Tag: French Literature

Mysteries of the Court of Miracles | Stephen Basdeo

“The blind man ran. The lame man ran. The man with no legs ran. And then, as he penetrated further down the street, the legless, the blind and the halt came swarming around him, together with the one-armed, the one-eyed, and the lepers with their sores….”

Napoleon the Second: An Ode | Victor Hugo

Translated from the French of Victor Hugo by G.W.M. Reynolds in The Monthly Magazine (1837): A quarter of a century has gone,/Since Gallia welcom’d her Napoleon’s son;/Before th’ imperial consort gave him birth;/And kingdoms trembled at the frolics wild/Which Nature play’d to welcome Valour’s child.

“Mysteries of the People” (1848): Eugene Sue’s Epic Socialist Novel | Stephen Basdeo

“It graphically traces the special features of class-rule as they have succeeded one another from epoch to epoch, together with the special character of the struggle between the contending classes. The “Law,” “Order,” “Patriotism,” “Religion,” “Family,” etc., etc., that each successive tyrant class, despite its change of form, fraudulently sought refuge in to justify its criminal existence whenever threatened; the varying economic causes of the oppression of the toilers; the mistakes incurred by these in their struggles for redress; the varying fortunes of the conflict;—all these social dramas are therein reproduced in a majestic series of “novels” covering leading and successive episodes in the history of the race—an inestimable gift, above all to our own generation, above all to the American working class.”