The Site
This phenomenal waste of bandwidth got underway sometime in spring 2006, mainly as a place to put all my transcriptions and translations and a bunch of cast lists. It was originally hosted on frenchboys.net, but I finally got around to getting it its own webhost and domain name in March 2008. Early versions of the site were hard-coded by hand in a text editor, which got utterly unmanageable after a certain point, so for now it’s running on WordPress for basic content management.
All the translations in the book section, and several of the cast lists in the musical section, should be taken with a grain of salt. I’m missing liner notes for an astonishing number of cast recordings, so quoting the cast lists as if they were gospel is probably not a good idea. I have multiple sources for most of them, but misspellings and flat-out inaccuracies are a very real possibility. The translations, meanwhile, were actually what I used to teach myself French (or at least what I used to claw my way up from a beginner classroom grasp of the language to some sort of competence in French As She Is Spoken), so the early ones are bound to be rough around the edges. Please use the form below to contact me if you find any errors.
Yours Truly
Is a lifelong fandom nerd and part-time goth, whose interests outside of Les Mis and French history include computer geekery, theatre, creative writing, singing (classical and opera), linguistics (historical), and blogging (formerly LiveJournal, now–God help her–Tumblr). She is not an academic, though she has been known to impersonate one to further her geeky research interests. Should you wish to contact her, she can be reached using the form below.
Sources
All translations are my own, except in the excerpts from Barricades, where they were done by Harsin. Footnotes, unless noted otherwise, were part of the original text.
Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables, Édition établie et annotée par Maurice Allem. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1951.
Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle, 1st series. Paris: EDHIS, 1974. Vol. 2, 11, 12.
Harsin, Jill. Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830-1848. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Atget, Eugène. “Le quartier des Halles.” Gallica. http://gallica2.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b3100014b.
Gennerat, Christian. “Cartographie de Paris et de sa banlieue.” http://plans.paris.online.fr/.
Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. Ed. Claude Aziza. Paris: Pocket Classiques, 1992.