Column | English gentlemen, shoot yourself first!

Last week we had dinner with Jeroen, a former student of mine, who turned out to live in a huge detached villa, with a separate dining room. Jeroen’s wife was called Hilde. She poured wine into stemless glasses, which was a pity.

“Are you also in the legal profession?” Thijs asked politely.

“International tax law, very boring, very boring,” she said with a wave of the hand.

“And what is the end of ends in international tax law?” I asked, “Abolish all rules?”

“The goal of goals,” repeated Jeroen, who sat down next to me. “Well said.”

“The end of ends is decency of means,” I quoted. Stephen Themerson. Not that I’ve read anything by him, by the way. Just that one statement.”

Jeroen jumped up. “That must have been his Huizinga lecture. He has had great success with that.” He got up and walked out of the room. Perhaps they also had their own library. There he was again. “Here I have it! A chair in decency1981. You can borrow it.”

“Were you there, at that lecture?” I asked.

“Well no, I was eight then.”

The next day I started A chair in decency. Not an easy meal. Themerson jumps from one subject to another. A recurring sentence was: “Messieurs les Anglais, tirez les premiers”. No idea what it meant.

I grabbed the iPad. The quote came from an account of an eighteenth-century battle. An English commander shouts: “Gentlemen of the French Guard, fire!” A French grenadier shouts back: “Gentlemen, we never shoot first, shoot yourself!” Then the battle breaks out.

And then Google says: “The verdict settled in the collective memory. Wiske quotes it in the Suske en Wiske album The Ape Fair.”

I jumped up and ran up the stairs. I knew that picture! I could see it clearly: Wiske stands in a dramatic pose with outstretched arms in front of a bunch of helmeted monkeys with guns drawn and then she says something I couldn’t read. Still, I recognized the text.

I skimmed through the album. There I already had the picture. But the speech bubble said: “Punch my heart with your bullets!” How could that be? I had been so sure of myself.

Then a light came on to me. This was the ‘improved’ reprint from a few years ago. I took out the old album and sure enough, there it was: „Messieurs les singes, tirez les premiers!

In 1976, then The Ape Fair appeared, the quote was apparently still known to a large public. Themerson also left it untranslated in 1981. But in 2017 they thought at the Suske en Wiske publisher: nobody recognizes this statement. Let’s come up with something else.

They were right about that because I got that’tirez les premiers‘ to all my friends and no one recognized it.

It is a pity, however, that this quote sinks even further. In the foreseeable future, no one will be able to feel the immense joy I experienced when I entered that enigmatic text The Ape Fair finally brought home after fifty years.

Nicole Mizee is a writer and replaces Frits Abrahams during his vacation.

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