Woman's Lip

En route to an ice cream parlor in Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera one day last summer, a doctor's wife named Josette Varinet, 30, discovered that she and her two children were taking the wrong route. Mme. Varinet began backing her Peugeot out of the one-way street when suddenly a big black car drove in, and its owner began assailing her with a wordy sermon on the failings of female drivers. To that Josette replied: "Je vous emmerde," an excremental expletive.

The man in the black sedan was furious. "That will cost you dearly," he cried. "You don't know who I am, but I'm a high police official." He made an appointment to meet her at headquarters the next day.

Josette promptly forgot about the confrontation--and the appointment--but almost a year later she received a summons ordering her to appear in criminal court on charges of using "insulting language to a magistrate exercising his duties." Maximum sentence: two years in prison.

The plaintiff, Controleur General de Police Michel Gonzales, was confident that no judge would uphold the defendant. In polite society, after all, one never even says merde outright but le mot de Cambronne, a reference to the same word used by a Napoleonic general when the British suggested that he surrender at Waterloo.

Nonetheless, Judge Pierre Braquemond deliberated for only ten minutes before acquitting Josette. Gonzales was as surprised as he was indignant, but the judge had a precedent from Normandy as his authority. In an earlier case, the Normandy judge had concluded: "The accused employed a locution as concise as it is emphatic, which was officially inaugurated by a Napoleonic general. Since then, it has been adopted as a useful means of externalizing, without superficial intellectual effort, an infinite variety of feelings. Often it escapes spontaneously from even the best educated lips with no harmful premeditation."

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