Goldenbird

Continuing the horror theme, today it’s Father Pietro’s turn to face his worst nightmare – a garden full of pests*) such as a wild sow and her farrow, a raven, sparrows, a mole, and three unruly seminarians. Falco is playing Saint Francis to a young raven, Nino is feeding his feathered friends instead of sowing, and I don’t want to know what Zeppe is going to do with his little spade.

I got the idea from studying Parisian argot, the famous slang of the underworld, which contains many imaginative, rude but sometimes poetical synonyms to the regular vocabulary. A priest, for example, could be called sanglier (wild boar), marcassin (wild piglet), corbeau (raven), or taupe (mole); all animals could be described as black like the priest’s cassock. In the days of Victor Hugo, seminary students were called mômes noirs (black kids: see also la môme Piaf).

There is an even more interesting explanation to the term sanglier. According to the Dictionnaire Du Jargon Parisien by Lucien Rigaud from 1878, “Le sanglier est sauvage ; le prêtre vit retiré du monde comme le sanglier au fond des forèts”. The wild boar prefers the deep forests, the priest must keep away from worldly life – being “in the world, but not of it”. From the point of view of the urban proletariat, the clerical class seemed as removed from their world as the wild boar in the forest.

*) N.B.: Pigs can be very useful helpmates in the garden. Our potbellied pig Sergei kept the lawn neat and free from weeds, trimmed and fertilised the rose bushes, and kept the ant and slug population in check.