#heine

My Psyker Heine.

I was directed to the English translation at the recommendation of @tenlittlebullets and am very glad I found it because Charles Godfrey Leland is a hoot! At first blush and in no particular order, some of my favorite bits are:

The mysterious man on a black pony with a Spanish mustache holding a red-and-black banner with "Liberty or Death" written on it, who somehow didn't manage to make it into any adaptations

Leland refuting Heine's claim that the uprising was spontaneous by citing the aforementioned man and his banner; "such figures are not common at funerals."

Heine taking an opportunity to compare the crowds gathered at the morgue to the audience of the opera Robert le Diable, which he apparently hated

Frequent invocations of the French Revolution, from the (invented?) figure of the old man dressed "according to the latest fashion of 1793" going to the barricades accompanied by his fretful wife, to Heine's claiming once to have "admired Robespierre, Sanctum Justum and the great Mountain"

"I could never endure being guillotined every day—and nobody did endure it—"

The real thread of admiration for the insurgents, aka "the patriots, who to-day are called rebels"

The comparison to Cleontes and Pantaeus, who are not quite as famous as Orestes and Pylades but that's how they tend to stage the deaths of Enjolras and Grantaire in the musical

"...This was related to me in the Church of Saint-Méry, and I was obliged to lean against the image of Saint Sebastian to prevent my falling to the ground from deep inward emotion, and I wept like a child."

Heine, then 35 years old, helping home a young neighbor who had lost her lover at the barricade and fainted when called upon to identify him at the morgue. He doesn't usually behave so decently and this is a touching change

Heine reports, perhaps unreliably, that the insurgents wore "garlands of willow 'round their small hats," which strikes me as a brilliant excuse to draw Les Amis in flower crowns

A fantastic roast of Lafayette which I will report in full later

Some really chilling descriptions of the "return to order" in the aftermath of the uprising. The brokers at the Bourse cheering as the stocks rise again, shops reopening with broken windows, the quiet progress of arrests, the awkward military review by Louis Philippe, and the state of siege that persisted through June. Nothing, not even the descriptions of the insurgents' deaths, makes me feel worse

with open arms *

Heine: * moves out of the way*

Viktor: Hey, why'd you move?!

Heine: I thought you were going to attack me.

Viktor: I was going to hug you!

Heine: Why would you hug me?