Sos, knowing I had a 10 hour flight to the Paris I wanted, I took three books. Rilke's little book about Rodin, that I had searched for and finally found and finally read on the plane. Rilke worked as Rodin's secretary so he knew him well. I also brought the above, George Sand's novel about her affair with Alfred De Musset in Paris in the early 1800s. Sand was much more interesting as a character than as an author- all the books are humorless and overwrought drama. The third was a paperback titled Henry & June, which was Anais Nin's diaries about her affair with Henry Miller in Paris in the 1930s.
Needless to say, I read the Sand after Rilke. It was humorless and overly dramatic and De Musseet comes off as bipolar. All sorts of strum and drang
about stupid and silly lover misunderstandings and a lot of hysterical encounters with people fainting.
I skipped the last 1/5 of it because it was just stupid and I really have a hard time identifying with characters that are insanely neurotic.
So I came back and finished reading 300 some odd pages about Nin & Miller, who were also crazy but at least there was a lot of hot sex in it.
So I ordered the below book: The Cofession of a Child of the Century by Alfred De Musset (not this movie version- which might actually come off better) It's his version of his affair with George Sand. Anyway, De Musset is still bipolar and still incredibly self centered and histrionic.
I skipped the last 1/5 of this one too, because it was just so much of a waste.
There is a pornographic lesbian novel that De Musset wrote that is supposedly his fantasy of his affair with Sand. I might go looking for that out of a sense of one's duty to get all sides.
Only read this stuff if you're goth and want to commit suicide often.
