L’inversion

Adding a note in English to my French practice from last night, I wanted to note for my English-speaking friends that French people don’t always use “l’inversion” (reversing the subject and the verb) because it’s uncool to sound too much like Voltaire. So that Enigma song about the Marquis de Sade has formal lyrics. In reality, it can be ambiguous whether something is an affirmation or a question.

You often have to listen for an “Est-ce que” at the beginning, a “n’est-ce pas?” at the end of a sentence, or a rising intonation. See the video at the end of the post.

While I appreciate the enhanced access to music and culture, I hate to admit that I’ve mostly been motivated by “occult” reasons to practice French right now. In addition to the bizarre Francophone aristocracy that Anneke Lucas talks about being victimized by as a child in the 1960s and 1970s, there are also a lot of psychic people and dead people who speak French, and I don’t know of any fast Google Translate for the astral plane.

Yes, I know this all sounds insane, but I don’t make the rules. This is why John Dee had to teach himself Enochian. As a French victim of remote mind control told me via Twitter DM, en français, she was raised to believe in a Cartesian reality, where there are no angelic or demonic forces, so “mind control” is difficult to accept, and “Cartesianism” is actually a much more spiritual worldview than the 100% atheistic materialist worldview that modern biology and cognitive science assumes, or at least the orthodox versions.