revolution_fr | The Last Nights of Ventôse

"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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thank you so much for providing all this information! It's virtually impossible to find out anything about her (life, work, anything) other than what is contained in that little book of Gerould's for a non-Polish speaker. (And - infuriatingly, bizarrely, somehow - none of the things she wrote in German [which I speak] - letters or literary work - have ever been published in Germany; I'm not sure if any translations have ever been printed, either, though I do vaguely recall reading of a German-language production of "The Danton Case" going on stage. But the name is completely obscure, even more so than in the English-speaking world, as far as I can tell.) I had no idea "93" survived at all, much less hit the market. Yet another incentive to learn the language!

The Last Nights of Ventôse

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