"Night" (La Nuit) by Guy de Maupassant

6 months ago
1

Published 1887.

The picture used is "Café Terrace at Night" by Vincent van Gogh.

There's a fantastic black and white photo of the steps of Montmartre, by David Clapp, but I don't know what the copyright status of it is. I believe David Clapp is still alive and active, so probably fully copyrighted, but I just don't know. I would have used it if I could have figured that out, but since I can't, you'll have to look it up for yourself.

To follow along: http://maupassant.free.fr/textes/anglais/night.html

The editor of the collection I'm reading from has been taking some liberties with the titles of the stories, which up to this point hasn't been a big deal, the liberties taken so far are well within artistic license for a translator. However, this specific story, for some reason, he entitled "A Queer Night in Paris". Now what the narrator describes in the story may well be a very queer night in the city of Paris, but the problem here is that Guy wrote a completely different story with that exact title. And we can see the French title for this story, "La Nuit", is clearly just "Night", so why use the title of a different story for this one? How bizarre. Definitely outside the scope of artistic license, that's just bad editing. C'est la vie. At least I caught it and corrected it here for my own recording purposes.

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