AT NOON TODAY, as on the first Wednesday of every month, sirens will ring out all over France. Air raid sirens, or at least that’s what they will sound like. When it happens, locals may not even notice, so used to it have they become. And only visitors will be alarmed, wondering for a moment if war has been declared, before the unchanging expressions all around them argue otherwise.
I only know about the sirens because on the corresponding day in August, I was in a Paris classroom, (re)learning French, when one of the country’s 4,500 warning sirens went off outside the window. To the quizzical faces of students, the teacher shrugged that this was just a monthly exercise against the event of a nuclear emergency or terrorist attack.
So we then digressed into a brief, tortured discussion of the apocalypse, before our limited vocabulary (English was of course banned) forced us to return to a more immediate threat to peace: the proliferation of French irregular verbs. By the time the sirens went off again, at 12.10, we had joined the locals in ignoring them.
It’s funny the things you stop noticing. Another day in class, it was our teacher – a born Parisienne – who looked out the window quizzically. “Écoute!” she said, pointing skywards.
But most of us heard nothing until she added: " Des mouettes! C'est curieux, non?" A peek in the dictionary later, we all agreed it was indeed odd to hear seagulls 100 miles from the sea. Then, in the high-point of my month-long return to school, I heard myself quip: " C'est le Paris Plage!"
Even now I blush with pride at the memory of my witty reference to the sand-and-parasol covered stretch of Seine embankment that, for a few weeks every summer, Parisians pretend is a beach. And okay, it wasn’t a great joke. But it was a joke conceived and simultaneously uttered in French, with – crucially – the correct gender assigned to the project (as opposed to the beach) . The teacher was almost as proud of me as I was.
IN THE circumstances, I’m reluctant to blame the same teacher for an error in a recent diary (August 27th) about the unfortunate Franco-Irishman Thomas Arthur Lally.
In fact, I only do so safe in the knowledge that, it being in English, she won’t be lowering herself to read it. It is possible, after all, that I misheard her, what with the all air-raid sirens and the seagulls. But I’m fairly sure it was she who told me that the Place de Grève, which hosted Lally’s grizzly execution in 1761, is now the Place de la Concorde: a detail I faithfully repeated in the column.
Au contraire, says alert Paris-based reader Paul Arnold. The Place de Grève, which did indeed host executions until the Place de la Concorde (then the Place de la Revolution) ousted it for that honour, is the former name of the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville, where the mayor of Paris now plots his urban beach and free bike schemes.
And I should probably have known this because in its original identity, the Place de Grève became immortalised as one of the more famous words in French. Apart from executions, the area was also long known for worker protests. Thus, today, even though the placename is gone, the French for “strike” – in the industrial action sense – is grève.
IT WAS STRIKES of a different kind that did for poor Lally, whose head was lopped off at the second attempt by his incompetent executioner in a spectacle that appalled onlookers.
And this was only the last instalment of a drawn-out travesty of justice in which the former military hero was convicted, essentially, of losing a war. But as readers Patrick Semple and Donal Kennedy both remind me, the idea of executing an officer for insufficient zeal in killing was not confined then to France.
The same era also saw the notorious case of Admiral Byng, an equally brave British naval officer, who paid the ultimate price for losing the Battle of Minorca to the French. In his satirical novel Candide, Voltaire – the man who campaigned to clear the dead Lally's name – had his hero witness Byng's execution and hear the explanation that in Britain it was occasionally necessary to execute an admiral "pour encourager les autres".
If not his head, Lally did at least retrieve his reputation in the end. And if it’s any further consolation, he is also well remembered in the country of his ancestors.
The editor of the Tuam Herald,David Burke, tells me that there is a rudimentary monument locally where the family once lived. And he adds that, in a remarkable coincidence, Tuam was twinned some years ago with the German town of Straubing, which long before had itself been twinned with the French Romans-sur-Isère, where Thomas Arthur Lally was born.
Even more impressively, the writer Lavinia Greacen informs me that she has spent years, on and off, researching Lally’s history for what would be his first Irish biography. The problem so far is that publishers don’t quite know what to make of the subject, which in Ireland is too French and in Britain is too Irish as well.
“But it’s a great story and it deserves to be told,” she adds. In fact, it has been told, or near enough. Lavinia has two-thirds of a first draft written. The rest is history. Or it will be, just as soon as a publishing house somewhere backs it.