The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Diary: The last of seven schools I attended in my short 13 years in Lebanon, for three years, was the Collège des Frères Maristes Champville–Champville not being the name of the little town where it was located, but the wishful place where it was, and the name by which we always referred to the school. You never mentioned the Marist brothers. It was always Champville, recognizable by its silver and dark blue school buses that seemed to go everywhere. The town itself is Dik el Mehdi, or rather Deek–long “e”–which in Arabic does in fact mean cock, but as in rooster. Languages have a way of finding each other like lovers across geography and time. They were the three years of war. Until then I had despised school, wherever it was, especially the four years spent under the boot of Jesuits. The Marist brothers were kinder, and so my years there were happier despite the war. My classrooms overlooked an enormous valley, with a view on Beirut miles away, sprawling onto the Mediterranean. It’s a wonder I paid any attention in class. The other day I went on the school’s website and found their yearbooks going back to the 1990s. I looked at one from 1994, flipped pages at random, and fell on the one above. The first thing you’ll notice is how common the Haddad name is. It’s why I dropped mine. The second thing I noticed–the charming innocence of these students aside–was how free the students were to describe Champville as a prison, and how common American references remain, for my compatriots, when they want to allude to something. Three of the six students seem repulsed by the school. Of course by now they’re thinking back, as I am, to that hilly school as the refuge it was, as the place we discovered Flaubert and first crushes. Geraldine Sawaya was my first: I’d never spoken to her for three years in school, but I ended up finding her in my only return to Lebanon in 2000, we spent most of my two odd weeks there together, even consummated our old love like two characters in a late Garcia-Marquez novel, and then I lost track of her again when she disappeared a few years later somewhere in Montreal. You see how that page from the yearbook had the same deadly effect that Simenon describes in one of his Maigret novels: “It was cool in the house, where there was a good smell of polish, cut hay, ripening fruit and simmering food. This smell, which was that of his childhood, of his parents’ house, had taken Maigret fifty years to rediscover.” Then I found this video produced by the school: “An evening to sing, dream and re-live the magic of our childhood.” It even starts with the Lebanese National Anthem. God help me, I cannot keep it together.

—P.T.

We sometimes mourn illusions with as much sadness as the dead.

–From Guy de Maupassant’s Une Vie (A Life, 1883).

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