"ROBESPIERRE" — A TRAGEDY OF MISPRONUNCIATION
Leonard R. Jaffee, Copyright © 2021, all rights reserved
FORENOTEBelow is a greatly altered version of an idea reflected in a same-name article that I authored, and Reader Supported News published, in 2013
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Oddly, this is pertinent:TAO TE CHING, Chapter 38 [much my translation] The truly good do not apprehend their goodness, and so are good. The deluded endeavor to be good, and so are not good. If one is truly good, one does nothing yet leaves nothing undone. The deluded are always busy, yet finish naught, leave much unminded. When the truly good act, all is complete. When a just man acts, much justice lingers unfulfilled. When an authoritarian commands and no one obliges, he grinds his teeth and moils to compel decorum. From absence of good, kindness is born. If kindness is not, justice controls. If justice dies, ritual reigns. Ritual seeks illusion of virtue — and spawns bewilderment. Prescience is a sham of Tao. Prescience whelps folly. Being great is being truly good — a beast, who dwells on reality — the fruit, not the flower. The truly good accept the fruit — ignore the flower.
PREFACE
The following text is a wee comedic history. Like a clown, it worries lest it fit the world's affairs of now and our past two decades, even all last century, or many centuries gone, or all human future, like humanity’s forever-before.
Likely you have read Charles Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities." Recall that Madame Defarge was a main character of that novel. Magically, she immigrated into my comedy.
In Dickens’s imagination, Defarge sat at the rim of a guillotining-site and knit while heads fell and blood splattered. She knitted also near-incessantly in her Parisian wine-shoppe. [
footnote 1 ]
Defarge's knitting created codes that denoted the name of a certain innocent man she hated for false cause and also the names of several members of his family. She designed to finish her knitting just as she scored the beheadings of all the objects of her hatred.
My wee comedy accounts Defarge’s circumstances Dickens did not report.
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L'HISTOIRE TRAGIQUE DE CITOYEN ROBESPIERRE
In the final fortnight of the French monarchy, a nice, kind Parisian man, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre (Citizen Robespierre), invented “hemp.” He labeled his invention “hemp” because he was a “hémophile” [en Anglias, “hemophiliac”] and 18th-century blood-letting French “physicians” abbreviated “hémophile” as “hémp” (pronounced “eemp”). Robespierre fell upon that linguistic reasoning because, applied to a wound, his invention helped clot blood.
By long, trial-and-error experimentation, Robespierre discovered that if one braids enough long hemp-fibers, one obtains an extended, snake-like object, which he named "rope" for the adventitious reason that as he tumbled while studying feasible uses of his discovery, he uttered a “whoops”-like expletive of his native Gascony — the expletive "roppes" [pronounced "rope"].
Robespierre swam to England to market his discovery in the newly emerging British techno-industrial market that soon would devise horrors like Frankenstein, the cotton gin (invented, British feminists know, by an anonymous English duchess, not Eli Whitney), and the steam engine (inspired by comparison of the locomotion of a punctured hot air balloon and the power emitted by deflating self-perceptions of political orators).
[Recall that the cotton gin and steam engine had been harnessed together first to produce spirits from grain and juniper berries, then to uses that wrought them infamy by swapping black slavery for sweat shops and (some allege) by starting the U.S. Civil War.]
When Robespierre arrived at Dover [England] customs, he encountered an affected, officious clerk who fancied himself a philologist. The clerk ordered Robespierre to write his name, address, and travel-purpose on a customs form. When the clerk read Robespierre’s completed form, the clerk pronounced Robespierre's name "Rope-spee-air."
[The clerk had confounded the French rule that one does not aspirate plosives. The clerk thought the opposite rule true, and, so, gave very excessive aspirate-plosive effect to the sound of the letter "b" — which, in his mouth, became the hardest letter "p" of English, almost the "pf" of Deutsche.]
The clerk examined samples our hero’s invention and discovery — specimens of raw “hemp” fiber and lengths of “rope.”
"So ye calls this stuff rope, does ye? I can see ye ‘a not head enough to think past yer own name fer a thing to call this dumb stuff ye made."
The clerk assessed Robespierre an 80-shilling duty (half of which the clerk pocketed).
Robespierre did not sell his discovery in England. So, despairing, he sought employment in Paris, which he reached by pedal-boat.
He secured a job of knitting robes for a Madame Defarge, who had diversified from (a) serving fake red Bourgogne and bathtub cognac in her downtown wine shoppe to (b) operating a lavish “restaurant des aliments rapides,” where she sold scores of counterfeit wines and offered Persian crêpes, kosher bacon, hot dogs, vegan-burgers, freedom fries, and pineapple pizza — and sold raiments of many kinds that two illegal immigrants wrought for pennies in her eatery’s back-room atelier.
Soon, our hero, Robespierre, was outproducing the immigrant labor — by a multiple of two. Yet, during midday breaks (three hours, in Paris), instead of seeking repast or sensual delight (as did most Frenchmen), the ever-hopeful Robespierre continued experimenting with his discovery.
Soon Robespierre's industry impressed Defarge — quite as did the net-profit-increase his robe-making garnered her. She fired her immigrant workers and denounced “those illegals” to The Reign of Terror, an official of which relieved the immigrants of their heads.
Defarge dubbed Robespierre "rock of robemakers" — which epithet, she noticed, bore striking association with his surname, Robespierre ("pierre" = "rock"). She noticed, too, that, with “rope,” among else, her star employee had crafted a device that sliced cabbages, onions, carrots, unwieldy hard fromages (majorero, Parmigiano Reggiano, smoked gruyère), and winter-hardened mounds of head cheese. The contraption even doubled as a poster frame.
Madame Defarge applauded Robespierre's ingenuity but feared his machine would not sell much forthwith, because few food-shop owners could fit its crude hulk into their interior designs. Still, Defarge reassured Robespierre that some imaginative use would make the device quite profitable.
The first Bastille Day (quatorze juillet de 1790) happened a month after Defarge rendered to Robespierre her market-prognosis. And the occasion’s celebration proved Defarge's hunch true.
Defarge had a cousin — a famous, prodigiously brilliant, but psychopathic, greedy teenager named Guy (pronounced "Ghee") — whom the English called, derisively, Guy-a-teen. Steeped in the works of Marquis De Sade, Tacitus, Jeremy Bentham, Machiavelli, and Mao Tse-Tung, Guy had appointed himself the commandant of his own paramilitary brain-child, La Garde Rouge (en Anglais, “The Red Guard”). Guy convinced the Revolution's rising powers to inaugurate The Reign of Terror.
Having witnessed the virtues of Robespierre’s slicing machine, Guy volunteered to embellish the Bastille Day celebration with mass public beheadings Guy effected utmost-efficiently with Robespierre's incisive invention, which Guy had extorted from our hero to claim it as his own creation. Giving audience to the glory that Robespierre’s device achieved, The Reign of Terror’s board of directors begged Guy to use “his” machine to regale the citizenry with similar beheadings weekly.
With a bottle of her imitation champagne, Madame Defarge christened Robespierre's machine "guillatine" (pronounced "ghee-a-teen") — to honor her cousin, Guy, and to insult the British, whom she hated with deep vitriol. But enter, again, the customs clerk who mispronounced our tragic hero's name.
"They can't dupes me," the customs clerk blurted while being interviewed by a renowned freelance journalist who sold his work to newspapers of all the great capitals of Europe. "Guy-a-teen ain’t invented that thar beheadin’ gadget. T’was Ropespierre. And without his 'rope' — so he called it after his dreadful name — without his 'rope' this whole bloody Frog revolution thing couldn't ‘a got near far as it done."
Surmising the interview might immortalize him if he said “the right things,” the clerk mused further: "I knows Ropespierre is the cap, so to speak, of them evil Frog forces over thar. T’weren’t Guy’s idee. T’were Ropespierre’s sly plannin’ ‘hind that Guy kid’s beheadin’ jubilees. T’were Ropesie’s game — gittin’ rich on Guy’s choppin' heads with Ropesie’s damn guill-o-tine."
Taking up, as did the world, the clerk's misspelling — "guillOtine" — the journalist investigated the clerk’s scurrilous accusations. Guy had set up guillotining sites in every major town of France. And Guy invented the "franchise" (the name reflecting the idea of being “frank,” hence gouging business-associates), and Guy franchised prolifically the deadly use of poor Robespierre's sorrily misdirected apparatus.
The franchise gave Guy a dominant share of profits other head-choppers made by appropriating properties of the condemned. Guy, himself, ran a like scam in Paris. But, slick as he was, Guy attributed the idea to Robespierre, who — as if a living self-fulfilling mis-prophecy — was drafted into the Revolutionary government’s leadership.
Being humble, shy, unassuming, and surely neither greedy nor a savvy entrepreneur, Robespierre just very reluctantly accepted the ostensible power Guy arranged for him. But Robespierre, like both Christ and De Sade (who refused a judgeship because he could not cast the first stone), had not the stomach for ruling people.
So, he botched the job and got "hoist by his own petard." [I quote trite — and passive-voice — Shakespeare, here, only because it befits the customs clerk's involvement). Poor Robespierre was slain by his own creation, literally. (His shrunken head hides in my garage.) Guy’s Reign of Terror killed our hero not because he was evil (for he was gentler than a lamb), but just because he invented hemp, discovered rope, and suffered a customs clerk's mis-sounding of his name.
Robespierre's tragedy did not end with his death. In the last three decades of the 20th century, the US outlawed domestic hemp production, to “protect” people from themselves and to support the American Drug Industry's macroeconomic "efficiency" of charging cancer-victims exorbitant fees for toxic painkiller cocktails. Several grave externalities resulted:*
In 2007, Asian hemp-makers increased their hemp's production and price and marketed directly in the US. The US government gouged its electorate with 150% hemp-rope tariffs. [And that
— not a bursting real-estate “bubble” — was the true cause of the 2008 recession.]*
In autumn 2013, to counter the true purpose(s) of GW Bush's Iraq "surge" (continued by Obama) and Obama's Afghanistan "surge" and drone attacks savaging Pakistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, India's, Malaysia's, Bangladesh's, and Indonesia's rope-making firms formed an "econo-state" called "IMBI," which declared war against NATO and all its member-nations. But computer error sent IMBI's bombing raids to Antarctica.*
In 2014, Greenpeace declared war against NATO — for inciting destruction of most of the world's penguin population (and, so, starving many orcas and seals) and for loosing millions of tons of ice that moved northward and lowered the world's temperatures to ice-age levels.*
In 2015, to cure the thermal problem and protest Euro-American "megalomania," Greenpeace's pacifist members burned themselves alive on icebergs.
Perhaps forever, Robespierre's name must suffer marring by the behaviors of money-gluttonous charlatans, because of his innocent invention and the vain fault of a corrupt clerk. Dona éï pacem. Dona nobis pacem. Dona pacem tibi.