Version LLCER 3

Année universitaire 2023-2024

V. Jobert-Martini et A. Terry

Évaluation : CC (1h) semaine 8. Version sur texte inconnu.

Text 1

It was a bright Sunday morning of early summer, promising heat, but with a fresh breeze
blowing. All the windows of the boardinghouse were open and the lace curtains ballooned
gently towards the street beneath the raised sashes. The belfry of George's Church sent
out constant peals and worshippers, singly or in groups, traversed the little circus before
the church, revealing their purpose by their self-contained demeanor no less than by the
little volumes in their gloved hands. Breakfast was over in the boardinghouse and the
table of the breakfast room was covered with plates on which lay yellow streaks of eggs
with morsels of bacon fat and bacon rind. Mrs. Mooney sat in the straw armchair and
watched the servant Mary remove the breakfast things. She made Mary collect the crusts
and pieces of broken bread to help to make Tuesday's bread-pudding. When the table was
cleared, the broken bread collected, the sugar and butter safe under lock and key, she
began to reconstruct the interview which they had had the night before with Polly. Things
were as she had suspected: she had been frank in her questions and Polly had been frank
in her answers. Both had been somewhat awkward, of course. She had been made
awkward by her not wishing to receive the news in too cavalier a fashion or to seem to
have connived and Polly had been made awkward not merely because allusions of that
kind always made her awkward but also because she did not wish it to be thought that in
her wise innocence she had divined the intention behind her mother's tolerance.

Mrs. Mooney glanced instinctively at the little gilt clock on the mantelpiece as soon as she
had become aware through her revery that the bells of George's Church had stopped
ringing. It was seventeen minutes past eleven: she would have lots of time to have the
matter out with Mr. Doran and then catch short twelve at Marlborough Street. She was
sure she would win. To begin with she had all the weight of social opinion on her side: she
was an outraged mother. She had allowed him to live beneath her roof, assuming that he
was a man of honor, and he had simply abused her hospitality. He was thirty-four or
thirty-five years of age, so that youth could not be pleaded as his excuse; nor could
ignorance be his excuse since he was a man who had seen something of the world.

James Joyce, "The Boarding House", Dubliners, 1914

Text 2

The flat was on the top floor of a four-storey Georgian terraced house in a quiet street in
the New Town. It had a grand entrance with iron railings, up four stone steps and through
a huge wooden door with a brass knocker. Inside it wasn't quite so grand, but the stairway
was attractively curved and the stone treads worn away in the middle by two centuries of
human traffic. Sanderson went ahead, lumbering wearily up the stairs. From behind I
noticed his dirty scuffed shoes, worn at the heel. A man with dirty shoes, my father
believed, is a man who has lost self-respect.

Inside the flat there was a warm cheerful aroma, fresh bread and asparagus perhaps, plus
something I couldn't quite identify – mint possibly. There was certainly no trace of the
cooking smells that give Scotland a bad name – the long-boiled vegetables, the deep-fried
everything.

Sanderson's wife – a younger woman than I was expecting – appeared in the hallway. Her
face was open and alert, eyes set wide apart. There must have been twenty years or more
between her and her husband. She had a natural elegance – nothing to do with clothes or
cosmetics. When she saw me she tilted her head to one side, slightly quizzical and with a
half-smile, leaving everything about her to be guessed at. Her white trousers floated as
she walked, giving her an ethereal quality, beautiful and unsettling. Sanderson did the
introductions. […]

Over drinks we talked mainly about Carrie's work. The drawing-room was filled with
large paintings, all hanging from the picture rail beneath an elaborate cornice, some of
them in gilt-edged frames, others on unframed canvases stretched over wood. There were
several full-size portraits, mainly female nudes in various attitudes. At the time I knew
hardly anything about painting, but these pictures exerted a strange pull on me. They
were unusually vivid – it was possible to sense the blood beneath the skin, the heartbeat
behind the ribcage. The adjective that came to mind was truthful, normally a word best
avoided and certainly not one I had ever considered in the context of painting. Nearly
every square centimetre of the surface was filled with naked, ample flesh, not in the least
stylised, but raw and blemished and natural. With a different painter the effect might have
been crude, but these paintings came over as bold and celebratory. I viewed each one in
turn, wishing I could say something clever or knowledgeable, something sophisticated
that would suggest being at home with pictures of naked women. Instead I said: "These
are very good", which was meant to be admiring, but in my own ears sounded feeble and
patronising.

In the corner by the door there was a painting that stood out from the others – a portrait
of a man, just the head, not the body. The features struck me at first as exaggerated: the
eyes and nose and lips, taken singly, were fantastic specimens, but together they looked
like a mistake, a face put together in a hurry. And yet it was an interesting face, the
different features not quite blending, but the overall effect captivating. It held me there in
a kind of wonderment. Curiously, I had a faint sense of dejà vu: the longer I studied the
face the more familiar it seemed.

Jennie Erdal, The Missing Shade of Blue, 2012

Text 3

I was a discord in Gateshead Hall; I was like nobody there; I had nothing in harmony with
Mrs Reed or her children, or her chosen vassalage. If they did not love me, in fact, as little
did I love them. They were not bound to regard with affection a thing that could not
sympathize with one amongst them: a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in
temperament, in capacity, in propensities: a useless thing, incapable of serving their
interest, or adding to their pleasure: a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation
at their treatment, of contempt of their judgement. I know that had I been a sanguine,
brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping child – though equally dependent and
friendless – Mrs Reed would have endured my presence more complacently; her children
would have entertained for me more of the cordiality of fellow-feeling; the servants would
have been less prone to make me the scapegoat of the nursery.

Daylight began to forsake the red room: it was past four o'clock, and the beclouded
afternoon was tending to drear twilight. I heard the rain still beating continuously on the
staircase window, and the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees
cold as a stone, and then my courage sank. My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt,
forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire. All said I was wicked, and
perhaps I might be so: what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to
death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die? Or was the vault under the chancel
of Gateshead Church an inviting bourne? In such a vault I had been told did Mr Reed lie
buried; and led by this thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with gathering dread. I could
not remember him, but I knew that he was my own uncle – my mother's brother – that he
had taken me when a parentless infant to his house; and that in his last moments he had
required a promise of Mrs Reed that she would rear and maintain me as one of her own
children. Mrs Reed probably considered she had kept his promise; and so she had, I dare
say, as well as her nature would permit her: but how could she really like an interloper,
not of her race, and unconnected with her, after her husband's death, by any tie? It must
have been most irksome to find herself bound by a hard-wrung pledge to stand in the
stead of a parent to a strange child she could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien
permanently intruded on her own family group.

A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not – never doubted – that if Mr Reed had
been alive he would have treated me kindly; and now, as I sat looking at the white bed and
overshadowed walls – occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly
gleaming mirror – I began to recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves
by the violation of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge
the oppressed; and I thought Mr Reed's spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his sister's child,
might quit its abode – whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the
departed –and rise before me in this chamber.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847

Text 4

Most mornings, I prepared breakfast for myself in the apartment, but since I disliked
cooking and lacked all talent for it, I tended to eat lunch and dinner in restaurants – always
alone, always with an open book in front of me, always chewing as slowly as possible in
order to drag out the meal as long as I could. After sampling a number of options in the
vicinity, I settled on the Cosmic Diner as my regular spot for lunch. […] From a strictly
anthropological point of view, I discovered that Brooklynites are less reluctant to talk to
strangers than any tribe I had previously encountered. They butt into one another’s
business at will (old women scolding young mothers for not dressing their children
warmly enough, passersby snapping at dog walkers for yanking too hard on the leash);
they argue like deranged four-year-olds over disputed parking spaces; they zip out
dazzling one-liners as a matter of course. One Sunday morning, I went into a crowded deli
with the absurd name of La Bagel Delight. I was intending to ask for a cinnamon-raisin
bagel, but the word caught in my mouth and came out as cinnamon-reagan. Without
missing a beat, the young guy behind the counter answered: “Sorry, we don’t have any of
those. How about a pumpernixon instead?” Fast. So damned fast, I nearly wet my drawers.

After that inadvertent slip of the tongue, I finally hit upon an idea that Rachel would have
approved of. It wasn’t much of an idea, perhaps, but at least it was something, and if I stuck
to it as rigorously and faithfully as I intended to, then I would have my project, the little
hobbyhorse I’d been looking for to carry me away from the indolence of my soporific
routine. Humble as the project was, I decided to give it a grandiose, somewhat pompous
title-in-order to delude myself into thinking that I was engaged in important work. I called
it The Book of Human Folly, and in it I was planning to set down in the simplest, clearest
language possible an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment,
every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and
checkered career as a man. When I couldn’t think of stories to tell about myself, I would
write down things that had happened to people I knew, and when that source ran dry as
well, I would take on historical events, recording the follies of my fellow human beings
down through the ages, beginning with the vanished civilizations of the ancient world and
pushing on to the first months of the twenty-first century. If nothing else, I thought it
might be good for a few laughs. I had no desire to bare my soul or indulge in gloomy
introspections. The tone would be light and farcical throughout, and my only purpose was
to keep myself entertained while using up as many hours of the day as I could. I called the
project a book, but in fact it wasn’t a book at all.

Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, Picador: New York, 2006