Daily Blague

His site was remarkable, surely. An American of non-Francophone parentage, Édouard wrote what always struck my half-tutored eyes as impeccable French. If he made mistakes, they were very raffinés; I recall reading a correction by Pierre Carion, an expat living in San Diego, that for the life of me I couldn't grasp. (I'm sure that I could provide the same service in English.) The point was that Édouard worked very hard at great risk. If he confessed in early days to confirming every sentence with dictionaries and phrasebooks, I missed it. Sale Bête was fluent to me, and I learned a great deal of bon français from it.

I learned a lot of other things, too, but not much about Édouard himself. The details that I was able to piece together portrayed a gay man of early middle age who lived on 11th Street in the West Village (not bad) and who, with his copain, shared a house in Stonington, Connecticut. Édouard himself, of course, never revealed the location of the house, but he ran a picture of a town square that looked familiar to me. We have a very close friend up there, and, upon inquiry, my supposition was thunderingly confirmed. Stonington, in case you've never thought to wonder, is the actual home of "Mystic Pizza." It is also home to many very tony people. Édouard seemed to revel in not being one of them.

I never believed that he wasn't, largely because Édouard's country entries (as distinct from those about Manhattan) were strewn with contrary implications. And there you have it: Édouard will always fascinate me because he remained anonymous, unlocatable. I can understand why a gay man would wish to be discreet, but Édouard never said a thing that might come back to bite him. He worked at an art gallery in Chelsea, and he spent the occasional hour with his lover in gay bars. The two of them appear to have lived like regular guys, with all the friction (implied with a spicy if taciturn intensity) that two men can expect to generate when they live together. There was talk of dirty clothes heaped on the floor. I have to say, Édouard - I will be permitted a moment of direct address, I hope - that I thought that you were making the bit about the dirty clothes up.

But I'm probably wrong; the man behind "Édouard" (not, obviously his real name, which I was afraid to discover to be "Ed") is a mystery. That will be the disappointment that I carry away from Sale Bête, along with more copious satisfaction. The mystery of "Édouard" distracted, in the end - oh, hell, long before the end - from the things that the site's author had to say. I kept asking questions that a fair disclosure of authorship would have settled. Is he thirtyish? Fortyish? Where'd he go to school? What's his family background? All the ordinary questions that everybody everywhere asks. Maybe Édouard stopped blogging because he was beginning to think about coming out. Not as a gay man, but as an anonymous blogger, no longer anonymous.

I thought that this post was going to be a critique of anonymous blogging. Not so, I guess; that will have to wait. May it be my own tribute to Sale Bête. I'm dismayed that I forgot until now to mention Betty, the chienne who has consented to live with Édouard and le copain. The lapse is a grave sign of my Edwardian unworthiness.