The Last Nights of Ventôse

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

"Actually, they were almost the same age, with a difference of two years only, but never really realizing this fact. They both accepted Maxime as the older one with no doubt. Their mutual feelings were much stronger than normal friendship; it was simply love from both sides, in Camille's case with a huge amount of adoration. The condition for his own happiness was Maxime being close to him; an adult child tended to live in a constant exhausting rebelion against his own slave's dependence. Yet the feelings of the older one were probably even stronger, though they did not restrain his being. Maxime's love was 'at least strange', entirely protective, much more passionate than fraternal attachment, not even paternal, but typically maternal. A kind of love hard to bear, painful, monstrously deep, mindless to the point of absurd, full of nervous fear and insatiable tenderness - in the case of a man, of course, hidden extremly well. During the last months, he didn't have time - nor right - to ponder Camille, aching in his all body with a dumb pain he refused to even think about; for half a year Camille had been giving him one stroke after another, deliberately and knowingly hitting the weakest point each time. An incredibly strong attack of malaria, from which Maxime was pulling through with such a toil, was probably the result of this game. A love of this kind is ripped of any dignity so far that the more your darling one harasses you, the more loved he is."

Not mine, though I wouldn't mind it to be. This piece of fanfiction is almost a hundred years old, being a part of a novel by Stanisława Przybyszewska, Ostatnie noce ventôse'a / The Last Nights of Ventôse. Posted in this community because it's one of a very few places where the author's name is recognized, and I think she is worth it.

Translation by me.

Comments

[lucieandco.livejournal.com]

I agree about fanfiction in general. Though I also think (perhaps inconsequently) that it 'matters less' if it is characters that are already fictional, since few people are going to read fanfiction for a book (film, ...) unless they have already read/seen the original (... or am I being optimistic?), whereas people certainly read historical fiction without ever having read non-fiction on the same topic. (Well, of course! It can't be demanded of the reader, unless they are actually trying to research the topic. But that is why the writer of historical fiction should treat their subject responsibly - because some readers aren't going to check the facts, and will let the fiction's images become their idea of How It Was.) The distorting effects are no different (though the internet scribe makes no profit, nor, usually, wins acclaim outside of a small circle of like minds), yet I feel less uncomfortable thinking that there are people out there whose ideas of fictional characters have diverged grotesquely from how the writer originally presented them than thinking that it is happening to real persons. (... come to think of it, I don't, being quite terribly attached to a few fictional folks, but, er, in theory.)
At the same time, it's easier (relatively speaking) to faithfully recreate fictional persons, since there is one definite source text that contains all that must be considered true about them, whereas with historical figures there are a thousand sources (or hardly any), all of which are already somebody's inevitably simplified black-on-white take on three-dimensional persons and complex events.
Speculation is more likely to go wrong then (gaps in the lives and personalities of fictional characters that are filled by fanfictioneers may not be what the author had in mind, if they had anything in mind for the things they did not write, but the possibilities can't be denied unless by the author, whereas in real people's lives there definitely are no gaps, there is a truth; it may already be impossible to retrieve, but there remains a challenge to at least try to come close to it - 'careful modifications', as you say - or even accept the gap, rather than fill it with whatever pleases), but it is also more necessary if there's to be a coherent story. One can identify an author's depiction of a real person as 'wrong' if it contradicts known facts, but it's hardly ever possible to call it 'right' if it doesn't, since we can never fully know the persons in question.

RE: one sentence - exactly! Taking into account how obviously phrases used to describe Enjolras (by the author, by other characters) match the phrases commonly associated with Saint-Just, it wouldn't have been absurd to expect that, apparently being so fond of describing that type, he'd give Saint-Just a scene to re-use some of that - not least since he does give Robespierre, Danton, and Marat a long scene (which I think is very well-handled), thus is clearly not averse to featuring historical figures as acting characters if it fits the context. But he doesn't. He has no need for Saint-Just to take the stage in order to tell his story, or to teach the reader anything. That is what I find so noteworthy - of course E. is not Saint-Just, but he has so much of him that, concluding (perhaps mistakenly - in which case this entire point is nil) that Hugo found him intriguing, I expected an extensive portrait (more as in 'painting' than as in 'characterisation/analysis', but a bit of both, surely) of Saint-Just in "93" and was initially disappointed when none was there - but seeing how it wouldn't have added anything to the novel if there had been one, I'm glad he resisted the temptation (perhaps I am wrong, and there was no temptation in the first place) to throw him in just to babble a bit about his hair and/or the incompletion of the absolute.
(As concerns the 'sad', by the way, it disappeared from the final version, but in an earlier draft, Enjolras, not yet the chief, had two lines for his initial description, too, describing him as 'froid, fanatique, et triste'-- which is not relevant to the characterisation of historical figures, just to further stress the connection between those two).

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

After my last reading of Hugo's 93 I realised that what makes this work a masterpiece is the author's ability to stop writing in the right places and restraining himself from commenting too much. As you say, only one sentence on Saint-Just (the view of the main figures from the revolutionary stage is a gem). Same with the structure of the ending: if he had not have finished right where he did and added more text, it would have been in my eyes maybe not ruined, but much worse (that's where, in my opinion, Charles Dickens fails with A Tale of the Two Cities).