Ten Little Chances to be Free

So tonight toi_marguerite (AKA Elyse) and I went to the theeeatre to see Musset's Les Caprices de Marianne.

I was resolved to turn OFF my fangirl brain for this. No, I told myself, Marianne is not an allegory for France. She is a teenage girl who was raised in a convent and immediately married off to a creepy old judge. This shit was written before Les Mis was a gleam in Victor Hugo's eye; Coelio is not Enjolras; Octave is not Grantaire. No, I told myself in the middle of the first act, stop trying to slash them, this is a plot in the general mold of Cyrano de Bergerac. Coelio is madly in love with Marianne and can't talk to her, so he sends Octave to make his intentions known; Marianne falls for Octave instead. Simple.

Ha ha ha.

See, Coelio is a beautiful, poetic, pure, vaguely ethereal soul who has devoted his entire existence to Marianne. Who is totally not an allegory for France dammit. Octave is his scruffy, drunken, womanizing best friend. Coelio is repeatedly referred to as Octave's, for lack of a better translation, better half. It didn't help that the guy playing Coelio was pretty and blond, and the guy playing Octave looked vaguely Minarik-ish, and the two of them had more chemistry together than either of them had with Marianne.

It gets better: ( Spoilers ahoy )

It's BEGGING for an allegorical interpretation. Marianne is France! The jealous old husband is tyranny! Coelio is the Republic! Or Enjolras. Or something. And Octave is totally Grantaire.

Wiki informs me that Les Caprices de Marianne was written in 1833 and first performed in summer 1851. I am not going to outright come out and SAY that Hugo saw it, put an allegorical spin on it after Napoleon III's coup d'état, and put it in his novel, but... oh shit, I just outright came out and said it.

So. I have taken the plunge, and started to explore Google Books--prompted by a giant collaborative nerdy fanfic project over on Abaissé. (Yes, that is a plug. I know there are plenty of people on my flist who'd be interested in gleefully and self-indulgently geeky research fic, and we have ten Frenchboys and only four typists so far.) Since we're writing about Ami backstories and political activities, my forays into Google Books have been mostly focused on press and politics around the July Revolution, but even a topic that specific turns up a wealth of really damn shiny material. Observe:

France Under the Bourbon Restoration (Jess, is this the one you found?)
Press, Revolution, and Social Identities in France, 1830-1835 (Google has a limited preview, and what I saw was so awesome that I pranced off to Amazon and bought a copy.)
The journalists and the July revolution in France. The role of the political press in the overthrow of the Bourbon restoration 1827-1830. (No preview, but UMD has a copy.)
Au temps des sociétés secrètes; la propaganda républicaine au début de la monarchie de juillet (1830-1835). (Title speaks for itself, yes? Shockingly enough, UMD does not have it, but Goucher does. So does Amherst, which will be useful on the off-chance that I get into Smith.)
Paris and its environs, displayed in a series of two hundred picturesque views, from original drawings (1831. Not political, but definitely useful and cool, and also downloadable for free in PDF.)

I also ended up surfing and read large parts of a British royalist screed on the blackguards and conspirators responsible for the July Revolution, and a scathing 150-page review/rebuttal of Les Misérables from 1862, and--

You get the idea.

Google Books is really cool; it could've been a pretty basic service, but being Google they made it incredibly useful and multi-functional. You can search for keywords within the text of the books, not just searching for titles and general topics; every book has all its information listed, along with links to other editions and related books. And, most awesomely, it gives you links to places you might buy the book and to WorldCat, which will give you a list of libraries that have it, sorted by how close they are to you. I already love WorldCat to death and have it on my searchbar, but linking it to Google Books is like putting it on steroids. It's awesome and kind of scary.

Also? The advanced search lets you filter by publication date. Which means... a multitude of things, really, but what springs immediately to mind is period medical literature. I did a few cursory searches to that effect and wandered over to WorldCat, which alerted me that the NIH library has an extensive history of medicine collection. Unfortunately, the NIH library also has closed stacks, which intimidates me a bit. Or at least makes me think it'd be a royal pain in the ass to use.

Anyway. Google Books = very, very bad for my health. And my time, and my bank account. Augh.

Have been working diligently on the horribly, awfully nerdy tour guide of Mizzie d00m, which has given me some lovely time with Google, Googlemaps, and old maps of Paris. This has led to an ever-growing list of things I didn't know when I actually visited Paris:

1. Legend has it that Hugo stayed in an inn in Montfermeil, Place de la Halle, called "Au rendez-vous d'Austerlitz." Sneaky bastard. On the one hand I wish I'd known this, but on the other hand I was already lost as fuck in Montfermeil just looking for the Fontaine Jean Valjean. Lord only knows what would've happened if I'd tried to find this.

2. If I'd read this article more closely I would've caught on that 40 rue des Archives is not where Valjean lived. It just happens to have a plaque mentioning that that part of the street used to be the rue de l'Homme-Armé. No. 7 would've been the fourth building on the other side of the street. D'oh.

3. The Jardin du Luxembourg used to be kinda diamond-shaped, with the rue de l'Ouest along its southwest side. Now only the top half is left, but the rue de l'Ouest is still there as the lower half of the rue d'Assas. I think I actually knew this, sort of, when I visited Paris, but couldn't be arsed to check it out. Oh well.

4. I had no way of knowing this before I got my giant .pdf map of 1830s Paris, but the Gorbeau house would've been somewhere down near where the rue Rubens intersects the blvd de l'Hôpital. I had a suspicion that the current No. 50 and 52, which I photographed, were nowhere near where Hugo intended, but not having any idea what had become of the Marché aux Chevaux/rue du Petit Banquier/rue des Vignes/whatever, I couldn't exactly pinpoint where he was talking about.

5. And, as I posted about back in November, the present-day rue du Champ de l'Alouette isn't the same as the old one. *headdesk* Rue Corvisart. Not that it freaking matters, because I'm betting the only remnant of the Field of the Lark is a few scrubby trees planted outside some ugly '60s apartment complex, but still.

Obviously the tour guide of nerdy doom will be updated to reflect all this, I just wish I had photos.

(Also, how sad is it that just writing this post led me off on a bunch of random tangents through gallica.bnf.fr and a whole bunch of random websites? Oops.)

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.

I feel... I don't know. Ignored might be the word. Like I keep shouting into the void about things that really excite me, and the answer isn't just "Oh that's nice, you loser," it's silence. I know I'm an enormous nerd and I have this compulsive drive to be a know-it-all, but I try to share my nerd-dom and my sources and the reasons for my squee, in the vain hope that maybe someone else will be just as excited about it--excited enough to do some nerdy things of their own, or critique mine, or enter into some sort of dialogue.

I mean, what has my Les Mis obsession driven me to do? I've written a couple fics and made a few icons, yeah, but I've also written all this meta. I've read thousands of pages of historical research, I've tracked down obscure annotated editions of the book so I could type up the deleted scenes and translate them. I've typed up and translated primary sources--mostly Révolutions du XIXe siècle, but other stuff too. I mod three comms, one of which is still active, I've made costumes, I've bought obscure French film adaptations on ebay.fr. I've seen the show 60+ times, I've tracked down cast lists and label information for every cast recording in existence, I've collected hundreds of bootlegs and recorded dozens more. I've found period maps of Paris and shared in Hugo's obsession for the places he describes in his book, and I've gone to France and visited them myself and barely anybody cared when I posted the pictures. Right now I'm translating the lyrics of the PRC back into English for one of two active forums still in existence, and the person who originally requested them hasn't even bothered to reply. I just... why? The people on this particular forum pay more attention to me when I snark reflexively at n00bs than when I spend an hour with Google and a French/English dictionary trying to find a phrase that expresses both the meaning and the slanginess of the Thénardiers' lyrics.

And now I feel guilty for being resentful about this, because it looks awfully close to a "look what I've done for you, you ungrateful hags!" snit. But it's not that, not entirely; I do all this because I love it, because it interests me. It's just that I wish I weren't the only one. I'd love more conversation and dialogue about all this, but failing that it would be nice to have some acknowledgement. I realize that not everyone has the means or the volition to go out to Montfermeil or translate Amis du Peuple pamphlets, but when nobody even looks at that and goes "wow, that's cool," I feel like a crazy lady who's wasting her time on things that nobody else gives a shit about.

At least Simon likes me. He sat on my shoulder all evening. :D (He's one heavy bird...) But he's going back to his mommy at the end of the week, and then my life will go back to being an endless abyss of woe, misery, and doom.

I think I'll go translate "At the End of the Day" now.

So apparently when I hit up the Rue du Champ de l'Alouette in Paris, I had the wrong street--right general vicinity, but the old Rue du Champ de l'Alouette goes by rue Corvisart these days. Since the two are very close together, I wouldn't ordinarily care that much except I was looking for some remnant of a field when I visited and the rue Corvisart would've been one more place to look.

I figured this out by comparing a map of the modern area to my giant unwieldy PDF of 1839 Paris, where it can be found by zooming in to 400% and looking a bit to the left of the Barrière d'Italie.

Further inspection of the two reveals a Hôpital Broca very near to the site of the former Field of the Lark, which is actually also there in the 1839 version under the name of Hôpital de Lourcine. Intrigued by the presence of a hospital right next to a LM plot point, I whipped out my trusty Google-fu and discovered that the building is a former convent, claimed by the state in 1790 and allowed to fall into disrepair until it was converted in 1832 into a home for cholera orphans. It didn't pick up the Hôpital de Lourcine name until two years later, when it was made into a hospital for women with venereal diseases. (Wiki adds that from 1825 to 1832 it was a "maison de refuge et travail," which I assume is a poorhouse.)

Not that any of this has any real usefulness, except as something to file away in case I actually write something and need an excuse for somebody to bump into Marius while he's off at the Field of the Lark pining for Cosette. But Google is awesome.