The Mirror

To one of his pupils in his Paris school, Pierre Larousse was a "small, dumpy man, his beard unkempt, his eyes sparkling--an introverted, sinister plodder strongly suspected of subversive ideas." But subversive or not, Pierre Larousse had one idea for which France has long been grateful. "I want," he announced in 1863, "to teach everyone everything."

Last week, 78 years after his death, old Pierre was still teaching. The great publishing house he founded had just put out a supplement to its six-volume Larousse du XXe Siecle, and by doing so, it had brought up to date France's foremost dictionary-encyclopedia. Today the Larousse books are the final popular arbiters for French words: nine out of ten Frenchmen know them, and eight out of ten families own either the one-volume Petit Larousse (1,800 pages, 70,000 words and articles), the two-volume Nouveau Larousse Universel (2,176 pages, 138,423 words and articles), or the definitive dictionary itself with 6,500 pages and 236,000 words and articles. Last week, with the new supplement, scholars and plain citizens could find out what has happened to their language--and their world--since 1933.

"Follow Me!" In his own day, Pierre Larousse spent a lifetime preparing for his dictionary. The crotchety son of a hotelkeeper in Toucy, he moved to the Paris Latin Quarter just so he could study. Each morning for eight years, he would emerge from his dingy room, make a tour of lectures at the Sorbonne, the College de France, the Observatory, and then, after 6, retire to the library to study some more. After a stint of teaching, he began writing textbooks on Latin, Greek, and French grammar, finally hit upon the idea of a dictionary-encyclopedia. Crouched behind his desk, he worked 16 hours a day, in 1865 issued his first 40-page weekly installment. "Subscribe," said he. "or do not subscribe. Speak of me or do not speak of me. I am ready and am taking the road. Follow me who will."

Those who did follow him found that Pierre Larousse was no one to hide his own opinions. He criticized the Roman Catholic Church (which promptly put his work on the Index), denounced the Emperor Napoleon III ("France . . . owes him an epitaph that could only be this: Napoleon the Last!"), refused to admit that General Bonaparte had ever become an emperor at all. As far as Larousse was concerned, Bonaparte should have dropped dead "at the Chateau de St. Cloud, near Paris, the 18th Brumaire, Year VIII* of the French Republic, one and indivisible." "Que Vous Etes Swing!" Today Larousse no longer goes in for such acerbity, but in its own way, it still manages to mirror the changing spirit of France. Under angoisse (anxiety), the new supplement quite naturally includes a discussion of existentialism; under egalite (equality), it notes that the "preamble of the [French] Constitution of 1946 completes this principle . . ." There are brief biographies of Lillian Gish (revived with Duel in the Sun") and Charles Chaplin, "the most authentic genius of the cinema." Picasso has swelled to 77 lines; Malenkov and Beria have arrived; Korea has grown from two-thirds of a column to two-thirds of a page. Eisenhower, Truman and Churchill are all hommes d'etat, but General de Gaulle has been demoted to a mere homme politique.

The war has brought in planning, bazooka, jerrycan, container, radar, bipartisme (bipartisanship). Gangster has gone Gallic, and racket (noun, masculine) is "an association of malfeasants engaged in blackmail or in the exploitation of merchants or individuals by terror." Swing is a synonym for chic ("Que vous etes swing!"); cash is slang for money, and auto-stop means hitchhiking. A girl is someone who dances in a chorus, and re-bop ou be-bop is defined in full.

But, as the supplement clearly shows, the French are more than borrowers. Among the words they have invented themselves: casse-pied (equivalent to a pain in the neck), entourloupette (doublecross), baratin (slick talk), and cache-sexe (everything from panties to Bikini to G-string).

* The Revolution's way of saying Nov. 9, 1799 --the first day of the famed coup d'etat that boosted Napoleon to Consul and paved the way for his becoming dictator of France.

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