In the heart of a grand, metropolitan river sit two small islands, one of which you will know of for the Our Lady cathedral and the blaze she suffered not so long ago, a blaze which brought down the ancient wooden roof beams from which Quasimodo once swung. The other island is not as storied. One thousand years ago its banks offered natural enclosure for the city’s cattle, but those cows are long gone—now it houses the city’s artisanal ice cream vendors.
Between the two islands is a stone bridge. A swooping design, like the scales of a great koi fish, cresting the surface of the river, was painted onto the pavement with a roller dipped in chalk by a famous TikTok artist.
A puppeteer stands where the stone bridge meets the cow-and-ice-cream island. He is alone. In the summer, on the weekends, when the weather is nice, there are others performing at his side—roller skaters winding around orange traffic cones on one foot, a man made of pure silver, a pianist on a wheeled baby grand playing Elton John—but today he is alone. The white, curving lines emanate from him like a concrete carpet rolled out for an audience only he awaits.
He wears black leather shoes, scuffed, pigeon-toed, and tilting outwards as though he hardly rests any weight in them; tan corduroy pants and jacket; a dark gray and tattered sweater; and a felt cap. Any traveler who, during working and evening hours Wednesday-Sunday and holidays for the past ten years, has wandered across these two small islands at the center of this city has surely encountered this man and his marionette show.
On the ground before him are two metal Turkish ashtrays for coins, both empty, a small, painted vase with a thin neck, and a wooden box that holds new copies of his DVD for 15 euros. Next to him is a sun-bleached blue fabric box with a divider in the middle forming two compartments, to store his marionettes.
He tells the fables of Jean de La Fontaine, beginning with the two goats. Having grazed in the meadows, the goats were seized spontaneously by the spirit of liberty. Emancipating themselves, they took to the mountains, without road or path. As they climbed, each alone, they reached a thin plank suspended over a deep river. While the Amazons would tremble at its quick current, the proud goats placed a white hoof on the plank, advancing towards one another until meeting in the middle. For lack of retreat, their fall was communal.
The wooden marionette goats meet one another on the miniature bridge laid atop the blue fabric box laid atop the stone bridge, their curved horns clinking softly and their rectangular pupils flashing yellow. They fall to their shared fate in the discard compartment, disassembling into piles of wood as they land.
The puppeteer’s body hangs like one of his marionettes, his head lolling slightly off to the side as if on a string neglected by its master. His raised avian elbows point out, but his forearms and hands are slack. His legs buckle as if he is suspended close enough to the ground that the ground pushes back up against dangling limbs, folding them back in on themselves.
He lifts two twig crosses into the air. His hands quiver, a gentle agitation that is his method for extracting marionettes from their tangled piles. In this careful way, a vibration runs through the invisible threads and awakens the sleeping wood, which then lifts itself from the nest of fishing line as the Wolf and the Stork. Wolf’s pink tongue flaps about while he speaks. Stork is made of chopsticks, two for the legs and two for the beak.
Wolf eats gluttonously. So quickly that a bone catches in his throat. It is in this state that Stork comes upon him. She runs to him, pulling the bone from his throat. The chopsticks of the stork’s mouth reach into the mouth of the marionette wolf and extract a small, whittled bone. When Stork demands compensation, Wolf laughs. “Isn’t it enough to have your neck pulled also from my mouth?” Stork’s chopstick beak clicks as she flees her patient.
The fable ends and the two performers walk to center stage and bow. An old Parisian woman passing by with a bag of groceries, a smart coat, and low-heeled velvet shoes tosses a twenty-cent piece into one of the empty ashtrays.
Stork is put in the box and out comes Dog, a beautiful and fat mastiff who strays close to the edge of the woods. Wolf, all skin and bones, pays Dog’s heartiness a compliment. “But you could be like me,” Dog retorts, “if you would quit these woods where your condition is to die of hunger. You need only give chase to beggars, to flatter your Master, and you will be paid in chicken and pigeon bones and in many caresses.” But Wolf spots something on Dog’s neck: a bit of skin peeling. Dog confesses it comes from the place his collar is often attached. Wolf scoffs. “At that price, all your meals, I do not want them in any way.” The wolf, his own Master, runs away, and runs again.
As he plays, his eyes often drift up above the horizon towards the sky. It seems that he isn’t seeing anything at all, focusing his attention instead into the sporadic twitching of his fingers, which nonetheless produce the audacious swing of a paw, indignant shake of a head, or snobbish, upturned nose.
His hands are not delicate or clean. They are weathered and the nails are strong. He collects the ashtrays and the twenty-cent piece, the vase, and the new copies of his DVD, and tucks them into a black backpack. Then he tenderly lays the dog and the wolf in the blue fabric box, which he covers with a soft lid of the same material. He lifts the box from the street and with that the show is over.
——
The puppeteer is named François Monestier and he comes from a family of puppeteers. I don’t know his age, but he has a gray beard and wrinkles on his forehead. His parents, Claude and Colette, founded the avant-garde marionette troupe Théâtre sur le Fil (Theater on a String) which infused modernism’s abstractions and formal experimentation into the popular, narrative craft of puppetry. That tradition, which evolves from the stock Italian character Pulcinella into the French Guignol and the British Punch and Judy, usually stages a violent and irreverent slapstick of poor against rich, worker against boss, and citizen against police, the gendarme or constable also being a central character in all of these traditions.
In public access television interviews from the ’70s with Claude and Colette, dutifully uploaded to DailyMotion by their son, Claude looks just like François, especially in his smile, which widens eagerly under questioning. He sports a close-fitting black turtleneck in the theater, revealing stringy arms. Claude explains to the interviewer, “Rather than having finished images that move afterwards, we like to start from the original material, the primary material, and then to make them become living creatures. We like that the man becomes the material and the material a little bit man.”
François called these materials, like cardboard, paper, fabric, and wood, “materiaux bruts,” meaning natural, untreated, raw, pure, animal, physical materials. He took a paper napkin lightly in his hands, pinching both ends and holding it at eye level, then twisting and untwisting it, collapsing and crumpling it suddenly, bringing his fingers apart and gently pulsing them to create trembling ripples, then swiftly pulling the soft paper napkin taut, almost to the point of tearing. All this expertly gave a series of metamorphic impressions that the napkin was afraid, tortured, oceanic, calm, fleeing, and liberated.
Anni Albers, the great string craft modernizer, wrote, “We are apt today to overcharge our gray matter with words and pictures—that is, with material already transposed into a certain key, preformulated material, and to fall short in providing for a stimulus that may touch off our creative impulse, such as unformed material, material ‘in the rough.’”
In one of their archived performances, Légende pour un Trou (Legend for a Hole), performed in 1975 for a class of eight-year-olds, two white strings are stretched horizontally across the stage. A curtain hangs from the lower string, which would normally hide the puppet masters, but in this show it is pulled to the side so that Claude and Colette are visible, dressed in black like stagehands.
Claude commands his audience: “We forget all the stories we know. We forget everything we’ve already seen and we simply open our eyes and ears until we hear nothing.” Then he follows a sound coming from backstage and finds a roll of white paper that seems to be breathing. Determining that something must be trapped in the roll, he cuts into the paper to free the creature. “Listen to his footsteps,” Claude says, interpreting the rhythmic sound of the scissors. Colette responds, “I hear him walking.”
Guided by Claude’s questioning hand against the black background, the white cut-out becomes a bird, and then a passing cloud, and finally a man, whom he attaches to the upper string.
Colette takes the remaining paper, from which the man has been cut, exclaiming, “Look, in the paper! There’s another.” She hangs the leftover paper next to the cut-out of the man, so that one white figure and one black figure surrounded by a white square hang in the center of the stage. The two become friends, and as they embrace, they disappear.
Claude says in the interview, “It’s the transformation from one appearance to another which renders them living, for us.”
The first lines of Carlo Collodi’s picaresque Pinocchio, published serially in an Italian children’s newspaper, read as follows:
“Once upon a time there was…
“‘A King!’ my little readers will say at once.
“No, children, you’re wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.”
Pinocchio “wasn’t a fancy piece of wood, just a regular woodpile log, the kind you might put in your stove or fireplace to stoke a fire and heat your room.” But when the log is held, it assails its captor, shooting out of his hands to whack him on the shins. No sooner does Geppetto finish the hands than they snatch off his wig. Where Albers’ devotion to the tactile qualities of her material gives her organized mastery of its fibers, in the canon of puppetry the autonomous qualities of the material, when formally liberated by the hand of the craftsperson, are those of impishness, volatility, and antagonism. How to prove the aliveness of something inert? This is the trick of the puppeteer: the puppet who disobeys and abandons his own master would seem to be the most alive of all.
Pinocchio is earnest, foolish, and childish. He is swindled by the cat and the fox, he neglects his studies and work out of laziness and under the influence of deadbeat friends, despite promises to his father and the Fairy with the Sky-Blue Hair. He is cajoled by these guardians with fabulist maxims like those of La Fontaine.
To François, Pinocchio is the greatest of literary masterpieces, the Don Quixote of Italy. It is the ultimate coming-of-age story, of realizing “that out in the world there are really mean people.” He said this, méchant, with conviction, with relish, fascination, spite and anger.
When he was young, like Pinocchio, François hated school and studying and quit his management accounting career before it had begun. He worked “like all young people. In the South of France picking apples, pears, apricots, peaches. I loved that life, but it didn’t last. I did some temporary work at the Post Office, little jobs like that.”
He joined up with Claude and Colette and the puppet family toured Europe—Provence, Italy, Portugal, Poland, the Netherlands—and then eventually the US, Latin America, down to Quito, and up to Vancouver. In Vancouver, he saw transformation masks, a style of red cedar mask made by the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, “articulated masks, masks that one could modify.” The yellow eyes of his puppets, inspired by the masks, are held in place like beads on a string.
In his twenties, François left his parents’ act to build a show of his own, first by constructing a small house, a castelet, made for puppets. Then he bought a car and found a girlfriend and together they drove to Spain, touring Aragon, just north of La Mancha. They took the small house to the Spanish streets and opened its doors to passersby, filling it with American stories of Indians defeating cowboys and wandering totem poles. The hand puppets would come alive, the street and the Spanish villagers would come alive, even the wooden house would come alive and play in the show.
“It was all in the street. I was not looking to play in theaters at all. I was only looking to play in the street. I knew what it was, what I wanted to do. And what I do, what I said to myself from the beginning, which made me want to do the street show, was that it has to be a door for everyone. The work of the common man.”
He laid out a guest book for his audience. They wrote touching and admiring letters to him. The children tugged at their parents’ hems to stop and watch, the Moroccans would offer him almond and honey sweets, the vegetable sellers gave him vegetables and the cheesemongers gave him cheese. But it was always he who called out to them and gathered them round for a story. The people loved him, but they never got close to him, he found no success, and he grew bitter towards them. Where was his common man?
So the show was finished. The cowboys and totem poles lay like piles of dead twigs, and where the car and the girlfriend went, he didn’t say. “I stopped doing that completely and didn’t do anything. I took care of the garden and I tinkered. I didn’t do anything anymore.”
——-
Far past the gates of the metropolis and its river lies the vast Forest of Sénart. One thousand years ago the woods were filled with charcoal makers and wolves and peasants gathering mushrooms and nuts. Then the King seized the land and cut it through with straight paths in the form of a star. The wood was milled at the timber mill on the river. Hounds were set loose on the paths to hunt down the wolves.
At the edge of this forest is the workshop of François. It is hidden behind a tall, plaster wall with a white wooden door opened by an ancient key. Above the door hangs a wooden mask of Sancho Panza. Inside is a steep, metal stairway that sways underfoot and leads down to an overgrown garden. In the summer, it grows turnips and cabbage and carrots, but it lays dormant and wild in the cold winter months.
When I visited his house, he offered slippers from his mismatched collection and a thick yellow, purple, and orange mash made of potatoes, beets, chestnuts, pumpkin, squash, pasta, chickpeas, and something else that was hard and crunchy. He heated the mash on the stovetop and seasoned it with black pepper which he ground with a stone mortar and pestle.
The dining table was pressed up against a dusty bookshelf set into the wall and filled with guides to regional flora and fauna, cookbooks, children’s rhymes, old graphic novels, and comic books. Pulling a book off the shelf at random yielded The Island of Brigadiers by the Franco-Belgian cartoonist known only as Fred. It told the story of an island inhabited by human-sized puppets played by giant, tyrannical hands that roamed the hillsides like horses. In one scene, the puppet hero takes the string like a lasso and tames his master.
François lived here during his depression, when he no longer performed or made puppets. He wandered the forest and picked up pieces of wood to bring back to his house and feed the fire. Until one day, “I went to the forest in the morning, at 8 o’clock or even before. I don’t remember. And I talked to a lumberjack, who cuts the wood, who sells the wood, and I told him, I asked him if there was work. Well, I’m strong enough, so it didn’t scare me. The work of a lumberjack.” His job was to cut the logs with an ax, load them onto the truck, and then drive the truck out to make deliveries. He was a poor navigator on foot. “But in the car, I’m efficient and I want to deliver the wood.”
“And this initiated me. Because afterwards I understood the mechanics of wood. And that it had value. That’s what I wanted to do, and that’s how I came to make wooden puppets. Because deep down I hadn’t given up on the business of making puppets. I hadn’t given up on doing it. I still believed. By touching the wood, it came back again.”
François found the fables as “a carrier text,” from a collection of La Fontaine illustrated by the Czech puppeteer Jiri Trnka. La Fontaine’s fables are written for one child, the six-year-old heir to the French throne. In his letter to the young Dauphin, he says, “The unsuspecting reader, implanted with the seeds of virtue, acquires self-knowledge without realizing that he does,” like a bitter pill slipped into a sweet pastry. His tales are often negatively instructive, the animals acting poorly or stupidly to prove a point. They are ironic, turning the bitter unfeelingness of the world into caustic humor.
In his act, the wolf is the only animal to return more than three times. It is one of the most frequently appearing creatures in La Fontaine, alongside the lion and the fox. As curated and animated by François, the world described in the fables is that of the vicious wolf: expect no reward for kindness; nothing is better than liberty; and unless you can outwit the hucksters, you will suffer endless abuse and trickery. “I am like the wolf,” he told me eagerly, pulling at the neck of his wool sweater from under his gray beard. “I wear no collar!” On a separate occasion, he confessed, “The wolf is always the character who is not only bad, but also the loser. He is a loser, he is a villain, and he is often stupid.”
During these years, François biked two hours to his bridge, and then two hours back, five days a week. Sometimes the police would come and give him trouble and tell him to move along but he always came back. He kept his box very light to travel easily on his bike and so that he could pack everything up at a moment’s notice.
When the mash was finished, we went out to the tall glass greenhouse which is his workshop. Brambles and vines scaled its outer walls and inside was a sparse collection of tools and a few hanging puppets. He sat hunched over a vice clamping a stub of wood and spoke while he whittled and sawed and drilled.
He remembered the fallen redwoods in the forests of Vancouver. “They were walls, and I was like this,” he said, pinching his fingers together and regarding the small space between his fingers as though he were holding a tiny creature, himself, against the felled giant.
As he was crouched there, watching himself in the Americas, there was a sudden crash of something landing on the greenhouse above his head. The item clattered down the side and fell into the brambles lining the greenhouse. François ran out into the garden, where he searched before procuring a small, dark object from the overgrown weeds.
“A bird carried it,” he said, placing it on the stump in front of him. It was a short piece of wet wood the size of a child’s fist, covered in bright green lichen. It seemed to have a head with a nose, and two little arms, and came to a dull point at the base for a handle. “Pinocchio,” he said sweetly, “you’ll become a real boy!”
He returned to the small piece of wood he had been carving, which had begun to take the shape of a monkey head. By gently revving a small power drill he started carving out the eyes. “Paper is good, it’s good indoors, but it can’t stand rain or wind. Wood. Wood is very good outdoors, there’s no problem. But the problem with wood is the weight compared to paper.” So he hollows out his puppets, “because it’s the lightest thing for the street.” The wood for the heads, hands, and feet of his marionettes he sources from the Sénart. For the bodies, he scavenges furniture upholstery, used clothing, and any old textiles he finds on the street. There are only three things that he buys new: sewing needles, fishing line, and embroidery thread.
“By touching the wood again it came back. Since I’m here, I’m working the wood. I can spend hours doing that. Woodworking is, how can I put it, an expression that’s not used much, but it’s interesting. Work is the only salvation. Redemption is in work, it’s the only one. It’s not good, we’ll say. There’s plenty of things you can try in life that are the wrong paths. The good path is work, it’s the only salvation.”
In the final installment of Pinocchio, after saving his father from the stomach of a massive shark, the puppet encounters the fox and cat who swindled him out of his gold coins. The cat has gone blind and the fox has sold his tail. When they ask him for assistance, he refuses them, reciting proverbs like, “The devil’s flour turns out to be the chaff!” Pinocchio finds employment turning the donkey wheel to draw up well water and earns one glass of milk every day to heal his father. On top of this, he studies, and cares for his father, and saves money. But it is only when he takes on an extra gig as a basket-weaver, working so much that he falls asleep on the job, that he awakens as a real boy.
——-
With his act in the street and unemployment payments in France, François gets by. Occasionally he is solicited while performing—small gigs for middle school classrooms, once the Christmas party at a law firm. “With that, I can pay my subscription, my monthly internet subscription.”
One day, François was approached by a man in a suit, who asked him if he’d like to be in a television show named Emily in Paris. The man offered more money than François had ever made. His day began at 6 a.m. in the Place Saint-Michel, where the production company had spared no expense: renting out an entire café in the morning, where François could order food and drinks without needing to pay; a coffee cart with pastries on set, next to the rented café, also for free; people whose sole job was to remind the actors to put their masks back on after each take; people whose sole job was to tell pedestrians not to walk on a certain part of the sidewalk; and an entire brasserie in the evening, all for free.
In the episode, a character is learning to busk in the picturesque Place. There are too many performers vying for space in the crowded square, each trying to outdo the others. Cutting through, for just a flash, are the horse and the wolf, followed by old leather shoes and the yellow straw hat worn by François in the sunshine.
When Pinocchio is asked the trade of his father, Geppetto, he replies, “Being poor.”
The last time we met, François had just returned to Paris from a month in Toulon, where the tide rises and falls with the weather, exposing wild oysters and mollusks, tiny red coral and algae, and where he swam four hours a day. He had sent photos taken with a webcam in the local library of the finished monkey marionette, and of himself wearing a snorkeling mask with a fish inside of it, pressed against his eyes. He had also detailed the soup he would make using leftover vegetables from the market and bass that he harpooned in the sea.
After playing on the stone bridge for ten years, he was now stationed on the paved square directly in front of Notre Dame, which was surrounded by metal scaffolding, cranes, and shipping container offices. He thought the construction lamps cast a brighter and more dramatic glow. The square was packed with tourists. A young, clean-shaven man with a guitar came over to ask François if he didn’t mind sharing the square with another performer and the two negotiated distance and relative sound. When we had spoken at his house, François had said, “I think that everyone should be able to cobble together a little something on the street and then recount a story like that with a pocket spectacle. I show what I show and what I can do. But I hope that others want to do it also.”
Children ran around at his feet, and an audience had formed in a semi-circle in front of him. A boy came over to where I was seated in the dirt and leaned against me, whispering, “It’s a wolf,” as François played the story of the horse and the wolf.
It was the end of winter’s rigor, in the season when gentle zephyrs rejuvenate the grass, when the animals leave their homes to seek their lives. Wolf saw Horse in the countryside. Since Horse was much larger than he, Wolf would need his cunning to catch this prey. He said he was a surgeon and knew the virtues of the meadow’s plants. So Horse revealed the wound under his hoof. My son, said Wolf, there is no other part susceptible to so many evils. Suspecting quickly, Horse dropped a kick, turning Wolf’s mandibles and teeth to marmalade. “It is well done,” said Wolf to himself, “each one to his trade must be attached. You wanted to be the herborist and were never but a butcher.”
Before he was finished, the boy grew bored, or distracted, and ran away.
