A certain Monsieur Blot

 

A certain Monsieur Blot is a very funny, French satire on the Frenchman-in-the-street. It’s one of the most popular book of Pierre Daninos and sold over 400 000 copies.

Paul Blot is an actuary (an insurance assessor) unnoticed and unnoticeable, suffering from an office colleague who steals his ideas and presents them as his own; a wife who can never remember the payoff line of her pointless anecdotes; children who always make friends with the children of richer families and want bigger and better « toys »; a mistress who makes his clandestine affair impossibly complicated… He is, in fact, the typical bourgeois Frenchman-in-the-street a newspaper competition is dedicated to finding. Monsieur Blot who wakes one morning to find himself the winner and his life becomes as untypical as anyone could find. He is asked out to dinner, invited to lunch on yachts and to dance at galas: his wife develops the most undesirable social aspirations but for the first time in his life his office colleagues treat him with respect… After the initial excitement, Blot finds that he is unmoved by fame. When he loses most of his money, he is delighted to slide back into his happy life of decent obscurity and become again the Frenchman-in-the-street .

Conjugal life

Our life together is identical with that of millions of other couples, which sometimes go well, sometimes badly. I think of those of whom the crime reporters say: ‘they were often heard quarrelling…’ In fact, during twenty years, our life together has only been shaken by a few small storms - and one big one. Yes… there has been a woman in my life and, as for all men of whom they say ’ there’s a woman in his life ’ , she wasn’t my wife.

***

‘All men feel the need sooner or later…’

‘Need to do what? Blow everything sky high? But go on, say it. Say it, since that’s what you’re getting at. Leave us! Go, if that’s what you want! Let this tart get her way and break up our home! I’ll manage somehow… I’ll go out and scrub floors…‘

‘Darling!’

Why scrubbing floors? (And as for that, why darling?) Thérèse, like all the rest of them, would be perfectly capable of doing a great many less dreary, more remunerative and also more dignified things. But, like the rest, she cries that she will do anything: scrub floors! For in the evocation of this ruin, in the very word scrubbing, there is something miserable which induces husband’s hearts to soften and lashes their self-esteem. In a hundred thousand homes all over the world, from Vladivostok to Vancouver, the same worst bursts out, the same phrase resounds: ‘I’ll go out and scrub floors! Since that tart has managed to destroy our home!‘

Just like scrubbing floors, destroying a home creates an image. One has a vision of the red and black posters of the war, the exodus (National War Loan - Subscribe Now), the woman in a shawl pushing a broken-down pram containing a screaming baby as she flees through the burning countryside. If woman seem drawn by the image of the ’home destroyed’, it’s because they are in love what men are in business: they want to build.

A certain taste of high tragedy and a feeling for situations seem to incite women to choose the night to unleash their fury...

Money…

I’m nobody’s fool over a penny, but over millions I become a complete idiot.

 
***

My experience seems to me wide enough to permit me to draw the conclusion that there are five ways of making a fortune:

- by putting one’s money in the bank;

- by buying stocks and shares;

- by buying gold;

- by buying pictures;

- by buying land.

When one possesses these five keys to fortune, one feels a different man. Judging that there is no sense in keeping them to myself, I am pleased to list them here. By the same token, I feel I have the right to withhold what this same experience has also revealed to me, and which is rather more disturbing, namely that there equally exist five ways of losing everything one has - and even more:

- by putting one’s money in the bank;

- by buying stocks and shares;

- by buying gold;

- by buying pictures;

- by buying land.