The Gay Purr-ee/Cat Pure Party went well. It was about $35 total for all the food, which consisted of champagne, brie, camembert, french bread, fake foie gras (foie de canard with pork, which was all I could find -- I think the animal rights folks may have some sway around here), truffle pte, and homemade crpes with fruit and powdered sugar. My sister dressed up like a Frenchman (she had to borrow a turtleneck and beret from me, but she brought her own moustache) and we played La Marseillaise while waiting for everyone to show up.
Incidentally, I'd never known what the words to La Marseillaise were before, but the whole song is about murdering murderous foreigners so that their "filthy blood will water the furrows of our fields." Meaning even France has cooler lyrics to its national anthem than America. I really think we need to do something about the Star-Spangled Banner, the poem wasn't well put together in the first place and the language is getting so old fashioned -- that's the reason why, when TV shows go out and ask folks on the street to sing the anthem, nobody seems to know the words. The language is so outdated it's becoming nonsensical, plus the sentence structure doesn't help: "Oh, say, can you see -- by the dawn's early light -- what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming; whose bright stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight o'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?"
I've taken to always singing the lyrics to To Anacreon in Heaven instead of the Star-Spangled Banner lyrics.
Anyway... I'm still working on the Eugenie translation, polishing it up, and have made an interesting discovery. A 1767 issue of the Mercure de France has a theater review of the play, that quotes extensively from it... but sometimes the quotations are a little different than the published text, and it even quotes passages (and describes) an entire scene that's missing from the final text. So I'm thinking I might have to translate that review and include it in a printing of the play. I was intending to print Eugenie as part of a complete works thing buy maybe I'll make a single edition of it so as to include this extra information.
Incidentally, I'd never known what the words to La Marseillaise were before, but the whole song is about murdering murderous foreigners so that their "filthy blood will water the furrows of our fields." Meaning even France has cooler lyrics to its national anthem than America. I really think we need to do something about the Star-Spangled Banner, the poem wasn't well put together in the first place and the language is getting so old fashioned -- that's the reason why, when TV shows go out and ask folks on the street to sing the anthem, nobody seems to know the words. The language is so outdated it's becoming nonsensical, plus the sentence structure doesn't help: "Oh, say, can you see -- by the dawn's early light -- what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming; whose bright stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight o'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?"
I've taken to always singing the lyrics to To Anacreon in Heaven instead of the Star-Spangled Banner lyrics.
Anyway... I'm still working on the Eugenie translation, polishing it up, and have made an interesting discovery. A 1767 issue of the Mercure de France has a theater review of the play, that quotes extensively from it... but sometimes the quotations are a little different than the published text, and it even quotes passages (and describes) an entire scene that's missing from the final text. So I'm thinking I might have to translate that review and include it in a printing of the play. I was intending to print Eugenie as part of a complete works thing buy maybe I'll make a single edition of it so as to include this extra information.
Sorry you had to make do with faux foie gras. Glad the party went well.