Day 2 - Tante Picot by Mlle G. du Planty

I guess you could say I inherited this book when my father died. I think he was interested in collecting old books, although I am not sure why. I feel pretty confident it wasn’t because he was interested in their content. Maybe it was because they look cool. Or he thought they would appreciate in value. Or that there is something kind of magical about holding something that a young person held & read over 100 years ago.

Anyway, I would say you can skip this book. It is from another era in a bad way. From the little I can find out about it, the author is trying to make an example of the main character - of how not to act. She is Tante Picot, an elderly aunt who comes to Paris to live with her nephew and his children. She is described as an old lady with a good heart and likeable, but her aggressive and authoritarian spirit make her intolerable, even to herself. In one of the vignettes, she starts rearranging the furniture, which causes a lot of noise for her downstairs neighbor. When the neighbor sends his Black domestic worker to try to get negotiate some “peace” Tante Picot berates her. Finally, when Tante Picot learns that the neighbor is suffering from a systemic inflammatory disease (Bouillaud’s disease) she changes her tune completely and offers some home remedies. I wonder if this character “Tante Picot” is known in the french culture, like an Uncle Scrooge or something - but I can’t find much about her.

Here is the old book with a watercolor painting of a pear. . .

Do you keep books that don’t mean anything to you just because they are old?