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

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

First of all, I consider Przybyszewska's historical fiction totally legitimate and insightful (as I explain here: ). I just posed the questions I posed in order to open an interesting debate ;-)

As for Robespierre and Desmoulins.
First of all: yes, I think they were friends during the years of Revolution. I doubt they were friends in the school and I am convinced they had no contact in the long years between the schoolyears and the revolution.

Second: There exists a problem of judging people's from today's poit of view. For example, today in many countries, people choose their bestmen or the godfathers of their children among their friends. In many other countries, and in many more in past, people have chosen them mainly for social prestige or in order to provide their children with support of an influential person in the future. That was especially the case of the godfathers. So, what may to us seem as a proof of a close friendship, might have just meant that Robespierre was in that moment the most influential of Desmoulins' acquaintances. Or not.
Anyway, there are indeed other signs that leave the door open for speculation, I admit it ;-) Though it seems to me that the boom of this speculations in the 20th century has more to do with our Freudian obsessions that with the late 18th century feelings and events, haha

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

Right for the last one! But psychically suffering children aren't the "invention" of our times, as well as homoerotic desires (no identity, I agree). The question is how would both of these things express themselves. Surely repressed - or, if we omit Freudian term, self-denied, on much larger scale than nowadays. But non-existent? Interesting topic.

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course you're right. But it's still highly significative to which figures "we" project them and to which we don't...I still find it highly significative to see when this "traumatic childhood" is used in a historiograhic explanation and when it's not. The same for the homoerotism...BTW, the men then had much less problems to express their FEELINGS for other men than the men of today, imo. We haven't progessed so much, with all that desire to classify the emotions and put them into labelled boxes. Anyway, it's another topic.

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

"the men then had much less problems to express their FEELINGS for other men than the men of today"

I do agree. And you're right: when it comes to the works of art or actions taken by historical persons, sometimes their traumatic childhood/homoerotic feelings/unrequited love/whatever is a key to understand the above, sometimes matter a little and sometimes not at all. Supreme Being protect me from scholar manierism and fanaticism puting one methodology above another ones: I am far from explaining everything via psychoanalysis.

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

That's nice to hear. For a scary example of such approach, see for example Jean Artarit's Robespierre ou l'impossible filiation. It's a clear case of a psych who's a way sicker than his object of professional (?) interest.

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

And what are his basic theses, before I find the book?

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't really recommend you to find the book and actually read it. It's awful. The basic theses?
Well, you can get an idea from this quote, for example:
Speaking of the noseblleds, Robespierre suffered from: "What was the nature of this blood? Remembering a tendency to be affected by tuberculosis in the family, we first thought of hemoptysis. But we would have other testimonies of this, because those suffering from tuberculosis don't spit blood only during night. So, would it be wounds caused by face scratching or bites? We'd rather say it was a psychosomatic sort of epistaxis [i.e. nosebleeding], with a strong sexual and feminine conotation(*)."
(translation to English is maelicia's)

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

And the footnote goes like that:
(*) Wilehm Fliess, The relations between the nose and the feminine genital organs (1897), Paris, 1977. Friend and correspondant of Freud, W. Fliess mentions the nosebleeds as true menstrual substitutions.


So, according to Artarit, Robespierre suffered from nosebleeds, because he wanted to menstruate.
I mean, WTF.

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

Too idiotic to take seriously. Though I'm a bit curious whether the author tried to connect this quasi-fulfilled desire for menstrual blood with number of death penalties during the Terror... I have a strange feeling that he did...

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

I can't say you are mistaken ;-)