Excusez-moi, did you just call me a flâneuse?

Posted on Jan 26, 2012

She could’ve just as easily been wearing a dirty burlap peasant dress and pointing her crooked skinny finger at me, spitting and sneering, “Boo! Boo! Rubbish! Filth!” like in the movie ‘The Princess Bride’. But it’s not quite like that; she’s wearing a coral pink cardigan and clear nail polish instead. Anyway…

I’ve just been called a name. Usually when someone points and spits a word at me, it doesn’t turn out to be a charming memory once it’s all over. Yet, I’m not immediately offended, only because it’s a French word and I love nearly any damn thing to do with France (and, like I said, she’s wearing a coral pink cardigan).

Yet, I’m unsure how to take it, this being called a flâneuse. Nope. I haven’t an inkling what it might mean (other than not feeling instantly compelled to bear my sharp white incisors).

I cull the archives stuffed in the little grey cells between my ears. Either the archives have been stolen (ahck, those bastards, again!) or I haven’t any dossiers on la flâneuse. The archives of the wondrous world wide websicle thing will have to suffice.

It seems that instead of this being a snarling insult, it is, on the contrary, a rather complimentary declaration of sorts. This finger-pointing name-caller is, in fact, announcing who she’s just discovered I am. I’ve been ousted.

I soon learn that la flâneuse has no English equivalent. It comes from term Flâneur (the man version) which originates from the French verb flâner; to saunter or to lounge. Flanri (flanerie) also being aimless idle behavior. Traditionally, the whole thing was touted as a masculine undertaking but history proves many ladies partook of this most delightful way of being. To be called a flâneuse puts you in company with women such as Paris’ Colette, Mrs. Zelda (F. Scott) Fitzgerald (for a time, anyway) and George Sand to name a few.

...being a flaneuse in Prague...

The term flâneur was defined in the Nineteen-Century Encyclopedia Laroussse as “a loiterer, a fritterer away of time, associated with the new urban pastimes of shopping and crowd watching.” Later, in his “art of walking” theory, Michel de Certeau proposed that modern flânerie also involves the everyday art of personal expression.

Ah, personal expression – near and dear to me ol’ heart. And aimless idle behavior – I am SO all about this! And I do love to fritter.

Others define a flâneuse as she who is a passionate observer of life, not limited only to taking in the spectacle of urban life, but to a leisurely taking-in all of it, from here there and everywhere. One could go flâneuse–ing along le boulevard Saint Germain in Paris just as easily as she could saunter down a dirt road amidst wheat fields, going nowhere in Canada’s vast prairie.

According to Wikipedia, Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of “a person who walks the city in order to experience it.” And, the term is not limited to someone committing the physical act of peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include a “complete philosophical way of living and thinking.”

I quite like Cornelia’s take on the flâneur/flâneuse:

There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell’s dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city. (Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962, Houghton Mifflin, New York)

And so I wasn’t offended when she declared me a flâneuse. Not in the least. I was, in fact, relieved—jubilant even—to have discovered that I am not alone in my “aimless sauntering and taking-in-of-life.”