Free Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau Page A

etc., covered with fabric or not, used to fasten clothing, on this
occasion a garment for men that one wears over top of the others.

anka
    The S bus arrives
A behatted dude gets
in
There follows a clash
Later outside Saint-Lazare
There is talk
of a button

Lescurian translation
    In the Y, in the Russian housing. A chapelry about thirty-two yeomen
old, felt hauberk with a corduroy instead of a rictus, nectarine too long, as if
someone had been pulling on it. Peradventures getting off. The chapelry in
quickness gets annoyed with one of his neologisms. He accuses him of jostling
him every time anyone goes past. A snivelling tonight which is meant to be
aggressive. When he sees a vacant seclusion he throws himself onto it.
    Two housings later, I meet him in the Couture de Röntgen, in front
of the Saint-Leaderette statuary. He is with a frill who says to him: “You ought
to get an extra byblow put on your overdraft.” He shows him where (at the
larcenies) and why.

ipogram
    Okay.
    At this stop, our bus did stop. Climbing on is a hip young chap with
a collar that was too long, who had on his noggin a cap with a limp ribbon. This
young man attacks both first foot and adjoining foot of an individual of which
bottoms, corns, and calli quickly turn to pulp; and post hoc, jumps for a stall
and sits on a foldaway chair that nobody was occupying.
    At a postliminiar position of his watch’s big hand, across from
Saint-Thingy or Saint-You-Know Station, a companion was informing him: “That
button on your topcoat is in too high a location.”
    That is all.

eometrical
    Within a rectangular parallelepiped moving along the length of a
straight line of equation 84
x
+ S =
y
, a homoid A having a
spherical cap surrounded by two sinusoids, above a cylindrical section with a
length of
l
>
n
, presents a point of osculation with a
trivial homoid B. Demonstrate that this point of osculation is a cusp.
    If homoid A comes into contact with homologous homoid C, then the
point of osculation is a disk of radius
r
<
l
. Determine
the height
h
of this point of osculation by comparing it with the
vertical axis of homoid A.

EXERCISES PUBLISHED OUTSIDE
OF EXERCICES DE
STYLE
    oq-tale
    Ever since the bistros got closed down, we just
have to make do with what we have. That’s why, the other day, I took a pub bus,
at cocktail hour, on the N.R.F. line. No point in telling you that I had a
terribly hard time getting in. I even had a permit, but IT WASN’T ENOUGH. It was
also necessary to have an INVITATION. An invitation. They are doing pretty well,
the R.A.T.P. But I managed. I yelled, “Coming through! I’m an Éditions Julliard
author,” and there I was inside the pub bus. I headed straight for the buffet,
but there was no way to get near it. In front of me, a young man with a long
neck who hadn’t removed the Tyrolean hat with a plait around it that he wore—a
lout, a boor, a caveman, obviously—seemed set on gobbling down every last crumb
that was before him. But I was thirsty. So I whispered in his ear, “You know,
back on the platform, Gaston Gallimard is signing contracts.” And off he ran,
the sucker.
    An hour later, I see him in front of the gare Saint-Bottin, in the
midst of devouring the buttons of his overcoat, which he had swapped for some
macarons.
    (first published in
Arts
, November 1954)

cience
fiction
    On a flying saucer found on Cassiopeia’s Alpha
Line (via Betelgeuse and Aldebaran), I noticed, among my travelling companions,
a young Martian whose too-long neck and plaited head prodigiously irritated me.
That is how Martians are built—sure. But, I don’t know why, this one really
grated on my system—my solar system, naturally. (That’s a little cosmic joke.)
We were really packed in there, on that saucer, which is easily understandable:
if it had only been a plate (another cosmic joke…). And suddenly my young
Martian starts marsing, pardon me, marching on the extrapods of a Moon Man. The
poor Moon Man hardly had time