Written by Leonard R. Jaffee   

Below follows a little comic ditty. Like a clown, it worries lest it pertain to the world's affairs of now and the last few years, or centuries before, or all human past and future.

I expect you have read Charles Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities." Recall that Madame Defarge was a character of that novel. Magically, she has immigrated into my ditty.

When Dickens created Defarge, she sat at a guillotine and knit while heads fell and blood splattered. She knitted also ceaselessly in her wine-shoppe.

Defarge's knitting created codes that denoted the name of a certain innocent man she hated for false cause and also the names of several members of his family. She designed to finish her knitting just as she scored the beheadings of all of the objects of her hatred.

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Now the story of Robespierre and the tragedy of mispronunciation:

In the final fortnight of the French monarchy, a very nice, kind man, Robespierre, invented hemp. By long, trial-and-error experimentation, he discovered that if one braids enough very long hemp fibres, one obtains an extended, snake-shaped object, which he called "rope" for the quite accidental reason that as he slipped and fell during one of his experiments researching possible uses of his discovery, he uttered the whoops-like expression of his region, Gascony, that expression being "roppes" (pronounced "rope").

Robespierre swam to England to sell his discovery in the newly emerging British techno-industrial market that soon would devise horrors like Frankenstein, the cotton gin (invented, British feminists know, by an anonymous English duchess, not Eli Whitney), and the steam engine — the three tools harnessed together first to the use of making spirits from grain and juniper berries, then to the use that wrought them infamy by swapping black slavery for sweat shops and starting the U.S. Civil War. When Robespierre arrived at Dover customs, he encountered an affected, officious clerk who fancied himself a philologist.

The clerk ordered Robespierre to write his name, address, and travel purpose on a customs form. When the clerk read what Robespierre wrote, he pronounced Robespierre's name "Ropespierre" — the clerk having confounded the French rule that one does not aspirate plosives. The clerk thought the opposite rule true, and, so, gave very excessive aspirate-plosive effect to the sound of the letter "b" — which, in his mouth, became the hardest letter "p" of English, almost the "pf" of Deutsche.

"So ye calls this stuff rope, does ye? I can see ye did not have head enough to think past yer own name fer a thing to call this dumb stuff ye made." The clerk assessed Robespierre a 20 shilling duty (half of which the clerk pocketed).

Robespierre did not sell his discovery in England, and, despairing, sought employment in Paris, where he landed a job of making knit robes in a shop owned by Madame Defarge, who had diversified from selling wine. During midday breaks (four hours in Paris), instead of seeking repast or sensual delight (as did most Parisians), the ever-hopeful Robespierre continued experimenting with his discovery.

Soon Robespierre's determination impressed Defarge. She called him "rock of robemakers" — which epithet, she noticed, bore striking association with his surname, Robespierre ("pierre" meaning "rock"). She noticed also that, with rope, among else, her star employee made a device that sliced unwieldy hard fromages (cheddar, gruyère, parmesan...), chopped cabbages, onions, carrots, reduced to manageable portions great, winter-hardened mounds of head cheese, and even doubled as a poster frame.

Madame Defarge applauded Robespierre's ingenuity but predicted his machine would not sell because shop-owners could not fit its crude hulk into their interior designs. Defarge reassured Robespierre, however, that she expected some imaginative use would make the device very profitable. The first Bastille day was the next of the week; and soon Madame Defarge's prediction came true.

Madame Defarge had a cousin, a famous, prodigiously brilliant, but psychopathic, greedy teenager named Guy (pronounced "Ghee") — whom the English called, derisively, Guy-a-teen. Steeped in the works of DeSade, Tacitus, Bentham, John Stewart Mills, and Machiavelli and being newly self-appointed the commandant of his own paramilitary brain-child, La Garde Rouge, Guy convinced the Revolution's rising powers to inaugurate a reign of terror to be embellished by daily public beheadings effected with utmost efficiency by use of Robespierre's invention.

Madame Defarge then dubbed Robespierre's machine "guillatine" (pronounced "ghee-a-teen") — to insult the British, whom she hated with deep vitriol. Enter, again, the customs clerk who mispronounced our tragic hero's name.

"They can't dupes me," the customs clerk blurted while being interviewed by a renowned freelance journalist who sold his work to newspapers of all the great capitals of Europe. "Guy-a-teen didn't invent that beheading machine; it was Ropespierre, and without his 'rope' (so he called it after his dreadful name) — without his 'rope' this whole bloody Frog revolution thing couldn't have got near far as it done." The clerk mused further that "I knows Ropespierre is the cap, so to speak, of the evil Frog forces over there, and his whole game is just to make a quick fortune from choppin' heads with that guill-o-tine."

Taking up, as did the world, the clerk's misspelling — "guillOtine" — the journalist investigated these scurrilous accusations. Guy had set up guillotine sites in every major town of France. Guy invented the "franchise" (the name reflecting the idea of being frank, hence gouging business associates), and Guy franchised use of Robespierre's sorrily misdirected apparatus.

The franchise gave Guy a share of profits head-chopping promoters made by appropriating properties of the condemned. Guy, himself, ran a like scam in Paris. But, slick as he was, he attributed the idea to Robespierre, who, as if a living self-fulfilling mis-prophecy, was drafted into the revolution's leadership.

Being humble, shy, unassuming, and surely neither greedy nor a savvy entrepreneur, Robespierre just very reluctantly accepted the ostensible power Guy arranged for him. But Robespierre, like both Christ and DeSade (who refused a judgeship because he could not cast the first stone), had not the stomach for ruling people.

So, he botched the job and got "hoist by his own petard" (and I quote trite Shakespeare here only because it befits the customs clerk's involvement). Poor Robespierre was slain by his own creation — not because he was at all evil (for he was a lamb), but just because he invented hemp, discovered rope, and suffered a customs clerk's mis-sounding of his name.

Robespierre's tragedy did not end with his death. In the last three decades of the 20th century, the US outlawed domestic hemp production, to protect people from themselves and to support the American Drug Industry's macroeconomic "efficiency" of charging cancer-victims exorbitant fees for toxic painkiller cocktails. Several grave externalities resulted:

* Asian hemp-makers increased their hemp's production and price and marketed directly in the US. Again, the US government gouged its electorate with 100% hemp-rope tariffs.

* In autumn 2013, to supplement the true purpose of GW Bush's Iraq "surge" (continued by Obama) and Obama's Afghanistan "surge" and drone attacks savaging Pakistan, Yemen, and Lybia, India's, Malaysia's, Bangladesh's, and Indonesia's rope-making firms formed an "econo-state" called "IMBI," which declared war against NATO and all its member-nations; but computer error sent IMBI's bombing raids to Antarctica.

* Greenpeace declared war against NATO — for inciting destruction of most of the world's penguin population (and, so, starving many orcas and seals) and for the loosing of millions of tons of ice that moved northward and lowered the world's temperatures to ice-age levels.

* To cure the thermal problem and protest Euro-American "megalomania," Greenpeace's pacifist members burned themselves alive on icebergs.

Perhaps forever, Robespierre's name must suffer marring by the behaviors of money-gluttonous charlatans, because of his innocent invention and the vain fault of a corrupt clerk. Dona ei pacem. Dona nobis pacem. Dona pacem tibi.