Où sont les neiges d'antan

“Où sont les neiges d'antan?” is a compact expression of loss whose familiar-sounding question about vanished time is made deliberately coarse in the novel. Its turn from the evocation of old snows to the pissoir collapses elegy into bathroom humor, making the past seem at once worth mourning and impossible to treat with solemnity.

Form and Turn

The passage asks, “Où sont les neiges d'antan? Où sont les neiges d'autrefois?” The two questions repeat the same search in slightly different words: where are the snows of yesteryear, where are the snows of former times? The parallel phrasing gives the opening the shape of a lament, but the next sentence breaks that register: “Dans le pissoir toute la chose comme ça.” The movement is not a measured answer so much as a brusque deflation, replacing the image of vanished snow with an indecorous, bodily setting.

Scene and Significance

The expression follows the Colonel's emergence from the bathroom, after he has dismissed his own beaten-up reflection and left what he calls every worthless thing behind. It therefore sits beside a moment of self-reproach and attempted renewal: he comes out feeling young again, while the phrase turns backward toward what has passed. The abrupt vulgarity refuses to let that backward glance become pure nostalgia. In a few lines, the passage holds together the wish to recover former time, the persistence of bodily indignity, and the Colonel's effort to leave his humiliations behind.