Jay Dwivedi

I read this story as part of my France Discovery Project in a collection entitled Voices From France by Miriam Morton.  Those of you who have read The Stranger by Albert Camus will recall the similarities, particularly the parts where Jerome Crainquebille is looking at his own life as if it were someone else’s.

If you have been to Montmartre in Paris or watched a movie like La Vie En Rose (and saw Edith Piaf sing there), the scene will be familiar to you.  Jerome Crainquebille is a humble vegetable seller in the neighborhood but gets into trouble with a cop (for supposedly using an extremely offensive expression), who were mostly ex-military men at the time and revered so much by French people that they could do no wrong.  Eventually, the policeman Bastien Matra confiscated his cart and put him in jail.  No surprise then that even his attorney wants him to simply confess.  In a trial that is an embarrassment to the French judicial system, the poor man is convicted but that turns out to be a small inconvenience (fine and imprisonment for two weeks) compared to what happened to him when he got out: no one would do business with him just because he was in prison.  In no time, from an entrepreneur he became extremely poor to a point that he missed the security and comfort of the prison.

Since desperate times call for desperate measures, he argued, this time he actually went to a cop and loudly and clearly uttered the same offensive expression.  The cop just asked him to get lost and stop bothering him.  Frustrated Crainquebille couldn’t believe that he is not being arrested for saying (supposedly) the words that sent him to prison and resulted in loss of his livelihood.  The cop told him, “If we were to arrest all the drunks who say what they shouldn’t, we’d never get through!  And what purpose would it serve?”