Faithful Reader, this entry should have appeared on the first of the month; vacations, however, intervened, and your correspondent was prevented from filing it by a lengthy detour over the Massif Central. He presents it now, with his most heartfelt apologies.
Today was poisson d’avril, which is the French version of April Fool’s Day, and a pretty big deal for the small French children at École Rex. Poisson d’avril seems to work largely on the same principle of April Fool’s Day – humiliating your peers and colleagues by revelling in their hopeless gullibility – with two key differences, which I adumbrate here for anthropological interest:
1. The Fishes. While in Canada, being able to to carry out a successful April Fool’s joke requires the ingenuity to come up with a conceivable and, if not clever, then at least cruel falsehood, as well as ability to deliver it convincingly, the French offer the convenient fall-back option of sneaking up behind your target and sticking a paper fish – a literal April Fish – to his or her back. This happened a great deal at École Rex.
2. The Day. Unlike in North America, where a mean-spirited conspiracy of elementary school teachers has put it about that if you play an April Fool’s prank after noon, you, rather than your evidently clueless target is the fool, poisson d’avril lasts all day long. That’s time to affix a lot of fishes.
In theory, poisson d’avril entails a Saturnalian reversal of scholastic authority, as teachers furnish their students both with a supply of paper fish, and the principal targets for them. Practice did reflect this, to some extent: my colleagues frequently arrived back in the staff room sporting their colourful marine accessories, and I was intermittently besieged by fish-wielding juveniles, although the boys who stuck fish in the girls’ hair were still efficiently reduced to tears in the director’s office. More generally, however, the teachers had the upper-hand, tormenting their classes with fake assignments and impossible collège entrance exams. One problem gave the quantities and prices of fish purchased by Madame Avril, before asking the age of the fishwife; an answer posted in the staff room confidently declared that she was 24.30€ old. On second thought, though, she was only four years old, “since April is the 4th month.”
My own poisson d’avril was to tell my students that, as they had learned enough English, we would be learning Latin in the future. My last class of the day, a group of seven and eight year-olds, took the exercise very seriously; one seven year-old also gave my gravitas a welcome boost by telling me, “Leon, quand tu parles latin, tu as l’air d’un homme sérieux.” If there was ever going to be a providential confirmation that a PhD was the right path for me, this surely must have been it.