Nodou

by Ferdinand de Saussure, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The Gremaud farm stood above Charmey, where the road stopped being a road and became a decision. Lucien Dufaux took the left fork because the mule took it, and arrived at half past ten with wet trouser-cuffs, a satchel of blank slips, and the Glossaire's printed questionnaire on the parts of the cheese cauldron, of which there were thirty-one.

Anne-Marie Gremaud gave him coffee with milk still warm from the cow and a chair by the stove, and answered the first nine questions without looking up from her knitting. The arm that swings the cauldron over the fire. The hook. The ring on the hook. The cloth for the curd. For each he wrote one slip: the word, as nearly as his alphabet allowed, then the French, then the commune, then the date, 14 October 1909. He had been a correspondent for four years. He was paid four francs a hundred slips, and he had learned that the eleventh question was always where a woman remembered she had bread in the oven.

At the eleventh question she said, "You are the man who writes down words."

"For the Glossaire. Yes."

"Then you should write down my children's. Nobody else can."

She said it flatly, as one says the hay is wet. Through the window he could see two small figures at the stone trough in the yard, a boy and a girl in identical grey smocks, their heads together over the water.

"Placide and Rosalie," she said. "Six at Candlemas. They talk to each other from morning to night and I do not understand one word in ten. Their father says it is our patois with the corners knocked off. The curé says it is a trial sent to us. Monsieur Overney at the school says they must be separated or they will never learn French. And the doctor from Fribourg says it is the language of Adam."

"Which doctor?"

She got up, took a folded newspaper from behind the clock, and gave it to him. La Liberté, three weeks old. A column on the second page, signed Dr A. Remy, under the heading A Natural Tongue in the Gruyère? Dufaux read it with his coffee going cold. Dr Remy recalled the Egyptian king in Herodotus who had two infants raised by a shepherd who never spoke to them, and heard them ask, at last, for bekos, which is Phrygian for bread. Dr Remy did not claim the Gremaud children spoke Phrygian. He claimed only that here, in a canton of Christian farmers, Providence had repeated the king's experiment, with a better control: two children, so long in each other's sole company that the tongue of their parents had failed to take, had produced from their own nature the outline of a language which belonged to no nation, and therefore, Dr Remy suggested, to all of them. He intended to return with a phonograph.

"He was here a whole afternoon," said Anne-Marie. "He gave them barley sugar."

Dufaux put the newspaper on the table, square with the edge.

"May I listen to them?"

---

They did not stop talking when he came out. That was the first thing he noticed and he wrote it down, on the back of a cauldron slip, because it seemed to him to matter: they were not performing. A barley-sugar doctor had sat on this trough a month before and they had evidently learned that men from the town were weather, to be ignored until they went away.

The trough was fed from a pipe of larch wood. The water was very cold; the girl kept putting her hand in it and taking it out red. The boy had a stick and was building something of pebbles on the rim. A cow on the slope behind them shifted, and her bell spoke once.

"Atse," said the girl, not looking round.

"Atse," the boy agreed, and added something longer, rising at the end.

Dufaux wrote atse on a slip. Then, beneath it, without hurrying, vatse. The patois word for cow, which he had written perhaps four hundred times in four years, worn down at the front by a mouth that had found the v too much trouble. He did not need a doctor for that. He needed only to have heard a three-year-old in Bulle say ain for pain.

He sat on the cold step of the dairy and listened for an hour. His hands went white, then blue at the nails. By noon he had twenty-two slips, and he laid them out on his knee in two columns. On the left, what the children said. On the right, what he believed they had made it from.

Atse: vatse. Lyô, which the boy called up the slope and which brought the cow's head round: the first half of Lyôba, the call every armailli in the Gruyère sang to his herd, and which this boy must have heard at every milking of his life. Bè, for the bread the girl took out of her apron: not Phrygian, he noted with a satisfaction he did not trust, but the farm's own word, with everything after the first syllable gone. A word for the water is too cold, which was a sentence of the patois, run together and swallowed until it was one word. A word for the stick. A word for the larch pipe. Every one had a parent.

What interested him was not the parents. It was the shape the parents had been forced into. The children had dropped the first sound of a word whenever it was a v or an f, and not otherwise. They put the stress always on the last syllable, though the farm put it elsewhere. They had a way, which he could not yet write, of turning anything into a question by lifting the final vowel half a tone and holding it. These were not accidents. Two mouths, alone together, had passed the farm's words through a sieve, and the sieve had its own mesh.

He thought of a professor in Geneva, a tall man who lectured with his eyes on the window, whose course he had once attended for a winter on a borrowed ticket. The professor had said something which Dufaux had written in the margin of his notes and had since copied into the front of every field-book he owned. He took out the current one now and looked at it, though he knew it by heart.

Ce n'est pas le langage parlé qui est naturel à l'homme, mais la faculté de constituer une langue.

What is natural to man is not spoken language but the faculty of constituting one.

He had always taken the sentence as a rebuke to men like Dr Remy. Sitting on the step, with twenty-two slips on his knee that each had a farm word for its father, he still took it so. The doctor had seen words without ancestry because he had not known the ancestors. There was nothing here a mother's patois and two lonely children could not account for.

Then the girl said nodou.

---

She said it to her brother, pointing at the pebble structure on the rim, and he answered nodou and moved a stone. Dufaux wrote it down. He wrote the right-hand column first, out of habit, and found he had nothing to put there.

He listened for it. It came again within a quarter of an hour, when the boy wanted the girl to help him lift a flat stone from the yard; and again when the two of them climbed the slope together to the cow. It did not come when the boy spoke of himself alone. For that he had something like the farm's mè, which was the farm's word for me, and Dufaux had already written it on the left of a slip and mè on the right.

At one o'clock Anne-Marie came out with a basket of washing and told the children, in patois, that they would all three take the linen to the line together. Rosalie answered her. Dufaux heard the farm's own we in the reply, plain and whole, with all its corners on. Not nodou.

He sat very still.

He made the test twice more before the light went. Once he went to the trough himself and pointed to the pebble building and said, in patois, we will make it higher, and held out a stone. The boy took the stone. When he spoke to his sister about it afterwards, the word he used for the three of them was the farm's word. When he spoke about the two of them, it was nodou. Once Anne-Marie called them both in for soup, and Placide, at the door, looked back at his sister and said nodou and something else, and they went in together, and at the table, among the family, the word did not appear again.

That evening at the inn in Charmey he wrote the slip out fair.

nodou. Pron. Used by the Gremaud twins, Placide and Rosalie, 6 yrs., of the two of them together, to the exclusion of any third person, including the mother. Not used of the speaker alone (mè), nor of the household (patois we). Cf. patois dou, two (masc.). Second element probably dou. First element uncertain: perhaps from the patois we, reduced.

He looked at the last line for a long time. Probably. Perhaps. He could give the word its parents. He could not find, in the farm or the parish or the canton, anybody from whom the children could have learned the thing it did. The farm's we covered a mother and two children, or a whole village, or the Confederation; it was one sign for the whole space. French had nous, which was the same space with a different sound. Neither had a word that stopped at two.

A slip had room for the word, the French, the commune, the date, and one line of comment, and he had used the line.

---

Dr Remy came back on the first of November with the phonograph. Dufaux was there because Anne-Marie had sent a boy down to Charmey to tell him, and because he wished to see it.

The phonograph was in a varnished box with a brass horn and travelled in the doctor's trap wrapped in a horse-blanket. The doctor set it up on the kitchen table and gave the children barley sugar and asked them to speak into the horn. They would not. He asked their mother to ask them. They would not. Eventually he took the machine out into the yard and set it on the rim of the trough, beside the pebble building, which had grown in under three weeks to the height of a man's knee, and went and stood by the dairy door and waited.

After a time the children forgot the brass horn as they had forgotten everything else from the town, and began to talk. The wax cylinder turned. Dr Remy listened with his eyes closed.

"There," he said to Dufaux. "Do you hear? Not one word of patois. Not one. You have been up here with your little papers. Tell me a single word of theirs you could find in your Glossaire."

"Atse," said Dufaux. "Vatse. A cow."

The doctor opened his eyes.

"Lyô. From Lyôba. Bè, bread. The farm's word, shortened."

"Coincidences."

"Twenty-two coincidences, by noon of the first day."

Dr Remy looked at the children for a while. He was not a stupid man; he had studied in Bern and in Paris, and he had been the first in the canton to set a broken femur with a steel plate. Dufaux saw him think it through, and saw him arrive somewhere he did not want to be.

"Then the whole thing is nothing," the doctor said at last. "A nursery dialect."

Dufaux had the slip in the breast pocket of his coat. He could feel the corner of it. He could have taken it out and shown the doctor a word that had a father and no teacher, and Dr Remy would have written a second column for La Liberté, and in the second column the word would have stood for the language of Adam.

He left it where it was.

"Not nothing," he said. "But not Adam."

The doctor packed his phonograph. At the gate he turned and asked, as a man asks for the bill, "What will become of them?"

"Monsieur Overney wants the girl sent to her aunt in Bulle for the winter," Anne-Marie said, from the doorway. "For the school. So that she learns French."

"Very sensible," said the doctor, and climbed into his trap.

---

Dufaux did not return to the farm until March. The road was mud over ice and the mule went down to its hocks twice before Charmey. He had no business there; the cauldron questionnaire was finished, and the Glossaire had sent him a new one, on the parts of the loom.

Placide was at the trough. The pebble building was gone, knocked down by the snow or by the boy. He had his stick and was drawing lines in the slush on the rim. When Dufaux came into the yard he looked up and, unlike in October, he did not go on as if a man from the town were weather. He looked at Dufaux steadily and waited to be spoken to.

"Bonjour, Placide," said Dufaux.

"Bonjour, monsieur," said the boy, in French, quite clearly.

Anne-Marie gave him coffee and told him that Monsieur Overney had been right. The girl was doing very well in Bulle. She could already recite. The boy was to go after Easter, to the same school, and the aunt would take him too, and they would come home in the summer for the alp.

"And when they're together, at Christmas?" Dufaux asked. "Did they talk the old way?"

She considered.

"For a day," she said. "Then less. She'd correct him. She has the French now and he hasn't, so she'd tell him the word, and he'd say it. It wasn't the same." She pulled a thread tight. "It's what we wanted."

Dufaux went out before he left and stood beside the boy at the trough. The water was running under a skin of ice from the larch pipe, which the frost had split, and someone had bound it with wire.

He took the slip out of his field-book. It had been in his pocket all winter and the corners had gone soft. He did not show it to the boy. He said only, in the farm's patois, pointing at the place on the rim where the pebble building had stood, "Who made it? You alone?"

Placide looked at the place. The stick stopped in the slush.

"Rosalie et moi," he said.

Dufaux nodded, and put the slip back, and went to see to the mule.

---

He came down into Bulle at four o'clock with the light going yellow over the castle. His way to the livery stable by the station took him past the girls' school. The windows were shut against the cold, but the classroom was full and the voices came through the glass, a roomful of small girls reciting together in the one rhythm a classroom has, the rhythm that belongs to nobody in it.

Je suis. Tu es. Il est. Nous sommes. Vous êtes. Ils sont.

Six places. He counted them as he went by, the way he had counted the cauldron's parts: one for the speaker, one for the one spoken to, one for the one spoken of, and then the same again for many. He listened for a seventh. The voices began again at je suis, and the mule pulled at the halter, and he walked on to the stable with the slip in his pocket and the six places going round behind him.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem tertium Nōnās Octōbrēs (5 October 2026), ā Ferdinandō dē Saussūre per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Ferdinand de Saussure, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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