Comments | calliope85: Yuletide + Paris + Revolutionary fervour

calliope85

Yuletide + Paris + Revolutionary fervour

Jan 18, 2010 13:18

I've been terminally rubbish at Yuletide this year. I've barely read anything. Trouble is, I tend to read fanfic when I get seized by the fannish need for a particular character or pairing, and then I go out and devour everything I can about her/him/etc/them. But I don't tend to read through archives on spec, so when the Yuletide archive goes live ( Read more... )

maxmaxmax, yuletide, place of greater safety

Comments 11

highfantastical January 18 2010, 14:09:35 UTC

Um, hi! I'm your recipient - sebastienne pointed me to this post, and I just can't resist commenting to say MY GOD, those pictures are amazing! Fangirlish Camille is... very fangirlish. In the good way. And I love the photoshopped one.

Also I am terribly impressed at the places you managed to find - my own revolutionary-Paris-stalking, which took place in the summer, was a bit cut short for various reasons (several people have responded to this with Well, That Just Means You'll Have To Go Again, with which I heartily concur), so we didn't get to see quite so many exciting places - but we did go to the Musée Carnavalet and saw all the things you mention - and, my personal favourite, Camille's inkpot!

This post is fascinating as an insight into your yuletide-writing process: when I was reading the story for the very first time (on Christmas morning!), I remember thinking, how can she possibly know so much about it? And capture the characters so well? So it's lovely to read a bit more about How You Did It. And of course I think you should be ( ... )

calliope85 January 18 2010, 14:49:35 UTC

:D Neither T nor I tend to remember to take photos on holiday except when deeply amused by something, so the ones we end up with tend to be...somewhat bizarre. I've got a photo of the Necker teapots from the Carnevalet somewhere. I was so pleased to find Fangirlish Camille though - it's a reproduction in the Conciergerie, which annoyingly didn't have a label to tell us where the original was; but I wonder if it's based on the miniature Jules Claretie mentions in his Camille biography ('The countenance is bright, intelligent, but not satirical, that of the young man of twenty, not the pamphleteer of thirty.... In this picture Camille Desmoulins is still a youth; around his almost childish face hangs his powdered hair ( ... )

highfantastical January 18 2010, 16:01:41 UTC

Oh, all the china was amazing! I love the idea of gathering up all the Revolutionary Tat that must have been floating round for decades and putting it in museums. YAY for conserving such things.

I've read Certain Chunks of Claretie, but not all of it - sounds like an excellent project for After Finals, I think. ;) I've heard that thing about Lucile's socks before, and I find it terribly, terribly cute! Surely all biographers and historians need to be sekritly fannish...

I am definitely planning to go back to Paris during my forthcoming gap year, so I will have to call on you for directions to hidden revolutionary awesomeness when I do. The companion with whom I was travelling fortunately, displayed great tolerance for my desire to go to places where Camille once walked around. It was GREAT.

It's lovely to think there are other Camille fangirls out there in the ether! I do love Mantel's Max very much too, of course (not so much the historical Robespierre, but as written by Mantel he... well, simply breaks my heart), and the Max ( ... )

calliope85 January 18 2010, 16:31:01 UTC

:D I must get T to post a picture of her Camille plate some time. We neither of us have any idea when it's from (her father found it on ebay.fr some time last year), but it's one of those crappy enamel jobbies they have by the sackload in the Carnevalet, and it has adorable Camille!sprite standing on his table with his hat and his pistol. SO PRECIOUS. So incongruously out of keeping with her minimalist flat. Revolutionary tat ftw.

Bonus Necker teaservice:

( ... )

Thread 8

parrot_knight January 18 2010, 23:20:59 UTC

Using this icon is potentially hazardous, I suppose, but it seemed counterintuitively appropriate.

I had wondered whether you would post a Yuletide update. As you suggested would be the case for non-Mantelians, I don't quite follow what is going on; but you make Robespierre very sympathetic and bring out the detached and clinical idealism of the revolutionaries. I would be tempted by that pastoral ideal of worship of the Supreme Being too. I don't know much about Desmoulins, and know more about the impact of the French Revolution in Great Britain than I do about the Revolution itself; but if your homage to Mantel's depth of research and style of writing is as good as your Gaiman a couple of years ago, then this is clearly another book which I have to put on my 'to read' list.

Mind you, I've not got round to Antal Szerb yet...

calliope85 January 18 2010, 23:32:23 UTC

Using a Robespierre icon in reply seems strangely aggressive, I'll admit :D ( ... )

parrot_knight January 19 2010, 00:04:33 UTC

Don't remind me of Finals essays. Some of them had very limited connections to what I was meant to be writing about. I wish I had let rip earlier in the week than I did, though I'm still fond of my favourite phrase: "The Fox-North coalition, bastard child of the second Rockingham administration..."

As often, I'm not sure where what I know comes from; mainly through editing articles and quickly researching other material to check up on what my authors were saying. I've not read what I think is still the main text, Alfred Goodwin's 'The Friends of Liberty: the English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution' (1979). There are some good reference group articles in the 'Themes' section of the Oxford DNB, but then I would recommend those. I have two three-volume biographies of Pitt to read, one by Stanhope, one by Ehrman, too, which will shed light from a premier position.