Sartre's second century

146 Chapter Ten
remords (remorse), les morts (the dead)—and one that is, for necessary
reasons, semi-submerged. An older meaning of the word mouche is "spy",
"informer", corresponding to the modern mouchard, and insofar as the
play can be taken as an allegory of the German occupation of France,
supported as it was by deplorable numbers of citizens ready and
sometimes eager to denounce their neighbours, that is what the flies—
loyal to Egisthe but able to be called off by Jupiter—represent.
In Les Mots, Sartre tells us that as a child he believed words to be the
quintessence of things, "la quintessence des choses", 13 and "having
discovered the world through language, for a long time I took language to
be the world". 14 He also tells us of a sinister chestnut tree, un marronnier,
about which he had read in the newspaper Le Matin; 15 and his work bears
witness to what appears to have been a protracted obsession with chestnut
trees. The most famous reference is, of course, to be found in the passage
in La Nausee where Roquentin sits hypnotised before a chestnut root; and
it is here, precisely, that he comes to the understanding that reality lies
beneath words, that words are, in a sense, impostors, and that we are
simply deceived by them. Now, one of the French words for "impostor",
which also designates the victim of an imposture as well as a clout or a
thump, is marron (chestnut), as in un medecin marron (an unqualified or
fake doctor), tu es marron (you've been had or duped), and recevoir un
marron (to get thumped). And the word marron evokes other words such
as marrant, of which Sartre seems particularly fond, and one of the senses
of which is "odd" or "peculiar". In La Mort dans Vdme {Iron in the Soul),
the situation of Mathieu and his soldier colleagues during the French
defeat in June 1940 is described by them as "marrant"; but it is also false
as in many ways it appears and is (at least at that stage of the fighting)
unreal. In any case, they are totally depressed, "Us en ont marre", and,
perhaps surprisingly, they all roar with hysterical laughter: "Us se
marrent". 16 Mathieu then begins to carve his name in a chestnut tree, only
to discover, like Lucien in "The Childhood of a Leader"—who proclaims
for that reason that the chestnut tree he hates and insults is en bois (made
of wood)—that the tree is resistant to words. So far, it would seem that the
13 Les Mots, 121.
14 "Pour avoir ddcouvert le monde h travers le langage, je pris longtemps le
langage pour le monde" (ibid., 154).
15 Ibid., 128.
16 Incidentally, marre comes from the Spanish word for "sea", mar, and en avoir
marre (to be thoroughly fed-up) means, etymologically, to be sea-sick, i.e. avoir la
nausee.