Faits divers

In Competition No. 2532 you were invited to take a recent news item and compress it into 25 words.

I am grateful to Eric Smith in the West Indies who suggested the idea and drew my attention to the shadowy figure of Félix Fénéon, art critic and anarchist, among other things. His fait divers, or news in brief, published over the course of 1906 in Le Matin newspaper, are the work of a supreme stylist. Fénéon gravitated towards material that was violent, bloody and macabre, which he distilled into elegant, deadpan three-liners. Les Nouvelles en Trois Lignes was published last year as Novels in Three Lines in a translation by Luc Santé. Here’s an example of Fénéon’s epigrammatic genius:

There is no longer a God even for drunkards. Kersilie, of St.-Germain, who mistook the window for the door, is dead.

The winners below net £10 per entry printed.

Academics have warned schools not to teach
children to be patriotic,
As their country, academics presumably apart,
Has given its citizens too many bad examples.