Exactly 20 years ago (give or take a few days) like most French schoolchildren I was given a piggy bank to collect yellow coins (small change). It was a charity campaign called Opération Pièces Jaunes, to help hospitalised children, but my classmates & I were quite indifferent to the charity aspect because all we cared about was the fact that our teacher started giving us a candle in the shape of President Jacques Chirac every time we returned our little box filled with coins.
We were completely enraptured by those candles and the way the president’s face would start melting hideously if we let them burn long enough. Without any kind of deliberation among ourselves we turned it into a class-wide contest—it was obvious to everyone that the point of the Yellow Coins charity campaign was to win many little Chiracs and melt them to make the face of our president as freakishly deformed as possible. We exchanged them for pogs and marbles. We had recently learnt about the Plague in history class, with great relish, hence one lucky girl who managed to obtain a particularly monstrous half-melted face with a big wax bubble reminiscent of a bubo sold it way above the going rate, for 12 galaxy marbles—a fortune. (I was among the losers of this auction, and commented in my diary, with deep regret, “It’s just what it would look like if the President had the bubonic plague!”) Every day after school we went round town begging passersby for coins with something akin to mania in order to get more Chiracs to burn into ever ghastlier shapes. An old lady we ambushed in front of the church praised us warmly for our charitable spirit.
Eventually our teacher ran out of candles and this odd chapter of my childhood ended as abruptly as it had started. Our class was congratulated in front of the whole school for being by far the most ardently devoted to the cause (we got ~15kg of coins.) I wonder if the principal asked our teacher what her secret was to make us collect a truly astonishing amount of coins compared to the other classes, and how he reacted when she replied that she motivated us with busts of the President. One teacher gave a Carambar for a full box of coins, another believed that helping sick children should be incentive enough, but our teacher, an expert in child psychology, was alone in her conviction that the best way to go about this was to hand out human wax effigies for her students to burn.
