The latest addition to my website is Lydie Salvayre‘s La Conférence de Cintegabelle (The Lecture). As the title tells us it is indeed a lecture given to the people of his small town, Cintegabelle. The lecture is about the art of conversation and a lecturer, who is not named, believes he is an expert on the subject and that the French are the best in the world at it. However, standards seem to have slipped and he is proposing to a select group of his neighbours – quite a few were not invited as not being up to his standards – and he outlines his talk. He is of course entirely pompous and rattles on about all sorts of things and Salvayre clearly has great fun in mocking him in his pomposity and in some of the things he says which are clearly outrageous or even just plain stupid. He criticises those neighbours that are not there, accusing some of them of mediocrity. We learn that he is a widower and that his wife, Lulu, has recently died and left him some money. Even though he seems to have loved her, he is quite critical of her claiming that she had a vocabulary of only a hundred words and was particularly large. He had tried to get the lecture published with a publisher in Paris but they all rejected him and he is not surprisingly somewhat bitter about that. As a result his neighbours are the beneficiaries of his words of wisdom. Above all this book is very funny as he mocks them and Salvayre mocks him.