'Quatres Sans Cul'

When it comes to dreams I am strictly a materialist. They are neither messages nor prophecies but a random firing of electrons in the amygdala. When not frightening, dreams can be entertaining (for the dreamer, and no one else) and occasionally they rouse a fleeting spurt of nostalgia. I woke Tuesday morning thinking it was 1973, I was in the French Alps and Nixon won’t surrender the tapes. I sensed the dream was a lengthy narrative, quickly evaporated, of which I retained only a snapshot: the Fontaine des Éléphants in Chambéry. It was erected in 1838 to honor a Chambéry-born “military adventurer,” Général de Boigne. On each of the four sides of the monument is the front half of an elephant. Locals know it as quatre sans cul – the assless four. 

That’s where I spent much of that summer, age twenty, living in a pension, drinking vats of wine and reading Montaigne, Shakespeare and Melville. I learned that Joseph de Maistre was born there. I hiked up the mountain overlooking Chambéry to the Croix du Nivolet. Nearby is the Grande Chartreuse, the founding monastery of the Carthusian order. Only later did I learn John Ruskin was in Chambéry in 1846. The most interesting product of his visit is probably his watercolor of two towers in the town. He mentions Chambéry in passing in the fourth volume of Modern Painters. In Praeterita (1885), his unorthodox memoir, Ruskin transcribes portions of a travel journal:

 

“Thursday, 3^rd May, Chambéry. – Up the hill that looks towards Aix, with my father and mother; had a chat with an old man, a proprietor of some land on the hillside, who complained bitterly that the priests and the revenue officers seized everything, and that nothing but black bread was left for the peasant.”

 

No mention of the quatre sans cul.