This week I’ll be writing to you from Paris (France. Not Texas.) Expect some terrible clichés and excessive use of French words. Like cliché.
The invitation arrived on a Tuesday,
wedged firmly between an email from my accountant (subject line: “Call me.”) and a receipt for a sandwich I have no memory of eating. It was in French. It informed me that I’d been invited as a guest of the 45th Salon International de la Caricature, du Dessin de Presse et d’Humour, which my phone’s Siri dictation insists on rendering as “the Saint Julie Motel festival.” I’ve stopped correcting it. Saint Julie sounds like a lovely woman. I hope her motel has decent water pressure. (And those little soaps.)
For this I have Liza Donnelly to thank. Liza, New Yorker cartooning veteran and previous Draw Me Anything guest, put my name forward to the organisers. I owe her a drink. Possibly a cow. More on that in a moment.
The festival’s real name is Saint-Just-le-Martel: a village of about 2,700 people in the Limousin countryside, 10 minutes outside Limoges. For 50 weeks of the year it is, by every account I can find, a quiet little place. Then autumn arrives, and it becomes the largest gathering of cartoonists on this here planet.
This has been happening every year since 1982, when Gérard Vandenbroucke and a handful of villagers decided that what their idyllic corner of France really needed was satire. The early pilgrims included Cabu, Wolinski, Plantu, Loup and Wiaz: names that mean nothing to most New Yorkers and everything to anyone who has ever tried to draw a politician into submission. Word spread. In a good year the village hosts 15,000 visitors and a couple of hundred cartoonists, all drawing, arguing and laughing at each other in a dozen languages. (Ok, imagine Comic-Con, if Comic-Con were run by farmers and had opinions about press freedom.)
They give out 10 prizes. The grandest is the Grand Prix de l’Humour Vache, the grand prize for “cow humour,” which in French means *savage*, and the winner receives an actual Limousin cow, valued at about €1,000. Not a trophy shaped like a cow. Not a bronze cow. An entire fucking cow.
The Pulitzer committee gives you $15,000 and a certificate. Saint-Just gives you livestock. I’ll let you decide which is the more serious civilisation.
Still.. I don’t know if I’ll enter. I don’t want to end up like Billy Crystal in City Slickers.
This year is the 45th edition. It runs from 26 September to 4 October, open 9am to 7pm, every day, continuously, meaning it does not close for lunch, which in France is bordering on a federal crime. There are 32 exhibitions under one roof, close to 1,500 drawings, another 7 exhibitions scattered around Limoges, more than 150 cartoonists in attendance, live caricature, signings, round tables, an apéro-jazz, and a prize called the Crayon de Porcelaine, a porcelain pencil, Limoges being the porcelain capital of France. A pencil made of porcelain: the most breakable possible version of a cartoonist’s only weapon. I refuse to believe that isn’t deliberate.
Oh! Here’s the part I’m still metabolising along with my cheese pasta from Delta Economy Plus: some of my New Yorker cartoons will be hanging in the exhibition. Mine! Drawings that started life at my drawing board in New York, with a dip pen and horrendous posture, will spend a week on a wall in rural France, being squinted at by people who read Le Monde and know what a subjunctive is.
Better still, the village doesn’t put its guests in hotels. (There aren’t enough hotels.) The families of Saint-Just take the cartoonists in to their homes.
Now, I’ve been to France more times than my accountant would like (I really should calL him back). I love France. France and I have an arrangement: I keep coming back, and it keeps pretending my French is charming. But in all those visits I have never once lived with a French family, and for the week of the salon, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing: a 40-something Australian exchange student with grey in his beard, a suitcase full of pens, and restaurant French that peaked in Year 9. I can say “je voudrais un croissant” and “où est la bibliothèque,” which should cover breakfast and precisely one emergency.
I genuinely cannot remember the last time I was this excited to pack a suitcase.
