#andyverse

Andromache Benoist (born January 8, 1875) was an American con artist. She is believed to have participated in most of the largest-scale thefts of the early 20th century. She is portrayed in the film As de Carreau (1976), a dramatized account of the Gabarre Train Heist of 1934. The film has been lost to time.

CARREAU, my Andy Benoist art book, is now available for download! Two years & a village of brilliant artists in the making, this book contains 170+ pages of illustrations old and new, original writing, and bibliographic material. I hope to open preorders for the print run later this year! Stay tuned for more information.

hello there! I am so pleased you enjoyed CARREAU and so glad you sent this message. there is no wrong way to read this book! there is nothing to understand—or everything, depending on how you look at it. my hope is only that whoever comes upon it will find it generative in whatever sense they personally deem it. the reader gets to decide!! that said, I'm always around to discuss questions you may have or provide additional bibliography. I may not be able to give any straight answers, but that's the beauty of a reception project, isn't it? ;}

and regarding the errors: I am not fluent in French and my literacy is somewhat limited, so I'm very thankful for the extra help! I have now corrected the dernière typo.

the s'a réveillée also caught my eye when I saw it in the dictionary (that sentence actually comes from Dictionary of Louisiana French, edited by Albert Valdman, Kevin Rottet et al.). from what I understand, in some cases reflexive verbs in Louisiana Creole can take avoir as auxiliary verb with the passé composé, as is described in this 1963 grammar of Louisiana French edited by Marilyn Conwell:

in fact, compound tenses which may be formed with être in continental French may be formed with avoir in Louisiana French:

the entry for réveiller in the Dictionary of Louisiana French seems to suggest that avoir is generally used with the past tense in the transitive and intransitive, but is used with either être or avoir in the reflexive:

it is very interesting to me that all of the examples of se réveiller in this dictionary are in the past tense, which makes sense—one doesn't regularly say "I wake up" or "[someone] wakes up" (or even "I wake [someone] up," to extend this to the transitive use) unless in present-tense narrative prose. so perhaps that has some influence on a potentially more prevalent usage of avoir, since a lot of what we understand of Louisiana French is from spoken language rather than written literature (the tale the original sentence is from, for example, was performed as cante fable; more on that in the next paragraph). but that is all conjecture, of course. I wish I could tell you why exactly this is the case—I'm sure there would be some good information if I were to keep digging, but I am no scholar of French, so this will have to do for now!

and just because it's interesting: quand elle s’a réveillée, il y avait un moqueur qu’était après amener du train côté de sa fenêtre comes from a tale called Petit Pouce recorded in Barry Jean Ancelet's 1994 collection of Cajun and Creole folktales that is understood to be a variant of folktale Aarne-Thompson-Uther index type 303 with strong African affinities (see also William Bascom 1992). here are the first few paragraphs from Ancelet's edition:

Ancelet also notes the connection to Le Petit Poucet:

It is interesting to note that the name of the young hero of this Louisiana version, told by a black Creole, resembles that of Petit Poucet, the thumbling hero of French oral tradition, while the names of the dogs, Miblé, Toumadaïe and N’Daye, seem African in origin. Roberts, in his note to this tale, speculates that the variants collected in Kentucky “appear to have come from the South, perhaps with the general movement of slaves to and from collecting stations in the Bluegrass”

so many incredible things going on with diasporic French language and literature. I'm still learning all the time! I have been meaning to get into research around French in Vietnam and this feels like the perfect springboard for me to do that, so I must thank you for the motivation!