The Gods Are Athirst

Sexual history becomes especially dangerous when a lover treats an imagined rival as a fact about another person. In this novel, the wish to know, the wish to possess and the wish to punish can reinforce one another. Political suspicion lends a public vocabulary to private jealousy. The resulting judgement can look impersonal to the person making it precisely because an institution has given it a recognised form.

France also gives the body a persistent place in public history. Hunger, illness, sexual desire, fatigue and fear interrupt programmes of regeneration. The descriptions of bread, meals, clothes and small purchases keep the reader close to the needs on which declarations of virtue act. They also prevent the crowd from becoming a single, permanent subject. People gather for food, entertainment, a procession, a political assembly or an execution; the purpose and composition of a gathering change.

Gamelin’s mother remembers the old order through experiences that do not arrange themselves into her son’s moral scheme. Such recollection has its own inconsistencies, but it gives the reader a measure of what ideological explanation omits. France’s narration can preserve affection and expose error in the same person. The English seeks the same freedom of movement.

History inside fiction

The novel’s public figures, assemblies, political trials, festivals and laws have a historical existence beyond the story. The same is true of much of its physical Paris. The notes give enough information to identify these references and to distinguish the local committees of a section from the national committees of the Convention. They do not treat every invented conversation as a record of what a historical person said.

Chronology needs particular care. The first chapter places a petition against twenty-two deputies beside a panorama of military and municipal crises that developed at different moments in spring 1793. It also invokes the earlier distinction between active and passive citizens after that distinction had been abolished for elections to the Convention. Translating these passages into a perfectly consistent chronology would change France’s text. The edition retains them and explains the difficulty where it occurs.

A character’s allegation is another kind of historical problem. Claims about conspirators, bankers, foreign agents or the hidden direction of events belong first to the speaker or thinker to whom France assigns them. A note may identify the real person named without endorsing the accusation. This distinction becomes especially important when Gamelin’s inward account of events grows more comprehensive and more assured.

The broad historical sequence remains legible: the Republic confronts war and civil conflict; rival revolutionary groups struggle over authority; exceptional judicial and political measures grow; the overthrow of Robespierre changes the distribution of power. The novel places that sequence inside the much smaller scale of neighbourhood, livelihood and attachment. Its effects are experienced through particular encounters and particular losses.

The narrator’s manner

France’s irony often depends on placing two sentences beside one another. Trubert says that the situation is unchanged; the narration supplies an appalling catalogue. The carpenter wants citizens compelled to attend the assembly; he then remembers what their attendance would mean. Neither episode needs a new sentence telling the reader to recognise hypocrisy or self-deception. An English translation that adds the judgement can weaken the arrangement that already makes it visible.

The narration also changes distance. It can report a public claim, enter a character’s thought, linger over a small object, or withdraw into a general reflection. Those reflections should not automatically be reassigned to the nearest character. Their position in the narrative matters. So does the possibility that a later scene will put pressure on what has sounded like a settled observation.

Repetition and contrast are often carried by concrete things: an altar, a print, a puppet, a flower, a piece of clothing, an inscription, a melody. The notes explain references that would otherwise be obscure, but they leave room for these objects to accumulate significance as the reader encounters them. The surviving verbal link between Trubert’s reassurance and the refrain he hums is one small example. The same English phrase is used in both places.

Reading the parallel text

The French occupies the left page and the English the facing right page in the print files. Each spread presents corresponding portions of a chapter. Paragraph locators have been added to both languages so that the reader can follow a passage when differences of sentence structure carry a phrase across a page boundary. These are editorial locators, not numbering supplied by France. Letters and songs are included in their proper places.