Btw, in case anyone in the Les Mis/French romantics fandom is interested, Arte currently has a 4 part documentary? thing on the French romantics. It features Hugo, Dumas, Sand, Gautier, Nerval and Balzac (amongst others). It's called "l'armée des romantiques" and is available on the Arte app and on YouTube.
ah that bit in every Romanticist bio where we gotta get the who's who as the author sees it (all this is from the Fourth Musketeer)
At the Café de Paris, on the boulevard, Alexander breathed the air of the great world. There the celebrities of journalism, literature, and dandyism met.
...this gets long
That man with the warlike hat and blinking eyes' is Nestor Roqueplan who has now left his garret, his washbasin-clock and his pistols-candelabra for the comfortable offices of the Figaro.
OK was this before/after/during its time as an anti-Romanticist paper??
Next him is Jules Janin, who looks comfortably rotund but thinks only of snapping at his neighbor, and who will later fight a duel with Dumas about a wretched question of dramatic criticism.
JULES JANIN DUELED ALEX DUMAS??
...JULES JANIN DUELES ALEX DUMAS AND LIVED?!?
That fellow by way of being a gentleman, dressed with the correctness of an English lord in a blue coat with gold buttons, a yellow waistcoat, and pearl-gray trousers, is the husband of Marie Dorval, Merle, one of the legitimist party, an epicure and an authority on gastronomy.
..wait, isn't that outfit a Werther cosplay? Am I getting the colors wrong?
. . Over at the long table, orating in a high voice, with his face awkwardly swathed in an enormous neckcloth to hide certain unpleasant scars, is Veron, nicknamed the Prince of Wales, actually the manager of the Revue de Paris, who pays Dumas royally, at least for the time being. With his high color, his greedy lips that look as if they were smeared with jam, and his gluttonous eyes, he seems at once an abbot of former times and a comedy valet.
This guy is way more important than you'd guess by how little he shows up in histories! Also he got his start in patent medicine, which is really jumping out at me post-Blue Castle read!
That tall, thin, dark man, with hair cut brush-shaped and a prominent nose, wearing a velvet caftan and a cap lined with martin fur, is Adolphe de Leuven, librettist of the Postillon de Lonjumeau, who launched Alexander. By his side, flaunting a magnificent kidskin waistcoat and whirling his rhinoceros cane, is handsome Roger de Beauvoir, with a mop of curly black hair, the only one of Alexander's friends who is an aristocrat of wealth-Beauvoir who entertains six hundred people at the Hôtel de Pimodan, and who has just challenged Balzac for accusing him of being named neither Roger nor Beauvoir. Although Balzac took the trouble to send him "forty pages of excuses," the dandy will listen to nothing and proclaims: "I scorn M. de Balzac's prose, I want only his skin!"
holy shit Balzac you messed up??
Here is Eugène Sue, very smart in his sea-green coat, with a rather vulgar turn of the nose that detracts from his good looks. Last, simpler and jollier than the rest, is that good fellow Méry who passes for a librarian at Marseilles, but who is always off on a lark to Paris; an amazing improviser who can compose correctly an act of a classical tragedy within two hours, and in the drawing-rooms describe the tortures of hell so vividly that the ladies beg for mercy.
Fun new party game: Describe the tortures of hell!
Near these gentlemen, but on a lower plane, the madmen appear. "He who was Gannot" and has made himself God under the name Mapah, is a fop and a billiard player now fallen on evil days who sends out manifestos signed "By Our Apostolic Ruin."
The Mahpah is one of the wildest ...visionaries? religious ...somethings? movement leaders? of the time, love seeing him get mentioned (Wiki) (Nonbinary wiki)
Jean Journet, called the Apostle, goes about dressed as a begging friar and sells his verses unfailingly entitled "Songs" or "Cries."
...I have no idea who this is . Sounds like he's coping with poverty very artistishly.
Poor Petrus Borel imagines himself to be a wolf; at his house Alexander has eaten cream from a skull. . . .
excuse you he never said he was a wolf
he said he was a werewolf
and no one actually disagreed
also man,you serve ice cream in skulls ONE time...
...you might see (Dumas) in the rue Grange-Batelière, in the salon of the dancer Marie Taglioni, "the sylph of sylphs," or at Delphine de Girardin's on the days when she recited her poems. But Alexander always grew sentimental near "the Muse" and asked her to receive him in private. "I love you," he said, "with an affection too selfish to share you with the world." Then, when they were alone together, she would interrupt him with questions about dramatic art. "Do tell me how one writes for the theater?" Dumas laughed at what he called "the naïveté of genius."
He was attractive to women, there was no doubt of that, even to the most distrustful of them. When Sainte-Beuve, who was fond of playing the rôle of intermediary, proposed to introduce Alfred de Musset to George Sand, she answered: "I don't want you to bring Alfred de Musset. He's too much of a dandy, we should never get along together. . . . Instead of him, do bring Alexander Dumas, in whose art I have found a soul, exclusive of his talent." Alexander came and Sand took a great liking to him.
Wow, imagine if George Sand had ever hung out with Musset
What a disaster that would have been huh
in that alternate world ><
"On 25 February, 1830, these young Romantics collided with the Classicists in a rowdy melee of catcalls, litter throwing and physical scuffles. The bataille d'Hernani would be repeatedly fought over the coming months. Although fairly conventional in its plot of doomed lovers, Hernani was a deliberate provocation against Neo-Classicism" -Critical Lives: Victor Hugo, Bradley Stephens
