The first oddity is the French phrase 'ventre à terre', which I think was used of horses but now means at full speed more generally. I associate to old fashioned pictures of race horses with legs sticking out front and back and I am grateful to Richard Gardner for the late nineteenth century illustration of the sort of thing I mean. I had thought that by then painters knew better, but maybe this painter was just painting what his customers expected.
Apart from the fact that horses do not move in this way, there is also the fact that cats do move in this way, 'ventre à terre', they do it across our lawns here at Epsom, but it is a very slow, hunting movement. Cats in this posture presumably hope that it will make them less visible to the crow or pigeon or whatever it is they think would do for their lunch. Unsuccessfully, in the case of our lawns; maybe it works better in the long grass of their ancestral homes.
In Chimneys, the phrase is used of Lord Caterham, rushing to the scene of something or other, although I cannot put my finger on the place in question. With the Lord Caterham of the television adaptation being far too old to do any rushing at all.
Moving on, said adaptation is odd in that it is the first television adaptation of a murder mystery which I recall seeing in which the adapter has taken liberties with the perpetrator. So in the adaptation, the perpetrator is cuckolded Lord Caterham, rather than the governess, who has been suppressed.
The original story by Agatha, makes full use of the false identity device. The male lead, Antony Cade, turns out to be the heir to a Balkan throne (the story having been written in the twenties when the sanguinary turmoils of the Balkans were still fresh in peoples' minds). The rich collector from the US turns out to be an agent of the FBI. The agent of the French Sûreté turns out to be a celebrated thief. The governess at Chimneys turns out to be both his accomplice and the morganatic widow of a former occupant of said Balkan throne. A device which Agatha perhaps borrowed from the bard, from whom she is fond of quoting. Think, for example, of the by the pricking of my thumbs. A device enriched by the various clues to its presence scattered though the text which one does not notice on a first reading, but which one does, on a good day, pick up on a second.
In the adaptation most of these falsies are dropped, along with the Balkan scaffolding to the story, this last replaced by an adultery and an Austrian count with an unlikely past. The two Lords Caterham are conflated into one. The butler is transposed to a housekeeper. The diamond theft is retained. A whole new sub-plot involving an aristo-bashing, rather proletarian national trusty and a badly treated maid. Last but not least, Miss. Marple is intruded into the story, yet another tribute to the strength of her brand. Another being the price her DVDs still command at Amazon.
I will return with further gems of the French idiom from the translation of this story in due course.
PS: the orginal contains some mildly anti-semitic stuff about an important financier. Nothing much by the standards of the day when the original was written, but properly dropped from the adaptation. I associate to Aldous Huxley, no less, stooping to such stuff occasionally, from much the same era as Agatha. But, once again, I cannot put my finger on that bit of the blog.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/de-but-en-blanc.html.
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