The talking plate

A few years ago, while visiting our eldest daughter in Lyon, my wife and I went to the Musée des Beaux Arts.   The ceramics section of a museum normally does little for me, but while walking through this one, with what I can only describe as a glazed expression (sorry), my eye was drawn to this assiette parlante, or ‘talking plate’.  

Word puzzles, unlike plates, do fascinate me, so I decided to do some research and try to track down the source of the lines.  I little realised, not only that I would be able to date the plate very precisely but that I would uncover a link between a mother-goddess and her love for a castrated shepherd boy with a 17^th century Capuchin monk who lost his crutch in a brothel.

So what do we have to go on?  It’s clear that we are looking at an extract from some sort of drama, involving a dialogue between characters named Sangaride and Atis.   There is also a reference to ‘cybelle’.   On closer inspection, the dialogue seems to be in rhyming couplets and concludes with the cryptic initials P.B which, if the rhyming scheme is maintained, should stand for something that rhymes with ‘appas’.

Cybele was originally a Phrygian mother goddess.  From the sixth century BC, cults of Cybele began to find their way into Greek territory.  In Greek myth, Zeus – having been rejected by Cybele – impregnated her while she slept.  Cybele gave birth to a hermaphrodite demon so terrifying that it was sexually mutilated by the other gods.  An almond tree sprang up from the blood, and the fruit of this tree came to be eaten by the daughter of the river Sangarius, which caused her to be delivered of a baby boy.  Although he was deliberately exposed in the mountains to die, the boy – Attis – survived and grew up to be a shepherd so handsome that Cybele (who was, by a devious route, his grandmother) fell in love with him.  But, jealous of Attis’s love for a Phrygian princess, Cybele drove him mad and he castrated and killed himself.   

The Romans incorporated Cybele into their pantheon.  The poet Catullus transported the legend to the forests of Phrygia: in this version the castrated Attis, now a woman, remains mad and serves as a handmaiden of Cybele.  Half a century later, Ovid retold the story in his Fasti.

Mythology is a fertile source for opera and it seems to have been Ovid’s version of the story which inspired the French opera Atys, a tragédie en musique  This was composed by Lully to a libretto by Quinault, and was first performed in 1676.   Written as a prologue and five acts, the opera (which was a favourite of Louis XIV but never a public hit) is much tamer than the myth which inspired it. 

In Lully’s opera, Sangaride is betrothed to the Phrygian king Celenus but secretly loves Atys, who reciprocates her love.  Celenus and Atys each aspire to be the high priest of the goddess Cybele.  However, Cybele also has her eyes on Atys and chooses him.   Celenus seems to accept his double rejection, but Cybele is not so even-tempered.   When she finds out that Atys loves another, she takes her revenge.  Castration might have been too rich for Parisian audiences in the reign of the Sun King, so Cybele blinds him instead.  Atys tries to kill himself but before he can do this, Cybele relents and changes him into a pine tree.

To complete the story of the talking plate, we stay in Paris but must go back in time about 50 years before Lully’s opera was first performed.   According to popular legend, a lame Capuchin friar named Pere Barnaba had achieved notoriety by losing his crutch.  In some versions he left it behind, in dubious circumstances, chez les filles: in others, it was stolen.  The story became the talk of the town and was turned into a popular song. 

Qui veut ouïr chanter

Chansonnette gentille

Du Père Barnaba

Qui n’est pas trop facile

Un jour de dans sa chambre

Un voleur y entra

D’une adresse subtile

Sa béquille emporta

[Who would like to hear / The nice little song / of Pere Barnaba? / This isn’t too easy / One day in his bedroom / A burglar got in / And in a cunning manner / Carried off his crutch]

Song was a very powerful medium in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when literacy levels were much lower.  Anything from political news to culinary recipes could be told, and learned, by adapting one of the many shared tunes.   And, a full hundred years later, in October 1737, a Paris Opera musician named Charpentier re-discovered the song after hearing it being sung in the street and paying drinking money to the singer to teach it to him.  

This put the song back into fashion.  Even without social media, the story of Pere Barnaba’s crutch became a full-blown craze.  According to the memoirs of the 3^rd Duc de Richelieu, “it received such favour that New Year gifts, fashions and headdresses were for three years en bequille.”  The duke tells how “the famous song was written on dessert plates (fut ecrite sur les assiettes des desserts); it was sung at banquets; and the charlatans who traversed the streets set their song en bequille”.  Images of a priest holding a crutch were everywhere – “on gingerbread, artificial table fruits, presents, curls”, even on the covers of almanacs and on snuff boxes. 

In the same year, Michel Corrette wrote a concerto comique basedon popular tunes, of which one was entitled La Béquille du Père Barnaba.  Another comic opera, called simply La Béquille, with a libretto by Laffichard, opened at the Theatre de la Foire de Saint-Laurent.  And this was also the year when the German composer Telemann, on a visit to Paris, wrote a symphonie amusante (now sadly lost) based on the story.  

The song itself was adapted to all manner of current events.  New verses – many satirical if not downright obscene – were added, passed on and printed in chansonniers.   Many examples can be found, of which this is one.   in 1737 a lieutenant of police named Rene Herault investigated freemasonry and revealed a number of its secrets to the French public, helping to launch a wave of persecution of freemasons across Europe.  This verse recorded a satirical view of events.

Le chef des polissons
Vint en grande furie
Troubler des francs-maçons
L’auguste compagnie
Pour apaiser sa bile
D’abord on lui planta
Dans le cul la béquille
Du père Barnaba

(The chief of police / Came in a great fury / To make trouble for the freemasons / This august company / To calm him down / Began by sticking Pere Barnaba’s crutch up his a***).

Returning to our plate, we see that the dialogue is preceded by a reference to Scene 3.   Act 1, Scene 3 of Lully’s opera Atys, which sets the scene for Cybele’s arrival on stage, contains these lines in which Sangaride utters this rhyming verse:

Escoutons les oyseaux de ces bois d’alentour,

Ils remplissent leurs chants d’une douceur nouvelle.

On diroit que dans ce beau jour,

Ils ne parlent que de Cybele.

(Listen to the birds in the woods all around / They are filling their songs with a new sweetness / One could say that on this lovely day / They talk of nothing but Cybele)

The author of the rhyme on the plate adapts this and supplies a reply for Atys

Entendez vous chanter

la tender Philomele ?

On croit a l’ecouter

qu’elle chante cybelle.

Non elle s’egosille

en voyant vos appas

a chanter la bequille

du P(ère) B(arnaba)

which one might translate freely into English as:

The nightingale’s air

Rings out around the dell.

To hear her, you would swear

She’s singing of Cybelle.

My dear, I think you’re wrong:

She likes your charms so much,

She’s pouring out the song

Of Barnaba’s crutch.

Given the initials and the rhyming on the plate, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that ‘PB’ stands for Père Barnaba.  The craze (especially Richelieu’s reference to the song being written on dessert plates) and the fashion for parody allow us to give a probably date for the assiette parlante as 1737-8 and to link the words to Lully’s opera from sixty years earlier.

And so the two-thousand-year-old year old shepherd boy and the unfortunate monk have made a unique rendezvous in a Lyon museum.