Ten Little Chances to be Free

Oh my fucking god

I just wanted to verify one thing for this fic

and ended up spending three hours on Google books reading the full rules and regulations for the Collèges Royaux circa 1820 and now I have to fucking gut this fic if I want to fix it

This is not even obsessive-compulsive anything it's the fact that this fandom is in a fucking black hole of history and you have to spend three hours on Google books to find out what age boys got sent off to school. I did not want or need to read the full regulations, I just wanted to know if thirteen was a fucking reasonable age and whether there were private religious schools. (Answer: somewhere between nine and twelve, and no, the Restoration's deal was to just stick the religion in the public schools.)

If I run into one more roadblock like this I am just punting and writing silly crack fic.

Background: this is a chapter from Eugène Sue's Mysteries of Paris. I'm translating it into English as I go, but if you want a passage in the original French feel free to ask. Rigolette is a grisette working as a seamstress circa 1838; she lives in the Temple area and spends most of the day working to earn 30 sous, or 1.5 francs, a day. By comparison, Feuilly earned 60 sous a day as a fanmaker; Marius' annual earnings as a translator broke down to about 40 or 50 sous a day.

Yes, there is an entire chapter where Rigolette explains her budget to the (rich, astonished, masquerading as poor) main character, who has just moved into a room on the floor below hers.

( Rigolette's budget )

-

There's a little bit more later in the chapter about how she entertains herself on the weekends with her boyfriend-of-the-moment without spending too much, but it's a bit more dispersed. Does anyone want me to type that up too?

This weekend is the Journées du Patrimoine, where historically and culturally important buildings all over France (and a good part of the rest of Europe, apparently) are opened to the public. I know I should've done something cool and unique that wasn't open the rest of the year, but Smith already got us guided tours of the Hôtel de Ville and the Assemblée Nationale, which are probably the only things I would've been interested in that aren't normally open to the public. So instead I went to the Musée de l'Eventail, which is cute and tucked away in an apartment building and still contains an active fan-making workshop. I don't know if they normally give guided tours or if it was just for this weekend, but we did indeed get a guided tour, with lots of technical vocabulary in French that I'm not going to be able to translate very well.

The biggest thing I took away from it is that "éventailliste" is actually ridiculously un-specific, because there are lots of subspecialties within the trade. There's the work of making the supports/sticks/whatever you want to call them, out of wood or ivory or mother-of-pearl or whatever: shaping, carving, decorating, punching tiny holes in very delicate mother-of-pearl to make those amazing lacy-looking brisé fans. I got the impression that that part was generally a masculine profession. Then you have the work of painting the leaf (either cloth or paper), which I surmise was fairly gender-neutral. Then you have the decoration work that was almost exclusively reserved for women: lacemaking, embroidery, sequins, etc. You also have someone overseeing the whole operation to make sure everything fits and that no faces are going to be painted onto a fold, and finally the work of folding and mounting the paper leaf onto the panels. I am not sure which of these roles the word "éventailliste" refers to, because generally you'd have a bunch of people in an atelier doing various tasks, not a single person assembling entire fans one by one.

Fans went out of fashion in the beginning of the 19th century (though you did sometimes see small ones), and didn't really make a comeback until 1830. There were the usual "folded paper mounted on panels with a scene painted on it" fans that were popular in the 18th century, although in the 19th century themes from everyday bourgeois life (births, deaths, marriages, children) were much more popular than the traditional pastoral scenes. There was also a huge resurgence in brisé fans, where the body of the fan is made up of the panels themselves instead of painted folded paper/cloth. These could get very elaborate and were incredibly arduous to make.

These are mostly impressions--especially about the trade of fanmaking itself--so if anyone has more concrete information, please share. XD

(And by "you guys" I know I functionally mean mmebahorel, mmejavert, and the handful of other people with an unhealthy interest in researching their Frenchboys.)

http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/asclepiades/pdf/palluault2.pdf

Three hundred and fucking fifty pages of PDF entitled "Medical Students in England and France, 1815-1858." WIN.

From the Department of Really Damn Useful Links: international exchange rates in the 19th century. Fairly stable throughout the century because everyone was on the gold or silver standards.

The basics: 1 pound sterling = 5 dollars = 25 francs = 5 pesos = 4 rubles, and calculating any of the German and Austrian currencies is enough to give anyone a headache. (The site also has a note about Polish currency, for those interested.)

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.

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.

It's probably not a good idea to recommend a book I've only read five pages of, but The Parisian Worlds of Frédéric Chopin looks so far like a superb resource for Les Mis-related research. The five pages I've read so far already contain a brief but excellent summary of routes to travel into Paris and modes of transport within the city. (Like, for instance, the difference between a fiacre and a cabriolet, and where the stagecoach terminals were.) The reason I'm taking this as indicative of what the rest of the book will contain... well, look at the table of contents:

1. Paris à la Galignani: An Anglo-Italian Guide to the French Capital for the English-Speaking Tourist
2. Polish Parisians: A People in Exile
3. From Citizen-King to Prince-President: France as a "Bourgeois-cracy"
4. Society and Salons: A "Who's Tout" of le Tout Paris
5. Pox Britannica: The Great Epidemic of Anglomania
6. Musical Currents along the Seine: From Concert Halls to Dance Halls
7. Opera: A Vocal Art and Social Spectacle
8. Bohemia and the Demimonde: Two Operas in the Making
9. Penning a Profit: Literature Becomes Lucrative
10. Stage by Stage: The Evolution of Theatrical Taste from the Battle of "Hernani" to the Reign of Rachel
11. Delacroix, Daumier, and Daguerre: A "3-D" View of Art
12. "A Votre Santé!": Coping with Poultices, Purges, and the Parisian Medical Profession
13. Visions of a Better World: Searching for Utopia from Menilmontant to the Rue Vanneau
14. The Big Shadow of the Little Corporal: Napoléon Becomes a Legend

The time period's a little later than would be ideal--1831-1849--but the author seems pretty good about noting dates for events and new technologies and such. (Omnibuses made their debut in 1828; the stuff on the railroad is fascinating, but it only dates from 1837ish so it wouldn't be useful except for an AU or post-story fic.)

The Amazon and half.com listings are a bit expensive, but I know I've seen it for less. If I encounter any problems as I read it that would make it not worth the price, I'll be sure to post them or at least edit this post... but it looks really cool.

I now have a half-working flatbed scanner. Half-working, you say? Well, yes. It had no problem scanning a nifty map of Paris from before the rue de la Chanvrerie got obliterated, but the minute I tried to put in a drawing of a dead!Eponine, it croaked on me. Go figure. Maybe it doesn't like gamines.

In any case, here is said map (it's the last item on this page if the hotlinking protection kicks in and won't let you use the first link). The spot where the barricade was constructed is highlighted in red. It's of the so-called "insurrectionary quarter" of Paris, the area surrounding the rues Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, and comes from 1849, before the Haussmann renovations destroyed that nicely labyrinthine section and replaced it with the rue Rambuteau. Shiny, ne? Even if nearly illegible. [If anyone, god forbid, wants a higher-res version, just ask. I actually had to resize it substantially to bring it down to 768x1024.]

Did a fairly massive update to the website, but aside from the map, most of it's nothing you haven't seen before. The updates are listed on the main page if you're interested.

:D :D :D

I was bitching and grousing all day about how impossible it is to find a copy of Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle and how I'm not a student anymore so I can't interlibrary loan it from whatever university has it and decent research is impossible to do and whine, whine, whine... when I realized.

I'm an idiot.

I live in Washington, DC. I'm practically sitting on the Library of Congress. I could probably get Révolutions du XIXe siècle, microfilm of Le National and La Réforme, Instructions pour une prise d'armes, assorted shiny Marrast pamphlets, maybe even court and police records, plus a bunch of secondary sources, without leaving my hometown.

Yep. Idiot.

Guess what I'll be doing next week. :DDD