David Hayes (London, openDemocracy): I sent this letter to the Spectator on 16 February concerning a review it published of Tony Parsons's book, My Favourite Wife. It was not published. The "Chinese proverb" canard has since been repeated elsewhere, without correction; eg in the Independent, 27 February.
Almost everything about Tony Parsons's work is cod (as indeed the critic Philip Hensher once demonstrated in an extended and devastating review in your pages). Including, it seems, his epigraphs. Olivia Cole writes in your magazine ("All at sea in Shanghai", 15 February 2008 ): "A Chinese proverb - A man with two houses loses his mind; a man with two women loses his soul - gives My Favourite Wife its epigraph."
The epigraph in fact belongs to the fourth in Eric Rohmer's series of six films, Comédies et Proverbes, and introduces his subtle anatomy of a young woman's search for simultaneous urban freedom and suburban stability, Les nuits de la pleine lune (1984; released in Britain as Full Moon in Paris). Rohmer presented the phrase as a French proverb, but later acknowledged he had written it himself.
Perhaps its true origin can be acknowledged in the paperback edition?
