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Louis XIV to French Revolution - suggestions?

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Catherine Delors
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Post by Catherine Delors » Thu February 18th, 2010, 12:05 pm

Let us know how it goes, I am curious... :)

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Miss Moppet
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Post by Miss Moppet » Thu February 18th, 2010, 8:34 pm

[quote=""Catherine Delors""]Let us know how it goes, I am curious... :) [/quote]

I just started La Nouvelle Heloise so it'll be a while before I get back to Proust. Don't know how I am going to get on with LNH. Academics seem to think it is insipid but the reviews at Goodreads are more enthusiastic.

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Catherine Delors
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Post by Catherine Delors » Thu February 18th, 2010, 8:37 pm

Some academics do love LNH. I prefer Proust... (great sense of humour.)

M.M. Bennetts

Post by M.M. Bennetts » Thu August 26th, 2010, 6:26 pm

Janine Montupet's The Lacemaker is just superb in either French or English.

And I assume that the three volume biography of Beaumarchais in French was better than the reduced translation into one volume in English, can't think of the author--it came out in English last year, I think.

But Beaumarchais had his finger literally in every pie. And because of that, one got to see really how corrupt was the judicial system of the ancien regime, how the kings really exerted their influence or didn't--he was music tutor to the King's children, how the ancien regime really thought about sex--his letters are stunningly explicit, the media wars, everything about the latter part of the 18th century in Paris, in fact.

SGM
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Post by SGM » Thu August 26th, 2010, 7:20 pm

If you are going beyond the Revolution and into the wars, then there is Arthur Conan Doyle's Brigadier Gerard. Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, Marge Piercey's City of Darkness, City of Light, Rafael Sabitini's Scaramouche
Currently reading - Emergence of a Nation State by Alan Smith

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