blagueur

Le guide Anatole, qui incarne le boheme blagueur dans ce roman, accumule dans sa description historique inexactitudes et absurdites:

Un blagueur ne saurait livrer l'oeuvre d'art que se veut de toute evidence cette description, seul l'artiste pour lequel la creation est douleur peut en etre la source.

149) is humour personified, a 'blagueur' par excellence.

Gaspard is incorruptible, irrepressible, indomitable; the amputation of a leg after his second, even briefer visit to the front brings out the very best of the 'blagueur' in him.

The speaker's refusal of these aesthetic strategies leads him to question his own stance and to reveal that he too is a poet cultivating a pose: "On veut, aveugle taciturne, / A soi tout seul etre blagueur" (777).

In describing the poet as a blagueur, Corbiere equates him with the established Parisian type, whose subversive mockery had become routine, mocked by the Goncourt brothers as "la revolte parisienne de la desillusion, la formule legere et gamine du blaspheme." (11) Corbiere's language is also frequently reminiscent of the blague.