Camus' teen goth Saint-Just...

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Another query - does anyone know the source, if any, for Albert Camus' description of Saint-Just (presumably while a law student) living in a room with black walls with teardrop patterns and the shutters closed? This sounds too teen-angsty to be true, but would be wonderful if it was (reminds me of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, when in a fit of depression he paints his bedroom black but Noddy's bells keep showing through!). Camus mentions it in the Saint-Just chapter of 'The Rebel'.

Comments

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

It's in Michelet -- though I have no idea where he took it. I have it somewhere on my LJ. I'll search through my (many) posts and come back to you.

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

Here: my translation: (http://maelicia.livejournal.com/318484.html)

[Saint-Just] had always willingly consulted, since his youngest age, the oracles of death. We have said the oddities of his youth; how, in the middle of a very corrupted town of the province, in a dissolute school of law, in the middle of the inner seductions of a lewd imagination, he created a refuge for himself, a room taut with black and white skulls, in which he lived with alone at some hours with the grand deadmen of the Antiquity, appeared to him this phrase which reflected his life: "The world is empty since the Romans."