And so, here we are, faced with a choice. Who will we be aiming at? Will it be Jean qui rit (laughing Jean), or will it be Jean qui pleure (crying Jean)?

This shooting target toy is in storage at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (MAD) in Paris, and is made of cardboard, wood, paper, and metal sheeting. It dates from around 1920, and the museum states the manufacturer as ‘Ch. Cottret’, though I have found no further information on this. All in all, this plaything took quite a while to draw – it was a peculiar task, given that for the most part I was effectively reproducing a printed illustration. I started off thinking it might be a rather thankless process but, interestingly, I ended up feeling like I had enjoyed it and learnt a great deal.

I first came across a Jean qui pleure figure at the same museum in Paris (please take a look at this character made around 1830, he is worth it), and was surprised by how my feelings towards him were a combination of intrigue and repulsion in equal measures. I toyed with the idea of drawing a portrait of him, but if I am completely honest, I didn’t particularly want to spend a whole week with him – I found him too unpleasant to look at, and too much in the realm of disturbing dolls. Something about his face, his hair, his little suit, and his posture felt more than disagreeable; that was very possibly the aim, though I think a big component may be down to fashions and doll-making methods of the time. He too has a companion called Jean qui rit (see here), who elicits a similar reaction from me.

I was intrigued by their specific names, which seemed to come from a saying or a story of some sort, so I started investigating a little, and eventually came across this shooting target toy, which I felt was a more suitable candidate, as it included the gun.

The origin of the phrase Jean qui rit, Jean qui pleure can be traced back to a poem published by Voltaire in 1772 (at the ripe age of 78) called Jean qui pleure et qui rit, which you can read in French here. The poem refers to the paradox of human life, in which one moment you can feel deep sadness and hopelessness, and yet moments later you can be full of joy.

Il le faut avouer, telle est la vie humaine:
Chacun a son lutin qui toujours le promène
Des chagrins aux amusements.

[We must acknowledge that such is human life:
Each of us has our own imp, who leads us
every day from sorrows to amusements.]

But when applied to children, the meaning of the saying seems to take on a different quality. The Jean qui pleure doll from 1830 was made to look like a spoilt child who is whimpering out of habit and does so frequently.

The focus is changed. In his poem, Voltaire was commenting on the capriciousness of human life, on how we can despair at injustices or terrible situations, but then moments later might enjoy a glass of wine or good company, turning from a weeping Heraclitus into a laughing Democritus. But the infant Jean qui pleure seems to be presented to us as something to be mocked and rejected: an example of undesirable behaviour. It is true that the expression on the face of Jean qui rit in our shooting target toy is not angelic – might he even be laughing at, and delighting in, someone else’s misfortune? The laughing figures are exaggerated too, but I feel this only adds to the moralising aspect of it, and the idea of good behaviour in children.

In 1865 a book was published by the Comtesse de Ségur, a Russian by birth and origin, called Jean qui grogne et Jean qui rit (Jean who grumbles and Jean who laughs), presumably inspired by the expression coined by Voltaire. The book is a moral tale based on the idea of Good (Jean qui rit) and Evil (Jean qui grogne).

The Comtesse de Ségur also wrote Les malheurs de Sophie (Sophie’s Misfortunes), a popular book that continues to be sold to this day and has two sequels. Nabokov parodied this in his book Ada or Ardor, in which he mentions a fictional book called Les sophismes de Sophie, written by a Mlle Stopchin – he was not a fan. In Speak, Memory he describes the stories as ‘an awful combination of preciosity and vulgarity’ and describes Mme de Segur as ‘sentimental and smug’.

I look at this toy and feel there is a ruthless edge to it, a somehow unpleasant concept of childhood, and yet there is something about it that intrigues me. I don’t like the idea of guns, I am not terribly taken with dualities of this kind, but I do welcome humour.

My mind turns to the emotional education we see in some of today’s curricula – understandably, people have sought to move away from ideas of good/bad behaviour and try to add layers of complexity and awareness, in an attempt to help children understand what they might be feeling.

However, as is often the case, training and resources are often limited, and some children can be left with a decidedly humourless ‘greatest hits’ approach to the subject, in which they can detachedly reel off a long list of disembodied feelings and emotions and associate them with different colours – I do sometimes feel for the reputation of those lovely colours! –, essentially classifying them into good/bad categories all over again.

Perhaps if we exemplify behaviours all the time, and make everything explicit, we actively avoid complexity and subtlety, as though we have decided that children are incomplete beings not yet deserving of those qualities in their world. I also thought about how wonderfully rich and layered good works of fiction (and humour) can prove in this context – a bountiful world of complex human experiences to live through and draw on, and to see nuances and lovely blends of colours, if I can use a self-indulgent visual image.

I had fun looking into the Jean qui rit, Jean qui pleure expression, which seems to be used in several different ways – there were newspaper articles referring to capricious weather, cartoons of politicians with good news and bad news, pieces about rocket launches that were partly successful and partly unsuccessful.

French 1960s singer Claude François (a.k.a. Cloclo) had a song called Gens qui pleurent, gens qui rient (you can enjoy it here), which was presumably a play on the expression (it sounds the same as Jean qui pleure, Jean qui rit). In the town of Saint Quentin in the north of France, the façade of the casino includes some comedy/tragedy theatre mask style sculptures, known locally as Jean qui rit and Jean qui pleure.

I think my favourite find was a 2013 song by Israeli singer Riff Cohen in which she says:

Jean qui rit Jean qui pleure c’est moi
Qui siffle avec deux doigts
Qui pleure avec un oeil,
L’un pleure, et l’autre, il se merveille
L’un pleure, et l’autre, il SE MERVEILLE!

[Laughing Jean, crying Jean, that’s me
Who whistles with two fingers
Who cries with one eye
One cries and the other marvels
One cries and the other MARVELS!]

 I think I quite like that version of Jean, for children and adults alike.

 As for these two? I think many children might find themselves gleefully pulling the trigger on both.