Ooh La La!!! Jojo and the French Dame

Hat’s off to Dave Ell for his outstanding artwork in this brand new Woody Toon. Dave managed to capture my vision of Madame Diderot, the absinthe swilling, Gauloises smoking, Dame in charge of French at the Woody Back to School Unit perfectly.

Being yanked out their seats for a face to face confrontation with the Dame is a most disagreeable experience for the inmates. Not only do they have to contend with her alcohol and nicotine tainted breath but Madame also douses herself in the brands of cheap bordello perfume more usually favored by the working girls on the la Rue Saint-Denis. It is difficult for the luckless inmates to recoil when they are being choked by being yanked across the desk by their neckties. Although Madame is a linguist of the highest order, when she becomes vexed she reverts to the use of a guttural Parisian slang which even the finest French scholars at the unit have difficulty following; although they have grown familiar with the meaning of ‘six du meilleur’.

Madame Diderot shares none of the enlightened philosophical traits of her namesake. She is notoriously crabby and lacking in any sense of humor, possibly due to her semi-permanent absinthe induced hangovers.

In her youth Madame Diderot had been considered something of a beauty. She had danced barefoot in nightclubs around the Algerian Quarter where she developed her taste for Gauloises and absinthe. She was married briefly to a refined nobleman but divorced him when he declined her invitations to handcuff him to their bed and so that she could beat him with her favorite six tailed flogger. She returned to the Algerian Quarter where she found the North Africans far more amenable to her desires to mete out punition corporelle.

Corporal punishment had been officially abolished within the French school system in 1881 but many of the finer institutes circumnavigated the abolition by employing independent martinets to discipline delinquent pupils in private salons.

Madame Diderot supplemented her generous alimony payments by establishing an agency of disciplinarians who were commissioned to fouetté over a thousand miscreants a year. It was lucrative work until one of her employees became over-zealous and Madame was forced to close the agency down and have it on her toes with some expediency to avoid a potential spell in chokey.

Taking advantage of her degree in French Literature she crossed the channel and secured a position at an exclusive boarding school where she was delighted to find corporal punishment was still strongly encouraged. Unfortunately her liking for absinthe caused friction with the governors and she was obliged to tender her resignation. For several years she used bogus credentials to secure new positions at prestigious boarding schools. A reference from a dead French President praising her tutorial work with a fictitious daughter was particularly impressive. Nonetheless her drunken antics generally caused her to have to slink away at the dead of night to avoid being sacked.

She ended up at Dartington Manor where she was befriended by Patty Hodge who had installed herself as the Mistress of Discipline. Patty took a shine to the Parisian and would occasionally allow her to participate in her thrashing duties. Madame Diderot had caned the backsides of both Cathryn and Cassandra Cassidy long before they were sentenced to Woodys.

When Patty was appointed Deputy Grand Dame at the Back to School unit she immediately handed Ms Lawton a copy of Madame Diderot’s resume, supported by the usual stack of bogus credentials. Madame was amongst the first recruits to the new Brass.

Sensibly Patty prevailed on her chum to cut back on the absinthe, particularly during the working day. It transpired that she was a natural and gifted educator. She was genuinely passionate about both the French language and her knowledge of French literature was staggering. Many of the inmates who had spoken passable French when they had started their sentences now spoke and wrote fluently. Her lectures and tutorials were generally quite popular.

In stark contrast her disciplinary techniques were not quite so popular. Besides being hauled out of their seats by what was known amongst the Woody Wags as the ‘French Yank’ the inmates were not best pleased that as soon as they were released from the pungent wafts of wretch-inducing pongs Madame slammed them chest-down across the desk top and pinned them down in a most undignified manner. Unlike the majority of the Woody Brass Madame Diderot had no time for meticulously staged set-ups, she just flipped up the miscreants skirt and went straight to work. It is rumored that Madame attended the Speedy Gonzalez School of Caning as whop after whop always lands across the defenceless tautened bumbags in a breath-taking, nerve-jangling, teeth-chattering flurry.

Personally I think Dave Ell has captured this magnificently … see what you think … Bottoms Up! … RH

 

 

Just the usual polite reminder that Woodettes Publications purchased these illustrations along with the copyright. I have no objection to other sites using them as long as they are accompanied by appropriate acknowledgment to the source.