The history of
Sir Claude Short-⁠Blade

For well over a cen­tury the very ex­ist­ence of this most fas­ci­nat­ing of ro­mances was be­lieved to be a myth. The only printed copy rec­orded in his­tory is a set of two pa­per­back vol­umes that the poet meant to have de­liv­ered to his mom in Nice by post, but mis­tak­enly had de­liv­ered to his niece in Post by his mom. Since his niece ab­stained from read­ing an­y­thing but hard­cover, she sent the books back to the au­thor, who, for want of cash, ex­changed them for a bag of pes­ti­cide at the drug­store and killed him­self. Af­ter this in­ci­dent the work was lost with­out a trace.

It was only this past June that the orig­i­nal man­u­script was dis­cov­ered, when the poet’s body was dis­in­terred and his pockets were searched af­ter a jus­tice found the books–pes­ti­cide deal un­fair and ruled in fa­vor of the cur­rent own­ers of the drug­store, to be com­pen­sated for the differ­ence in price, in­fla­tion-ad­justed and rounded up to the near­est mil­lion euros.

Not much is known about the per­sonal life of Claude-Hip­po­lyte An­dri­eux. Nei­ther the date of birth nor the date of death is rec­orded an­y­where. It is also un­clear whether he iden­ti­fied as male or as fe­male—or both, or nei­ther—for, upon ex­hu­ma­tion, the de­ceased was found to have been wear­ing a thong, but no bra. For the sake of con­ven­ience and to avoid con­fu­sion, the poet is re­ferred to us­ing mas­cu­line pro­nouns through­out this article.

I was given ac­cess to the man­u­script for four weeks, dur­ing which I was able to trans­late the whole work from un­rhymed syl­labic French lines to rhym­ing ac­cen­tual English cou­plets. (I chose this me­ter in def­er­ence to the chiv­al­ric ro­mances of the Old & Mid­dle Eng­lish Pe­ri­ods. In de­fi­ance of said mod­els, how­ever, I stopped al­lit­er­at­ing af­ter the first line, find­ing it too quaint to read and too diffi­cult to write. The rhymes were in­serted out of habit.) The length of the poem has not been al­tered: every line in the trans­la­tion cor­re­sponds to a line in the orig­i­nal, al­beit not nec­es­sar­ily to the right one.

I had in­tended to tran­scribe An­dri­eux’s French to pub­lish it along­side my Eng­lish, but un­for­tu­nately all the man­u­script pages were de­stroyed in a flood. “Why didn’t you say your house has no roof?” Well, how was I sup­posed to know we’d be get­ting heavy show­ers in god­damn July? An­y­how, a trans­la­tion of my Eng­lish trans­la­tion back into French is cur­rently in the works. Once it is fin­ished, an Eng­lish–French edi­tion will be made avail­a­ble for pur­chase via print on de­mand. Mean­time, a prose syn­op­sis of the more sub­stan­tial, main ep­i­sodes of this price­less work is here pro­vided for the en­ter­tain­ment of the impatient.

Andrieux started com­pos­ing his epic poem at his fa­vor­ite cafe, when he found his coffee and crois­sant not to his lik­ing and asked the gar­çon to take them away and to bring other ones. He was fin­ished by the time the gar­çon came back to tell him they were out of crois­sants and could he in­ter­est him in a mac­a­ron in­stead—a tes­ta­ment to An­dri­eux’s gen­ius and the poor qual­ity of serv­ice at Pa­ri­sian ca­fes of the time.

The poem re­lates the he­roic ad­ven­tures of one Claude Lame-Courte (named af­ter the poet, no doubt) as he em­barks on a mis­sion to res­cue Mad­e­moi­selle Cé­lina Bon­ne­ment, a sim­ple yet beau­ti­ful lass of high spir­its and low cal­o­ries, from a fierce bearded dragon who holds her cap­tive in a run-down stu­dio apart­ment which has been re­ceiving mort­gage de­lin­quency no­tices for nine months, and will not re­lease her until she has con­vinced some­one to up­grade to the ad-free tier of La Gazette.

The work is di­vided into two books. The first book be­gins with an in­vo­ca­tion of Pan, Greek god of shep­herds, who some­times—mostly on bank hol­i­days—serves as the French god of the ba­guette. The poet then de­vises an in­gen­ious, syr­inx-like ap­pa­ratus for fight­ing fam­ine us­ing seven bread­sticks of un­e­qual lengths, and dem­on­strates, by way of ir­ref­u­ta­ble logic, that once a man is guilty of one deadly sin, he is guilty of all seven. By the same to­ken he ar­gues that, since com­mit­ting one sin is just as deadly as com­mit­ting seven, one may as well do the lat­ter. Fol­low­ing this rev­e­la­tion, he makes a case for pan­sex­u­al­ity, and cor­rob­o­rates his ar­gu­ment by say­ing that even France’s great­est war­rior prac­ticed it at least twice.

(Now de­not­ing the qual­ity of be­ing at­tracted to peo­ple re­gard­less of their gen­der, pan­sex­u­al­ity orig­i­nally char­ac­ter­ized tak­ing a par­tic­u­lar lik­ing to per­sons with grossly dis­sim­i­lar top and bot­tom halves, as those of the god Pan. See ¶ 3 for an in­stance of this dis­sim­i­lar­ity in the poet himself.)

Thus the poet be­gins nar­rat­ing the tale of Sir Claude: In his room at an inn, Claude was mak­ing love to the inn­keeper’s wife, who had a head full of hair and a clean-shaven pussy, when the two were in­ter­rupted by the inn­keeper, who, out­raged by his wife’s in­fi­del­ity, tore off his own clothes and chal­lenged Claude to a duel. Claude, how­ever, see­ing that the inn­keeper had a bald head and hairy balls, pro­posed a three­some, which the inn­keeper accepted.

Later, the three con­versed over some coffee, dis­cus­sing, among other top­ics, Des­cartes’s say­ing “je pense, donc je suis”, Fer­mat’s con­jec­ture, Ra­meau’s theory of the fun­da­men­tal bass, and whether it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some­one not named Louis in charge for a change. The sub­ject of blondes came up, and Claude con­fessed that he could never get it up for a nat­u­ral blonde, but added that he wouldn’t mind sleep­ing with a bru­nette who wore a blonde wig. The cou­ple told him they knew of one such girl, Mlle Cé­lina, who was be­ing held cap­tive by a bearded dragon and awaited a brave knight to res­cue her. Claude vowed to free Cé­lina and to take her as his bride.

The next morn­ing, af­ter a whole­some break­fast and a quickie with the inn­keeper’s wife, Claude set off on his jour­ney north. It was a rainy day, and by the time he had walked three and a half miles it was show­er­ing so heav­ily that he had no choice but to seek shel­ter in a nearby vil­lage. He knocked on the door of a cottage.

— The door’s open, said a woman’s voice from in­side. Come in!

Taking note of her south­ern ac­cent, Claude re­al­ized that the horse­shoe mag­net he car­ried for good luck was in­ter­fer­ing with his com­pass, and all this time he’d been walk­ing south. Ob­vi­ously he couldn’t give up his good-luck charm, so he threw away the com­pass. The rain stopped im­me­di­ately, and Claude re­al­ized that the com­pass was also in­ter­fer­ing with his good-luck horse­shoe mag­net. Hav­ing no need for shel­ter now, he turned away and started north—the real north—but then, think­ing he might en­joy spend­ing the night in a warm bed with a beau­ti­ful woman, turned back, opened the door, and looked in­side: re­gret­ta­bly she was a nat­u­ral blonde. He closed the door, and walked away.

At sun­set he ar­rived where he had be­gun, and he de­cided to stay the night at the inn and re­sume his quest in the morn­ing. He was shocked, how­ever, to find that the inn was gone. This to him seemed odd, es­pe­cially be­cause the inn­keeper and his wife and all the guests were still there. They were ca­su­ally roam­ing around, as if noth­ing had hap­pened, and it took Claude a while to re­al­ize they were all asleep. Ex­hausted him­self, he joined the sleep­walk­ers. Thus ended the first day and the first adventure.

The fol­low­ing morn­ing, Claude woke up in bed, in the same room he had taken at the inn, and saw that the build­ing was back—though, sur­pris­ingly, all the peo­ple were gone. In the ab­sence of the inn­keeper’s wife, he made him­self an om­e­lette and mas­tur­bated. Then, not want­ing to waste an­other mi­nute, he counted to 59 and hit the road. Un­for­tu­nately for him, the road was a spoiled brat and told its mom, who cursed him with an abun­dance of ba­nana peels through­out the rest of his path. This was irony at its bit­ter­est, for Claude was es­pe­cially fond of bananas.

Around noon he ar­rived at his des­ti­na­tion, the apart­ment build­ing where Mlle Cé­lina was be­ing held. Such an early ar­ri­val felt ba­thetic to Claude, who thought he hadn’t ac­com­plished much on the way and de­cided to start over and to go on a few side quests first. These side quests in­cluded start­ing—and, later, ex­tin­guish­ing—a great fire in Es­ter­háza, proof­read­ing Thomas Jeffer­son’s first draft of the Dec­la­ra­tion of In­de­pend­ence, at­tend­ing a re­hearsal of the mar­riage of Fi­garo (not the play by Beau­mar­chais, nor the opera by Mo­zart, but the ac­tual wed­ding cer­e­mony of a guy named Fi­garo), and many more, which for the sake of brev­ity have been left out of this sum­mary. Claude also thought it wise to pick up all the ba­nana peels as collectibles.

After a dec­ade of wan­der­ing, Claude re­turned to the bearded dragon’s lair to face his foe:

— My name is Claude Lame-Courte, he said. I have come to res­cue the fair Mlle Célina.

— My hero! Mlle Cé­lina exclaimed.

— Very well, said the bearded dragon. Sign here, please.

— Er … sign what? the knight asked.

— Paperwork.

— What for?

— For up­grad­ing to the ad-free tier of La Ga­zette, of course.

— Whoa, whoa! I’m not here to up­grade to the ad-free tier of La Ga­zette. I’m just here to res­cue Mlle Cé­lina. That’s all.

— But I can’t let her go un­less some­one up­grades to the ad-free tier of La Gazette.

— Why not?

— That was our deal.

— Is this true? Claude asked Célina.

— Yes, she replied.

— I wasn’t aware of this deal.

— Well, that’s the price for her free­dom, said the bearded dragon.

— What’s the price?

— Oh, it’s only two francs more than what you pay now.

— French?

— Swiss.

— Son of a bitch!

— I can maybe give you a 10% dis­count for all the ba­nana peels in your inventory.

— At any rate, I’m not even both­ered by the ads. I barely no­tice them anymore.

— So what do you pro­pose instead?

— IDK. [JNSP in the orig­i­nal.] Fight?

— Knock your­self out.

And so, bran­dish­ing his trusty bread knife, Claude at­tacked the bearded dragon, who, con­trary to what the lo­cals had said, was not made of bread and, there­fore, did not suffer any in­ju­ries. Claude, on the other hand, stepped on a ba­nana peel and fell down with a loud thud. Draw­ing his last breath, ex­pir­ing in the arms of his be­loved Cé­lina, he said:

— Couple, adieu ; je vais voir l’ombre que tu devins.

Andrieux opens the sec­ond book pon­der­ing the cru­elty of love, re­mark­ing how Sir Claude’s death was brought about by two things he loved so much—the fair Mlle Cé­lina & the ba­nana—and in­vokes the ghost of Ma­rie An­toi­nette, whose death was sim­i­larly caused by the two things she held most dear—the peo­ple of France & the guillotine.

The sec­ond book com­prises the open-world phase of Sir Claude’s ad­ven­tures. Fol­low­ing his un­timely death and with no more mis­sion to carry out, the ghost of Claude trav­els around Eu­rope and rec­ords his ex­pe­ri­ences and ob­ser­va­tions in his note­book. An­other tes­ta­ment to An­dri­eux’s su­per­la­tive im­a­gi­na­tion, this for­mat per­mit­ted him to pres­ent an ac­cu­rate and en­gag­ing ac­count of the most sig­nifi­cant ad­vances in the arts, sci­ences, and pol­i­tics from the French Rev­o­lu­tion up to his own time.

Among the en­tries in Claude’s note­book are⁠—

May 1804: The Cor­si­can twit has pro­nounced him­self em­peror. Why does he have his hand in his shirt? Per­haps giv­ing us the finger?

Mar 1807: The Brits are abol­ish­ing the slave trade. Thank good­ness I’m dead.

Dec 1808: The con­cert was too long, and the hall was too frig­ging cold. 2 stars.

Apr 1818: The new in­ven­tion by Herr von Drais is most prom­is­ing. A great im­prove­ment on the horse. I pre­dict all chev­a­liers will adopt it in five years’ time.

Oct 1834: The Beagle has re­turned from its sec­ond voy­age. Chuck says he’s found ev­i­dence of an­i­mals turn­ing into other an­i­mals, the fool.

In the spirit of keep­ing an up-to-date chron­i­cle of hu­man­kind’s big­gest achieve­ments, I have taken the lib­erty of ap­pend­ing en­tries on the more note­wor­thy in­ven­tions of our mod­ern times. These in­clude WWI, WWII, and the WWW.

11 July 2025