2023-12-17 08:02:36
“Ah well, old man, if I would have known, I would have come! » This sentence is perhaps a little obscure for the youngest, but it has marked a few generations thanks to the cult film The War of the Buttons, released in theaters in 1962. Little Gibus’s response made all of France laugh… and it wasn’t the first time. Return to a deliberately wrong twist.
From book to film? Not quite
Before Yves Robert’s feature film, there was Louis Pergaud’s novel, published in 1912 and recounting the misadventures of two rival “gangs” of children in the rural France of the time. To think that the most famous line in the film comes from there, there is no doubt, but in fact, not at all. It is rather attributed to the humorist Pierre Dac, who recorded it in his satirical periodical Marrow bone…in 1939. Before Dac, some sources even attribute this amusing twist to the artist Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, who lived from 1827 to 1875.
Why is this wrong?
Because the only acceptable turn of phrase is: “if I had known, I would not have come”. Concerning the first part of the sentence, it’s simple: to make a hypothesis after “if”, we can only use the imperfect tense (“if I had won the lottery”, “if you had done homework”) . As for the second part of the sentence, the error is even more blatant: before the verb “comer”, we can only use the auxiliary “être” (“I came”) or the semi-auxiliary “aller” ( “I’m going to come”), but in no case the auxiliary “have”.
#shouldnt