We had a lot of fun in Paris under the Regency, and Mehmed Efendi will not contradict us. In 1721, after spending two years in our capital as ambassador, the Janissary returned to the Ottoman Empire and published an account of what he saw – a book which would later be translated here under the title The Paradise of unfaithful. In that same year, 1721, the young Montesquieu, 32 years old, returned the ball to him with his famous Persian letters. We know the plot: two Persians traveling across Europe to Paris, Usbek and Rica, recount their adventures in writing to their friends who remained there. This “kind of novel” (as Montesquieu said) takes up the caustic spirit of Characters by La Bruyère (published in 1688) while inventing a new form. It must be believed that not everyone had perceived the polemical spirit of the book since in 1728 the teasing Montesquieu was elected to the French Academy…
Three centuries later, this classic remains read. It has just been reissued in the Bouquins collection. In a more original way, with his usual spirit, Gilles Martin-Chauffier publishes a modern variation, Qatari Letters. The narrator is Hassan, a young and ambitious embassy advisor, a sort of Paul Morand of Doha, who recounts his Parisian mission to his brother Driss. The action covers the period 2023-2024. Is our country still a paradise for infidels? If a certain puritanism has extended its empire there, some fantasies persist – you have to see Hassan discovering fashion week (a twisting chapter during which Martin-Chauffier equals Loïc Prigent). Between a bullfight in Dax and a football match at the Parc de Princes, the diplomat seduces a snobbish aristocrat, Caroline, who works in a public relations agency. She gets him up to speed, lets him meet people and see the country. Hassan sometimes has the impression of being in one of our “famous 18th century salons (the century, not the district)”.
In one of the most successful chapters, his partner invites him to spend the end of year holidays in her parents’ Savoyard chalet. On December 31, already forced to drink champagne, the unfortunate man was also forced to watch the wishes of “His Majesty Macron I” – “another local fantasy”. If he is not fond of Macron (qualified in turn as a “pipelette” and an “asexual king”), the acid Hassan is even harsher with Sandrine Rousseau (a “buffoon”). He has not yet seen Jean-Luc Mélenchon: “Anywhere else in the world, it would have been left in the accessories store a long time ago.” Our shoddy Danton inspires him with this correct observation: “France remains France: a great lady who has her works and her poor. Nothing more. When she ends up electing a man of the left, a Blum or a Mitterrand, it’s is always a great bourgeois who wraps himself in his cashmere scarves to go and treat himself to first editions. Everything waltzes and nothing changes. The big evening never arrives. Only one political figure escapes his attacks: Rachida Dati, “the Muslim Wonder Woman”…
“Secular Goddess”
We can read Qatari Letters like an entertainment book, in the manner of Major Thompson’s Notebooks that Pierre Daninos once wrote. But the cowardly tone is crueler – in his best moments, Martin-Chauffier would make Patrick Besson pass for Baptiste Beaulieu. Above all, he puts his two cents on hot topics like immigration, caricatures or the “Secular Goddess”. On a lighter note, our public finances are an unfathomable mystery for Hassan. We have “debt in the clouds”. And the erudite Hassan quotes Oscar Wilde: “It’s very boring not to have money, if you also had to do without it!” Then to continue: “That said, here, abstracting from the principle of reality shocks no one. It’s even the opposite. The irreducible Gauls owe their pure and simple survival to Europe but they never stop attack.”
Even on a subject as hackneyed as the opening ceremony of the last Olympic Games, Martin-Chauffier manages to find the right tone. To avoid the repetition of television sets, should we return to literature, to the style and the shift that fiction allows? We wish this brilliant sotie to have a success comparable to that which Patrick Rambaud had experienced with his Chronicles of the reign of Nicholas I. Let’s laugh a little more before the sky finally falls on our heads.
Qatari Letters. By Gilles Martin-Chauffier. Albin Michel, 220 p., €19.90.