"And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes his head at times. The strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have their hours of weakness.

Will the future arrive? It seems as though we might almost put this question, when we behold so much terrible darkness. Melancholy face-to-face encounter of selfish and wretched. On the part of the selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education, appetite increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls, a fear of suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for the suffering, an implacable satisfaction, the I so swollen that it bars the soul; on the side of the wretched covetousness, envy, hatred of seeing others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human beast towards assuaging its desires, hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality, impure and simple ignorance.

Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? is the luminous point which we distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal is frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small, isolated, imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great, black menaces, monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger than a star in the maw of the clouds."

- Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

The baby blanket is done right on time for friends' baby shower! Now need another stress crocheting project...

<3 <3 <3

send me something that will make me cry? been fighting (the deliberate instillation of) fear all day. tears against fears! ahem. i will see myself out.

Just leaving this here, with immense gratitude to the folks, Lune Lys and Antoine Saint-Just, who have translated and annotated (! the puns!) the first part of La Terreur et la Vertu and hosted it on Youtube.

It works as a tragedy in the classical sense, symbolism and humanity intertwined; and the language is to be repeated and spoken on stage, to be memorized, on occasion; and Robespierre is good enough to briefly imagine that he may just be able to bend history, this time, by sheer force of will; and Danton and Camille are raw and determined to live for their Republic, even when they are asked to die for it. (And in the end, quoting Bulgakov, manuscripts don't burn).

Done with A Place of Greater Safety... I do share in the criticism shared by more informed and better studied folks (what in the world is it with all the women - they're either Undesirable Unhappy Shrews (Manon Roland, Theroigne, Eleonore Duplay) or Teenagers with Questionable Desires (Lucile, Louise, Elisabeth Duplay let's just stop here before the rant expands), or Simple Wives (Gabrielle, Marie Antoinette at a stretch) etc., etc.; and poor Saint-Just got the villain treatment that apparently didn't even merit character development, or perhaps the book was already precariously long by the time he showed up in the pages; and it looks very much like an attempt to write an asexual character with no understanding of asexuality, and a polyamorous relationship with no understanding of that either - yours truly, ace poly lemur). Well, perhaps, as one of the character says in the book, history is fiction; but I suppose, fiction isn't history.

That said, it does inspire one to get more into the French Revolution, which happens to be a rather timely sort of special interest that has been slowly bubbling up in the background. And the writing, with all the changes in tone and in style and in third-to-first person, actually worked for me, as a liberating sort of reminder that I, too, may decide "it is my book and I will write it the way I see fit", of course whether the publishers agree is another question.

Now, what I truly and personally want to shake this book about (why shake? perhaps, the words will rearrange into a more favorable sequence) is that with the determined focus on the "revolution, warts and all", it spends rather too much time on the warts, and not nearly enough on the rest. There's not enough determination, conviction, idealism, reforms, the absolute exhaustion of trying to design a state from scratch, not enough Vendée, not enough war (and may I note the insufficiency of Lazare Carnot? in a committee of lawyers, be a physicist ;)). There's just not enough revolution.

(Oh, and Camille - yes for lots of Camille on the page, but the way I see him is an unquenchable firebrand, not someone defined by being cared for - again, interpretations at least lead to formalizing my own thoughts to myself).

In all this, I am in search for good fiction about the French Revolution (I seem to be finding enough history at least for starters, but one needs a balance and an escape too).

[so I tried to answer and then it became this whole personal essay instead O__O I suppose one can always be fanciful and blame Camille for momentary possession]

Camille Desmoulins (and yes, he is Camille, for some reason, even though Robespierre is not Maximilien, nor Saint-Just is Antoine, and there are entirely too many Jean Pauls to find the right Marat among them; but Camille is Camille forever) is – was – a lawyer and a journalist and one of the key figures of the French Revolution, famous for his impassioned speech that led to the storming of the Bastille in 1789, written about in quite a few lovely posts by people much more seriously interested in and knowledgeable about this historical period than myself, and my beloved because of – well, because of his incendiary, scathing, often overblown, and sometimes downright brilliant pamphlets – because  of staying true to freedom as he saw it (including clemency, including freedom of speech, including a very fair share of populism and naïveté, but hell it is worth learning French if only to memorize some of his words) –  because my grandmother was a history teacher during a dictatorship.

Being a history teacher meant: lectures in a city left in ruins by the frontline having passed back and forth too many times to count; stealing carrot peels from the table after her better-off roommate decided to make a salad for herself, and eating them before she returned; family caught in the guerrilla war and narrowly escaping a deportation to Siberia; her brother imprisoned by the KGB for the crime of owning a radio; being told that there was no money to get a degree in anything but a certificate to teach elementary school; but she wanted to study history, and she wanted to learn French, and, smiling in the pictures with her perfectly coiffed hair, half-starved, defiant against her entire family, she did.

Being a history teacher meant: a strictly state-approved curriculum, but fortunately, there was nothing wrong with the French Revolution on the surface of it, and if she dedicated rather a lot of time to it, well, she was one of the best history teachers in her city; and if her husband, my grandfather, had decided to learn French too, while in hiding, for a year, during the war (and what were the reasons for hiding? some things you only learn many years later, from whispers), and couldn’t get a position in a university due to insufficient ideological purity, well, they met rather late in life, but lived together for more than fifty years. Being a history teacher meant Robespierre, and Danton, and Marat, and the ideals of a Revolution and the fear of Terror, and above all, the freedom of opinion that leads to immortality. (Do I agree with it all? But my grandparents’ house was perhaps the only place in my childhood where my agreement wasn’t required, even then). Being a history teacher meant sticking ideas in the gaps between words, so that her students would notice, and living for fifty years until she, too, got to see a dictatorship fall.

But now, being a grandma meant that July 14th was an important holiday to a degree that I didn’t understand how nobody else seemed to have heard of it in my elementary school, and being taught the first two stanzas of La Marseillaise in French and in translation, and being given Ninety-Three at much too young an age and informed that I was going to cry at the end, and Incorruptible as the epithet for Robespierre and the ideal to be attained, and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People and David’s Death of Marat somehow a part of a backdrop of what probably was a very unusual childhood, though it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, and Camille Desmoulins as that favorite of grandma's that she doesn’t even want to mention too often, nor too casually, as if not to stain the words.

It meant stories upon stories, during the times when history and story blended together, and a weird, awkward, bookish grandkid, of the type who decades afterwards falls headlong into the French Revolution in the middle of very real, very immediate hard times for liberty and harder choices that all of a sudden have to be made, and starts reading about Camille, exasperating, uncompromising, flawed, scared, courageous, firebrand Camille, and – well, reading Camille, one can sometimes believe that words can reach beyond the grave.