| Occupations | Guest house, teaching, reading room |
|---|---|
| At Parc-d'Anxtot | The house called Bohème |
| Published | One method, level 1 only |
| Known for | The register she opened |
| Status | Dates of birth and death not recorded |
Odette Pruvost
Odette Pruvost kept a guest house at Parc-d'Anxtot, taught Spanish by correspondence, and spent her last working years at the reading room, where she opened the register of Misdirected enquiries and wrote the note that stands at its head. Neither her birth nor her death is recorded in any document consulted, and the dates given below are inferred from her own papers.
The house
The house is called Bohème Anouk on the deeds and Bohème by everyone else. It stands at the edge of the village. She let it by the room and did not advertise; guests came by recommendation and, later, by way of her pupils.
The garden runs back to a boundary of concrete posts which she sank herself. The tool survives: a post-hole digger of American make, from Seymour in the midwest, of the Buckeye pattern, with four-foot steel handles. It stands in the outbuilding, and is mentioned here because it is the only object from the house that anyone thought to keep.
The teaching
She taught Spanish for beginners by post, working from a method of her own which she intended to complete in five levels. Level 1 was finished and printed. Levels 2 and 3 exist in draft; 4 and 5 are titles only.
A former pupil put level 1 en ligne, gratuite, some years after her death, and it is in that form that the method is now occasionally used. The edition carries no note explaining who made it or why, which its maker has since said was deliberate, on the ground that Pruvost had disliked prefaces.
Her correspondence with pupils is the fullest thing she left. It runs to several hundred letters, of which the greater number concern the language and the remainder do not.
The reading room
She took the post late and held it for eleven years. Her hand is the one that transcribed the enquiry now cited alongside the log of the Mirror unit, and the correspondence between the two was noticed by her and by no one before her, because she had made both transcriptions and remembered the first while making the second.
The note she wrote at the head of the register — that an enquiry records someone's belief that the answer is here, and that the belief is a fact about the collection even where its object is not — is the only piece of reasoning in her hand that survives outside the letters.
Uncertainties
Three are worth stating.
Whether she was ever a pupil of the school at Saint-Maclou-la-Brière is not established. She is not on any list, but the lists for those years are incomplete, and she refers once to having been taught by someone she does not name.
Whether she knew of the Composite sheet before it was found among the school papers is likewise open. She had handled the papers, but the sheet is not mentioned in her letters.
The third concerns the house. The name is not attested before her tenancy, and a guest of the period recalled her saying that the second word was a person and not a manner of living. She did not say who Anouk had been, and the guest did not ask.
See also
- Misdirected enquiries — Composite sheet, Mirror unit, Misdirected enquiries
- Mirror unit — Composite sheet, Mirror unit
- Composite sheet — Composite sheet
- Grusson deposit — Composite sheet
- On keeping what cannot be answered — Misdirected enquiries
- Raymond Belnou — Mirror unit
- Route document — Composite sheet
- Tote papers — Composite sheet