Volume 54, Number 16 · October 25, 2007
The Hidden Master of the Human Comedy
By Luc Sante
The original French title of this book, Nouvelles en trois lignes, can mean either 'the news in three lines' or 'novellas in three lines.' It was the title under which these items—there are 1,220 of them in all; a mere 154 have been omitted here* because their significance has fallen into obscurity—were all published in 1906 in the Paris daily newspaper Le Matin. Newspapers in many countries apart from the United States run columns of such brief stories, which in French are called faits-divers ('sundry events'; 'fillers' are nearly but not quite the same—there is no simple English equivalent). They cover the same subjects as the rest of the paper—crime, politics, ceremony, catastrophe—but their individual narratives are compressed into a single frame, like photographs. They may suggest, portend, echo, pose questions, present enigmas, awaken troubling memories, but they usually do not have a second act. Cases in which a story runs over into a subsequent item on a later day are rare. People have been clipping and saving such items, for their oddity or their usually unintentional humor, since the fait-divers first made its appearance in the nineteenth century, but they have seldom if ever considered them literary texts, attributable to an author.
Feature, 5391 words
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