"Rabagas," whom I know on a Sun Court list, has made an interesting post about his translation of a play by Ferdinand Dugue about the Duke de Roquelaure. What's unusual about this writer's work is that the subject is consistently of a father's love for a child. This is a historical play set in the 17th century, and written in the 18th century, but even so, the perspective bears mention.
To quote:
It's a really good play, and it deals, rather unusually for its day, with the rights of an adoptive parent versus those of a natural parent, and comes down firmly on the side of adoptive parent.
This is the 3rd play by Dugue that I've worked on... All three plays deal with a father's love for his children ... This is an unusual theme for the 1850's and Dugue treats it with sophistication and care, in several different contexts.
So the question, for me, is: how did men feel about their children in 17th century France? I don't believe it is possible to generalize. Louis XIV was an emotional man—there are a number of accounts of him giving way to tears in public—and he is said to have broken down over the death of a newly-born infant daughter. On the other hand, he was reportedly unmoved by the death of his teen-age son by Louise de la Vallière—but who knows what he felt, in truth? In piecing together historical realities, we are like the proverbial blind-men feeling an elephant, trying to describe the nature of the beast: it's a tail, a trunk, an ear. We only have scraps of facts to go by; the rest must be left to intuition—an informed intuition, but intuition none-the-less.
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