French (?) handwriting on back of CdV - translation/help please!

[chinakay]

See reply #11. I think it's puis also...then. Puis ci me parait. Then this or it appears to me.

[Eidde]

I thought it might be 'Celui-ci' with the first 'c' missing. The squiggle that looks like an 's' would be a hyphen. I'm not sure what 'puis ci' would mean whereas 'celui-ci' would fit well grammatically

Eddie

[chinakay]

That's it! The L in Calorgne is exactly the same, and l'autre down below. Makes much more sense.

[Eidde]

If the word after 'parait' is in fact 'moins' (=less) and it is connected to 'que l'autre' then what bothers me is the insertion of this strange list.

How about this for a theory? Perhaps the list is what something or other is less of. In other words, someone has annotated the image to say something along the lines of 'In this one (picture) I look less like an orang-utan (etc) than in the other one'. (Passport photos, anyone?)

The problem here is that 'celui-ci' has to refer to a masculine noun and 'image' and 'photograph' are feminine - daguerréotype, perhaps, which is masculine. Or maybe 'celui-ci' just refers to the man - 'this bloke'?

To prove this theory we just have to find the other image

Eddie

[veeblevort]

Don't know if people did such things in those days,
but is it possible that the CdV is one of a number
pasted into a notebook, journal or scrapbook? This
was perhaps later broken up for sale, and excess
paper trimmed off. If that is so, the writing may
well be comparing two separate images as Eddie's
translation suggests. The writing being upside down
could indicate a book bound at the top edge like a
reporter's or police notebook, and given that the
writing is mostly intact, the book need not be
much bigger than the CdV itself.

vv.