La Famille, Part Five

My Oncle Jacques was not a nice person. He was tall and slim, with the slicked-back hair popular among American movie stars, and he wore thick, black-framed glasses that he hoped made him look like an intellectual, which he was not. What he was, as his father—my paternal grandfather—liked to remind everyone, was a gifted concert pianist who, for two decades, was the toast of France and, for reasons unknown, Rio de Janeiro.
It’s difficult for me to offer an honest opinion of him. He mistreated his younger sister—my mother—and often behaved like a lout, with the approval and support of his father.
Shortly after the demise of Le Petomane, the flatulist Joseph Pujol, practical jokes were the height of entertainment. Pujol’s strange ability to fart songs and extinguish candles at a distance had made farting all the rage. Oncle Jacques and his father’s favorite trick was to sit on either side of a woman dinner guest. My grandfather would surreptitiously tug the woman’s dinner napkin off her lap and onto the floor, and discreetly point to the cloth. The woman would lean to one side to retrieve the napkin, and my uncle would slip a whoopee cushion onto her chair. As she straightened up, the cushion would emit a dreadfully loud farting sound and silence the table. My grandfather, always the gentleman, would pat the prank victim on the arm and say, “Please, Madame, it could happen to anyone.”
All in good fun.
Another flatulent pastime was conducting a telephone conversation while in the toilette, breaking wind and flushing every time the party on the other end of the call began to speak. Oncle Jacques did this with elan and enjoyed the embarrassment it caused among female acquaintances.
He was also a storyteller. In his keyboard repertoire was the very complex and demanding Left Hand Concerto by Ravel. Oncle Jacques would whisper to fans that the composer had written the piece to develop Jacques’ left hand, which was weaker than his right one. This was untrue. Ravel’s work was created for a military pilot who had lost his hand fighting the airborne enemy during World War 1. Jacque’s lie was never challenged and enhanced his already significant reputation.
For all his shortcomings, Jacque’s talent lives on. Most of Poulenc and Ravel’s recorded works exist thanks to Jacques’ LPs and CDs available in record stores and online. He was an Oscar Wilde character, living for weeks and months in an admirer’s chateau where he would entertain guests and in turn be offered hospitality, meals, trips, and clothing. He was one of Jean Cocteau’s horizontal friends and I have an old photo of him with Coco Chanel, Igor Stravinsky and other luminaries of the time.
Members of the family did not get along. Jacques, in particular, considered himself a leading light, and was often at odds with uncles, aunts and cousins. He particularly disliked my Tante Thérése, a member of the Bertrand clan, who had married very young and, before being widowed, had lived an adventurous life in the French colonies. Their enmity grew as the years passed, and eventually they refused to be in the same room together.
Tante Thérése died in the late 50s and was ensconced in the Bertrand/Fevrier crypt at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. My uncle, I am told, was delighted. He died a few years later, struck down by a motorbike ridden by a drunk shoemaker. There was only one space left in the family’s crypt, and Oncle Jacques was laid there, next to Tante Therese for all eternity.