the corsican twins (13. 459)

Vaguely remembering the short musical number—it turns out it was a song about phonetics from PBS‘s The Electric Company—I don’t know if I ever knew Alexandre Dumas’ Les Frères corses and so neither registered nor appreciated the numerous other cultural references. In the 1844 novella, the formerly conjoined brothers, separated by a surgeon at birth, were called Louis and Lucien. Whereas the former became a sophisticated attorney in Paris, the latter sibling remained close to his roots, living with their widowed mother in the south of the island near Porto Vecchio. Despite being put asunder by the doctor’s scalpel as newborns, the brothers have a sympathetic connection at a distance and can feel the other’s emotions. Lucien undertakes the role of mediator between two local feuding families and with Louis’ help lawyers up. There are myriad homages, pastiches and parodies, including Gene Wilders’ Start the Revolution without Me, dozens of adaptations and the twins renamed as Cheech and Chong, Samantha ans Sabrina, and in the GI JOE cartoon series, brothers-in-arms Tomax and Xamot are depicted as having the Corsican syndrome where any injury to one is suffered by the other. Dumas’ work is in part of an allegory critical of contemporary French attempts to centralise government power and civilise its provincial regions, including the territory annexed since 1768 remains ruggedly independent, like Bretagne.