Rossignol, Rossignol...

Click on Luscinia Megarhyncos/Rossignol Philomèle/Nightingale to hear the April night-time song of Sainte-Cécile.

"Philomèle: qui aime le chant. C'est du latin, du grec à l'origine..."

The last place you'd expect a dummy's guide to the classics is the zinc counter of the mobile bar at the village fête.

I'd just got the hang of serving Kronenbourg from a chilled chrome tap, and it was going down well at 11 am under the azure canopy of sky and the pracariously propped serving hatch which ran the whole length of the stretch-model Citroën HY truck. The hatch threatened to decapitate any drinker who slapped his francs down too hard, but it hadn't done so, yet.

Jean was our resident classicist. He'd spent four years in Hamburg during World War Two, where he worked in a bakery as a forced labourer, "un prisonnier"...There was little to do at night if you wanted, as he did, to minimise fraternization. So he studied Latin and Greek from two ageing text books which were in German...

His fingernails were long. He traced two circles on the zinc, one the size of a ping-pong ball, one that of a football.

"La RAF, quand ils bombardaient, ils détruisaient ça...Les Américains, ça". He described alternately the smaller and larger circle.

"...et les Mosquito de la RAF faisaient un passage avant le bombardement, à basse altitude, pour nous prévenir. Les Forteresses Volantes, jamais. Ils étaient trop hauts".

We chatted for half an hour that day, in the lead-up to lunchtime at the fête, as the barbecue smoke and odours of saucisses grillées started to drift across the lawn of La Salle Polyvalente towards Le Camping.

I told our former prisonnier des Nazis that I hadn't slept well because of the nightingale, and that was when I discovered Jean's knowledge of Latin and Greek.

So at 6 am this morning, as Lucinia Megarhyncos, who had sung non-stop all night, got the better of my struggle to ignore the panoply of phrases, I rose to write this.

And to picture Jean ten years ago, in the afternoons towards the end of his life, sitting on his bench in Le Camping, facing Le Petit Lay, rolling his smokes and running through the Latin names of the birdsong.

Lexique: La Salle Polyvalente; Encore du latin et du grec: Polyvalent = multi-usages! C'est la grande salle des mariages, des fêtes et des manifestations de notre commune. Elle est construite en 1985.
Le Camping; Il se trouve entre la salle, et la rivière qui s'appelle Le Petit Lay.