Claude Tillier: Mon oncle Benjamin (1843)

Claude Tillier's Mon oncle Benjamin is perhaps better known as a film: Édouard Molinaro's Mon oncle Benjamin (1969) starring Jacques Brel followed René Leprince's silent film of the same name in 1924. Georges Brassens proclaimed that anyone who didn't like the book was no friend of his. Yet Claude Tillier (1801-44) remains a figure little known in the history of French literature.

Mon oncle Benjamin is an anarchic, episodic novel set in the mid-nineteenth century and narrated by the unnamed great-nephew of Benjamin Rathery. Benjamin is a very talented doctor practising in Clamecy, a lover of women, but above all a huge fan of good wine (indeed alcohol in general, almost to the point of alcoholism) and good food, although he cares nothing for money and has accumulated huge debts to various tradesmen. Benjamin is twenty-eight at the time the forty-year-old narrator tells the story, and the uncle lives with his sister and her husband Machecourt. Benjamin's sister in particular thinks her brother should be married, and what better match than to Arabelle Minxit, the daughter of the rich doctor M. Minxit, who loves Benjamin as though he were his son? Well, because Arabelle loves the villainous M. de Pont-Cassé, that's why. And Benjamin appropriately behaves very coldly towards her.

Anarchic? Yes, Benjamin shows no respect for anyone in authority. When the Marquis de Cambyse is offended that Benjamin doesn't greet him with great respect, Benjamin tells the marquis that he has spent years earning his title, whereas the marquis has spent none for his. Time for a fight.

And fighting is what Benjamin does well, but without blood being spilled. I particularly like the moment when the good doctor wants to have the part of his cheek, which the marquis has been forced to kiss, removed after his death and moved to the Panthéon, to which he adds, when it's been built. It's at moments like that that Mon oncle Benjamin reads much later than a mid-nineteenth-century novel. A classic.