While studying in children aged three to thirteen the successive kinds of respect that they accord the rules of the game of marbles, Jean Piaget, author of such remarkable works as The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), was able to identify three stages, which correspond to fundamentally different modes of conduct and follow each other in invariable succession: obedience to motor rules pure and simple, corresponding before the age of seven to preverbal motor intelligence that is basically independent of any social relation; obedience to the coercive rule, corresponding from ages seven to eleven to the unilateral respect shown by a child who receives orders without any possibility of talking back; obedience to the rational rule after age eleven, a constituted and constituent rule based on mutual respect. Insofar as the social interaction of adults tends to reproduce on a larger scale the mechanism of the game of marbles, versions of which have been played in all cultures and in all centuries, we have to recognize that only rare individuals reach the degree of awareness that marks the third stage, and that the vast majority is arrested in the second (blind submission to the evil chief, whether called Hitler or Stalin; fanatical observance of the rules in lieu of awareness of those rules; a need to be approved by the ‘grown-up,’ which in desperate cases is equivalent to what schoolchildren, with regard to the teacher, used to label a ‘brown-noser’: overachieving, tattling, etc.).
Jacques Prévert seems to have accomplished the leapfrog exploit – that is indeed the term – of passing directly from the first stage to the third; and he has not only accomplished it but has remained able to jump in both directions at will. With one foot on the id and the other on the ego, the latter entirely distinct from the false superego – or rather, as he himself says, ‘one foot on the right bank, one on the left, and the third in the behinds of imbeciles’ – he knows the shortcut that can make the entire process appear to us in a flash, shining with childhood, and that can keep the reservoir of revolt forever stocked.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Paroles, 1947.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: Paroles (selections). Blood and Feathers: Selected Poems.
Those who piously …
Those who copiously …
Those who flagulate
Those who inaugurate
Those who believe
Those who believe they believe
Those who behhhh-behhhh
Those who have feathers
Those who nibble
Those who andromachus
Those who dreadnought
Those who capital-letter
Those who sing in time
Those who brush till it shines
Those who have a pot belly
Those who lower their gaze
Those who can carve a chicken
Those who are bald inside their heads
Those who bless the mob
Those who distribute kicks in the rear
Those who stand to honour the dead
Those who bayonet …
Those who give heavy artillery to children
Those who feed children to heavy artillery
Those who float and never sink
Those who don’t think two plus two makes five
Those whom their giant wings keep from flying
Those who in dreams plant bits of broken glass in the Great Wall of China
Those who don a wolf’s face when eating lamb
Those who steal eggs and don’t have the nerve to cook them
Those who have fifteen thousand seven hundred and seventy-two feet of Mont Blanc, nine hundred and eighty-four of Eiffel Tower, a chest width of ten inches, and who are proud of it
Those who suckle at the motherland’s bosom
Those who run, steal, and avenge us – all of these and many more besides proudly entered the President’s palace, making the gravel crunch; all of them jostled and hurried, for there was going to be a great dinner of heads and everyone had donned the one he liked best.
One the head of a clay pipe, another the head of a British admiral; there were some with stink-bomb heads, Galliffet heads, animals that are sick in the head heads, Auguste Comte heads, Rouget de Lisle heads, Saint Theresa heads, headcheese heads, toe-cheese heads, monseignor heads, and milkman heads.
Some, for everyone’s amusement, carried on their shoulders charming calves’ faces, and these faces were so beautiful and so sad, with little sprigs of parsley stuck in their ears like the seaweed in rocky hollows, that no one even noticed them.
A mother with a death’s-head laughingly showed her orphan-headed daughter to an old diplomat, a family friend, who had on the head of Soleilland.
It was truly quite delightfully charming and in such impeccable taste that when the President arrived with a sumptuous Dove’s-egg head,1 the place went wild.
‘It’s easy once you’ve thought of it,’ the President says while unfolding his napkin, and in the face of so much spite and simplicity the guests can no longer contain themselves; through cardboard crocodile’s eyes a fat businessman sheds real tears of joy, a slightly smaller one gnaws at the table, beautiful women oh-so-gently massage their breasts, and the admiral, carried away by his enthusiasm, downs his flute of champagne from the wrong side, chomps the stem, and with perforated intestine dies on his feet, gripping the bulwarks of his chair and crying: ‘Women and children first!’
By a strange coincidence, the seafarer’s wife, on her maid’s advice, had that very morning made herself an astounding war-widow’s head, with two long pleats of bitterness on either side of the mouth, and two neat, grey pockets of sorrow beneath blue eyes.
Standing on her chair, she shouts at the President, loudly demanding her war-widow’s pension and the right to wear the deceased’s sextant as a brooch on her evening gown.
Having calmed down a bit, she then lets her lonely-woman’s gaze wander over the table and, seeing some herring fillets among the hors d’oeuvres, she automatically serves herself while sobbing, then serves herself some more, thinking of the admiral who didn’t eat that many of them in life even though he loved them so. Stop. It’s the chief of protocol who says that they have to stop eating, for the President is about to speak.
The President has risen. He has cracked the top of his shell with his knife so that he won’t be so warm, not quite so warm.
He speaks, and the silence is such that you can hear the flies buzzing about and you can hear them buzzing about so clearly that no one can even hear the President talking, and that’s too bad because it so happens he’s talking about flies, about their indisputable usefulness in every sphere and in the colonial sphere in particular.
… for without flies no flyswatters, and without flyswatters no Bey of Algiers, no consul … no affront to be avenged, no olive trees, no Algeria, no crushing heat, gentlemen, and crushing heat means health for travellers, furthermore …
but when flies get bored they die and all those stories of the good old days, all those statistics fill them with deep sadness; they begin by letting one leg fall from the ceiling, then the other, and they drop like flies into the plates below, onto shirt fronts – dead, as the song goes.
– first published in Commerce
1. Untranslatable pun: oeuf de colomb suggests both a dove’s egg and the locution ‘c’est comme l’oeuf de Colomb,’ or ‘it’s easy once you’ve thought of it’ – as the President himself remarks in the next paragraph. [trans.]