Le bourgeois versifié (Le bourgeois gentilhomme au plus près de Molière) par Jacques Jouet (review)

his family, and after returning to Paris with a lead on an apartment and a job due to Victor’s help, Jeremy becomes embroiled in an assassination having to do with a snake, a postcard of a Renaissance painting, a colleague, and of course, music. Once again, the reader is bedazzled by the language, the references, the sights, smells, and sounds of 1920s Paris jazz scene.When the music hall murders start accumulating, Jeremy finds himself in the thick of it:“SimonettaVespucci...arrêt cardiaque [...] dépouille de serpent! Deux fois de suite, ce n’était plus un malheureux hasard, c’était une préméditation” (70). Old friends, jazz clubs, the new cinema are introduced so that the reader has a rounded knowledge of the time, place, and ambiance of the arts. Everything points to “La Tour de Babel,” a Pigalle music hall where all the victims were employed. Could Renaud Lemerle, the theater’s director, be involved? Could it be one of the performers or someone else at the theater? Could the motive be revenge, jealousy or unrequited love? Why the Renaissance painting with its serpent around Simonetta’s neck? Why postcards of the tableau and snakes present at each cadaver? Poor Jeremy! Besides desirous of a true musical career, he pursues his connections to P.K., the father he never knew, and frankly, the series of murders has become a time-consuming distraction . The characters he meets are many. The list of suspects grows, but complications continue to arise as Jeremy meets more and more people able to bring him closer and closer to his origins. Suffice it to say, Jeremy will be reunited with some of his family, but the killings to this point remain unsolved, and there are many red herrings. Throughout this ordeal, Jeremy crosses paths with extraordinary personalities such as Tristan Tzara and Fujita. Happy about finding information on his past, he is about to abandon the research into the music hall deaths, when he himself is brutally attacked and warned not to continue their pursuit. Jeremy is as good a detective as a pianist, it seems. His senses in full alert serve him well. There is a dose of humor, a pinch of ethnic and linguistic references, and always the Izner touch: beautifully detailed, animated scenes where character and theme count.Accolades for our amateur sleuth, the use of argot, the authenticity of the material. This reader cannot wait for volume three. Alliance Française, Santa Rosa (CA) Davida Brautman Jouet, Jacques. Le bourgeois versifié (Le bourgeois gentilhomme au plus près de Molière). Paris: P.O.L, 2017. ISBN 978-2-8180-4224-3. Pp. 208. One of the most comedic scenes from Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme occurs when Monsieur Jourdain learns the difference between prose and verse, understanding for the first time that his common conversation is prose and that which is not prose is verse and vice versa. Of course, Molière wrote this play in prose, but imagine if he had written it in verse. This re-imagination of the classic comédie-ballet comes from Jacques Jouet, a long-time member of Oulipo. Jouet began this project by translating 210 FRENCH REVIEW 91.4 Reviews 211 the end of Act II, Scene 4 of the original play because he was intrigued by the difficulty and formality of writing in verse. This attempt developed into the desire to translate the play in its entirety (201). The length of time between presentation of the first extract and publication of the complete play (from 2002 to 2017) is a testament to the challenges of writing in, or translating to, verse. Just as Molière used in some of his other works of theater, Jouet engages the alexandrine to complete Le bourgeois versifié, believing it“un vers actif, aujourd’hui, parmi d’autres, et non des moindres, aussi vrai que la ‘cadence nationale’, comme dit Mallarmé, est dans la mémoire de la langue française, à mon avis inarrachable” (202). Though, rather than be fixed in the past, Jouet’s alexandrines reflect the influence of their nineteenth- and twentieth-century iterations. This manipulation works to underscore Monsieur Jourdain...