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The Man With The Broken Ear

Let's start this engine with Tintin and the Arumbaya fetish in The Broken Ear. In a nutshell, a pre-Columbian statuette is stolen from a Belgian museum, so of course Tintin ''always ready'' gets on the case and finds the whereabouts of the artefact, much worse for the wear after going through the usual array of worldwide adventures. You'd want to be an Arumbaya fetish for less than that. Come on, you'd be put on a pedestal as a valued museum piece, admired, praise sung to you, then you'd be taken for a round-the-world hike, and after a walk through the Amazonian park (it will shrink to that one day), you'd be put back on your very own pedestal with veteran status (strung up and with a few band aids, but you can't have your cake and eat it) to be even more admired and sung praise to.

That is the fete [sic] of the Napoleon fetish of flesh and blood met by Edmond About's puppet in The Man With The Broken Ear. This Lorraine writer does know how to put frightfully jolly capers together with a lot of sense, and with a touch of sci-fi redolent of Jules Verne minus the tiresome educational tirades. His anti-hero is a colonel of the Napoleonic army who got freeze-dried after a Napoleonic defeat by the Prussians, and who then gets sold as an antique to a French civil engineer on his way back home to a quiet provincial town from a prestigious job in Russia (O Tula!). The mummy's newly-found contemporaries revive the body, curious to hear the human grandfather clock pipe in. The live clockwork soon reveals itself to be an uncontrollable time-bomb; the mordant of the satire is leonine. The clone of his dead and buried Bonny master rushes here and there, hither and thither, drinking, wenching, duelling, fighting in brawls, bawling out ''Long Live the Emperor!'' as regular as clockwork, upsetting all the carts on his OCD way to refresh his conqueror's career; he revives all the antics of his days on remote control. Lorraine oblige, his one good deed is to innocently deceive the deceitful former Prussian antique dealers who sold him down the Spree to get his lawful inheritance back - not for himself, but to provide a dowry to his grand-daughter, who is engaged to the salvaging civil engineer. In the end, it is nevertheless for the German Writing on the Wall to get him: der Menetekel, of sound Hebraic stock has long been established as the translation for ''bad omen of Biblical proportions''.

I do hear here and there renewed references to Napoleon with regard to Mr French President's (also the name of a branded camembert) mismanagement of the pandemic and of the vaccination campaign, as well as with regard to the upcoming presidential elections next year. It is too sad a subject to gloat over, however Napoleon keeps popping back up in French politics as a legitimising mantra, a good-luck charm and a holy relic more regularly aired than the Holy Shroud of Torino, the secular one allegedly warranting electoral support from raving gung-ho crowds. Not so much so for those who happened to have been trampled under Nappy's war-horses, and there are many more I think than of the others. Strangely enough, only a few days ago I was reading about the Dunblane massacre in crimeandinvestigation.co.uk. People who had known the gun-toting paedo dubbed Mr Creepy aka Thomas Hamilton describe him as ''deceitful, intolerant and suffering from delusions of grandeur'', a man obsessed with guns and training young boys manu militari to his peculiar standards. Luckily for me Edmond About, a writer I worship has settled the score in the Nap matter over a century ago. That's what they call in the French language ''remettre les pendules a l'heure'', to reset the clocks; to set the record straight.


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