Abstract
This article examines the parodies of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet written by Pierre Rousset for the Guignol Theatre (Lyon, France) in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first part analyses the process of writing the parody, which involves a double transposition from Shakespeare's play to the opera libretto and from the libretto to the puppet play. The second part focuses on the complex encounter between Guignol theatre types and the Shakespearean character. Through these two questions, the article seeks to show that parody does not ‘destroy’ Shakespeare or Guignol, but rather offers an ironic take on both.
In October 1868, Pierre Rousset's parody of Romeo and Juliet premiered at the Guignol Theatre of the Galerie de l’Argue in Lyon, France. 1 This was probably the first time that Shakespeare's works were performed on the Guignol stage. Due to its great success with the public, the parody was revived at least three times, in August 1869, in January 1871, and in June 1872 when it was given the title Guignol et Juliette, 2 under which it was finally published in 1911. 3 In the years that followed, Rousset wrote parodies of two other Shakespeare plays, Othello, or The Moor of Venice (1869), the text of which has not survived, 4 and Hamlet (date unknown). As far as we know, by the beginning of the twentieth century, he remained the only author of Guignol parodying Shakespeare tragedies. 5
The Guignol, a glove puppet invented in the early nineteenth century by Laurent Mourguet of Lyon, represents a typical Lyonnais from the working class: he works hard and earns little; he goes drinking in a cabaret; and despite his hard life, he remains cheerful and good-hearted. After starting out in public gardens, Guignol moved to cafés, where he entertained the public by acting out comedies. His repertoire gradually broadened, and by the time Guignol et Juliette was first performed, it included not only the so-called traditional plays but also féeries.
Among the adaptations of Shakespeare's works for puppets, the Guignol versions stand out. First, because although reduced versions of plays for actors are not uncommon in the nineteenth-century Western puppet repertoire, 6 parodic transformations of them are much rarer. 7 This makes Rousset's case particularly relevant to the study of Shakespeare's rewritings for puppets. Second, Rousset did not parody the original plays, but rather their operatic versions, Charles Gounod's Romeo and Juliet (first performed in 1867 at the Théâtre-Lyrique Impérial in Paris) and Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet (in 1868 at the Opéra de Paris). His Guignol plays were therefore the result of a double process of rewriting: Shakespeare's plays were first modified to meet the demands of the operatic genre and then reworked for puppets. One may wonder what remains of Shakespeare in the end. No less relevant is the question of what remains of Guignol after such a metamorphosis.
Shakespeare in nineteenth-century French opera
A closer look at the adaptations of Shakespeare for the French operatic stage may help guide our understanding of Rousset's writing process. Despite Shakespeare's popularity in French literary circles in the first half of the nineteenth century, the English playwright's arrival on the French scene was surprisingly slow. Opera adaptations played an important role in introducing Shakespeare's works to the French public. However, as shown by Gaëlle Loisel, ‘[the] Shakespeare that librettists and – a fortiori – composers take on [was] always a Shakespeare mediatised, reshaped by the translations and adaptations that have been made of his texts’. 8
This statement is particularly true of Hamlet, the translation of which by Alexandre Dumas and Paul Meurice (1848) was used by the librettists of Thomas, Jules Barbier, and Michel Carré. Dumas and Meurice removed all political context, emphasising the love between Hamlet and Ophelia and Hamlet's struggle between love and revenge. They also changed the beginning and end of the play, opening it with Claudius and Gertrude's coronation party and closing it with Hamlet being proclaimed king. Rewritten for the opera, Hamlet departs even further from Shakespeare's tragedy. More psychological and based mainly on monologues, it is much more difficult to adapt to opera than, for example, Romeo and Juliet. 9 In order to meet the demands of the genre, Barbier and Carré condensed certain scenes and philosophical meditations (including the ‘To be or not to be’ scene) and added a few others, the most important of which is the scene of Ophelia's suicide (in Dumas/Mercier, as in Shakespeare, it is Gertrude who tells of her death).
Romeo and Juliet avoids such carnage, as Steve Huebner points out: ‘Unlike the librettos they wrote for Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet, in the case of Romeo and Juliet, Barbier and Carré did not allow any popular adaptation to come between the literary masterpiece and the opera’. 10 Some secondary characters were omitted, and the final scene was changed so that Romeo and Juliet die together (to meet genre requirements), but in general, the plot remained in line with Shakespeare's work.
It is highly likely that Rousset's acquaintance with Shakespeare's plays was made through its opera versions represented in Grand-Théâtre of Lyon, in 1868 for Romeo and Juliet and in 1873 for Hamlet. This Shakespeare à la française, which served as a reference point for the parodies, poses a problem for the analysis of transposing Shakespeare's work to the Guignol stage. Thus, most of the ‘disloyalty’ to Shakespeare's plays in the Guignol parodies is the result of this borrowing. Space does not permit a full examination of the metamorphosis of the text in all its stages, from the original text to the French translation, to the libretto, to the play for Guignol (see Online Supplemental Material for more detailed comparisons of the different versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet analysed in this article). This article will instead focus primarily on those passages in the libretto that remain identical to Shakespeare's text, in order to focus on the question of the parodic transformation of the latter.
Pierre Rousset's parodies for Guignol
Born into a butcher's family in 1826, Rousset began playing Guignol when he was in his forties. Around 1864, 11 Rousset, a weaver by trade, found himself unemployed. To support his wife and two children, he accepted an offer from his friend David, director of the Guignol Theatre at the Galerie de l’Argue, to replace Louis Josserand in the role of Guignol. While working as a puppeteer, Rousset began to write for Guignol, creating a new repertoire inspired by the operas performed at the Grand-Théâtre de Lyon: L’Africaine, La Favorite, Faust, and others. Rousset thus introduced what would become one of the main genres of the modern Guignol repertoire at the end of the nineteenth century: parody.
The concept of adapting for Guignol a play for actors was not as revolutionary as it may seem at first glance. According to the nineteenth-century compiler Jean-Baptiste Onofrio, the ‘classical’ Guignol repertoire already included such adaptations. 12 However, Rousset was probably the first of the Guignol authors to use the technique of parody, ‘[the ironic transformation of an] earlier text, ridiculing it with all kinds of comic effects’. 13 The introduction of parody is often seen as the drastic change from the classical Guignol plays. To Paul Fournel, it represents a dangerous mutation of Guignol: ‘Guignol [became] a kind of mocking parrot, producing the text on the text at the risk of losing his own voice’. 14 Alphonse Amieux, on the contrary, defends the idea that parody is not a simple imitation or copy of the previously existing text, but ‘a genre in its own right, lively, good-natured’, ‘a new play on a completely different level’. 15 Similarly, he does not see parody as a departure from ‘classical’ repertoire, but as an evolution of it: ‘far from departing from tradition, opera parody continues it by rejuvenating it’. 16 So was the parody more of a destruction of tradition or its evolution?
The different versions of the text
Anyone wishing to study Rousset's parodies of Shakespeare is soon confronted by the fact that the plays written for Guignol have come down to us in many different versions, in print and in manuscript, which document the multiple reworkings of the text. What have survived are copies by different hands either written down during or after the show or re-copied. In the case of Guignol et Juliette, in addition to the printed edition of 1911, there are at least five manuscript versions 17 and one typed version. 18 For Hamlet, I have found two typed editions that show many differences between them. Which one is preferable as the reference text? Can it be determined which is closest to the spirit of Rousset's play?
A comparison of the different versions of Guignol et Juliette reveals important differences between the printed play and four manuscript copies made between 1880 and 1900 by J[êrome] Pancard (June 1880), E. F. Piegay (August 1880), Jean-Louis Balandras (1883), and V[ericel] Joannés (date unknown 19 ). 20 Compared to the manuscript versions, the printed version is more literary, lacking, especially in the prologue, the physical gags and actions that punctuate the speech. For example, Gnafron's line, ‘C’est égal, vois-tu Chignol, un petit coup de grosse caisse… ça ne ferait pas de mal. Il frappe sur le ventre de Guignol’ [That's all right, Chignol, a bang on the bass drum wouldn’t do any harm. He slaps Guignol on the stomach], appears in all the manuscripts (although crossed out in Piegay's), but is absent from the printed text.
Of the four manuscripts, two are almost identical: those of Pancard and of Joannés. One of the things they have in common is that the names of the characters are the same as in Gounod's opera: only in these two versions is Gregorio identified, who in the other versions becomes ‘the cook’; Juliet's father keeps the name ‘Capulet’, as do the characters of Friar Laurence and Friar Jean; finally, in Joannés's version, Romeo's page is called Stéphano, as in the opera. Moreover, Joannés worked with Rousset at the Théâtre de la Rue du Port du Temple in the early 1880s. 21 It is likely that he performed the play with its author. Therefore, the Joannés manuscript will be used as the reference text for the present analysis.
The case of Hamlet is no less complicated, since there are two undated and unsigned typed versions of which nothing is known about the origin. The text from the Bordier collection 22 is closer to the plot of Shakespeare's tragedy, reintroducing, for example, the scene between Ophelia and Polonius at the beginning of Act 2, which had been cut by Barbier and Carré. On the contrary, the version kept at the Institut International de la Marionnette 23 is closer to the libretto. In favour of this version is the presence of the prologue, the characteristic feature of Rousset's parody. In addition, Guignol here is more in keeping with the popular Lyon type. For these reasons, this version has been retained for the present analysis.
The processes of (re)writing
Rousset's parodies combine two important processes: rewriting for puppets and ironic transformation of the libretto. The first involves major changes to the structure to meet the requirements of the genre. The second consists in the juxtaposition of two narratives, that of Shakespeare and that of Guignol performing the operatic version of Shakespeare.
Structurally, Rousset tightened up the plot, which had already been tightened by the librettists. He kept the order of the scenes but divided them up differently, eliminated, or reduced some of them. He thus shortened the acts to adapt the rhythm of the play to the hand puppet performance. He used the same principle at the macro level of the scene, remodelling each dialogue to change its dynamics. A good example of Rousset's writing method is the balcony scene in Guignol et Juliette. In Shakespeare's play as in its operatic version, Romeo, tormented by his love for Juliet, comes to the Capulet garden. He is talking about his feelings when Juliet comes out on the balcony. She expresses her desire to renounce her identity and for Romeo to renounce his, unaware that Romeo is listening: O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name, Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet. Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this? ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy […] Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized. Henceforth I never will be Romeo. ’What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night, So stumblest on my counsel? By a name I know not how to tell thee who I am. (2.2.36–40, 54–9)
Je ne puis goûter un instant de repos…que les heures d’insomnie s’écoulent lentement.
Ce qu’il y a de sûr… c’est qu’elles ne vont pas vite.…
O Guignol!… pourquoi ce nom est-il le tien? Abjure-le ce nom qui nous sépare, ou j’abjure le mien!… Je veux bien… capon qui se dédit Qui m’écoute?… Qui vient ainsi surprendre mes secrets dans l’ombre de la nuit?… Puisque le jour ne vient pas… je suis ben forcé de t’écouter à borgnon. (3.3; pp. 31–3)
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I cannot taste a moment's rest… How slowly the hours of sleeplessness pass by. One thing's for sure… they don’t go fast…. O Guignol!… why is this your name? Renounce this name that separates us, or I’ll renounce mine!… I’ll do it… Coward who denies himself. Who's listening to me? Who's coming to spy on my secrets in the shadow of night? Since the day never comes… I’m forced to listen to you in the dark.]
Similarly, the scene of Hamlet's first encounter with the Ghost illustrates the metamorphosis the play undergoes in the Guignol version. In Hamlet, in Shakespeare's play as in the libretto, Hamlet asks the Ghost: ‘Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak. I’ll go no further’ (1.5.1–2). Rousset's version of this line is much longer:
Eh ben, nous voilà seuls, parle vite ou je gèle.
Dis-moi pourquoi tu viens – personne t’appelle
ne me fais pas languir, dis le moi tout d’un coup
n’allons pas bavarder par ce temps de loup. (2.1)
25
[Well, here we are alone, speak fast or I’ll freeze Tell me why you have come – nobody calls you Don’t make me languish, tell me all at once let's not chat in this wolfish weather.]
Oui, mon fils je suis ici pour te dicter ma vengeance, frappe sans crainte, venge moi, venge moi!
Mais qui donc qui faut assommer, j’ai encore ma trique, je me charge de taper, va!
Écoute moi sans m’interrompre… L’infame que l’on nomme roi aujourd’hui, d’accord avec ton indigne mère m’a empoisonné pendant mon sommeil pour régner à ma place.
C’est pas possible !… Oh ! Les gredins. Pour me venger, n’attends pas l’heure du repentir… Cependant épargne ta mère, le ciel se chargera d’elle… Adieu mon fils et venge-moi. (2.1) Yes, my son, I am here to dictate my revenge, strike without fear, avenge me, avenge me! But who’s to be knocked out? I’ve still my club, I’ll do the beating, go on! Listen to me without interrupting… The infamous one called king today, poisoned me in my sleep with the agreement of your unworthy mother, so that he could rule in my place. That’s not possible!… Oh, the villains. To avenge me, do not wait for the hour of penance… But spare your mother, heaven will take care of her… Adieu, my son, and avenge me.]
In both plays discussed here, the prologues follow the same pattern. First, the miserable situation of Guignol and Gnafron is introduced. In Guignol et Juliette, Guignol is hungry and Gnafron is thirsty; 26 in Hamlet, Guignol is unemployed and Gnafron and his daughter Louison have nothing to eat. This is followed by a chance meeting with a desperate theatre director. In Guignol et Juliette, he was left without actors because they wanted to be paid in advance. In Hamlet, he tried to hire actors but found none. Guignol, even though he hadn’t heard of Shakespeare before, is enthusiastic about becoming an actor; Gnafron is doubtful, but he ends up following Guignol.
If the prologue serves to explain Guignol's decision to perform Shakespeare's tragedy and to justify the change of register, the function of the conclusion is to free Guignol from the mask of the Shakespearean character. It is particularly important in Guignol et Juliette, where everything ends with the death of the lovers. This death undermines the eternal character of Guignol: ‘Guignol is a false actor, a character in disguise. To let him die in the booth would be to admit the possibility of his death on another level …’.
27
To avoid this, Rousset finds an original solution by using the scene of Juliette's suicide as a turning point: Puisque tu voulais mourir… pourquoi ne m’as-tu pas laissé ma part de ce poison maudit ?… Faudra-t-il donc me briser la tête contre le marbre de ce tombeau ?… Scène III Les mêmes, Gnafron Gnafron entre avec un énorme coutelas
Tenez voilà qui fera peut-être votre affaire.
Oh merci!… Frappez vous-même!… Arrachez-moi la vie … je vous en conjure.
Eh ben, ne bougez pas.
Il va frapper lorsque Guignol se jette entre eux deux.
Hé! Un instant, nom de nom!…
Il était temps que tu m’arrêtes!… J’allais l’estourbir au naturel! Si on en tuait une chaque fois que la pièce se joue… ça reviendrait tout de même un peu cher. (8.2–3; pp. 71–2) If you wanted to die … why didn’t you leave me my share of this cursed poison? Shall I smash my head against the marble of this tomb?
Scene 3
Same, Gnafron
Gnafron enters with a huge carving knife
Here, this might prove useful. Oh, thank you! Strike! Rip the life out of me … I beg you. Well, don’t move.
He's about to strike when Guignol throws himself between them.
Hey!… just a moment, by golly!… It's about time you stopped me!… I was going to do her in for real! If we killed one every time the play was performed … it would be a bit expensive.]
The operatic version of Hamlet is less dangerous for Guignol because it does not end with Hamlet's death, as in Shakespeare. However, Guignol still must be freed from the melancholy mask of the Prince of Denmark. And here, too, Gnafron is the best remedy. Hearing his friend mourn Ophelia's death, he says to Guignol: ‘Oh! la la Chignol […] tu prends au sérieux tout ce que tu fais… La pièce est finie petit, ainsi plus de tristesse’ [Oh! la la Chignol, […] you take everything you do too seriously … The play's over, my boy, so no more sadness.] (5.4). The happy ending is complete when the director agrees to employ Guignol and Gnafron for three years.
Guignol and Gnafron as Shakespearean characters
Thus, a large part of the rewriting of Shakespeare's plot for Guignol passes through the characters of Guignol and Gnafron. While the former replaces the main character, Romeo or Hamlet, the latter takes on the secondary roles of Mercutio, Friar Laurence, or Horatio. Roger Bensky, speaking only of Guignol, points to the reciprocal danger of such a substitution: ‘his [Guignol's] unexplained presence under the mask of a well-known literary character ultimately undermines it and threatens his [Guignol's] fundamental conception’. 29 What's more, to slip into the skin of a Shakespearean character reworked for the opera is to risk distorting the authentic language of Guignol. The historians of Guignol theatre often point out the metamorphosis that Guignol undergoes in the parody. With Rousset, Guignol, the good-hearted working man with the snappy tongue, is transformed into ‘a bourgeois, more literate and speaks in verse’. 30 Thus, the question is two-fold: how far does the osmosis between the two works go and when does it become harmful for both?
A closer look at how Guignol deals with two emblematic situations in Shakespeare's tragedies, love and death, is warranted. Guignol is a straightforward lover: ‘Je t’attends Juliette en baîllant comme une huitre / Ouvre donc ta lucarne, ou je casse une vitre!’ [I am waiting for you Juliet, yawning like an oyster / Open your skylight, or I’ll break a window!] (3.2; p. 31). His love is expressed in a popular manner: ‘Quand je suis près de toi mon bichon, tu me fais l’effet d’une bouche de chaleur qui s’ouvre dans mes nuits sombres …’ [When I’m close to you, my little lamb, you make me feel as if a mouth of warmth were opening in my dark nights …] (1.4), says Guignol-Hamlet to Ophelia. In love as he is, Guignol can’t help making an ironic comment: ‘La voilà, ma Juliette, comme le coeur me bat … Comme on est délicat, tout de même, quand on est amoureux’ [Here she is, my Juliet, and how my heart beats … How courteous one is, after all, when one is in love!] (4.4; p. 44).
Even as he dies, Guignol remains himself. He commits suicide like Romeo, but agonises like Guignol, seasoning his dying words with the jokes in the manner of a Lyonnais canut (silk-worker): A ta santé, Juliette!… à nos tristes amours
Je vais me suicider pour terminer mes jours!
Il boit et tombe sur la bande. Il a laissé la bouteille sur la bande. Oh la!… oh la la!… Ca vous nettoie si bien le corgnolon… que ça emporte le morceau! (8.2; p. 69) Cheers, Juliet!… to our sad loves I’ll kill myself to end my days!
He drinks and falls on the stage. He left the bottle on the stage.
Oh la!… oh la la la la!… It cleans the throat so well… that it takes the bit with it!] Ah! C’est toi!… Viens! Fuyons au bout du monde! Au bout du monde! Ah! Je crois bien que je ne tarderais pas d’aller au commencement de l’autre… Montrant la bouteille. Tiens regarde!… j’ai avalé ce nettoyage.
Mais c’est du poison!
…
Juliette!… voilà le jour!… Entends-tu le chant de l’alouette?…
Le délire s’empare de lui!…
Guignol de même. Ce n’est pas l’alouette!… Est-ce le rossignol?…
Ou mon ventre qui miaule un air en si bémol?
Cependant je suis mort… voilà ce qui m’embrouille.
Avant de m’enterrer je veux qu’on me chatouille. (8.2; pp. 70–1) [Juliet approaches Guignol. Ah, it's you! Come with me! Let's flee to the end of the world! To the end of the world! Ah! I don’t think it would take me long to go to the beginning of the other… points to the bottle Here, look!… I swallowed this detergent. But it's poison!…. Juliet!… Here comes the day!… Do you hear the song of the lark!… He is delirious!… It's not the lark!… Is it the nightingale?… Or my belly mewing a tune in B flat? But I am dead…. That's what confuses me Before burying me I want to be tickled.]
Guignol's reaction to the death of his beloved is the same as his attitude to his own death. In the libretto, in front of Ophelia's dead body, Hamlet mourns the death of his bride:
Morte! glacée!…
Tombant agenouillé près du corps inanimé d’Ophélie.
O crime!
O de leurs noirs complots déplorable victime !
C’en est fait!… Je te perds!…
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in despair. Dead! Frozen! …
Falling on his knees beside Ophelia's lifeless body.
O crime! O wretched victim of their black intrigue! It is done!… I lose thee!…]
In the scenes of battle, too, the rhythm is reworked for the transposition of the action to the puppet stage. The puppet aesthetics are particularly evident when Guignol kills. When the moment of revenge arrives, Guignol-Hamlet says: ‘Ah! Il faut le tuer, je vais chercher ma trique’ [‘Ah! It's time to kill, I’ll go look for my club], then comes back, ‘tue le roi et le jette en coulisse’ [kills the king and throws him backstage] (SD 5.4). Guignol-Romeo also ‘tears off’ Tybalt's stick, ‘knocks him out’ and takes the body backstage (to the équevilles, 33 as he puts it) (SD 5.3; p. 54).
While Guignol seems to identify himself completely with the character he embodies, Gnafron's identification with the role is superficial. He always remains Gnafron, the best friend of Guignol. In Hamlet, Gnafron plays the part of Horatio. The first time he appears onstage is to tell Guignol about having met the Ghost. While in the opera this testimony takes place in the same scene as Hamlet's conversation with his father, Rousset, probably unknowingly, returns to the original order of Shakespeare's play, where Horatio's testimony precedes the night scene. While in Shakespeare as in the opera, Horatio disputes Hamlet's decision to stay alone with the Ghost, in Rousset's parody, Gnafron-Horatio happily accepts Guignol-Hamlet's order to go and ‘have a few drinks’: ‘Je boirai à ta santé, Chignol, et ça va me remettre de ma frayeur’ [I’ll drink to your health, Chignol, and it’ll put me out of my fright] (2.1). Gnafron maintains his love for the bottle in all his roles. As Friar Laurence, he prays with the words: ‘Dominus, Domino / Je bois toujours mon vin sans eau’ [Dominus, Domino / I always drink my wine without water] (4.1; p. 41). If Shakespeare's Friar Laurence meets the dawn with a basket that he wants to fill ‘with baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers’ (2.3.8), Rousset's Gnafron ‘admire la nature en sondant les mystères du jus de la treille...’ [admires nature by probing the mysteries of the juice of the vine …] (4.2; p. 41).
The main difficulty with parody is that it removes the characters from their natural environment, the Guignol play, with its humour based on regional references. The references to wine help to maintain the link with the traditional type of Gnafron. With Guignol, Rousset relies heavily on language, interspersed with informal and slang words such as flouer [to cheat], fringale [to be ravenously hungry], frimousse and binette [face], roupiller [to sleep], and asticoter [to annoy], as well as Lyonnais expressions: bassouiller [to partially immerse oneself in water], corgnolon [gullet], and s’emboconner [to stink]. He also refers to Lyon, its river Saône, its famous Place Bellecour, and the traditional character of its Christmas crib, Mère Coquard. The synthesis of popular expression and Shakespearean character often seems artificial, like a poorly assembled collage in which Guignol and Gnafron are forcibly squeezed into the masks of Shakespearean characters.
What Susan Young says about the use of local dialect in burattini's version of Shakespeare is revealing, because she interprets it as inherent in the process of transposing Shakespeare's work to the glove puppet stage: ‘In the matter of burattini, the local dialect lends immediacy and vigor to the performance because of its expressive power’. 34 With Bensky, it can then be affirmed that Rousset mainly uses language to maintain consistency with the traditional Guignol and Gnafron types. 35 But what if this logic is taken one step further? What if one assumes that language not only guarantees the permanence of Lyon's puppet types, but also serves as a parodic mechanism? In this case, the translation of Shakespeare's poetry (through the filter of the opera libretto) into Guignol contributes to the overall comic effect of transposing a Shakespearean theme into the setting of a puppet theatre. The rough collage between Guignol and his role can thus be interpreted as a deliberate play on dissonance, revealing irony and bringing a metatheatrical structure to the surface.
It is symbolic that in their first appearance as Shakespearean characters, Guignol and Gnafron wear masks as they embody Romeo and Mercutio infiltrating the Capulet masquerade. Their dialogue takes on a double meaning:
… Dis-donc, Chignol, est-ce que tu crois que je vais garder longtemps cette guenille sur la frimousse.
Quand on a une binette aussi jolie que la tienne… je comprends que ça fasse de la peine de la cacher… Si on nous reconnaissait ça ferait du potin… y vaut mieux garder nos muselières… (2.3; p. 17) … Hey, Chignol, do you think I’ll keep this rag on my face for long? When one has as pretty a mug as yours… I understand that it bothers you to have to hide it… If we were recognised, it would be talk… we’d better keep our muzzles on…]
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Rébecca Dufeix from the Documentation Centre of the Gadagne Museums in Lyon, France, and Anaïs Avossa from the Documentation Centre of the Mucem in Marseille, France.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This article is one of the outputs of the European Research Commission's PuppetPlays project (Horizon 2020/G. A. 835193), which paid for this publication's open access.
Supplemental material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.