Hang Yourself Brave Crillon
Posted: July 14, 2025 Filed under: France, Hemingway Leave a comment
From Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography:
Like most people who were drawn by Hemingway’s magnetic personality and valued him more as a companion than as a writer, Lanham found it amusing and exciting to be with him and to be known to have been with him. (The general is remembered today not for his military career but for his friendship with Hem-ingway.) While Hemingway was at the Ritz during the first week of September with Mary, Lanham, echoing Henry IV’s taunt to the Duke of Crillon after a victory at Arques, sent him a provocative message. “Go hang yourself, brave Hemingstein. We have fought at Landrecies and you were not there.”
This was (as Lanham knew) an irresistible challenge, and Hemingway immediately hastened northeast from Paris to Landrecies and Le Cateau (where Dorman-Smith and the British army had retreated after the bad show at Mons in the Great War). “The countryside through which Hemingway travelled in order to reach my command post,” wrote Lanham, who had summoned him there, “was alive with Germans who had been by-passed. All of these people were trying frantically to get back to Germany proper and the Siegfried Line. He was very lucky indeed to have made this trip without being killed.”
Boys will be boys (Hemingway was 44).
Had to look up Henry IV’s taunt to Crillon:
Hang yourself, brave Crillon; we fought at Arques and you were not there
According to Oxford Essential Quotations (4th Ed.) that’s the “traditional form given by Voltaire to [the original] in a letter from Henri to Crillon, 20 September 1597; Henri’s actual words, as given in Lettres missives de Henri IV, Collection des documents inédits de l’histoire de Francevol. 4 (1847) were
My good man, Crillon, hang yourself for not having been at my side last Monday at the greatest event that’s ever been seen and perhaps ever will be seen’
Boldface mine. You can feel the bro-ness, it’s giving Ben Affleck and Adam Driver in The Last Duel.
How did Hemingway and Lanham both know this?
(source). Maybe it was in the boys’ books of the day.
(Frequent readers of this site will recall that Pendu/Pender/PennDu language games&names in French reveal the origin of Cezanne’s House of the Hanged Man.)
All four of Henry IV’s Oxford quotes bang, his most famous might be
Paris is worth a mass
The origin story in that:
On 25 July 1593, with the encouragement of his mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, Henry permanently renounced Protestantism and converted to Catholicism to secure his hold on the French crown, thereby earning the resentment of the Huguenots and his ally Elizabeth I of England. He was said to have declared that Paris vaut bien une messe (“Paris is well worth a Mass”), although the attribution is doubtful.
That’s apparently Gabrielle on the left, some interpretation.
Here’s Henri IV at Arques:
Some pretty pictures and intriguing backstory of Arques-la-Bataille on the “Normandy Then and Now” website:
John Henry Twachtman painted the river there in 1885:
That’s in the Met.
Henri’s greatest event that had ever been wasn’t the only battle in the are
Just outside the town is the World War I Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery, designed by J R Truelove, the final resting place of 377 men of the Chinese, West Indies, and South African Native Labour Corps.
As for Landrecies, it’s Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention the Second World War, but notes:
It was the site of a skirmish between the British I Corps under Douglas Haig and the German First Army on 25 August 1914, that resulted in the death of Archer Windsor-Clive, the first first-class cricketer to fall in World War I.
Some day I’d like to do a little road trip through here:
Almost every town here has a famous siege or battle. Finish in Bruges. Or maybe Brussels, see The Royal Museum for Central Africa (they don’t know what to do with that inheritance). Or maybe Ghent. I’d like to see the altarpiece:
At St. Bavo’s Cathedral:
(Source)
Helytimes 