The Salt Smugglers Read Free

scholarship, — all of which directed a continuous beam of light through the obstinate fog of the feudal era.
    Pardon these digressions, — I shall keep you abreast of my travels in search of the abbé de Bucquoy. — This eccentric and ever-so-slippery figure cannot hope to elude my painstaking investigation for very long.

    The staff at the Bibliothèque Nationale couldn’t be more helpful. No serious scholar could complain about its current modus operandi; — but should a novelist or serial writer show his face, « all hell breaks loose in the stacks». A bibliographer, a man dealing in a standard field of knowledge, knows exactly what books to request. A fantaisiste writer, a writer who runs the risk of perpetrating a serial novel, upsets the natural course of things and bothers everybody in sight for the sake of some half-baked idea that has happened to pop into his mind.

    It is in circumstances like these that one should admire the patience of the senior librarian, — the lower-level staff are often too young to have mastered this degree of paternal self-abnegation. Occasionally the people who turn up at the library are extraordinarily rude. Convinced that the mere fact of belonging to the reading public endows them with a privileged status, they address the librarians in the same peremptory tone one might use to get a waiter’s attention in a café. — And faced with this kind of treatment, the famous scholar or academician will respond with the benign resignation of a monk, suffering no end of indignities from the reading public from ten till two thirty sharp.
    Having taken pity on my plight, the staff had scoured the catalogues and had even gone so far as to explore the reserve collection and rummage through the unappetizing garbage heap of novels, — where the abbé de Bucquoy might have found himself classified by mistake; suddenly one of the assistant librarians shouted out: « We have it! In Dutch! » He read me the title out loud: « Jacques de Bucquoy, Incidents of the most remarkable sort ...”
    â€” Excuse me, I interrupted, but the book I was looking for is entitled “ Incident of the rarest sort ...”
    â€” Let’s have another look then, perhaps there was a translation error: “... drawn from a sixteen-year voyage to the Indies , Harlem, 1744.”
    â€” That’s not it ... and yet the book dates from exactly the same period as the abbé de Bucquoy, whose first name was indeed Jacques. But what on earth could this fantastic abbé have been doing in the Indies? »
    Another assistant librarian appears on the scene: the name has been misspelled; it is not de Bucquoy, but rather Du Bucquoy, and since this may have also been spelled Dubucquoy, the search has to be started all over again, this time under the letter D.
    Damn these names with nobiliary particles! Dubucquoy, I said, would be a mere commoner ... whereas the title of the book refers to him as the count de Bucquoy.
    A paleographer who was working at a nearby table raised his head and said to me: « A particule in a name has never been proof of nobility; on the contrary, it often indicates that the name belongs to the landed gentry, that is, to those people who were originally known as franc-alleu folk. They took the name of their property and the various branches of a given family were often designated by the different endings of their names. The great families of French history are called Bouchard (Montmorency), Bozon (Périgord), Beaupoil (Saint-Aulaire), Capet (Bourbon), etc. The resultant de and du are often the product of sheer irregularity or outright usurpation. But this is not all: in Flanders and in Belgium, the de is the same article as the German der , meaning the . — Thus, de Muller means the miller, etc. — With the result that a good quarter of France is filled with bogus aristocrats. Béranger used to make light of the de in his name