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CLISSON AND. EUGÉNIE
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CLISSON AND EUGÉNIE
TRANSLATOR’ S NOTE
AFTERWORD
INTERPRETATION OF CLISSON AND EUGÉNIE
A SELF-PORTRAIT. The Birth of a Novelist
A Relationship is Formed
Clisson and Eugénie is Drafted
The Protagonists in Clisson and Eugénie
A NOVEL
Elements of the Epistolary Novel
The Narrative of Reverie
A Pastoral Novel
BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MANUSCRIPT
NOTE TO READERS
FURTHER READING
About the Author
Copyright
More historical fiction from Gallic
Translated from the French by Peter Hicks
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There are two things to point out about the story’s abbreviated style. The first is that it is not easy to write in such a way. It is no easier to compose concise sentences than long ones and it takes as much skill to write sparely as to create prose that is liberally laced with metaphors. So a terse pared-down style requires as much talent as the ornate flowery style espoused by many contemporary French writers.
It is quite obvious that Clisson and Eugénie has been worked and reworked many times. Napoleon spent hours and hours on the story, take it from me, another writer. So the book is not just the hasty scrawl of a general, bored in his barracks; it is a work that haunted the man, that exhausted him, that tormented him until he had the correct sentences down on paper. One should not be misled by the unfinished appearance of the story. True, there appear to be little things missing, and certainly the work was not fully finished. But there is enough evidence from the versions left to posterity that Napoleon worked at and polished the writing several times, and that the opening at least was very close to the final version, had Napoleon been able to finish it.
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