Whooping cough, headdresses and heartthrobs

Coiffes or headdresses, Château de Javarzay

Whooping cough, headdresses and heartthrobs – read on to discover the link between these words, and my work at the Château de Javarzay.

 

I love learning new things or discovering new words and often find myself falling down Google research rabbit holes. What really puts a smile on my face is when I discover an unexpected link between things that interest me. You might remember my blog post about the lousy summer weather we have endured this year, where I attributed the link between the 1815 volcanic eruption in Indonesia and the subsequent career path taken by twelve-year-old Jean-François Cail, born (in 1804) in rural Chef-Boutonne, who went on to become one of France’s major industrialists. Well, it’s happened again. 

With Julia Chapman, Librairie des Halles, Niort

We recently had the opportunity to meet one of my favourite authors, Julia Chapman (or Stagg, depending on which series of her books you are reading) at a book signing in Niort. Julia and I have been online friends since 2011, when her Fogas Chronicles series was just making its way into the world. I reviewed her books, interviewed her for the blog and eagerly awaited each new book in the five-book series set in the French Pyrenees. Her writing perfectly captured the nuances of life in a rural French village, from the characters to the politics, as she brought the mountain community to life with a great eye for detail and lots of humorous moments. I was, and still am a huge fan and even had the pleasure of lunching with her, in York, in the spring of 2014. 

 

While the Fogas Chronicles took a while to find a home in the French book shops, her second series, The Dales Detectives, set in a market town in the Yorkshire dales, is a huge hit here in France. So much so, the new books have been released in French, around six months before they are released in English and the first two books have been televised – I think they love the Britishness of it. With the tenth (and final – sniff, sniff) book released this month in France, Julia and her husband Mark, set off on a publicity tour of French bookshops, that unbelievably included one in Niort, about an hour away from us. 

Julia Chapman, Librairie des Halles, Niort

In the twenty years we have lived here, we have only visited Niort in the evening a handful of times, but the chance to enjoy an evening listening to Julia was too good an opportunity to miss. We had a great time and came away with a copy of book ten, in French. My level of French is now good enough that I do read in French, slowly, but it tends to be non-fiction and on a subject that I know well. Having now read the first four chapters of Date With Destiny, or Rendez-vous Avec le Destin, I am delighted with two things. The first is how much I am able to understand and the second, how well the humour and Yorkshireness of the English versions comes across in the translation. I have had to look up a few new words, however, but this is a good thing as it increases my French vocabulary.

 

One of the words I had to look up was “coqueluche”. When simply translated it means whooping cough, but this made no sense or had any relevance to the paragraph I was reading. I dug a bit deeper to find that in French you can “avoir la coqueluche”, to have whooping cough, or you can “être la coqueluche”, to be a whooping cough – meaning to be a heartthrob or media darling. This made more sense, as the passage was describing a particularly colourful character who was a reality TV star.

Coiffes or headdresses, Château de Javarzay

However, my inquisitive mind needed to know why the word for heartthrob and whooping cough are the same in French. This is how I found myself on the Académie Française website, reading all about coiffes or headdresses, something I thought I knew pretty well thanks to the last three years working at the Château de Javarzay. Part of our museum includes the bonnets and coiffes worn by Poitou women in the late nineteenth century, as well as the social culture around why they wore them. 

Coiffe from La Rochelle (shell-shaped)

Before it was attributed to the disease, a coqueluche was the name of a headdress, the word being a mix of the words for shell (coquille) and hood (capuche). Head coverings, that kept the chill from your head, were considered an essential protection against illnesses, including whooping cough, hence the shared name. Whooping cough (the illness) is extremely contagious, spreading quickly from person to person, much like the adoration in the public eyes of the latest media darling or heartthrob. So, there you have the link between whooping cough, headdresses, heartthrobs and the Château de Javarzay – don’t you just love the nuances of the French language, I know I do.

Amazon link to The Dales Detective Series 

Amazon link to The Fogas Chronicles 

French Village Diaries is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk at no extra cost to you.