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To be or not to be a Kaiserin

To be or not to be a Kaiserin

Searching for inspiration

 Since our quite disastrous experiences in hospital and the more disastrous blow up of The Little Family, I have not been able to concentrate much. I sit in front of the screen of my laptop and vaguely browse the Net without any decisive attention. There are books around me but I do not feel much like reading. I do not feel like writing. I do not feel like…

[camille-de-fleurville]

I love April

Glamis Village in April (James MacIntosh Patrick

I love April.

It was Mother’s birthday month and I associate it with the big bouquetwe made for her with the flowers of the garden, mainly with irises and apple blossoms. She had a fondness for irises and she nursed and raised the plants, exchanging rhizomes with friends and collectors near our house: they came in all sorts of hues from the simple,…

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Flaming orange Pre-Raphaelite colour and black Malevitch square

Flaming orange Pre-Raphaelite colour and black Malevitch square

Once upon a time … I blogged regularly – almost daily. Once upon a time … I could see properly. Once upon a time … there was a Little Family. Once upon a time…

I see that it has been almost six months since I wrote an entry to this blog. I would like to resume this activity to rule at least one thing from my list of “Once upon a time”. So let me explain briefly why I stopped and what has…

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Dispair

Once, I had a voice and I screamed.

Now, I have no more time to myself. I may not come often.

It will depend on the help I shall, may or might get – or not.

My life is now fully busy with The Girls.

Elder Girl is unmanageable because of her pathologies and because she hates me as I ask her to do things she does not want to do. The Younger follows the example of The Elder.

We have no hours.

T…

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In need of a word of comfort

In need of a word of comfort

I have started writing to The Little Family during the last month but I cannot end the post. Feelings are too raw and I am overtired.

Elder Girl had to be dashed to hospital after a fit where she convulsed and badly hurt her head and scalp. She had a scan, a electro-encephalogram, various tests, was examined by various doctors and a neurologist, and diagnosed epileptic, which is often the case…

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Some news from The Little Family

Some news from The Little Family

It has been a long time since I posted my last words on all my blogs. I think the middle of July is the last date for “Sketches and Vignettes from la Dordogne”, when I talked about a play at the Avignon theatre festival. And it was even sooner than this for “Lights and Shades”.

I have not left off blogging. I simply had no time. I have not much time left for blogging, writing, reading, or for…

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For whom the bell tolls?

For whom the bell tolls?

  Renoir – Le Moulin de la Galette

  Time flies. Soon after France lost the final of the European football Championship, it was National Day and the yearly enjoyment in the Tour de France with its drugged cyclists – as usual. It was a cold 14 July, with clouds and bitter wind but the military parade on the Champs Elysées went on as usual, followed by the same stilted interview of the President by…

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July: The Little Family is back (for better or for worse)! Good news / bad news ?

July: The Little Family is back (for better or for worse)! Good news / bad news ?

Some news from The Little Family who is now firmly rooted in July, warmth, sunshine, early mornings (when possible), sometimes late nights if there is something from the summer music and theatre festivals on TV, fruits, vegetables like courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes, peaches, apricots, nectarines, soon melons…

And soon the Great House Scouring Party on the 21st of July, the day Anne-Fleur…

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Ramblings about France and Britain from habits to literature via Brexit

Ramblings about France and Britain from habits to literature via Brexit

I guess that for some of you the life of The Little Family, Anne-Fleur’s tears and my relations with Red Tape as a carer treated as a diary, have little or no interest. They are first written for another blog created to talk about these issues, and called “Lights and Shades”. However, readers are more used to “Sketches and Vignettes” and I have come to re-post the entries of “Lights and Shades”…

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Diary (9) – Please, help! I have Down Syndrome... What then? Dear friends and readers, Positive things first. Your reading and writing comments or a "like" was a surprise for Dr Quack and the local Red Tape.

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In the post before last, I told you how I met Proust when I was ten and a half while he was taking a walk near Combray, admiring hawthorn and Gilberte Swann. Anecdotally, he helped me look at hawthorn flowers: he mostly helped me look around me, look differently, read, and respect difference. As did Virginia Woolf.

I was no genius and did not understand “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu”. I did not even read the whole of it this spring and summer. I read “Du Côté de chez Swann” and was interested by Marcel because he was a child. I remember the stained glass of the church window with Geneviève de Brabant and la duchesse de Guermantes, a long passage where the Narrator was telling how Tante Léonie liked her potatoes – and that testifies both of my greed and of my fascination for the length of the passage (over two pages for one sentence!) -, the description of the sound of the bell over the rusty gate at Combray, Gilberte au jardin des Champs Elysées, these small things that were close to my life or that I could experience.

Later, I came back to “La Recherche”, book after book, with stumbles, hesitations, darts forward and re-reads, misunderstandings and non-understandings. One does not exhaust the reading of “La Recherche”, as of other great fiction. But I read the last volume, “Le Temps Retrouvé” with awe. It applies to my life, to my attitude to life, and I find it relevant to our days.

The Narrator is an adult and rediscovers a number of people he has known since his childhood, from afar or closer. And le baron de Charlus makes a sort of roll call of the protagonists, from the past and present, as some are dead and others … decrepit. All previous books have tended towards this moment. Time is “found back” (retrouvé) in the present. All that was before is the past. Only the last pages capture the essence of THE moment. But is Time found back or is it now lost?  With a supreme irony, when Time is found, it is definitely lost. The quest to recover it (“A la Recherche du Temps Perdu”) is to find that it was lost while the Narrator was living it. And now that we are at the end of the quest, what we find is … nothing. Or, in any case, not Time as it was before. This is definitely lost.

I often turn back to my past. It was a time…

Yes, it was a time when I had a family, great-grand-parents, grand-parents, parents and other collateral members. Yes, I was a child, a young girl. There were summers that seem warmer than these summers. It was an easy and graceful life. It was a life of books and of music. A life of discussions. A life with friends and neighbours. A life where there were laughs, long shadows in the evenings, short shadows at noon, a cool house, a lovely garden, children shouting and running, flowers, pruned trees and fruits. What a life it was!

But was it?

What do I remember? Do I remember right? Was there truly such a time? There could not have been days like pearls on a perfect necklace of summery days. There could not have been only laughs. And if there was a cool house and a well-tended garden, there were people who did that. It could not have been plays, and music, and books only. The Little Family was already there: some people must have coped with their needs.

I remember Lost Time and would have it Present Time. But this is impossible. Like the Narrator, I listen to a roll-call of deaths: human beings, places, facts, they have all gone and perhaps never existed as I figured them out.

I remember them as I wish they would have been because I need them. I need to comfort myself with a dream that might have been true.

I turn to British (English?) novels that talk of this past time or a time that reminds me of “my” time: Mrs Thirkell’s “Chronicles of Barset”, Miss Read’s “Thrush Green” or “Fairacre”, novels of a time that was written in the first part of the twentieth century. Novels of past fights, of nostalgia, and I forget that, when they were written, they either already were fluffy eiderdowns or were talking of a reality which was not that cosy.

I forget that when these novels were “revived”, in the 1980s, the initiators of this revival wanted to root the present in the past. And, indeed, it is desirable to know the past in order to understand the present and to prepare the future. There is this maxim that one of my conservative great-aunts used to tell me: “the more you adapt yourself to things that change, the less these things change”. I discovered later that she was citing the Antonines and Lampedusa’s “The Leopard”.

Things must move on. We cannot hold time. It slips through our fingers like water or like sand. It does not repeat itself but in scrolls: never exactly different, never exactly the same.

This is a lesson for my personal life that I learn everyday with difficulty, in cahoots, with tears, with pain, with hurts.

This is also a lesson for countries and societies. We shall not come back to an idyllic time that was embellished by … time itself. The Antonines knew that they lived a moment of balance but that this balance was precarious. The Barbarians were to come and destroy the Roman world to build theirs. But were they Barbarians? And what did the Romans do to themselves? Were they not in part their own Barbarians? When Lampedusa makes his Prince Salina advise his nephew, Tancredi, about adopting changes to maintain the possibility of Salinas and Tancredis, what share of responsibility do the Sicilian aristocratic families carry in their own fall?

What is the West’s – and I mean all the First World nations – load of responsibility in its decline? What is Europe’s load of responsibility in its vagaries – and I mean the Continent Europe, not only the European Union -? Have we dreamt our pasts?

Better look at them squarely, learn from them, and go ahead. There is no point in dwelling fruitlessly upon the past. It never comes back.

Turning back In the post before last, I told you how I met Proust when I was ten and a half while he was taking a walk near Combray, admiring hawthorn and Gilberte Swann.

[camille-de-fleurville]

In the post before last, I told you how I met Proust when I was ten and a half while he was taking a walk near Combray, admiring hawthorn and Gilberte Swann. Anecdotally, he helped me look at hawthorn flowers: he mostly helped me look around me, look differently, read, and respect difference. As did Virginia Woolf.

I was no genius and did not understand “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu”. I did not even read the whole of it this spring and summer. I read “Du Côté de chez Swann” and was interested by Marcel because he was a child. I remember the stained glass of the church window with Geneviève de Brabant and la duchesse de Guermantes, a long passage where the Narrator was telling how Tante Léonie liked her potatoes – and that testifies both of my greed and of my fascination for the length of the passage (over two pages for one sentence!) -, the description of the sound of the bell over the rusty gate at Combray, Gilberte au jardin des Champs Elysées, these small things that were close to my life or that I could experience.

Later, I came back to “La Recherche”, book after book, with stumbles, hesitations, darts forward and re-reads, misunderstandings and non-understandings. One does not exhaust the reading of “La Recherche”, as of other great fiction. But I read the last volume, “Le Temps Retrouvé” with awe. It applies to my life, to my attitude to life, and I find it relevant to our days.

The Narrator is an adult and rediscovers a number of people he has known since his childhood, from afar or closer. And le baron de Charlus makes a sort of roll call of the protagonists, from the past and present, as some are dead and others … decrepit. All previous books have tended towards this moment. Time is “found back” (retrouvé) in the present. All that was before is the past. Only the last pages capture the essence of THE moment. But is Time found back or is it now lost?  With a supreme irony, when Time is found, it is definitely lost. The quest to recover it (“A la Recherche du Temps Perdu”) is to find that it was lost while the Narrator was living it. And now that we are at the end of the quest, what we find is … nothing. Or, in any case, not Time as it was before. This is definitely lost.

I often turn back to my past. It was a time…

Yes, it was a time when I had a family, great-grand-parents, grand-parents, parents and other collateral members. Yes, I was a child, a young girl. There were summers that seem warmer than these summers. It was an easy and graceful life. It was a life of books and of music. A life of discussions. A life with friends and neighbours. A life where there were laughs, long shadows in the evenings, short shadows at noon, a cool house, a lovely garden, children shouting and running, flowers, pruned trees and fruits. What a life it was!

But was it?

What do I remember? Do I remember right? Was there truly such a time? There could not have been days like pearls on a perfect necklace of summery days. There could not have been only laughs. And if there was a cool house and a well-tended garden, there were people who did that. It could not have been plays, and music, and books only. The Little Family was already there: some people must have coped with their needs.

I remember Lost Time and would have it Present Time. But this is impossible. Like the Narrator, I listen to a roll-call of deaths: human beings, places, facts, they have all gone and perhaps never existed as I figured them out.

I remember them as I wish they would have been because I need them. I need to comfort myself with a dream that might have been true.

I turn to British (English?) novels that talk of this past time or a time that reminds me of “my” time: Mrs Thirkell’s “Chronicles of Barset”, Miss Read’s “Thrush Green” or “Fairacre”, novels of a time that was written in the first part of the twentieth century. Novels of past fights, of nostalgia, and I forget that, when they were written, they either already were fluffy eiderdowns or were talking of a reality which was not that cosy.

I forget that when these novels were “revived”, in the 1980s, the initiators of this revival wanted to root the present in the past. And, indeed, it is desirable to know the past in order to understand the present and to prepare the future. There is this maxim that one of my conservative great-aunts used to tell me: “the more you adapt yourself to things that change, the less these things change”. I discovered later that she was citing the Antonines and Lampedusa’s “The Leopard”.

Things must move on. We cannot hold time. It slips through our fingers like water or like sand. It does not repeat itself but in scrolls: never exactly different, never exactly the same.

This is a lesson for my personal life that I learn everyday with difficulty, in cahoots, with tears, with pain, with hurts.

This is also a lesson for countries and societies. We shall not come back to an idyllic time that was embellished by … time itself. The Antonines knew that they lived a moment of balance but that this balance was precarious. The Barbarians were to come and destroy the Roman world to build theirs. But were they Barbarians? And what did the Romans do to themselves? Were they not in part their own Barbarians? When Lampedusa makes his Prince Salina advise his nephew, Tancredi, about adopting changes to maintain the possibility of Salinas and Tancredis, what share of responsibility do the Sicilian aristocratic families carry in their own fall?

What is the West’s – and I mean all the First World nations – load of responsibility in its decline? What is Europe’s load of responsibility in its vagaries – and I mean the Continent Europe, not only the European Union -? Have we dreamt our pasts?

Better look at them squarely, learn from them, and go ahead. There is no point in dwelling fruitlessly upon the past. It never comes back.

Turning back In the post before last, I told you how I met Proust when I was ten and a half while he was taking a walk near Combray, admiring hawthorn and Gilberte Swann.

[camille-de-fleurville]

Diary (8) - Anne-Fleur's tears

Diary (8) – Anne-Fleur’s tears

  Tuesday was the first warm summer day of the year. Yesterday was better – or worse: it depends how you like your temperature. Around 2 pm, it was flirting with 35° C. There is no air conditioning at home but good isolation and a subtle play with the opening and shutting of shutters and windows, according to moments of the day and the course of the sun.

This causes problems to The Girls:…

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Diary (7) - Mentally handicapped, mentally disabled, different

Diary (7) – Mentally handicapped, mentally disabled, different

circa 1933: English critic, novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941). (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)

I was ten when I first met Virginia Woolf. I was something like ten and a half when I met Marcel Proust. These two meetings were to be decisive for my future life.

Of course, they were not in-person meetings. I may have already told you about them, but I need to remember them…

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Poetry is honey for the soul (13) - Camille

Poetry is honey for the soul (13) – Camille

Poetry is honey for the soul

Today is Sunday and I have chosen the poem of the day.

It was mentioned once in a blog,

I looked for it and found it.

It is, for me, as a foreigner, something very English,

not British, English.

Something I would find with Anthony Trollope, with John Donne,

with John Keats, with Mrs Gaskell, with Barbara Pym.

Something Victorian and Edwardian,

a nostalgia for a past…

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Where I try to write a "straight" book review: "Mrs Ames"

Where I try to write a “straight” book review: “Mrs Ames”

A pre-Lucia and Mapp novel with the same ingredients but less hilarious – if Benson’s humour, always in the understatement, may be called hilarious – perhaps because less mature. However, there comes a portrait and pains of a woman, and the novel takes a new direction. Not as funny as Lucia & Co but perhaps more rounded and definitely not Wodehousian.

I am glad I re-read this book. I shall…

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Poetry is honey for the soul (12) - Ellen Moody

Poetry is honey for the soul (12) – Ellen Moody

Poetry is honey for the soul

Ellen has already contributed to this collection of poems chosen by blogger readers for other blogger readers. Her first choice was this poem by Judith Wright:

Today she suggests two poems linked by the same theme of birds. The first is well-known as it is “The Ode to a Nightingale” by Keats, read by Stephen Fry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKVNJH0SbUM

 Th…