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]

Well, exactly. As soon as I wrote it, the other level of loneliness came to my mind. But that would indeed be a completely different story.

Oh yes, the archetypisation is probably unavoidable, but still annoying.
I mean, if anyone wishes to argue that
1) Saint-Just was a cold bastard, he/she can still do that without claiming -erroneously- that he had no friends.
2) Robespierre was a cold bastard, he/she can still do that without claiming -lacking any support for such hypothesis- that Robespierre did never have sex.

What I find especially annoying is see young and old historians (or political journalists) being influenced by stereotypes they've got from pop-culture and that seem to have a life on their own, totally independent on any serious analysis of sources. That's not very professional.

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

I wonder if a scholar, writer or journalist, no matter how willing, can ever run away from cultural stereotypes and become truly objective. Can we. But that'd be another debate.

The topic of Robespierre and sex-or-lack-thereof is both interesting and annoying, when used as an argument pro the "cold bastard" image. If he were, sorry to put it a bit vulgar, chasing everything female (or male, or both), it would also be probably used by his opponents as an argumant for the image mentioned. All is good to support the images people have in their heads.

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

No, but they should at least try and they have to expect criticism if they do not.
As for the second point: very true.