Geniuses remain men.
They are also subject to the corrosive rules of the French language.
Hugo, Balzac, Apollinaire ... Many were those who fell into his traps.
Errors of agreement, mistakes in conjugation, omissions of a letter, pleonasms, typos, words out of their imagination ... Their syntax was sometimes abused.
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There is something poetic about these blunders. Voltaire notes in his correspondence:
"My dear philosopher, I imagine that the termometer in your apartment is like mine, very close to boiling water."
Others are not so far from those that we still see today:
"In ten years, I will have the most beautiful clientele in Paris,"
writes Balzac in
A Beginning in Life.
And how not to smile at this blunder by Maupassant, in
La Patronne
:
"(…) I entered a brasserie where I drank two cups of coffee and four or five little worms to give me courage"
.
Yes, our greatest writers had their weaknesses. Spelling was the pet peeve of some.
Le Figaro
invites
you to discover their pearls, according to
The prettiest French mistakes of our great writers
, by Anne Boquel and Etienne Kern (Payot, 2015). Will you get 10/10?