Ten Little Chances to be Free

Montreuil-sur-Mer tomorrow! Any photo/research requests?

This afternoon was kind of disgustingly gorgeous--cool in the shade, warm in the sun, windy and intermittently cloudy, and the trees are starting to go into flower. And I managed to be inside whenever it started raining. I love spring weather. Walked along the Seine from the eastern end of Paris (a bit past Bercy) to Saint-Michel, where I predictably went to Gibert Jeune and spent too much money on books.

Haul:
- La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (George Sand) - already read it, but I bought Consuelo in the exact same bookstore from the exact same used books rack two years ago, and I didn't have a copy of Comtesse de Rudolstadt, so I couldn't resist
- Corinne (Mme de Staël)
- Armance (Stendhal)
- Méditations poétiques (Lamartine)

So, I guess apart from the Sand it was an early-Romanticism kick, except I honestly didn't set out to do that. It was just what they had for cheap.

And now I get to choose what to take on the train to Montreuil-sur-Mer. Oh boy. Armance is probably too short for a train ride... Corinne? Père Goriot? Faust? Vidocq's memoirs?

(It occurs to me that if I ever have a kid, I'm going to have to teach her French so that she can raid my library. And feel properly pleased with herself when she stumbles upon the naughty books.)

I really need to stop buying books faster than I can read them. FFS. If it turns out that the cheap surface-mail option for shipping books from France is a hoax, I don't know what I'm going to do--probably corner people on Barricade Day and strongarm them into smuggling my books back into the US in their luggage.

However, "I need to stop buying books" is a general statement. In the specific case of this beautiful edition of Les Travailleurs de la Mer, I regret nothing. 8€ and free shipping for a beautiful beautiful edition of a Hugo book I haven't read yet, with illustrations by Gustave Doré? I regret nothing.

Reading Quatrevingt-Treize right now. I'm right at the beginning of the Paris section, the chapter where Robespierre and Danton and Marat are hanging out in the back room of a café. Is it just me or is this book really geeky? It's like the Friends of the ABC in Les Mis were preliminary character sketches for what Hugo wanted to do in Quatrevingt-Treize, and now he's expanding on those ideas and indulging his historical geeky side. At the same time it's very Hugo: the characters are absolutes, without coming off as stereotypes.

Or at least, thus is my impression so far. I still have 250 more pages to read.

In other "currently reading" news, Eugene Sue has one up over Hugo: when someone in Mysteries of Paris is blatantly someone else in disguise, or there's a "X is Y's long-lost daughter!" plot twist that's easy to figure out, Sue pulls a "the reader will no doubt have guessed by now..." at exactly the moment it becomes obvious, instead of keeping up the pretense for hundreds and hundreds of pages god damn you Hugo. Kind of like the Jane-Rochester romance in Jane Eyre: Bronte knows that neither her heroine nor her readers are dumb, and only gives them one Juicy Juicy Subtext And UST Up The Wazoo scene before it's made explicit. I mean, there's something to be said for suspense, but there's also a lot to be said for not dragging it out too long.

Feeling better now after a good cry, three cups of tea, and some Mystères de Paris. Host mother came in halfway through the second cup; I can't tell if she got the message or if she's just bipolar and in a good mood. She started to nag me for leaving the kettle on the stove and then stopped, said something along the lines of "but I have little manias like that," and chatted about museums for the next fifteen minutes.

Mystères de Paris is wonderfully cracked-out. It's like if you took Dumas, stripped him of all subtlety, and added Hugo's obsession with argot and the Parisian underworld. It also has the following elements, all of which made me giggle and wonder if Hugo was stealing from Eugène Sue:

- A virtuous fanmaker earning four francs a day. Hanging out in seamy taverns and talkin' argot with the bandits.
- Mysterious dandy lurking in the shadows of said tavern.
- A mysterious man who is richer than he appears, buying the freedom of a prostitute with a heart of gold, while the madam ridiculously over-inflates the costs to try to wring more money out of him
- Said mysterious gentleman, trying to stay incognito in Paris, renting a house at the end of the Rue Plumet
- ....I'm probably forgetting things. Really.

It's fairly light reading aside from some antiquated vocabulary, so I've been knocking back fifteen or twenty pages at a time over tea. It's 1300-ish pages, so I predict it'll last me until the end of the semester at this rate.

And speaking of entertaining books, I am now the proud(?) owner of Thérèse Philosophe and Gamiani ou deux nuits d'excès. And OMG if I had a scanner I would totally scan the original illustrations to the latter, because there is NOTHING FUNNIER than 1830s porn. It's just as ugly and ridiculous as 1830s fashion plates, only... naked.

Amazon.fr has no shipping cost for books. It is absolutely 100% free within metropolitain France.

SAVE ME FROM MY OWN BIBLIOPHILIA



Already bought: George Sand, Lelia; Eugene Sue, Les Mysteres de Paris; Alfred de Musset, La Confession d'un enfant du siecle. Seriously considering: Mme de Stael, Corinne; Anon (attrib. Musset), Gamiani ou deux nuits d'exces.)

(Yes, I know, I am boring hear me snore.)

Things in strikethrough I've read, things in italics I'm currently reading. Number of pages in parentheses.

Original List:

Quicksilver (916)
The Confusion (815)
The System of the World (886)
His Majesty's Dragon (353)
Throne of Jade (398)
Black Powder War (365)
Empire of Ivory (404)
Victory of Eagles (374)
La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (~690)
Les sept cordes de la lyre (164)
Mademoiselle de Maupin (82/284)
American Gods (588)
Faust (503 but bilingual, so 251 pages each of German and English)

Added to the list since I got back to Smith:

The Well of Loneliness (437)
The Persian Boy (411)
L'éros romantique (23/224)

Pages read: 3395
Pages remaining: 4417
Pages on original list: 6740
Pages on updated list: 7812
Approximately 43% done with the whole list, 50% done with original list

Why am I calculating these things?

Okay. Visa interview tomorrow in Boston. I have all the documents ready and such. Hopefully nothing goes terribly wrong this time.

And I've only done 3,000 pages of summer reading so far; you'd think the remaining 4,500+ pages on my shelf would deter me from acquiring more books, but no, I was weak. I found a shiny book all about gender-bending and homoeroticism in the French Romantic literature around 1830 in the Mt Holyoke library catalog. I mean, come on, with a subject that specific how could I ever forgive myself for not checking it out? So I got it over ILL and it'll probably be waiting for me when I get back from Boston.

My original summer reading list:
The Baroque Cycle
- Quicksilver
- The Confusion
- The System of the World
Temeraire
- His Majesty's Dragon
- Throne of Jade
- Black Powder War
- Empire of Ivory (in the middle of it)
- Victory of Eagles
La Comtesse de Rudolstadt
Les sept cordes de la lyre (just started it)
Mademoiselle de Maupin
American Gods
Faust

Added to the list since I got back to Smith:
The Well of Loneliness
The Persian Boy
L'éros romantique

Fuck. I should be working on root-finding programs for some of the approximation functions I've been working with, instead I'm shooting longing glances at my library copy of La Comtesse de Rudolstadt and pondering the similarities between Jane Eyre and the whole Consuelo/Comtesse de Rudolstadt saga. I'm actually really surprised that I can't find any juicy literary analysis on the subject online, because Consuelo is a French Romantic Jane Eyre (or is Jane Eyre an English Consuelo?) I mean, come on, Bildungsroman by a female author about a "plain" female protagonist trying to find her way in a world that doesn't have a place for her, strong themes of integrity and self-determination, eventual love with an equally odd and outcast man under downright Gothic circumstances that's initially rejected because it's not on the heroine's own terms. You'd think comp-lit people would be jumping all over it but I can't find anything online besides offhand references putting them both in the category of "19th century female protagonist, written by female author." (Often tossing Mme de Stael's Corinne in with them in the same sentence, so maybe I should try to find a copy of that too.)

In any case, if you like Jane Eyre and can find a copy of Consuelo in translation, I do encourage you to read it because they're very similar in some ways. And very different in others--Consuelo is huge and sprawling in the grand tradition of French Romanticism, not to mention a good bit more colorful what with opera-house intrigue and echoes of Czech religious conflicts and secret societies plotting the French Revolution and all sorts of crazy stuff. It has shades of epic and isn't as tightly focused on introspection as Jane Eyre, but damn, I think Jane and Consuelo would get along splendidly.

I've unpacked the books I brought home from Smith, but giant stacks of them haven't made it to the bookshelves yet, because there is no room on the bookshelves. Nevertheless, I am a shameless book whore and just spent upwards of $70 on:

The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson
- Quicksilver
- The Confusion
- The System of the World
Temeraire vol. 1-3 box set by Naomi Novik
- His Majesty's Dragon
- Throne of Jade
- Black Powder War
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Faust by Goethe (in a nice bilingual edition no less)
Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier

Which, for that price (including shipping) is a pretty good haul, but--BAD. Do not need more books. Except I've been wanting all of these like burning for months, so I guess that partially excuses it.

My summer reading list includes all of these, a book and a play by George Sand (La Comtesse de Rudolstadt and Les sept cordes de la lyre), the rest of the Temeraire series if I like the first three, and possibly some Stoppard if I have time. Due to the general impossibility of finding anything by Sand at a reasonable price online, I'm going to be relying on the Smith library, which has her complete works.

It's going to be really weird reading all these things that weren't written in the 19th century.

Edit: Have been doing some page counts. Stephenson averages 900 pages per book, Novik averages 400, American Gods is 600 and change, Faust is 500, Mlle de Maupin is 300 and change--5500 pages total, plus about a thousand pages of Sand all told, and some miscellaneous light reading. I'm looking at about seven thousand pages to read this summer. :D

Since I did recs yesterday and historical squee today, I figured I might as well compile a reading list of dorky LM research... after a certain amount of smacking Amazon to keep it from putting it under my real name, I present Books for Hardcore Les Mis Nerds.

Yes, I am a wicked temptress. I think this goes without saying.

Holy shit guys, Camden lock is burning down.

I had forgotten how minuscule the print is in my annotated LM. The text of the novel itself looks to be about 10pt, the notes more like 8pt and half of them are in italics. When I had it from the library a couple years ago, I actually bought a pair of reading glasses even though my vision is perfectly fine, but I have since managed to scratch them horribly and then misplace them and forget about them. I kind of wish I'd remembered, because I tried going through it tonight looking for parts to type up and now I have a pretty awful headache. I did find some good stuff, though: a very extended version of Javert denouncing himself to M. Madeleine, the original idea for how Marius found out the truth about his father, M. Gillenormand's cousin the entomologist, a short and sad little scene after Cosette throws away her convent clothes... I'll transcribe it after I've either found my reading glasses or bought a new pair.

And so help me God, I need some impulse control. I went to the mall (yeah, I know) today for a very specific item: Lush sells a shampoo bar with henna in it, I don't want my red hair to fade, and for some reason they don't sell it on the website. I walked out with the shampoo bar in question, plus $30 worth of stuff from L'Occitane en Provence, a 2008 calendar of Waterhouse paintings (which I'd secretly been wanting, but not entertaining any real hope of finding), and an arm-breaking load of books that I used up all my Borders gift cards on. And it's all brain candy, too--I have a secret weakness for Da Vinci Code ripoffs, which are a definite case of the imitations being way better than the original, but still kinda trashy even if the writing isn't as horrible as Dan Brown's. You know the type. Unassuming modern scholar starts unravelling a historical mystery and ends up discovering some utterly fanciful Dangerous Secret buried in the annals of history... it's a guilty pleasure, what can I say. (And dude, The Historian is about Vlad Ţepeş. How could I resist?)

...the headache hasn't gone away yet. Fucking tiny text.