Robert Helmont: Diary of a Recluse 1870-1871
()
About this ebook
Alphonse Daudet
Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) novelist, playwright, journalist is mainly remembered for the depiction of Provence in Lettres De Mon Moulin and his novel of amour fou, Sappho. He suffered from syphilis for the last 12 years of his life, recorded in La Doulou which has been translated into English by Julian Barnes as The Land of Pain.
Read more from Alphonse Daudet
A Very French Christmas: The Greatest French Holiday Stories of All Time Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Big Book of Christmas Tales: 250+ Short Stories, Fairytales and Holiday Myths & Legends Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHarvard Classics: All 71 Volumes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLetters From My Windmill Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Letters from my Windmill Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTartarin De Tarascon Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fromont and Risler — Complete Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSappho Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Alphonse Daudet – The Complete Collection Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInternational Short Stories: French Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Big Christmas Basket: 200+ Christmas Novels, Stories, Poems & Carols (Illustrated): Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, The Gift of the Magi, A Christmas Carol, Silent Night, The Three Kings, Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Heavenly Christmas Tree, Little Women, The Tale of Peter Rabbit… Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRobert Helmont Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTartarin of Tarascon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Immortal Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsArtists' Wives Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Nabob Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTartarin On The Alps Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Robert Helmont
Related ebooks
Robert Helmont: Diary of a Recluse, 1870-1871 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRobert Helmont Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHonoré de Balzac - A Short Story Collection: One of the founders and popularizes of realism in World literature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSons of the Soil Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStrangers in Paradise: A Memoir of Provence Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe War Trail The Hunt of the Wild Horse Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOriginal Short Stories — Volume 3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Overcoat and Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWinter Cranes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsValentine Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOriginal Short Stories — Volume 03 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWolfsangel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dreamthorp A Book of Essays Written in the Country Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMary Barton Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow Paris Amuses Itself Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEugenie Grandet Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVignettes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVignettes: A Miniature Journal of Whim and Sentiment Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPierrette Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Road to San Giovanni Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEugenie Grandet (French Literature Classic) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOld Mortality Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The End, How the Great War Was Stopped Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Department of Missing Persons: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJew's Harp Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBefore Dawn on Bluff Road / Hollyhocks in the Fog: Selected New Jersey Poems / Selected San Francisco Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMARY BARTON: A Tale of Manchester Life, With Author's Biography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Christmas Kalends of Provence And Some Other Provençal Festivals Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Fat and the Thin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Social History For You
Whore Stories: A Revealing History of the World's Oldest Profession Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters--And How to Get It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A People's History of the United States: Teaching Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Three Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A History of Magic and Witchcraft: Sabbats, Satan & Superstitions in the West Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories of Rootworkers & Hoodoo in the Mid-South Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Untold History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Renegade History of the United States Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5made in america: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Robert Helmont
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Robert Helmont - Alphonse Daudet
Robert Helmont
Diary of a Recluse 1870-1871
By
Alphonse Daudet
Translated by Laura Ensor
Illustrated by Picard and Montegut
PREFACE
While spending a day in the country on one of those pretty green islets that are dotted about in clusters on the Seine between Champrosay and Soisy, and wrestling with a friend, my foot slipped on the damp grass, and I broke my leg. My unfortunate love for athletic and violent exercise has already played me so many ugly tricks, that I should probably have forgotten this accident, as I have others, but for its precise and memorable date: the 14th of July 1870! . . . I still see myself at the close of that sad day, lying on the sofa in the former studio of Eugène Delacroix, whose small house on the borders of the forest of Sénart we were then occupying. When my leg was stretched out, I hardly suffered, for already I felt the vague restlessness of increasing fever, exaggerating the sensation and heat of the stormy atmosphere, and enveloping all around me in a misty cloud, as it were, of shimmering gauze. To the accompaniment of the piano they were singing the choruses of Orphée, and no one, not even I, suspected how serious was my condition. Through the wide-open bay window in the studio came the sweet breath of the jasmine and roses, the beat of the night-moths, and the quick flashes of lightning showing up, above the low garden walls, the sloping vineyards, the Seine, and the rising ground opposite. Suddenly the stillness was broken by the sound of a bell; the evening papers are brought in and opened, and voices broken by emotion, anger, or enthusiasm exclaim: War is declared!
From this moment nothing remains to me but the feverish recollection of a state of languor lasting six weeks; of six weeks of bed, of splints, of cradle and plaster case, in which my leg seemed imprisoned in company with thousands of tormenting insects. During that hot summer, so exceptionally stormy and scorching, this inaction full of agitation was dreadful, and my anxiety, increased by the accounts of the public disasters which filled the papers that covered my bed, added to my restlessness and sleeplessness. At night the rumble of the distant trains disturbed me like the tread of endless battalions, and by day, pale and sad faces, scraps of conversations overheard in the road or at the neighbour’s, through my open window: The Prussians are at Châlons, mother Jean,
and the vans at every moment raising clouds of dust in the quiet little village, lent a mundane and sinister echo to my perusal of the news of the war.
Soon we were the only Parisians left at Champrosay, left alone with the peasants, obstinately attached to the land, and still refusing to admit the idea of an invasion. Directly I could leave my couch and be moved, our departure was decided.
Never shall I forget my first outing in the little old-fashioned garden, filled with the perfume of ripe peaches and fading roses. Around me, poor invalid that I was, seated on the steps of a ladder laid against the fruited wall, they were hurrying on the departure, loading the vans, gathering the fruit and flowers in the unconscious preoccupation of leaving nothing for the enemy; even the child, with its arms full of toys, picking up a little spade forgotten in the grass.
As for me, I inhaled the fresh air with delight; and with an emotion caused by my weak state and my returning health, I gazed at the grey house, and at the red flowers covering the Virginian jessamine interwoven round the bay window of the studio. I thought of the happy hours, so soft and tranquil, spent there the last three years, the hearty laughter, the æsthetic discussions so thoroughly in harmony with the little home, full of the memories of a great artist. Should we ever behold again the sunny path so often slowly paced with short and chatty steps, the verandah where we sat in the fine June evenings, in the brightness of a flowery Spanish broom which, ball-shaped, seemed like an enormous lustre lighted up in the fading twilight, the richness of its golden colour deepening as the light decreased!
The family omnibus was filled up and loaded, all our cherished ones tightly pressed against each other, the child’s toys side by side with the parrokeet’s cage, the bird scared by the sharp-pointed ears of a favourite greyhound: we started, passing first through the little village with its closed and silent villas. The peasants still held out, although disturbed at the departures, watching them from their doorways with tears rising in their eyes, and a certain uneasiness depicted in the stolid cupidity of their countenances. What a return to Paris! The highway crowded with men and beasts, the sheep running loose between the wheels, the green of the market-gardeners’ carts mingling with the piled-up furniture in the vans. On the railway embankment, which lay on one side of our road, trucks upon trucks extending in interminable rows, halting and whistling calls, which were answered and re-echoed on the distant line. And then at last the octroi, where the belated droves of cattle and people and vehicles are accumulated before the too narrow gateway, and—for me a novel sight—men of the National Guard mixed with the customs officers—a Parisian militia, full of zeal and good nature, whose bayonets shine amidst the crowd and in the sunshine on the slopes of the fortifications, now heightened by gabions and bristling with guns.
A few days later I again journeyed to Champrosay, but the road no longer presented the same aspect. The approach of the enemy, so long threatened and now imminent, could be felt by the deserted state of the suburbs, and the care displayed by our main-guards. Endless formalities were required in order to pass through. Amongst the loitering peasants might be seen the prowling figures of suspicious-looking spies, recalling the sinister plunderers of the battlefields; and the solitude, the agonised expectation of the districts I passed through—Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, Draveil—abandoned and silent, imparted a mystery to the very windings of the road, where one almost expected to see the shadow of an Uhlan vidette on the watch. Champrosay, with its solitary street bordered on each side by villas, seemed to grow larger in the death-like stillness: Vasta silentio,
as Tacitus says. Glimpses of parks, caught sight of through the iron gates, a background of dark shrubberies in the distance, flower-beds glowing in the brightness of a September day, here and there a circle of garden chairs on a terrace, forgotten like the idle