Translations
Sunday, 19 February 2006 00:41![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
montagnarde1793And as promised, the full text of
Chapter Eight
Eléonore
Maximilien Robespierre had also to suffer from this calumny, in symbolic of the revolutionary era, and he would know quite well how to handle it. To discredit him among the credulous, his enemies furtively related that he had tried to be chosen as the private tutor that the Legislative, at its debut, had had the idea to offer to the Dauphin.
It was pretended that, prepared by the evening lessons which he gave to the young Duplays, our hero had postulated immediately that this employment which he felt dignified in would suit him, and, aware that he would be agreeable, the constitutional monarchist deputies, would charge the Princesse de Lamballe with presenting the royal couple with his nomination. Before the insurmountable repulsion of the Queen and her friends, the chief Jacobin would be content to collect the payment of the charge that he solicited; and in recognition, he would then found a journal favorable to the Court: Le Défenseur de la Constitution.
At the end of a bit of time, b the hostility accrued from Marie-Antoinette, the payments would cease; following this, furious, the Arrageois, shifting his energies, would precipitate the tenth of August.
This Défenseur de la Constitution that he would publish every week on Thursday from the 19 th of May 1792, was quite royalist, and would cease to seem so after its twelfth number; then its editor would publish during six months in installments his Lettres à ses Commettants.
Although it would be difficult to know with what heart Robespierre would fill his first paper, the story of the tutor corresponded neither to his prudence, nor to his distaste of money. "Money scares him," Danton would later say of him, dumbfounded. Also of suspect origin, seemingly, was this idea that he would pass for having had later: the problem of the subsistence of the troops disquieting the government, he would have advised to follow the armies with immense troops of pigs, who which would feed on the cadavers and becoming fat, would be killed to feed the soldiers.
He suffered from other calumnies. The most fanciful concerned his love life, which was, yet, so minimal! It would be fastidious to cite all that would take the depraved imaginations of the Thermidoreans about his good fortunes, all the beauties that he would have beheaded for avenging themselves of their rigors. He had never been sensual; his father's example horrified him; his method of work excluded the existence of burdensome women, devourers of time and precious ideas. Moreover, he had cold humors in the legs that he did not keep from showing them.
However, few months after is entry into the house of the cabinet-maker of the rue Saint -Honoré, the rumor was in political circles that Eléonore—called Cornélie or, by Danton, Cornélie Copeau—the Duplays' eldest daughter, had become his mistress. After his death, numerous writers would pretend that he would never do such a thing, that he was very much too delicate for having attended to the virtue of this admirer, and they are joined in this way of thing by the champions of his modesty, who continue to affirm this in our day, despite the formal evidence of Pierre Villiers, that he died a virgin.
In truth, when similar rapports establish themselves between a man and a woman, curious people do not discover there the formal proofs, in the letters or the confidences of the interested; treason by some, inquisitive. But Maximilien did not put these confidences in anyone; and, in the seeming case, he must have recommended to his young accomplice to keep silent. For another thing, they did not exchange correspondence since they lived under the same roof.
Certain historians, who were not among his friends but who believed in his complete chastity, believe they found in the disposition of the rooms of Duplay's house a proof of the impossibility of the relations between Maximilien and Eléonore. In effect, he must have had to traverse the chamber of the father and mother Duplay to get from the chamber of the young daughter to his own.
This disposition of the rooms being a true fact, it may be deduced that appears without name to the entire world.
Yet we have seen those parents who sleep heavily. For another thing the frolics of such lovers, which, in all ways, must not have been very frequent with the temperament of Maximilien, could have taken place during the day, all simply in his room, where numerous visitors discovered the young girl, silently huddled in a corner and holding less of a place than Brount.
Moreover, is it not admissible to imagine that he father and mother Duplay would have blocked their ears if they had heard the furtive step of their daughter crossing their room to go to that of their God? Could it not have been the best means of keeping him as their intimate?
In truth, the frenetic affection of the mother Duplay for her guest was like as she would have volunteered to give to him all her daughters in order to keep him there. For as long as he was there, she loved no one more than him. As for father Duplay, the cult of nature, philanthropy, interest superior to humanity, would have immediately convinced him, if he had had some vague desire to resist, that this was inconceivable.
The arrangements, tacit or verbal that would have linked to this subject did not cross these walls, protectors of the immaculate reputation of the Incorruptible. Officially, Eléonore was promised to Maximilien. They entered the salon one evening hand in hand under the tender gaze of the company. They would marry later. No date was fixed; and our hero, in little hurry to form a permanent liaison, must have taken some precautions in order that the misadventure of his parents before the birth of their firstborn would not take place.
On the outside, the public of the moment thought that that they were lover and mistress, finding the thing quite natural and not attaching any importance to it. The interested parties took the best route and did not speak to them about their relations, and did not speak about it themselves. Having escaped the Thermidorean torment, Eléonore must have, until her death in 1832, kept her fidelity to the memory of her lover and the same silence. On this point, all the Duplays observed an admirable discipline. But to the outside and in particular at the studio of the painter Regnault where she worked, one could frequently hear the Duplay's eldest daughter called Mme Robespierre. A friend of the Incorruptible, Vilate, juror on the revolutionary tribunal, tells us: "the daughter of his host passed for his wife." Even if Robespierre had lived today, who would have wanted to or could give us more precise information?
Certainly, Eleonore was far from being beautiful; and before the arrival of their illustrious guest, her parents had tried in vain to find her a husband. She had small grayish eyes, a long enough nose, square at the end, abundant chestnut brown hair, a plump and wide mouth always slightly parted, and a dazed and submissive air given off by all these traits.
It was better this way. Feminine beauty did not take much part in the preoccupations of our hero. He judged it burdensome, useless, and without doubt also as vicious as riches. The fuss of frivolous passions! Having the faculty to choose among the three Duplay daughters, he took the eldest and the plainest. He cannot be accused of taking luxury in his amours.
Such a liaison was therefore rational, convenient, and could not disserve his popularity. She would not prevent him from his work. To the contrary. He kept the girl at his disposition at all times; she was well-behaved: it was she who stopped her education; she was ready to obey him; and, thus, the rare times when he desired her, she would not make him forget the times.
His method was in coincidence thus with the clear dogma. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, source of all truths, did not decree—Emile, book V: "It is in the order of nature that women obey men. When therefore he takes her from an inferior class, the natural order and the civil order are in accord and all goes well." It is also advisable to note that Eléonore-Cornélie, born into a somewhat inferior class, did not come from the lowest of classes, which were equal in the eyes of "the divine man" to which the same book V of Emile added the precaution: "It is difficult to find in the ranks of the people a spouse capable of making happiness for an honest man: not that one may not be as vicious in the lower classes as in the highest classes, but because one may have there a bit of an idea of what is beautiful and honest."
Later Maximilien appears for a moment disgusted with his acquisition. In the presence of Charlotte , he offers her one day to his brother.
"You must marry Eléonore," he tells him casually.
"My faith no!" responded Bonbon emphatically, for he must have felt a certain fright, because he did not see the question of women in the same way as the head of the family.
Maximilien would keep Eléonore. Mme Duplay insinuated to him warningly sometimes that he must sort things out; he did not respond. Essentially, the whole city knew he was affianced to the daughter of a cabinet-maker, a creature modest of body and spirit, who was convenient to the imagery, to the propaganda of Maximilien Robespierre, the apostle of Equality.
These relations were certainly lacking in the affection which is in essence aristocratic; and in public, he never felt the need to address her with gallantry. Sometimes he went out with her and Brount, a companion capable of pushing back some evil counterrevolutionary; they went and walked in the Champs-Elysees, in the garden of Marbeuf, national property.
They sat on a bench; and he spoke to her of the rights of man, of Liberty, of Reason, and of Virtue. He came thus to exploit her ideas, which he hastened to record on a bit of paper; they would serve him for a discourse or a manifesto. It was then that little Savoyards in rags, in black bonnets, their marmot in their arms, approached them, collecting some sous. Then, having offered a contribution, it pleased them to dance for them, their dances accompanied by tambourine played by an old woman, which lightened and invigorated his spirit as oranges lightened and invigorated his body.
Two times a year, he took the whole Duplay family to the theater, where he had free seats periodically in the place of the former King; he explained and critiqued the intentions of the author in such a way that the spirits of his hosts abandoned all terrestrial comprehension to climb fully into the clouds when he reached them during his discourses from the Jacobins.
Sometimes—quite rarely in truth—he pushed his walks to outside Paris, up to four or five places from the precinct, towards some village like Choisy, to the house of the carpenter Vaugeois fils, or some country like the heights of Suresnes, which evoked from him the Reveries d'un Promeneur solitaire. He did not go there alone, yet, but with Mme Duplay, Eléonore being reserved for smaller outings.
These great outings with the mother Duplay, which her daughter Elisabeth naively noted in her Journal, should not shock anyone. The father Duplay was flattered by the homage rendered by the Incorruptible to his wife; and in this era of general debauchery, the public did not pay much attention.
In the course of their walks, did the incandescent hostess reach to warm up Maximilien and to thus share in a certain measure the favors due to her daughter?—We will never know, if it is not by some of those fortuitous findings which sometimes benefit the historian.
As to the other daughters of his hosts, Maximilien was contented to educate them.
"My mother watched with pleasure when we took an interest in Robespierre," reports little Elisabeth.
He spoke to her in his sweetest voice, when she was close to twenty years old:
"Little Elisabeth, look at me as your best friend, as a good brother. I will give you all the advice which one needs at your age."
Young girls can, must even, have complex souls, with hidden vices. He recalled the subtle comments of M. de la Roche on the vicissitudes of the way taught in the collège Louis-le-Grand. It was necessary that a teacher also be a confessor. What plots formed against Elisabeth and Victoire's virtue? In his moments of recreation, this keenly interested him; and he would have wanted to have the details.
At the least glimmer of trouble that he distinguished in their regard, he pursued them with questions on their comportment with their male friends, on their dreams and daydreams. He insisted; he had learned with the priests to be persuasive; and his face would darken, when they evaded his interrogations.
(Admittedly, it's poorly translated, but I was in a hurry and some of those sentences were really quite convoluted.)
Chapter Eight
Eléonore
Maximilien Robespierre had also to suffer from this calumny, in symbolic of the revolutionary era, and he would know quite well how to handle it. To discredit him among the credulous, his enemies furtively related that he had tried to be chosen as the private tutor that the Legislative, at its debut, had had the idea to offer to the Dauphin.
It was pretended that, prepared by the evening lessons which he gave to the young Duplays, our hero had postulated immediately that this employment which he felt dignified in would suit him, and, aware that he would be agreeable, the constitutional monarchist deputies, would charge the Princesse de Lamballe with presenting the royal couple with his nomination. Before the insurmountable repulsion of the Queen and her friends, the chief Jacobin would be content to collect the payment of the charge that he solicited; and in recognition, he would then found a journal favorable to the Court: Le Défenseur de la Constitution.
At the end of a bit of time, b the hostility accrued from Marie-Antoinette, the payments would cease; following this, furious, the Arrageois, shifting his energies, would precipitate the tenth of August.
This Défenseur de la Constitution that he would publish every week on Thursday from the 19 th of May 1792, was quite royalist, and would cease to seem so after its twelfth number; then its editor would publish during six months in installments his Lettres à ses Commettants.
Although it would be difficult to know with what heart Robespierre would fill his first paper, the story of the tutor corresponded neither to his prudence, nor to his distaste of money. "Money scares him," Danton would later say of him, dumbfounded. Also of suspect origin, seemingly, was this idea that he would pass for having had later: the problem of the subsistence of the troops disquieting the government, he would have advised to follow the armies with immense troops of pigs, who which would feed on the cadavers and becoming fat, would be killed to feed the soldiers.
He suffered from other calumnies. The most fanciful concerned his love life, which was, yet, so minimal! It would be fastidious to cite all that would take the depraved imaginations of the Thermidoreans about his good fortunes, all the beauties that he would have beheaded for avenging themselves of their rigors. He had never been sensual; his father's example horrified him; his method of work excluded the existence of burdensome women, devourers of time and precious ideas. Moreover, he had cold humors in the legs that he did not keep from showing them.
However, few months after is entry into the house of the cabinet-maker of the rue Saint -Honoré, the rumor was in political circles that Eléonore—called Cornélie or, by Danton, Cornélie Copeau—the Duplays' eldest daughter, had become his mistress. After his death, numerous writers would pretend that he would never do such a thing, that he was very much too delicate for having attended to the virtue of this admirer, and they are joined in this way of thing by the champions of his modesty, who continue to affirm this in our day, despite the formal evidence of Pierre Villiers, that he died a virgin.
In truth, when similar rapports establish themselves between a man and a woman, curious people do not discover there the formal proofs, in the letters or the confidences of the interested; treason by some, inquisitive. But Maximilien did not put these confidences in anyone; and, in the seeming case, he must have recommended to his young accomplice to keep silent. For another thing, they did not exchange correspondence since they lived under the same roof.
Certain historians, who were not among his friends but who believed in his complete chastity, believe they found in the disposition of the rooms of Duplay's house a proof of the impossibility of the relations between Maximilien and Eléonore. In effect, he must have had to traverse the chamber of the father and mother Duplay to get from the chamber of the young daughter to his own.
This disposition of the rooms being a true fact, it may be deduced that appears without name to the entire world.
Yet we have seen those parents who sleep heavily. For another thing the frolics of such lovers, which, in all ways, must not have been very frequent with the temperament of Maximilien, could have taken place during the day, all simply in his room, where numerous visitors discovered the young girl, silently huddled in a corner and holding less of a place than Brount.
Moreover, is it not admissible to imagine that he father and mother Duplay would have blocked their ears if they had heard the furtive step of their daughter crossing their room to go to that of their God? Could it not have been the best means of keeping him as their intimate?
In truth, the frenetic affection of the mother Duplay for her guest was like as she would have volunteered to give to him all her daughters in order to keep him there. For as long as he was there, she loved no one more than him. As for father Duplay, the cult of nature, philanthropy, interest superior to humanity, would have immediately convinced him, if he had had some vague desire to resist, that this was inconceivable.
The arrangements, tacit or verbal that would have linked to this subject did not cross these walls, protectors of the immaculate reputation of the Incorruptible. Officially, Eléonore was promised to Maximilien. They entered the salon one evening hand in hand under the tender gaze of the company. They would marry later. No date was fixed; and our hero, in little hurry to form a permanent liaison, must have taken some precautions in order that the misadventure of his parents before the birth of their firstborn would not take place.
On the outside, the public of the moment thought that that they were lover and mistress, finding the thing quite natural and not attaching any importance to it. The interested parties took the best route and did not speak to them about their relations, and did not speak about it themselves. Having escaped the Thermidorean torment, Eléonore must have, until her death in 1832, kept her fidelity to the memory of her lover and the same silence. On this point, all the Duplays observed an admirable discipline. But to the outside and in particular at the studio of the painter Regnault where she worked, one could frequently hear the Duplay's eldest daughter called Mme Robespierre. A friend of the Incorruptible, Vilate, juror on the revolutionary tribunal, tells us: "the daughter of his host passed for his wife." Even if Robespierre had lived today, who would have wanted to or could give us more precise information?
Certainly, Eleonore was far from being beautiful; and before the arrival of their illustrious guest, her parents had tried in vain to find her a husband. She had small grayish eyes, a long enough nose, square at the end, abundant chestnut brown hair, a plump and wide mouth always slightly parted, and a dazed and submissive air given off by all these traits.
It was better this way. Feminine beauty did not take much part in the preoccupations of our hero. He judged it burdensome, useless, and without doubt also as vicious as riches. The fuss of frivolous passions! Having the faculty to choose among the three Duplay daughters, he took the eldest and the plainest. He cannot be accused of taking luxury in his amours.
Such a liaison was therefore rational, convenient, and could not disserve his popularity. She would not prevent him from his work. To the contrary. He kept the girl at his disposition at all times; she was well-behaved: it was she who stopped her education; she was ready to obey him; and, thus, the rare times when he desired her, she would not make him forget the times.
His method was in coincidence thus with the clear dogma. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, source of all truths, did not decree—Emile, book V: "It is in the order of nature that women obey men. When therefore he takes her from an inferior class, the natural order and the civil order are in accord and all goes well." It is also advisable to note that Eléonore-Cornélie, born into a somewhat inferior class, did not come from the lowest of classes, which were equal in the eyes of "the divine man" to which the same book V of Emile added the precaution: "It is difficult to find in the ranks of the people a spouse capable of making happiness for an honest man: not that one may not be as vicious in the lower classes as in the highest classes, but because one may have there a bit of an idea of what is beautiful and honest."
Later Maximilien appears for a moment disgusted with his acquisition. In the presence of Charlotte , he offers her one day to his brother.
"You must marry Eléonore," he tells him casually.
"My faith no!" responded Bonbon emphatically, for he must have felt a certain fright, because he did not see the question of women in the same way as the head of the family.
Maximilien would keep Eléonore. Mme Duplay insinuated to him warningly sometimes that he must sort things out; he did not respond. Essentially, the whole city knew he was affianced to the daughter of a cabinet-maker, a creature modest of body and spirit, who was convenient to the imagery, to the propaganda of Maximilien Robespierre, the apostle of Equality.
These relations were certainly lacking in the affection which is in essence aristocratic; and in public, he never felt the need to address her with gallantry. Sometimes he went out with her and Brount, a companion capable of pushing back some evil counterrevolutionary; they went and walked in the Champs-Elysees, in the garden of Marbeuf, national property.
They sat on a bench; and he spoke to her of the rights of man, of Liberty, of Reason, and of Virtue. He came thus to exploit her ideas, which he hastened to record on a bit of paper; they would serve him for a discourse or a manifesto. It was then that little Savoyards in rags, in black bonnets, their marmot in their arms, approached them, collecting some sous. Then, having offered a contribution, it pleased them to dance for them, their dances accompanied by tambourine played by an old woman, which lightened and invigorated his spirit as oranges lightened and invigorated his body.
Two times a year, he took the whole Duplay family to the theater, where he had free seats periodically in the place of the former King; he explained and critiqued the intentions of the author in such a way that the spirits of his hosts abandoned all terrestrial comprehension to climb fully into the clouds when he reached them during his discourses from the Jacobins.
Sometimes—quite rarely in truth—he pushed his walks to outside Paris, up to four or five places from the precinct, towards some village like Choisy, to the house of the carpenter Vaugeois fils, or some country like the heights of Suresnes, which evoked from him the Reveries d'un Promeneur solitaire. He did not go there alone, yet, but with Mme Duplay, Eléonore being reserved for smaller outings.
These great outings with the mother Duplay, which her daughter Elisabeth naively noted in her Journal, should not shock anyone. The father Duplay was flattered by the homage rendered by the Incorruptible to his wife; and in this era of general debauchery, the public did not pay much attention.
In the course of their walks, did the incandescent hostess reach to warm up Maximilien and to thus share in a certain measure the favors due to her daughter?—We will never know, if it is not by some of those fortuitous findings which sometimes benefit the historian.
As to the other daughters of his hosts, Maximilien was contented to educate them.
"My mother watched with pleasure when we took an interest in Robespierre," reports little Elisabeth.
He spoke to her in his sweetest voice, when she was close to twenty years old:
"Little Elisabeth, look at me as your best friend, as a good brother. I will give you all the advice which one needs at your age."
Young girls can, must even, have complex souls, with hidden vices. He recalled the subtle comments of M. de la Roche on the vicissitudes of the way taught in the collège Louis-le-Grand. It was necessary that a teacher also be a confessor. What plots formed against Elisabeth and Victoire's virtue? In his moments of recreation, this keenly interested him; and he would have wanted to have the details.
At the least glimmer of trouble that he distinguished in their regard, he pursued them with questions on their comportment with their male friends, on their dreams and daydreams. He insisted; he had learned with the priests to be persuasive; and his face would darken, when they evaded his interrogations.
(Admittedly, it's poorly translated, but I was in a hurry and some of those sentences were really quite convoluted.)
