Night Thoughts

[amie-de-rimbaud.livejournal.com]

 Has anyone ever read Young's Night Thoughts, which Camille supposedly took with him into prison? I just bought myself a mid 19th c. edition on Ebay for $10 and my feelings about reading it are difficult to put into words.

Do you know if he possessed a copy in the original English, or if it was a French edition?

(I know I already posted about my man tonight--don't you know it's a Camille attack rrrrrarrggggh!)

Comments

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

On a related note, I recently heard the bizarre-sounding statistic that in early 19thc France, 80% of the population didn't speak 'French'! I doubt it would be that high, but the rural/peasant populations of the 18thc probably didn't speak a version of the language that the educated/Parisian upper/middle classes could understand! I suppose they would be speaking dialect, Occitan, patois, etc. as a first language, much as large areas of Britain in the same period spoke Welsh, Cornish, Gaelic, rather than the South-East middle-class English which is now the 'standard' language.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, Occitan is definitely a historical language with a rich literature, not a dialect, though brain-washed centralists may deny it :-)
Plus, in Bretagne "la langue breton", a celtic indo-european language was widely spoken.

[(Anonymous)]

France was much more linguistically diverse than England I think, especially by the late 18th century, most English people spoke English.

The statistics on French lnaguages are based on the study by Abbé Gregoire, which I always quote in essays yet I always lose after I've finished... I didn't think it was as high as 80% either. But there was an extraordinarly high number of people who couldn't even understand French.

One of the sad things about this revolution though is the way it treated minority languages... It's one of the reasons why Breton is so neglected now, and will soon be forgotten, is a remnant of this republique une et indivisible which recognises no language but French.

[(Anonymous)]

I meant to say, in fact, that perhaps 80% people had a different language/dialect as their mother tongue but they may be able to speak French as well, but many peasants couldn't even speak it. Sorry to be unclear.