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]

... a thousand apologies. I've just realised I literally forgot a paragraph in this reply. Which explains why the whole suddenly fit into two! The following was supposed to follow after the parenthesis that begins this here second part (and explains what "Les Misérables" is supposedly a good example of):

Historical fiction would be unreadable without 'the human touch' (if there could even be 'fiction' without it - if a book contains only hard facts or argument-based theories, it's non-fiction, isn't it?), but I think that from the point on where there is more romance, more psychology, or more decidedly out-of-time-and-place politics/philosophy (e.g. Marxism in the eighteenth century) than accurate history, it should step away from involving real people as characters. Not from choosing real events as the setting, necessarily, unless it distorts them absolutely ... in which case (as both Sibylla and I have said a few times now), why pick them in the first place (unless you have absolutely no other way of getting your word out)?

(... all right, maybe it didn't add anything. Ah well!)

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

Agree with what you write on historical fiction, though I'd defend psychology: history is not made by figures, but living people. Though definitely not everything is a romance. As for "Marxism in the eighteenth century" problem, I think it can defend itself to some point if the author refers to pre-Marxists tendencies 18th century philosophy, as nothing comes out of nowhere (I'm not a specialist in the period, but theoretically it can be done; my master's degree thesis was basically on pre-Freudism in 19th century Polish fiction), but it's another matter and not really relevant here. But I generally agree, if the literary events take place in particular historical period and/or particular place, it should be made for a reason and with careful modifications for probability, as well as characters' psychology.