Ten Little Chances to be Free

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.

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 don't know if this was originally in Wilbour or if it's Fahnestock and MacAfee's fault, but "Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk" is a fucking shitty translation.  Seriously, I want to slap whoever's responsible for that.  How many people reading the book have gone "...bwuh?  What the fuck is 'Orestes Fasting' supposed to mean?"

The original French is "Oreste à jeun et Pylade ivre," which, fuck you Charles Wilbour, is more appropriately translated as "Orestes Sober and Pylades Drunk." At least, if à jeun corresponds as closely to nüchtern as I think it does, it very technically means 'fasting' as in not having eaten, but more idiomatically, sober, clearheaded, or matter-of-fact.  Yes, the pun is lost if you translate it as 'sober.'  But at least it fucking makes sense.

This post brought to you by the ire of an amateur linguist and the incestuousness of European languages.  I'll drink to that.

(And yes, in case you were wondering, that does mean my screen name is a translative brainfart.)