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tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-07-10 12:59 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-07-10 12:59 pm
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Le mot de Cambronne
Rereading Les Mis for the first time in ages. First time my Pléiade edition has served as a reading copy, not just for reference. I'm bouncing back and forth between "Yes I will read all the footnotes this is fascinating!" and "No I will not interrupt my reading just to look up footnotes and find that they're yet more minor phrasing corrections Hugo made since the rough draft."
Anyway, almost done with Waterloo. Still not very keen on most of it, but OMG, Cambronne totally makes up for the endless descriptions of the layout of the battlefield. If I had to give someone the essence of Hugo bottled up into less than five pages, those two chapters on Cambronne would be it. It is the passage I would give my students if I ever ended up teaching an intro French lit class. It is fabulous. And gives Hugo a chance to use all his favorite words--not just le mot de Cambronne, which practically gets its own digression nine hundred pages later, but also divine and sublime and hurricane and all his other verbal tics. (Reason #489043 why I love the French language: it has a word for "struck down by a thunderbolt.")
According to the footnotes, Cambronne always flatly denied having said the more polite and poetic "The Guard dies and doesn't surrender," and admitted that what he actually said was far more earthy and belonged squarely to a soldier's vocabulary. The footnote goes on to say that it is very difficult to track down sources for what he actually said when it's completely unprintable, but conflicting reports have it as either "Shit!" (à la Hugo) or "Des bougres comme nous ne se rendent jamais!" which roughly translates to "Mofos like us don't ever surrender!"
Anyway, almost done with Waterloo. Still not very keen on most of it, but OMG, Cambronne totally makes up for the endless descriptions of the layout of the battlefield. If I had to give someone the essence of Hugo bottled up into less than five pages, those two chapters on Cambronne would be it. It is the passage I would give my students if I ever ended up teaching an intro French lit class. It is fabulous. And gives Hugo a chance to use all his favorite words--not just le mot de Cambronne, which practically gets its own digression nine hundred pages later, but also divine and sublime and hurricane and all his other verbal tics. (Reason #489043 why I love the French language: it has a word for "struck down by a thunderbolt.")
According to the footnotes, Cambronne always flatly denied having said the more polite and poetic "The Guard dies and doesn't surrender," and admitted that what he actually said was far more earthy and belonged squarely to a soldier's vocabulary. The footnote goes on to say that it is very difficult to track down sources for what he actually said when it's completely unprintable, but conflicting reports have it as either "Shit!" (à la Hugo) or "Des bougres comme nous ne se rendent jamais!" which roughly translates to "Mofos like us don't ever surrender!"