Grouchy

Feeling grouchy and grumpy, but not wanting to unload (or, as my parents would say, quoting the Sixties in disparaging tones, to "let it all hang out") in a public online forum, I trawled the Web for comic strips and cartoons and pictures, and found mostly male and white characters, one of whom is a favorite of mine, Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes fame (oh, we do so miss them) and one of whom, of course, was the dwarf (one of the seven of Snow White) Grumpy.

So then I googled "grouchy" instead of "grumpy" (yes, I was procrastinating from my Deep Academic Writing, one of a handful of summer projects, in some ways quite pleasurable since I get time to think, which rarely happens during the academic year, and in other ways a pain) and discovered that one of Napoleon's generals was named Emmanuel Grouchy, or Emmanuel de Grouchy (depends whom you read) and that despite victories at Wagram and elsewhere, he became known and remembered for his association with Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. (The French, naturally, did not name a train station after Waterloo as the British did, and having been raised in France I associate the name Waterloo with catastrophe, defeat, gloom, and all the rest. How you tell history --and remember it-- depends on where you are...) So, poor guy (yes, that's his picture, one of the less cheery ones) he ran off to the United States for a while (this coincided with Napoleon's abdication) but then came back to France, where he died mid-century. Mid-19th-century, that is. His son and grandson wrote some book to try and rehabilitate his memory because despite the fact that he received more honors from at least one successor of Napoleon, he never could shake the Waterloo association.

Talk about reasons to feel grumpy.

At any rate, his name in French of course is not pronounced like the English grouchy (it's pronounced "groo-shee") but the association is still appropriate.

Here is a slightly more cheery photo of him.

So this looks nothing like my current state of mind, as I am not a general nor the loser of a Waterloo-ish military battle, but you know I like to keep my posts erudite ;-).

I will soon begin a series of theological and other "summer term reflections" here, which will cheer me up a bit and may or may not put you to sleep. But more on that later. Enjoy General Grouchy.