ABSTRACT
A very funny book came in the mail the other day, joyfully upsetting the author's "serious" reading. The book is called Le Professeur Froeppel. It was written by Jean Tardieu, who was a prominent poet and playwright during his long lifetime and also-through various managerial positions-greatly responsible for the growth and quality of French National Public Radio after the Second World War. However, if one lingers at the editor's preface to the second edition, he willl smell something fishy: Tardieu mentions Froeppel as the author of a prose work, Un mot pour un autre, and of a play, Finissez vos phrases, both of which appear as such in Tardieu's own bibliography at the end of the volume. Certainly one of the lasting effects of Tardieu's comic writings, and especially Le Professeur Froeppel, is to make us ask the age-old philosophical questions all over again.
