French Middle Ages literature, Bonaparte, Arabic travel writing

Since my last post, I've read an issue of The Economist and an issue of The Globe.

I only teach the first week of December, and I take advantage of it every year to read much more. This year, I'm giving a big push in the French collection Bibliotheque de la Pleiade. I hope to have only a few volumes left to read at the close of the year.

Well, so far I've been reading the most extraordinary things. The first was the volume of Arabic travel writing, Voyageurs arabes. It was really something to read the accounts, written over 1000 years ago, of travel throughout the Middle East, China and India, even central Asia. One writer describes the Russians as the dirtiest people in the world -- not washing before eating or after sex, and compares them to wandering donkeys. I can only imagine what my European forbears must have seemed like to aristocrats from other, more advanced, cultures.

The next was Jeux et Sapience du Moyen Age. These were the earliest know plays in French, or what I would call middle French, it's so old. There was a book on hunting, and a travelogue through Jerusalem, and excerpts from a treasury, that is to say, an encyclopedia of the era. The plays are charming and simple, and what I took away the most was the fact that I no longer have anyone with whom to speak the old French, now that my uncle has died. Oh, I speak French a bit in my professional life, but not with the heavy accent and contractions and archaic grammar of my mother's generation.

Finally, I'm reading right now the Memorial de Sainte Helene, written by Napoleon Bonaparte's chamberlain. It is incredible to be reading first hand accounts of the great man as he endures imprisonment and reflects on his life.