These are the opening lines of the poem:

O brother men who after us remain,

Do not look coldly on the scene you view,

For if you pity wretchedness and pain,

God will the more incline to pity you.

You see us hang here, half a dozen who

Indulged the flesh in every liberty

Till it was pecked and rotted, as you see,

And these our bones to dust and ashes fall.

Let no one mock our sorry company,

But pray to God that He forgive us all.

First of all, I looked at the French textbook to refresh my memory. I read that François Villon had written this poem in prison, while thinking that he might be sentenced to death. I could always start by dramatising the story behind the poem.

‘You have to think about this poem … as if he wrote it imagining it would be the last thing he ever wrote. Look at the lexical field.’

‘The what?’

‘The lexical field. It’s a way of grouping different words belonging to the same family … You don’t notice all the violent images?’

‘Yeah, I suppose so. Like “pecked” and “rotted”, you mean?’

‘Exactly. That’s a clue. What does it make you think of?’

‘Rotted? I dunno … rotten fruit?’

‘Yeah, sure. But what else?’

‘A decomposing body.’

‘There you go. Very good.’

‘That’s gross. I don’t get why Martinez is making us read this.’ ‘It’s a classic of French literature …’

INTERESTING ANECDOTES ABOUT KARL LAGERFELD (2)

His mother was an austere woman. Madeleine told me she’d seen Frau Lagerfeld one day in the Chanel offices; she was a very old woman by then. And Karl had whispered to her: ‘My mother was always that old …’ Beyond his sarcasm, it was clear that he loved and admired his mother, despite the emotional distance she kept from him. She was so severe-looking that you’d assume she was a very logical person, but she had a sort of secret addiction: she consulted fortune tellers. In the summer of 1939, she summoned one of these women to their home. Seeing young Karl, she put her finger to her lips. But he was used to that. Silence was his mother’s favourite melody. How old would he have been at the time? No one really knows. Karl never revealed his date of birth. Maybe four or five. Anyway, he sat in a corner of the living room and watched the scene unfold. He was amazed to see that his mother looked suddenly like a little girl in the presence of this clairvoyant and her cards. After a while, the two women turned to look at him. Had he sighed too loudly? No. He’d even learned to breathe without the air leaving his lungs. They were simply talking about him. Later, Karl would find out what they’d been saying. His mother had asked the fortune teller: ‘What will my little boy become?’ The fortune teller had closed her eyes, as if the contours of the future were more easily visible in the dark, before confidently announcing: ‘A priest!’ Lagerfeld’s mother had almost fainted. She may have been a believer, but she found it inconceivable that her son would devote his life to God. She did not like this prediction at all. So she decided to change it: sometimes people see fortune tellers not to find out what the future will bring but to alter it. From that moment on, young Karl never set foot in a church again. His mother even banned him from attending family weddings and funerals. Oddly, despite pursuing a career as far from the priesthood as could be imagined, he led a relatively monastic life, often dressing in a style quite close to that of a man of the cloth.