Alphonse Daudet's Letters from My Windmill - I ought rather to be dispatching rose-coloured poems and basketfuls of love stories

Letters from My Windmill (1869) is a collection of newspaper columns – folk tales, sketches, lazing around – by Alphonse Daudet, an author who for a time, a bit after Windmill was written, was the most popular novelist in France, the “Dickens of France,” a designation I would not take too seriously.

This particular book has become his most prominent in English, and I believe also in French, by chance.  The pieces are mostly about Provence, about “noble peasants living uncomplaining lives of suffering amidst the cicadas and lavender and Mistral and so on, drinking harsh red wine and eating their simple but nutritious peasant fare,”* and how was Daudet to predict Vincent van Gogh and Michelin Guides and the now massive Provencal tourist industry.  Americans romanticize Provence more than the French do, but it is summer cottage land for all of us.

Provence is in France, and therefore wonderful, so my argument against its romanticization is that Normandy, Bordeaux, Roussillon, etc. are also in France and also wonderful.  But  I have barely been in Provence, just in the edge of it, two days in Avignon, which was wonderful, so perhaps someday I will recant much of this.

What role Daudet had in popularizing Provence I do not know, but the love of Provence has helped keep the book alive, much like Washington Irving’s Tales from the Alhambra has remained attached to a visit to Granada.

The book itself is a work of pure charm.  Colleen of Jam & Idleness liked it so much she vowed to read all of Daudet’s books.  It is a happy, sentimental book.

After all, why should I be sad?  I live a thousand leagues from Paris, on a sun-soaked hill, in the country of tambourines and muscat wine.  Around me all is sunshine and music…  I ought rather to be dispatching rose-coloured poems and basketfuls of love stories.  (Ch. 15)

The little joke here is that the stories generally end in suicide, revenge, shipwreck, or, in one memorable case, mortal combat with a wolf.  The sentimentality is that of Dickens or Hugo.

The style is more of a blend of Flaubert and Hugo.  Daudet catches some nice effects.  Here is a priest racing through a Mass:

Like hurrying wine-harvesters treading the grapes, both splatter about in the latin of the Mass, sending splashes in all directions.  (Ch. 17)

Here Daudet has shifted to Algeria to see a snowfall:

In this so pure, so rare air of Algeria, the snow seemed like dust of mother-of-pearl.  It had the sheen of white peacock feathers.  (Ch. 18)

That last piece, “The Oranges,” begins in Paris, where “oranges have a sad look.”  In the winter they are sold from handcarts, so that “thousands of oranges [are]scattered about the streets, the peel lying in the mud of the gutters, making you think of some gigantic Christmas tree shaking its branches laden with artificial fruit all over Paris.”  If you are writing a historical novel set in 19th century Paris, you would be crazy not to steal this.  With a step or two, memories about oranges take Daudet to a Campo Santo in Corsica, where he watches, in between naps, an old man tend the cemetery:

Yet, without his being aware of it, this good man worked with a kind of reverence, softening all noises and gently closing the door of the vault each time, as if he feared to waken someone.  In the great, radiant silence, his care for that little garden disturbed not one bird, and it had nothing of sadness about it.  It only made the sea seem more immense, the sky more high; and this siesta without end, amid the ever-restless, ever-triumphant life-forces of nature, diffused all around it the feeling of eternal rest.

Two truffled turkeys, the skin “stretched so tightly you would have thought it was going to burst as it was roasting,” appear at the beginning of Chapter 17.  I read an old Penguin Classics edition, tr. Frederick Davies.

*  I am quoting myself, something I wrote before I had actually read the book.  I was not quite right, but I was close.

Notes on Herzen's My Past and Thoughts - Those five years were for me, too, the worst time of my life

Since I am going to write a note on a Russian writer, I will first mention that I am for some reason organizing a readalong of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, for which I will also be reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.  I suppose I should start reading soon.  Chernyshevsky’s novel is not all that long, but it calls for breaks, some perhaps extended.  I would love to know if anyone is able to just plow through it.  The novel does have a plot, more plot than Dostoevsky’s endlessly superior novella.

Alexander Herzen barely mentions Chernyshevsky in his memoirs, My Past and Thoughts (1866).  They are both radical socialists devoted to the overthrow of the Russian monarchy, both magazine editors.  But Chernyshevsky is younger, fiercer, and most importantly working right in the jaws of the Czar (and he paid the price for it), while Herzen is writing in exile.

The literary conceits are opposed, too – I am confusing history with literature.  Chernyshevksy’s revolution is the one that succeeded, while Herzen’s, non-violent and humanist, is the one that failed.  The second volume of My Past and Thoughts, the one I just finished, finally, is a memoir of failure.  This volume hinges around the European revolutions of 1848, especially in France and Italy where Herzen saw them fail in person.  His earlier book, From the Other Shore (1850), is his direct reaction to the catastrophe of 1848, a series of articles so rhetorically sophisticated I barely remember them.  It is a book of idealistic disillusionment or something like that.  The sensible and skeptical revolutionary – I can see how this is a difficult position.

My Past and Thoughts is a memoir as bracing as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, so Herzen’s subject is not entirely political.  Parallel to the sputtering after effects of 1848 is an agonizing section titled “A Family Drama.”  Herzen’s wife Natalie falls for another revolutionary, charismatic but nuts.  She breaks off the affair, but her lover (and his wife) act like loons.  As if this were not painful enough, Herzen’s mother and one of his sons dies in a shipwreck.  And then Natalie, the wife, dies from what I assume is typhoid.  Meanwhile, the nutcase is challenging Herzen to duels or begging him to be friends again.  I have seen people say that Herzen’s memoir is like a novel.  This section is like a soap opera that takes a tragic turn.

Those five years were for me, too, the worst time of my life; I have not now such riches to lose or such beliefs to be destroyed.  (671)

A truffled turkey appears on p. 492, in Herzen’s encomium to an old friend who taught him that revolutionaries are allowed to have fun, for example to enjoy Schubert and good food.  The truffled turkey is an old obsession at Wuthering Expectations; I am just cataloguing its appearances.  Someday I will eat one.

I am not doing much more here than writing notes.  Finishing volume 2 puts me through a thousand pages of about 1,800 total.  I am reading the 1968 four volume edition, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens. Volume 4 has an index, which is how I know about the near-absence of Chernyshevsky.

That was my masterpiece. The best thing I’ve ever done. - the art of The Belly of Paris

The painter, Claude Lantier, young and ambitious, is the character who does not belong in The Belly of Paris, who is an outsider to Les Halles.  He is what is now called a point-of-view character, someone who can offer his eyes to the book’s reader, like a pair of binoculars.  Whenever Zola wants to go for a stroll through Les Halles he drops the painter into the novel as a guide.  Lantier is the one who sees like Zola sees.

But he never felt the elbows digging into him, he stood in ecstasy before the lungs and lights that hung from the auction hooks.  He often explained to Cadine and Marjolin that there was no sight more beautiful than this.  The lights were a tender rose-pink, deepening gradually and turning at the lower edges to a bright crimson.  Claude compared them to watered satin, finding no other term to describe the silken softness of the flowing lengths of flesh which fell in folds like the caught-up skirts of a dancer.  (164-5)

And Zola is not quite done with Lantier’s rapture, but that seems like enough.  Plus I have become distracted by metaphor – “ox hearts as solid as church bells,” “yellow sauerkraut that looked like old lace.”  Zola uses this kind of language throughout the novel, whether or not the painter is present.  It is only the painter, though, who approaches the world with the same sort of appreciative aesthetic distance as the narrator.

His reward is a scene that rivals the Symphony of Cheeses.  He describes what happened when his aunt lets him decorate the window of her charcuterie:

“I had plenty of strong colours to work with – the red of the tongues, the yellow of the hams, the blue of the paper shavings, the pink of the things that had been cut into, the green of the sprigs of heather, and the black puddings – a magnificent black, which I’ve never managed to produce on my palette.  And, of course, the caul, the sausages, the andouilles, and the crumbed trotters gave me a very subtle range of greys.  With all that I created a real work of art.”  (187)

The resulting portrait-in-foodstuffs is crowned by “a huge turkey with a white breast, marbled under its skin by the black truffles,” “magnificent, like  a huge belly,” and also “primitive and ironic.”  This is the first truffled turkey I have encountered since I started Wuthering Expectations, which is exciting.  The aunt “thought the turkey was so obscene that she threw me out.”

“Never mind!  That was my masterpiece.  The best thing I’ve ever done.”  (188)

The word "I" might refer to more than one person, only one of them fictional.  Thirteen years later, Lantier will star in his own novel, The Masterpiece, in which he likely surpasses the sausage shop window in some way or another.   I assume the later novel works quite differently than The Belly of Paris, that as Lantier becomes the object of study another character will have to step into the role of observer and tour guide.  Who will tell me which passages are particularly good?

Make your green bean casserole from scratch - Happy Thanksgiving!

Update: the recipe is here.

Since it's Thanksgiving Week, and my mind is elsewhere, Wuthering Expectations will postpone its ponderations about William Thackeray, Emily Dickinson, and, endlessly, Nathaniel Hawthorne for a week.

My heartfelt holiday advice is not to use a can of cream of mushroom soup in your green bean casserole, but to make the sauce from scratch.  You can do it all in one pan.  Everyone will be happier.  Let me know if you want the recipe.  My recipe is France-tested.  Meaning, it was served, and was un triomphe, at a Thanksgiving dinner in France, with French guests.  No, not Parisians, but jolly, friendly Normans.

Make the fried onion topping from scratch, too (separate pan for that).  Shallots fry up more prettily than onions.

Is anybody cooking a truffled turkey for Thanksgiving?  One of those truffled trukey posts has a recipe in the comments.  Man, back in 2007 I knew how to keep it short.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Postscript:  The Library of America blog wrote up my Wilder Little House week.  If you thought I was blowing smoke, but were too polite to say so here, go over there and tell them.  An LOA edition of Wilder is in the works - good.

I'm thinking of switching to an all truffled turkey blog

You first parents of the human race that ruined yourself for an apple, what might you have done for a truffled turkey? But in your earthly paradise you had no cooks, no fine confectioners.

I weep for you!

Jean Antheleme Brillat Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, 1825, Chapter XXVII.

jars of truffled turkeys

"The landlord of the Bell - whose magnificent porcelain jars of truffled turkeys are exported to the uttermost ends of the earth -..."

Lost Illusions, p. 623 (Modern Library)

The novel is set in 1822. What might sealed, shipped meat have been like at that time?

The internet leads me to this supposed Rossini quote:

"I have wept three times in my life. Once when my first opera failed. Once again, the first time I heard Paganini play the violin. And once when a truffled turkey fell overboard at a boating picnic."

Would it kill someone to put a citation on this? Anyway, I would not mind a porcelain jar of truffled turkey for Christmas.