Robespierre being so affected by passing the death sentence was a bit of a surprise, knowing what’s coming up. It's certainly a challenge to a common perception.
And, of course, we keep having to remember not to get too attached to any of these people - they may not be around for very long!
I'm certainly enjoying this,but I am finding it trickier than the Wolf Crawl - I think knowing more of the history would be helpful. At the moment, I'm not finding it easy to differentiate between the three major characters, but this may become easier as the cracks in relationships start to appear.
My favourite phrase? "(T)he chaste and peaceful sleep of emotional despots." It feels like the perfect take-down of a certain sort of manipulation.
Yes, Robespierre's against the death penalty right up until he isn't. It makes for quite the compelling volte-face.
There are SO many lawyers in this revolution. You'll find it easier to tell the three men apart as you go along: Camille is a mess, but his writing is perfect. Danton is a bit of a Cromwell: intent on rising to the top whatever the system. Max is Max. Cold, exact, righteous.
Then there's Fabre. Gotta love Fabre.
And throw caution to the wind: become attached to them. Read dangerously, hope against hope they can get through this with their heads still on.
"And throw caution to the wind: become attached to them."
Classic Simon! That's why we love ya. 😀 Such a complement to my tendency to "read-at-arms-length". (And not just because I'm waiting on my new glasses to arrive.)
That's a useful way of remembering them. I was stuck with ugly (Danton), ladies' man (Camille) and not much fun at parties (Max). Fabre - a new one on me - is 'just an actor'. (Apologies to Equity members.)
That is such a helpful way to remember those three. Thank you.
I am one of those who are completely clueless about the history and the people being portrayed. I am simultaneously full of and with little hope for how their stories play out.
I was able to listen to the podcast you recommend last week, and it has been extremely helpful and enlightening. The two of you make me feel so much smarter for a while. :)
I’m struck by the contrast of Max at the beginning of his chapter, methodical, routine bound, making family visits and what he will become. he will put the same intensity and fixed purpose into his behavior in the future.
I agree with Camille that Rousseau's Confessions is too confessional - I think Mantel is referring to the fact that in it Rousseau admits very explicitly to enjoying being spanked and also to dumping the children that he and his mistress had in orphanages and abandoning them, despite writing multiple books about how important it is to raise and educate children correctly. Pretty scandalous even for a memoir today!
I always think it's strange that people think Robespierre is cold when any account of him seems to be the opposite, like Mantel portrays him, rather as sensitive and sentimental and a bit of an overthinker.
I also think it's strange that a lot of people love Marie Antonette for... no reason that I can tell? when there were SO many cool women during the French Revolution, who were politicians, writers, journalists etc. Isn't that much more interesting and cooler?!
Like Camille, I think Max's outward demeanour is misread, as you say. And thanks for reminding me about Rousseau's actual confessions! And I agree about MA, there are so many more fascinating women than her in the revolution. She is a rather tragic figure, but there are some amazing women, and we've already met quite a few.
It's a shame people don't know more about them! I just googled it and there are actually a load of books about revolutionary women in the FR in English - time to add to my TBR!
Do you think Marie Antoinette is widely admired? I feel that she's more regarded as completely out of touch with the suffering of her subjects - all the Let them eat cake (mis)quotes and the playing at dairymaids and whatnot. My main impression of the French court ladies was formed at an impressionable age when I read an illustrated story about how their elaborate hairstyles took so long to create that they never washed them and so had mice nesting in their hair.
Completely agree on all the other kickass women of the revolution though!
I don't think people who are particularly interested or knowledgable about the period admire Marie Antoinette, but I do feel like in some circles of popular culture she's widely seen as admirable and sympathetic - I semi-regularly come across people with a vague interest in history who love her, and there's a huge amount of films, books etc about her compared to any of the revolutionary women, for example. I just asked AI for its top ten French Revolution films and three of them are about Marie Antionette! Not a single one is about any of the other women in the Revolution. Obviously AI is not research but I think it shows how disproportionate the interest in her is!
As a Versailles-focused creator, I can confirm that there are people out there who want all-Marie-Antoinette content, all the time. I don't oblige. My view is that she was one of the least interesting women who lived in the great château.
Do you follow Helen Day on social media? I *think* she curated the Ladybird exhibition, but anyway, she posts beautiful art from the ladybird books, as well as other work by the artists who worked on them.
In fact if I remember correctly Rousseau also admits to exposing himself to random women in the hope they'll spank him. Though it has been many many years since I read it but I was probably too young to read it haha so I remember 'cause I was young enough to be shocked!
I also enjoyed how teenage Max is in his response to his sister - his response of "she doesn't understand me" when she was talking about herself and how she feels made me laugh. Poor Charlotte! Also, ironic that I believe she ended up writing a book about her brothers... so (I've not read it) but I imagine she understood more than he thought.
I feel the same regarding Robespierre. There is something about him that makes you want to get to know him and to like him. His reaction to the judgement he had to make is not cold, neither is his affection for his dog. I know his hands later become bloodied but we all know what a fierce belief I something can do to a person.
This passage where Danton considers the unknowability of other people‘s lives around him really struck me (p. 120 in my edition):
„He turned his head to the door, where outside the city lay. There are a million people, he thought, of whose opinions I know nothing. There were people hasty and rash, people unprincipled, people mechanical, calculating and nice. There were people who interpreted Hebrew and people who could not count, babies turning fish-like in the warmth of the womb and ancient women defying time whose paint congealed and ran after midnight, showing first the wrinkled skin dying and then the yellow and gleaming bone. Nuns in serge. Annette Duplessis enduring Claude. Prisoners at the Bastille, crying to be free. People deformed and people only disfigured, abandoned children sucking the thin milk of duty: crying to be taken in. There were courtiers: there was Hérault, dealing Antoinette a losing hand. There were prostitutes. There were wig-makers and clerks, freed slaves shivering in the squares, the men who took the tolls at the customs posts in the walls of Paris. There were men who had been gravediggers man and boy all their working lives. Whose thoughts ran to an alien current. Of whom nothing was known and nothing could be known.“
I don‘t have anything intelligent to say about it, but it has really stayed with me. The „thin milk of duty“ reminds me of the first book I read about the French Revolution, a YA book called MAMIE 1780-1794 by an author called Cili Wethekam, about an orphaned girl - given to a professional wetnurse whom she has to share with many milk siblings - who through the twists and turns of fate experiences much of the revolution first hand. Discerning readers will be able to tell from the title that it does not end well for her and also have a good guess who‘s at fault. It‘s actually a really well done novel that focuses on ordinary people‘s lives. It also gave me a lifelong appreciation for textile arts, as Mamie turns into an excellent embroiderer and seamstress and has great plans for an independent future.
You‘re making me check train fares to Paris, by the way - the Musée Carnavalet was recently refurbished, I think, and of course there’s Notre Dame (which I was completely obsessed with last year through the final bits of the restoration) AND there‘s the big David Hockney retrospective, plus all the cycle paths and getting rid of cars. The train fares are the least expensive part, and it‘s only six hours!
I am really enjoying the book, and honestly I know so little about this part of history, and there are so many characters, I'd be lost without reading it in this way, so thank you!
One thing I'm really struck by with Mantel - both here and in the Wolf Hall books - is that way she gives us these sweeping histories, and time will pass quickly - months in a sentence - while also giving us total gut punches that are so in a single moment and just as true today. In this week's section, I was particularly impressed at the passage where Max thinks about the various ways to die, and especially this: "You might die like Henriette: alone, your blood pumping out onto white linen, unable to call, unable to move, shocked to death, paralyzed - while downstairs, people were making small talk and passing cakes around." She's just so, so good!
I am likewise absolutely thrilled with Mantel’s sentences and how the words wrap around time and concept alike and encompass so many events that will lead to another event, in another part of the book. I just re read Wolf Hall for my local book club and I keep floating on the clouds of her language and story telling, pardon my exuberance. Hugely appreciate the historical context discussion, but also just to be lost in Mantel’s word web is delicious ….
OH also to all the people who are struggling to keep names straight - I recommend reading Mark Steel’s Vive la Revolution: A Stand-up History of the French Revolution. It's very readable and funny as well as accurate!
Especially, she would not like to be the Queen;she had seen her in Procession in the Streets, her Face set with stupidity and helpless Contempt, her Hard Edge Diamonds flashing around her like naked blades. -WOW what a sentence!
“Maximilien: Life and Times” introduces us to Robespierre’s inner world, and “A Wedding, a Riot, a Prince of the Blood” introduces is to the full cast of characters who will eventually, for a time, stand in counterpoise to Robespierre’s eventual excesses, except for Marat, who will be on Robespierre’s side. This is very deliberately done by Mantel. By the end of “A Wedding…” we will have essentially all the characters on stage who will be the subject of this tragedy.
I’m really enjoying this, despite knowing next to nothing about the French Revolution so very different from Wolf Crawl as definitely know what happens to the characters there. I think what little I do know about the French Revolution was reading The Scarlet Pimpernel many years ago - I loved it as a teenager. The Mark Steele book looks good - I will have to seek that out, I struggle to listen to podcasts - I get distracted too easily!
I hope you like it - I read it the first time I read a Place of Greater Safety and found it both very helpful & informative as well as funny and accessible! I don't have the concentration span for podcasts either haha
I am re-reading APOGS, but prior to reading it the first time, most of my knowledge of the French Revolution also came from The Scarlet Pimpernel, both book and mini-series. I loved that book SO MUCH as a teenager.
Oh good…I’m not the only reader who really needs to pay attention as I had forgotten what I must have learned somewhere in my formal education about all of these characters and events. But then Simon rescues us with his wonderful weekly updates, and the comments from fellow slow-readers add yet more color and content. Now, at the end of three weeks, the wry humor and what (to me) seems rich and effortless writing has seduced me.
Most of the sentences others have already noted, I had also underlined in my book. Here are a few more:
“It is legal because I wish it,” shouts the King. Resonates here in the US…
“Piety to some purpose,” mutters Lucile as she arranges for secret communication with Camille.
“When he married [Philippe], and appeared with the new Duchess at the Opéra, the galleries were packed by the public prostitutes decked out in mourning.”
A bit of heresy, so please move on if you are offended: For some reason, Wolf Hall drew me in, and I was enchanted with the style and the complexities. I started APOGS several months ago in preparation for the slow read, expecting to feel the same, but I just found it wearisome. I hoped the weekly emails would change my mind, but they haven't. I got Marge Piercy's _City of Darkness, City of Light_ from the library, and I'm like - yes, much better. I know what's going on, she tells me things I need to know, it's not like some giant in-crowd secret to figure out the story. I don't know whether I've tired of Mantel, or whether there's some missing x factor in this early/immature work that explains why she had trouble finding a publisher . . .
That's absolutely fine, Jonna! Of course I don't think APOGS is for everyone, or that everyone who likes Wolf Hall, will like A Place of Greater Safety. They are very different books in many ways. I love them both but for different reasons, and I hope I can find expression for that love here and help more readers to enjoy it. But I'm not going to convince everyone!
I think it was near the end of #whiskyandperseverance you cast about for opinions for future slow reads and I, being in the midst of reading it the first time, suggested APOGS. I’m mentioning it not to take any credit for the idea, of course, but rather to say that this slow read is the fulfillment of a long-held wish! When the idea of group slow reads was brand new to me, this was the book I wanted to savor. And it’s living up to my high expectations, I’m getting so much more out of it this time. Thank you thank you, Simon!
Wonderful! Once I had started doing a slow read of W&P, I knew the next one had to be Wolf Hall, and then APOGS. I'm glad it is living up to your expectations!
Oh the creeping violence! I love how Machiavellian Lucile is. I love Camille. They'll be fabulous together. I keep thinking about the threes: our 3 leads, the 3 estates. It's really hardwired in us, isn't it? I'm not having any trouble keeping the 3 leads apart because Wiki has the portraits of them and they are so different physically but also in character. Did I mention I love Camille?
“If there were anyone to watch his progress along the road they would see that he is staggering, lurching from foot to foot. He tries consciously to stand up straight and put some order in his steps, but his legs feel too far away. The whole despicable body is teaching him a lesson again: be true to yourself. This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.”
I’m rather behind and the conversation has moved on, but I’ll add my thoughts here anyway… if Wolf Hall is a ghost story, I think APOGS is a horror story. There is something about Max ruminating on the different methods of death (pp103-104) in the middle of a sleepless night that I found very chilling. His mother, “waiting to be butchered” and Henriette’s “blood pumping out onto white linen, unable to call, unable to move”. Truly the stuff of nightmares. Best of all, the description of Camille (so much foreshadowing for poor Camille!) as a “damned soul draped about in muscle and bone”. Oh Hilary! 👏👏👏👏👏
Robespierre being so affected by passing the death sentence was a bit of a surprise, knowing what’s coming up. It's certainly a challenge to a common perception.
And, of course, we keep having to remember not to get too attached to any of these people - they may not be around for very long!
I'm certainly enjoying this,but I am finding it trickier than the Wolf Crawl - I think knowing more of the history would be helpful. At the moment, I'm not finding it easy to differentiate between the three major characters, but this may become easier as the cracks in relationships start to appear.
My favourite phrase? "(T)he chaste and peaceful sleep of emotional despots." It feels like the perfect take-down of a certain sort of manipulation.
Yes, Robespierre's against the death penalty right up until he isn't. It makes for quite the compelling volte-face.
There are SO many lawyers in this revolution. You'll find it easier to tell the three men apart as you go along: Camille is a mess, but his writing is perfect. Danton is a bit of a Cromwell: intent on rising to the top whatever the system. Max is Max. Cold, exact, righteous.
Then there's Fabre. Gotta love Fabre.
And throw caution to the wind: become attached to them. Read dangerously, hope against hope they can get through this with their heads still on.
"And throw caution to the wind: become attached to them."
Classic Simon! That's why we love ya. 😀 Such a complement to my tendency to "read-at-arms-length". (And not just because I'm waiting on my new glasses to arrive.)
Ha, I don't know how to read at arms length. All or nothing. Maybe you should give me lessons?
That's a useful way of remembering them. I was stuck with ugly (Danton), ladies' man (Camille) and not much fun at parties (Max). Fabre - a new one on me - is 'just an actor'. (Apologies to Equity members.)
Fabre would be furious with the description. He had hopes of going into landscape gardening.
That is such a helpful way to remember those three. Thank you.
I am one of those who are completely clueless about the history and the people being portrayed. I am simultaneously full of and with little hope for how their stories play out.
I was able to listen to the podcast you recommend last week, and it has been extremely helpful and enlightening. The two of you make me feel so much smarter for a while. :)
Haha, that's good! I'm sure you'll feel super smart by the time you finish.
I really appreciate when you give these quick ways to remember people. Thank you!
I’m struggling keeping every one apart too. Going to keep reading of course but good to know I’m not alone.
Yep, me too...
I’m struck by the contrast of Max at the beginning of his chapter, methodical, routine bound, making family visits and what he will become. he will put the same intensity and fixed purpose into his behavior in the future.
I agree with Camille that Rousseau's Confessions is too confessional - I think Mantel is referring to the fact that in it Rousseau admits very explicitly to enjoying being spanked and also to dumping the children that he and his mistress had in orphanages and abandoning them, despite writing multiple books about how important it is to raise and educate children correctly. Pretty scandalous even for a memoir today!
I always think it's strange that people think Robespierre is cold when any account of him seems to be the opposite, like Mantel portrays him, rather as sensitive and sentimental and a bit of an overthinker.
I also think it's strange that a lot of people love Marie Antonette for... no reason that I can tell? when there were SO many cool women during the French Revolution, who were politicians, writers, journalists etc. Isn't that much more interesting and cooler?!
Like Camille, I think Max's outward demeanour is misread, as you say. And thanks for reminding me about Rousseau's actual confessions! And I agree about MA, there are so many more fascinating women than her in the revolution. She is a rather tragic figure, but there are some amazing women, and we've already met quite a few.
It's a shame people don't know more about them! I just googled it and there are actually a load of books about revolutionary women in the FR in English - time to add to my TBR!
Brilliant!
Do you think Marie Antoinette is widely admired? I feel that she's more regarded as completely out of touch with the suffering of her subjects - all the Let them eat cake (mis)quotes and the playing at dairymaids and whatnot. My main impression of the French court ladies was formed at an impressionable age when I read an illustrated story about how their elaborate hairstyles took so long to create that they never washed them and so had mice nesting in their hair.
Completely agree on all the other kickass women of the revolution though!
I don't think people who are particularly interested or knowledgable about the period admire Marie Antoinette, but I do feel like in some circles of popular culture she's widely seen as admirable and sympathetic - I semi-regularly come across people with a vague interest in history who love her, and there's a huge amount of films, books etc about her compared to any of the revolutionary women, for example. I just asked AI for its top ten French Revolution films and three of them are about Marie Antionette! Not a single one is about any of the other women in the Revolution. Obviously AI is not research but I think it shows how disproportionate the interest in her is!
As a Versailles-focused creator, I can confirm that there are people out there who want all-Marie-Antoinette content, all the time. I don't oblige. My view is that she was one of the least interesting women who lived in the great château.
I'm glad you don't oblige them! Out of curiosity, who would you say is the most interesting?
For my money, Mme de Pompadour.
I don't know much about her but the little I do is fascinating - shame she died so young!
Do you follow Helen Day on social media? I *think* she curated the Ladybird exhibition, but anyway, she posts beautiful art from the ladybird books, as well as other work by the artists who worked on them.
In fact if I remember correctly Rousseau also admits to exposing himself to random women in the hope they'll spank him. Though it has been many many years since I read it but I was probably too young to read it haha so I remember 'cause I was young enough to be shocked!
I also enjoyed how teenage Max is in his response to his sister - his response of "she doesn't understand me" when she was talking about herself and how she feels made me laugh. Poor Charlotte! Also, ironic that I believe she ended up writing a book about her brothers... so (I've not read it) but I imagine she understood more than he thought.
I feel the same regarding Robespierre. There is something about him that makes you want to get to know him and to like him. His reaction to the judgement he had to make is not cold, neither is his affection for his dog. I know his hands later become bloodied but we all know what a fierce belief I something can do to a person.
Oh thanks so much for this insight into Rousseau’s confessions - it does sound quite scandalous!
This passage where Danton considers the unknowability of other people‘s lives around him really struck me (p. 120 in my edition):
„He turned his head to the door, where outside the city lay. There are a million people, he thought, of whose opinions I know nothing. There were people hasty and rash, people unprincipled, people mechanical, calculating and nice. There were people who interpreted Hebrew and people who could not count, babies turning fish-like in the warmth of the womb and ancient women defying time whose paint congealed and ran after midnight, showing first the wrinkled skin dying and then the yellow and gleaming bone. Nuns in serge. Annette Duplessis enduring Claude. Prisoners at the Bastille, crying to be free. People deformed and people only disfigured, abandoned children sucking the thin milk of duty: crying to be taken in. There were courtiers: there was Hérault, dealing Antoinette a losing hand. There were prostitutes. There were wig-makers and clerks, freed slaves shivering in the squares, the men who took the tolls at the customs posts in the walls of Paris. There were men who had been gravediggers man and boy all their working lives. Whose thoughts ran to an alien current. Of whom nothing was known and nothing could be known.“
I don‘t have anything intelligent to say about it, but it has really stayed with me. The „thin milk of duty“ reminds me of the first book I read about the French Revolution, a YA book called MAMIE 1780-1794 by an author called Cili Wethekam, about an orphaned girl - given to a professional wetnurse whom she has to share with many milk siblings - who through the twists and turns of fate experiences much of the revolution first hand. Discerning readers will be able to tell from the title that it does not end well for her and also have a good guess who‘s at fault. It‘s actually a really well done novel that focuses on ordinary people‘s lives. It also gave me a lifelong appreciation for textile arts, as Mamie turns into an excellent embroiderer and seamstress and has great plans for an independent future.
You‘re making me check train fares to Paris, by the way - the Musée Carnavalet was recently refurbished, I think, and of course there’s Notre Dame (which I was completely obsessed with last year through the final bits of the restoration) AND there‘s the big David Hockney retrospective, plus all the cycle paths and getting rid of cars. The train fares are the least expensive part, and it‘s only six hours!
Sabine, you must travel by diligence; it is the only appropriate way to travel!
Pretty much all our characters make an appearance in Mamie, most of them from far away. I‘m lucky - that way they‘ve always populated my imagination.
I am really enjoying the book, and honestly I know so little about this part of history, and there are so many characters, I'd be lost without reading it in this way, so thank you!
One thing I'm really struck by with Mantel - both here and in the Wolf Hall books - is that way she gives us these sweeping histories, and time will pass quickly - months in a sentence - while also giving us total gut punches that are so in a single moment and just as true today. In this week's section, I was particularly impressed at the passage where Max thinks about the various ways to die, and especially this: "You might die like Henriette: alone, your blood pumping out onto white linen, unable to call, unable to move, shocked to death, paralyzed - while downstairs, people were making small talk and passing cakes around." She's just so, so good!
I am likewise absolutely thrilled with Mantel’s sentences and how the words wrap around time and concept alike and encompass so many events that will lead to another event, in another part of the book. I just re read Wolf Hall for my local book club and I keep floating on the clouds of her language and story telling, pardon my exuberance. Hugely appreciate the historical context discussion, but also just to be lost in Mantel’s word web is delicious ….
OH also to all the people who are struggling to keep names straight - I recommend reading Mark Steel’s Vive la Revolution: A Stand-up History of the French Revolution. It's very readable and funny as well as accurate!
Especially, she would not like to be the Queen;she had seen her in Procession in the Streets, her Face set with stupidity and helpless Contempt, her Hard Edge Diamonds flashing around her like naked blades. -WOW what a sentence!
Yes! This stopped me in my tracks too!
“Maximilien: Life and Times” introduces us to Robespierre’s inner world, and “A Wedding, a Riot, a Prince of the Blood” introduces is to the full cast of characters who will eventually, for a time, stand in counterpoise to Robespierre’s eventual excesses, except for Marat, who will be on Robespierre’s side. This is very deliberately done by Mantel. By the end of “A Wedding…” we will have essentially all the characters on stage who will be the subject of this tragedy.
I’m really enjoying this, despite knowing next to nothing about the French Revolution so very different from Wolf Crawl as definitely know what happens to the characters there. I think what little I do know about the French Revolution was reading The Scarlet Pimpernel many years ago - I loved it as a teenager. The Mark Steele book looks good - I will have to seek that out, I struggle to listen to podcasts - I get distracted too easily!
I hope you like it - I read it the first time I read a Place of Greater Safety and found it both very helpful & informative as well as funny and accessible! I don't have the concentration span for podcasts either haha
I am re-reading APOGS, but prior to reading it the first time, most of my knowledge of the French Revolution also came from The Scarlet Pimpernel, both book and mini-series. I loved that book SO MUCH as a teenager.
Oh good…I’m not the only reader who really needs to pay attention as I had forgotten what I must have learned somewhere in my formal education about all of these characters and events. But then Simon rescues us with his wonderful weekly updates, and the comments from fellow slow-readers add yet more color and content. Now, at the end of three weeks, the wry humor and what (to me) seems rich and effortless writing has seduced me.
Most of the sentences others have already noted, I had also underlined in my book. Here are a few more:
“It is legal because I wish it,” shouts the King. Resonates here in the US…
“Piety to some purpose,” mutters Lucile as she arranges for secret communication with Camille.
“When he married [Philippe], and appeared with the new Duchess at the Opéra, the galleries were packed by the public prostitutes decked out in mourning.”
A bit of heresy, so please move on if you are offended: For some reason, Wolf Hall drew me in, and I was enchanted with the style and the complexities. I started APOGS several months ago in preparation for the slow read, expecting to feel the same, but I just found it wearisome. I hoped the weekly emails would change my mind, but they haven't. I got Marge Piercy's _City of Darkness, City of Light_ from the library, and I'm like - yes, much better. I know what's going on, she tells me things I need to know, it's not like some giant in-crowd secret to figure out the story. I don't know whether I've tired of Mantel, or whether there's some missing x factor in this early/immature work that explains why she had trouble finding a publisher . . .
That's absolutely fine, Jonna! Of course I don't think APOGS is for everyone, or that everyone who likes Wolf Hall, will like A Place of Greater Safety. They are very different books in many ways. I love them both but for different reasons, and I hope I can find expression for that love here and help more readers to enjoy it. But I'm not going to convince everyone!
Is anyone else watching Carême on Apple TV? I am particularly enjoying the sinisterness of their Fouché. Very enjoyable nonsense.
I'm about to get Apple TV so I'll take a note and have a look for it.
Just about keeping up with the schedule. I've had a wicked weekend partying, consequently not so much reading!
Still finding that I need to concentrate hard on the storyline.
I hope to focus this week on making progress with the reading and then re-reading this post and following some of your support material.
Thanks so much, Simon. I'm enjoying it; I love this period in history, I love Mantel.
Camille would be proud of your wicked weekend.
It was a bit of Eurovision and a housewarming.
I think it was near the end of #whiskyandperseverance you cast about for opinions for future slow reads and I, being in the midst of reading it the first time, suggested APOGS. I’m mentioning it not to take any credit for the idea, of course, but rather to say that this slow read is the fulfillment of a long-held wish! When the idea of group slow reads was brand new to me, this was the book I wanted to savor. And it’s living up to my high expectations, I’m getting so much more out of it this time. Thank you thank you, Simon!
Wonderful! Once I had started doing a slow read of W&P, I knew the next one had to be Wolf Hall, and then APOGS. I'm glad it is living up to your expectations!
Oh the creeping violence! I love how Machiavellian Lucile is. I love Camille. They'll be fabulous together. I keep thinking about the threes: our 3 leads, the 3 estates. It's really hardwired in us, isn't it? I'm not having any trouble keeping the 3 leads apart because Wiki has the portraits of them and they are so different physically but also in character. Did I mention I love Camille?
Love the irony here:
“If there were anyone to watch his progress along the road they would see that he is staggering, lurching from foot to foot. He tries consciously to stand up straight and put some order in his steps, but his legs feel too far away. The whole despicable body is teaching him a lesson again: be true to yourself. This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.”
I’m rather behind and the conversation has moved on, but I’ll add my thoughts here anyway… if Wolf Hall is a ghost story, I think APOGS is a horror story. There is something about Max ruminating on the different methods of death (pp103-104) in the middle of a sleepless night that I found very chilling. His mother, “waiting to be butchered” and Henriette’s “blood pumping out onto white linen, unable to call, unable to move”. Truly the stuff of nightmares. Best of all, the description of Camille (so much foreshadowing for poor Camille!) as a “damned soul draped about in muscle and bone”. Oh Hilary! 👏👏👏👏👏
I agree with this! I sometimes call APOGS a new genre all of its own, historical terror.
I love that. Historical terror - my new favourite genre.