppose it sprang from working for the same French company on two separate occasions but really that could have just as easily gone the other way. Repeated viewings of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg helped, as did actually going to Paris on someone else's seemingly limitless expense account. I was raised an Anglophile by Anglophile parents who'd met and married in England (though they are not British) and was fed a steady diet of teatimes, Upstairs Downstairs, Forsyte Saga, Monty Python and all things Austen. What I love about England is the landscape, music, pints, accents and literature. But the French have them on design, food, Sancerre, fashion (apologies to Vivienne Westwood, Paul Smith) and just the ability to make everything look cuter, like, you know, sailor shirts. Or matchbooks. Or book covers. If I read/spoke French, it's possible I'd even prefer their literature, though it seems heretical to say so. But since I've read all my Flaubert, Stendahl, Balzac, Zola, in translation, I can never be sure.

Jean Dujardin's Villain Auditions from Jean Dujardin

Did the French invent Star Wars?

Like most sentient creatures who were born when I was born, I have a certain powerful regard for the Star Wars trilogy. Note I say "trilogy"—I saw the later three "prequels" and consider them...well, abominations would suggest that I'm more of a Star Wars fan than I actually am, but they were lame. Except for the flying Yoda part. And I might have just liked that because I saw the premiere of that film (I don't even know which one it was) at the Ziegfeld in NYC and the audience was just SO INTO IT, that it was hard not to get swept away by the euphoria of the moment. The truth is that when I was 9 or so, I took the very unpopular position that Close Encounters of the Third Kind was better than Star Wars. Even then I liked to be contrary about movies.

Enough disclaimers.

No, wait—one more. I have daughters, not sons, and thus have not been afflicted by any of the Clone Wars/Star Wars cartoon spinoffs and all their expensive Lego incarnations. I don't have to read Star Wars bedtime stories or make beds with Star-Wars-for-Pottery-Barn sheets. Parents of boys could smugly point out that they've been spared the horrors of Disney Princesses, Barbies, Strawberry Shortcake et al—fair enough. But my kids' taste is slightly off the beaten path, so I too have been (mostly) spared from having to read too many Barbie books (one could argue that even one Barbie book is too many but if nothing else, parenthood increases one's tolerance for just about everything).

The point is I have no dog in this fight. If the seeds of Star Wars can be found in some Lefty French comix, I've got no quarrel with that.

L'Empire Des Mille Planetes ("Empire of a Thousand Planets") is the second volume of a French comic book series Valerian and Laureline created by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mezieres. I paid a dollar for this hardback published in 1971 and it seems like kind of a score, a rare edition of a series superpopular among devotees of time-traveling space operas—a series that's also credited with inspiring not only the Star Wars movies (apparently Valerian-reading Frenchies were among the film's designers) but The Fifth Element, Conan the Barbarian and Avatar. The books were published in many languages, including English, but my edition is French and I don't read French so anything I know about this I know from wikipedia (and therefore it is unassailably true). Unfortunately, I neglected to scan the scene most often cited as proof that George Lucas and his French henchmen ripped off the comic, when the Han Solo-ish anti-hero Valerian is encased in plastic during an interrogation, much like studly wiseacre Han Solo gets the carbon treatment at the end of Empire Strikes Back. (If anyone cares, I'll add it later.) But even I can see that the airships look an awful lot like all those, uh, ones in Star Wars, whatever they're called. Anyway, you know an estate sale has done its job if it's raised your awareness of an obscure pop-culture controversy. George Lucas ripped off the French? Mon dieu!