Case Closed
After two years' investigation into the murder of a young woman whose split-open skull and skeleton had been found at low tide one winter's day in 2003 in the seaside town of Plouezoc'h, in Brittany, local officials were relieved to find that the death had in fact occurred sometime during the first half of the 15th century.Said Francois Gerthosser of the Plourin-les-Morlaix police, in rather loose translation: "We reckon it was pirates."
Update on 7 February, 06 by
groundskeeper
groundskeeper
In response to comments by an esteemed reader: Plouezoc'h may indeed be a village of someone's fictional invention. We have not yet mustered the resources to send a trusted correspondent to investigate. We are ashamed and doing what we can to rectify all institutional shortcomings. In the meantime, the Plouezoc'h municipal website certainly makes the place seem very real and dynamic (and even rather attractive as a stopover point on a tour of Brittany and Finisterre). We have yet to determine the meaning and origin of the apostrophe.
The image of the skeleton, paired with the original story by the Agence France-Presse and picked up by USA Today, Yahoo, Harper's, etc., (and us), is apparently that of another set of bones exhumed from a graveyard in another part of france--"A skeleton discovered from a medieval cemetery of a cathedral in the French city of Ajaccio, in June 2005"--illustrative mostly of what might remain of a human body after the passage of a certain amount of time.
What did François Gerthosser actually say? According to the original AFP wire, the inspector mentioned that the death might be linked to "une scène de piraterie." The translation "we reckon it might be pirates" does indeed seem a bit off-tone.
Why the impulse to have a local French police authority speaking like, well, like the current American president? Is there conspiracy involved? Perhaps. Then again, Americans (and the various media that serve them) do seem to enjoy finding (or making up) scenarios in which the French come off as particularly backwards and colorful. As they (the "Americans," that fictional, undifferentiated mass) also enjoy consuming stories of their presidents and other purported role-models displaying behavior and patterns of speech distinct in one way or another from what they expect in representatives of the educated and monied class in America. We believe this impulse (to mock or otherwise marvel at the common-ness of the supposedly uncommon?) may in fact predate George Bush Jr., the era of Freedom Fries, etc., but we may not be able to put any time into finding specific examples--in, say, the travel writings of Mark Twain or the correspondences of John Adams from Paris to the Continental Congress.
Interestingly, the French have often been caught engaging in similar sport from their side of the ocean. See for example, Garrison Keillor's recent piece in the New York Times Sunday Book Review of American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, by Bernard-Henri Lévy.
The image of the skeleton, paired with the original story by the Agence France-Presse and picked up by USA Today, Yahoo, Harper's, etc., (and us), is apparently that of another set of bones exhumed from a graveyard in another part of france--"A skeleton discovered from a medieval cemetery of a cathedral in the French city of Ajaccio, in June 2005"--illustrative mostly of what might remain of a human body after the passage of a certain amount of time.
What did François Gerthosser actually say? According to the original AFP wire, the inspector mentioned that the death might be linked to "une scène de piraterie." The translation "we reckon it might be pirates" does indeed seem a bit off-tone.
Why the impulse to have a local French police authority speaking like, well, like the current American president? Is there conspiracy involved? Perhaps. Then again, Americans (and the various media that serve them) do seem to enjoy finding (or making up) scenarios in which the French come off as particularly backwards and colorful. As they (the "Americans," that fictional, undifferentiated mass) also enjoy consuming stories of their presidents and other purported role-models displaying behavior and patterns of speech distinct in one way or another from what they expect in representatives of the educated and monied class in America. We believe this impulse (to mock or otherwise marvel at the common-ness of the supposedly uncommon?) may in fact predate George Bush Jr., the era of Freedom Fries, etc., but we may not be able to put any time into finding specific examples--in, say, the travel writings of Mark Twain or the correspondences of John Adams from Paris to the Continental Congress.
Interestingly, the French have often been caught engaging in similar sport from their side of the ocean. See for example, Garrison Keillor's recent piece in the New York Times Sunday Book Review of American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, by Bernard-Henri Lévy.
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•Or, perhaps, are these problems the main point? I'll read on about Treasure Maps; perhaps my answers are there.