When we hatched the idea for this adventure we imagined that it would be easy to find works by all of the authors, they're Nobel Prize winners after all, but the first two authors have proved us wrong.
We thought we found success at first when we located a book of Rene Sully-Prudhommes poems on Amazon. The listing said that the work was in English and 64 pages long. We ordered it, but when it came we were all disappointed to find that the book was actually in French and only sixteen pages long. Since none of us speak or read french the booklet was of no use to us.
Luckily we managed to find a book on Nobel laureates at the library that contained some poems by Sully-Prudhomme and selections from his journal, which gives us even greater insight into the mind of the poet than we expected. Our author won the prize when he was 62 and the selection of his journal that we have is from when he was in his twenties.
He seems to be heartbroken and melancholy. While he writes often of women he doesn't seem to really understand them. He is funny at times too, changing abruptly from one thing to the next and makes dramatic, sweeping statements that tend to the preposterous, here's one of my favorites:
"I cannot think how an ugly woman can appear at a ball; it does not make sense. It is a strange illusion on the part of women to imagine that the clothes make one forget about the face and the figure! I hate ugliness, I hate it to the point where I am harsh and unfair toward these poor disgraced creatures. Ugliness is a groping, a stupidity, a farce of nature's; it revolts me. An ugly woman covered in finery is and can only be a prop, and one regrets that the clothes do not hide her completely."As if a woman appears at a ball only for the amusement of others! No wonder he was unsuccessful in love.
But I'm being hard on poor Rene. He is also full of very beautiful musings and observations on the nature of life and happiness, like this:
"...happiness is possible, it exists! These attacks of joy last for a minute at most with me, just long enough to plunge my face in the refreshing stream and to withdraw it, the time it takes for hope to wing its way through the night of thought and vanish..."Lovely.
