"...a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold.
"There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke. My jovial cackling at first disconcerted Eugenie, until she herself was infected by my mirth. We laughed until we cried."
Have you ever had a similar experience? I know at the end of a really bad day, I do indeed start laughing - though I've never had as bad a day as Jean-Dominique must have had.
Yeah, that was great scene. The Empress Eugenie coming back from the dead for a hospital visit.
ReplyDeleteLaughter is such an essential part of our humanity. Sometimes it's all we have. If there's a situation beyond our control, lots of bad things happening, we can't change it, but we can retake a measure of control by laughing at it. We can reassert our spirit.
(I didn't know much about Eugenie. I looked her up and saw that she was largely blamed for the death of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico. "Critics claimed that she had encouraged French involvement in Mexico as a means of keeping herself busy and to get over her husband's affairs." Not funny, lady.)
Yeah, I liked that scene. It was kind of touching how he felt a kinship with an inanimate bust of Eugenie -- both stuck in the hospital, unable to move or talk.
ReplyDeleteGreat point about laughing, too. I've found many trying situations where laughter was a tremendous help.
Oh dear! Thanks, kc, for the research - but I confess now that I like Eugenie far less than I thought I did.
ReplyDeleteI like your thoughts on this, Erin. Funny how limiting circumstances make us more sympathetic to, or at least aware of, the things around us. I thought I read somewhere that the actor Christopher Reeve said he'd never fully appreciated the way clouds move until after his immobilizing accident.