About
Hucheloup had invented a capital thing which could be eaten nowhere but in his house, stuffed carps, which he called carpes au gras. One fine morning, he had seen fit to notify passers-by of this "specialty"; he had dipped a brush in a pot of black paint, and as he was an orthographer on his own account, as well as a cook after his own fashion, he had improvised on his wall this remarkable inscription:--
CARPES HO GRAS.
One winter, the rain-storms and the showers had taken a fancy to obliterate the S which terminated the first word, and the G which began the third; this is what remained:--
CARPE HO RAS.
Time and rain assisting, a humble gastronomical announcement had become a profound piece of advice.
-Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Technical Details
800x600 resolution or higher recommended; works best at higher resolutions. Written in a plain ol' text editor on a Windows XP laptop running 1400x1050, and tested in Firefox 1.5, IE 6, Opera 9.10, and Netscape 8.0. Graphics made in Photoshop 7.0.
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.
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. All the fanfiction should be taken with several grains of salt, lime, and tequila.
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. Please contact me if you find any errors.
The essays are gone, unfortunately; the original ones were written in the idiosyncratic and slightly spastic style proper to LiveJournal, which I decided ought to stay on LiveJournal. I might rewrite them piecemeal at some point in the future and put them back up on the site under Fanworks.
The Webmistress
Is a lifelong fandom nerd and part-time goth, whose interests outside of Les Mis include singing (classical and opera), linguistics (historical), Victoriana (morbid), computer geekery, and LiveJournal. She is not an academic, though she has been known to impersonate one to further her geeky research interests.
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.