Children understand everything—as everybody knows. If I knew that children would be the only ones reading this book, I would not even think of writing an afterword. But, alas, I’m afraid that these tales will be read as much by grown-ups as by younger people. So I feel I should provide a few explanations.
Rue Broca is not a street quite like any other street. If you look at a map of Paris, you will see—or think you see—that rue Pascal and rue Broca cross the boulevard de Port-Royal at right angles. If, confident in your map-reading, you were to take your car and drive down this boulevard, expecting then to turn into one or other of these two side streets, you might go back and forth a hundred times between the Observatory at one end of the boulevard and Gobelins station at the other, but you would not find either of those two streets.
So, you will ask me: are rue Broca and rue Pascal made-up streets? Not at all! They do exist. And they do indeed run, in nearly straight lines, from boulevard Arago to rue Claude-Bernard. Therefore, they ought to cross the boulevard de Port-Royal.
The explanation of this anomaly is not to be found on your map, for the map can only show two dimensions. As in Einstein’s world, at this spot, the surface of Paris curves and passes right over itself, so to speak. Forgive me for drawing on the jargon of science fiction, but really, there is no other way to say this: as with rue Pascal, rue Broca forms a dent, a hollow, a dive into three-dimensional sub-space.
Now, leave your car in its garage and return to the boulevard de Port-Royal, but this time on foot. Set out from Gobelins station and forge ahead, along whichever pavement you prefer. At a certain point, you will see that the row of houses that lines the boulevard has a gap in it. Instead of marching along beside shops or the wall of an apartment building as usual, you are walking alongside a space, a space fenced off by a railing to stop you falling into it. On the same pavement, not much farther along, you’ll see the head of a staircase that appears to plunge deep into the entrails of the earth, like the steps that take you down to the Metro. Go down this staircase without fear. Once at the bottom, you are by no means underground; in fact, you will be in rue Pascal. Above your head, you’ll see something that looks like a bridge. This bridge is the boulevard de Port-Royal, which you have just left behind.
A little farther along the boulevard, you will find another such staircase, like the first, but this one leading down to rue Broca.
This is bizarre, but it is true.
Now, let’s ignore rue Pascal—it is too straight, too wide, too short also to harbour any mystery—and look at rue Broca alone.
This is a twisty street, narrow, crooked and sunken. By virtue of the spatial anomaly that I have described, although both its ends come out in Paris, the street itself is not quite part of Paris. No distance away, but on another plane, underground yet in the open air, this street by itself forms something like a small village. For the people who live there, this gives it a rather special feeling.
First, everybody knows everybody, and each one of them knows more or less what the others do and what they’re busy with, which is exceptional in a city like Paris.
And then, the majority of them come from all kinds of different places; very few are from Paris. In this street, I have met Berbers, Algerian French, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, a Pole, a Russian… even a few French people from other parts of France!
Still, the people of rue Broca share at least one common pleasure: they love stories.
I have had many misfortunes in my literary career, the majority of which I attribute to the fact that the French in general—and Parisians in particular—do not like stories. They demand the truth, or, failing that, plausibility, realism. While the only stories that really interest me are those about which I am certain, from the start, that they have never happened, will never happen and could never happen. I feel that, due to the basic fact that it makes no documentary or ideological claims to justify its existence, an impossible tale has every chance of containing a good deal more profound truth in it than any story that is merely plausible. Which perhaps makes me—I console myself—more of a realist in my own way than all those who claim to seek the truth, and who spend their lives stupidly ruled by insipid lies—lies that are indeed realistic purely by virtue of how insipid they are!
And now—one occasion does not make a habit!—here is a true story:
At number 69, rue Broca (I know, I know! I shall now be accused of God knows what dreadful innuendo. But what can I do? It was at number 69, not 67 or 71. For all you lovers of truth, this is one for you!). As I was saying, then: at number 69, rue Broca, there is a cafe-grocer’s, the owner of which, Papa Sayeed, is a Berber married to a Breton woman. At the time of my story, they had four children: three girls and one boy (they had a fifth child later). The eldest girl is called Nadia, the second Malika, the third Rashida, and the little boy, who at the time was the youngest child, is called Bashir. Next to the cafe, there is a mansion house. In this house, among other tenants, lives a certain Monsieur Riccardi, Italian as his name suggests, also the father of four children, of whom the eldest is called Nicolas and the youngest is called Tina. I am leaving out other names, because there’s no need for them and they would only be confusing.
Nicolas Riccardi often played in the street with the Sayeed children, for his father was a regular customer at the shop. This had been going on for a while and nobody would have dreamt of writing any of it down in a book had a certain odd character not one day turned up in the area.
This person was known as Monsieur Pierre. He was fairly tall, with chestnut hair that stuck up in spikes like a hedgehog, browny-green eyes and glasses. He always wore a two-day-old beard (people even wondered how he managed to keep his beard in what is usually a very temporary state, for a beard) and his clothes, such as they were, seemed always on the verge of falling apart. He was forty years old, a bachelor, and he lived up above on the boulevard de Port-Royal.
He came to rue Broca only to frequent the cafe, but he was often there and at all hours of the day. Besides, his tastes were modest: he appeared to live mainly on biscuits and chocolate, also on fruit when there was any, and all washed down with a great number of milky coffees and mint teas.
When he was asked what he did, he would reply that he was a writer. As his books were never seen anywhere, especially not in bookshops, this reply satisfied nobody, and for a long time the population of rue Broca wondered what he really did for a living.
When I say the population, I mean the grown-ups. The children never wondered anything of the sort, for they had understood right away: Monsieur Pierre was keeping his cards close; he was not a man like other men, really he was an old witch!
Sometimes, trying to unmask him, they would dance around him calling:
“Witch, old witch with your coconuts!”
Or again:
“Witch, old witch with your rubber jewellery!”
Instantly, Monsieur Pierre would throw off his disguise and become what he really was: he would wrap his old raincoat around his head, leaving only his face uncovered, let his thick glasses slide down to the end of his crooked nose and scowl frightfully. Then he would pounce on the kids, with all his claws out, giving a high, shrill, nasal cackle, something like the bleat of an old nanny goat.
The children would run away as if they were dreadfully afraid—but really they weren’t as frightened as all that, for when the witch got hold of any of them, they would wriggle around and beat her off with their fists; and they were quite right to do so, for that is how we should treat old witches. They are only dangerous when we are afraid of them. Unmasked and shown who’s in charge, they become rather good fun. At this stage, they can be tamed.
So it was with Monsieur Pierre. Once the children had forced him to reveal his true identity, everyone (starting with Monsieur Pierre himself) was greatly relieved, and normal relations were soon established.
One day when Monsieur Pierre was sitting at a table, enjoying one of his endless milky coffees, with the children clustered around, he began, of his own accord, to tell them a story. The next day, at their request, he told another one, and then on the days that followed, he told still more stories. The more he told, the more the children asked him to tell. Monsieur Pierre was obliged to start rereading all the collections of stories that he had ever read since his own childhood, simply in order to satisfy his audience. He told them stories from Charles Perrault, the tales of Hans Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Russian stories, Greek, French and Arabic tales… and the children are still asking for them!
After a year and a half, having no more stories left to tell, Monsieur Pierre made the children a proposal: they would all meet every Thursday afternoon and together they would make up brand-new stories. And if they could come up with enough stories, the stories could be put into a book.
Which is what they did, and that is how this collection came about.
The stories in the collection were, thus, not written by Monsieur Pierre alone.* They were improvised by him in collaboration with his listeners—and whoever has not worked in this way may struggle to imagine all that the children could contribute, from solid ideas to poetic discoveries and even dramatic situations, often surprisingly bold ones.
I’ll give a few examples, so first of all the first sentences in ‘The Pair of Shoes’:
“There once was a pair of shoes that got married. The right shoe, which was the man, was called Nicolas, and the left shoe, which was the lady, was called Tina.”
These few lines, which form the seed for the story that follows, come from young Nicolas Riccardi, whose little sister’s name does indeed happen to be Tina.
Scoobidoo, the doll who knew everything, really existed, as did the guitar that became firm friends with the potato. And even as I write these words, the cunning little pig is still making himself useful as the piggy bank in Papa Sayeed’s cafe.
On this same cafe’s counter, in 1965, there was also a glass bowl that held two little fish, one red, the other yellow with black spots. It was Bashir who first realized that these fish could be “magic”, and this is why they appear in ‘The Witch in the Broom Cupboard’.
As for those who will say that these stories are too serious for children, I offer the following reply in advance, with the help of one last example:
In an early version of the tale titled ‘Uncle Pierre’s House’, my ghost only realized that he was a ghost thanks to the little girl amusing herself by putting her hand through his ethereal leg. It was Nadia, Papa Sayeed’s eldest daughter, who had the inspired idea of having the little girl sit in the same armchair as the ghost, so that, on waking, the ghost discovers her sitting “right inside Uncle Pierre’s tummy”. These last few words are Nadia’s own. Can grown-ups appreciate the symbolic value and moral beauty of this marvellous image? Our poor old ghost, a perfect specimen of the hardened, shrivelled-up, embittered old bachelor, is suddenly able to see himself as he really is. Suddenly liberty is within his reach, and truth, and generosity; he is—in short—set free, and his new freedom begins from the very moment when he symbolically becomes a mother. My friend Nietzsche also writes, I don’t recall exactly where, of men as mothers… Yet it took a little girl to come up with this perfect idea!
But I’ll stop here, for it would after all be a bit much if, in a book intended for children, the afterword meant for the adults were itself to take up more space than your average fairy tale!
In any case, I haven’t much else to add, except to wish my young friends from rue Broca happy reading, and the same to all who live on other streets in other towns, everywhere.
Pierre Gripari, 1966
* Apart from ‘The Witch in the Broom Cupboard’, which is inspired by Russian folklore.