A Certain Slant of Light

The queen let out a piercing cry on seeing herself caught, for in her agitation she did not at first recognize the young woman who had been given her by La Porte.

"Oh, don't be afraid of anything, Madame!" said the young woman, pressing her hands together and weeping at the queen's distress herself. "I am Your Majesty's, body and soul, and far as I am from her, inferior as my position is, I believe I have found a way to save Your Majesty from grief."

"You? Oh, heavens! You?" cried the queen. "But come, look me in the face. I'm betrayed on all sides; can I trust you?"

"Oh, Madame!" cried the young woman, falling to her knees, "upon my soul, I am ready to die for Your Majesty!"

THANK YOU, DUMAS. THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER WANTED. The loyalty! In the midst of betrayal! Falling to one's knees and pledging to die for your liege lord! And with girls, which is all that I want in life and something that I hardly ever get.

I may end up taking this back once we meet the Countess de Winter (...I can't quite see yet how to work a Rebecca crossover, but REST ASSURED it is on my mind), but so far in both The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo I have really appreciated how much Dumas simply treats women as people. They get to drama llama just as much as his men, and he hasn't done any finger-wagging at either Anne of Austria or Constance Bonacieux (the young woman in the above quotation) who have both gotten entangled in extramarital affairs - but they're both married to total jerks anyway so Dumas is like, eh, so it goes.

( Spoilers through Chapter 23 )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Jane Langton’s The Fragile Flag, and aaaaaaaah, I really liked this book, you guys. Young Georgie (also the heroine of Langton’s The Fledgling) finds an old American flag in the attic, which gives people visions if it wraps around them; she decides to march on Washington with it, in hopes of convincing the President not to launch the Peace Missile (for which read Reagan’s Star Wars; the book was published in 1984).

Naturally the march swells to enormous size as it continues on, and George manages to meet the president in the end, etc. etc. Of course it’s escapism, but it’s really nice escapism in the current political climate. And the book is beautifully constructed, too, all the pieces of the plot (it’s more complicated than I’ve made it sound here) all come together like clockwork, and strike like midnight at just the climactic moment.

I also finished Warren Lewis’s The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, which I read because the Inklings book I read recently praised it (Warren Lewis is C. S. Lewis’s brother) and also because I’ve long meant to learn more about France, and indeed it is a pleasant and readable introductory work to seventeenth century France.

And, for the Unread Book Club: I reread William McCleery’s Wolf Story, which in our youth my brother and I liked so much that we importuned our father to read it multiple times. I think he got bored and started making up new twists in the story to amuse himself, although I can’t be sure because the father in the book (who is telling a story to his child in the book) also gets bored with the story he is telling and keeps trying to come up with twists to end it quickly. It’s very meta.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m slogging through Margaret Stohl’s Black Widow: Forever Red, which I am not liking nearly as much as I expected sadly. I think this is partly the fault of my own expectations - I thought this would be about Natasha’s childhood or at least give us large lumps of backstory, perhaps flashbacks!, but it really does not. But it’s also not very strongly written.

Really not feeling this one. Maybe I’ll just give it up.

I’m also working on Gary Paulsen’s The Island, which is an oddly poetic book - I mean, not odd really, or only because my main association with Paulsen is Hatchet which is more of a survival story. This one involves a lot of our hero sitting on the island, contemplating nature.

And I continue to chug along in Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight!

What I Plan to Read Next

Norah of Billabong is winging its way through the mail to me as we speak! So definitely that.

After much waffling and repeated warnings not to do it, I have gone ahead and started reading The Count of Monte Cristo. Somehow none of the warnings were as powerful as the fact that I actually own the book and it has been sitting on my shelf, taking up space and waiting to be read.

And also I missed having a lengthy book project to post about every Thursday. This is probably an unfortunate sign of my long slow march toward reading Proust.

In any case! So far The Count of Monte Cristo is all right. Dantes started out on top of the world - about to be made captain of his own ship and marry the girl he loves - and in few short chapters, he has been cast down to the depths of despair, although I think he's still under the impression that he's going to get out of jail soon and go on with his life. Oh Dantes! As if accused Napoleonic conspirators get to go on with their lives.

I just watched a beautiful French movie! I mean beautiful in the most literal of senses: Renoir is an exquisitely shot film of beautiful people in lovely countryside, as if the filmmakers tried to make the movie look as much like a Renoir painting as possible. It reminds me of Bright Star, which also seems infused with light; only the light in Renoir is more golden, more late afternoon, perhaps reflecting Renoir's advancing age.

I was briefly concerned that the film was going to tell the tale of the aged Renoir's seduction of his model, the nubile young Dedee. But in fact the romance is between Dedee and Renoir's son Jean, who is home on convalescent leave from the trenches. (Yes, Jean Renoir, whose 1937 The Grand Illusion is one of the classics of the French World War I film genre, is now a main character in a biopic set in France during World War I. It's kind of glorious.)

Jean and his crutches are as close as the film gets to the trenches. The golden glow of the late afternoon makes Renoir's bucolic estate seem ageless and timeless, but it slowly grows clear that the world has changed and will change more: Renoir and his garden are beautiful relicts.

It's a film about the end of an era, but not a tragedy, not least because of Renoir's earthy good humor. As his health slowly fails, he descends into occasional grouchiness but not despair. Renoir painted until the day he died - literally; he painted his final still life the morning of his death. It's a meditative film, a film about the fading of a life well-lived.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The first five books of Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girl series, which is about a boarding school for spy girls. BOARDING SCHOOL FOR SPY GIRLS, you guys. So many of my favorite things packed in those five words!

It’s basically literary candy, but it is my kind of literary candy, and I enjoyed it immensely. The only problem is - the sixth and last book doesn’t come out till September! Ugh, waiting is so hard.

What I’m Reading Now

Susan Cooper’s The Grey King. I will probably have to hand in my geek card for saying this, but Will Stanton is powerfully boring.

Also, we’re reading Voltaire’s Candide for French class. There’s an annotated version here which makes reading it virtually painless if you have a little background in French.

Well, painless as far as the language part goes. The plot is full of pain. So far Candide has been chased from his home and ladylove, press-ganged into the army, beaten to death, narrowly escaped a battle and wandered through harrowingly destroyed villages, had a chamber pot dumped on his head, and met up with his old teacher who is covered with pulsating syphilitic sores.

And this is just the first four chapters!

Still better than the story about the horse being marched off to the abattoir, though. Or the one about the guy turning his head.

What I Plan to Read Next

For once I don't have any definite plans for this. I am getting a pile of academic books from the library today, and I really should make some headway on those...

Nineteenth century adventure fiction and I do not agree with each other. Now you might imagine that this is because nineteenth century adventure fiction overbrims with imperialistic projects and unexamined sexism and racism, and that certainly doesn't help, but in fact our disagreement is even more fundamental than that: I find it boring.

I was thinking about this as I slogged through Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, which features Phileas Fogg, the most boring hero in the history of stalwart and boring heroes. Verne makes a point of mentioning how utterly uninterested Phileas Fogg is in actually seeing the world; he's merely going around it to fulfill a bet, and steadfastly doesn't see anything anywhere. Why is this a selling point?

Therefore I spent a lot of the book thinking about how to make it more entertaining, and came to the inevitable answer: MUPPETS.

Kermit would play Phileas Fogg, obviously, and in his capable green hands would imbue him with way more warmth and feeling than Phileas-Fogg-he's-like-a-human-clock ever has in Verne's hands.

Fogg's French manservant, Passepartout, would clearly be played by Fozzie. Fozzie is a bear, and that gives him a naturally Gallic air. (Doesn't France have some symbolic thing going on with bears? Maybe I just made that up?)

Also, there is a scene were Detective Fix, the police inspector who is chasing Phileas Fogg around the world on the suspicion that he's a bank robber, gets Passepartout drunk, plies him with opium, and then leaves him zonked out in an opium den, thus throwing Fogg's plans into confusion because Passepartout doesn't show up with the tickets when he's supposed to. This is clearly something Fozzie would do.

(Gonzo and Rizzo will probably just tag along after Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, because we clearly want as much of them in the movie as possible. Unless we want to save Gonzo to be the guy that Fogg has a duel with in America?

This is the best scene ever, you guys, even Verne can't quite destroy the entertainment value. So Fogg and the American dude are going to have a duel, except, oh no! the train is late, so it's not going to make the scheduled stop. The conductor is so apologetic about the fact that they can't have their duel when they planned that he clears out a train car for them, so they can shoot each other on the moving train.

Detective Fix is like "WOE IF FOGG DIES THEN I WON'T BE ABLE TO MAKE AN ARREST. Also I am beginning to be concerned that someone so honorable that he would do something as stupid as fight a duel on a train would never rob a bank.")

Detective Fix! Detective Fix is my greatest achievement, the triumph of my casting. Because Fix will be played by...Miss Piggy!

Think about it. Chasing Kermit around the globe with the goal of karate chopping him at the end is totally something Miss Piggy would do.

A thunderstorm at teatime! It cleared the air and cooled the world enough that I could in fact have tea, which was lovely. (I was organizing my tags last night, and you guys, I had not realized how much I post about tea. Which reminds me, assuming that no one falls deathly ill over night, tomorrow I am having an Oreo tea with Emma and Rick. Did you guys know there are watermelon Oreos? I wouldn't have believed it either, but I have photographic proof!

( Watermelon Oreos ahoy! )

However, they will not be gracing tomorrow's tea. We got a bag yesterday, and they taste sort of like Jolly Ranchers or watermelon bubblegum, which makes them oddly refreshing...but mostly odd. We shall be having peanut butter Oreos instead.)

But back to my thunderstorm tea! Usually I read something with my tea, and I considered reading more Les Miserables. I have achieved page nine hundred! The end is in sight! Okay, three hundred pages away; but still, on the horizon.

Marius has dropped the creepy stalker baton, Eponine has picked it up, Marius finally went to see his grandfather, who offered him money, which Marius refused even though it would have allowed him to be happy with Cosette because Marius is just special like that -

- and now he is marching off to the barricades. Everyone is going to die there, and as such I find myself loathe to go on reading.

So instead I read Alexandre Dumas fils novel Camille (which is also called The Lady of the Camellias, which has the advantage of actually making sense), which at a mere two hundred pages seemed breathlessly svelte. Also, compared to Les Mis, rather slight: it tells the tragic tale of a young man who falls in love with a courtesan, believes himself betrayed by her, and realizes only too late how truly she loved him.

Naturally it was rather schlocky. But I was prepared for it to be failtastic (it's a French guy! Writing about women! Women who have sex! How many ways could this go wrong?), so schlocky was almost a relief.

It's had a ton of theatrical adaptations (including one with young Colin Firth), and I can see why. The outlines of the story overflow with feeling, and I suspect with good actors there's not a dry eye in the house by the end.

But the writing (or rather the translation): well, it's quite pacey, and I had a good time reading it - but that's just it; for a tragedy, I shouldn't be able to say "It's a fun book!", at least not without adding caveats of the "but in a soul-crushing way" variety. So it's a good read, but for me, at least, Dumas didn't quite accomplish what he meant to.

Via sartorias: The Paris Time Capsule Apartment. (My friend Emma tells me that this whole website is full of secret Paris things and urban exploring in general. Clearly I should poke through its nooks and crannies.)

But this article in particular is so cool: an apartment in Paris, which the owner shut up when she fled at the beginning of World War II, was only recently reopened. Can you imagine how amazing it would be to walk into it? Like stepping into the past. I wonder why the owner never returned.

It’s like the beginning of a mystery novel, especially when you factor in the forgotten painting that they found! What kept her away? The owner paid the rent punctually till she died, so she hadn't forgotten about it... it haunted her, perhaps; it holds ghosts, literal or figurative.

If I had any gift for mystery plotting, I would try my hand at it.

Another poem from French class.

Tomorrow, at dawn
by Victor Hugo

Tomorrow, at dawn, at the hour when the countryside whitens
I will leave. You see, I know that you are waiting for me.
I will go through the forest, I will go by the mountain.
I cannot remain far from you any longer.

I will go, my eyes fixed on my thoughts,
without seeing anything outside of myself, without hearing any sound,
alone, unknown, my back bent, my hands crossed,
sad, and the day for me will be like the night.

I will look at neither the gold of the evening that falls,
nor the mist that descends toward Harfleur,
and when I will arrive, I will put on your tomb
a bouquet of green holly and heather in bloom.

The poem is not just a flight of fancy: Hugo wrote it when his daughter Leopoldine drowned with her husband in a boating accident, in 1847.

Watching Les Miserables has put me irresistibly in mind of the other French novel I’ve read about tragic revolutions: Zola’s Germinal, which reads as if Zola read Les Miserable and said, “You know what is wrong with this book? Way too happy. Two whole characters end up happy, gross.”

I found Germinal so distressing the first time I read it - for class; I can’t imagine I would have finished it otherwise - that I sold it back to the bookstore thereafter, because I couldn’t stand to have it sharing my living space. I have since regretted this, because if you don’t mind having your soul crushed into tiny little pieces by Zola’s determinism, it’s a fascinating read. The characters are so human that you - don’t quite like them, for the most part - but they seem real to you; you worry about them, you hope they’ll do better.

Of course they do not. Literally everyone in this book, workers and bourgeois, ends up worse off, except Souvarine the crazy revolutionary. After his girlfriend died in Moscow - they stared into each other’s eyes the whole time while she was being hung, how’s that for traumatizing? - Souvarine destroyed all vestiges of human feeling in his soul and therefore cannot suffer anything but death. And of course, being a bad person, he doesn’t die.

No, wait, even Souvarine suffers! He loses his pet rabbit - indeed, his landlady feeds him his beloved pet rabbit! Apparently he didn’t quite manage to kill all his softer feelings in the service of the glorious socialist future that will bathe the earth in blood.

In Les Miserables, people talk about how Enjolras’ girlfriend is France. Well, Souvarine scorns to have a girlfriend as warm and touchy-feely as a nation-state. Souvarine’s girlfriend is the frickin’ apocalypse. Building a more just world would be nice, but if it’s not possible Souvarine is perfectly happy to tear down what we have and leave nothing but smoking blood-soaked ruins in its place.

The plot of the book concerns the miners going on strike. When the miners give up, Souvarine is so incensed that he sabotages the mine. And then he sees his friend Etienne about to go into the sabotaged mine, and Souvarine has one last burst of fellow feeling and is all “NO DON'T GO DOWN...oh, wait, you are with your girlfriend Catherine. Human feelings mean you are a failure as a revolutionary, and I will leave you both to your terrible mine cave-in death.”

(I occurs to me that Souvarine and Javert have a lot in common. Oh, Souvarine is a servant of Chaos while Javert is a servant of Order, but they share a black-and-white view of the world and a tremendously unforgiving attitude toward anyone who by their lights sins. I could totally see Souvarine killing himself if he realized that a) the world was more complicated than he had hitherto realized, and b) he therefore lost his nerve and fell short of what he considered his duty.)

Souvarine is my faaaaaaaavorite. In a “NO SOUVARINE DON’T DO IT” kind of way, but still, I’m pretty sure this means there’s something wrong with me.