ABSTRACT
In an 1862 letter to Tom Armstrong, Du Maurier enclosed a sketch and a dialogue headed 'The two voices', recording a somewhat heated exchange between his English and French 'selves'. In slangy French of the kind Trilby would later use, the artist's French voice accuses his English voice of preventing him 'from copulating with everyone'. In Peter Ibbetson George Du Maurier's 'naughty voice' emerges via the 'intricate cipher invented and perfected together entirely during sleep', which refers 'to things that had happened to [them] both when together'. Du Maurier's statement should be taken as a challenge to comb history — literature, art, music — for the French, English, and 'Frankingle and Inglefrank' associations of the French names and phrases he used. Du Maurier changed the name of the glass-blower at the top of Peter's pedigree from 'Mathurin Busson' — the name of his great-grandfather in real life — to 'Mathurin Budes', described as a Breton squire.
