Théophile Gautier

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sarah Terry.

The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt by Théophile Gautier.

Translated by F. C. de Sumichrast.

Prologue, part one.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org.

The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt by Théophile Gautier.

Translated by F.C. de Sommiquest.

Many thinkers who lived before Freud, and some who live contemporaneously with him, have maintained that the world itself is a fantasy, or, in de Casser's phrase, a superstition of the senses.

Gaultier has pointed out that we live only by illusion, by a process of seeing ourselves and all things as they are not, the animals alone being without imagination have no escape from reality from heretic to psychoanalyst from poet to rag-picker we are all in flight from the real truth is what we desire it to be and the facts of life are a masquerade in which we imagine that we have identified the maskers the highest intellectuals have always delighted in poetic fantasy and philosophic paradox knowing well that the universe itself is multiform fantasy and paradox and that everything perceived or conceived as actuality is merely one phase of that which has or may have innumerable aspects In this phantom world of the infinite, among these veils of Maya that are sevenfold behind sevenfold, nothing is too absurd, too lovely, or dreadful to be impossible.

End of section 14.

On Fantasy.

He sought from it an accompaniment, in the musical sense of the term, to the movements of his soul, and being somewhat prone to melancholy, his taste seems to have favored somber landscapes, stormy and tragical.

The entire Romantic school was born from him, Victor Hugo and George Sand, Théophile Gautier, who draws from the French tongue resources unequaled in wealth and color, and even M. Zola himself, whose naturalism, after all, is but the last form and, as it were, the end of Romanticism, since it would be difficult to discover in him any characteristic that did not exist, as a germ at least, in Balzac.

I have just said that Chateaubriand sought in nature an accompaniment to the movements of his soul.

This was the case with all the Romanticists.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sarah Terry.

The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt by Théophile Gautier.

Translated by F. C. de Sumichrast.

Prologue, part one.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org.

The romance of a mummy and Egypt by Théophile Gautier.

Translated by F.C. de Sumichrast The romance of a mummy prologue part three Shall I open the sarcophagus? said Argyropoulos, after Lord Evandale and Dr.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sarah Terry.

The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt by Théophile Gautier.

Translated by F. C. de Sumichrast.

Prologue, Part 1.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org.

The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt by Théophile Gautier Translated by F.C. de Sumichrast The Romance of the Mummy Prologue, Part 2 While this conversation was going on, the workmen, urged by Argyropoulos, proceeded to lift the great stone slab which filled up the orifice of the passage.

As they cleared away the slab in order to pass their crowbars under it, for Lord Evendale had ordered that nothing should be broken, they turned up in the sand innumerable small statuettes a few inches in height, of blue and green enamelled ware, of admirable workmanship.

the next spine-tingling true adventure tale from The Lives of the Highwaymen, stories of the rogues and doxies who made the romantic age spicy.

Before we finish this episode off, let's continue our reading of Claremonde by Théophile Gautier.

1836, the original title was La Morte Amoureuse, translation by Lefkadio Hearn, 1909.

We started this story two weeks ago in the bonus Oops All Vampires episode.

And this, brother, is the story of my youth.

Never gaze upon a woman, and walk abroad only with your eyes ever fixed on the ground, for, however chaste and watchful one may be, the error of a single moment is enough to make one lose eternity.

The End Okay, Théophile Gautier, even in translation, is just a master.

The next early Victorian ghost story will be coming up on the next Sixpenny Spookies episode on the first Sunday of next month.

[on-hold music]That was Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic with the second section of Gustav Mahler's Seventh Symphony, the section called by the composer Night Music.

The French composer Hector Berlioz lived next door to the poet Théophile Gautier, and in 1841, Berlioz took six of Gautier's poems and set them for a soprano singer and piano.

He called the group of them Les nuits d'été or Summer Nights.

In 1856, he arranged them for singer and orchestra, and I'm gonna play you the one called The Ghost of the Rose, Le spectre de la rose.

In my ignorance, I thought I was lapsing from a sane and proper ideal.

And then, the second miracle in my career, which has been full of miracles, I came across a casual reference in The Staffordshire Recorder, of all places, to the Mademoiselle de Maupin of Théophile Gautier.

Something in the reference, I no longer remember what, caused me to guess that the book was a revelation of matters hidden from me.

I bought it.