The Child

by Valles, Jules; Parmée, Douglas

• ISBN13: 9781590171172
• ISBN10: 1590171179
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-01-31
• Publisher: NYRB Classics

Summary

The Childis a story about growing up that is comparable in humor and humanity to Great Expectations, even as its unflinching exposure of violence and hypocrisy foreshadows the nightmare realsim of Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Jules Valles, an anarchist and a bohemian, dedicated his book "to all those who were bored stiff at school or reduced to tears at home, who in childhood were bullied by their teachers or thrashed by their parents," and it tells the (autobiographical) tale of a young boy constantly scapegoated and abused, emotionally and physically, by his peasant mother and schoolteacher father, whose greatest concern is to improve their social status. But the young hero learns to stand up to his parents, even to love them, in time, and for all the intense pain the book registers it is anything but dreary. To the contrary, Valles's book is one of the funniest in French literature, a triumph of insubordinate comedy over the forces of order and the self-appointed defenders of decency.

Author Biography

Jules Vallès (1832–1885), French writer and revolutionary, is most famous for his trilogy of autobiographical novels: L’Enfant (The Child), Le Bachelier (The Graduate), and L’Insurgé (The Insurgent). Through Vallès’s alter ego, Jacques Vingtras, the books describe the writer’s difficult childhood as the abused son of a schoolteacher, his rejection of his classical education and growing admiration for the peasant class, and finally his bohemian life in Paris as a militant journalist and pamphleteer. Vallès grew up in the provinces and came to Paris to study as a young man. Forced by his family to return home, he soon rebelled against his socially ambitious father and returned to the capital. There Vallès associated with other young radicals and published articles in various left-wing newspapers under a series of pseudonyms, which nevertheless failed to protect him from government persecution. Vallès led protests against the repressive policies of Napoleon III and played a significant role in the Paris Commune of 1871; his newspaper, Le Cri du Peuple (The Cry of the People), became the mouthpiece of the revolt. After the defeat of the Commune, Vallès was exiled for nine years, which he spent mostly in London, writing articles and composing his autobiographical trilogy. Upon his return to Paris, he resurrected Le Cri and spent the last five years of his life working furiously on articles, pamphlets, and the last book of his trilogy.

Douglas Parmée (1914–2008) was a lecturer in modern languages at Cambridge and a Lifetime Fellow of Queens’ College. He translated many works of classic and contemporary literature from French, Italian, and German, receiving the Scott Moncrieff Prize for French translation in 1976. NYRB Classics publishes his translations of The Child by Jules Vallès, Afloat by Guy de Maupassant, and Nature Stories by Jules Renard.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
My Mother	5	(9)
My Family	14	(11)
School	25	(6)
The Small Town	31	(5)
My Clothes	36	(7)
Holidays	43	(15)
The Joys of Family Life	58	(9)
The Horseshoe	67	(7)
Saint-Etienne	74	(7)
Good People	81	(11)
The School	92	(11)
Polishing---Guzzling---Cleanliness	103	(6)
Money	109	(9)
Back Home	118	(20)
Plans to Escape	138	(15)
Drama	153	(21)
Memories	174	(7)
The Departure	181	(48)
Louisette	229	(9)
My Classical Studies	238	(11)
Madame Devinol	249	(13)
Boarding at Legnagna's	262	(18)
Madame Vingtras in Paris	280	(25)
Back Home	305	(17)
Deliverance	322	(13)
Notes	335