Split (1)

train · 2.09M rows

identifier stringlengths 1 43	dataset stringclasses 3 values	question stringclasses 4 values	rank int64 0 99	url stringlengths 14 1.88k	language stringclasses 1 value	title stringlengths 0 200	top_image stringlengths 0 125k	meta_img stringlengths 0 125k	images listlengths 0 18.2k	movies listlengths 0 484	keywords listlengths 0 0	meta_keywords listlengths 1 48.5k	tags null	authors listlengths 0 10	publish_date stringlengths 19 32 ⌀	meta_description stringlengths 0 258k	meta_lang stringclasses 68 values	meta_favicon stringlengths 0 20.2k	meta_site_name stringlengths 0 641	canonical_link stringlengths 9 1.88k ⌀	text stringlengths 0 100k
5097	dbpedia	3	2	https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Theophile_Gautier	en	New World Encyclopedia	https://www.newworldency…avicon-32x32.png	https://www.newworldency…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/images/nwe_header.jpg", "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/d/images/thumb/b/bd/Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier_by_Nadar_c1856-1.jpg/200px-Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier_by_Nadar_c1856-1.jpg", "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/d/images/thumb/d/d6/Th%C3%A9ophil_Gautier_1856_Nadar.jpg/300px-Th%C3%A9ophil_Gautier_1856_Nadar.jpg", "https://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/skins/common/images/Cc.logo.circle.png", "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/resources/assets/poweredby_mediawiki_88x31.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	https://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/favicon.ico		https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Theophile_Gautier	Théophile Gautier Théophile Gautier photographed by Nadar Born: August 30 1811(1811-08-30) Tarbes, France Died: October 23 1872 (aged 61) Neuilly-sur-Seine, France Occupation(s): Writer, poet, painter, art critic Literary movement: Parnassianism, Romanticism Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (August 30, 1811 – October 23, 1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and literary critic whose life spans two major phases in the development of French literature. Gautier was born in the height of French Romanticism; he was a friend of Victor Hugo, and in his early years he wrote poems that effused the highly sentimental and overwrought style of the Romantics. In mid-life, however, Gautier made a dramatic about-face; he became one of Romanticism's fiercest critics, spending most of his time in the middle-period of his career satirizing Romantic poets. By the time he had come into his own as a poet and completely outgrown his youthful Romantic tendencies, Gautier had evolved into an entirely unique voice in French literature. Famous as one of the earliest champions of "Art for art's sake," Gautier's aesthetic attitudes and lean style—reminiscent of Balzac's—would herald a number of developments in late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature, among them the development of the schools of Naturalism and Modernism, as well as French Symbolist and Surrealist poetry. Gautier's eclectic output and changing opinions makes him one of the most protean figures in French literature. He left behind no single magnum opus—whether play, poem, novel, or essay—that defined his opinions and solidified his position amidst his contemporaries. Having lived in a period of major transition in French artistic and literary tastes, it is difficult to characterize Gautier in any of the typical historical periods. Although his output may be in some degrees uneven, Gautier's sheer prolificness, as well as his endless creativity and iconoclasm, makes him one of the most engaging, beguiling, and important literary figures of his era. Life Théophile Gautier was born on August 30, 1811, in Tarbes, capital of Hautes-Pyrénées département in southwestern France. His father, Pierre Gautier, was a fairly cultured minor government official, and his mother was Antoinette-Adelaïde Concarde. The family moved to Paris in 1814, taking residence in the ancient Marais district. Gautier’s education commenced at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris (alumni include Charles Baudelaire and Voltaire), which he attended for three months before being brought home due to illness. Although he completed the remainder of his education at Collège Charlemagne, Gautier’s most significant instruction came from his father, whose love of classical literature inspired Gautier to undertake the study of Latin. While at school, Gautier befriended Gérard de Nerval and the two became lifelong friends. It is through Nerval that Gautier was introduced to Victor Hugo, one of the most influential Romantic writers of the age. Hugo became a major influence on Gautier; it is believed that Hugo convinced him to attempt a career as a writer. Towards the end of 1830, Gautier began to frequent meetings of Le Petit Cénacle, a group of artists who met in the studio of Jehan Du Seigneur. The group was a more young and cynical version of Hugo’s Cénacle, a similar, older group of artists and writers which had a major influence over the development of Romanticism in France. Gautier's Cénacle consisted of such artists as Gérard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, Petrus Borel, Alphonse Brot, Joseph Bouchardy, and Philothée O’Neddy. Le Petit Cénacle soon gained a reputation for extravagance and eccentricity, but also as a unique refuge from society. Gautier began writing poetry as early as 1826, but the majority of his life was spent as a contributor to various journals, mainly for La Presse, which also gave him the opportunity for foreign travel and meeting many influential contacts in high society and in the world of the arts. During his career as a reporter, Gautier became a well-traveled man, taking trips to Spain, Italy, Russia, Egypt, and Algeria. Gautier would later gain a good deal of fame and popularity through his series of travel books, including Voyage en Espagne (1843), Trésors d’Art de la Russie (1858), and Voyage en Russie (1867). Gautier's travel literature is considered by many as some of the best from the nineteenth century, often written in a personal style, providing a glimpse not only of the world, but also of the mind of one of the most gifted writers of the nineteenth century. In 1848, Paris erupted in revolution; King Louis Philippe would be forced to abdicate the throne and, after a period of anarchy and a brief experiment in democratic rule, Louis Napoleon would seize control of France, founding the Second Empire. During these tumultuous days, Gautier wrote at a fever-pitch. 497 newspapers were founded in Paris during the Revolution of 1848, and Gautier participated directly in the explosive growth of French journalism; within nine months, Gautier had written four solid volumes worth of journalism. Following the revolution, Gautier's talents as a journalist would continue to be recognized. His prestige was confirmed by his role as director of Revue de Paris from 1851-1856. During these years Gautier first began to gravitate away from Romanticism; he began to publish essays and editorials that toyed with his idea of "art for art's sake." During these years he also began to develop a serious reputation as a gifted poet. The 1860s were years of assured literary fame for Gautier. Although he was rejected by the French Academy three times (1867, 1868, 1869), Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the most influential critic of the day, set the seal of approval on the poet by devoting no less than three major articles to a review of Gautier’s entire published work in 1863. In 1865, Gautier was admitted into the prestigious salon of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, cousin of Napoleon II and a niece to Bonaparte. The Princess offered Gautier a sinecure as her librarian in 1868, a position which gave him access to the court of Napoleon III. During the Franco-Prussian war, Gautier made his way back to Paris upon hearing of the Prussian advance on the capital. He remained with his family throughout the invasion and the aftermath of the Paris Commune, eventually dying on October 23, 1872, due to a long-standing cardiac disease. Gautier was sixty-two years old. He was interred at the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris. Works Criticism Gautier spent the majority of his career as a journalist at La Presse and later at Le Moniteur universel. He saw journalistic criticism as a means to a middle-class standard of living, although he complained that his work writing for newspapers drained his creative energy and prevented him from writing more poetry. Gautier’s literary criticism is notably poetic, almost lyrical, in nature: His reviews often seem to be as much about Gautier and his own thoughts and tastes as they are about the book or person being reviewed. Nevertheless, in his roundabout way, Gautier always manages to be an insightful and generous critic of many of the writers of his generation. Later in life Gautier also wrote extensive monographs on such giants as Gérard de Nerval, Honore de Balzac, and Charles Baudelaire, which have become touchstones for scholarly work on these figures. Art Criticism: At a very young age Gautier dreamed of becoming a painter, an ambition he did not abandon until he met Victor Hugo and was inspired instead to become a writer. Ironically, despite his early background in the visual arts, Gautier did not contribute a great volume of essays to the world of art criticism. Nevertheless, Gautier is one of the more important figures in the evolution of art criticism in France. Gautier had a peculiar style of art criticism which was, at its time, rather controversial. Strongly influenced by Denis Diderot’s idea that the critic should have the ability to describe the art so as the reader can “see” it through description alone, Gautier wrote art criticism without any reference to the classical principles of line, form, color and so on; rather he attempted, as much as possible, to recreate or "transpose" the painting into prose. Although today Gautier is less well known as an art critic than Baudelaire, he was more highly regarded by the painters of his time. In 1862, he was elected chairman of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts through which he became a close associate of such painters as Eugène Delacroix, Edouard Manet, Gustave Doré, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Theatre Criticism: The majority of Gautier’s career was spent writing a weekly column of theatrical criticism. Because Gautier wrote so frequently on plays, he began to consider the nature of the plays and developed the criteria by which they should be judged. His principles for the structure of drama have gone on to influence a number of playwrights and theater critics in France and abroad. Gautier suggested that the traditional five acts of a play could be reduced to three: an exposition, a complication, and a dénouement. Gautier also attacked the classical idea that tragedy is the superior genre, arguing that comedy was, at its greatest, of equal artistic merit. In addition to this, Gautier argued strongly against "realistic" theater; he believed that theater, as a medium, was best suited to the portrayal of fantasy, and that attempting to mimic reality was simply, in his own words, "undesireable." Early poetry Poésies (1830) Poésies, published in 1830, is a collection of forty-two poems that Gautier composed at the age of 18. However, as the publication took place during the July Revolution, no copies were sold and the volume was eventually withdrawn. In 1832, the poems were reissued, printed in the same volume with Gautier's epic Albertus. Another publication was released in 1845, that included revisions of some of the poems. The most significant aspect of these early poems is that they are written in a wide variety of verse forms, documenting Gautier's wide knowledge of French poetry as well as his attempts to imitate other more established Romantic poets such as Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, and Hugo. Albertus (1831) Albertus, published in 1832, is a long narrative poem of one hundred and twenty-two stanzas, each consisting of twelve lines of alexandrine (twelve-syllable) verse, except for the last line of each stanza, which is octosyllabic. Albertus is a parody of Romantic literature, especially of tales of the macabre and the supernatural. The poems tell a story of an ugly witch who magically transforms at midnight into an alluring young woman. Albertus, the hero, falls deeply in love and agrees to sell his soul, only to discover his mistake—and the hideousness of the witch—after his soul has already been lost. The publication of this poem marks Gautier's sharp turn away from Romantic sentiments. La Comédie de la Mort (1838) La Comédie de la Mort, published in 1838, is a period piece much like Albertus. In this work, Gautier focuses on the theme of death, which for Gautier is a terrifying, stifling, and irreversible finality. Unlike many Romantics before him, Gautier’s vision of death is solemn and portentous, proclaiming death as the definitive escape from life’s torture. During the time this text was written, Gautier was frequenting many cemeteries; France itself was at that time plagued by epidemics, and death was a daily reality in Paris. In the poem, Gautier transforms death into a curiously exhilarating experience that delivers the poet, however briefly, from the gruesome reality of life on earth. Mature poetry España (1845) España is usually considered the transitional volume between the two phases of Gautier’s poetic career. It is a collection of 43 miscellaneous poems inspired by Gautier’s journeys through Spain during the summer of 1840. In these poems, Gautier writes of not only the Spanish language, but also the conventional aspects of Spanish culture and traditions such as music and dance. Emaux et Camées (1852) Emaux et Camées was published when Gautier was touring the Middle-East and is considered to be his supreme poetic achievement. The title, translated, "Enamels and Camoes," reflects Gautier’s abandonment of the Romantic ambition to create a kind of "total" art in favor of a more modern approach which focuses on miniatures, and on the form of poem rather than its content. Emaux et Camees started off as a collection of 18 poems in 1852, but further editions contained up to 47 poems. Plays Between the years 1839 and 1850, Gautier wrote all or part of nine different plays: Un Voyage en Espagne (1843) La Juive de Constantine (1846)—(lost) Regardez mais ne touchez pas (1847)—(written primarily by collaborators) Pierrot en Espagne (1847)—(attribution uncertain) L’Amour soufflé ou il veut (1850)—(unfinished) Théophile Gautier did not consider himself to be dramatist, though he would dabble in the form, motivated primarily by his thoughts on drama that arose from his theater criticism. His plays, unfortunately, saw very few productions. During the Revolution of 1848, many theaters were closed. Most of the plays that dominated the mid-century were written by playwrights who insisted on conformity and conventional formulas and catered to cautious middle-class audiences. As a result, most of Gautier’s rather experimental plays were never published or performed. Novels Mademoiselle du Maupin (1835) In September 1833, Gautier was solicited to write a historical romance based on the life of French opera star Mlle. Maupin, who was a first-rate swordsman and often went about disguised as a man. Originally, the story was to be about the historical la Maupin, who set fire to a convent for the love of another woman, but later retired to a convent herself, shortly before dying in her thirties. The novel was rather popular in Gautier's time for its taboo-breaking subject-matter, but modern critics consider it to be of little interest to contemporary readers. The preface to the novel, however, is considered to be of great importance by scholars, as it is in the preface that Gautier first explicitly states his philosophy of "art for art's sake." In the preface, Gautier argues that art is inherently useless and unreal: "Everything useful," Gautier famously quips, "is ugly;" and art, according to Gautier, is able to transcend the ordinary, "useful," world, thus becoming beautiful. Chronology of Works 1830: Poésies(Volume I) 1831: First article in Le Mercure de France au XIXe siècle 1832: Albertus 1833: Les Jeunes France, roman goguenards 1834-5: Published articles which will later form Les Grotesques 1835-6: Mademoiselle de Maupin 1836: Published "Fortunio" under the title "El Dorado" 1838: La Comédie de la mort 1839: Une Larme du diable 1841: Premiere of the ballet, "Giselle" 1843: Voyage en Espagne, Premiere of ballet, "La Péri" 1845: Poésies(complete) first performance of comedy "Le Tricorne enchanté" 1847: First performance of comedy "Pierrot posthume" 1851: Premiere of the ballet, "Pâquerette" 1852: Un Trio de romans, Caprices et zigzag, Emaux et camées, Italia 1853: Constantinople 1851: Premiere of the ballet, "Gemma" 1855: Les Beaux-Arts en Europe 1856: L’Art moderne 1858: Le Roman de la momie, Honoré de Balzac 1858-9: Histoire de l’art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans 1861: Trésors d’art de a Russie ancienne et moderne 1863: Le Captaine Fracasse, Romans et contes 1865: Loin de Paris 1867: Voyage en Russie 1871: Tableaux de siée 1872: Emaux et camées, Théâtre, Histoire du romantisme References ISBN links support NWE through referral fees Grant, Richard. Théophile Gautier. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. ISBN 0805762132 Richardson, Joanna. Théophile Gautier: His Life and Times. Nabu Press, 2010 (original 1958). ISBN 978-1178076486 Tennant, Phillip Ernest. Théophile Gautier. London: The Athalone Press, 1975. ISBN 0485122049 All links retrieved April 30, 2023.
5097	dbpedia	1	81	https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47950.html.images	en	The Project Gutenberg eBook of Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature	https://www.gutenberg.or…cover.medium.jpg	https://www.gutenberg.or…cover.medium.jpg	[ "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/images/cover.jpg", "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/images/bran_001.jpg", "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/images/bran_002.jpg", "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/images/bran_003.jpg", "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/images/bran_004.jpg", "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/images/bran_005.jpg", "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/images/bran_006.jpg", "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/images/bran_007.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2015-01-12T00:00:00		en	images/cover.jpg		https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47950/pg47950-images.html	The Project Gutenberg eBook of Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 5. The Romantic School in France This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 5. The Romantic School in France Author: Georg Brandes Translator: Mary Morison Diana White Release date: January 12, 2015 [eBook #47950] Most recently updated: April 4, 2024 Language: English Credits: Produced by Jens Guld and Marc D'Hooghe (Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.) * START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAIN CURRENTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE - 5. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN FRANCE * MAIN CURRENTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE BY GEORG BRANDES IN SIX VOLUMES V. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN FRANCE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1904 Dis-nous mil huit cent trente. Époque fulgurante, Ses luttes, ses ardeurs.... —TH. DE BANVILLE Nicht was lebendig, kraftvoll sich verkündigt Ist das gefährlich Furchtbare. Das ganz Gemeine ist's, das ewig Gestrige, Was immer war und immer wiederkehrt Und morgen gilt, weil's heute hat gegolten. —SCHILLER. CONTENTS LIST OF PORTRAITS DE MUSSET GEORGE SAND BALZAC HENRY BEYLE (STENDHAL) MÉRIMÉE THÉOPHILE GAUTIER SAINTE-BEUVE I THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND The literature produced in France between the years 1824 and 1828 is important and admirable. After the upheavals of the Revolution, the wars of the Empire, and the lassitude of the reign of Louis XVIII., there arose a young generation that applied itself with eager enthusiasm to those highest intellectual pursuits which had so long been neglected. During the Revolution and the wars of Napoleon the youths of France had had other vocations than the reformation of literature and art. The best energies of the nation had been diverted into the channels of politics, military enterprise, and civil administration. Now a great volume of intellectual force which had long been confined was suddenly set free. The period of the restored Bourbon kings and the Monarchy of July may be defined as that of the decisive appearance of the bourgeoisie on the historical stage. With the fall of Napoleon the industrial period of history begins. Confining our attention to France, we observe that the new division of the national property which had been made during the Revolution, and which it had been Napoleon's economic mission to vindicate to the rest of Europe, now began to produce its natural consequences. All restrictions had been removed from industry and commerce; monopolies and privileges had been abolished; the confiscated lands of the Church and estates of the nobility, broken up and sold to the highest bidder, were now in the hands of at least twenty times as many owners as before. The result was that capital, free, floating capital, now began to be the moving power of society and consequently the object of the desires of the individual. After the Revolution of July the power of wealth gradually supersedes the power of birth and takes the power of royalty into its service. The rich man is received into the ranks of the nobility, acquires the privileges of a peer, and, by utilising the constitution, manages to draw ever-increasing profit from the monarchical form of government. Thus the pursuit of money, the struggle for money, the employment of money in great commercial and industrial enterprises, becomes the leading social feature of the period; and this prosaic engrossment, which contrasts so strongly with the revolutionary and martial enthusiasm of the foregoing period, helps, as background, to give the literature of the day its romantic, idealistic stamp. One only of its eminent authors, one of the greatest, Balzac, did not feel himself repelled by the period, but made the newborn power of capital, the new ruler of souls, money, the hero of his great epic; the other artists of the day, though it was often the prospect of material gain which inspired their labours, kept in their enthusiasms and their works at as great a distance as possible from the new reality. The decade 1825-35, the most remarkable and most fertile period from the literary point of view, was from the political, colourless and inglorious. Its focus is the Revolution of July, but this Revolution is a solitary blood-spot amidst all the grey. The first half of the decade, 1825-30, the reign of Charles X., is the period of the religious reaction. The three ministries—Villèle, Martignac, and Polignac—do not mark so much three stages of the reaction as three different tempos: Allegro, Andante, and Allegro furioso. During the Villèle ministry the Jesuits attained to almost unlimited power. The monasteries were restored; laws of mediæval severity regarding sacrilege were enforced (death, for example, being the punishment for the robbery of a church); aid was refused to all poor people who could not produce certificates of confession; and in 1827 a law circumscribing the liberty of the press was proposed which would have reduced the enemies of the Church to silence; but this proposal the Government was obliged to retract, owing to the opposition of the Chamber of Peers. The citizen troops were disbanded, the censorship was restored; then the ministry was defeated by a majority in the Chambers, and resigned in January 1828. The cabinet of uncompromising churchmen was followed by one which pursued the policy of concession; the Martignac ministry made a feeble endeavour to stem the power of the Jesuits, but the only result of this was that the King seized the opportunity of the first reverse the Government suffered in the Chambers, to dismiss it and replace it by a ministry whose leader, Polignac, previously ambassador to the court of England, was a man after his own heart. Polignac believed in the monarchy as God's shadow upon earth; believed (and was confirmed by visions in his belief) that he had received from God the mission to restore it to its ancient glory. But his Government was so unpopular that its one military achievement, the conquest of Algiers, was coldly received by the country and openly regretted by the strong Opposition. The dissolution of the Chambers led, in spite of the pastoral letters of the bishops and the personal interference of the King, to the re-election of the Opposition, and on this followed the coup d'état. There were three days of fighting, and the ministry was swept away by the wave of popular feeling which carried with it the throne and the house of Bourbon. But although the first half of the decade was, politically speaking, a period of reaction, it presents a very different aspect when regarded from the social and intellectual point of view. In the first place, the oppression itself produced the desire for freedom. The bourgeoisie and the professional classes, who finally, with the aid of the populace of the capital and the students, dethroned the house of Bourbon, were during the whole period in a state of increasing discontent and opposition. One of the consequences of this was that literature, which at first was as fully inspired as politics with the spirit of reaction against the doctrines and doings of the close of the eighteenth century, and which started with any amount of enthusiasm for Catholicism, monarchy, and the Middle Ages, completely changed its tone. Chateaubriand's dismissal from the Villèle ministry gave the signal (see Main Currents, iii. 293). In the second place, it is to be observed that the intellectual life of those highest circles of society which prescribed the tone and style of literature, was only outwardly in sympathy with the political reaction. Regarded from one point of view, the Restoration was an aftermath of the eighteenth century in the nineteenth, of the age of humanity in the age of industry. From the powdered court emanated courtly manners and customs, from the salons of the old nobility emanated the free-thought on moral and religious subjects in which the eighteenth century had gloried. One of the strong points of that national tradition which these highest circles defended and endeavoured to continue, was the recognition of talent in every shape; they envisaged literature and art with many-sided culture and wide sympathy. A tolerant, sceptical spirit in religious matters, genial unrestraint and delicate forbearance in the domain of morality, was, so to speak, the atmosphere inhaled and exhaled by good society; and no atmosphere could be more favourable and more fructifying for a literature in active process of growth. As the oppression of the reaction begot liberalism in politics, so the culture of the best society allowed unpolitical literature free play both in the domain of feeling and that of thought, demanding nothing but refinement and perfection of form. Hence literature was in a most favourable position to give the reins, to give a start, to a new intellectual movement. The July dynasty was founded, the tri-coloured citizen-monarchy was established, Louis Philippe was stealthily elevated to the throne of France, holding the difficult position of king by the grace of the Revolution. The pregnant characteristics of his government revealed themselves during the first five years of his reign. There was, in the first place, that want of a decided, dignified foreign policy inevitable in a monarchy that was supported exclusively by the prosperous middle classes. The cautious, peace-loving King brought one humiliation after another upon France. For the sake of the peace of nations, he refused the throne offered by the Belgians to his second son, and with the same motive he quietly allowed Austria to suppress the Italian revolutions, which the French nation correctly regarded as the offspring of the Revolution of July. He was incapable of preventing the suppression of the Polish insurrection and the surrender of Warsaw, which occasioned real national mourning in France. The country, as one of the great powers, lost daily in prestige and influence. And in its internal relations the Government displayed an equal want of dignity. The constant demands for money which were made by the royal family and almost invariably refused by the Chambers produced a most disagreeable impression. For a short time Louis Philippe was popular, popular as the soldier of Valmy and Gemappes, as the citizen King, the former exile and schoolmaster, whom Lafayette himself had called "the best republic." But he had not the faculty of preserving popularity, though he made an eager bid for it to begin with. He was a gifted and, essentially, a prudent man. His family life was admirable; he was thoroughly domestic, and regular in his habits; his sons attended the public schools; he himself, in the attire of an ordinary citizen, carrying the historical umbrella, walked unattended in the streets of Paris, always ready to return a bow or a "Vive le Roi!" with a friendly word or a shake of the hand. But the bourgeois virtues which he displayed are not those which Frenchmen value in their rulers. The cry: "We want rulers who ride," shouted at gouty Louis XVIII., describes one of the feelings which led to the dethronement of Louis Philippe. For when Louis Philippe did ride, the spectacle was anything but an inspiring one. In June 1832, after one of the innumerable small insurrections in Paris, he declared the city to be in a state of siege, and on this occasion held a review of 50,000 citizen troops and regular soldiers, who were drawn up on each side of the boulevard. The King did not ride along the middle of the street, but first along the right side, where the citizen soldiers were stationed, leaning from his saddle the whole time to shake hands with as many of them as possible, and two hours later back in the same way along the line of the regular troops. He looked as if his ribs must inevitably be broken. He kept on smiling the whole time; his cocked hat slipped down over his forehead and gave him an unhappy look; his eyes wore a beseeching expression, as if he were entreating favour, and also forgiveness for having declared them all to be in a state of siege. What a spectacle for an impressionable, imaginative people, for a crowd of which the older members had seen Napoleon Bonaparte ride past "with his statuesque, Cæsar-like countenance, his fixed gaze, and his inapproachable ruler's hands."[1] In spite of the King's eager endeavour to win popularity, there was a wider gulf between his court and the people than there had been between the people and the paternal monarchy of the Restoration. The old nobility kept away from the new court, and there was a more distinct separation of class from class. With enmity and disgust the landed proprietors saw the magnates of the stock-exchange usurping all power. Legitimists and the superior bourgeois class, politicians and artists, ceased to associate. One by one the salons of the old monarchy were closed, and with them disappeared the gaiety and naturalness of the refined beau monde. With the old form of government vanished its accompaniments of magnificent elegance and graceful frivolity, vanished the fine lady's lively wit and charming audacity. In the circle of the wealthy bankers whom the King patronised and the Crown Prince associated with before his marriage, the place of all this was taken by English sport and club fashions, a vulgar addiction to the pleasures of the table, and tasteless magnificence and luxury. The King was originally a Voltairian, and in his family alliances he had shown a leaning to Protestantism, but in his anxiety for the safety of his throne he made a hasty change of front; he humbled himself (in vain, as it proved) to win the favour of the clergy, and the tone of the court became pious. The upper middle classes simultaneously developed a half-anxious, half-affected piety, originating in fear of the Fourth Estate. Hypocrisy, which the aristocratic reactionary literature had fostered, now began to spread into the bourgeois class, and free-thought was considered "bad form" in a woman. Morals became outwardly stricter; a more English tone prevailed; but in reality men were less moral; society was lenient to the fraud of the millionaire, pharisaically severe to the woman whose heart had led her astray. "The previous generation had not," as one of the historians of the day observes, "placed under the ban of society either the priest who forsook his church or the woman who forsook her husband, so long as their motives were unselfish; now it was the sign of mauvais ton to desire the re-institution of divorce, not to mention the marriage of priests." The Faubourg St. Honoré, the quarter of the financiers, set the tone. Little wonder that the umbrella soon became the symbol of this monarchy, and the expression Juste-milieu—which the King had once cleverly used in speaking of the policy that ought to be employed—the nickname for everything weak and inefficient, for a power without lustre and dignity. If we take the decade 1825-35 as a whole, it is easy to understand how hopeless it must have seemed from the aesthetic point of view. II THE GENERATION OF 1830 It is against this grey background, this foil of Legitimist cowls and Louis-Philippe umbrellas—in this society where the new-born power of capital, strong as Hercules, has, even in its cradle, strangled all the external romance of life—on this stage upon the grey walls of which an invisible finger has written in grey letters the word Juste-milieu—that a fiery, glowing, noisy literature, a literature enamoured of scarlet and of passion, suddenly makes its appearance. All the conditions were present in combination which were certain to impel young, restless minds towards romantic enthusiasm, towards ardent contempt for public opinion, towards worship of unbridled passion and unrestrained genius. Hatred of the bourgeoisie (as in Germany a generation earlier hatred of the Philistines) becomes the watchword of the day. But whereas the word "Philistine" conjures up a picture of the chimney-corner and the pipe, the word "bourgeois" at once suggests the omnipotence of economic interests. Its essential antipathy to utilitarianism and plutocracy turned the intellectual current of the day, in the case of the men of talent already before the public, and still more strongly in the case of the budding geniuses, in the direction of antagonism to everything existing and accepted, at the same time mightily increasing the force of the current. The religion of art, and enthusiasm for liberty in art, suddenly took possession of all hearts. Art was the highest, art was light, art was fire, art was all in all; its beauty and audacity alone imparted value to life. The young generation had heard in their childhood of the great events of the Revolution, had known the Empire, and were the sons of heroes or of victims. Their mothers had conceived them between two battles, and the thunder of cannon had ushered them into the world. To the young poets and artists of the day there were only two kinds of human beings, the flaming and the grey. On the one side there was the art which meant blood, scarlet, movement, audacity; on the other, a strictly regular, timid, bourgeois, colourless art. Everything in the life of their day seemed to them unpoetic, utilitarian, devoid of genius, grey; they desired to show their contempt for such a day, their admiration of genius, and their hatred of the bourgeois spirit. For now, since the middle-class had become the influential one, this spirit had become a power. Seen from the point of view of our own day, the young men of those days appear to have been younger than youth generally is—younger, fresher, more richly gifted, more ardent and hot-blooded. And we see the youth of France, who in the days of the Revolution had by their devotion changed the political and social conditions of the country, and in the days of the Empire had risked their lives on every battlefield in France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Egypt, now devoting themselves with the same ardour to the culture of literature and the arts. Here, too, there were revolutions to be made, victories to win, and countries to conquer. During the Revolution they had worshipped liberty, under Napoleon martial glory; now they worshipped art. For the first time in France the word art came to be regularly applied to literature. In the eighteenth century literature had aimed at transforming itself into philosophy, and much was then included under this denomination to which we no longer apply the word; now it aimed at the name and dignity of art. The explanation of the change is, that the analytical and reasoning tendency which distinguishes both the imaginative and reflective works of the classical period, had in the new century slowly made way for interest in the actually existing, in what is perceivable by the senses. And the deeper-lying reason of this new preference was that men now placed nature, original, unconscious, rustic, uncultivated nature, above all the culture of civilisation. Why? Because a historically minded age had succeeded to a rationalising one. A man no longer coveted the title of philosopher, for it was now considered a greater distinction to be original than to be a self-conscious thinker. The poetical literature of the eighteenth, nay, even that of the seventeenth century was despised, because it was purely intellectual; because, bloodless and elegant, it seemed to have been produced by attention to conventions and rules, not to have been born and to have grown. For whereas the eighteenth century had held thinking and acting to be the highest forms of activity, the children of the new age regarded origination, natural genesis, as the highest. It was a German idea, Herder's and Goethe's, by which men's minds were unconsciously occupied, and which produced in them an aversion for rules and academic principles. For how could art as unconscious, natural production be subjected to arbitrary external rules! An intellectual movement had begun which recalled the Renaissance. It was as if the air which men breathed intoxicated them. In the long period during which France had been at an intellectual standstill her great neighbours, Germany and England, had hastened past her, had got a long start in the work of emancipation from old, hampering traditions. She felt this, felt it as a humiliation, and the feeling gave a sharp impulse to the new art enthusiasm. And now the works of foreign authors, both the new and the hitherto unknown older books, made their way into the country and revolutionised the minds of the young; every one read translations of Sir Walter Scott's novels, of Byron's Corsair and Lara, and devoured Goethe's Werther and Hoffmann's fantastic tales. All at once the votaries of the different arts felt that they were brothers. Musicians studied the literature both of their own country and of other nations; poets (such as Hugo, Gautier, Mérimée, Borel) drew and painted. Poems were read in painters' and sculptors' studios; Delacroix's and Devéria's pupils hummed Hugo's ballads as they stood at their easels. Certain of the great foreign authors, such as Scott and Byron, influenced poets (Hugo, Lamartine, Musset), musicians (Berlioz, Halévy, Félicien David), and painters (Delacroix, Delaroche, Scheffer). Artists attempt to overstep the limits of their own in order to embrace a kindred art. Berlioz writes Childe Harold and Faust symphonies, Félicien David a Desert symphony; music becomes descriptive. First Delacroix and then Ary Scheffer choose subjects from Dante, Shakespeare, and Byron; the art of the painter at times becomes illustration of poetry. But it was the art of painting which was most powerful in influencing the sister arts, especially poetry, and that distinctly for good. The lover no longer, as in the days of Racine, prayed his mistress "to crown his flame." The public demanded naturalness of the author, and refused to accept representations of impossibilities. In 1824 Delacroix exhibits his Massacre of Scios, a picture with a Grecian subject and a reminiscence of Byron, in 1831 The Bishop of Liège, which illustrates Scott's Quentin Durward, in May 1831 Liberty at the Barricades. In February 1829, Auber's opera, La Muette de Portici, makes a great sensation; Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable follows in 1831. In February 1830 Victor Hugo's Hernani is played for the first time at the Théâtre Français; in 1831 Dumas' Antony is a grand success. The authors Dumas and Hugo, Delacroix the painter, the sculptor David d'Angers, the musical composers Berlioz and Auber, the critics Sainte-Beuve and Gautier, Frédéric Lemaître and Marie Dorval the scenic artists, and, corresponding to them, the two great dæmonic musical virtuosi Chopin and Liszt—all these make their appearance simultaneously. One and all proclaim the gospel of nature and of passion, and around them assemble groups of young men who apprehend and cultivate literature and art in a spirit akin to theirs. These men did not always realise that in the eyes of posterity they would constitute a natural group. Some of the greatest of them felt as if they stood alone, and believed that the spirit and tendency of their work was different from that of their contemporaries', nay, actually antagonistic to it. Nor were they entirely wrong, for there are very essential points of difference between them. Yet common excellences, common prejudices, common aims, and common faults unite them and make of them a whole. And it happened much more frequently than is generally the case, that those whom reflection inclines us to class together actually did feel themselves drawn to each other; many of the best among them early joined hands and formed a league. Seeking the connecting links we find, as it were, a chain which binds the group together. When, after the lapse of many years, we dryly say or write the words, "they formed a school," we seldom take the trouble to conjure up any adequately vivid impression of what the formation of a school of literature and art signifies. There is a mysterious magic about the process. Some one remarkable man, after a long unconscious or half-conscious struggle, finally with full consciousness, frees himself from prejudices and attains to clearness of vision; then, everything being ready, the lightning of genius illuminates what he beholds. Such a man gives utterance (as did Hugo in a prose preface of some score of pages) to some thoughts which have never been thought or expressed in the same manner before. They may be only half true, they may be vague, but they have this remarkable quality that, in spite of more or less indefiniteness, they affront all traditional prejudices and wound the vanity of the day where it is most vulnerable, whilst they ring in the ears of the young generation like a call, like a new, audacious watchword. What happens? Scarcely are these words spoken than there comes with the speed and precision of an echo a thousand-tongued answer from the wounded vanities and injured interests, an answer like the furious baying of a hundred packs of hounds. And what more? First one man, then another, then a third, comes to the spokesman of the new tendency, each with his own standpoint, each with his revolt, his ambition, his need, his hope, his resolve. They show him that the words he has spoken are incarnated in them. Some communicate directly with him, some with each other in his spirit and his name. Men who but lately were as unknown to each other as they still are to the public, who have been spiritually languishing, each in his separate seclusion, now meet and marvel to find that they understand each other, that they speak the same language, a language unknown to the rest of their contemporaries. They are young, yet all are already in possession of what to them constitutes life; the one has his dearly-bought joys, the other his bracing sufferings; and from these life-elements each has extracted his own portion of enthusiasm. Their meeting is electric; they exchange ideas with youthful haste, impart to each other their various sympathies and antipathies, enthusiasms and detestations; and all these well-springs of feeling flow together like the streams that form a river. But the most beautiful feature in this crystallisation of artistic spirits into a school is the reverence, the awe which, in spite of the unanimity of their opinions, and in spite of their good comradeship, each feels for the other. Outsiders are apt to confuse this with what is satirically called "mutual admiration." But nothing is in reality more unlike the interested homage paid in periods of decadence than the naïve admiration of each other's talents exhibited by the men who are unconsciously forming a school. Their hearts are too young, too pure, not to admire in real earnest. One young productive mind regards the other as something marvellous, which holds surprises in store. To the one the workshop of the other's mind is like a sealed book; he cannot guess what will next appear from it, has no idea what pleasures his comrade has in store for him. They honour in one another something which they value higher than the personality, than the usually as yet undeveloped character, namely, the talent by virtue of which they are all related to the deity they worship—art. Seldom, however, in the world's history has the mutual admiration accompanying an artistic awakening been carried to such a pitch as it was by the generation of 1830. It became positive idolatry. All the literary productions of the period show that the youth of the day were intoxicated with the feeling of friendship and brotherhood. Hugo's poems to Lamartine, Louis Boulanger, Sainte-Beuve, and David d'Angers; Gautier's to Hugo, Jehan du Seigneur, and Petrus Borel; De Musset's to Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve, and Nodier; and, very specially, Sainte-Beuve's to all the standard-bearers of the school; Madame de Girardin's articles; Balzac's dedications; George Sand's Lettres d'un Voyageur—all these testify to a sincere, ardent admiration, which entirely precluded the proverbial jealousy of authors. They did not only praise one another, they communicated ideas to each other and helped each other. Now it is an inspiring influence, now an artistic criticism, now some actual service rendered, which knits the bond of friendship between two authors of this period. Émile Deschamps inspires Victor Hugo to borrow themes from the old Spanish Romancero; Gautier writes the beautiful tulip sonnet in Balzac's Un grand Homme de Province a Paris, and helps him to dramatise certain of his plots; Sainte-Beuve reads George Sand's manuscripts and aids her with his criticism; George Sand and De Musset influence one another powerfully at a certain stage of their career; Madame de Girardin, Méry, Sandeau, and Gautier collaborate in a novel written in letters; Mérimée is the bond of union between the realists Beyle and Vitet and the romanticists. The short period during which all meet and combine is the blossoming time of literature. Before many years pass Nodier is in his grave, Hugo is living in exile in Jersey, Alexandre Dumas is turning literature into a trade, Sainte-Beuve and Gautier are to be found in Princess Mathilde's circle, Mérimée is presiding over the Empress Eugenie's courts of love, De Musset sits solitary over his absinthe, and George Sand has retired to Nohant. One and all in their riper years made new connections, connections which aided their development; but their boldest and freshest, if not always their most refined and beautiful work was done at the time when they were holding their first meetings in Charles Nodier's quarters at the Arsenal, or in the apartments in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs where Hugo and his pretty young wife kept house on their 2000 francs a year, or in Petrus Borel's garret, where the host's Hernani cloak decorated the wall in company with a sketch by Devéria and a copy of a Giorgione, and where, owing to lack of chairs, at least half of the company had to stand. These young Romanticists felt like brothers, like fellow-conspirators; they felt that they were the sharers in a sweet and invigorating secret; and this gave to the works of the school a flavour, an aroma like that of the noble wines of a year when the vintage has been more than ordinarily good. Ah! that bouquet of 1830! There is no other in the century that can be compared with it. In all the arts a break with tradition was aimed at and demanded. The inward fire was to glow through and dissolve the old musical forms, to devour lines and contours and transform painting into colour symphonies, to rejuvenate literature. In all the arts colour, passion, and style were aimed at and demanded—colour with such urgency that the most gifted painter of the period, Delacroix, neglected drawing for it; passion with such ardour that both lyric poetry and the drama were in danger of degenerating into hysteric foolishness; style with such artistic enthusiasm that some of the younger men, such as those two opposite poles, Mérimée and Gautier, neglected the human groundwork of their art and became devotees of style pure and simple. The original, the unconscious, the popular was sought after and demanded. "We have been rhetoricians," men cried; "we have never understood the simple and the illogical—the savage, the people, the child, woman, the poet!" Hitherto the people had only served as a background in literature—in Victor Hugo's dramas the passionate plebeian, the avenger and requiter, appeared on the scene as the hero. Hitherto the savage had talked like a Frenchman of the eighteenth century (Montesquieu, Voltaire)—Mérimée in Colomba and Carmen depicted savage emotions in all their wildness and freshness. Racine's child (in Athalie) had spoken like a miniature edition of a grown-up man—Nodier with a childlike heart put simple, innocent words into his children's mouths. In the French literature of an earlier period, woman had generally acted with full consciousness, arriving at conclusions like a man; see the works of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire. Corneille paid homage to virtue, Crébillon the younger to frivolity and vice, but both the virtue and the vice were conscious and acquired. George Sand, on the contrary, depicted the innate nobility and natural goodness of a noble woman's heart. Madame de Staël in her Corinne had represented the gifted woman as a being of great and commanding talent—George Sand, in Lélia, represented her as a great sibyl. In olden days the poet had been a courtier, like Racine and Molière, or a man of the world, like Voltaire and Beaumarchais, or simply an ordinary decent citizen, like Lafontaine. Now he became the neglected step-child of society, the high-priest of humanity, often poor and despised, but with the starry brow and the tongue of fire. Hugo hymned him as the shepherd of the people, Alfred de Vigny represented him in Stello and Chatterton as the sublime child who prefers dying of hunger to degrading his muse by common work, and dies blessing his fellow-men, who acknowledge his worth when it is too late. III ROMANTICISM At first Romanticism was, in its essence, merely a spirited defence of localisation in literature. The Romanticists admired and glorified the Middle Ages, which the culture of the eighteenth century had anathematised, and the poets of the sixteenth century—Ronsard, Du Bellay, &c.—who had been supplanted by the classic authors of the age of Louis XIV. They attacked pseudo-classicism, the tiresome and monotonous Frenchifying and modernising of all ages and nationalities. They took as their watchword "local colouring." By local colouring they meant all the characteristics of foreign nations, of far-off days, of unfamiliar climes, to which as yet justice had not been done in French literature. They felt that their predecessors had been led astray by the premise that every human being was simply a human being, and, moreover, more or less of a Frenchman. In reality, there was not such a thing as universal humanity; there were separate races, peoples, tribes, and clans. Still less was the Frenchman the typical human being. It was imperative, if they were to understand and represent human life, that they should free themselves from themselves. This idea gave the impulse to the art and criticism of nineteenth-century France. Authors now made it their endeavour to train their readers to see things from this new point of view. They no longer wrote to please the public—and it is this fact which gives value to the books of the period. Therefore a critic who, like myself, is engaged in tracing the main currents of literature, must dwell upon many a seldom read and still more rarely bought Romantic work, and do little more than mention such a talented dramatist as Scribe, who for a whole generation dominated the stage in every country in Europe. For if an author does not penetrate to the essential in the human soul, to its deepest depth; if he has not dared, or has not been able to write his book regardless of consequences; if he has not ventured to represent his ideas in statuesque nakedness, has not imaged human nature as it showed itself to him, improving nothing and modifying nothing, but has taken counsel with his public, been guided by its prejudices, its ignorance, its untruthfulness, its vulgar or sentimental taste—he may have been, probably has been, highly distinguished by his contemporaries, he may have won laurels and wealth by his talents; for me he does not exist, to what I call literature his work is valueless. All the offspring of the author's mariage de convenance with that doubtful character, public opinion, all those literary children which their author begets, giving a side-thought to the taste and morality of his public, are defunct a generation later. There was no real life and heat in them, nothing but timorous regard for a public which is now dead; they were nothing but the supply of a demand which has long ceased to exist. But every work in which an independent writer has, without any side-thought, uttered what he felt and described what he saw, is, and will continue to be, no matter how few editions of it may be printed, a valuable document. There is only a seeming contradiction between this condemnation of the literary work produced to please the public, and the doctrine of the sound natural influence of society on the author. It is certain that the author cannot separate himself from his age. But the current of the age is not an undivided current; there is an upper and an under one. To let one's self drive with or be driven by the upper one is weakness, and ends in destruction. In other words, every age has its dominant and favourite ideas and forms, which are simply the results of the life of former ages, that were arrived at long ago and have slowly petrified; but besides these it owns another whole class of quite different ideas, which have not yet taken shape, but are in the air, and are apprehended by the greatest men of the age as the results which must now be arrived at. These last are the ideas which form the unifying element of the new endeavour. In 1827 an English theatrical company visited Paris, and for the first time Frenchmen saw Shakespeare's masterpieces, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet, admirably played. It was under the influence of these performances that Victor Hugo wrote that preface to Cromwell which is regarded as the programme of the new literature. The literary war of liberation began with an assault upon French classical tragedy, the weakest and most exposed point in literary tradition. Hugo knew very little about the attacks upon its authority which had been made in other countries; and to those who have read the utterances delivered on the same subject many years previously by Lessing, Wilhelm Schlegel, and the English Romantic writers, his manifesto offers little that is new. But it was, of course, an important step to carry the war into France itself. The vigorous arguments expended in proving the unnaturalness of compressing the action of every drama into twenty-four hours and a single pillared hall, seem to the reader of to-day almost as uninteresting as the absurdities attacked; but he must remember that Boileau's authority was then still supreme, still unshaken in France. Of interest as regards Hugo's own development are the passages in which he expounds his private theory of poetry; although he is so much of the poet and so little of the thinker that his arguments are, as a rule, sadly inconclusive. What he attacks is the idealistic, pseudo-classic tendency of tragedy. This he does, oddly enough, in the name of Christianity, and by means of a great historical survey, made on as false a system as any of those of his contemporary, Cousin, of whom it reminds us. He distinguishes three great periods—the primitive, when poetry is lyric; the period of ancient civilisation, when it is epic; and the age of Christianity, which is the period of the drama. The peculiar characteristic of the poetry of the Christian, which he treats as synonymous with the modern, period is that it (having learned from religion that man consists of two elements, an animal and a spiritual, body and soul) makes place in the same work for the two elements which in literature have hitherto excluded each other, the sublime and the grotesque. It is no longer imperative that tragedy should be solemn throughout; it may venture to develop into drama. If we pay less heed to what Hugo says than to what he really intends to say, we find that the sum and substance of this tolerably foolish argument is a naturalistic protest against pure beauty as the proper or highest subject of art. His idea is: We will renounce convention; we will not feel ourselves in duty bound to exclude everything from serious poetry which directly reminds us of the material world. We see this from the examples he gives. The judge is to be allowed to say: "Sentenced to death. And now let us dine." Queen Elizabeth is to be allowed to swear and speak Latin; Cromwell to say: "I have the Parliament in my bag and the King in my pocket." Cæsar in his triumphal car may be afraid of its upsetting. And Hugo calls Napoleon's exclamation: "There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous," the cry of anguish which is the summary of both drama and life. Exaggerated as Hugo's language may be, his meaning is plain. What he asserts is the aesthetic value of the ugly. He maintains that the beautiful only comprehends form as absolute symmetry, form in its simplest relations and most intimate harmony with our being, whereas the ugly is a detail in a much greater, harmonious whole which we are unable fully to discern. He declares that the ugly has a thousand types, whereas the beautiful is poor, and has but one; which last theory we may be excused for calling one of the most absurd ever advanced by a poet. It was parodied by his opponents in the axiom: Le Laid c'est le Beau ("Foul is fair," as the witches sing in Macbeth), and combated with the objections which the Romanticists themselves offered in the Seventies to extreme realism. Was not this French Romanticism, then, after all simply a thinly-veiled naturalism? What did Victor Hugo demand in the name of the young generation but nature—faithful reproduction, local and historical colour? Is not George Sand Rousseau's daughter? the preacher of a gospel of nature? And Beyle and Mérimée, are they not half-brutal, half-refined worshippers of nature? Is not Balzac nowadays actually honoured as the founder of a naturalistic school? The answer is simple. Hugo's watchword was, undoubtedly, nature and truth, but it was at the same time, and first and foremost, contrast, picturesque contrast, antithesis founded upon the medieval belief in the confliction between body and soul; that is, a dualistic Romanticism. "The salamander heightens the charm of the water-nymph, the gnome lends beauty to the sylph," he says. He desired truth to nature, but he believed it was to be arrived at by making nature's extremes meet, by placing opposites in juxtaposition—Beauty and the Beast, Esmeralda and Quasimodo, the courtesan's past and the purest love in Marion Delorme, bloodthirstiness and maternal tenderness in Lucrèce Borgia. In his early youth nature was to Victor Hugo a great Ariel-Caliban, the product of a superhuman ideality and an unnatural bestiality, the result obtained by the combination of two supernatural ingredients. But this conception of nature, which corresponded exactly with that of Germanic Romanticism, at times made way in Hugo's case for the magnificent pantheism which found typical expression in that profound and beautiful poem, "Le Satyre," in La Légende des Siècles. The combination of love of nature with predilection for the unnatural, is to be traced far on into the new literature. All its authors chant the praises of nature. But what they detest and shun under the name of the prosaic and the commonplace is very often the simple nature that lies nearest them. Romantic nature alone is dear to them. George Sand escapes from the world of dreary, hard realities into that of beautiful dreams, Théophile Gautier into the world of art. George Sand in Lelia, Balzac in Père Goriot, make the ideal or the omnipotent galley-slave the judge of society; Balzac actually writes fantastic legends in Hoffmann's style. And they are even more inclined to shun the plain and simple in their language than in their characters. They soon evolved a pompous diction, which far outrivalled that of the classic periods. These were the golden days of the glowing, dazzling adjective. Picturesque, enthusiastic words, with which the narrative was inlaid as with so many transparent jewels, opened up endless vistas. In so far, therefore, it may be said that both the style and the predilections of these young authors were purely romantic. But only in so far. In Victor Hugo, the founder of the school, the dual love of the natural and the unnatural was the result of a personal peculiarity. His eye naturally sought and found contrasts; his mind had an innate tendency towards antithesis. In Inez de Castro, the melodrama of his earliest youth, and later in Marie Tudor, we have the throne on one side of the stage, the scaffold on the other, the monarch and the executioner face to face. About the time when the preface to Cromwell was written, Hugo was, his wife tells us, in the habit of walking on the Boulevard Montparnasse. "There, just opposite the Cemetery, tight-rope dancers and jugglers had erected their booths. This contrast of shows and funerals confirmed him in his idea of a drama in which extremes meet; and it was there that the third act of Marion Delorme occurred to him, the act in which the tragic, fruitless attempt of the Marquis de Nangis to save his brother from the scaffold forms the counterpart to the antics of the jester." In the preface to Cromwell, when he is asserting the necessity of representing an action in the place where it actually happened, he writes: "Could the poet dare to have Rizzio murdered anywhere but in Mary Stuart's chamber? ... or to behead Charles I. or Louis XVI. anywhere but on these sorrowful spots within sight of Whitehall and the Tuileries, which seem as if they had been chosen in order that the scaffold might contrast with the palace?" In spite of all his asseverations this poet does not really see natural environments with an understanding eye. He does not see them act as formative influences upon the human soul; he employs them as great symbols of the tremendous reverses of fate; he arranges them like the stage scenery of a melodrama. If we look deeper, what reveals itself to us in this? A characteristic which is to a certain extent distinctive of many of the French Romanticists, and which may be most briefly expressed thus: French Romanticism, in spite of all the elements it has in common with general European Romanticism, is in many ways a classic phenomenon, a product of classic French rhetoric. Words undergo strange vicissitudes in this world of ours. When the word romantic was introduced into Germany it signified almost the same as Romanesque; it meant Romanesque flourishes and conceits, sonnets and canzonets; the Romanticists were enthusiastic admirers of the Roman Catholic Church and of the great Romanesque poet Calderon, whose works they discovered and translated and lauded. When, a century later, Romanticism reached France, the same word meant exactly the opposite thing—it meant the German-English tendency as opposed to the Greco-Latin Romanesque tendency; it meant Teutonic. The simple explanation of this is, that whatever is strange and foreign produces a romantic impression. The art and literature of a people of a homogeneous civilisation and culture, like the ancient Greeks, are classic; but when one civilised, cultured nation discovers another civilisation and culture which seem to it strange and wonderful, it is at once impressed by it as romantic, is affected by it as by a landscape seen through coloured glass. The Romanticists of France despised their own national excellences, the perspicuity and rational transparency of their own literature, and extolled Shakespeare and Goethe because these poets did not, like Racine and, to a certain extent, Corneille, break up human life into its separate elements, did not represent isolated emotions and passions which offered dramatic contrasts, but, without any rhetorical recurrence to the fundamental elements, flung real human life on the stage in all its complex cohesion. The Frenchmen determined to follow this great example. But what was the result? Under their treatment, in the hands of Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, George Sand, Sainte-Beuve, real life was dissolved and disintegrated anew. In the hands of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas its extremes formed symmetrical contrasts, exactly as in classic tragedy. Order, moderation, aristocratic refinement, a transparent, severely simple style distinguished Nodier, Beyle, and Mérimée, exactly as they had done the classic authors of the eighteenth century. The light, free, airy fancy which intermingles all the most varied imaginations of the poetic mind, which unites near and far, to-day and hoary antiquity, the real and the impossible, in one and the same work, which combines the divine and the human, popular legend and profound allegory, making of them one great symbolic whole—this real romantic gift was not theirs. They never saw the dance of the elves, nor heard the thin, clear tones of their music floating across the meadows. Although Celts by birth, these men were Latins; they felt and wrote as Latins; and the word Latin is equivalent to classic. If we understand by Romanticism what is generally understood, that is, an overwhelming of the style by the subject-matter, contents uncontrolled by any laws of form, such as we have in the writings of Jean Paul and Tieck, and even in Shakespeare and Goethe (A Midsummer Night's Dream and the second part of Faust), then all the French Romanticists are classic writers—Mérimée, George Sand, Gautier, and even Victor Hugo himself. Hugo's romantic drama is as disintegrative, regular in construction, perspicuous, and eloquent as a tragedy of Corneille. At the mention of this name my thoughts turn involuntarily and naturally from the characteristics common to the periods to the common characteristics of race. In Hugo, Corneille's apparent antagonist, Corneille lives again. There are many veins in the French character. There is a vein of scepticism, jest, sarcasm—the line Montaigne, La Fontaine, Molière, Mathurin Régnier, Pierre Bayle, &c.; there is the true, thoroughbred Gallic vein—Rabelais, Diderot, Balzac; and amongst the rest there is the heroic vein, the vein of enthusiasm. It is this last which pulsates so strongly in Corneille; and in Victor Hugo the blood begins to course in it again. If we compare Hugo in his stateliness with other poets, we shall find that there is probably not one in the whole world whom he resembles so much as he does old Corneille. There is something Spanish about the French eloquence of both, and Spain had certainly made its impression on them both; in Corneille's case a literary impression, in Hugo's a personal, received in his childhood. The drama to which Corneille owes his fame is the Cid, in which a Spanish theme is treated in a Spanish spirit, in imitation of Spanish models. The drama which makes Hugo famous is Hernani, Spanish in its subject, and permeated by the spirit of Calderon's code of honour. But in both these dramas it is heroism pure and simple which is inculcated and exhibited. They are schools for heroes. It is not human nature in its manysidedness, but heroic human nature which Corneille represents; in Victor Hugo this same heroic human nature is merely symmetrically complemented by wildly passionate human nature. Let us glance at this Hernani, round which the great conflict between the party of the future and the party of the past raged. The story of the first performance has often been told. Adherents of the old school listened at the doors during the rehearsals, and picked up single lines, which they caricatured; and a parody of the play was acted before the play itself. The author had a hard struggle with the censor; he had to fight for his play almost line by line. There was a long correspondence on the subject of the one line: "C'était d'un imprudent, seigneur roi de Castille, et d'un lâche." And the actors and actresses regarded the work with equal disfavour; only one of the company applied himself with goodwill to the study of his part. Hugo was determined to dispense with the paid claque, but he arranged to have three hundred places at his disposal for the first three nights. The most faithful of his followers, young men who, according to their own confession, spent their nights in writing "Vive Victor Hugo!" all over the arcade of the Rue de Rivoli, with no other aim than to annoy the respectable citizen, now enlisted a corps of young painters, architects, poets, sculptors, musicians, and printers, to whom Hugo gave the watchword Hierro, and who were prepared to present an iron front to the foe. The moment the curtain rose the storm burst, and every time the play was performed there was such an uproar in the theatre that it was with the greatest difficulty it could be acted to the end. A hundred evenings in succession was Hernani hissed, and a hundred evenings in succession was it received with storms of applause by young enthusiasts, who for their master's sake did not weary of listening to the same speeches evening after evening and defending them line by line against the hate, rage, envy, and superior power of his opponents. The fact may seem unimportant, yet it is worthy of observation, that France is the only country in which such esprit de corps, without the existence of any tangible corps, such unselfish devotion to the cause and honour of another, has ever been witnessed. The enemy took boxes and left them unoccupied, in order that the newspapers might report an empty house; they turned their backs to the stage; they made disgusted grimaces, as if the play were more than they could stand; they affected to be absorbed in the newspapers; they slammed the box doors, or laughed loud and scornfully, or hooted and hissed and whistled; so that a resolute defence was absolutely necessary. There is not an emotion in Hernani which is not strained to its extremest pitch. The hero is a noble-minded man of genius, the genius and noble-mindedness being of the type which exists in the imagination of a young man of twenty. His genius impels him to lead the life of a brigand chieftain, and out of pure high-mindedness and contempt for ordinary prudence he does the most foolish things—betrays himself, lets his mortal enemy escape, gives himself up again and again. As chieftain he exercises unbounded power over other men, but it seems to be his courage alone which gives him this, for all his actions are as unreasoning as a child's. Nevertheless there is life and reality in the play. This noble and disinterested highwayman, who lives at war with society and is the leader of a band of faithful enthusiasts, reminds us of the poet himself, the literary outlaw, who filled pit and gallery with a band of young men quite as remarkable in appearance and attire as his brigand troop. Madame Hugo describes the contingent of spectators who appeared on the first evening in answer to her husband's invitation as "a troop of wild, extraordinary creatures, with beards and long hair, dressed in every fashion except that of the day—in woollen jerseys and Spanish cloaks, Robespierre waistcoats and Henry III. caps—displaying themselves in broad daylight at the doors of the theatre with the clothing of all ages and countries on their backs." Their frantic devotion to Hugo was as great as that of Hernani's band of robbers for its captain. They knew that Hugo had received an anonymous letter in which he was threatened with assassination "if he did not withdraw his filthy play," and, improbable as it was that the threat would be literally fulfilled, two of them accompanied him to and from the theatre every evening, though he and they lived in the farthest apart quarters of Paris. Amongst Hugo's papers of this date there is a quaint note from the painter Charlet, which expresses the feelings of these youths. "Four of my Janissaries offer me their strong arms. I send them to prostrate themselves at your feet, begging for four places for this evening, if it is not too late. I answer for my men; they are fellows who would gladly cut off heads for the sake of the wigs. I encourage them in this noble spirit, and do not let them go without my fatherly blessing. They kneel. I stretch out my hands and say: God protect you, young men! The cause is a good one; do your duty! They rise and I add: Now, my children, take good care of Victor Hugo. God is good, but He has so much to do that our friend must in the first instance rely upon us. Go, and do not put him you serve to shame.—Yours with life and soul, "CHARLET." Supported by such devoted enthusiasts as these in its struggle with fanatic opposition, romantic art stormed the enemy's first redoubt and won its first important victory. What these young men heard from the stage was the expression of their own defiance and thirst for independence, of their courage and devotion, their ideal and erotic longings, only pitched in a still higher key; and their hearts melted within them. The time was February 1830, five months before the Revolution of July. The dullest materialism made life colourless. France was as regularly ordered as the avenues of the gardens of Versailles; it was ruled by old men, who patronised only such young ones as had written Latin verse to perfection at school, and had since qualified themselves for office by absolute correctness of behaviour. There they sat, these correct, faultlessly-attired youths, with their neckcloths and stiff standing collars. Contrast with them the youths in the pit, one with locks reaching to his waist and a scarlet satin doublet, another with a Rubens hat and bare hands. These latter hated the powerful Philistine bourgeoisie as Hernani hated the tyranny of Charles V. They gloried in their position; they, too, were freebooters, poor, proud—one a cherisher of Republican dreams, most of them worshippers of art. There they stood, many of them geniuses—Balzac, Berlioz, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, Petrus Borel, Préault—taking the measure of their opponents of the same generation. They felt that they themselves were at least not place-seekers, not tuft-hunters, beggars, and parasites like those others; they were the men who a few months later made the Revolution of July, and who in the course of a few years gave France a literature and art of the first rank. We know how they regarded Hernani. What did they see in the second great character, King Charles of Spain? He repels at first. We cannot place much faith in this cold, cautious monarch's ardent love for Donna Sol; and he, moreover, employs violent and dishonourable means to get her into his power. But the poet soon raises him to a higher level, and makes us feel the great ambition which fills his soul. It was Charles's tremendous monologue at the tomb of Charlemagne which decided the fate of the drama that evening. And this much criticised and ridiculed monologue is in reality the work of a young master. It is easy to perceive, even if we did not know, how untrue it is to history, how impossible it is that Charles V. should have thought thus; but we are fascinated by the faithfulness with which the political ideas and dreams of 1830 are mirrored, and by the marvellous political insight displayed. This is the historical insight which sometimes astonishes us in poets; Schiller showed it at the age of 21, in Fiesco. Listen to Don Carlos's description of Europe: A building with two human beings on its pinnacles, two elected chiefs, to whom every hereditary monarch must bow—the Emperor and the Pope. Almost all the states have hereditary rulers, and are, in so far, in the power of chance; but the people are at times able to elect their Pope or their Emperor; chance corrects chance, and the balance is restored. The Electors in their cloth of gold, the Cardinals in their scarlet, are the instruments by means of whom God chooses. "Qu'une idée, au besoin des temps, un jour éclose; Elle grandît, va, court, se mêle à toute chose, Se fait homme, saisit les cœurs, creuse un sillon; Maint roi la foule aux pieds ou lui met un baîllon; Mais qu'elle entre un matin à la diète, au conclave, Et tous les rois soudain verront l'idée esclave Sur leurs têtes de rois que ses pieds courberont Surgir, le globe en main ou la tiare au front." The poet was certainly not thinking of Charles V. when he wrote this, but of an Emperor much nearer his own day, the Emperor of whom he had just written in the Ode à la Colonne de la Place Vendôme, that his spurs outweighed Charlemagne's sandals. It must not be forgotten that men's enthusiasm for Napoleon in those days by no means implied that they were Bonapartists; it only signified that they belonged to the party of progress. The Napoleon they worshipped was not the tyrant of France, but the humiliator of kings and of hereditary authority. The Emperor, as compared with the King, was regarded as the personified people; therefore the young generation was deeply moved when Charles in his monologue exclaims: "Rois! regardez en bas! ... Ah! le peuple!—Océan! Vague qui broie un trône! Miroir où rarement un roi se voit en beau!" They are, thus, revolutionary and perfectly modern reminiscences and comparisons which occur in rapid succession to Charles V. At the grave of Charlemagne he matures into the popular Emperor who has been so often dreamed of in modern times, and his passionate ambition is purified by his intense desire to solve gigantic problems and accomplish prodigious tasks. The man who was, to begin with, so obnoxious to the youthful part of the audience, whose brutal desire made him so inferior to his noble-minded rival Hernani and the proud lady they both love, ends, when he is Emperor, by renouncing his claims and showing mercy—and suddenly the two happy lovers seem small and insignificant beside him. With his hand on his heart he says softly to himself: "Éteins-toi, cœur jeune et plein de flamme! Laisse régner l'esprit que toujours tu troublas. Tes amours désormais, tes maîtresses, hélas! C'est l'Allemagne, c'est la Flandre, c'est l'Espagne!" And with his eye on the imperial banner he adds: "L'empereur est pareil à l'aigle, sa compagne. A la place du cœur, il n'a qu'un ecusson!" Such words as these produced a powerful effect on the ambitious young men who were the real audience of the play. The drama, the tragedy, of ambition moved them as deeply as the drama of independence. They knew that great public aims are attained, great tasks accomplished only by manly resolution nourished upon the intensest emotions, longings, and joys of the heart, which have been offered as a burnt-offering on the altar of the aim—therefore they understood Carlos. Nevertheless the fifth act, with the duet between the lovers, is in its purely lyric excellence the gem of the play. Here was love as those young men felt it and desired to have it represented. This dialogue on the threshold of the bridal chamber which the lovers are never to enter; this blending of a happiness so great and intense that, as Hernani says, it demands hearts of bronze on which to engrave itself, with all the horrors of annihilation; this sensual feeling, which is chaste and harmonious in her, pure and ardent in him, blissful in both; Donna Sol's supra-mundane enthusiasm; Hernani's longing to forget the past in the present and its peace—all this was Romanticism of the kind the youth of the day demanded and greeted with thunders of applause. As a drama Hernani is extremely imperfect; it is a lyrical, rhetorical work, containing much that is extravagant. But it has the one, all-important merit, namely, that in it an independent and remarkable human soul has expressed itself unrestrainedly. From such a work it is possible to learn much of its author's mental idiosyncrasy. He is there with his genius, his limitations, his character, his whole past—with his conceptions of liberty and authority, of honour and nobility, of love and of death. And the work presents to us not only Victor Hugo and a bit of the Spain of 1519, but the young generation of its own day and a piece of the France of 1830. Hernani is the essence of the spirit which inspired the youth of France at the time of the Revolution of July; it is an image of France which, seen in a romantic light, expands into an image of the world. But when, instead of confining our attention to a single work, we proceed, as now, to study a whole literature, hosts of pictures of moods and thoughts, of portraits, and of images of the world, pass before us. We shall detain them to compare them with one another and see in what they agree, by this means attaining to a certainty of what the fundamental characteristic of the age is; then we shall let them pass before us in historical succession, and try, by carefully observing in what they differ from one another, to discover the law which produces these differences; we shall watch, as it were, the flight of the arrows which indicate the direction of the spiritual currents. IV CHARLES NODIER From the year 1824 onwards Hugo, Dumas, Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve, De Musset, and De Vigny met almost every Sunday evening at the house of a friend who that year took up his residence in the outskirts of Paris, near the Arsenal, in a modest dwelling which went by the name of the Little Tuileries. Their host was a man who in point of age belonged to the previous generation (he was born in 1780), but who in his mental attitude had anticipated the nascent literature, which he consequently at once and without hesitation took under his protection. His name was Charles Nodier. Nodier's life had been one of strange vicissitudes; he had been an emigré in the Jura, a newspaper editor in Illyria, and now he was a librarian in Paris.[1] His most remarkable characteristic as an author is that he is always from ten to twenty years in advance of every literary movement. His novel Jean Sbogar, the story of a species of Illyrian Karl Moor, which he planned in Illyria in 1812 and published in 1818, although improbable and uninteresting as a tale, is remarkable from the fact that its author, long before the days of Proudhon and modern communism, has put some of the most striking truths and untruths of the communistic faith into the mouth of his hero. Jean Sbogar writes:— "The poor man's theft from the rich man would, if we were to go back to the origin of social conditions, prove to be merely the just return of a piece of silver or of bread from the hands of the thief to the hands of the man from whom it was stolen." "Show me a power which dares to assume the name of law, and I shall show you theft assuming the name of property." "What is that law which calls itself constitution and bears on its brow the name and seal of equality? Is it the agrarian law? No, it is the contract of sale, drawn up by intriguers and partisans who have desired to enrich themselves, which delivers a people into the hands of the rich." "Liberty is not such a very rare treasure; it is to be found in the hand of the strong and the purse of the rich. You are master over my money. I am master of your life. Give me the money and you may keep your life." Jean Sbogar is, we observe, not a common but a philosophic highwayman. The most natural thing about him is that he wears gold earrings, and this realistic trait Madame Nodier had almost succeeded in eliminating. Nodier allowed himself to be, as a rule, guided by his wife's taste and wishes. But when he once in a way felt inclined to rebel, and, to excuse himself, pled his submission on all other occasions, Madame Nodier always said: "Don't forget that you refused to sacrifice Jean Sbogar's earrings to me." This is declared to have been the one and only literary disagreement which ever occurred between the couple. Men had forgotten the existence of such a book as Jean Sbogar, when Napoleon's memoirs came out and informed them that he had had it with him at St. Helena, and had read it with interest. The little novel belongs to Nodier's transition period. It was written before he had developed his characteristic individuality. This he did about the time of the formation of the Romantic School proper. He stood then, so to speak, at the open door of literature, and bade that school welcome. His review of Victor Hugo's boyish romance, Han d'Islande, is a little masterpiece of criticism, sympathetic and acute. It was the beginning of the warm friendship between the two authors. The appreciation of Hugo is so marvellously correct that in reading it to-day one can hardly believe that its writer was unacquainted with all the master's later works. It required no small amount of cleverness to foresee them in Han d'Islande. The stories which Nodier now began to write possess a charm and attraction unique in French literature. They are distinguished by a mimosa-like delicacy of feeling. They treat chiefly of the first stirring of passion in the hearts of youths and maidens; the fresh dew of the morning of life is upon them; they remind us of the woods in spring. It is a well-known fact that there is some difficulty in finding French books of any literary value which are fit for young girls' reading; but such tales as Nodier's Thérèse Aubert, or the collection of stories entitled Souvenirs de Jeunesse, meet both requirements. The only risk run would be the risk of imbuing the young readers with fanciful platonic ideas; for these tales are as sentimental as they are chaste; the love which they describe may be a friendship with little of the sexual element in it, nevertheless it completely engrosses the little human being. It owes its charm to the fact that as yet no experience has made these minds suspicious and that no false or true pride prevents these hearts from revealing their emotions. As all the tales are founded on reality, on memories of their author's youth, the terrors of the Revolution form the dark background of them all, and they all end with a parting or the death of the loved one. A childlike delicacy of feeling is the fundamental characteristic of Nodier's character. To the end of his days he remained a big, unworldly child, with a girlish shrinking not only from the impure, but even from the grown-up standpoint. Above this groundwork of naïve freshness of feeling there rises, as second story, a wildly exuberant imagination. Nodier possessed such a gift of extravagant invention that one can hardly help believing that he must have been subject to visions and hallucinations; he had the dangerous quality peculiar to a certain type of poetic temperament, that of scarcely being able to speak the truth. No one, not even he himself, ever knew for a certainty whether what he was relating was truth or fiction. Jest is the mean between the two. Nodier was considered one of the most entertaining of Frenchmen, and he was not the least offended when he was told by his friends that they did not believe a word of what he was telling them. On a tour which he and Hugo, accompanied by their wives, made together in the south of France, they arrived at an inn in the little town of Essonne, where they were to breakfast. It was in this inn that Lesurques had been arrested, a man who was executed in 1796 for a murder of which he was afterwards proved to have been innocent. Nodier, who had known him, or at any rate said he had, spoke of him with an emotion that brought tears into the eyes of the two ladies, and disturbed the cheerfulness of the repast. Noticing Madame Hugo's wet eyes, Nodier promptly began: "You know, Madame, that a man is not invariably certain of being the father of his child, but have you ever heard of a woman not knowing if she is her child's mother?" "Where did you hear of such a thing?" asked Madame Hugo. "In the billiard-room next door," was the reply. Pressed for an explanation, Nodier related with much gusto how, two years previously, a coachful of wet-nurses, coming from Paris with children who were to be reared in the country, stopped at this very inn. That they might breakfast in peace, the nurses deposited their charges for the time on the billiard-table. But whilst the women were in the salle-à-manger some carriers, coming in to play a game of billiards, lifted the children off the table and laid them at random on the bench. When the nurses returned they were in despair. How was each to recognise her own nursling? The children were all only a few days old, and indistinguishable one from the other. At last, merely making sure of the sex, each took one from the row; and now there were in France a score or so of mothers who discovered a likeness to beloved husbands or to themselves in children with whom they had no connection whatever. "What a story!" said Madame Nodier. "Were the children's clothes not marked?" "If you begin to inquire into the probability of a thing, you will never arrive at the truth," answered Nodier, nothing daunted, and quite satisfied with the effect produced. He himself never inquired into probabilities. The world of probabilities was not his; he lived in the world of legend, of fantastic fairy-tale and ghost story. If a fairy has ever stood by the cradle of a mortal, that mortal was Charles Nodier. And in this fairy he believed all his life; he loved her as she loved him, and she had a part in all that he wrote. What though he was married by law and in earthly fashion to Madame Nodier! The marriage had no more spiritual significance than Dante's with Gemma Donati; his true bride and Beatrice was the fairy Bellas, once the Queen of Sheba, whose praises he and Gérard de Nerval so often sang. The world in which he lives is the world in which Oberon and Titania dance, in which strains from the Thousand and One Nights blend with the melodies of Ariel's celestial orchestra, in which Puck makes his bed in a rosebud, whilst all the flowers perfume the summer night. It is a world in which all the personages of real, wide-awake life appear, but grotesquely magnified or grotesquely diminished, to suit the comprehension of the child and the requirements of the fantast. Here, as Nodier himself somewhere says, we have Odysseus the far-travelled, but he has shrunk into Hop-o'-my-thumb, whose tremendous voyage consists in swimming across the milk-pail; here is Othello, the terrible wife-murderer, only his beard is not black but blue—he has turned into the notorious Bluebeard; here is Figaro, the nimble lackey who flatters the grandees so cleverly, only he is transformed into Puss in Boots, a less entertaining personage, though almost as interesting from the psychological point of view. No author of the French Romantic period is more closely related to the German and English Romanticists than Nodier. Any one who does not know his works may form some idea of them by recalling Sir Walter Scott's ghost stories and Hoffmann's audacious fantasies. But these, of course, do not convey an idea of Nodier's artistic individuality. His peculiarity is, that in his representation of Romantic subjects he is not what we are in the habit of calling Romantic, but, on the contrary, severely Attic, classically simple, sparing in the matter of colour, and devoid of passion; there is none of the Scotch mist we are conscious of in Sir Walter, or of the fumes of the Berlin wine-vaults which we inhale in reading Hoffmann. His peculiarity as a stylist is that, whilst the young Romanticists around him were sensualising language and supplanting the idea by the picture, he himself transcribed his wildest Romantic fancies into the clear and simple language of Pascal and Bossuet. Enthusiastic champion as he was of the new tendency in literature, in the matter of style he remained old-fashioned, and expressed the fantastic imaginations of the nineteenth century in the severe, perspicuous language of the seventeenth. Audacious to the verge of insanity in his fantasies, he is sober and clear in his style. As Prosper Mérimée has cleverly said, a fanciful tale by Nodier is like "the dream of a Scythian, told by an old Greek poet." His Inès de Las Sierras is a ghost-story the beauty of which renders it infinitely superior to the ordinary ghost-story. The horror produced by the unaccountable apparition is blent with the admiration aroused by the supernatural visitant's gentle grace; these feelings do not neutralise each other, but act in combination with a peculiar power; and it is this combination which is the secret of Nodier's effects. It is a pity that he has spoiled the beautiful story by a trivial and improbable conclusion, which explains away the ghost in the most commonplace manner. The apparition seen in the old castle at midnight is not the ghost of the young dancing-girl, murdered 300 years before, but a living Spanish maiden who happens to bear the same name, and whom a fantastic and incredible concatenation of circumstances has led to dance there, dressed in white. There is genuine Latin rationality in this solution of the mystery, but it is offered to us, as it were, ironically. A story like Inès de Las Sierras, however, is what most exactly demonstrates the poetic progress made since the eighteenth century, which was such an enemy of the supernatural, even in fiction, that Voltaire regarded himself as an audacious reformer when (in his Semiramis) he allowed the ridiculous ghost of Minus to howl some alexandrines through a speaking-trumpet in broad daylight. La Fée aux Miettes seems to me the best of Nodier's fantastic tales. There is undoubtedly too much of it; it is not without an effort that one follows all the wild twists and turnings of a fantasy which occupies 120 quarto pages, even though much of it is both interesting and charming. A poor, harmless lunatic in the asylum of Glasgow tells the story of his life. This is the setting of the tale, but we forget it altogether in the marvellousness of the events related. All the chords of human life are touched, jarringly and wildly. It is as if life itself passed before one's eyes seen wrong side out, seen from the perfectly permissible standpoint of the dreamer or the delirious fever-patient. In the little town of Granville in Normandy lives a worthy, simple-minded young carpenter, Michel by name. In the same town lives an old female dwarf, shrivelled and ugly, who, because she gathers up the scraps of the school-children's breakfasts, is called "la fée aux miettes." Four or five centuries ago she might have been seen in Granville, living in the same way, and she has made her appearance at intervals since. This being is assisted by the young carpenter with small sums of money, and she in return assists him with all manner of wise advice. She always speaks to him as if she were passionately in love with him, and she begs him to promise to marry her, so that by this means his money may in time return to him again. She gives him her portrait, a picture which does not resemble her at all, but represents the fairy Belkis, who in olden days was the Queen of Sheba beloved by Solomon. The youth falls in love with this picture of a beautiful, dazzling, bewitching woman. Wherever he goes her name meets him; when he determines to try his fortune in a foreign country, the ship he sails in is called the Queen of Sheba. He wanders about the world dreaming of Belkis, as we wander, one and all of us, dreaming of our castle in the air, our ideal, our fixed idea, which to our neighbours is madness. Falsely accused of a murder committed in the room in which he had slept at an inn, poor Michel is sentenced to be hanged. He is carried through a hooting crowd to the gallows. There proclamation is made that, according to old custom, his life will be spared if any young woman will have pity on him and take him for her husband. And behold, Folly Girlfree, a merry, pretty girl who has always liked him, approaches the scaffold, prepared to save him. But he asks time for reflection. He likes Folly Girlfree, and she is both good and beautiful, but he does not love her; he has only one love, his ardently, secretly adored ideal, the Fairy Belkis. He looks tenderly and gratefully at Folly, deliberates, and—requests to be hanged. This deliberation with the rope round his neck, this conclusion that, as Shakespeare puts it, "many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage," is described with delightful humour, with a naïve philosophy which is unforgettable from the fact that some such idea has occurred at one time or other to all of us. They are proceeding to hang Michel, when loud cries are heard, and the Crumb Fairy, followed by all the street boys, arrives breathless, bringing proofs of the prisoner's innocence. He marries her out of gratitude, but hardly has the door on the wedding night been hermetically closed between him and his aged wife, hardly has he shut his eyes than Belkis in her bridal veil approaches his couch. "Alas! Belkis, I am married, married to the Crumb Fairy." "I am she." "Nay, that is impossible; you are almost as tall as I." "That is because I have stretched myself." "But this beautiful, curly, golden hair falling over your shoulders, Belkis? The Crumb Fairy has none of it." "No, for I show it only to my husband." "But the Fairy's two great teeth, Belkis; I do not see them between your fresh, fragrant lips?" "No, they are a superfluity only permissible to old age." "And this almost deadly feeling of bliss which takes possession of me in your embrace, Belkis? The Fairy never gave me this." "No, naturally," is the laughing answer; "but 'at night all cats are grey.'" Henceforward Michel lives a divided life; his days are spent with the wise old Fairy, his nights with the beautiful young Queen of Sheba, until at last he finds the singing mandragora, and, having made his escape from the madhouse, mounts to the Fairy's and Belkis's heaven on the wings of the mandragora's song. This is madness, no doubt, but it is marvellous madness—madness instinct with soul. Who is this crumb-gathering fairy? Is she wisdom? Is she renunciation and duty? Is she the inexhaustible patience which suddenly reveals itself as genius? Is she fidelity turning into the happiness that is the reward of fidelity? She is probably a little of all of this; and therefore it is that she can transform herself into youth and beauty and bliss. In some such fashion Nodier has thought out, or dreamt his story. At its maturity his imaginative faculty is more wanton and bold. No longer contented with producing shapeless, unordered material, he presents his material to us with a grotesque, loquacious, satirical explanation. No Frenchman comes so near having what Englishmen and Germans call humour as Nodier. At times he seems to be positively possessed by whimsicality. Then he not only turns the everyday world topsy-turvy in his stories, but plays with his own relation to the story, satirises contemporaries, makes a thousand innuendoes, philosophises over the illusions of life. He takes even the art of the printer into his service to heighten his fantastic effects; or, more correctly speaking, in order to prove the absolute power of his personality over his material, he leaves not a single thing, not even the purely mechanical means of communication, untouched by his mood. In his famous tale, Le Roi de Bohème et ses sept Châteaux, he exhausted the resources of the printing establishment. At his command the letters become so long that they stretch from top to bottom of the page; he commands again, and they dwindle into the tiniest of the tiny; he screams, and they stand up on end in terror; he becomes melancholy, and they hang their heads all along the lines; they are inseparably mixed up with illustrations; Latin and Gothic groups alternate, according to the mood of the moment; sometimes they stand on their heads, so that we have to turn the book upside down to read them; sometimes they follow the narrative so closely that a descent of the stairs is printed thus: Hereupon our hero went dejectedly down the stairs. It is interesting to trace in the account of Nodier's life written by his daughter, the foundations of fact upon which he built his fantastic tales. It rarely happens that, as in Inès de Las Sierras, something real (in this case an old castle which Nodier had visited in the course of a tour he made with his family in Spain in 1827) forms the groundwork. Sometimes, as for example in Trilby, the point of departure is a legend; and it is significant that this particular legend should have been told to Nodier by Pichot, the French translator of Scott and Byron. The idea of Smarra Nodier got from hearing the old porter of his house in Paris, who was too ill to sleep anywhere except sitting in his chair, relate his nightmares and dreams. The model for the Fée aux Miettes was an old woman who served in his father's house when he was a child, and who treated his father, a man of sixty, as if he were a giddy youth. This old Denise maintained that before entering the Nodiers' household she had been in the service of a Monsieur d'Amboise, governor of Château-Thierry. When she held forth on this subject, she mixed up with her own experiences reminiscences of the most extraordinary events and most antiquated customs; and the family, out of curiosity, caused inquiry to be made about this remarkable governor. The archives of the town showed that only one of the name had ever existed, and that he had died in 1557. One can see how the story of the fairy evolved itself out of this curious incident. The very slightest element of fact—a landscape, a legend, a dream, a lie, a mere mote—was enough for Nodier. The amiable, clever man, whose house was for a number of years the rendezvous of the men of letters who made their début about 1830, the place where all the talented young beginners repaired to seek encouragement and, if possible, permission to read a ballad or a little piece of prose before the select company which assembled there on Sunday afternoons, this man in his proper person represents the extreme of Romantic fantasticality in the literature of the period. The fantastic supernaturalism which was the main characteristic of German Romanticism, is only one of the poles of French Romanticism; or, to speak more correctly, it is merely one of its elements—in some of the most notable men of the school a weak and subordinate, in others an important element, but an element always present. In Victor Hugo's case it announces itself at once, in his Ronde du Sabbat, and makes itself forcibly felt in the great Légende des Siècles, though in this latter the legend is only naïve history; we have a glimpse of it even in the rationalistic Mérimée (half explained away in La Vénus d'Ille, more distinct in La Vision de Charles XI. and Les âmes du purgatoire); it reigns, half-seraphic, half-sanguinarily sensual, in Lamartine's La chute d'un ange; it pervades Quinet's pantheistically vague Ahasvère; it appears in George Sand's old age in the pretty fairy-tales she writes for her grandchildren; it occupies even the plastic Gautier in the many tales in which he allows himself to be influenced by Hoffmann; and, as Swedenborgian spiritism, it actually, in a romance like Séraphitus-Séraphita, completes Balzac's great Comédie Humaine. But in no other author has it the naïve originality and the poetic force which distinguish Nodier. V RETROSPECT—FOREIGN INFLUENCES The new literary and artistic movement had both foreign and indigenous sources. The foreign are the more clearly evident. As has already been observed, the older foreign literature which had hitherto been kept out of France, and the new, which was captivating men's minds by its novelty, were simultaneously seized on and assimilated by the young generation, with an eagerness exactly proportioned to the vehemence with which the works in question repudiated the rules adhered to in earlier French literature. Before the eyes of the young school there was, as it were, a prism, which refracted all rays in a certain uniform manner. The rays which passed through changed their character in the process. The name of Shakespeare early became the great rallying cry of the Romanticists. August Wilhelm Schlegel had prepared the way for Shakespeare; in his famous Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, which were published in French as well as German, he had been the first to extol and expound him. Mercier, the French "prophet of Romanticism," eagerly took up the cry; Villemain and Guizot followed suit; imitations and translations, the latter more faithful than those of the previous century, did what in them lay to popularise the name and art of the great Englishman. At the beginning of the Twenties, the progress that had been made was not sufficient to prevent a company of English actors who tried to play Shakespeare in the Porte-St. Martin theatre, being received with a shower of apples and eggs and cries of: "Speak French! Down with Shakespeare! He was one of Wellington's adjutants!"[1] But we have seen that their successors met with a most cordial reception only a few years later. In the interval Beyle had made his determined effort to procure Shakespeare due recognition; the Globe (published first three times a week, then daily) had made its appearance as the organ of the younger generation, and its ablest contributors had conducted the campaign of the new cause with remarkable skill. Beyle who, in spite of his paradoxicalness, is one of the most clear-headed and original writers of his day, expresses profound admiration for Shakespeare without being guilty of any lack of piety towards Racine, whom he represents as the Englishman's antipodes. He shows that the moments of complete illusion which ought to occur during the course of every theatrical performance, occur more frequently during the representation of Shakespeare's than of Racine's plays, and also that the peculiar pleasure imparted by a tragedy depends upon these same seconds of illusion and the emotion which they leave in the spectator's mind. Nothing hinders illusion more than admiration of the beautiful verse of a tragedy. The question we have to answer is: What is the task of the dramatic poet? Is it to present us with a beautifully evolved plot in melodious verse, or is it to give a truthful representation of emotions? In his own answer to this question Beyle goes farther than Romantic tragedy, exemplified by Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, subsequently did; for he unconditionally rejects verse as a vehicle for tragic drama. Granted, he says, that the aim of tragedy is to give a faithful representation of emotions, then its first requirement is distinct expression of thoughts and feelings. Such distinctness is detracted from by verse. He quotes Macbeth's words, spoken when he sees the ghost of Banquo sitting in his place: "The table's full;" and maintains that rhyme and rhythm can add nothing to the beauty of such a cry. It was obviously Vitet, not Hugo, who subsequently came up to Beyle's dramaturgic ideal. He warns against imitation of Shakespeare. The master should only be followed in his understanding observation of the society in which he lived, and his skill in giving his contemporaries exactly the kind of tragedy which they needed; for to-day too, in 1820, the desire for a certain kind of tragic drama exists, even though the public, intimidated by the fame of Racine, does not venture to demand it of the poet. It is only when an author studies and satisfies his age that he is truly Romantic. For "Romanticism" is the art of providing nations with the literary works which in the existing condition of their ideas and customs are fitted to give them the greatest possible amount of pleasure, whereas "Classicism" offers them the literature which gave their greatgrandfathers the greatest possible amount of pleasure. In his own day Racine was a Romanticist. Shakespeare is a Romanticist, in the first place because he depicted for the Englishmen of 1590 the bloody struggles and the results of their civil wars, and in the second place because he has painted a series of masterly, subtly shaded pictures of the impulses of the human mind and the passions of the human heart. The teaching of Romanticism is, not that men should imitate England or Germany, but that each nation should have its own literature, modelled upon its own character, just as we all wear clothes cut and sewn for ourselves alone. To Beyle, we observe, Romanticism is almost the exact equivalent of what we call modern art. Characteristic of that inveterate tendency of the Latin race to classicism which has already been alluded to, are his repeated assertions that the author should be "romantic" in all that concerns his subject-matter, this being "the requirement of the age," but that he should remain classic in his manner of presenting it, in vocabulary and style. For language is an established convention and therefore practically unchangeable. Men should try to write like Pascal, Voltaire, and La Bruyère.[2] With characteristic variations the most eminent contributors to the Globe formulate their definitions of Romanticism in very fair harmony with each other and with Beyle. At the time when Hugo was still royalist, Christian, and conservative, the Globe was already revolutionary, philosophic, and liberal. The first to publish the programme of Romanticism in the Globewas Thiers. He proclaimed its watchwords to be nature and truth—those almost inevitable war-cries in every artistic and literary revolution. He opposes himself to the academic, the symmetrical in plastic art, and in dramatic poetry demands historic truth, which is the same as what was afterwards called local colouring. Duvergier de Hauranne, in an article On the Romantic, defines classicism as routine, Romanticism as liberty—that is to say, liberty for the most varied talents (Hugo and Beyle, Manzoni and Nodier) to develop in all their marked individuality. Ampère defines classicism as imitation, Romanticism as originality. But an anonymous writer (in all probability Sismondi) tries to give a more exact definition; he remarks that the word Romanticism has not been coined to designate the literary works in which any society whatever has given itself expression, but only that literature which gives a faithful picture of modern civilization. Since this civilisation is, according to his conviction, spiritual in its essence, Romanticism is to be defined as spirituality in literature. The future author of Les Barricades, Vitet, at this time a youth of twenty, tries to settle the matter with the impetuosity and audacity of his age. According to him it simply means independence in artistic matters, individual liberty in literary. "Romanticism is," he says, "Protestantism in literature and art;" and in saying so he is obviously thinking merely of emancipation from a kind of papal authority. He adds that it is neither a literary doctrine nor a party cry, but the law of necessity, the law of change and of progress. "Twenty years hence the whole nation will be Romantic; I say the whole nation, for the Jesuits are not the nation." The reader can see for himself that there is only the merest shade of difference between these definitions and the conclusion arrived at by Victor Hugo: "Romanticism is Liberalism in literature;" and it will not surprise him to learn that the Globe greeted the preface to Cromwell with the exclamation: "The movement has now reached M. Hugo." Hugo's chief contribution to it was victory.[3] Next to Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott was the English author who exercised, if not the most profound, certainly the most plainly traceable influence. He found his way across the French, as across every other frontier. Before the days of his popularity in France the great Scotchman had found in Germany, Italy, and Denmark admirers, who, inspired by patriotic and moral aims, adopted the tone of his fiction. The Waverley novels began to appear in 1814; in 1815 they were already imitated by De la Motte Fouqué in the German "Junker" style; in 1825-26 Manzoni's Promessi Sposi appeared; and in 1826 Ingemann began to publish his romantic historical tales, which inculcate a childish kind of patriotism and royalism, and are, as it were, haunted by a pale ghost of Sir Walter Scott. The Waverley novels were translated into French almost immediately after their appearance, and at once achieved a great success. Scott became so popular that in the early Twenties the managers of the theatres commissioned authors to dramatise his novels. The unsuccessful play Emilia, written by Soumet, the poet of the transition period, was an adaptation of Scott. Victor Hugo himself, using the name of his young brother-in-law, Paul Fouchet, sent in an adaptation of Kenilworth, which as a drama was also a failure. The young Romantic generation, however, was not appealed to by the qualities in the novels which were most highly appreciated in Protestant countries, but by the talent of their picturesque descriptions and their medieval flavour. It was by his wealth of crossbows and buff jerkins, of picturesque costumes and romantic old castles, that Scott found favour in the eyes of Frenchmen. They ignored or disapproved of the common-sense, sober view of life and the Protestant morality which had won him readers in Germany and Scandinavia. Beyle was the first to criticise Scott severely. He prophesies that in spite of his extraordinary popularity his fame will be short-lived; for, according to Beyle, Scott's talent lay more in the describing of men's clothes and the limning of their features than in the representation of their emotional life and their passions. Art, says Beyle, neither can nor ought to imitate nature exactly; it is always a beautiful untruth; but Scott is too untruthful; his passionate characters strike us as being ashamed of themselves; they lack decision and boldness and naturalness. And it was not long before his critics began to make the complaint, so often reiterated by Balzac, that he could not describe woman and her passions, or at any rate dared not describe these passions with their pleasures, pains, and punishments, in a society which attached exaggerated importance to literary modesty. 4[4] The novels with plots laid in modern days made no impression; only Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, Kenilworth, The Fair Maid of Perth, and one or two others were popular. The special merit of this foreign author in the eyes of Frenchmen was, that he had substituted the novel of dramatic dialogue for the two forms of the longer novel hitherto in vogue—the narrative, in which the headings of the chapters were summaries of the contents and the author played a prominent part, and the letter form, which squeezed all the surprises and all the passion in between "Dear Friend" and "Yours sincerely." The most talented of the young French writers are plainly influenced by him. The one whose moral standard most closely approached the English, Alfred de Vigny, wrote Cinq-Mars, a novel with a plot laid in the days of Richelieu, an entertaining, but now old-fashioned work, in which the contrast of good and evil overshadows all other contrasts, and which betrays a remarkable want of appreciation of Richelieu's greatness as a statesman. There is almost a total absence of Scott's skill in characterisation; instead of it we have a lyric element, the glorification of youthful, impetuous chivalry—the old French bravoure. Prosper Mérimée fell under the great Scotchman's influence at the same time as Alfred de Vigny, and wrote his Chronique du Règne de Charles IX., a work the spirit of which is still less like Scott's. Mérimée singles out the str
5097	dbpedia	1	97	https://www.amazon.com/Honor%25C3%25A9-Balzac-Th%25C3%25A9ophile-Gautier-ebook/dp/B0CLL5X7G3	en	Amazon.com			[ "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/captcha/bysppkyq/Captcha_lbmlqudkqm.jpg", "https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/oc-csi/1/OP/requestId=Z8CD7N0SC1WSNYR8BD9H&js=0" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	Enter the characters you see below Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies.
5097	dbpedia	3	61	https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/book-author/theophile-gautier/	en	Théophile Gautier Biography	https://www.readandcoboo…avicon-32x32.png	https://www.readandcoboo…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Read-and-Co-Books-Logo@1000x-8.png", "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Read-and-Co-Books-Logo@1000x-8.png", "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Author-Bio-Theophile-Gautier.jpg", "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/charles-baudelaire-gautier-9781409795988-cover.jpg", "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Newsletter-plane.png", "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-includes/images/spinner.gif", "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cropped-Favicon.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Discover the books, life, and legacy of in a full biography from Read & Co. Books.	en	https://www.readandcoboo…avicon-32x32.png	Read & Co. Books	https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/book-author/theophile-gautier/	First Name Email Address* I accept the terms and conditions Your e-mail address is only used to send you newsletters from Read & Co. Books. You can unsubscribe any time using the link included in the newsletter.
5097	dbpedia	2	95	https://www.wix.com/wordsmatter/blog/2020/06/french-authors/	en	10 Famous French Authors and Their Incredible Lives	https://static.wixstatic…ff00cac7~mv2.png	https://static.wixstatic…ff00cac7~mv2.png	[ "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_7bd5077866a748469ea26a3bff00cac7~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_49,h_28,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/72c0b2_7bd5077866a748469ea26a3bff00cac7~mv2.png", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_e1f19f2c77464b3ebda630c0daedba2b~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_144,h_81,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/72c0b2_e1f19f2c77464b3ebda630c0daedba2b~mv2.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_2fa817d9593b4cc5bd191332c9a65fb6~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_92,h_55,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/72c0b2_2fa817d9593b4cc5bd191332c9a65fb6~mv2.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_e85211fbded7470e891985839724b7cf~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_147,h_74,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/72c0b2_e85211fbded7470e891985839724b7cf~mv2.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_42b2c968420f43dc97f2eadc67168576~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_130,h_74,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/72c0b2_42b2c968420f43dc97f2eadc67168576~mv2.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_cf6ae731e3944fe980e697efd5ff21e8~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_140,h_79,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/72c0b2_cf6ae731e3944fe980e697efd5ff21e8~mv2.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_a6bb03dbefdd43bda62cbbde0d633b36~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_104,h_60,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/72c0b2_a6bb03dbefdd43bda62cbbde0d633b36~mv2.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_2e2810acac184e93b3dbfea63f99648d~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_147,h_81,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/72c0b2_2e2810acac184e93b3dbfea63f99648d~mv2.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_b7b5e80783de4afe8d2b11ccfcea44c6~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_147,h_86,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/72c0b2_b7b5e80783de4afe8d2b11ccfcea44c6~mv2.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_f69219fc918e43f68ba9400483a506fe~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_115,h_62,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/72c0b2_f69219fc918e43f68ba9400483a506fe~mv2.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_a358343e5df34638bb483db624ecd0c8~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_103,h_60,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/72c0b2_a358343e5df34638bb483db624ecd0c8~mv2.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_4c0301fcc3304a3da2fe1d41b9b3f03d~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_100,h_100,al_c,q_80,blur_3,enc_auto/72c0b2_4c0301fcc3304a3da2fe1d41b9b3f03d~mv2.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_d4491112e3224b25aac92c71e5bdcb9c~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_147,h_46,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/72c0b2_d4491112e3224b25aac92c71e5bdcb9c~mv2.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/72c0b2_f1806ad2b62947cfb29d07338e845af8~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_250,h_450,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/C.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Jonathan Sitbon" ]	2020-06-18T07:26:37.441000+00:00	Follow us as we unveil the unbelievable lives and works of some of the best French authors of all times.	en	https://www.wix.com/favicon.ico	Content-Writing	https://www.wix.com/wordsmatter/blog/2020/06/french-authors/	French authors have left a lasting imprint on world literature. Many of their books became legendary, such as The Little Prince or Les Misérables, and the incredible stories they shaped, together with the innovative language they used, have changed the lives of generations of readers. But on top of writing extraordinary novels and poems, French writers have also lived truly extraordinary lives, which are often not well known by the general public. In this article, you’ll get to dive into the works and biographies of these giants. Here are 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about famous French authors: Victor Hugo lived on a street named after him Emile Zola changed the course of the Dreyfus Affair ("J'accuse !") Albert Camus: The absurd death Guy de Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower Romain Gary is the only person to win the Goncourt Prize twice Honoré de Balzac was addicted to coffee Marcel Proust wrote a 856-word long sentence Paul Verlaine committed a crime of passion Georges Perec wrote a 300-page novel without the letter “e” Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word “surrealism” 01. Victor Hugo lived on a street named after him “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.” Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is one of the best-known French writers and the author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Les Misérables, and The Last Day of a Condemned Man. As a leading figure of the Romantic movement, he created the "Cénacle" in 1827, a literary coterie gathering young authors and whose seat was his apartment. Widely considered a literary genius at an early age, he was elected to the French Academy in 1841. Known for writing novels, poems and plays with a cause, Victor Hugo engaged in several political battles, like the one against the death penalty or the Second Empire led by Napoleon III. This last combat got him exiled to Jersey in 1848, then to Guernsey for about 20 years, where he produced the richest part of his literary work. Upon his return to France in 1870, Victor Hugo was welcomed as the symbol of Republican resistance to the Second Empire. On his 80th birthday, 600,000 admirers cheered him in front of his house, located on Eylau avenue in Paris. The same year, the avenue was renamed after him, “avenue Victor Hugo”, while he was still living there. “I saw for the first time my boulevard”, wrote Hugo in his collection of biographical notes and essays, Things Seen. Therefore, Victor Hugo lived in a street called “Victor Hugo” and letters were addressed to him as follows: “To Mr. Victor Hugo, In his avenue, in Paris". Fancy, isn’t it? 02. Emile Zola changed the course of the Dreyfus Affair ("J'accuse !") "One day, France will thank me for having helped to save her honor." Already in his lifetime, Emile Zola (1840-1902) was considered one of the most popular French authors and journalists who ever lived. A leader and theorist of the movement of Naturalism in literature, his novels, such as L'Assommoir, Germinal, The Ladies’ Paradise, Nana or The Monomaniac, display a methodic, almost scientific description of his era. He uncompromisingly analyzed the men of his time and never ceased to engage in social causes - the most famous of which being the Dreyfus Affair. It started in 1894, in a France marked by a stiff revival of anti-Semitism. Dreyfus, a French officer of Jewish origin, was falsely convicted of passing military secrets to France’s archenemy, Germany, and subsequently expelled from the army and sentenced to life imprisonment in Devil’s Island. Committed to fighting injustice, Zola decided to defend the disgraced officer. On January 13, 1898, in the newspaper L’Aurore, he published an open letter addressed to the President of France, Félix Faure, entitled “J’accuse !” (“I Accuse!”), in which he destroyed the false accusations against Dreyfus. This pamphlet came as a bombshell. It divided France and the French people into two irreconcilable parts: the “Dreyfusards” (Dreyfus’ supporters) and the “anti-Dreyfusards”. The French author was condemned for defamation, and had to flee to England to avoid imprisonment. It’s only in 1906, after countless twists and turns, that Alfred Dreyfus was finally rehabilitated and reintegrated into the army - an outcome that Zola, who died four years earlier, never got to know. Nonetheless, his commitment and relentlessness resulted in the denunciation of anti-Semitic practices and the release of an innocent man. Hats off, gentleman! 03. Albert Camus: The absurd death “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” Born in French Algeria, Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a philosopher, author and journalist. From his involvement in the Resistance during World War II to his denunciation of the Soviet Union, Camus demonstrated a constant political activity throughout his life. Philosophically, he stayed on the margins of the main movements of his time, opposing both Marxism and Existentialism, and fighting any overarching ideology aimed at dissociating men from their human condition. He was also involved in the defense of North African Muslims and antifascist Spanish refugees. His books are steeped in his existential anxieties and his endless questioning about human condition. His views contributed to the rise of Absurdism, a philosophy inviting to embrace the inability to find any purpose in a fundamentally absurd human existence. This theme inspired Camus’ “absurd cycle”, a series of novels, plays and essays including The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus, Caligula and The Misunderstanding. In 1957, Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the second-youngest recipient in history. Three years later, while returning to Paris after celebrating New Years Eve with his family in his home in Lourmarin, he died in a car accident after the driver, his friend Michel Gallimard, crashed into a tree. The French author was 47 years old. 04. Guy de Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower “I left Paris and even France, because the Eiffel Tower ended up boring me too much.” Henry-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant, commonly known as Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), was a journalist and writer of novels and short stories (such as Bel Ami, The Horla, Une Vie) that brilliantly mixed realism with fantasy. Most of his works have a pessimistic consonance, as Maupassant insisted on portraying the cruelty, stupidity and selfishness of the human race. Although he lived for several years in Paris, Maupassant has repeatedly admitted to hating the Eiffel Tower. Like many fellow authors and artists, he thought of the iron monument to be a desecration of the beauty of the French capital. Ironically enough, he often had lunch in one of the restaurants located on its first floor. After a journalist asked him why he would eat in the Eiffel Tower if he disliked it so much, the French writer replied: "It is the only place in the city where I do not see it". He ended up leaving Paris, and eventually France, because of the iconic tower: “It could not only be seen from all over, but it could be found everywhere, made of all sorts of known matters, exhibited in all the shops and show windows, an inevitable and racking nightmare. It was not the only thing, though, that created in me an irresistible desire to be alone for a while, but everything that has been made in and over it, and even around it”, he wrote in The Wandering Life. 05. Romain Gary is the only person to win the Goncourt Prize twice “With maternal love, life makes a promise at dawn that it can never hold.” Born Roman Kacew in Vilnius, Lithuania, Romain Gary (1914-1980) emigrated to France at the age of 14. He studied law and was later enlisted in the Free French Air Force during the Second World War. After the war, he joined the diplomatic career, during which he wrote many of his most famous books. Haunted by the war and the angst of aging, the French writer described the complexity and turmoil inherent to human relationships in emblematic books such as Promise at Dawn and The Dance of Gengis Cohn. In 1956, he received the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious literary award in France, for The Roots of Heaven, the story of a crusading environmentalist who fights to save elephants from extinction. In 1974, in search of renewal, he decided to write a new series of novels using a pseudonym. In 1975, without knowing the real identity of the writer, the jury of the académie Goncourt awarded its prestigious prize to Emile Ajar for The Life Before Us, the story of a Muslim orphan boy living under the care of an old Jewish woman, in post-war Paris. This is how Gary became the first and only writer in history to win the Goncourt twice. 06. Honoré de Balzac was addicted to coffee “Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.“ Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was one of the initiators of Realism in literature. In 1834, he had the idea of grouping all of his novels in an organized whole, which would eventually turn into one of the most fantastic efforts in the history of literature: the Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), a masterpiece gathering more than 2,000 characters in 91 different works, in which he aimed to paint the “social species” of his time. As you could already guess, Honoré de Balzac was a hard worker, and like many hard workers, a huge fan of coffee. He wouldn’t let anyone prepare his beverage because he followed a very precise recipe, mixing three varieties of coffee beans - Bourbon Island, Martinique and Yemen mocha - before boiling the decoction for hours in order to obtain a caffeine concentrate capable of keeping him awake all night. He even wrote about the effects of coffee in his Treatise on Modern Stimulants. During the last years of his life, the French author actually slept very little. He would spend entire nights writing and drinking coffee. Legend has it that Honoré de Balzac could sometimes drink up to 25 coffees a day! We can say that Balzac was, in a way, the Georges Clooney of the 20th century. Coffee… What else? 07. Marcel Proust wrote a 856 word-long sentence “We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.” Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is widely regarded as one of the most influential novelists of all times. His immense work, In Search of Lost Time, comprising seven volumes published between 1913 and 1927, is based on a deep psychological reflection on the relationship between literature, memory and time. Early on, he suffered from asthma attacks which forced him to take long rest periods. This seclusion prompted him to write down his thoughts and feelings, which he expressed through long sentences that stretched over entire paragraphs. This method has often been interpreted as a way for the author to fight the destruction occasioned by the passing time, and to express in writing what he could not say orally because of his breathing impairment. In Sodom et Gomorrah, published in 1921, he wrote one of the longest sentences in French literature, made of 858 words. Hard to believe, isn’t it? You can read it here (in French). 08. Paul Verlaine committed a crime of passion “Here are fruits, flowers, leaves and branches, and then here is my heart that beats only for you.” Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) is the author of some of the most well-known poetry books in French literature, such as Poèmes saturniens, Fêtes galantes and Romances sans paroles - the latter, written during his years of relationship with Arthur Rimbaud. It’s in 1871 that Verlaine met with Rimbaud, who was sixteen and had just moved to Paris. Verlaine fell in love with him and soon left his wife Mathilde Mauté to follow the young poet on his trips across Europe. What followed were two years of a stormy relationship, marked by recurring dramas and high consumption of opium, absinthe and hash. On the night of July 8, 1873, Rimbaud joined Verlaine in Brussels. The few days spent together were stormy, Verlaine thinking of returning to London and Rimbaud refusing to go with him. On July 10, Verlaine drank excessively and went out to buy a six-shot revolver with a box of cartridges. After yet another argument during which Rimbaud told him that he wanted to leave him, Verlaine shot his lover twice after shouting at him, "That's it for you, since you're leaving!" One bullet struck Rimbaud above the left wrist joint, the other touched the wall. On August 8, 1873, Verlaine was sentenced for serious injury to two years in prison and a 200-francs fine. In 2016, more than 140 years later, the revolver used by Verlaine against his companion was sold at auction for a whopping €434,500. Fortunately, this gun has caused more ink than blood to flow. 09. Georges Perec wrote a 300-page novel without the letter “e” “To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.” Georges Perec (1936-1982) was one of the most remarkable French writers of the twentieth century. He reached literary fame in 1965, after the publication of Things: A Story of the Sixties, in which he described in a very meticulous way the mundane events of his daily life. Perec was particularly fond of literary devices and experiments, from constrained writing to plays of words, from endless lists to absurd classifications. They enabled him to tackle with grace some very heavy, recurring topics, such as disappearance and the quest for identity, tracing back to Perec’s trauma who lost all of his family in the Holocaust when he was a child. In 1969, he took up an unprecedented literary challenge: a 300-page lipogrammatic novel entitled A Void, made of regularly built sentences, but using only words that do not include the letter “e” - the most frequent vowel in the French language. In an interview (in French) about this incredible literary endeavor, Perec said: “When we write, we usually pay attention to the sentences, we try to modulate our sentences. We pay attention to the words, we pick our words. But we hardly pay attention to the letters, that is to say the graphic supports of writing. If we decide to deprive ourselves, to make an element disappear in this alphabet, and instead of 26 letters, we decide to only have 25, a real catastrophe is meant to occur, as soon as the letter we choose is important”. Incrdibl, right? 10. Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word “surrealism” “It is high time to relight the stars.” Guillaume Albert Vladimir Alexandre Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky, commonly known as Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), was one of the most influential poets of the early 20th century (Alcools, Caligrammes), as well as a calligraphist and author of erotic short stories. Theorist of the “New Spirit”, he was a good friend of Pablo Picasso, with whom he shared a passion for the emerging Cubist movement. In 1916, while fighting with the French army, he was injured by shrapnel that hit his right temple. After a long and painful recovery, he published the collection Les Mamelles de Tiresias, which he qualified as a “surrealist drama”. He used the term “surrealism” for the first time in a letter to Paul Dermée, a Belgian writer and friend of his, in which he tried to name the new literary movement he was initiating: “All things considered, I believe indeed that it is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism that I had first employed. The word “surrealism” does not yet exist in dictionaries, and it will be more convenient to handle than supernaturalism already used by MM. the philosophers”. This marked the beginning of Surrealism. If Apollinaire coined the term, it is only a few years later that André Breton, with his Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), would lay the conceptual groundwork of the movement. Deeply influenced by the works of Freud, surrealist authors would develop unconventional literary techniques and explore all of the facets of the unconscious mind in search for creativity. The word “surreal” appeared in the English language in the 1930s as a backformation of “surrealist”. It is still widely used today, almost a century later, as a slang for “weird” or “irrational”. Do you also use this word a lot? Now you will know where it comes from. Pamela Benais, French UX Writer and Localization Expert at Wix
5097	dbpedia	0	63	https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/bibliography.html	en	Paris: Capital of the 19th Century			[ "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/banner-90px.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	Bibliography by Pauline de Tholozany Ph.D., Brown University 2011 This annotated bibliography is designed for undergraduate students doing research on Paris in the nineteenth century. It has sections on Visual Arts, Architecture, Urbanism, Literature, Music, and History, and therefore can be useful for a wide range of subjects. An independent section is dedicated to the Arcades Project, since the book touches on all of the disciplines listed above. The bibliography is meant to be consulted online, with hyperlinks that will allow the users to click directly on the section that is of particular interest to them. It is also available as a PDF printable version. In each section the books are arranged alphabetically. Titles are hyperlinks that will take the user directly to the bibliographic record in Josiah. They are followed by the location of the book on the Brown campus (Rockefeller Library, Hay Library, Science Library, and Orwig Library, mainly). A short commentary describes the content of the book listed. Books that relate to two or more topics are cross-listed and will appear in more than one section. This happens particularly in the subdivisions of the History section, which is the longest and which encompasses a wider range of topics. If a book is cross-listed, the bibliographic references will be followed by a note indicating in which other sections the book is mentioned. Here is an example of a book listed in two subdivisions of the History section (“Foreigners and Exiled”/”Political History”). In the “Foreigners and Exiled” section, it will appear as follows: KATZ, PHILIP MARK. From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998. Cross-listed with Political history. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Contents: Dictionaries [ top ] JEAN COLSON & MARIE-CHRISTINE LAUROA, ed. Dictionnaire des monuments de Paris. Paris : Editions Hervas, 1993. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This volume has a 20 pages introduction about the development of the city from the roman era to the present. The dictionary has entries about the history of streets, piazzas, avenues and arcades. It also lists buildings (libraries, schools, hotels and restaurants) and has several entries about the main parks and gardens of the capital. FIERRO, ALFRED. Historical Dictionary of Paris. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library A dictionary of monuments, places, and political figures related to Paris, from the Roman Era to the present. The book has a short introduction about French History, and a very good bibliography (nearly 50 pages, classified according to themes such as politics, urbanism, society, culture, economy, Americans in Paris). At the end of the volume, there is also a whole set of statistics about population, number of streets, foreigners in Paris, tourism, housing, etc. HILLAIRET, JACQUES. Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris. Vol.1-2. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is one of the most complete dictionaries on the subject. There is a fifty page introduction at the beginning of the first volume: the text covers roughly the story of the capital’s urbanization and the evolution of the city from the Romans until today. The book has sections dealing with specific topics (such as “Graveyards”, “Transportations”, “schools”), and providing a brief chronological outline for each entry. The dictionary itself is extremely complete and precise: the author provides a detailed description for each street, and then describes its history. He also makes an inventory of the houses and of their numbers, sometimes describing facades that are particularly meaningful. He also specifies who built the houses, who lived in them, and how the streets were named. At the end of each volume, the book has a list of ancient street names, and of their contemporary counterparts. LAZARE, FELIX & LOUIS. Dictionnaire administratif des rues et des monuments de Paris. 1855 (2nd ed). Paris : Editions Maisonneuve et Larose, 1994. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Felix and Louis Lazare both worked for the city council of Paris before Haussmann started his urbanization plans. They both lamented his project, and the project of the Dictionnaire consisted in recording as much data as possible, before Paris was irrevocably transformed. The volume contains information about various things such as water plants, sewers, gas lightning, and statistics about streets and carriages in the capital. It also has population studies, and includes data about consumption in Paris in the 1850’s. The Arcades Project [ top ] The Arcades Project BENJAMIN, WALTER. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.; London : Harvard University Press, 2002. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library It is difficult to classify The Arcades Project, because it is a work that deals with many aspects of Parisian life in the nineteenth century: consumerism, Art, fashion, Architecture, Politics, Philosophy, Poetry and Literature, among others. It is a succession of notes, and a collection of quotes and thoughts about consumer culture and its links to modernity. Benjamin started this book in 1927, and it remained a work in progress for the next thirteen years. It was published posthumously in 1980. BENJAMIN, WALTER. Das Passagen-Werk. Frankfurt am Main : Suhrkamp, 1983, ©1982 LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Original German version of the book. The Arcades Project [ top ] Secondary sources on The Arcades Project BUSE, PETER, et al., eds. Benjamin’s Arcades, an Unguided Tour. Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press, 2005. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is a collection of collective short essays on various themes which emerge in Benjamin’s Arcades Project. It includes papers on subjects such as the arcades, modernity, advertising, and idleness. McLAUGHLIN, KEVIN, AND PHILIP ROSEN, eds. Boundary 2. Special Issue. Benjamin Now : Encounters with the Arcades Project. Binghamton, Dept. of English, State University of New York at Binghamton. Volume 30, Number 1, Spring 2003. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library / Online: http://josiah.brown.edu/record=b1850427 This special issue of the journal Boundary 2 contains a dozen of the papers that were presented at a conference held by the Forbes Center for Research in Culture and Media Studies at Brown University. They all present contemporary views on Benjamin’s works, and they deal with subjects such as fashion, architecture, and the streets of Paris. RICHTER, GERHARD, ed. Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is a collection of articles about Benjamin’s works. For Richter (the editor of the volume) some of Benjamin’s concepts function as “ghosts”, in the sense that they can never be, and are not intended to be, fully grasped or circumscribed. This happens in particular with the notions of Culture and History, two concepts that are recurring tropes in the introduction and in the articles: how do we understand these fragmented, dispersed concepts? The book is divided into four sections: “Culture of the image”, “Textualities of experience”, “Rethinking history”, and “Figures of finitude”. Architecture [ top ] General works COUPERIE, PIERRE. Paris through the Ages. An Illustrated Historical Atlas of Urbanism and Architecture. New York: G. Braziller, 1971. Cross-listed with Urbanism. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is arranged chronologically: it starts in the Roman era and ends in the middle of the twentieth century. For each time period, there is a map of Paris on the left page, while the right page has information on specific buildings built at that period. It is a good place to start reading about the development of urbanism and Architecture in Paris. LEMOINE, BERTRAND. Architecture in France, 1800-1900. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book deals with French Architecture in the nineteenth century. It is not restricted to Paris: it includes many examples of buildings from Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and several other cities. It is very well illustrated, and the text gives a general idea of Architecture in nineteenth century France. LOYER, FRANÇOIS. Paris Nineteenth Century: Architecture and Urbanism. New York: Abbeville Press, c1988. Cross-listed with Urbanism. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This volume gives a chronological history of urbanism and Architecture in Paris. It has many reproductions of plans, elevations, and architectural details. The book deals with different types and styles of buildings, as well as with topics such as apartment layouts, room distribution, individual houses, and gardens. LOYER, FRANÇOIS. Paris XIXe siècle: l'immeuble et la rue. Paris: Hazan, 1987. Cross-listed with Urbanism. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library French version of the previous volume. MIGNOT, CLAUDE. Architecture of the Nineteenth Century. Köln: Evergreen Benedikt Taschen, 1994. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library A very complete survey of nineteenth century Architecture in Europe and in the United States, with many references to Paris. The book starts with chapters dealing with different architectural styles, explaining their motifs and their aesthetic postulates. Several of the following chapters focus on various types of buildings. There are long sections on shopping arcades in Paris, railway stations, prisons, and hospitals. PEROUSE DE MONTCLOS, JEAN-MARIE. Paris City of Art. New York: Vendôme Press, 2003. Cross-listed with Fine Arts – General Works. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This 700 page book deals with the History of Art and Architecture in Paris from the Roman era to the present. The author discusses Art and Architecture in relation to the History of Paris. There are many illustrations with notes and descriptions. The third part of the volume is entitled “Contemporary era”, and focuses on Art in Paris during the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth. These chapters would be a good place to start reading about Architecture and Fine Arts in Paris. There are several sections that could be particularly useful to acquire a general idea of the topic: “Architecture, between orthodoxy and public opinion”, “Urban development and private building”, as well as the sections on Painting, Sculpture, and on the industrialization of Art. PEROUSE DE MONTCLOS, JEAN-MARIE. Paris. Paris: Hachette, 1994. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book works like a dictionary: the author gives a description as well as a summary of each building’s history. There are maps, prints, and photographs to illustrate the various stages and transformations of the buildings. It includes summaries of many monuments’ history. Architecture [ top ] Books on specific topics ACCOLTI GIL, BIAGIO. Paris: vestibules de l’éclectisme. Paris: Vilo Editeur, 1982. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book deals with vestibules and entrance halls of Parisian buildings in the nineteenth century. It analyses the relation between facades and interiors, and how it was linked to Haussmann’s work in Paris. The author argues that entrance halls, which used to reflect one’s social position, were no longer spaces of display after Haussmann: instead, they became common spaces, and were a sign of the shift from the aristocratic way of life to the bourgeois lifestyle. BABOULET, LUC, ed. Le Paris des maisons: objets trouvés. Paris: Picard; Pavillon de l'arsenal, 2004. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is not specifically about the nineteenth century, but several chapters could be very interesting for someone working on the private sphere and the emergence of the domestic space during that period. This is a collection of articles on various subjects related to private dwelling. Several types of buildings are analyzed: the “hôtel particulier”, the villa in the suburbs of Paris, and collective dwellings, among many others. The texts deal with the representation of the private sphere and its architectural incarnations. BORSI, FRANCO. Paris 1900: Architecture and Design. New York: Rizzoli, 1989. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library A book about Art Nouveau, and its philosophical/political implications. The introduction analyses how it was perceived as a threat to nationalism. There is also a chapter on the 1889 universal exhibit. BRESC-BAUTIER, GENEVIEVE. Le photographe et l’architecte: Edouard Baldus, Hector-Martin Lefuel et le chantier du nouveau Louvre de Napoléon III. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées nationaux, 1995. Cross-listed with Fine Arts – Photography LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book documents the constructions in the Louvre under Napoléon III. The book comments both on Lefuel’s (the architect in charge) plans and buildings and on Baldus’ photographs of the process. Baldus was hired by the Emperor to document the demolition and construction around the Louvre, and several albums were created with his photographs. The first chapter deals with the photographer’s task of documenting the progression of Lefuel’s work, and the second chapter gives a detailed chronology of the construction of the Imperial Louvre. The last two chapters discuss both the exterior decorations and the interiors of the new Louvre, giving insights from the architect and the photographer’s perspective. CANTELLI, MARILU. L’illusion monumentale: Paris, 1872-1936. Liège: Mardaga, 1991. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This text questions the notion of « monument », and how it shifted after Haussmann’s transformation of Paris. The author argues that in the bourgeois buildings, the monumental characteristic is displaced to the outside ornaments. She calls “monumentalité mineure” the transformation of the concept by the bourgeois culture. Des grands chantiers… Hier. Photographies, dessin: outils de l’architecte et de l’ingénieur autour de 1900. Paris: Mairie de Paris, direction des affaires culturelles, 1988. Cross-listed with Fine Arts – Photography LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book explores the relations between photographs (and, to a lesser degree, drawings) and Architecture at the end of the nineteenth century. It is the catalog of an exhibit held in 1988-1989. It contains little text (except for a few opening essays on the photographer Albert Fernique and on the architect Jean-Camille Formigé). The rest of the book is a catalog with many reproductions of the photographs that were part of the exhibit. There are sections on the first uses of photography in Architecture, on the photographers’ roles in the urban construction sites (particularly Paris), on metal Architecture, Universal Exhibits, and on the way photography influenced the architectural drawing. A few of these photographs are accompanied by a short commentary. DUMONT, MARIE-JEANNE. Le logement social à Paris, 1850-1930. Les habitations à bon marché. Liège: Pierre Mardaga éditeur, 1991. Cross-listed with History – Classifying and Policing: Social Classes and Social Types. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library During the Third Republic, the French government started to build many apartment houses for city workers from the middle and lower classes. The author argues that Architecture books usually give little attention to these buildings. Dumont’s aim in this book is to describe the evolution of this specific type of construction, as well as the way of life it presupposed. She shows how the houses were built according to new sanitary norms, how they were adapted to family life, and how the rooms were usually distributed in an apartment. The book is extensively illustrated, giving many examples of maps, plans, inside views, and photographs. LERI, JEAN-MARC, EMMANUEL DAYDE, AND JACQUELINE LAFARGUE. Du palais au palace. Des grands hôtels de voyageurs à Paris au XIXe siècle. Paris: ACR: Paris Musées, 1998. Cross-listed with History – The Emergence of Mass Culture – Mass Culture and Consumer Society. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book was published on the occasion of a 1999 exhibit at the Musée Carnavalet. It is more a synthesis on the subject than a classic exhibit catalogue. It deals mainly with the hotels’ architectural features: size, interiors, decoration, and organization of the rooms. Through many examples, the book shows the evolution in the way hotels were built, and how the American model influenced French Architecture and affected the building of larger hotels during the Second Empire (such as the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, which contained almost 700 rooms). The book starts with a section on the Consulate and on the Empire; it analyzes the evolution of different types of buildings through several case studies. There are also sections on hotels in the vicinity of train stations, on the “palace” (this model is illustrated by the Hôtel Ritz), and on the hotels’ staff. MARREY, BERNARD. Le fer à Paris. Paris: Picard : Pavillon de l'Arsenal, 1989. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Bernard Marrey retraces the history of iron in Parisian Architecture. Most of the book deals with nineteenth-century Paris, since it is at that time that iron became a visible material in public buildings. The author raises several important questions about iron and Architecture: why is it that before the nineteenth century, iron was never displayed in the facades of buildings? It was used extensively in Architecture before, but only as a framework, and most of the time it was hidden under stones or bricks. Iron started to become “visible” in the nineteenth century, but curiously, only in public buildings such as libraries, train stations or arcades. MARREY, BERNARD. La brique à Paris. Paris: Editions du Pavillon de l'Arsenal: Picard, 1991. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book analyses the role of brick in Parisian architecture. After being abandoned by the eighteenth-century architects, brick was used extensively in the nineteenth century, either on its own on in conjunction with stone, for both collective and private buildings. Each chapter has a short introduction, and then gives a list of the buildings which are relevant to the topic. MARREY, BERNARD. Les grands magasins: des origines à 1939. Paris: Picard, 1979 LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Here Bernard Marrey develops the subject of commerce, trade, capitalism, and their relations to the architecture of arcades, shops, and department stores. The first chapters give a chronological background to the history of department stores and arcades from the revolution until the 1930’s. The following chapters deal each with a different department store, explaining the history of the building and its architectural structure. MEAD, CHRISTOPHER CURTIS. Charles Garnier's Paris Opéra: Architectural Empathy and the Renaissance of French Classicism. New York, N.Y.: Architectural History Foundation; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library A very readable history of the Opéra Garnier. The author starts with a biography of Charles Garnier, and then deals with his architectural theories. He then describes some of the projects for the building of the Opera, after which he focuses again on Garnier and on the stages in the construction of the building. MUSÉE NATIONAL DES MONUMENTS FRANÇAIS. Photographier l’architecture, 1851-1920. Collection du musée des Monuments français. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, distribution Seuil, 1994. Cross-listed with Fine Arts – Photography LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is the catalogue of an exhibit held in 1994 about the relations between Architecture and Photography. The catalogue itself is preceded by short essays on Photography and Architecture. It is then divided into sections with themes such as the representation of Paris, the Mission Héliographique, the discovery of the Orient, etc... The commentary texts and the choice of photographs that are reproduced focus particularly on the 1851 Mission Héliographique, a project commissioned by the state and whose aim was to gather photographs that would document the changing cityscapes of France. It involved famous photographers who were then beginning their careers, such as Le Secq, Le Gray, or Baldus. The catalogue also has a section on Marville, who is particularly famous for his 1865 work, L’album du vieux Paris. This project had also been commissioned by the state, in order to document the changing streets of the old Paris which were about to disappear. OLSEN, DONALD J. The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Cross-listed with Urbanism. Olsen argues that cities are “complex but legible documents that can tell us something about the values and aspirations of their rulers”. His analysis is political: he understands the rise of national capitals as concomitant to that of the nation state. Olsen tries to think about architecture in relation to political projects and social issues. At the end of the book, he also analyses the city and its relation to domestic space: for him, the two main conceptual models of the nineteenth century are the family on the one hand, and the nation state on the other, both of them being mirrored in architecture. VAN ZANTEN, David. Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French capital, 1830-1870. Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Cross-listed with Urbanism LOCATION: Rockefeller Library The author shows how the French government and the state institutions played a crucial role in the nineteenth century, both in public and in private Architecture. For a very long time indeed, state Architecture was particularly influential and would set a tone for the whole nation in terms of style. However, Van Zanten argues that little by little, innovations started to happen in the private sphere. The rise of Art Nouveau is particularly significant, since it was the first style that originated in private Architecture. There are chapters on subjects such as representational buildings (palaces or state buildings), and private versus institutional buildings. Van Zanten also concentrates extensively on the “Quartier de l’Opéra”, and on government architectural services and policies. VAN ZANTEN, DAVID. Designing Paris: the Architecture of Duban, Labrouste, Duc, and Vaudoyer. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is a study of the aesthetic theories and architectural achievements of four prominent architects in the Second Empire: Duban, Labrouste, Duc, and Vaudoyer. The four of them were sent to the French Academy in Rome, where they shared many architectural principles and innovations. The author follows a chronological approach to describe their lives and works, after which he dedicates one chapter to each of the four architects’ most famous building. There is, for instance, a whole chapter on Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Nationale. Urbanism & City Planning [ top ] General works CHRIST, YVAN. Les métamorphoses de Paris. Cent paysages parisiens photographiés autrefois et aujourd’hui. Paris: A. Balland, 1967. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book reproduces a collection of photographs of Paris’s streets from around 1850, and juxtaposes next to them pictures taken a century later. COUPERIE, PIERRE. Paris through the Ages. An Illustrated Historical Atlas of Urbanism and Architecture. New York: G. Braziller, 1971. Cross-listed with Architecture LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is arranged chronologically: it starts in the Roman era and ends in the middle of the twentieth century. For each time period, there is a map of Paris on the left page, while the right page has information on specific buildings that were built at that period. It is a good place to start reading about the development of urbanism and architecture in Paris. LOYER, FRANÇOIS. Paris Nineteenth Century: Architecture and Urbanism. New York: Abbeville Press, c1988. Cross-listed with Architecture. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This volume gives a chronological history of urbanism and Architecture in Paris. It has many reproductions of plans, elevations, and architectural details. The book deals with different types and styles of buildings, as well as with topics such as apartment layouts, room distribution, individual houses, and gardens. LOYER, FRANÇOIS. Paris XIXe siècle: l'immeuble et la rue. Paris : Hazan, 1987. Cross-listed with Architecture LOCATION: Rockefeller Library French version of the previous volume. ROULEAU, BERNARD. Le tracé des rues de Paris; formation, typologie, fonctions. Paris: Editions du centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1967. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is a description of the Parisian urban space, from the Roman period until the twentieth century. It particularly emphasizes the nineteenth century. It could help students and scholars to visualize the various stages of urbanization, thanks to its numerous maps (17 maps of Paris, 5 of which about the ninteenth century) and district plans. VAN ZANTEN, David. Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830-1870. Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Cross-listed with Architecture. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library The author shows how the French government and the state institutions played a crucial role in the nineteenth century, both in public and in private Architecture. For a very long time indeed, state Architecture was particularly influential and would set a tone for the whole nation in terms of style. However, Van Zanten argues that little by little, innovations started to happen in the private sphere. The rise of Art Nouveau is particularly significant, since it was the first style that originated in private Architecture. There are chapters on subjects such as representational buildings (palaces or state buildings), and private versus institutional buildings. Van Zanten also concentrates extensively on the “Quartier de l’Opéra”, and on government architectural services and policies. Urbanism & City Planning [ top ] Books on specific topics BEAUMON-MAILLET, LAURE. Paris inconnu. Albums du cabinet des estampes de la Bibliotheque Nationale. Paris: Albin Michel, 1984. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book reproduces works of arts from the private collection of Hippolyte Destailleur, an architect and a collector who was interested in documenting the urbanism of Paris and the changing shapes of the city. The book contains about a hundred reproductions of paintings, prints, drawing and sketches of the capital. Most of them are scenes of construction or demolition. OLSEN, DONALD J. The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Cross-listed with Architecture. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Olsen argues that cities are “complex but legible documents that can tell us something about the values and aspirations of their rulers”. His analysis is political: he understands the rise of national capitals as concomitant to that of the nation state. Olsen tries to think about architecture in relation to political projects and social issues. At the end of the book, he also analyses the city and its relation to domestic space: for him, the two main conceptual models of the nineteenth century are the family on the one hand, and the nation state on the other, both of them being mirrored in architecture. PINKNEY, DAVID. Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris. Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1958. LOCATION: Annex / Electronic resource: http://josiah.brown.edu/record=b4164439 This book is a very good synthesis of Napoleon III’s urban policy in Paris. The volume covers roughly the period between 1850 and 1871. It gives information about the implementation of Haussmann’s plans, and about the political project that triggered them. There are also chapters on water and sewer systems, on underground Paris, and on the financing of Haussmann’s project. SZAMBIEN, WERNER. De la rue des colonnes à la rue de Rivoli. Paris: Délégation à l'action artistique de la ville de Paris, 1992. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book analyses in detail two emblematic streets. The rue des Colonnes, created in 1797, stands as an example of urbanism at the time of the Revolution. Then Szambien analyses the history of the rue de Rivoli, and its transformations during the nineteenth century. Urbanism & City Planning [ top ] On Haussmann CARMONA, MICHEL. Haussmann: His Life and Times, and the Making of Modern Paris. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 2002 LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is a biography of Haussmann, but it focuses on his works in Paris and his accomplishments in terms of urban planning. The book has a chronological pattern, and describes Haussmann’s career and his successive jobs in the French administration, insisting mainly on the years when he was Préfet de Paris. The last section of the book deals specifically with the transformation of Paris, how it was implemented, and how it affected private dwelling. CARMONA, MICHEL. Haussmann. Paris: Fayard, 2000. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library French version of the preceding book. CHAPMAN, JOAN MARGARET. The Life and Times of Baron Haussmann; Paris in the Second Empire. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1957. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book deals both with Haussmann’s life and career and with the transformation of Paris that he initiated. JORDAN, DAVID P. Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann. New York: Free Press, 1995. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book retraces Haussmann’s life and his relation to Paris and its cityscape. It has many quotes and illustrations. It could be a good place to start reading about Haussmann and his influence on the transformation of the capital in the nineteenth century. REAU, LOUIS, et al. L'oeuvre du Baron Haussmann, préfet de la Seine (1853-1870). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book gives a chronological description of Haussmann’s work in Paris. At the end of the volume, there are chapters on gardens, graveyards, sewers, and transportation. Fine Arts [ top ] General works CHASTEL, ANDRE. L’art français. Paris: Flammarion, c1993-2000. Vols. 4 & 5. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library These two volumes present an in-depth description of French Art in the nineteenth century. Volume 4 (entitled Le temps de l’éloquence, 1775-1825), focuses mainly on Classicism, Historical painting, the Arts under Napoleon and the beginnings of museography. The fifth volume (entitled Le XIXe Siècle, 1819-1905) has chapters on French Romanticism and Realism, as well as a long section on Paris and the emergence of the modern city. CHU, PETRA TEN-DOESSCHATE. Nineteenth Century European Art. Upper Saddle River, NJ : Prentice Hall, 2006. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Although this book is about European Art, the majority of its chapters deal with France. It is an excellent synthesis of artistic movements from the end of the enlightenment to the period known in France as “la belle époque”. This work replaces French Art in a European perspective, and it also analyses artistic practices in relation to History and to the political context of the time. It is very well illustrated, and each chapter has a very complete bibliography (divided into the following sections: general works, primary sources, monographs and catalogues, films and videos). CHU, PETRA TEN-DOESSCHATE, AND GABRIEL P. WEISBERG, eds. The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is a collection of articles about French Graphic Arts during the July Monarchy. Themes treated include caricatures, representations of social classes, and representations of historical episodes. There is also a well documented article by David Van Zanten about the Louvre’s architectural evolution in the first half of the nineteenth century. EISENMAN, STEPHEN. Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History. New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1994. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is divided into four sections: “Classicism and Romanticism”, “New World frontiers”, “Realism and Naturalism”, “Modern Art and life”. The text is not organized chronologically, but rather according to themes and concepts. This book would be a very good starting point to examine the artistic theories of the nineteenth century. FRASCINA, FRANCIS, et. al. Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the Open University, 1993. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book questions the definition of the modern and of modern painting as opposed to academic painting. It covers the second half of nineteenth century Art, and most particularly Realism and Impressionism. There is also a section about gender and representation, in which the author studies the role of women in these two artistic movements. Although it deals with very specific art theories, this book remains very approachable. Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide. A Journal of Nineteenth Century Visual Culture. College Park, MD: Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art, 2002-. LOCATION: Electronic resource. This journal is published twice a year, and contains articles on nineteenth century Art, as well as essays on subjects like fashion, the representation of women, and visual culture in general. Many of the essays focus on one work in particular, and give a detailed analysis of it. But there are also articles about more general patterns, including a very interesting special issue about the influence of Darwin’s theories on Art. Oxford Art Online. 1998. Laura Macy. Oxford University, England: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/ Oxford Art Online (formerly Grove Art Online) is both a dictionary of Art terms and a repertory of artists from all over the world. For each artist the database gives a detailed biography, a bibliography, and a description of the main characteristics of his or her work. One can also look for technical terms and names of artistic movements (Realism, Impressionism, Classicism, etc.). PEROUSE DE MONTCLOS, JEAN-MARIE. Paris City of Art. New York: Vendôme Press, 2003. Cross-listed with Architecture LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This 700 page book deals with the History of Art and Architecture in Paris from the Roman era to the present. The author discusses Art and Architecture in relation to the History of Paris. There are many illustrations with notes and descriptions. The third part of the volume is entitled “Contemporary era”, and focuses on Art in Paris during the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth. These chapters would be a good place to start reading about Architecture and Fine Arts in Paris. There are several sections that could be particularly useful to acquire a general idea of the topic: “Architecture, between orthodoxy and public opinion”, “Urban development and private building”, as well as the sections on Painting, Sculpture, and on the industrialization of Art. ROSEMBLUM, ROBERT. 19th Century Art. New York: Abrams, 1984. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Unlike Eisenman’s book on the same topic, this volume is organized chronologically, each chapter covering two to three decades of the century. In each chapter, there is a section on painting and one on sculpture, and these sections are themselves divided into various parts, one for each country. This book is a descriptive introduction to Art in the Nineteenth century. TUFFELI, NICOLE. Nineteenth Century French Art. Edinburgh: Chambers, 2004. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library An excellent synthesis of the evolution of Painting, Sculpture, and Photography in the nineteenth century. In a hundred pages, the author gives a concise panorama of the Arts during that period. It is well illustrated, and there is a selective bibliography of works on the same topic at the end of the book. VAUGHAN, WILLIAM. Arts of the 19th Century. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998-1999. v. 1. 1780 to 1850 -- v. 2. 1850-1905. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library These two volumes deal with Nineteenth Century Art, mainly in Europe and in the United States. The first volume covers the period between 1780 and 1850, and the second volume focuses on the years between 1850 and 1905. The chapters are not organized in a chronological order, but rather according to genres, or techniques: historical painting, portraits, nature paintings, sculpture, graphic arts. In every chapter there is a section for each country. These two volumes have many full page illustrations. Fine Arts [ top ] Art and Politics AGULHON, MAURICE. Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789-1880. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book explores the figure of Marianne in Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts. BOIME, ALBERT. Art in an Age of Bonapartism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This volume looks at the Arts (painting in particular) in conjunction with historical and political events. It has a very interesting section on the Napoleonic iconography and its political meanings. BOIME, ALBERT. Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, 1815-1848. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book follows the preceding volume on Napoleon, but this time it deals both with Europe and the United States. It has many chapters on France, and deals with the Arts under Charles X and under the July Monarchy. It also deals with graphic Arts and Photography. BOIME, ALBERT. Art and the French Commune. Imagining Paris after War and Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book looks at Impressionism and its relation to the Paris Commune. Boime argues that although many Art books mention the Commune as a political context, very few critics try to consider the influence that the events could have had on the impressionists’ art, which developed right after the Commune events. He focuses on the decade between 1870 and 1880, and argues that the political changes after the Commune encouraged the painters to focus even more on modern and everyday life subjects. It also led the way to a more favorable reception of the Impressionists’ art. There are chapters on the critical reception of the paintings, on the impact of the commune on the Impressionists, and on their artistic, aesthetic, and political agenda. PORTERFIELD, TODD B. The Allure of Empire: Art in the service of French Imperialism. Princeton N.J: Princeton University Press, 1998. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is about French Orientalism in Arts and in politics at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. It links colonization to Orientalism, and shows how politics and military conquests are linked to Orientalism as it manifested itself in the Arts. There are chapters on the Obelisk at the Place de la Concorde, as well as on representations of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, on the Musée d’Egypte, and on the Women of Algiers, a recurring theme in the paintings of the time. Fine Arts [ top ] Neoclassicism CLIFTON-MOGG, CAROLINE. The Neoclassical Source Book. New York: Rizzoli, 1991. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book would be a very good place to start reading about Neoclassic Art and models. It includes commentary texts on many famous neoclassical figures and themes, and has sections on Art, public Architecture, Interiors, and gardens. CROW, THOMAS. Emulation: David, Drouais, and Girodet in the Art of Revolutionary France. New Haven: Yale University Press; Los Angeles: in association with The Getty Research Institute, 2006. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is an in depth analysis of Jacques Louis David’s Art, as well as that of Drouais and Girodet, two of David’s most skilled students. Crow comments on the influence they had on each other, and on the family-like relationship Drouais and Girodet had with David. He dwells in particular on the theme of the father figure, and explains how it emerges in many of their works. IRWIN, DAVID G. Neoclassicism. London: Phaidon, 1997. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is a richly illustrated history of Neoclassicism in Europe, destined for non-specialists. The book deals with practices associated with Neoclassicism (collecting, archaeological practices, the “Grand Tour”) as well as with the fields it influenced: public and private architecture, landscape painting, historical and political painting, and interior decoration. MONNERET, SOPHIE. David and Neoclassicism. Paris: Terrail, 1999. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is a chronological study of Jacques Louis David’s work, and of his role in Neoclassicism. The author analyzes his most famous paintings, but the focus is primarily on David’s life and career. WEST, ALLISON. From Pigalle to Préault. Neoclassicism and the Sublime in French Sculpture: 1760-1840. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library In this book about French Neoclassical Sculpture, the author argues that with the emergence of a new style, new themes were developed. She particularly insists on the new concept of “secular mortality”, and on the fact that the religious tradition lost ground as an implicit moral value behind the work of Art. On the other side, because Neoclassicism primarily represented antique figures, the author argues that the representation of Royal figures became less pervasive in the public sphere. This chronological study also takes into account the Roman and Greek sources which greatly inspired these sculptors. The last chapter of the book deals with the Elgin Marbles and the influence of their discovery on Neoclassical Sculpture. Fine Arts [ top ] Romanticism BENOIST, LUC. La sculpture romantique. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library A 300 page book about French Romantic sculpture, with chapters on Lyricism, historical Sculpture, portraits and caricatures. It is richly illustrated, and contains many excerpts from letters of painters and writers. BROOKNER, ANITA. Romanticism and its Discontents. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book gives various perspectives on French Romanticism both in the visual Arts and in Literature. There are chapters on Gros, Delacroix, and Ingres, as well as on writers such as Musset and Baudelaire. BROWN, DAVID BLAYNEY. Romanticism. London; New York: Phaidon, 2001. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is a condensed description of Romanticism in Europe. Brown describes the ideas and principles behind the Romantic Movement. He deals with topics such as the changing status of the artist, the treatment of the historical past, and the Romantic visions of the self and of Nature. This book is not arranged chronologically, but rather according to these main themes. It is intended for a general public. IVES, COLTA FELLER. Romanticism and the School of Nature: Nineteenth-Century Drawings and Paintings from the Karen B. Cohen collection. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is the catalogue of an exhibit held at the Metropolitan Museum. The exhibit dealt with several Romantic artists and their visions of Nature (including landscapes, seascapes, and animal paintings). It deals mainly with British and French artists, with one section per artist including detailed comments and analysis for each painting or drawing. NOON, PATRICK J. Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism. London: Tate Publishing, 2003. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is the catalogue of an exhibit held at the Tate Gallery which sought to compare French and British versions of Romanticism. There are sections on the reception in England of The Raft of the Medusa, as well as on exhibitions and salons in both countries, on representations of historical and literary heroes, portraits, animals, modern life, and landscapes. TRAPP, FRANK ANDERSON. Delacroix and the Romantic Image: Oriental Themes, Wild Beasts, and the Hunt. Amherst, Mass.: Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, 1988 LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is the catalogue of an exhibit held at the Mead Art Museum. The exhibit dealt with oriental themes in French paintings, and in particular in Delacroix’s. The book has an introduction about the collection and the works on display. The pictures reproduced here are more rarely seen than Delacroix’s most famous paintings, and therefore can add to our vision of him as a romantic artist. Fine Arts [ top ] Realism and Naturalism McPHERSON, HEATHER. The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Cross-listed with Fine Arts – Impressionism and Fine Arts – Photography. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book analyzes the shifting cultural significance of portraits in the second half of the nineteenth century. The time period coincides with the advent of photography. It has traditionally been argued that the emergence of photographs caused the progressive abandon of realistic painting. The author seeks to nuance that assumption, by showing the different approaches that renewed the genre of portrait painting, in relation and in opposition to photography. From Ingres’ photographic precision to Picasso’s abstractions, McPherson seeks to trace the evolution of a genre which is rarely addressed by critics. The book consists of six case studies, including Courbet’s portrait of Baudelaire, the iconography of the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and Cézanne’s self-portraits. The last chapter compares the representations of the artist in Vuillard’s works to Proust’s descriptions of Elstir in In Search of Lost Time. MALPAS, JAMES. Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library James Malpas understands Realism in its broad sense: he argues that Realism is not limited to the Nineteenth Century Art Movement led by Courbet. He understands Realism in a broader perspective as an “Art which opposed the imitation of Realism in order to establish itself as new reality”. After a short chapter on nineteenth-century Realism, the author analyses mainly twentieth-century paintings. This book would therefore be useful for someone working on the influence of the Realist movement in the twentieth century, but not for a study of the movement itself. NEEDHAM, GERALD. Nineteenth Century Realist Art. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This volume is a good supplement to Nochlin’s book on Realism, because it analyzes several of the same themes from a chronological perspective. It seeks to explore the evolution of Realism throughout the nineteenth century, replacing it in a historical and political context. NOCHLIN, LINDA. Realism. Harmondsworth, New York: Penguin, 1971. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Intended for the general reader, this book questions the notion of Realism as an artistic movement and a philosophical issue. After defining the term, Nochlin deals with topics such as the trivialization of Death, the relations between Realism and modernity, and the way in which Realists represented contemporary life. The epilogue of the book has a short section on Architecture. NOCHLIN, LINDA. Realism and Tradition in Art, 1846-1900. Sources and Documents. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This volume is a collection of nineteenth century primary sources about Realism and Naturalism. One section presents excerpts from supporters of traditional academic art, while the other includes reactions and defense of Realism (with a section of Gustave Courbet’s Realist Manifesto). WEISBERG, GABRIEL P. Beyond Impressionism: the Naturalist Impulse. New York: N. H. Abrams, 1992. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is an in-depth study of Naturalism in America and Europe, and focuses particularly on France. There are three chapters of particular interest on that topic: “Critical and Literary worlds of Naturalism”, “The creation of a Naturalist Icon” (which is about the relationship between photography and Naturalist painting), and “Naturalism in France: the great debate”. Fine Arts [ top ] Symbolism EDWARD, LUCIE-SMITH. Symbolist Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is a short history of the Symbolist movement in France and in Great-Britain. It has chapters on the relation between Romanticism and Symbolism, on the Symbolist movement in France, as well as on several French painters: Moreau, Redon, Puvis de Chavannes, Gauguin and the Nabis. KAPLAN, JULIUS. The Art of Gustave Moreau: Theory, Style, and Content. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book has a first chapter on Moreau’s views about Art, with several excerpts from letters and notes. After a short summary of his life and work, the next chapters deal in detail with specific phases in Moreau’s artistic career. LACAMBRE, GENEVIÈVE. Maison d’artiste/maison-musée: l’exemple de Gustave Moreau. Paris: Ministère de la culture et de la communication, reéunion des musées nationaux, 1987. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This short volume looks at Moreau’s home: the artist worked for several years on transforming his house in Paris into a Museum of his own works. MATHIEU, PIERRE-LOUIS. Gustave Moreau. Paris: Flammarion, 1994. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is a comprehensive study of Moreau’s work and career. The book is organized chronologically, and is richly illustrated. It analyzes Moreau’s sources and inspiration, as well as the political and historical context. It is written in French. Fine Arts [ top ] Impressionism CALLEN, ANTHEA. The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This comprehensive study deals with the Impressionists’ innovations in technique. Callen compares their methods to those of artists from other periods, and deals with issues such as treatment of light, palette tones, canvasses (size, texture), brushes, and frames. CLARK, T.J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is an important reference in the study of Impressionism. It analyses the movement’s relation to modern life, and seeks to understand if Impressionism criticizes or celebrates what it depicts (some of the predominant themes of Impressionist painting are consumption, leisure, commerce, and the “petite bourgeoisie”). Clark also analyzes the shifts in the subjects chosen by the painters: at first, Impressionists depicted mainly scenes of private leisure, (typically picnics scenes, or moments of “flânerie”). But as time passed, these scenes of leisure tended to be more and more located in public spaces, such as cafes, bars, or “grands magasins”. Clark tries to see if this development is representative of a change of attitude towards modern life. ENGELMAN, INES JANET. Impressionism: 50 paintings you should know. New York: Prestel, 2007. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is intended for a general reader with little knowledge about Impressionism. It has a short introduction presenting a general overview of the movement itself, after which Engleman describes and comments on 50 paintings, which are classified in a chronological order (from 1863 to 1906). HOUSE, JOHN. Impressionism: Paint and Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book analyses Impressionism and the movement’s relation to social and artistic norms. House tries to provide an interdisciplinary approach. He deals with social and political questions as well as with aesthetic problems (such as techniques and subject matter). There are chapters on the Impressionists’ representations of Paris and on the vision of modern life that emerges in their paintings. ISKIN, RUTH. Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is about the relation between Impressionist painting and the rise of a new consumer culture. Focusing primarily on Manet and Degas, this study analyses the place of women in representations of modern life. Iskin questions the Impressionists’ treatment of the new visual culture of consumption (advertising practices, posters, etc). LEWIS, MARY TOMPKINS, ed. Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post Impressionism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is a collection of articles that analyze Impressionist painting through various angles: treatment of landscapes, changes in artistic and social practices (such as the private exhibits replacing the Salons, or the economic alterations in the artists’ status), politics, and aesthetics. McPHERSON, HEATHER. The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Cross-listed with Fine Arts – Realism and Fine Arts – Photography. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book analyzes the shifting cultural significance of portraits in the second half of the nineteenth century. The time period coincides with the advent of photography. It has traditionally been argued that the emergence of photographs caused the progressive abandon of realistic painting. The author seeks to nuance that assumption, by showing the different approaches that renewed the genre of portrait painting, in relation and in opposition to photography. From Ingres’ photographic precision to Picasso’s abstractions, McPherson seeks to trace the evolution of a genre which is rarely addressed by critics. The book consists of six case studies, including Courbet’s portrait of Baudelaire, the iconography of the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and Cézanne’s self-portraits. The last chapter compares the representations of the artist in Vuillard’s works to Proust’s descriptions of Elstir in In Search of Lost Time. RUBIN, JAMES HENRY. Impressionism. London: Phaidon, 1999. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is an introduction to Impressionism. It is designed for the general reader. The chapters are for the most part organized chronologically, but they sometimes focus on one specific theme or aspect, such as the relations between Impressionism and politics. The book has a bibliography that can provide the reader with suggestions for additional readings (each section of the bibliography corresponds to a chapter of the book). WALTHER, Ingo. Impressionist Art, 1860-1920. New York: Taschen, 2002. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is a comprehensive introduction to French Impressionism, and retraces its emergence as well as its later evolution (Neo and Post-Impressionism). It is intended for a general public, but the text is detailed enough to be of interest for someone with a previous knowledge of Impressionism. It is richly illustrated, and has an index, a dictionary of the main impressionist painters, and a complete bibliography. Fine Arts [ top ] Graphic Arts BANN, STEPHEN. Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth Century France. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is about printmaking in France in the nineteenth century. It analyzes practices and norms of printmaking, and the way in which they evolved with the emergence of photography. It also questions the notion of reproduction, through various examples of print replicas of paintings. CATE, PHILLIP DENNIS. Prints Abound: Paris in the 1890’s: from the Collections of Virginia and Ira Jackson and the National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: London: Lund Humphries; Wappinger Falls, N.Y.: Distributed in North America by Antique Collectors' Club, 2000. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is the catalogue of an exhibit held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It reproduces prints from periodicals, artists’ albums, and illustrated books of the last decade of the nineteenth century. There are essays on prints in 1890 Paris, on the representation of the city, and on the relation between music and illustration during that decade. CATE, PHILLIP DENNIS, ed. The Graphic Arts and French Society, 1871-1914. New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum,1988. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This volume is about the evolution of graphic arts in France (newspapers, advertising, and prints) after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. There are four essays by different scholars. The first one is about the artists’ vision of Paris, and the way it changed after the beginning of the third Republic: artists no longer focused exclusively on Medieval parts of Paris, but also represented modern streets and buildings. Other essays deal with illustrations, as well as with the representation of women and of Paris as a city of pleasure. CHAM. Parodies littéraires: précédé de Cham le polypier d’images, par Bertrand Tillier. Paris: Phileas Fogg, 2003. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is a selection of parodies written and illustrated by the famous caricaturist Cham. These texts and illustrations were published by Philipon in “Le musée ou magasin comique”. In these works, Cham creates parodies of the most famous and successful novels of the time, among which Robinson Crusoe, Atala by Chateaubriand, Les mystères de Paris by Eugene Sue, and Le Chevalier d’Harmental by Alexandre Dumas. CUNO, JAMES B. Charles Philipon and La Maison Aubert: the Business, Politics, and Public of Caricature in Paris 1820-1840: a Thesis. Thesis (PhD) Harvard University, 1985. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This 500 page dissertation deals with the role and influence of Philipon and his print shop, “La Maison Aubert”. Philipon is famous for publishing prints and caricatures by artists such as Daumier or Grandville. He is also at the origin of the publication of “La poire” (“the pear”) a famous caricature of King Louis Philippe. Some chapters explore Philipon’s career and the development of “La Maison Aubert”, while others stress his role in Gavarni’s or Daumier’s careers, and his influence in the publication of caricature in general. There is a very detailed bibliography at the end of the volume. DAUMIER, HONORE. Paris et les parisiens. Paris: Editions Olbia, 1999. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library A selection of prints by Daumier about everyday life in Paris. The volume opens with an excerpt from Baudelaire’s “quelques caricaturistes français” in which the poet praises Daumier’s work. FARWELL, BÉATRICE. The Charged Image: French Lithographic Caricature, 1816-1848. Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1989. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is the catalogue of an exhibit held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1989. It presents a collection of prints and lithographs that are commented upon individually. There are also two essays: “The Charged Image”, by Beatrice Farewell, starts by analyzing the etymology of the word “caricature” (from the Italian caricato, which means loaded, charged). The second essay, by Stuard Kadison, is about censorship in France at that time. Un journal révolutionnaire, le Charivari: un choix de numéros facsimilés du premier quotidien illustré, de 1832 a 1856. Paris: Editions de la Courtille, 1971. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book reproduces facsimiles of Le charivari, a daily newspaper published between 1832 and 1893. This particular volume is a selection of newspaper issues published between 1832 and 1856. MERYON, CHARLES. Paris, 1860: eaux fortes sur Paris et “Les tableaux parisiens”. Paris: Editions de la bibliothèque, 2001. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book gathers the « tableaux parisiens » by Charles Baudelaire along with Meryon’s “eaux fortes sur Paris », which are a series of prints that Baudelaire particularly liked. The introduction to the volume describes the relationship between the two men. RENONCIAT, ANNIE. La vie et l’oeuvre de J.J. Grandville. Paris: ACR: Vilo, 1985. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library A detailed study of Grandville’s works. This book is arranged chronologically and lists in details the various projects in which Grandville participated. WECHSLER, JUDITH. A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth Century Paris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book analyzes caricature as a fusion of 2 important tropes of the nineteenth century: Physiognomics (a discipline which, at the time, sought to classify people and their temperaments according to their physical characteristics) and Pathognomics (a discipline whose aim was to pair emotions with specific bodily signs). There are chapters on panoramas, marionette figures, political caricatures, as well as specific caricaturists such as Daumier. Fine Arts [ top ] Photography BRESC-BAUTIER, GENEVIEVE. Le photographe et l’architecte: Edouard Baldus, Hector-Martin Lefuel et le chantier du nouveau Louvre de Napoléon III. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1995. Cross-listed with Architecture LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book documents the constructions in the Louvre under Napoléon III. The book comments both on Lefuel’s (the architect in charge) plans and buildings and on Baldus’ photographs of the process. Baldus was hired by the Emperor to document the demolition and construction around the Louvre, and several albums were created with his photographs. The first chapter deals with the photographer’s task of documenting the progression of Lefuel’s work, and the second chapter gives a detailed chronology of the construction of the Imperial Louvre. The last two chapters discuss both the exterior decorations and the interiors of the new Louvre, giving insights from the architect and the photographer’s perspective. Des grands chantiers… Hier. Photographies, dessin: outils de l’architecte et de l’ingénieur autour de 1900. Paris: Mairie de Paris, direction des affaires culturelles, 1988. Cross-listed with Architecture LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book explores the relations between photographs (and, to a lesser degree, drawings) and Architecture at the end of the nineteenth century. It is the catalogue of an exhibit held in 1988-1989. It contains little text (except for a few opening essays on the photographer Albert Fernique and on the architect Jean-Camille Formigé). The rest of the book is a catalogue with many reproductions of the photographs that were part of the exhibit. There are sections on the first uses of photography in Architecture, on the photographers’ roles in the urban construction sites (particularly in Paris), on metal Architecture, Universal Exhibits, and on the way photography influenced the architectural drawing. A few of these photographs are accompanied by a short commentary. HEILBRUN, FRANÇOISE. Charles Nègre, photographe, 1820-1880. Paris: Éditions des Musées Nationaux, 1980. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This monograph covers Charles Nègre’s work, most of which consists of photographs of the South of France and of the suburba of Paris (Vincennes and Chartres). But Nègre also took about 40 photographs of Paris, several of which are reproduced in this book along with a text explaining Nègre’s project to photograph the changing shape of the city. He also took several photographs of Notre Dame, his most famous being the “Stryge” (1853). McCAULEY, ELIZABETH ANNE. Industrial Madness. Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book focuses on professional Parisian photographers during the Second Empire. It analyzes the social and cultural shifts provoked by photography, as well as the emergence of a “photographic consciousness”. The book is divided into two parts: the first part describes the techniques, their evolution, and the way in which the business of photography functioned and developed in Paris. Part two consists in five case studies about Nadar, Braquehais, Collard, Aubry, and photographic Art reproductions. The conclusion deals with the role played by the political regime in the development of photography. McPHERSON, HEATHER. The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Cross-listed with Fine Arts – Realism and Fine Arts – Impressionism. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book analyzes the shifting cultural significance of portraits in the second half of the nineteenth century. The time period coincides with the advent of photography. It has traditionally been argued that the emergence of photographs caused the progressive abandon of realistic painting. The author seeks to nuance that assumption, by showing the different approaches that renewed the genre of portrait painting, in relation and in opposition to photography. From Ingres’ photographic precision to Picasso’s abstractions, McPherson seeks to trace the evolution of a genre which is rarely addressed by critics. The book consists of six case studies, including Courbet’s portrait of Baudelaire, the iconography of the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and Cézanne’s self-portraits. The last chapter compares the representations of the artist in Vuillard’s works to Proust’s descriptions of Elstir in In Search of Lost Time. MARBOT, BERNARD. After Daguerre: Masterworks of French Photography (1848-1900) from the Bibliothèque Nationale. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is about French photography, and does not specifically deal with Paris. It focuses on photography as an Art (in opposition to the documentary use it had been put to by Marville or Le Secq), and thus deals more with portraits, nudes, landscapes, and still life. There are, though, several photographs of Paris reproduced in the book, in particular facades of monuments and a few cityscapes. This book reproduces a great variety of work from many photographers, many of them little-known. For each photographer the authors give a brief biographical summary and a description of their works. MARBOT, BERNARD. Une invention du XIXe siècle, expression et technique, la photographie: collections de la société française de photographie. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1976. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This catalogue presents a selection of photographs from nineteenth-century France. It has an index of the photographers whose works are reproduced at the end of the volume. It is not a general introduction, but rather a series of reproductions with short commentaries. MUSÉE NATIONAL DES MONUMENTS FRANÇAIS. Photographier l’architecture, 1851-1920. Collection du musée des monuments français. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, distribution Seuil, 1994. Cross-listed with Architecture. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This is the catalogue of an exhibit held in 1994 about the relations between Architecture and Photography. The catalogue itself is preceded by short essays on Photography and Architecture. It is then divided into sections with themes such as the representation of Paris, the Mission Héliographique, the discovery of the Orient, etc... The commentary texts and the choice of photographs that are reproduced focus particularly on the 1851 Mission Héliographique, a project commissioned by the state and whose aim was to gather photographs that would document the changing cityscapes of France. It involved famous photographers who were then beginning their careers, such as Le Secq, Le Gray, or Baldus. The catalogue also has a section on Marville, who is particularly famous for his 1865 work, L’album du vieux Paris. This project had also been commissioned by the state, in order to document the changing streets of the old Paris which were about to disappear. PARRY, EUGENIA. Henri le Secq: Photographe de 1850 à 1860. Catalogue raisonné de la bibliothèque des arts décoratifs, Paris. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Henri le Secq was a collector of art, an engraver, and a photograph. Le Secq particularly liked to take photographs of architecture, and understood photography as a means to document the past state of the city. Most of the photographs presented in this monograph were taken in Paris. Le Secq took many pictures of Notre Dame, and the book also comments on Charles Nègre’s photograph of Le Secq on the cathedral tower, standing next to the “stryge”. This book provides a great example of photography as a means to record and describe architecture in the middle of the nineteenth century. RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX. L’invention d’un regard (1839-1918). Paris: Éditions de la réunion des Musées nationaux, 1989. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is about the birth of photography in France. Its first chapters deal with the medium in general (technical advances, negatives, uses of light, perspectives and framing of pictures), while the last ones deal more with the styles of photographs that emerged from the discovery of that medium: realism and abstraction, close ups and portraits. Several photographs are about Paris, but this book is primarily a general introduction to French photography in the nineteenth century. RICE, SHELLEY. Parisian Views. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book gathers a collection of essays on photography and its relation to modern Parisian life. The introduction, entitled “Time Zones” discusses photography and its shifting relation to time: the speed that characterized modern Parisian life could not be represented when photography started. Daguerre’s photographs represent for the most part empty streets, simply because the time of exposure was so long (about thirty minutes) that the figures of passersby could not appear on the daguerreotype. The second essay is entitled “Parisian Views”, and discusses photography’s rendering of the city. It deals with texts by Baudelaire and photographs by Baldus, Nègre, Le Secq and Braun. The third part, “Still Points in a Turning World”, deals mainly with Marville’s photographs, and in particular those commissioned by Haussmann to document the changing shapes of the streets of Paris. The fourth chapter is on Notre Dame, and the fifth chapter, “Souvenirs”, deals with poetic and photographical representations of Paris as a city in decay. This chapter also includes a long section on Nadar’s aerial views of Paris, as well as on his photographs of the sewers. The last chapter deals with travels and travelers, trains, and boats in photography. Language and Literature [ top ] BANCQUART, MARIE CLAIRE. Paris « fin de siècle» : de Jules Vallès à Rémy de Goncourt. Paris: Editions de la différence, 2002. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book describes and analyzes representations of Paris in novels by Zola, Maupassant, Balzac, Huysmans, Rimbaud and Vallès. The introductory chapter dwells on Flaubert and Baudelaire’s legacies, since the city had a particularly important role in their texts. The following chapters analyze Paris as a mythological figure. They focus primarily on texts about the Commune, social marginalities and modern style Paris. The book is richly illustrated, and tries to show the relation between Literature and the changing Parisian cityscape. BONNEFOY, YVES. Le poète et “le flot mouvant des multitudes” : Paris pour Nerval et Baudelaire. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2003. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book gathers a series of Bonnefoy’s articles about Paris in Nerval's and Baudelaire’s works. More specifically, it describes how the city is often depicted as an abyss or an ocean in their metaphors. BROOKS, PETER. Realist Vision. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library One chapter in this book is entitled “Unreal City: Paris and London in Balzac, Zola, and Gissing” (Chapter 8). This chapter is particularly interesting because of the link that it makes between urbanism and realist fictions. CITRON, PIERRE. La poésie de Paris dans la littérature française de Rousseau à Baudelaire. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1961. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is about the poetic representations of Paris in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It provides a description and an analysis of themes, motifs and metaphors linked to Paris in the texts of Mercier, Hugo, and Baudelaire. CLEBERT, JEAN-PIERRE. La littérature à Paris: l’histoire des lieux, la vie littéraire. Paris: Larousse, 1999. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Each section of this book is about a street or a neighborhood in Paris: after a brief presentation, the author gives an account of its literary representations, quoting abundantly from novels and poems. This volume would be a very good reference book. It has an index of the names of authors cited in each section. COOPER, BARBARA T., and MARY DONALDSON EVANS. Moving Forward, Holding Fast: The Dynamics of Nineteenth Century French Culture. Atlanta, G.A.: Rodopi, 1997. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library The nineteenth-century representation of the city is fundamentally linked to the ideas of speed and dynamism. This book is a collection of papers about the ideal of progress in literature, but also about trends that resisted it and idealized the past (the introduction cites as examples the troubadour genre in painting, or the architectural restorations made by Viollet-le-Duc). There are numerous essays on Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant, Baudelaire, and Zola. D’SOUZA, ARUNA, & MCDONOUGH, TOM, Eds. The invisible flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006. Cross-listed with History – The Emergence of Mass Culture and History – Classifying and Policing: Social Classes and Social Types LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This volume presents a collection of essays from prominent critics specialized in Art History and in Feminism. It deals with the place of women in Paris, and more specifically in the city’s public spaces. There are essays on subjects such as the figures of the “bourgeoise” and the “flâneuse”, the place of women in parks and theatres, magazines, advertising, and department stores. DUFIEF, PIERRE-JEAN. Paris dans le roman du XIXe siècle. Paris: Hatier, 1994. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is designed as an introduction for a general public. It has a short historical summary about Paris in the nineteenth century, followed by a series of nine excerpts from novels by Balzac, Hugo, Maupassant and Zola. Each short excerpt (about one page) is accompanied by a commentary text. The last section of the book deals with general topics, such as panoramas, or metaphorical representations of Paris. FERGUSON, PRISCILLA PARKHURST. Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth Century City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book analyses Paris as a city which was linked to revolutionary dynamics and ideals. The successive revolutions that happened there (1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871) shaped a specific image of the city, not only as the place of past revolutions, but also as a space which could always be pregnant with new revolutionary potential. Ferguson argues that, for the writers of that time, seeking to encompass the figure of Paris was also a means to search into the Revolutionary state of mind. GLUCK, MARY. “Theorizing the Cultural Roots of the Bohemian Artist.” Modernism-/-Modernity. 2000; 7 (3 Sept): 351-378 LOCATION: Rockefeller Library Abstract (source: infogate): A historical and theoretical expansion of the figure of the bohemian artist through the linkage of social and aesthetic dimensions. Traces the origins of bohemian culture to the 1820s-1830s, from romantic drama, melodrama, and the comedie-Vaudeville to allegorical romance. Focusing on literature and especially theatrical performance, explores issues such as self v. collective, and high culture v. popular culture. Includes discussion of Latin Quarter regulars such as Théophile Gautier as well as some Daumier satirical drawings of Vaudeville. HARVEY, DAVID. “The Cartographic Imagination: Balzac in Paris”. Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture. Darkwadker, Vinay, ed. New York: Routledge, 2001. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This article deals with the Balzac’s novels (in particular History of the Thirteen and Old Goriot) and the place of Architecture and Urbanism within these texts. LEE, D. “The catastrophic imaginary of the Paris Commune in Jules Verne's 'Les 500 millions de la Begum'." Neophilologus. 2006; 90 (4) : 535-553. LOCATION: Online. Abstract: (source: infogate) The bitter memory of the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870 and the Commune of 1871 underwrite several late nineteenth-century French novels. In the domain of popular literature, Jules Verne's "Les 500 millions de la Begum" of 1879 pits two opposing cities -one French and utopian, the other German and dystopian - against each other. Less than a simple representation of a French revenge against their Prussian enemies, however, the cities stand in for the troubling tendencies of urban modernity above and beyond nationalism. Moreover, the figure of Pompeii, a model of urban catastrophe linked to the specter of the Paris Commune, lurks underneath the novel's progressive and hopeful surface. LIDSKY, PAUL. Les écrivains contre la commune. Paris: F. Maspero, 1970. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book provides a detailed description of the writers’ reactions to the Paris Commune. It quotes extensively from the letters and articles of the most prominent writers’ of the time and analyzes their positions about the Commune. The author quotes extensively from Zola, Flaubert, George Sand, Hugo, Vallès, and Anatole France. MAXWELL, RICHARD. The Mysteries of Paris and London. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book analyzes nineteenth-century novels and their urban settings. Maxwell comments mainly on works by Dickens and Hugo, and he is interested in the function of the city in their texts. The city is more than a décor. In a chapter about Notre Dame de Paris, Maxwell shows that Paris is represented as a maze, with Esmeralda playing a role similar to that of Ariane in ancient mythology. He also analyzes the insistence of Hugo on the difficulty to read the city, a place where many different codes, languages, and kinds of slang cohabit. MORETTI, FRANCO. Atlas of the European Novel. 1800-1900. New York: Verso, 1998. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is an attempt to analyze nineteenth-century French and English Literature according to geographical parameters: on the one hand, Moretti wants to describe literature in space : that is, novels as they relate to the place where they were created. And on the other hand, he is also interested in the place of space in literature, and on the way that the fictional discourse treats its décor. The first part of the book is devoted to the novel as a genre concomitant to the rise of the Nation State. The second part of the book is probably the most interesting for our topic: entitled “A tale of two cities”, it deals with novels taking place in London and Paris, and draws maps which represent the errands of the characters in these cities. Moretti intends to reveal patterns behind these various trajectories in the capitals, focusing primarily on Balzac’s and Flaubert’s novels (Lost Illusions, Père Goriot, and The Sentimental Education). Paris au dix-neuvième siècle: aspects d’un mythe littéraire. Lyon: presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1984. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is a collection of papers read at a colloquium in Lyon in 1982. They deal with the representation of Paris in texts such as Balzac’s La fille aux yeux d’or, Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale, and Eugène Sue’s Les mystères de Paris. PRENDERGAST, CHRISTOPHER. Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1992. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This volume is a reference for nineteenth century Literature scholars. Christopher Prendergast analyzes the conflicting representations of Paris in a time when the city was radically changing. The capital was seen as the center of progress and of European cultural life. Writers like Hugo have described Paris as prefiguring a glorious future for civilization, which suggests that the city is actually readable, and has a meaning that can be deciphered. But, Prendergast argues, Haussman’s works in Paris paradoxically did not trigger representations of Paris as legible: the city’s identity, on the contrary, becomes blurred and uncertain for many writers. Prendergast’s study deals with these conflicting attitudes toward the city, by analyzing a variety of objects of study (such as speed, cityscapes, panoramas, underground Paris, and insurrections, among others topics). Music [ top ] BARBIER, PATRICK. Opera in Paris, 1800-1850: a Lively History. Portland, Or: Amadeus Press, 1995. LOCATION: Orwig Library. This book is a factual description of the world of Opera in the first half of the century. It starts with a description of the relation between Napoleon and Opera, and gives details about the laws that were regulating the field at the time. It then portrays the evolution of Court Theater after the fall of the Empire, and the various functions and roles of the staff that worked in Opera, from composer to chorus, including dancers and musicians. The book includes descriptions of scenery, stage machinery, and administrative offices. It goes on to draw a general chronological perspective on the changing aesthetics of Opera and on the various careers of the composers. It also deals with subjects such as the audiences’ social status, the artistic life, and the representation of Opera in the Press. BLOOM, PETER, Ed. Music in Paris in the Eighteen-thirties. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1987. LOCATION: Orwig Library. This volume gathers papers which were originally presented during a conference at Smith College in 1982. A ten page preface describes the particularities of Paris and of the cultural/musical context of that decade. The volume contains 22 papers, a few of which are in French (in which case they are followed by a short summary in English). The topics of the articles vary considerably: composers (Mendelssohn, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner and Liszt), French popular songs, chamber music, representations of musicians in comedies, music instruments in the world fairs, operas and melodramas, among other subjects. BRODY, ELAINE. Paris: the Musical Kaleidoscope, 1870-1925. New York: G. Braziller, 1987. LOCATION: Orwig Library. This book describes the various musical currents that influenced French Music at the turn of the century. It has thirteen chapters, each of which describes a particular trend: Wagner’s love-hate relationship with France and the influence that he had on French music, “Japonisme” and Orientalism, Art, Literature, “Expositions universelles” and the way in which music was represented there. The book also describes cabarets and popular music, as well as Russian, Spanish, and American influences on French music. GERHARD, ANSELM. The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. LOCATION: Orwig Library. This book proposes an analysis of new modes of representation in Opera. In the nineteenth century, both “tragédies lyriques” and operas ceased to be staged in the royal court. Instead, their premieres always took place in the city, and the author argues that their subject matter often portrayed “city ways and attitudes”. Gerhard calls this trend “urbanized Opera”. In this book, he describes the visual culture of an era (panoramas, dioramas, and kaleidoscopes), and the way in which operas began to draw a new public. The chapters of the book often deal with a single composer or author (Rossini, Eugene Scribe, Meyerbeer, Victor Hugo, and Verdi, among others). HUEBNER, STEVEN. French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. LOCATION: Orwig Library. This book deals with French Opera and its relation to Wagner, whose work had a very strong impact in France in the last decade of the century. This study addresses a scholarly public. The book contains a general introduction on the subject, and is divided into four parts: “Jules Massenet”, “Ambivalent Wagnerians and conservative renewal”, “Wagnerian renewal”, and “Realist opera”. The last part has chapters on Bohemian Montmartre and on Zola’s influence on Alfred Bruneau. LACOMBE, HERVE. The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. LOCATION: Orwig Library. This book can be read both by a general public and scholars alike. It focuses on the Second Empire (1852-1870). The first part deals with the material conditions of creating and performing an opera. It also dissociates the various genres that prevailed at the time (“Grand Opéra” and “Opéra Comique”), and describes in detail the practical stages that anyone wanting to mount an Opera would have had to deal with (commissioning, censorship) as well as the roles of the main participants (theater director, librettist, publisher). The second part focuses on the music and the poetry (construction of drama, space and time, poetic and musical expression). The last part is entitled “society, Genres, and Aesthetes”. It describes the careers of several composers, and goes back to the question of genres, describing them in more detail. The last chapter is a study of the aesthetic principles of the time, and exposes the different visions and conceptions of Opera that prevailed in the nineteenth century. PATUREAU, FREDERIQUE. Le palais Garnier dans la société parisienne: 1875-1914. Liège: Mardaga, 1991. LOCATION: Orwig Library. This book is an in-depth account of the way in which the Opera Garnier was administered, and of the types of shows which were staged there. A first part deals with the functional administration, and includes sections on the relation between the opera and the state, financial organization, budget, and wages. The second part is about the repertoires and the types of Operas that were staged in the building (here the author describes the commissioning, the main composers, and the efforts made to renew the repertoire). The last part describes the public at the Opera, which mainly consisted of social elites, even though Patureau also describes what she sees as a “democratization of the public”. PERLOFF, NANCY LYNN. Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. LOCATION: Orwig Library. This book deals with “the startling blend of popular and art idioms” that Erik Satie and his group “introduced in French music” (p. 2). Although the author focuses more particularly on the first two decades of the twentieth century, a few chapters can be very useful for the study of cabarets and popular entertainments in the late nineteenth century (see in particular the introduction, and chapter 1, “Popular Institutions in Turn-of-the-Century Paris”). SPIES, ANDRE MICHAEL. Opera, state, and Society in the Third Republic, 1875-1914. New York: P. Lang, 1998. LOCATION: Orwig Library. This book examines the links between the state and the Opera at the turn of the century, focusing particularly on the ideology which Opera could potentially convey. The book describes the Opera’s administration, and the links between Opera and nationalism (chapter 2: “The State and the Ideology of the Opera: Carmen or Jeanne d’Arc?”). Spies goes back to the question of ideology in the third chapter, this time in so far as the public related to it: he dissociates the social concerns and struggles as exposed in the “Opéra Comique” from what was staged in the aristocratic Opera (which typically attracted an audience that was not very receptive to social themes). The book goes on to describe the role of the state in the choices of repertoire. The final chapters are on public opinion and critics, as well as on the impact of the librettists. WEBER, WILLIAM. Music and the Middle Class: the Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna between 1830 and 1848. Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. LOCATION: Orwig Library. This study focuses on London more than on Paris or Vienna, but it is a very good introduction to the history of the emergence of concert life in the middle class. The book deals with the social characteristics of the public, and with the rise of the middle class. The two decades at stake here are decades of economical growth, which triggered a rising standard of living in the three capitals. Weber calls these phenomena a “cultural explosion”, and he analyzes the repercussions of this shift in his first chapter. The following sections include topics such as popular-music, classical-music (focusing particularly on the kind of public that would attend those performances), and concert life. WHITING, STEVEN MOORE. Satie the Bohemian: from Cabaret to Concert Hall. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. LOCATION: Orwig Library. Erik Satie was a music composer from the turn of the century. He was also very active in the milieu of cabaret and music-hall, and composed several popular songs and humoristic works. This book dwells on these two aspects of Satie’s work, and on his conception of music as an art that should depart from its classical frames. The first part of the book describes the milieu of the café-concerts, music-halls and cabarets at the turn of the century. The second part is more specific, since it deals with Satie’s involvement in the Chat Noir, the Divan Japonais, and the Auberge du Clou, among others. The last part describes and analyzes Satie’s work as a composer of both ballets and songs. History [ top ] General historical and cultural studies CHARLE, CHRISTOPHE. Paris fin de siècle. Culture et Politique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is about Paris as a cultural, philosophical, and intellectual center. It understands Paris as one of the main poles of modernity at the end of the century, and seeks to show its specificity as a cultural metropolis (through a comparison with Berlin in particular). There are chapters on universities, artistic and literary circles, intellectual figures, the evolution of the discipline of History, politics in literature, the building of a literary nationalism, and the Dreyfus affair. GAILLARD, MARC. Paris au XIXe siècle. Paris: Nathan, 1981. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is organized chronologically and gives a richly illustrated description of Paris and its evolution in the nineteenth century. There are sections on sewers, gardens, new streets, fountains, docks, train stations, etc… HARVEY, DAVID. Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2003. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book analyzes the concept of modernity as it is related to Paris and to the nineteenth century. It focuses particularly on the July monarchy (1830-1848) and the Second Empire (1851-1871). It has chapters on Balzac, revolutionary politics, labor power, the condition of women, consumerism, spectacle and leisure, sciences, and urban transformations. There is also a final section on the building process of the Sacré coeur in Montmartre. HIGONNET, PATRICE L.R. Paris Capital of the World. Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This long book (about 500 pages) can be used as a general cultural introduction to the city’s history in the nineteenth century. Each chapter can be read separately, and can prepare the way for further research. There are chapters on themes such as Revolution, crime, science, Parisian myths, alienation, literary representations of the city, Paris as a capital of pleasure, and phantasmagorias. MARCHAND, BERNARD. Paris, histoire d’une ville: XIXe et XXe siècle. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book is divided into six parts, three of which concern the nineteenth century. These six sections are arranged chronologically. The text is a detailed and well-documented description of demographical, social, spatial, and political changes in Paris. It analyzes various issues such as poverty, the modernization of the city, the development of transportation, social classes, etc… OSTER, DANIEL. La vie parisienne. Anthologie des mœurs du XIXe siècle. Paris: Sand/Conti, 1989. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This volume gathers a collection of texts and illustrations from the nineteenth century about the city life in Paris. The very long introduction describes the relations between the city and the artistic and journalistic milieus. The texts of this anthology are classified according to a series of themes related to Parisian life: streets and boulevards, underground Paris (sewers and catacombs), public places (woods, gardens, cafes, restaurants, cabarets, balls, universal exhibits, theaters), Parisian types. Very often, the illustrations for the texts were not part of the original publication, and come from other sources (such as newspapers or magazines). History [ top ] Everydaylife studies AMATO, JOSEPH ANTHONY. On foot: A History of Walking. New York: New York University Press, 2004. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library / Online: http://josiah.brown.edu/record=b4229859 This book deals with the physical, social and economical significances of walking. Practices of walking vary through the ages and according to their function (marching, going for a walk, carrying, etc). Two chapters are of particular interest: chapter 4, entitled “mind over foot. Romantic walking and rambling”, talks about the romantic ideal of walking and the links that it could draw between man and nature. Walking, for the romantics, is a way of flying away from the industrial world and from the urban space. In Chapter 7, “a new footing for the nation: taming and cleaning up in revolutionary Paris”, Amato describes the policies of the successive French governments to try and control the mobs and their displacements, in a century that was constantly under the threat of revolt and revolution. ARON, JEAN-PAUL. Essai sur la sensibilité alimentaire à Paris au 19e siècle. Paris: A. Colin, 1967. Cross-listed with History – The Emergence of Mass Culture – Mass Culture and Consumer Society. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book deals with the place of food in nineteenth-century Paris: it describes consumption and eating practices in relation to wealth and social class. It also questions the notion of taste, and gives a list of the groceries which would have been considered as luxury goods at the time. More generally, the book draws a picture of the food consumption habits of the first half of the century. It uses sources such as restaurant menus and grocery store bills to trace the social practices of eating out, and it compares the prices of the various goods which were available at the time in cafes and restaurants. BARNES, DAVID S. The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth Century Struggle against Filth and Germs. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Cross-listed with History – Medicine. LOCATION: Science Library / Online: http://josiah.brown.edu/record=b4350520 This book studies the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the way scientific discoveries influenced public health politics: Barnes is particularly interested in what he calls the bacteriological revolution, led in France by Pasteur at the end of the century. Between 1870 and the 1890’s, the approach to health had radically changed, leading from what Barnes calls the “sanitary era” to the “bacteriological” one. In other words, hygiene, filth, heredity and habits were understood to be at the root of health problems in the 1870’s. The bacteriological revolution, with the discoveries of microbes and of the way they function, changed that assumption and gave to science a predominant role over habits and ways of life. The author here is more interested in mentalities and social consequences of this revolution than in the scientific problems as such. His approach is greatly influenced by Foucault and Bourdieu. CLAYSON, HOLLIS. Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870-1871). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library A study of the artists’ reactions to the Franco-Prussian war, and of the conflict’s impact, both on everyday life and on artistic representations and practices. The author deals with subjects such as the artistic renderings of military life, women’s position in the conflict, the caricatures depicting the food crisis that resulted from the siege, the artists’ roles in the events (Courbet’s in particular), or the influence that the war had on Regnault’s orientalist paintings. DELATTRE, SIMONE. Les douze heures noires: la nuit à Paris au XIXe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel, 2000. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This book analyzes the tropes of night and darkness in 19th century Paris. The eighteenth century was dominated by the figures of light and enlightenment. In contrast to that, Simone Delattre seeks to question the value given to night and nightlife in the capital during the following century. She analyzes the importance of night in the construction of Paris as a myth, and how this role changed with the emergence of street lighting. There are sections on nightlife and entertainment (gambling houses, balls, carnivals), as well as on nocturnal police and crime. She bases her analysis on literary works as well as on authentic historical documents. FORTH, CHRISTOPHER “‘The Belly of Paris’: The Decline of the Fat Man in Fin-de-siècle France.” Cultures of the Abdomen: Diet, Digestion, and Fat in the Modern World. Forth, Christopher, & Carden-Coye, Ana, Eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Cross-listed with History – Classifying and Policing: Social Classes and Social Types and History – Medicine. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library This article and the introduction to this volume deal with the place of fat in the modern era. Forth’s article is about the transformation of the symbols attached to fat in Paris: while at the beginning of the century, fat is a sign of financial ease, it becomes at the turn of the twentieth century an emblem for sexual impotence, and appears as such in a few novels by Zola. GLUCK, MARY. Popular Bohemia. Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth Century Paris. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Cross-listed with History – The Emergence of Mass Culture – Mass Culture and Consumer Society. LOCATION: Rockefeller Library/ Annex Hay This book seeks to consider Modernism as fundamentally linked to popular culture. It challenges the assumption that
5097	dbpedia	2	94	https://www.my-french-house.com/blog/article/75255/areas-loved-by-writers-painters-artists	en	Inspiring Places Loved by Writers, Painters & Artists in France	https://www.my-french-house.com/assets/interface/favicon-16x16.ico	https://www.my-french-house.com/assets/interface/favicon-16x16.ico	[ "https://mfh-c4bd.kxcdn.com/images/icons/flag-uk.png", "https://www.my-french-house.com/blog/article/75255/assets/content/news/75255/thumb/1.jpg", "https://www.my-french-house.com/assets/images/icons/register.png", "https://www.my-french-house.com/assets/images/banners/01sideBannerNewBuild.jpg", "https://www.my-french-house.com/assets/content/advertising/26/thumb/1.jpg?v=2408" ]	[]	[]	[ "French", "Writer", "Painter", "artist", "area", "France", "artistic", "creative", "inspiration", "poet" ]	null	[ "Patrick Joseph" ]	2017-10-26T00:00:00	Discover some of the best artistic and inspiring areas in France for writing, painting, music and for enjoying a refreshing creative French lifestyle.	en	/assets/interface/favicon-16x16.ico	My French House	https://www.my-french-house.com/blog/article/75255/areas-loved-by-writers-painters-artists	Areas Loved by Writers, Painters and Artists Originally posted on 26th October, 2017 & updated on 10th May, 2024 For centuries, writers and artists have taken creative inspiration from France. It’s hardly surprising. The landscape, the chateaux, the coastline, the cities, the culture, the history, the boulevards, the cathedrals, the light, the climate… whatever it is that sparks the imagination, it’s sure to be found somewhere in this diverse and beautiful country. France has been a source of literary and artistic inspiration for talent both home-grown and from further afield. Great writers whose genius has flourished in France include Molière, Hugo, Dumas, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Louis Stevenson, Dickens, Wilde, Joyce, Nietzsche and Turgenev. And among the artists to be inspired by this amazing country are Monet, Cezanne, Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse and Braque. Disregarding Paris for now (it could fill a blog by itself), let’s take a tour around some of the well-known - and more obscure – places in France that have inspired a host of writers and artists. Normandy Inspires Artists The Normandy area of northern France has a milder climate than further south and is known for its lush green meadows, farmhouses, apple orchards and varied coastline. • Giverny: This picturesque village on the border of Normandy is well cited as the birthplace of Impressionism. The artist Claude Monet (1840-1926) lived in Giverny for more than 40 years. The walled water garden, planted by Monet himself, was the subject of many of his paintings, including his famous Water Lilies series. • Rouen: This port city on the river Seine features Gothic churches, medieval timber houses and cobblestone streets. The city and its harbour were the subject of Monet’s paintings, but he was particularly inspired by the imposing Cathédrale Notre-Dame, depicting it at different times and seasons in a series of 30 paintings. • Normandy coastline, Etretat: The striking chalk cliffs of the Normandy coastline have provided creative inspiration for many writer and artists, and the agricultural town of Etretat was a particular favourite of Monet, as well as the French landscape painter Eugène Louis Boudin (1824-1898) and painter Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) leader of the Realism movement in 19th century France. The writer Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), best known for his short stories, also spent most of his childhood here. The Light of Provence Loved by artists for the quality of its light, the South of France has provided creative inspiration to writers and artists for centuries. The Côte d’Azur in particular has attracted a plethora of creative types, including many from less balmy climes such as Robert Louis Stevenson, HG Wells, DH Lawrence, Aubrey Beardsley, James Joyce, Berthold Brecht, Vladimir Nabokov, Georges Braque and Friedrich Nietzsche. • Aix en Provence - One of the French Post-Impressionist movement’s leading artists, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), was born in Aix en Provence and lived most of his life in this cultured and cosmopolitan city, where the sun shines 300 days a year. Visit Aix – as it’s simply known – and you’ll understand why it held Cézanne in its thrall. It’s a real image of Provence, with sparkling fountains, tree-lined thoroughfares (including the famous Cours Mirabeau, said to be Europe’s most captivating street), Roman ruins and bustling markets. The stunning landscape around the city features the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, painted no less than 87 times by Cézanne. Another famous son of Aix is the writer Emile Zola, who spent his youth in the city. • Nice and the French Riviera: The awe-inspiring coastline and sparkling azure water have been the inspiration for many writers and artists. Henri Matisse (1869-1954) spent more than 40 years in Nice and many of his paintings capture the bright, colourful beauty of this sunny part of France. The city, which features the stunning, palm tree-lined Promenade des Anglais, was also loved by many other artists including Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). • Arles : This city in Provence was once a provincial capital of ancient Rome but is perhaps now best known as the inspiration for many of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings. Located on the river Rhône, sun-soaked Arles has plenty of Roman treasures and lovely little cobbled squares, and has hosted an annual art celebration since 1970. • Antibes: Monet, to mention him again, came here for four months between January and May, 1888, and in that time painted 40 landscapes of this pretty. Picasso also spent a very productive year here. About 12 km from here is Cagnes sur Mer, where Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) had his home. Historic Occitanie Part of the Occitanie region, Languedoc-Roussillon stretches from Provence to the Pyrénées and the Spanish border. It includes the cities of Montpellier and Toulouse but includes some lesser known places that inspired creativity over the centuries. • Collioure : The artist Henri Matisse was a fan of this little fishing port on the French Mediterranean near the border with Spain. Shortly after arriving here in 1905, he was joined by his friend, the fellow artist Andre Derain. They embarked together on a painting spree of the town, revelling in its intense light and colours. Writers and Noirmoitier This island lies off the Atlantic coast of France in the Vendée department, within easy reach of the UK. Its charm and temperate climate is a modern day favourite with Chocolat author Joanne Harris. Some say the Island inspired one of Tintin’s stories. French Gardens and Parks Known as the garden of France due to a tradition stretching back to the Renaissance, the Loire Valley’s landscape is dotted with the impressive chateaux that make the area one of the most recognisable in France. • Nantes : The writer Jules Verne (1828-1905) was born in Nantes, and the city and its environs continued to inspire him throughout his life. The Loire river held a deep fascination for him, and its bridges and quays, and the maritime hustle and bustle, inspired his popular Voyages Extraordinaires series of adventure novels which included Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days. My son is reading one of these at the moment, can’t wait to watch the flim again. • Touraine: Writers have long taken inspiration from Touraine’s tranquility, romance and elegance. Touraine is a popular tourist destination, surrounded by chateaux and located in the Loire Valley vineyard. Famous literary fans have included René Descartes, François Rabelais and Honoré de Balzac. Boost Your Artistic Style This list is far from exhaustive, but we hope it’s been an enjoyable read. Why not channel your inner creativity with a visit to France? Check our properties and immerse yourself in this inspirational country, perhaps we can help find that inspirational retreat in a corner of France that may just change everyhing, ask Leonardo da Vinci! You won’t be the first film producer, actor or musician planning to find a base to live, work and embrace French culture, with the rest of Europe on your doorstep. Back to articles
5097	dbpedia	0	62	https://sffrd.library.tamu.edu/site/search/by/subject/3661	en	The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database			[ "https://library.tamu.edu/assets/images/askus.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	iphone-icon.png		//sffrd.library.tamu.edu/site/search/by/subject/3661	Flag Title Flag This Row "Trouver une langue&period; &period; &period;"&colon; Etude thematique de trois contes fantastiques&period; York, Holly Ulmer Ph&period; D&period; Dissertation, Emory University, 1983&period; 153 p&period; (DAI-A 44(3)&period;) Flag This Row Bakhtin's Chronotope and the Fantastic&colon; Gautier's 'Jettatura' and 'Arria Marcella'&period; Crichfield, Grant Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 4(3&semi; [&num;15])&colon; 25-39&period; 1991&period; Flag This Row Du fantastique au fantasmatique&colon; Morcellement, decomposition et recreation du corps feminine chez Theophile Gautier Ton-That, Thanh-Van in&colon; Dupeyron-Lafay, Francois, ed&period; Les Representations du corps dans les oeuvres fantastiques et de science-fiction&colon; Figures et fantasmes&period; Paris&colon; Michel Houdiard Editeur, 2005&period; p&period; 19-27&period; Flag This Row effet fantastique, L’&colon; Etude sur la mise-en-jeu du sujet dans des textes fantastique des dix-neuvieme et vingtieme siecles / Fantastic Effect, The&colon; A Study of the Play of the Subject in Texts of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Fantastic Literature&period; Brown, Helene Georgette Ph&period; D&period; Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1989&period; 361 p&period; (DAI-A 50(10)&colon; 3245&period; April 1990&period;) Flag This Row Fantasic Lies, Ethical Truths&colon; An Anthropological Approach to the Fantastic&period; Muller, Markus Ph&period; D&period; Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998&period; viii, 240 p&period; Flag This Row Fantasmagoria and Optics in Theophile Gautier's 'Arria Marcella'&period; Crichfield, Grant in&colon; Saciuk, Olena H&period;, ed&period; The Shape of the Fantastic&period; New York&colon; Greenwood, 1990&period; pp&period;85-92&period; Flag This Row Fantastic and European Gothic, The&colon; History, Literature and the French Revolution&period; Gibson, Matthew Cardiff&colon; University of Wales Press, 2013&period; 243 p&period; (Gothic Literary Studies) Flag This Row Figurations de la femme dans la letterature fantastique&colon; La Femme-Demon / Figurations of Women in Fantasy Literature&colon; The Demon-Woman&period; Bulver, Kathryn Mary Ph&period; D&period; Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1992&period; v, 306 p&period; (DAI-A 53(6)&colon; 1936&period; December 1992&period;) Flag This Row Future Looks Backward, The&colon; Projection and the Historical Imagination in 19th-Century France&period; Wing, Thomas C&period; Ph&period; D&period; Dissertation, Yale University, 2013&period; 201 p&period; (DAI 74&period; June 2014) Flag This Row Gautier's Spirite&colon; Beyond the Shadow of the Idea&period; York, Holly Ulmer in&colon; Saciuk, Olena H&period;, ed&period; The Shape of the Fantastic&period; New York&colon; Greenwood, 1990&period; pp&period;155-162&period; Flag This Row Gender-based Ideology in Film and Literature&colon; The Fantastic and Related Genres&period; Hottell, Ruth A&period; Ph&period; D&period; Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1987&period; 220pp&period; (DAI-A 49(1)&colon; 95-96&period; July 1988&period;) Flag This Row Imagining Bodies&colon; Technological Visions of Displaced Minds in French Speculative Fiction&period; Mitchell, Lia Ardith Swope Ph&period; D&period; Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2019&period; 202 p&period; (DAI-A 81(2)(E)&period;) Flag This Row One of Cleopatra's Nights Stableford, Brian in&colon; Magill, Frank N&period;, ed&period; Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Vol 3&period; Englewood Cliffs, NJ&colon; Salem Press, Inc&period;, 1983&period; pp&period; 1158-1159&period; Flag This Row Painter in Words Ladd, Thyrill L&period; Fantasy Commentator 2(1)&colon; 3-4&period; Winter 1946/47&period; (No&period; 13) Flag This Row Salem Belles, Succubi, and the Scarlet Letter&colon; Transatlantic Witchcraft and Gothic Erotic Affect&period; Cutler, Sylvia Master's Thesis, Brigham Young University, 2019&period; 40 p&period; (MAI 82 (4)(E)&period;) Flag This Row Speculative Sex&colon; The First Gropings Stableford, Brian M&period; New York Review of Science Fiction 27(2)&colon; 1, 8-13&period; October 2014&period; (No&period; 314) Flag This Row Spirite&period; Stableford, Brian in&colon; Magill, Frank N&period;, ed&period; Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Vol 4&period; Englewood Cliffs, NJ&colon; Salem Press, Inc&period;, 1983&period; pp&period; 1798-1800&period; Flag This Row Teufel, Der&colon; Seine Gestalten und Masken in der Literatur des 19&period;Jahrhunderts (Hoffmann, Gautier, James)&period; Amos, Thomas in&colon; Petzold, Dieter, ed&period; Inklings&colon; Jahrbuch fur Literature und Asthetik, BAND 22, 2004&period; Moers&colon; Brendow Verlag, 2004&period; p&period; 31-47&period; Flag This Row Vampire Vixens&colon; The Female Undead and the Lacanian Symbolic Order in Tales by Gautier, James and Le Fanu&period; Rogers, Susan L&period; Ph&period; D&period; Dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1993&period; 193 p&period; Flag This Row Variations sur un theme&colon; Le Double et ses avatars dans le recit fantastique&period; Thevenin, Dominique Suzanne Ph&period; D&period; Dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1987&period; 203 p&period; (DAI-A 49(1)&colon; 87-88&period; July 1988&period;)
5097	dbpedia	1	79	https://theidlewoman.net/2013/08/02/captain-fracasse-theophile-gautier/	en	Captain Fracasse (1863): Théophile Gautier	https://theidlewoman.net…470925946132.jpg	https://theidlewoman.net…470925946132.jpg	[ "https://theidlewoman.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/logo_mini.png?w=100", "https://i0.wp.com/theidlewoman.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/bea73-fracasse-e1470925946132.jpg?w=184&h=295&ssl=1", "https://i0.wp.com/theidlewoman.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/theophile-gautier.jpg?w=428&h=295&ssl=1", "https://www.netgalley.com/badge/9c50e81c4f462860fe2b5077a8abf5faa24f2a5b", "https://www.netgalley.com/badge/8727e98d324b0ded4c96babc8b349a4827ce6256", "https://www.netgalley.com/badge/5d72891c5c5a809d403888b39ec2cdeb7ae762e2", "https://www.netgalley.com/badge/7ddc17cb0f37f47042cf88fddc2808d309770a86", "https://www.netgalley.com/badge/0b947a165852c80a74eac13413d6e087b57075a2", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2013-08-02T00:00:00	★★½ Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the random swashbuckler of the week! I had never heard of this book, which was recommended automatically to me by LibraryThing, but since the Kindle version was free, I couldn't resist. It turns out that Captain Fracasse was Gautier's third full-length novel, published in 1863, nine years before his death.…	en	https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico	The Idle Woman	https://theidlewoman.net/2013/08/02/captain-fracasse-theophile-gautier/	★★½ Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for the random swashbuckler of the week! I had never heard of this book, which was recommended automatically to me by LibraryThing, but since the Kindle version was free, I couldn’t resist. It turns out that Captain Fracasse was Gautier’s third full-length novel, published in 1863, nine years before his death. It’s a romantic romp through a picturesque vision of 17th-century France, following a troupe of commedia dell’ arte actors travelling from Gascony to Paris, with a poverty-stricken young nobleman in their midst. According to Wikipedia, the fount of all knowledge, it’s a pastiche of the Roman Comique (1651) by the French writer Paul Scarron, which tells the story of an itinerant company of comedians. Captain Fracasse ticks off all the elements necessary for a thoroughly old-fashioned adventure: the kind you can curl up with on a wet Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, it’s overshadowed by an outdated and overly flowery translation. The story is good-natured, although so predictable that plot developments might as well be announced by fanfare. It opens on a dark night when a company of actors beg for shelter at the ruined old chateau of the young Baron de Sigognac. To date, this young man has lived quietly in his delipidated family home, too proud to beg for charity, accompanied only by a faithful old servant and his loyal cat, dog and pony, all equally aged. The arrival of the actors offers him a glimpse of a dazzling world beyond the estate, and he plucks up the courage to go with them on their journey to Paris, hoping that there he will find a way to approach the King and appeal to his munificence, reminding him of the noble history of the de Sigognacs. A more immediate appeal is the presence of the beautiful actress Isabelle, the illegitimate daughter of a mysterious nobleman. De Sigognac immediately falls in love with her and (of course) she immediately adores him in return. (However, this being a very polite novel, no one gets round to saying anything about it until at least the middle of the book.) En route to their next major stop in Poitiers, the company faces ambushes by bandits, snowstorms, bitter cold and the tragic death of one of the actors. Conscious that he can’t pay his way, and keen to show his gratitude to the actors for their hospitality, de Sigognac overcomes his gentlemanly pride and offers to fill the space in the company, taking on the guise of the braggart Captain Fracasse. He becomes a great success and, by the time the troupe arrives in Poitiers, they are playing to full houses. But it is in Poitiers that de Sigognac meets his nemesis, the Duke of Vallombreuse: an arrogant nobleman who is smitten with the lovely Isabelle, and determined to do all that he can to remove his unsuitable rival from his path. Yes, even now you can probably predict what’s going to happen. The novel itself reads like a commedia dell’ arte performance, with the kind of archetypal characters, flowery dialogue and tidy, happy resolution that you’d see on the stage. The line between art and life in one of these acting troupes always seems to have been slightly blurred – as in Scaramouche, the actors in Captain Fracasse are dedicated to a single role and they share their name with their on-stage character. So we have the troupe leader Herode, who plays the tyrant, the pedant Blazius, the leading lady Serafina, the modest Isabelle, the doughty chaperon Mme. Leonarde, the cheeky soubrette Zerbine, the vain romantic lead, Leander, the clever servant Scapin, and the swaggering braggart Matamore. You know by now that I have a soft spot for this sort of thing, and it’s true that if I were being less indulgent I might point out certain things. There are spoilers ahead, if it’s possible to give spoilers in a book where you can predict the basic facts of the ending within about three chapters. If I were being critical, therefore, I might draw your attention to the lack of psychological complexity; the fact that no one can have a conversation without declaiming; the primness of the lovers even by Victorian standards; and the fact that the villain renounces his ways in the final chapters, under the influence of the heroine’s modest and innocent soul, and becomes generally a very nice chap. Everyone (except the villain, most of the time) is worthy, good-natured, warm-hearted and understanding, and there are several long conversations in which various people tell each other how fantastically noble and wonderful they are. I’m being slightly facetious, but I think it only fair to warn you if you’re thinking of embarking on the book. However, if you do decide to risk the purple prose, you’ll find yourself in a world of duels, love affairs, the commedia dell’ arte, attempted abduction, dastardly villains, bravos, gypsies and disguises. Put your cynicism aside, read it tongue-in-cheek, and allow yourself to be carried along on its charming tide. As far as I can see, this novel has only been translated into English once: by F.C. de Sumichrast in 1902, which is the translation I’ve been reading in this free ebook. I think it’s perfectly fair to say that it’s well overdue for a new translation. No doubt the source material has its own flaws, but de Sumichrast’s sugary Victorian translation does it no favours and I can’t imagine that anyone but the most devoted fan of swashbuckling adventures will plough on through to the end. That’s not to say, however, that the story doesn’t have an archaic, fairy-tale charm. In style it reminded me very much of Stradella, in which all the heroes and heroines are unbelievably good, all the bravos are surprisingly honourable and there is much prose of the flowery and ornate variety. Some years ago, I read Gautier’s more famous novel – Mademoiselle du Maupin – which struck me at the time as remarkably modern and subversive for its time (considering it was published at around the time Jane Austen was writing). That was translated by Helen Constantine for Penguin Classics and, although it kept its period flavour, it was a much more exciting and lively read. In fact, its spirit is so different from de Sumichrast’s translation here, that the two books might as well be by entirely different authors. I’d be interested to see what Constantine could do if she got her hands on Captain Fracasse. It’s the kind of story which might work better as a film, and fortuitously I have a DVD on its way of the 1990 film staring the delectable Vincent Perez as de Sigognac. There was an earlier film starring Jean Marais as the young baron, but I’m hoping that the 1990 version will have a similar feel to Cyrano de Bergerac and Le Bossu.* Of course I will let you know my thoughts on that in due course… In the meantime, if you like swashbucklers like Scaramouche, or if you have a soft spot for the kind of Victorian historical romances written by people like F. Marion Crawford, you should definitely give this a go (and you should watch Molière, if you haven’t yet seen it, because that has a very similar art-imitating-life feel to it). For those with more lukewarm feelings about this genre, it might be wise to steer clear until there is a more up-to-date and less sugary English translation. As for myself, I’m now keen to read more about the commedia dell’ arte in this period. Has anyone read any other good fiction – or non-fiction – on the subject? Buy the book * It didn’t. It was so indescribably bad that even I couldn’t put up with it for more than half an hour. Yet more disappointment, alas!
5097	dbpedia	3	3	https://arthistorians.info/gautiert/	en	Dictionary of Art Historians	https://arthistorians.in…ontPage_2022.jpg	https://arthistorians.in…ontPage_2022.jpg	[ "https://arthistorians.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/DoAH_logo.png", "https://arthistorians.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/DoAH_logo.png", "https://arthistorians.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Pierre-Jules-Theophile-Gautier.jpeg", "https://licensebuttons.net/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png", "https://arthistorians.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/DAHVC_Logo2020-2048x422-1-1024x211.png", "https://licensebuttons.net/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png", "https://arthistorians.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/DAHVC_Logo2020-2048x422-1-1024x211.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2023-11-08T22:48:02+00:00	French art critic and poet; primary exponent of the art-for-art's sake approach. Gautier was the son of bureaucrat in the French tax office, Pierre Gautier	en	https://arthistorians.in…09/DoAH_logo.png	Dictionary of Art Historians	https://arthistorians.info/gautiert/	Full Name: Gautier, Théophile Other Names: Pierre-Jules-Théophile Gautier Gender: male Date Born: 1811 Date Died: 1872 Place Born: Tarbes, Occitanie, France Place Died: Paris, Île-de-France, France Home Country/ies: France Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period) Career(s): art critics Overview French art critic and poet; primary exponent of the art-for-art’s sake approach. Gautier was the son of bureaucrat in the French tax office, Pierre Gautier, and his mother was mother was Antoinette-Adelaïde Concarde. In 1814 his family moved to Paris where Gautier received a formal education at the Collège Charlemagne. In 1829 he entered the studio of Louis-Edouard Rioult (1790-1855), a pupil of Jacques-Louis David. Though he did not remain there long, he adopted a bohemian lifestyle, joining the Romantic circle of Victor Hugo. Following the July Revolution (1830), he was among the esthetes who embraced the notion of art’s autonomy and freedom from supporting ideology. Gautier’s preface to his 1835 book, Mademoiselle de Maupin became an early statement of the “l’art pour l’art” ideology, i.e., art need bear no deep meaning or be for any purpose other than its own beauty to be important. When Emile de Girardin (1806-1881) founded his La Presse in 1836, Gautier was one of its first regular art and theatre critics. Gautier covered nearly all the Salons for La Presse during Louis-Philippe’s reign, 1830-1848. He wrote on architecture and the applied arts as well. Gautier promoted the work of Ingres and Delacroix largely through his technique of actively and personally entering into the picture’s story. Gautier’s 1843 travelogue, Tra los montes, and reissued as Voyage en Espagne in 1845, introduced France to the work of Francesco Goya. He fell in love with the ballerina Carlotta Grisi (1819-1899), whose performances he reviewed, eventually marrying her sister Ernestina Grisi. After the 1848 revolution, Gautier focused on sculpture as the prime medium. In 1854 he joined Le Moniteur universel, leaving La Presse the following year, to write a book on the Exposition Universelle of 1855, Les Beaux-arts en Europe (1855-56). He assumed the editorship of L’Artiste in 1856. The following year his poem “L’Art” appeared. “L’Art” is the most specific statement of his view of sculpture, the naked, idealized body as expressing a metaphor of the primacy of the life (Snell). Gautier became the Second Empire’s chief arbiter of artistic sensibility, both artistic and literary. He framed both Delacroix and Ingres as modern Old Masters. He was instrumental in the official acceptance of Gustav Courbet, though he condemned the artist as a willful, misguided anti-idealist. Gautier did not approve of Impressionism, criticizing Manet’s “Olympia” (1863) because it could not allow a nostalgic interpretation. His later Salon reviews, from the 1860s onward are simple descriptions of paintings, resorting to ghost-writers to handle the ever-increasing size of the shows. He secured a sinecure as the librarian to Princess Mathilde Bonaparte (1820-1904) in 1868. His final Salon review was in 1872. He succumbed to cardiac failure at age 61 and is interred at the Cimetière de Montmartre, Paris. The notion “l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake) preceded Gautier’s use. It had been popularized in the early 19th century in De l’Allemagne (1813) by Madame de Staël (1766-1817) and in the philosophy lectures delivered by Victor Cousin (1792-1867) at the Sorbonne, “Du vrai, du beau et du bien” 1816-1818. Gautier however, was the first to publish the phrase in 1833, followed closely by Cousin’s published lectures three years later. Gautier’s art theory views art as a microcosm of an inner world, perceived and translated through the outer world of appearances by the viewer. Art appreciation for Gautier “transported” him to a world of pure emotions, violence and sensations that heightened the dramatic truth of art. This idealism lead to a religious experience of art, which he termed the “temple of art,” a somewhat ironic position for a person who viewed himself as a modern pagan. His interest in 18th-century art led to a reappraisal of the style. His emphasis on the subjective in art appreciation greatly influenced Edmond and Jules de Goncourt as well as the younger Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). His approach continued its appeal in twentieth century, though it was replaced by other methodologies. Nicos Hadjinicolaou, in his 1978 Art History and Class Struggle provided a strong critique against “l’art pour l’art.” A passionate temperament during revolutionary times, he had caught the imagination of revolutionary young artists and writers and yet balanced his reputation with the cautious bourgeoisie (Licht). Selected Bibliography Mademoiselle de Maupin: double amour. Paris: E. Renduel, 1835-1836; Tra los montes. Paris: G. Charpentier et cie, 1843 [most commonly cited edition is the 2nd, corrected ed. Voyage en Espagne. Paris: G. Charpentier, 1845]; Les Beaux-Arts en Europe, 1855. 2 vols. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1855-1856; L’art moderne. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1856; Abécédaire du Salon de 1861. Paris: E. Dentu, 1861. Sources Richardson, Joanna. Théophile Gautier, his Life & Times. London: Coward-McCann 1959; Spencer, Michael C. The Art Criticism of Theophile Gautier. Geneva: Droz, 1969; Licht, Fred. Goya in Perspective. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973, p. 170; Snell, Robert. Théophile Gautier, a Romantic Critic of the Visual Arts. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982; Lacoste-Veysseyre, Claudine. La critique d’art de Théophile Gautier. Montpellier: Sup Exam, 1985 [includes an index of artists discussed by Gautier]; Snell, Robert. “Gautier, (Pierre-Jules-)Théophile.” Dictionary of Art.
5097	dbpedia	3	76	https://en.geneastar.org/genealogy/gautiert/theophile-gautier	en	Unusual traffic	https://geneacdn.net/pub…/img_generic.jpg	https://geneacdn.net/pub…/img_generic.jpg	[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Geneanet, The Free Collaborative Genealogy Database! Build Your Family Tree, Share Your Family History and Improve Your Genealogy Research.	en	https://geneacdn.net/favicon.ico	Geneanet	https://en.geneastar.org/bots/firewall?cause=suspicious_ip	We have detected an unusual traffic on our network. Please fill in the form below to confirm that you are not a robot.
5097	dbpedia	3	21	https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/104SNR	en	Théophile Gautier (The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection)	https://static.getty.edu…e-20/share75.png	https://static.getty.edu…e-20/share75.png	[]	[]	[]	[ "Getty Museum collections", "artworks", "art works", "art history", "video", "interpretation of art", "acquisitions", "artists", "Getty art", "collections Getty", "collezioni Getty", "colecciones Getty", "Sammlung Getty", "Getty exhibits", "Getty current exhibitions", "Getty Museum exhibits", "los angeles collections", "antiquities", "decorative arts", "sculpture", "manuscripts", "photography", "paintings", "drawings" ]	null	[]	null	Explore the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center and the Getty Villa.	en	/art/collection/favicon.ico	The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection	https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/104SNR
5097	dbpedia	1	38	https://search.proquest.com/openview/896e7d5aab0bfc1168191fe45b7bc0f6/1%3Fpq-origsite%3Dgscholar%26cbl%3D1816663	en	J.G. Palache, Gautier and the Romantics (Book Review)	https://search.proquest.…roQuest_logo.gif	https://search.proquest.…roQuest_logo.gif	[ "https://search.proquest.com/assets/ctx/51be0a5b/images/icons/blank.gif", "https://search.proquest.com/assets/ctx/51be0a5b/images/icons/blank.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Explore millions of resources from scholarly journals, books, newspapers, videos and more, on the ProQuest Platform.	en	/apple-icon-57x57.png		null	This is a short preview of the document. Your library or institution may give you access to the complete full text for this document in ProQuest.
5097	dbpedia	0	74	https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/d60c1075-3a68-456f-9a28-f23286ac6120	en	Deconstructing Gautier's literary dandyism	https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/assets/utexas/images/favicons/favicon.ico	https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/assets/utexas/images/favicons/favicon.ico	[ "https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/assets/utexas/images/UT_Lib_RGB_inf_brand_b2_Texas_ScholarWorks.svg", "https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/assets/utexas/images/UT_Lib_RGB_inf_brand_b2_Texas_ScholarWorks.svg", "https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/assets/utexas/images/ut-libraries-logo_1.png", "https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/assets/utexas/images/footer-icon-fbk.png", "https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/assets/utexas/images/footer-icon-twt.png", "https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/assets/utexas/images/footer-icon-inst.png", "https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/assets/utexas/images/footer-icon-ytb.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	The purpose of this paper is to examine how the text of Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin disproves the philosophy of the dandiacal artform called, “l’art pour l’art,” presented within the preface to the novel. To elucidate the characteristics inherent to dandyism, I will first introduce the history of the European dandy, and then I will examine how this cultural icon influenced artistic production and criticism during the nineteenth century. Writers such as Théophile Gautier, who perceived the notion of artistic utility as the antithesis of individual expression, chose to adopt the model of aesthetic superiority presented by the dandy as a means to advocate artistic anti-utilitarianism. In my thesis, however, I intend to demonstrate that the story of d’Albert and Madeleine de Maupin, the two dandiesque figures of Gautier’s novel, in fact contradicts and undermines the notion of “l’art pour l’art”	en	assets/utexas/images/favicons/favicon.ico		null	The purpose of this paper is to examine how the text of Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin disproves the philosophy of the dandiacal artform called, “l’art pour l’art,” presented within the preface to the novel. To elucidate the characteristics inherent to dandyism, I will first introduce the history of the European dandy, and then I will examine how this cultural icon influenced artistic production and criticism during the nineteenth century. Writers such as Théophile Gautier, who perceived the notion of artistic utility as the antithesis of individual expression, chose to adopt the model of aesthetic superiority presented by the dandy as a means to advocate artistic anti-utilitarianism. In my thesis, however, I intend to demonstrate that the story of d’Albert and Madeleine de Maupin, the two dandiesque figures of Gautier’s novel, in fact contradicts and undermines the notion of “l’art pour l’art”
5097	dbpedia	0	8	https://gl-tch.org/giselle/cards/the-writer-theophile-gautier	en	The Writer: Théophile Gautier	https://gl-tch.org/image…fdaa0bd6f618.png	https://gl-tch.org/image…fdaa0bd6f618.png	[ "https://gl-tch.org/imager/images/1580/Théophile_Gautier_by_Nadar_107ba0fef558a41d666f0c5ced6386ef.png 960w, /imager/images/1580/Théophile_Gautier_by_Nadar_7ae5c972e237858797cbcd68d2e7144c.png 820w, /imager/images/1580/Théophile_Gautier_by_Nadar_b44883d4183892031244002b2fc95272.png 375w", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/images/14.Théophile_Gautier_MET_DP158033.jpg", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/images/15.Mademoiselle_de_Maupin_by_Beardsley.jpg", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/images/16-Les_Ondines_ou_les_Wilis_Grand_Palais_Paris_47536603491.jpg", "https://gl-tch.org/imager/images/1909/735px-Giselle_C_Grisi_as_Giselle_1842_2020-07-24-162900_6614e1469faba5459a616522cd1126aa.jpeg", "https://gl-tch.org/imager/images/2386/Screenshot-2020-07-16-at-15.19.45_2020-07-26-121957_1c510339d2650253d18e29601457c8e8.png", "https://gl-tch.org/imager/images/7197/Rat-ville-champs-2_cb3255da8dc144d4065ad28a45d0f748.jpg", "https://gl-tch.org/imager/images/5889/Libretto-Card-Image-Crop_6614e1469faba5459a616522cd1126aa.jpg", "https://gl-tch.org/imager/images/18200/Mark-Fisher-1_6614e1469faba5459a616522cd1126aa.png", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/website-images/chatbot-icon-head.png", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/svgs/down-arrow.svg", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/svgs/paper-plane.svg", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/svgs/home--green.svg", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/svgs/home--green.svg", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/svgs/home--green.svg", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/svgs/home--green.svg", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/website-images/SED-logo.png", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/website-images/lottery-logo.png", "https://gl-tch.org/assets/website-images/footer-logo--green.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2020-07-07T16:13:00+01:00		en	/favicons/apple-icon-60x60.png	gl-tch.org	https://gl-tch.org/giselle/cards/the-writer-theophile-gautier	Théophile Gautier, poet, novelist, journalist and dance critic who wrote the libretto for Giselle with Vernoy De Saint-Georges is a contradictory figure. Richard Holmes delights in the opulent erotic world of his short stories, Felicia McCarren problematises him in research considering the cultural and social politics of the world of the Paris Opéra, Helen Constantine celebrates his radically queer vision, telling us that he was at the centre of many controversies in France taking a key role in literary and artistic circles of nineteenth century Paris. (Helen Constantine, Introduction to Mademoiselle de Maupin, pg xii) a face like a double bed on a Sunday morning The photographer Felix Nadar made portraits of him, perhaps like us, drawn to a face described as 'like a double bed on a Sunday morning' (Richard Holmes, Introduction to My Fantoms, pg x) cross-dressing and duelling A provocateur, only one of the ways he scandalised Paris was with a novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) where he explored ideas of gender, sex and sexuality as fluid categories in a way that could not be more modern today. The story was based on the life of the woman memorably described in Bust magazine as a '17th-century, cross-dressing, duelling, bisexual opera singer' Julie d'Aubign. As if Madameoiselle de Maupin wasn't controversial enough, it was embroiled in a literary scandal with respect to the preface. In this writing Gautier, in a dispute with literary magazine Le Constitutionnel and swept up in a wider discourse across all the arts (including in the writing of his colleague Jules Janin three years earlier) crystallised the Romantic artists desire for free expression and 'art for art's sake'. (John G Chapman, Jules Janin and the Ballet, pg 65) heterotopias Gautier was writing from the demi-monde, a space that might be described through Michel Foucault's idea of a heterotopia. The term describes a temporary space that lies parallel to society where normative rules don't apply, although the demi-monde worked differently for women. Virginia Rounding writes about ' ...victims of scandal, divorcees, women separated or abandoned by husband or lover, 'merry widows' or foreign women whom the authorities might deport when it suited them' (Virginia Rounding in Helen Constantine's Introduction to Mademoiselle de Maupin, pg.xii) . The world of the Wilis is such a space, where the Wilis, unmarried, possessed of voracious appetites for dancing, call to mind the declassed women that surrounded Gautier, including dancers. In the world of the Opéra he simultaneously occupied a position outside as a powerful critic and a maker of stars, and inside as an artist and librettist. Felicia McCarren writes about his relationship to Carlotta Grisi and his writing of Giselle 'Just as the librettist constructs a double subject, or two women-in-one, the librettist himself makes a living dancer into two women, a living legend who is both the character she plays and a performer with a mythic past'. (Felicia McCarren, Dance Pathologies, pg 60). McCarren goes on to read Giselle in relation to the privileges and ambiguities of his position at the Opéra: Taking into account the history and conditions of it s first production, the text can be read as social critique: a state of the art review of the ballet at the Paris Opéra of 1841. (Felicia McCarren, Dance Pathologies, pg 68) Gautier in this project We were drawn to Gautier initially through the libretto, we then discovered his letters to Heinrich Heine where his vivid description of the first night of Giselle and his enthusiasm for the world of the ballet infected us. Then we found his essay The Rat where he moves between horror at the flesh markets of Paris where one can buy a child, to a kind of celebration of the system of prostitution at the Opéra that the student dancers will most probably become part of. where's the party mate? He has accompanied us through this project, like your dodgy mate who disappears on a night out and then turns up months later. He's in our films, whispering in our ears in our recordings. Then he's off like a dirty shirt. Still hung up on the same girl, still looking to find another party.
5097	dbpedia	2	82	http://reynolds-news.com/2021/05/28/19th-century-french-poets-and-novelists-part-ii-gwm-reynolds/	en	19th-century French Poets and Novelists (Part II)	https://i0.wp.com/reynol…g?fit=1032%2C739	https://i0.wp.com/reynol…g?fit=1032%2C739	[ "https://reynolds-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/cropped-picture2.jpg", "https://stephenbasdeodotorg.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/alexander_dumas_pere_par_nadar_-_google_art_project.jpg?w=777&resize=829%2C1092", "https://stephenbasdeodotorg.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/honore_de_balzac_1842_detail.jpg?w=550&resize=550%2C500", "https://stephenbasdeodotorg.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/800px-alphonse_de_lamartine.png?w=794&resize=800%2C1032", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/9cb6015523ac217cafd9162960fea69d?s=48&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/176e6aa562b360fb85a9d50c96c3d6f4?s=48&d=identicon&r=g" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Dr Stephen Basdeo" ]	2021-05-28T00:00:00	If the attractions of any art can cause the soul of man to feel itself suddenly lifted afar from the grosser joys of earth, and wrapped in a species of blissful delirium—it is poetry. If there be any author who has complete power over the minds of his readers, to enchain them in the mystic bonds that his effusions cast around them, and actually to implicate them and their feelings, their sympathies, and their passions, in the scenes that he depicts in glowing colours—it is the poet.	en	https://i0.wp.com/reynol…it=32%2C32&ssl=1	Reynolds's News and Miscellany	http://reynolds-news.com/2021/05/28/19th-century-french-poets-and-novelists-part-ii-gwm-reynolds/	A Reprint of an Article by George W.M. Reynolds Part Two (Read Part One First) We now come to Alexandre Dumas.[1] Speaking of the ‘Souvenirs d’Antony,” the critic of the “Quarterly” says, “The scene of the first tale is Naples during its occupation by the French. A reward is offered for the head of a certain captain of banditti that infested the neighbourhood. Two peasant boys find him asleep, and recollecting, dear children (they are all along called enfans) how they had seen a sheep killed, cut his throat, &c.” Now this sentence corroborates our assertion relative to the critic’s ignorance of the French language. These two boys had numbered seventeen summers, and the French as often apply the word enfant as garçon to individuals of that age. Fathers of families call their sons enfans even when they are thirty or forty years old. But to continue. We must inform the writer in the “Quarterly” that the two first and the last of M. Dumas’ five tales are founded on facts, that he gathered those facts himself in Naples and that all Frenchmen understand as much. We must moreover remind the same gentleman—for from his language we naturally suppose the author of the article entitled “French Novels” to be of the male sex—that there are two schools of novels, the romantic and the fashionable, and that M. Dumas’ tales come under the former denomination. We may also add, that because the days of Ann Radcliffe, Maturin, Goethe, Schiller, Clara Reeve, Monk Lewis, &c. &c., are gone by, there is no reason wherefore M. Dumas should not choose to be their imitator, if his taste or his talent induce him to follow their footsteps, and to study in the halls which, when they retired, became, as it were, deserted. Having lashed Dumas with as little ceremony and as little reason as the others who went before him, the critic turns his arms against De Balzac, and his comments upon this author are perhaps the only fair and unprejudiced portion of the whole article. Balzac is nevertheless a beautiful, though a dangerous writer, full of sentiment, of philosophy, of metaphysical reasoning, and of energy; but his works have certainly now and then an immoral tendency, although not to the extravagant extent described in the “Quarterly.” As literary productions De Balzac’s novels are the first in France; and if the descriptive portions of his works be occasionally wearisome and tedious, as in the “Lys de Vallée,” and the “Peau de Chagrin,” the elegance of the language and the vivacity of the ideas amply compensate for this fault. The critic in the “Quarterly” has a particular regard for the word vulgar, and applies it not only as frequently as opportunities occur, but also where it is an inappropriate, a false, and an unjust epithet. The coarse ribaldry of “Joseph Andrews” is not extenuated even by the admirable wit that abounds in its pages; but no one can truly say that De Balzac’s works “are a series of unconnected tales of the vulgarest and most licentious character.” We, however, strongly suspect that the author of the article in the “ Quarterly” is one of those Englishmen who have passed six weeks or two months in Paris, and have, from the reminiscences of their school education, retained a sufficient smattering of the French language just barely to skim over a few easy novels (with the indispensable aid of a Nugent’s dictionary), and thence, on their return to England, imagine themselves capable of criticising and dissecting foreign institutions, customs, habits, morals, literature, and jurisprudence, while really their knowledge of those matters is too trivial even to allow them to discuss the subjects in common conversation. Of this an editor of the “Atlas” gave us a specimen about a year ago; when, in a long article intended to be a notice on the “Revue des deux Mondes,” and the “Revue de Paris,” he coolly tells us ‘‘ that the French have no other literary periodical journals of any consequence, that their reviews of new books are always scanty and short, and that they pay but little attention to criticisms on recent publications.” All this is entirely false. The Parisian press boasts of the “Chronique de Paris,” the “Voleur,” and the “Cabinet de Lecture,” which are as large as the “Athenaeum,” which appear six times a month, and which invariably contain critical notices as elaborate as those of the English parallel papers. In addition to these, there are the “Revue des deux Mondes,” the “Revue de Paris,” “France Litteraire,” and “Le Panorama de Londres,” which are published every Sunday, and consist of from 150 to 200 closely-printed octavo pages each, the “Revue du Nord,” the “Revue Brittannique,” and a variety of other magazines published monthly, and of the same size as their English cotemporaries. All these periodicals are more or less devoted to literary criticism; besides which, the French daily political newspapers (to the number of thirty-seven) all contain feuilletons where new works are reviewed with an impartiality that ought to put to shame the reckless profusion of praise, which English critics bestow on the most insignificant and contemptible books. But let us return to our subject. The writer in the “Quarterly” has attacked the French novelists in a most savage manner: will he allow us to ask him if he has ever read any French poetry? and if he has not, we will introduce him to Lamartine, and say a few words with regard to “Jocelyn.” If the attractions of any art can cause the soul of man to feel itself suddenly lifted afar from the grosser joys of earth, and wrapped in a species of blissful delirium—it is poetry. If there be any author who has complete power over the minds of his readers, to enchain them in the mystic bonds that his effusions cast around them, and actually to implicate them and their feelings, their sympathies, and their passions, in the scenes that he depicts in glowing colours—it is the poet. He is like an enchanter, who, with a magic wand, can make works of imagination appear facts, and give reality to fables, so that the bewitching pleasure which the reader experiences rather resembles a long unwearied dream of delight than the effect of a certain operation premeditated, undertaken, and pursued when awake. And such a poet is De Lamartine. We were in raptures with many passages in Victor Hugo’s “Chants du Crepuscule;” we admired them for the novelty of the subject, the peculiarity of their style, the strange comminglings of bliss, hope, fear, sorrow, and doubt, that were their characteristics, and the pervading harmony of their versification; but we can scarcely express our ecstasy at the perusal of “ Jocelyn.” There is something so touching in the manner in which it is written, something so pleasing and yet so touching in the tale, and something so elevated in the thoughts, the metaphors, and the ideas which abound in brilliancy and number throughout the pages, that we with difficulty laid aside the book when once it was commenced. But let us be more special in our remarks. “Jocelyn” is an episode—it is not an entire poem. Even if the work were completed, and if the fragment, as it now stands, were connected as two books with ten others in the same style, the whole would not be entitled to the name of an “Epic Poem.” We do not mean to say that “Jocelyn,” on the ground of its own merits, is unworthy of being considered an epic composition; for the word “epic” has a peculiar and singular meaning; nor that De Lamartine is incapable of achieving that summit of all poetic emulation; nor that he would be forced to remain on the sides of Mount Helicon or Parnassus, without ever arriving at the summit, even if he had tried thereto to climb. No; but the style, the incidents, and the arrangements of this episode, totally preclude the possibility of coupling it with that word, whose definition is particular. Lamartine informs us in his preface, that as he intended at the commencement of the book to extend it at some future period, and as that extension would embrace the incidents, the subjects, and the style of “Jocelyn,” he preferred sending forth this episode of his intended work at present, in order to prepare the way for the remainder, or to furnish materials for the lucubrations of some other poet, who might take upon himself the completion or an imitation of the original ideas. But no one was bold enough to publish, if he were to write, the remaining six books to be filled up of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene;” and should M. de Lamartine be prevented from fulfilling his hopes and his anticipations in this work, we fear that it will for ever remain a fragment. From the prologue we gather the origin of the tale. The author had a friend who lived in an enviable solitude, and who occupied his time chiefly in taking care of his flocks that wandered with him amongst the mountains. One morning the author ascended the hills, as was his wont, to visit his venerable acquaintance, and was surprised not to see him in his accustomed haunts— For, ’twas the hour, when, free from ev’ry care, The holy hermit pour’d to heaven his prayer; And tow’rds the cottage as I nearer drew, That, which was wonder first, to terror grew; For, from the chimney, curling to the sky, No smoke, as usual, met my anxious eye; And then, while yet the sun had not repos’d In Thetis’ lap, the lattices were closed. A shudder came upon me, as the blast A transient ruffling o’er the waves may cast; Still, without vainly yielding to my woe, I hastened on with step no longer slow. (page 23) The author entered the cottage, and encountered the old servant Martha in the little parlour. By her his fears were confirmed—his friend was no more. He ascended the stairs, and entered the chamber of death. On the bed was stretched the venerable deceased. Calm was his visage, placid was his mien, His cheek unruffled as it e’er had been; And on his tranquil countenance was shed A ray that seemed to tell he was not dead; And the faint smile, which curled his lip ere he Had left the earth to seek eternity, Still lingered—happy sign that envious death Used but small effort to withdraw his breath! (page 26) When the funeral obsequies were completed, the author questioned the old servant as to the domestic habits of the deceased, and whether he ever amused himself with writing. A reply in the affirmative led to further interrogation, and at length a number of manuscripts were discovered in the loft. The contents of those papers formed the tale of “Jocelyn,” which Lamartine in his preface declares to be “almost a recital of facts, and not an ideal narrative accidentally entering into his thoughts.” The tale opens with the noble sacrifice of a brother’s worldly prospects to secure a happy marriage for his sister. The resignation of Jocelyn to the force of adverse circumstances compelling him, as the condition of his sister’s felicity, to give up all claim to the estate their mother possesses, and reducing him to the necessity of seeking an asylum in a house whose inmates are dedicated to the service of their God—is admirably delineated and portrayed. But Jocelyn had the internal satisfaction which a good man feels when he has done a good action; or, in his own words,— Heav’n has rewarded me! ‘Twas yesterday The happy Ernest bore his bride away. Flashed from her eyes the bliss her bosom knew, And to his own the warm transfusion flew. Before the sacred altar as they knelt, While both one sentiment of pleasure felt, T’would seem that fortune’s choicest gifts were shed, And fav’ring genii hovered o’er their head, To promise future bounties, and ensure A long duration of that union pure! (page 54.) It was thus in witnessing the felicity of his sister that Jocelyn was amply rewarded for the noble sacrifice he had made. But the hour for parting with his mother was dreadful. Dear, tender parent, seek a calm repose— ‘Twas thus I tried to soothe my mother’s woes;— Absorb the anguish of your deep distress, A few short hours, in sleep’s forgetfulness: Pray for thy children, suffocate those sighs, And wipe the tear-drops from your streaming eyes, So that amid the visions of to-night No horrors break upon my mental sight Wherefore anticipate the hour when you To him you reared must breathe a long adieu? Alas! full soon, already far too near, Will come that hour, despite of sigh and tear; And then may God support thee, then from heaven May resignation to your soul be given; And thou shalt see me enter on the race That God marks for me, with a smiling face. Sleep! and when morning beams on all around, At your bed-side shall Jocelyn be found; And if one tear of bitterness betray Our inward grief, Heaven wipe the drop away! (page 61.) And Jocelyn departed; and as he turned away from the maternal mansion, his tears fell profusely. Thus concludes the diary of the first epoch. The date at the commencement of the second epoch, and the introductory lines, inform us that six years have passed away since the era of Jocelyn’s departure from the maternal dwelling. These six years have been spent in a religious seminary, in solitary tranquillity and sombre peace. The revolution now rages in all its fury, and the fertile plains of France are covered with blood. Jocelyn’s mother and sister, and that fair sister’s husband, quitted their disastrous country at the commencement of the civil tumult; and Jocelyn himself is obliged to fly from the persecuting hand that has thus exiled his family, and seek shelter in Dauphiny. He falls in with an old hermit, who kindly takes compassion upon him, and conducts him to the “Eagle’s Grotto,” a cave situated amidst the almost impervious recesses of the windings of the Alps. It is surrounded by an immense gulf: the only communication with the main land, as it were, from this island, (for such appellations are appropriate to the localities M. de Lamartine beautifully describes,) is an immense arched bridge of ice, which frowns over the abyss beneath, and rears its lofty curve high in the air, so that none could possibly imagine its competency to afford so practicable a thoroughfare. For some time Jocelyn lived contentedly in his forlorn retreat, without ever crossing the tremendous bridge of communication, At length one morning he ventured to reconnoitre the lands on the other side of the gulf. This is an era marked by a circumstance which formed an important feature in the life of Jocelyn, and gave him a companion in his exile. An individual, outlawed by the government for political offences, had taken refuge amongst the Alps, and was pursued by two military emissaries sent in search of proscribed fugitives. The unfortunate individual was accompanied by his son, a youth of fifteen or sixteen, and as they ran along the edge of the gulf the soldiers prepared to fire. Jocelyn, on the cavern side of the abyss, unmindful of his own danger, made a sign to the fugitives, and pointed towards the bridge that might lead them to security. The outlaw and his son arrived at the middle of the curved mass of ice—Jocelyn received the latter safely in his arms, but the former was mortally wounded; not, however, before he had dealt death to the two soldiers who pursued him. Laurence, such was the boy’s name, was delicately but beautifully formed. His countenance was fraught with feminine softness; his luxuriant hair fell in long ringlets over his well-shaped shoulders; his jacket was invariably buttoned up closely to his throat; and his slender waist was encircled by his neckerchief, when he and Jocelyn climbed the mountains to collect fruits, catch birds, &c. &c., for their daily food. Jocelyn soon became sincerely attached to Laurence, and Laurence manifested a reciprocal regard for his friend. But Jocelyn often felt himself embarrassed in the society of Laurence, and frequently cast down his eyes to avoid meeting the glance which that affectionate youth threw at him. Time passed on; and, in Jocelyn’s own words,— Since griefs no longer his young heart oppress, How Laurence thrives in youthful loveliness! At times a heavenly radiance seems to shine Upon his brow; and as his eyes meet mine, I scarce can brook the magic of his charms, But feel my bosom ruffled with alarms,— The holy fears that erst those women knew, When tow’rds their Saviour’s sepulchre they drew, And when the angels’ answer to their prayer Told them in solemn sounds, “He is not there!” (page 166.) One morning Jocelyn ventured out at an early hour, and left Laurence asleep in the cave. Jocelyn crossed the bridge of ice which an avalanche had formed, and beneath which the waters dashed in roaring eddies, thundering onwards, and scattering the foam around. He amused himself for some time in the regions without the gulf, and then retraced his steps towards the bridge. But a terrible storm overtook him, the rage of elements resembled the combat of armed warriors in deadly strife, the earth shook, the lightning flashed, the sky was clouded over. Jocelyn hurried onwards, and was nearly separated from Laurence for ever; for the bridge gave way and mingled with the torrents beneath. Jocelyn’s activity, however, saved him, and he thanked God that Laurence was not with him. Arrived at the cavern once more, he sought for Laurence, but sought in vain. Overcome with terror and horrible apprehensions, he almost yielded to his despair, when a certain trace led him towards a part of the gulf. Amidst the crags, near the torrents, and covered with beating sleet, lay Laurence. Jocelyn sprang to the bottom, seized his friend in his arms, and hurried with him to the cave. Long time I called him back to life in vain, My lips no breath to his could give again; Despairingly I placed him on my bed, And staunched the blood that his fair brow had shed. Still was he lifeless! From his bleeding breast, E’en with my teeth, I rent the gory vest; Great God! beneath that garment long concealed, A female’s lovely bosom was revealed! (page 304.) Laurence recovered, and now that Jocelyn found he might love his companion without fear and without restraint, when the mystery so singularly developed was fully explained by the blushing maiden, and when she no longer experienced the necessity of withholding a secret from her preserver, their mutual joy knew no bounds. But, alas! that felicity was of short duration. A train of circumstances, which our limits will not permit us to relate, compelled Jocelyn to become a priest, and to bid an eternal farewell to the distracted girl, who was removed from the “Eagle’s Grotto” to the protection of friends. No impure passion had sullied her innocence, and Jocelyn was again alone in the world. Peace was restored to France, and in process of time we see Jocelyn installed in a humble curacy in the vicinity of his favourite Alps. One day he is sent for to a neighbouring town to shrive the soul of a lady at the point of death. He is the only pastor in the neighbourhood, and he hastens to obey the summons. In the dull chamber sickly was the light, The dingy curtains hid her from my sight, Save when the slightest motion half-revealed A pallid brow, at other times concealed; And on that brow, so paly, yet so fair, Were wildly scattered locks of auburn hair, That, amply clust’ring o’er her bosom’s swell, Thence to the ground in rich profusion fell. “O Father!’ she cried in accents scarce unknown. My soul was shaken by that dulcet tone; I felt, while all my frame convuls’d with fear, A vague remembrance as it met my ear; And scarcely, in that moment of distress, An exclamation could my lips suppress!” (page 178, vol. ii.) The lady proceeded with her confession, and told Jocelyn that her first and only love had been blighted in its bud, that she had since married another, that her husband died shortly after their union, and that she had vainly mingled in the dissipation and gaiety of life and society to chase away the reminiscences of her primal passion. Pleasure had been no solace to her— “For still devoid of hope, alas! each day In bitterness and anguish passed away; And all the energies of life, declining, Seemed to be broken by a constant pining. Yet on her cheek remained the youthful bloom That half defied th’attraction of the tomb; Thus a fair tree, with foliage ever green, Contains a worm which gnaws its core unseen.” (page 186, vol. ii.) The lady pursued her confession in the same melancholy strain, composed half of bitterness and half of an unnatural joy that she was approaching her end, and concluded in the following manner:— “Oh! in the hour when dissolution’s nigh, Could he but on me cast a tearful eye, And could his voice but whisper in my ear, That tender voice, to me so soft, so dear, The tomb would lose its sting!” “No more restrained By fear,” I cried, “Laurence, thy wish is gained!” The feeble lamp a sickly lustre shed, She rais’d herself with rapture in the bed; And gaz’d upon my features. “Yes—’tis he! “Laurence, ‘twas God that sent me thus to thee, To grant you absolution, and ensure Peace to thy soul, no longer stained—but pure!” (page 189, vol. ii.) Laurence never rises from that bed, which was soon pressed by the cold corpse of one so lovely, so fascinating, and so unfortunate! The remaining pages are uninteresting, save for their poetic beauty, and the proofs they afford of the originality of M. de Lamartine’s genius. And in these times when almost all are copyists, when our great predecessors have done so much, and have done that much so well, that we, their imitators, have little left to do save to embody their ideas in our own language, and then be at fault, the merit of originality is not only singular, but also one of the best recommendations for an author. Having thus disposed of the greater portion of our pages in this article to the consideration of Lamartine, with a view of instructing the writer in the “Quarterly” and of edifying our readers in general, we will proceed in our refutation of the most glaring falsehoods and misrepresentations to be found in the critical notice of the abovementioned Review that called forth this answer. Our limits prevent us from following the critic through his animadversions on Michel Masson and Georges Sand; suffice it to say, that they are couched in the same prejudiced style as the others, and are interlarded with the same abuse, indiscriminately distributed, and as equally unmerited as in the former instances. Let us pass on to the critic’s extraordinary argument to prove that immorality in France has arrived to such a dreadful extent, and so much preponderates over that of his own countrymen, “that no one can read the sketches he has given of French novels, and the instances he has produced of French morals, without seeing that they are not only of one country, but of one family; and that the novels, in fact, present upon the whole the less unfavourable view of the state of French society.” Now it is perfectly true that French novels are generally founded on intrigues, &c. &c., and that English novels are totally different in this respect; but do intrigues, suicides, adulteries, and murders exist the less in England for that? The French novel, as it regards sketches of domestic manners, is only a picture of society in France; but as it regards tales of intrigue, illicit love, suicide, and murder, it is a picture of all the world, and is as applicable to England, Spain, Italy, and Germany, as to France alone. Moreover, because we read in a French novel a description of a wife’s infidelity, a husband’s vengeance, and a lover’s suicide, does the critic in the “Quarterly” mean to argue that every wife is unfaithful in France, that every husband revenges his wrongs, and that every lover kills himself in despair? Are English women always pure? is vengeance unknown in Britain? and is suicide merely a name amongst our immaculate countrymen? No—we never take up a paper without reading a case of crim. con.;[2] we see, alas! too often, terrible instances of the most deadly vengeance; and occurrences of suicide have lately been so frequent in England, that the very police-magistrates have assumed to themselves the right of punishing those who are detected and saved in an attempt at self-destruction. Yet the author of the article we are examining adduces a long list of cases where individuals in France have committed suicide on account of remorse, disappointed love, or even a trivial stroke of adversity, to prove that the immorality of the French is not confined to a few depraved beings, but that it is partaken of and shared amongst thirty-four millions of souls, without a single exception, they being all one family in vice. Perhaps the critic, whose deplorable misrepresentations we have taken some pains to correct, is not aware that the average amount of crime in England preponderates slightly over that in France; and that there are more murders, more robberies, more infanticides, and more unnatural crimes registered in the annals of turpitude and delinquency in the former than there are in the latter country. An appeal to the “Newgate Calendar,” and to a collection of the “Gazette des Tribunaux,” will bear us out in our assertion. The abuser of French novels now proceeds to favour us with some extracts from the said “Gazette des Tribunaux,” relative to several horrible trials that have lately taken place in France. Amongst the hundreds that occur annually in that as well as in any other country, it is very easy to select half a dozen of the most dreadful, “in order to prove that the principles which pervade the novels appear to exhibit themselves elsewhere.” In answer to this we declare that the same principles exhibit themselves also in England; particularly when Mrs. Brownrigg flogged her apprentices to death, and when Cooke at Leicester, about five years ago, murdered Mr. Paas with a log of wood, and then burnt the body piecemeal on the fire to get rid of all traces that might lead to his discovery. The late murder of Mrs. Brown by Greenacre was not attended with any dreadful circumstances, we suppose. Oh! No—in England murders are always committed mercifully and humanely, according to the inferences we naturally draw from the remarks of the critic in the “Quarterly;” whereas in France they are invariably attended with unusual circumstances of horror. To support this assertion he adduces the case of Dellacollonge, “who cut the body into pieces for the purpose of more easily disposing of it in ponds and ditches.” Our worthy critic forgets the almost parallel conduct (above-mentioned) of Cooke, who cut the body into pieces to burn it; nor could he possibly foresee the monstrous deeds of Greenacre. The verdict in Dellacollonge’s case was as follows:—“As to the murder, the culprit is guilty of voluntary homicide, but without premeditation; and as to the robbery, he is guilty, but with extenuating circumstances.” Upon which the writer in the “Quarterly” says, “Without premeditation! He had concealed the girl for some days in his house, till he could find an occasion of making away with her. And the extenuating circumstances were that to the robbery was superadded sacrilege, and that sacrilegious robbery was committed to enable a murderer to make his escape.” Now this is false and misrepresented; Dellacollonge did not even mean to murder the girl when he put his hand to her throat with severity, to give her an idea of the preliminary feelings of strangulation. A reference to the French journals of February, 1836, will establish the truth of this assertion. The misrepresentation is about the words “extenuating circumstances.” In England life is often wasted for trivial crimes; in France it is always spared, that the culprit may have time to repent, when mercy can possibly be thus extended; and it was only a merciful and humane feeling that caused the addition of the words “extenuating circumstances” to be made to the jury’s verdict; an addition that, without compromising their sincerity, did honour to the jurors’ hearts. The palpable object of the article under notice, and as the author himself almost confesses, is to show that “the July revolution has worked a great and sudden change” in the morality of the French. He says it has “emancipated the women from all etiquette and reserve; that is, in one word, modesty!” This is false and absurd, so absurd, indeed, that we are astonished to meet with so palpable a folly in the “Quarterly Review.” A child could not be made to believe that the insurrection of a mighty people to displace a tyrant, and to elevate another man to the throne, could produce such baneful effects. A monarchical change cannot so essentially affect private morals. The predilections and passions of individuals are not subject to variation on account of the secession or expulsion of one dynasty and the succession of another. An extension of political liberty does not implicate a decrease of moral rectitude and social order; it rather encourages an increase. The example of a superstitious and encroaching despot could not benefit the morals of the French; but the example of a good husband, a good father, a good Christian, and a man who was a good son, certainly must be a beneficial one for the country. [1] G.W.M. Reynolds, ‘The French Poets and Novelists’, The Monthly Magazine, June 1837, pp. 609–18.
5097	dbpedia	1	43	https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47075/47075-h/47075-h.htm	en	The Project Gutenberg eBook of Charles Baudelaire, by ThÃ©ophile Gautier.			[ "https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47075/47075-h/images/baud_cover.jpg", "https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47075/47075-h/images/baud_001.jpg", "https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47075/47075-h/images/baud_003.jpg", "https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47075/47075-h/images/baud_004_01.jpg", "https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47075/47075-h/images/baud_005_02.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	* START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 47075 * CHARLES BAUDELAIRE HIS LIFE BY THÃOPHILE GAUTIER TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH, WITH SELECTIONS FROM HIS POEMS, "LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE," AND LETTERS TO SAINTE-BEUVE AND FLAUBERT AND AN ESSAY ON HIS INFLUENCE BY GUY THORNE AUTHOR OF "WHEN IT WAS DARK," "THE VINTAGE OF VICE" ETC. "Close to your hand lies a little volume, bound in some Nile-green skin that has been pounded with gilded nenuphars, and smoothed with hard ivory. It is the book that Gautier loved, it is Baudelaire's masterpiece." OSCAR WILDE ("Intentions"). WITH FOUR PHOTOGRAVURES LONDON GREENING & CO 31 ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W.C. 1915 [Pg v] CONTENTS THE LIFE AND INTIMATE MEMOIRS OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. BY THÃOPHILE GAUTIER1 SELECTED POEMS DONE INTO ENGLISH VERSE BY GUY THORNE95 [Pg vi] I.EXOTIC PERFUME95 II.THE MURDERER'S WINE97 III.MUSIC101 IV.THE GAME103 V.THE FALSE MONK105 VI.AN IDEAL OF LOVE106 VII.THE SOUL OF WINE108 VIII.THE INVOCATION110 IX.THE CAT111 X.THE GHOST112 XI.THE LITANIES OF SATAN113 XII.ILL-STARRED!116 XIII.LINES WRITTEN ON THE FLY-LEAF OF AN EXECRATED BOOK118 XIV.THE END OF THE DAY119 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE, DONE INTO ENGLISH. BY GUY THORNE 122 I.VENUS AND THE FOOL123 II.THE DESIRE TO PAINT124 III.EACH MAN HIS OWN CHIMÃRA 125 IV.INTOXICATION126 V.THE MARKSMAN127 CORRESPONDENCE OF BAUDELAIRE 131 LETTERS TO SAINTE-BEUVE (1856-1866) 131 LETTERS TO FLAUBERT (1857-1862) 161 SOME REMARKS ON BAUDELAIRE'S INFLUENCE UPON MODERN POETRY AND THOUGHT. BY GUY THORNE 169 APPENDIX 201 INDEX 205 ILLUSTRATIONS CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (Frontispiece) THÃOPHILE GAUTIER L'AUTEUR DES FLEURS DU MAL (A bitter caricature of Baudelaire, unsigned. Upon the original from which this copy has been made the following line from "Les Litanies de Satan" is scrawled: "O Satan, prends pitiÃ© de ma longue misÃ¨re." (From the collection of Ernest Taylor, Esq.) MIGNON ASPIRANT AU CIEL [Pg 1] THE LIFE AND INTIMATE MEMOIRS OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE BY THÃOPHILE GAUTIER I The first time that we met Baudelaire was towards the middle of the year 1849, at the HÃ´tel Pimodan, where we occupied, near Fernand Boissard, a strange apartment which communicated with his by a private staircase hidden in the thickness of the wall, and which was haunted by the spirits of beautiful women loved long since by Lauzun. The superb Maryx was to be found there who, in her youth, had posed for "La Mignon" of Scheffer, and later, for "La Gloire distribuant des couronnes" of Paul Delaroche; and that other beauty, then in all her splendour, from whom Clesinger modelled "La Femme au serpent," that statue where grief resembles a paroxysm of pleasure, and which throbs with an intensity of life that the chisel has never before attained and which can never be surpassed. [Pg 2] Charles Baudelaire was then an almost unknown genius, preparing himself in the shadow for the light to come, with that tenacity of purpose which, in him, doubled inspiration; but his name was already becoming known amongst poets and artists, who heard it with a quivering of expectation, the younger generation almost venerating him. In the mysterious upper chamber where the reputations of the future are in the making he passed as the strongest. We had often heard him spoken of, but none of his works were known to us. His appearance was striking: he had closely shaved hair of a rich black, which fell over a forehead of extraordinary whiteness, giving his head the appearance of a Saracen helmet. His eyes, coloured like tobacco of Spain, had great depth and spirituality about them, and a certain penetration which was, perhaps, a little too insistent. As to the mouth, in which the teeth were white and perfect, it was seen under a slight and silky moustache which screened its contours. The mobile curves, voluptuous and ironical as the lips in a face painted by Leonardo da Vinci, the nose, fine and delicate, somewhat curved, with quivering nostrils, seemed ever to be scenting vague perfumes. A large dimple accentuated the chin, like the finishing touch of a sculptor's chisel on a statue; the cheeks, carefully shaved, with vermilion tints on the[Pg 3] cheek-bones; the neck, of almost feminine elegance and whiteness, showed plainly, as the collar of his shirt was turned down with a Madras cravat. His clothing consisted of a paletot of shining black cloth, nut-coloured trousers, white stockings, and patent leather shoes; the whole fastidiously correct, with a stamp of almost English simplicity, intentionally adopted to distinguish himself from the artistic folk with the soft felt hats, the velvet waistcoats, red jackets, and strong, dishevelled beards. Nothing was too new or elaborate about him. Charles Baudelaire indulged in a certain dandyism, but he would do anything to take from his things the "Sunday clothes" appearance so dear and important to the Philistine, but so disagreeable to the true gentleman. Later, he shaved off his moustache, finding that it was the remains of an old picturesqueness which it was both childish and bourgeois to retain. Thus, relieved of all superfluous down, his head recalled that of Lawrence Sterne; a resemblance that was augmented by Baudelaire's habit of leaning his temple against his first finger, which is, as every one knows, the attitude of the English humorist in the portrait placed at the beginning of his books. Such was the physical impression made on us after our first meeting with the future author of "The Flowers of Evil." We find in the "Nouveaux CamÃ©es parisiens"[Pg 4] of ThÃ©odore de Banville, one of the poet's best and most constant friends whose loss we deplore, a portrait of Baudelaire in his youth. We are permitted to transcribe the lines here, prose equal in perfection to the most beautiful verse. It portrays Baudelaire as he is very little known, and as he was only at that particular time. "In a portrait painted by Ãmile Deroy, one of the rarest works of art by modern painters, we see Charles Baudelaire at twenty years of age, at a time when, rich, happy, well-loved, already becoming celebrated, he wrote his first verses which were applauded by Paris, the literary leader of the whole world! O rare example of a divine face, uniting all graces, power, and most irresistible seductiveness! The eyebrow well-marked and curved like a bow, the eyelid warm and softly coloured; the eye, large, black, deep and of unequalled fire, caressing and imperious, embraces, interrogates and reflects all that surrounds it; the nose, beautifully chiselled, slightly curved, makes us dream of the celebrated phrase of the poet: 'Mon Ã¢me voltige sur les parfums, comme l'Ã¢me des autres hommes voltige sur la musique!' The mouth is arched and refined by the mind, and at the moment is of the delicate tint that reminds one of the royal beauty of freshly plucked fruit. The chin is rounded, but nevertheless haughty and powerful as that of Balzac. The whole face is of a[Pg 5] warm pallor, under which the rose tints of beautiful rich blood appear. A newly grown beard, like that of a young god, decorates it. The forehead, high and broad, magnificently drawn, is ornamented by black, thick hair, naturally wavy and curly like that of Paganini, which falls over a throat worthy of Achilles or Antinous." One must not take this portrait too literally. It is seen through the medium of painting and poetry, and embellished by a certain idealisation. Still, it is no less sincere and faithful of Baudelaire as he appeared at that time. Charles Baudelaire had his hour of supreme beauty and perfect expansion, and we relate it after this faithful witness. It is rare that a poet, an artist, is known in the spring-time of his charm. Reputation generally comes later, when the fatigue of study, the struggles of life, and the torture of passion have taken away youthfulness, leaving only the mask, faded and altered, on which each sorrow has made her impress. It is this last picture, which also has beauty, that one remembers. With his evasive singularity was mingled a certain exotic odour like the distant perfume of a country well loved of the sun. It is said that Baudelaire travelled for some time in India, and this fact explains much. Contrary to the somewhat loose manners of artists generally, Baudelaire prided himself upon[Pg 6] observing the most rigid convenances; his courtesy was often excessive to the point of affectation. He measured his phrases, using only the most carefully selected terms, and pronounced certain words in a particular manner, as though he wished to underline them and give them a mysterious signification. Italics and capital letters seemed to be marked in his voice. Exaggeration, much in honour at Pimodan's, he disdained as theatrical and coarse, though he allowed himself the use of paradox. With a very simple, natural, and perfectly detached air, as though retailing, Ã la Prudhomme, a newspaper paragraph on the state of the weather, he would advance monstrous axioms, or uphold with perfect sang-froid some theory of mathematical extravagance; for he had method in the development of his follies. His spirit was neither in words nor traits; he saw things from a particular point of view which changed their outlines, as objects seen in a bird's-eye view are changed from when seen at their own elevation; he perceived analogies, inappreciable to others, the fantastic logic of which was very striking. His gestures were slow, sober, and rare; for he held southern gesticulation in horror. Neither did he like volubility of speech, and British reserve appealed to his sense of good form. One might describe him as a dandy strayed into Bohemia;[Pg 7] but preserving there his rank, and that cult of self which characterises a man imbued with the principles of Brummel. Such was our impression of Baudelaire at our first meeting, the memory of which is as vivid as though it had occurred yesterday. We were in the big salon, decorated in the style of Louis XIV, the wainscot enriched and set off with dull gold of a perfect tone, projecting cornices, on which some pupil of Lesueur or of Poussin, having studied at the HÃ´tel Lambert, had painted nymphs chased by satyrs through reed-grass, according to the mythological taste of the period. On the great marble chimney, veined with vermilion and white, was placed, in the guise of a clock, a golden elephant, harnessed like the elephant of Porus in the battle of Lebrun, supporting on its back a tower with an inscribed dial-plate. The chairs and settees were old and covered with faded tapestry, representing subjects of the chase by Oudry and Desportes. It was in this salon, also, that the sÃ©ances of the club of hashish-eaters took place, a club to which we belonged, the ecstasies, dreams, hallucinations of which, followed by the deepest dejection, we have described. As was said above, the owner of this apartment was Fernand Boissard, whose short, curly, fair hair, white and vermilion complexion, grey eyes[Pg 8] scintillating with light and esprit, red lips and pearly teeth, seemed to witness to the health and exuberance of a Rubens, and to promise a life more than usually long. But, alas, who is able to foresee the fate of another? Boissard, to whom none of the conditions of happiness were lacking, fell a victim to a malady much the same as that which caused the death of Baudelaire. No one was better equipped than Boissard. He had the most open-minded intelligence; he understood painting, poetry, and music equally well; but, in him, the dilettante was stronger than the artist. Admiration took up too much of his time; he exhausted himself in his enthusiasms. There is no doubt that, had necessity with her iron hand compelled him, he would have been an excellent painter. The success that was obtained by the "Episode de la retraite de Russie" would have been his sure guarantee. But, without abandoning painting, he allowed himself to be diverted by other arts. He played the violin, organised quartettes, studied Bach, Beethoven, Meyerbeer, and Mendelssohn, learnt languages, wrote criticisms, and composed some charming sonnets. He was a voluptuary in Art, and no one enjoyed real masterpieces with more refinement, passion, and sensuousness than he did. From force of admiring, he forgot to express beauty, and what he felt so deeply he came to believe he had created.[Pg 9] His conversation was charming, full of gaiety and originality. He had a rare gift of inventing words and phrases, and all sorts of bizarre expressions, that linger in the mind. Like Baudelaire, amorous of new and rare sensations, even when they were dangerous, he wished to know those artificial paradises, which, later, made him pay so dearly for their transient ecstasies. It was the abuse of hashish that, undoubtedly, undermined his constitution, formerly so robust and strong. This souvenir of a friend of our youth, with whom we lived under the same roof, of a romantic to whom fame did not come because he loved too much the work of others to dream of his own, will not be out of place here, in this introduction destined to serve as a preface to the complete works of a departed friend of us both. On the day of our visit Jean FeuchÃ¨res, the sculptor, was there. Besides his talent in statuary, FeuchÃ¨res had a remarkable power of imitation, such as no actor was able to compass. He was the inventor of the comic dialogues between Sergeant Bridais and gunner Pitou, which even to-day provoke irresistible laughter. FeuchÃ¨res died first, and, of the four artists assembled on that day at the HÃ´tel Pimodan, we only survive. On the sofa, half recumbent, her elbow resting on a cushion, with an immobility of pose she often[Pg 10] assumed, Maryx listened dreamily to Baudelaire's paradoxes. No surprise was manifested on her almost Oriental countenance. She wore a white robe, oddly ornamented with red spots like tiny drops of blood, and while Baudelaire talked she lazily passed the rings from one hand to another—hands as perfect as was her figure. Near the window, the "Femme au serpent" (it is not permitted to give her name) having thrown back her lace wrap and delicate little green hood, such as never adorned Lucy Hocquet or Madame Baurand, over an arm-chair, shook out her beautiful fawn-brown hair, for she had come from the Swimming Baths, and, her person all draped in muslin, exhaled, like a naiad, the fragrant perfume of the bath. With her eyes and smile she encouraged this tilt of words, and threw in, now and again, her own remarks, sometimes mocking, sometimes appreciative. They have passed, those charming leisure hours, when poets, artists, and beautiful women were gathered together to talk of Art, literature, and love, as the century of Boccaccio has passed. Time, Death, the imperious necessities of life, have dispersed this mutually sympathetic group; but the memory is dear to all those who had the good fortune to be admitted to it. It is not without an involuntary sigh that these lines are penned. Shortly after this first meeting Baudelaire came[Pg 11] to see us and brought a volume of his verses. He himself relates this visit in a literary article which he wrote about us in terms of such admiration that we dare not transcribe them. From that moment a friendship was formed between us, in which Baudelaire always wished to conserve the attitude of favourite disciple to a sympathetic master, although he owed his success only to himself and his own originality. Never in our greatest familiarity did he relax that deference of manner which to us seemed excessive and with which we would gladly have dispensed. He acknowledged it Ã vive voix, and the dedication of the "Flowers of Evil" which is addressed to us, consecrates in its lapidary form the absolute expression of his loving and poetical devotion. If we insist on these details, it is not for their actual worth, but solely because they portray an unrecognised side of Baudelaire's character. This poet, whom people try to describe as of so satanic a nature, smitten with evil and depravity (literary, be it well understood), knew love and admiration in the highest degree. But the distinguishing feature of Satan is that he is incapable of admiration or love. The light wounds him, glory is a sight insupportable to him, and makes him want to veil his eyes with his bat-like wings. No one, even at the time of fervour for romanticism, had more respect and adoration for[Pg 12] the great masters than Baudelaire. He was always ready to pay his legitimate tribute of praise to those who merited it, and that without the servility of a disciple, without fanaticism; for he himself was a master, having his realm, his subjects, and his coinage of gold. It would perhaps be fitting, after having portrayed Baudelaire in all the freshness of his youth and in the fulness of his power, to present him as he was during the later years of his life, before Death stretched out his hand towards him, and sealed the lips which will no longer speak here below. His face was thin and spiritualised; the eyes seemed larger, the nose thinner; the lips were closed mysteriously, and seemed to guard ironical secrets. The vermilion tints of the past had given place to a swarthy, tired yellow. As to the forehead, it had gained in grandeur and solidity—so to speak; one would have said that it was carved in some particularly durable marble. The fine hair, silky and long, nearly white, falling round a face which was young and old at the same time, gave him an almost sacerdotal appearance. Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris on April 21st, 1821, in an old turreted house, in the Rue Hautefeuille. He was the son of M. Baudelaire, the old friend of Condorcet and of Cabanis, a distinguished and well-educated man who retained the polished manners of the eighteenth century, which the[Pg 13] pretentious tastes of the Republican era had not so entirely effaced as is sometimes thought. This characteristic was strong in the poet, who always retained the outward forms of courtesy. In his young days Baudelaire was in no way out of the ordinary, and neither did he gain many laurels at his college prize distributions. He even found the B.A. examination a great difficulty, and his degree was honorary. Troubled by abstract questions, this boy, so fine of spirit and keen of intelligence, appeared almost like an idiot. We have no intention of declaring this inaptitude as a sign of cleverness; but, under the eye of the pedagogue, often distrait and idle, or rather preoccupied, the real man is formed little by little, unperceived by masters or parents. M. Baudelaire died, and his wife, Charles's mother, married General Aupick, who became Ambassador to Constantinople. Dissension soon arose in the family Ã propos of young Baudelaire's desire for a literary career. We think it wrong to reproach parents with the fears they manifest when the gift of poetry develops in their offspring. Alas! They are right. To what sad, precarious, and miserable existence does he vow himself—he who takes up a literary career? From that day he must consider himself cut off from human beings, active life; he no longer lives—he is the spectator of life. All sensation comes to him as motif for analysis.[Pg 14] Involuntarily he develops two distinct personalities, and, lacking other subjects, one becomes the spy on the other. If he lack a corpse, he stretches himself on the slab of black marble and buries the scalpel deep in his own heart. And what desperate struggles must he endure with the Idea, that elusive Proteus, who takes all manner of forms to escape captivity, and who will only deliver his oracle when he has been forced to show himself in his true aspect! This Idea, when one holds it, frightened, trembling, vanquished, one must nourish, clothe, fold round in that robe so difficult to weave, to colour and to arrange in graceful curves. During this long-drawn-out task the nerves become irritable, the brain on fire, the sensibilities quickened, and then nervous disorder comes with all its odd anxieties, its unconscious hallucinations, its indefinable sufferings, its morbid capriciousness, its fantastic depravity, its infatuations and motiveless dislikes, its mad energy and nervous prostration, its searches for excitement and its disgust for all healthy nourishment. We do not exaggerate the picture; but we have before us only the talented poets, crowned with glory, who have, at the last, succumbed on the breast of their ideal. What would it be if we went down into the Limbo where the shades of still-born children are wailing, like those abortive endeavours and larvÃ¦ of thought which can achieve[Pg 15] neither wing nor form? Yes! Desire is not power, nor is Love possession! Faith is not enough. Another gift is necessary. In literature, as in religion, work without grace is futile. Although they do not suspect this region of anguish, for, to know it really, it is necessary to go down oneself, not under the guidance of a Vergil or a Dante, but under that of a Lousteau, of a Lucien de RubemprÃ©, parents instinctively display the perils and suffering of the artistic life in the endeavour to dissuade the children they love, and for for whom they desire one more happy and ordinarily human. Once only since the earth has revolved round the sun have parents ardently wished to have a son's life dedicated to poetry. The child received the most brilliant literary education, and, with the irony of Fate, became Chapelain, the author of "La Pucelle"! and this, one might even say, was to play with sinister fortune! To turn his stubborn ideas into another course, Baudelaire was made to travel. He was sent a great distance, embarking on a vessel, the captain of which took him to the Indian seas. He visited the Isles of Mauritius, Bourbon, Madagascar, Ceylon perhaps, and some parts of the "Isle of the Ganges"; but he would not, for all that, give up his intention of becoming a man of letters. They[Pg 16] tried vainly to interest him in commerce, but a trade in cattle to feed Anglo-Indians on beefsteak had no attractions for him. All he retained of this voyage was a memory of great splendour which remained with him all his life. He gloried in a sky where brilliant constellations, unknown in Europe, were to be found; the magnificent vegetation with the exotic perfumes, the elegantly odd pagodas, the brown faces and the soft white draperies—all that in Nature was so warm, powerful, and full of colour. In his verses he was frequently led from the mists and mud of Paris to the countries of light, azure, and perfume. Between the lines of the most sombre of his poems, a window is opened through which can be seen, instead of the black chimneys and smoky roofs, the blue Indian seas, or a beach of golden sand on which the slender figure of a Malabaraise, half naked, carrying an amphora on the head, is running. Without penetrating too deeply into the private life of the poet, one can imagine that it was during this voyage that Baudelaire fell in love with the "Venus noire," of whom he was a worshipper all his life. When he returned from his distant travels he had just attained his majority; there was no longer any reason—not even financial, for he was rich for some time at least—to oppose Baudelaire's choice of a vocation; it was only strengthened by[Pg 17] meeting with obstacles, and nothing would deter him. Lodged in a little apartment under the roof of the same HÃ´tel Pimodan where later we met him, as has been related earlier in this introduction, he commenced that life of work, interrupted and resumed, of varied studies, of fruitful idleness, which is that of each man of letters seeking his particular field of labour. Baudelaire soon found his. He conceived something beyond romanticism—a land unexplored, a sort of rough and wild Kamtschatka; and it was at the extreme verge that he built for himself, as Sainte-Beuve, who thoroughly appreciated him, said, a kiosque of bizarre architecture. Several of the poems which are to be found amongst the "Flowers of Evil" were already composed. Baudelaire, like all born poets, from the start possessed a form and style of which he was master; it was more accentuated and polished later, but still the same. Baudelaire has often been accused of studied bizarrerie, of affected and laboured originality, and especially of mannerisms. This is a point at which it is necessary to pause before going further. There are people who have naturally an affected manner. In them simplicity would be pure affectation, a sort of inverted mannerism. Long practice is necessary to be naturally simple. The circumvolutions of the brain[Pg 18] twist themselves in such a manner that the ideas get entangled and confused and go up in spirals instead of following straight lines. The most complicated, subtle, and intense thoughts are those which present themselves first. They see things from a peculiar angle which alters the aspect and perspective. All fancies, the most odd, unusual, and fantastically distant from the subject treated of, strike them chiefly, and they know how to draw them into their woof by mysterious threads. Baudelaire had a brain like this, and where the critic has tried to see labour, effort, excess, there is only the free and easy manifestation of individuality. These poems, of a savour so exquisitely strange, cost him no more than any badly rhymed commonplace. Baudelaire, always possessed of great admiration for the old masters, never felt it incumbent upon him to take them for models; they had had the good fortune to arrive in the early days of the world, at the dawn, so to speak, of humanity, when nothing had been expressed yet, and each form, each image, each sentiment, had the charm of virginal novelty. The great commonplaces which form the foundation of human thought were then in all their glory and sufficed for simple geniuses, speaking to simple people. But, from force of repetition, these general subjects of verse were used up like money which,[Pg 19] from continual circulation, has lost its imprint; and, besides, Life had become more complex, fuller of originality, and could no longer be represented in the artificial spirit of another age. As true innocence charms, so the trickery of pretended innocence disgusts and displeases. The quality of the nineteenth century is not precisely naÃ¯vetÃ©, and it needs, to render its thoughts and dreams explicit, idiom a little more composite than that employed in the classics. Literature is like a day; it has its morning, noon, evening, and night. Without vain expatiation as to whether one should prefer dawn or twilight, one ought to paint the hour which is at hand, and with a palette of all the colours necessary to give it its full effect. Has not sunset its beauty as well as dawn? The copper-reds, the bronze-golds, the turquoise melting to sapphire, all the tints which blend and pass away in the great final conflagration, the light-pierced clouds which seem to take the form of a falling aerial Babel—have they not as much to offer to the poet as the rosy-fingered Dawn? But the time when the Hours preceded the Chariot of Day is long since fled. The poet of the "Flowers of Evil" loved what is unwisely known as the style of the decadence, and which is no other thing than Art arrived at that point of extreme maturity that determines civilisations which have grown old; ingenious,[Pg 20] complicated, clever, full of delicate tints and refinements, gathering all the delicacies of speech, borrowing from technical vocabularies, taking colour from every palette, tones from all musical instruments, forcing itself to the expression of the most elusive thoughts, contours vague and fleeting, listening to translate subtle confidences, confessions of depraved passions and the odd hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness. This style of the decadence is the "dernier mot" of Verbe, summoned to express all and to venture to the very extremes. One can recall, Ã propos of him, language already veined with the greenness of decomposition, savouring of the Lower Roman Empire and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek Art fallen into deliquescence; but such is the necessary and fatal idiom of peoples and civilisations where an artificial life has replaced a natural one and developed in a man who does not know his own needs. It is not easy, moreover, this style condemned by pedants, for it expresses new ideas in new forms and words that have never been heard of before. Contrary to the classical style, it admits of backgrounds where the spectres of superstition, the haggard phantoms of dreams, the terrors of night, remorse which leaps out and falls back noiselessly, obscure fantasies that astonish the day, and all that the soul in its deepest depths and[Pg 21] innermost caverns conceals of darkness, deformity, and horror, move together confusedly. One can well imagine that the fourteen hundred words of the dialect of Racine do not suffice an author who is given the difficult task of rendering modern ideas and things in all their infinite complexity and their diversity of colour. Thus Baudelaire, who, despite his ill success at his baccalaureate examination, was a good Latinist, preferred undoubtedly, to Vergil and to Cicero, Apuleius, Juvenal, Saint Augustine, and Tertullian, whose style has the black radiance of ebony. He went even to the Latin of the Church, to hymns and chants in which the rhyme represents the old forgotten rhythm, and he has addressed, under the title of "FranciscÃ¦ meÃ¦ Laudes," "To an erudite and devotee," such are the terms of the dedication, a Latin poem rhymed in the form that Brizeux called ternary, which is composed of three rhymes following one another, instead e of alternating as in the tiercet of Dante. To this odd piece of work is joined a note no less singular. We transcribe it here, for it explains and corroborates what has just been said about the idioms of the decadence: "Does it not seem to the reader, as to me, that the language of the last Latin decadence—the supreme sigh of the strong man already transformed and prepared for the spiritual life—is[Pg 22] singularly adequate to express the passion that is comprised in, and felt by, the modern world? Mysticism is the opposite pole on the compass of Catullus and his followers, purely cynical and superficial poets, who have only known the pole of sensuality. In this marvellous language, solecism and barbarism seem to me to express the negligences of a passion forgetful of itself and regardless of conventionality. The words, taken in a new acceptation, reveal the charming maladroitness of a northern barbarian kneeling before a Roman beauty. The pun itself, when it crosses pedantism, has it not the saving grace and irregularity of infancy?" It is unnecessary to push this point further. Baudelaire, when he had not to express some curious deviation, some unknown side of the soul, employed pure, clear language, so correct and exact that even the most difficult to please would find nothing to complain of. This is especially noticeable in his prose writings, when he treats of more general and less abstruse subjects than in his verse. With regard to his philosophical and literary tenets, they were those of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he had not then translated but whom he greatly admired. One can apply to him the phrases that he himself wrote of the American author in the preface to the "Extraordinary Histories ":—"He[Pg 23] considered progress, the great modern idea, as the ecstasy of fools, and he called the perfectionings of human habitations, scars and rectangular abominations. He believed only in the Immutable, the Eternal, the self-same, and he was in the possession of—cruel privilege! in a society amorous only of itself—the great good sense of a Machiavelli who marches before the wise as a column of light across the desert of history." Baudelaire had a perfect horror of philanthropists, progressionists, utilitarians, humanitarians, Utopians, and of all those who pretend to reform things, contrary to nature and the universal laws of society. He desired neither the suppression of hell nor of the guillotine for the disposal of sinners and assassins. He did not believe that men were born good, and he admitted original perversity as an element to be found in the depths of the purest souls—perversity, that evil counsellor who leads a man on to do what is fatal to himself, precisely because it is fatal and for the pleasure of acting contrary to law, without other attraction than disobedience, outside of sensuality, profit, or charm. This perversity he believes to be in others as in himself; therefore, when he finds a servant in fault he refrains from scolding him, for he regards it as an irremediable curse. It is, then, very wrong of short-sighted critics to have accused Baudelaire of immorality, an easy form[Pg 24] of evil-speaking for the mediocre and the jealous, and always well taken up by the Pharisees and J. Prudhommes. No one has professed greater disgust for baseness of mind or unseemliness of subject. He hated evil as a mathematical deviation, and, in his quality of a perfect gentleman, he scorned it as unseemly, ridiculous, bourgeois and squalid. If he has often treated of hideous, repugnant, and unhealthy subjects, it is from that horror and fascination which makes the magnetised bird go down into the unclean mouth of the serpent; but more than once, with a vigorous flap of his wings, he breaks the charm and flies upwards to bluer and more spiritual regions. He should have engraved on his seal as a device the words "Spleen et IdÃ©al," which form the title of the first part of his book of verse. If his bouquet is composed of strange flowers, of metallic colourings and exotic perfumes, the calyx of which, instead of joy contains bitter tears and drops of aqua-tofana, he can reply that he planted but a few into the black soil, saturating them in putrefaction, as the soil of a cemetery dissolves the corpses of preceding centuries among mephitic miasmas. Undoubtedly roses, marguerites, violets, are the more agreeable spring flowers; but he thinks little of them in the black mud with which the pavements of the town are[Pg 25] covered. And, moreover, Baudelaire, if he understands the great tropical landscapes where, as in dreams, trees burst forth in strange and gigantic elegance, is only little touched by the small rural sites on the outskirts; and it is not he who will frolic like the Philistines of Heinrich Heine before the romantic efflorescence of spring and faint away at the song of the sparrows. He likes to follow the pale, shrivelled, contorted man, convulsed by passions, and actual modern ennui, through the sinuosities of that great madrepore of Paris—to surprise him in his difficulties, agonies, miseries, prostrations, and excitements, his nervousness and despair. He watches the budding of evil instincts, the ignoble habits idly acquired in degradation. And, from this sight which attracts and repels him, he becomes incurably melancholy; for he thinks himself no better than others, and allows the pure arc of the heavens and the brilliancy of the stars to be veiled by impure mists. With these ideas one can well understand that Baudelaire believed in the absolute self-government of Art, and that he would not admit that poetry should have any end outside itself, or any mission to fulfil other than that of exciting in the soul of the reader the sensation of supreme beauty—beauty in the absolute sense of the term. To this sensation he liked to add a certain effect of surprise, astonishment,[Pg 26] and rarity. As much as possible he banished from poetry a too realistic imitation of eloquence, passion, and a too exact truth. As in statuary one does not mould forms directly after Nature, so he wished that, before entering the sphere of Art, each object should be subjected to a metamorphosis that would adapt it to this subtle medium, idealising it and abstracting it from trivial reality. Such principles are apt to astonish us, when we read certain of the poems of Baudelaire in which horror seems to be sought like pleasure; but that we should not be deceived, this horror is always transfigured by character and effect, by a ray of Rembrandt, or a trait of Velasquez, who portrayed the race under sordid deformity. In stirring up in his cauldron all sorts of fantastically odd and enormous ingredients, Baudelaire can say, with the witches of Macbeth, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." This sort of intentional ugliness is not, then, in contradiction to the supreme aim of Art; and the poems, such as the "Sept Vieillards" and the "Petits Vieilles," have snatched from the poetical Saint John who dreams in Patmos this phrase, which characterises so well the author of the "Flowers of Evil": "You have endowed the sky of Art with one knows not what macabre ray; you have created a new frisson." But it is, so to speak, only the shadow of the talent of Baudelaire, a shadow ardently fiery or[Pg 27] coldly blue, which allows him to give the essential and luminous touch. There is a serenity in his nervous, febrile, and tormenting talent. On the highest summits he is tranquil: pacem summa tenent. But, instead of writing of the poet's ideas, it would be infinitely better to allow him to speak for himself: "Poetry, little as one wishes to penetrate one's self, to question one's soul, to recall the memories of past enthusiasm, has no other end than itself; it cannot have any other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, as that which is written purely from the pleasure of writing. "I do not say that poetry does not ennoble tastes—be it well understood—that its final result is not to raise men above vulgar interests. This would be an obvious absurdity. I say that, if the poet has followed a moral aim, he has diminished his poetical power, and it would not be imprudent to lay a wager that his work will be bad. Poetry is unable, under pain of death or decay, to assimilate itself to morals or science. "It has not Truth as an object; it has Itself. The demonstration of Truth is elsewhere. "Truth has only to do with songs; all that gives charm and grace to a song will give to Truth its authority and power. Coldness, calmness, impassivity, drive back the diamonds and flowers of[Pg 28] the Muse; they are absolutely in opposition to poetical humour. "The Pure Intellect aspires to Truth, Taste informs us of Beauty, and Moral Sense teaches us Duty. It is true that the middle sense is intimately connected with the other two, and is only separated from the Moral Sense by very slight divergences, so that Aristotle has not hesitated to place some of its operations among the virtues themselves. Also, that which especially exasperates the man of Taste in the sight of Vice is its deformity and disproportion. Vice outrages justice and truth, revolts the Intellect and Conscience; but, like an outrage in harmony—a dissonance—it wounds more particularly certain poetical natures, and I do not believe it would be scandalous to consider all infraction of moral, the beautiful moral, as a fault against rhythm and universal prosody. "It is this admirable, this immortal instinct of Beauty which makes us consider the earth and all its manifold forms, sounds, odours, sentiments, as a hint of, and correspondence to, Heaven. The insatiable thirst for that which is beyond and which veils life, is the most lively proof of our immortality. It is at once by and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul gets a glimpse of the splendours beyond the tomb. And, when an exquisite poem brings tears to the eyes, these tears are not the proof of an excess of joy, they are[Pg 29] the witness rather of an excited melancholy, an intercession of the nerves, of a nature exiled in imperfection wishing to possess itself, even on this earth, of a revealed paradise. "Thus, the principle of poetry is, strictly and simply, the Human Aspiration towards Supreme Beauty; and the manifestation of this principle is in the enthusiasm, the awakening of the soul, enthusiasm quite independent of that passion, which is the intoxication of the heart, and of that Truth, which is the Food of Reason. For passion is a natural thing, too natural even not to introduce a wounding note, discordant in the domain of un-sullied Beauty; too familiar and too violent not to degrade pure Desires, gracious Melancholies and noble Despairs, which inhabit the supernatural regions of Poetry." Although few poets have a more spontaneously sparkling inspiration and originality than Baudelaire—doubtless through distaste for the false poetic style which affects to believe in the descent of a tongue of fire on the writer painfully rhyming a strophe—he pretended that the true author provoked, directed, and modified at will this mysterious power of literary production; and we find in a very curious piece which precedes the translation of Edgar Poe's celebrated poem "The Raven," the following lines, half ironical, half serious, in which Baudelaire's own opinion is set[Pg 30] down under the guise of an analysis of the famous American author: "The poetic principle, which makes the rules of poetry, is formulated, it is said, and modelled after the poems. Here is a poet who pretends that his poems have been composed according to technique or principle. He had certainly great genius and more inspiration than is general, if by inspiration one understands energy, intellectual enthusiasm, and the power of keeping all his faculties on the alert. He loved work more than anything else; he liked to repeat, he, the finished original, that originality is something needing apprenticeship, which does not necessarily mean to say that it is a thing to be transmitted by instruction. Chance and incomprehensibility were his two great enemies. Has he willingly diminished that faculty which was in him to take the most beautiful part? I should be inclined to think so; however, one must not forget that his genius, so ardent and agile, was passionately fond of analysis, combination, and calculation. One of his favourite axioms was the following: 'Everything in a poem as in a novel, everything in a sonnet as in a novelette, ought to contribute to the dÃ©nouement. A good writer has the last line already in his mind when he writes the first.' "Owing to this admirable method the writer was able to begin even at the end, and work, when it[Pg 31] pleased him, at whatever part he liked. Amateurs will perhaps sneer at these cynical maxims, but each can learn from them what he wishes. It would be useless to show them what Art has gained from deliberation, and to make clear to the world what exacting labour this object of luxury known as poetry really is. After all, a little charlatanry is permitted to genius. It is like the paint on the cheeks of a naturally beautiful woman, a new condition of the mind." This last phrase is characteristic and betrays the individual taste of the poet for artificiality. He, moreover, does not hide this predilection. He takes pleasure in this kind of composite beauty, and now and then a little artificiality that elaborates advanced and unsound civilisations. Let us say, to take a concrete example, that he would prefer to a simple young girl who used no other cosmetic than water, a more mature woman employing all the resources of the accomplished coquette, in front of a dressing-table covered with bottles of essences, de lait virginal, ivory brushes, and curling-tongs. The sweet perfume of skin macerated in aromatics, like that of Esther, who was steeped in oil of palms for six months and six months in cinnamon, before presentation to King Ahasuerus, had on him a powerful effect. A light touch of rose or hortensia on a fresh cheek, beauty-spots carefully and provocatively placed at the corner of the mouth[Pg 32] or of the eye, eye-lashes burnished with kohl, hair tinted with russet-brown and powdered with gold-dust, neck and shoulders whitened with rice-powder, lips and the tips of the fingers brightened with carmine, did not in any way revolt him. He liked these touches of Art upon Nature, the high lights, the strong lights placed by a clever hand to augment grace, charm and the character of the face. It is not he who would write virtuous tirades against painting, rougeing, and the crinoline. All that removed a man, and especially a woman, from the natural state found favour in his eyes. These tastes explain themselves and ought to be understandable in a poet of the decadence, and the author of the "Flowers of Evil." We shall astonish no one if we add that he preferred, to the simple perfume of the rose or violet, that of benzoin, amber, and even musk, so little appreciated in our days, and also the penetrating aroma of certain exotic flowers the perfume of which is too strong for our moderate climate. Baudelaire had, in the matter of perfumes, a strangely subtle sensuality which is rarely to be met with except amongst Orientals. He sought it always, and the phrase cited by Banville and at the commencement of this article may very justly be said of him: "Mon Ã¢me voltige sur les parfums comme l'Ã¢me des autres hommes voltige sur la musique." [Pg 33] He loved also toilets of a bizarre elegance, a capricious richness, striking fantasy, in which something of the comedian and courtesan was mingled, although he himself was severely conventional in dress; but this taste, excessive, singular, anti-natural, nearly always opposed to classical beauty, was for him the sign of the human will correcting, to its taste, the forms and colours furnished by matter. Where the philosopher could only find a text for declamation he found a proof of grandeur. Depravity—that is to say, a step aside from the normal type—is impossible to the stupid. It is for the same reason that inspired poets, not having the control and direction of their works, caused him a sort of aversion, and why he wished to introduce art and technique even into originality. So much for the metaphysical; but Baudelaire was of a subtle, complicated, reasoning, and paradoxical nature, and had more philosophy than is general amongst poets. The Ã¦sthetics of his art occupied him much; he abounded in systems which he tried to realise, and all that he did was first planned out. According to him, literature ought to be intentional, and the accidental restrained as much as possible. This, however, did not prevent him, in true poetical fashion, from profiting by the happy chances of executing those beauties which burst forth suddenly without[Pg 34] premeditation, like the little flowers accidentally mixed with the grain chosen by the sower. Every artist is somewhat like Lope de Vega, who, at the moment of the composition of his comedies, locked up his precepts under six keys—con seis claves. In the ardour of his work, voluntarily or not, he forgot systems and paradoxes. II Baudelaire's reputation, which during some years had not extended beyond the limits of the little circle who rallied round the new poet, widened suddenly when he presented himself to the public holding in his hand the bouquet of the "Flowers of Evil," a bouquet which in no way resembled the innocent posy of the dÃ©butante. Some of the poems were so subtly suggestive, yet so abstruse and enveloped with the forms and veils of Art, that the authorities demanded that they should be withdrawn and replaced by others of less dangerous eccentricity, before the book could be comprised in libraries. Ordinarily, there is no great excitement about a book of verses; they are born, live, and die in silence; for two or three poets suffice for our intellectual consummation. In the excitement, rumour, and allayed scandal which surrounded Baudelaire, it was recognised that he had given the public, which is a rare occurrence, original work of a peculiar savour. To[Pg 35] create in the public a new sensation is the greatest joy that can happen to a writer, and especially to a poet. "Flowers of Evil" was one of those happy titles that are more difficult to find than is generally imagined. He summed up in a brief and poetical form the general idea of the book and indicated its tendencies. Although it was evidently romantic in intention and composition, it was impossible, by even ever so frail a thread, to connect Baudelaire with any one of the great masters of that particular school. His verses, refined and subtle in structure, encasing the subjects dealt with so closely as to resemble armour rather than clothing, at first appeared difficult and obscure. This feeling was caused, not through any fault of the author, but from the novelty of the things he expressed—things that had not before been made vocal. It was part of Baudelaire's doctrine that, to attain his end, a poet must invent language and rhythm for himself. But he could not prevent surprise on the part of the reader when confronted with verse so different from any he had read before. In painting the evils which horrified him, Baudelaire knew how to find the morbidly rich tints of decomposition, the tones of mother-of-pearl which freeze stagnant waters, the roses of consumption, the pallor of chlorosis, the hateful bilious yellows, the leaden grey of pestilential fogs, the poisoned[Pg 36] and metallic greens smelling of sulphide of arsenic, the blackness of smoke diluted by the rain on plaster walls, the bitumens baked and browned in the depths of hell; and all that gamut of intensified colours, correspondent to autumn, to the setting of the sun, to over-ripe fruit, and the last hours of civilisation. The book is opened by a poem to the reader, whom the poet does not attempt to cajole, as is usual, and to whom he tells the absolute truth. He accuses him, in spite of all his hypocrisy, of having the vices for which he blames others, and of nourishing in his own heart that great modern monster, Ennui, who, with his bourgeois cowardice, dreams of the ferocity and debauches of the Romans, of bureaucrat Nero, and shop-keeper Heliogabalus. One other poem, of great beauty, and entitled, undoubtedly by an ironical antiphrasis, "Benediction," depicts the coming of the poet to the world, an object of astonishment and aversion to his mother as a shameful offspring. We see him pursued by stupidity, envy, and sarcasm, a prey to the perfidious cruelty of some Delilah, happy in delivering him up to the Philistines, naked, disarmed, after having expended on him all the refinements of a ferocious coquetry. Then there is his arrival, after insults, miseries, tortures, purified in the crucible of sorrow, to eternal glory,[Pg 37] to the crown of light destined for the heads of the martyrs who have suffered for Truth and Beauty. One little poem which follows later, and which is entitled "Soleil," closes with a sort of tacit justification of the poet in his vagrant courses. A bright ray shines on the muddy town; the author is going out and runs through the unclean streets, the by-ways where the closed shutters hide indications of secret luxuries; all the black, damp, dirty labyrinths of old streets to the houses of the blind and leprous, where the light shines here and there on some window, on a pot of flowers, or on the head of a young girl. Is not the poet like the sun which alone enters everywhere, in the hospital as in the palace, in the hovel as in the church, always divine, letting his golden radiance fall on the carrion or on the rose? "ÃlÃ©vation" shows us the poet floating in the sky, beyond the starry spheres; in the luminous ether; on the confines of our universe; disappearing into the depths of infinity like a tiny cloud; intoxicating himself with that rare and salubrious air where there are none of the miasmas pertaining to the earth and only the pure ether breathed by the angels. We must not forget that Baudelaire, although he has often been accused of materialism, and reproached for expending his talent upon doubtful subjects, is, on the contrary, endowed[Pg 38] in a large degree with the great gift of spirituality, as Swedenborg said. He also possesses the power of correspondence, to employ a mystical idiom; that is to say, he knows how to discover by secret intuition the unexpressed feelings of others, and how to approach them, by those unexpected analogies that only the far-sighted are able to seize upon. Each poet has this power more or less developed, which is the very essence of his art. Undoubtedly Baudelaire, in this book dedicated to the painting of depravity and modern perversity, has framed repugnant pictures, where vice is laid bare to wallow in all the ugliness of its shame; but the poet, with supreme contempt, scornful indignation, and a constant recurrence towards the ideal which is so often lacking in satirical writers, stigmatises and marks with an indelible red iron the unhealthy flesh, plastered with unguents and white lead. In no part is the thirst for pure air, the immaculate whiteness of the Himalayan snows, the azure without blot, the unfading light, more strong and ardent than in the poems that have been termed immoral, as if the flagellation of vice was vice itself, and as if one is a poisoner for having written of the poisonous pharmacy of the Borgia. This method is by no means new, but it thrives always, and certain people pretend to believe that one cannot read the "Flowers of Evil" except with a[Pg 39] glass mask, such as Exili wore when he worked at the famous powder of succession. We have read Baudelaire's poems often, and we are not struck dead with convulsed face and blackened body, as though we had supped with Vanozza in a vineyard of Pope Alexander VI. All such foolishness—unfortunately detrimental, for all the fools enthusiastically adopt that attitude—would make any artist worthy of the name but shrug his shoulders when told that blue is moral and scarlet immoral. It is rather as if one said: "The potato is virtuous, henbane is criminal." A charming poem on perfumes classifies them, rousing ideas, sensations, and memories. Some are fresh, like the flesh of an infant, green like the fields in spring, recalling the blush of dawn and carrying with them the thoughts of innocence. Others, like musk, amber, benzoin, nard, and incense, are superb, triumphant, worldly, and provoke coquetry, love, luxury, festivities, and splendours. If one transposed them into the sphere of colours, they would represent gold and purple. The poet often recurs to this idea of the significance of perfumes. Surrounding a tawny beauty from the Cape, who seemed to have a mission for sleeping off home sickness, he spoke of this mixed odour "of musk and havana" which transported her soul to the well-loved lands of the Sun, where the leaves of the palm-trees make fans in the blue and tepid[Pg 40] air, where the masts of the ships sway harmoniously to the roll of the sea, while the silent slaves try to distract their young master from his languishing melancholy. Further on, wondering what will remain of his work, he compares himself to an old flagon, forgotten amongst the spider-webs, at the bottom of some cupboard in a deserted house. From the open cupboard comes the mustiness of the past, feeble perfumes of robes, laces, powder-boxes, which revive memories of old loves and antiquated elegance; and, if by chance one uncorks a rancid and sticky phial, an acrid smell of English salts and vinegar escapes, a powerful antidote to the modern pestilence. In many Ã passage this preoccupation with aroma appears, surrounding with a subtle cloud all persons and things. In very few of the poets do we find this care. Generally they are content with putting light, colour, and music in their verses; but it is rare that they pour in that drop of pure essence with which Baudelaire's muse never failed to moisten the sponge or the cambric of his handkerchief. Since we are recounting the individual likings and minor passions of the poet, let us say that he adored cats—like him, amorous of perfumes, and who are thrown into a sort of epileptical ecstasy by the scent of valerian. He loved these charming, tranquil, mysterious, gentle animals, with their[Pg 41] electrical shudders, whose favourite attitude is the recumbent pose of the Sphinx, which seems to have passed on to them its secret. They ramble round the house with their velvet footfalls as the genius of the place—genius loci—or come and seat themselves on the table near the writer, keeping company with his thoughts and watching him from the depths of their sanded golden eyes with intelligent tenderness and magical penetration. It is said that cats divine the thoughts which the brain transmits to the pen, and that, stretching out their paws, they wish to seize the written passage. They are happy in silence, order, and quietude, and no place suits them better than the study of a literary man. They wait patiently until his task is done, all the time purring gently and rhythmically in a sort of sotto voce accompaniment. Sometimes they gloss over with their tongue some disordered fur; for they are clean, careful, coquettish, and will not allow of any irregularity in their toilet, but all is done quietly and discreetly as though they feared to distract or hinder. Their caresses are tender, delicate, silent, feminine, having nothing in common with the clamorous, clumsy petulance that is found in dogs, to whom all the sympathy of the vulgar is given. All these merits were appreciated by Baudelaire, who has more than once addressed beautiful poems to cats—the "Flowers of Evil" contain three—[Pg 42]where he celebrates their physical and moral virtues, and often he makes them pass through his compositions as a sort of additional characteristic. Cats abound in Baudelaire's verse, as dogs in the pictures of Paul Veronese, and form there a kind of signature. It also must be added that in these sweet animals there is a nocturnal side, mysterious and cabalistic, which was very attractive to the poet. The cat, with his phosphoric eyes, which are like lanterns and stars to him, fearlessly haunts the darkness, where he meets wandering phantoms, sorcerers, alchemists, necromancers, resurrectionists, lovers, pickpockets, assassins, grey patrols, and all the obscene spectres of the night. He has the appearance of knowing the latest sabbatical chronicle, and he will willingly rub himself against the lame leg of Mephistopheles. His nocturnal serenades, his loves on the tiles, accompanied by cries like those of a child being murdered, give him a certain satanical air which justifies up to a certain point the repugnance of diurnal and practical minds, for whom the mysteries of Erebus have not the slightest attraction. But a doctor Faustus, in his cell littered with books and instruments of alchemy, would love always to have a cat for a companion. Baudelaire himself was a voluptuous, cajoling cat, with just its velvety manners, alluring mysteries, instinct with power concealed in suppleness,[Pg 43] fixing on things and men his penetrating look, disquieting, eccentric, difficult to withstand, but faithful and without perfidy. Many women pass through the poems of Baudelaire, some veiled, some half discernible, but to whom it is impossible to attribute names. They are rather types than individuals. They represent l'Ã©ternel fÃ©minin, and the love that the poet expresses for them is the love and not a love. We have seen that in his theories he did not admit of individual passion, finding it too masterful, too familiar and violent. Among these women some symbolise unconscious and almost bestial prostitution, with plastered and painted masks, eyes brightened with kohl, mouths tinted with scarlet, seeming like open wounds, false hair and jewels; others, of a colder corruption, more clever and more perverse, like marchionesses of Marteuil of the nineteenth century, transpose the vice of the body to the soul. They are haughty, icy, bitter, finding pleasure only in wickedness; insatiable as sterility, mournful as ennui, having only hysterical and foolish fancies, and deprived, like the devil, of the power of love. Gifted with a dreadful beauty, almost spectral, that does not animate life, they march to their deaths, pale, insensible, superbly contemptuous, on the hearts they have crushed under their heels. From the departure of these amours, allied to hate,[Pg 44] from pleasures more wounding than sorrow, the poet turns to his sad idol of exotic perfume, of savage attire, supple and wheedling as the black panther of Java, which remains always and compensates him for the spiteful Parisian cats with the pointed claws, playing with the heart of the poet as with a mouse. But it is to none of these creatures of plaster, marble, or ebony that he gives his soul. Above this black heap of leprous houses, this infectious labyrinth where the spectres of pleasure circle, this impure tingling of misery, of ugliness and perversity, far, far distant in the unalterable azure floats the adorable spirit of Beatrice, the ever-desired ideal, never attained; the supreme and divine beauty incarnated in the form of an ethereal woman, spiritualised, fashioned of light, fire, and perfume; a vapour, a dream, a reflection of the enchanted and seraphic world, like the Sigeias, the Morellas, the Unas, the Leonores of Edgar Poe, and the Seraphita-Seraphitus of Balzac, that marvellous creation. From the depths of his fall, his errors, and his despairs, it is towards this celestial image, as towards the Madonna of Bon-Secours, that he extends his arms with cries, tears, and a profound contempt for himself. In his hours of loving melancholy it is always with her he wishes to fly away and hide his perfect happiness in some mysterious fairy refuge, some cottage of[Pg 45] Gainsborough, some home of Gerard Dow, or, better still, some marble palace of Benares or Hyderabad. Never did his dreams lead him into other company. Can one see in this Beatrice, this Laura whom no name designates, a real young girl or woman, passionately loved by the poet during his life-time? It would be romantic to suppose so, but it has not been permitted to us to be intimate enough with the secret life of his soul to answer this question affirmatively or negatively. In his metaphysical conversations, Baudelaire spoke much of his ideas, little of his sentiments, and never of his actions. As to the chapter of his loves, he for ever placed a seal upon his fine and disdainful lips. The safest plan would be to see in this ideal love a pleading only of the soul, the soaring of the unsatisfied heart, and the eternal sigh of the imperfect aspiring to the absolute. At the end of the "Flowers of Evil" there is a set of poems on "Wine," and the different intoxications that it produces, according to the brain it attacks. It is unnecessary to say that they are not Bacchic songs celebrating the juice of the grape, or anything like it. They are hideous and terrible paintings of drunkenness, but without the morality of Hogarth. The picture has no need of a legend and the "Wine of the Workman" makes one shudder. The "Litanies of Satan," god of evil and prince of the world, are one of those cold,[Pg 46] familiar ironies of the author, in which one would be wrong to see impiety. Impiety is not in the nature of Baudelaire, who believed in the superior law established by God for all eternity, the least infraction of which is punished by the severest chastisement, not only in this world, but in the future. If he has painted vice and shown Satan in all his pomp, it is without the least complacence in the task. He also had a singular prepossession of the devil as a tempter in whom he saw a dragon who hurried him into sin, infamy, crime, and perversity. Fault in Baudelaire was always followed by remorse, contempt, anguish, despair; and the punishment was far worse than any corporal one could have been. But enough of this subject; we are critic, not theologian. Let us point out, among the poems which comprise the "Flowers of Evil," some of the most remarkable; amongst others, that which is called, "Don Juan aux Enfers." It is a picture of tragic grandeur, painted in sombre and magisterial colours on the fiery vault of hell. The boat glides on the black waters, carrying Don Juan and his cortÃ¨ge of victims. The beggar whom he tried to make deny God, wretched athlete, proud in his rags like Antisthenes, paddles the oars to the domain of Charon. At the stern, a man of stone, a discoloured phantom,[Pg 47] with rigid and sculptural gestures, holds the helm. The old Don Luis shows his whitened locks, scorned by his hypocritically impious son. Sganerelle demands the payment of his wages from his henceforth insolvent master. Donna Elvira tries to bring back the old smile of the lover to the disdainful lips of her husband; and the pale lovers, brought to evil, abandoned, betrayed, trampled under foot like flowers, expose the ever-open wounds of their hearts. Under this passion of tears, lamentations, and maledictions Don Juan remains unmoved; he has done what he has wished. Heaven, hell, and the world judge him, according to their understanding; his pride knows no remorse; the shot has been able to kill, but not to make him repent. By its serene melancholy, its cheerful tranquillity, and oriental kief the poem entitled "La Vie AntÃ©rieure" contrasts happily with the sombre pictures of monstrous modern Paris, and shows that the artist has, on his palette, side by side with the blacks, bitumens, umbers, and siennas, a whole gamut of fresh tints: light, transparent, delicate roses, ideal blues, like the far-away Breughel of Paradise, with which to depict the Elysian Fields and mirage of his dreams. It is well to note particularly the sentiment towards the artificial betrayed by the poet. By the word artificial one must understand a creation[Pg 48] owing its existence entirely to Art, and from which Nature is entirely absent. In an article written during the life-time of Baudelaire, we pointed out this odd tendency of which to poem entitled "RÃªve parisien" is a striking example. Here are the lines which endeavoured to lender this splendid and sombre nightmare, worthy of the engravings of Martynn: "Imagine a supernatural landscape, or rather a perspective in metal, marble, and water, from which all vegetation is banished. All is rigid, polished, mirrored under a sky without sun, without moon, without stars. In the midst of the silence of eternity rise up, artificially lit, palaces, colonnades, towers, stair-cases, fountains from which fall heavy cascades like curtains of crystal. The blue waters are encircled, like the steel of antique mirrors, in quays, basins of burnished gold, or run silently under bridges of precious stones. The crystallised ray enshrines the liquid, and the porphyry flagstones of the terraces reflect the surrounding objects like ice. The Queen of Sheba, walking there, would lift up her robe, fearing to wet her feet, so glistening is the surface. The style of this poem is brilliant, like black, polished marble." Is it not a strange fantasy, this composition made from rigid elements, in which nothing lives, throbs, breathes, and where not a blade of grass, not a leaf, not a flower comes to derange the[Pg 49] implacable symmetry of forms invented by Art? Does it not make one believe in the unblemished Palmyra or the PalenquÃ© remaining standing on a dead planet bereft of its atmosphere? These are, undoubtedly, strange imaginings, anti-natural, neighbours of hallucination and expressions of a secret desire for unattainable novelty; but, for our part, we prefer them to the insipid simplicity of the pretended poets who, on the threadbare canvas of the commonplace, embroider, with old wools faded in colour, designs of bourgeois triviality or of foolish sentimentality: crowns of roses, green leaves of cabbages, and doves pecking one another. Sometimes we do not fear to attain the rare at the expense of the shocking, the fantastic, and the exaggerated. Barbarity of language appeals to us more than platitude. Baudelaire has this advantage: he can be bad, but he is never common. His faults, like his good qualities, are original, and, even when he has displeased, he has, after long reasoning, willed it so. Let us bring this analysis, already rather too long, however much we abridge it, to a close by a few words on that poem which so astonished Victor Hugo—"Petites Vieilles" The poet, walking in the streets of Paris, sees some little old women with humble and sad gait pass by. He follows them as one would pretty women, recognising from[Pg 50] the threadbare cashmere, worn out, mended a hundred times, from the end of lace frayed and yellow, the ring—sorrowful souvenir, disputed by the pawn-broker and ready to leave the slender finger of the pale hand—a past of happier fortune and elegance: a life of love and devotion, perhaps; the remains of beauty under ruin and misery and the devastations of age. He reanimates all these trembling spectres, reclothes them, puts the flesh of youth on these emaciated skeletons, revives in these poor wounded hearts illusions of other days. Nothing could be more ridiculous, nothing more touching, than these Venuses of PÃ¨re-Lachaise and these Ninons of Petits-MÃ©nages who file off lamentably under the evocation of the master, like a procession of ghosts surprised by the day. III The question of versification and scansion, disdained by all those who have no appreciation of form—and they are numerous to-day—has been rightly judged by Baudelaire as one of the utmost importance. Nothing is more common now than to mistake technique in art for poetry itself. These are things which have no relation. FÃ©nelon, J. J. Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Chateaubriand, George Sand are poetic in principle, but not poets—that is to say, they are[Pg 51] incapable of writing in verse, even mediocre verse, a special faculty often possessed by people of inferior merit to that of the great masters. To wish to separate technique from poetry is a modern folly which will lead to nothing but the annihilation of Art itself. We encountered, in an excellent article of Sainte-Beuve on Taine, Ã propos of Pope and Boileau, lightly treated by the author of "The History of English Literature" this clear and judicial paragraph, where things are brought to light by the great critic who was from the beginning, and is always, a great poet. "But, Ã propos of Boileau, must I then accept this strange judgment of a man of esprit, this contemptuous opinion that M. Taine takes of him, and fear to endorse it in passing?—'There are two sorts of verse in Boileau: the most numerous, which are those of a pupil of the third form of his school; the less numerous, which are those of a pupil of rhetoric.' The man of letters who speaks thus (Guillaume Guizot) does not feel that Boileau is a poet, and, I will go further, he ought not to be sensible of poetry in such a poet. I understand that one does not put all the poetry into the metre; but I cannot at all understand that, when the point in question is Art, one takes no account of Art itself, and depreciates the perfect workers who excel in it. Suppress with a single blow all the poetry in verse, or else speak with[Pg 52] esteem of those who possess the secrets. Boileau was of the small number of those; Pope equally." One could not express it better nor more justly. When it is a question of a poet, the composition of his verse is a considerable thing and worthy of study, for it constitutes a great part of his intrinsic value. It is with this stamp his gold, his silver, his copper are coined. The verse of Baudelaire is written according to modern methods and reform. The mobility of the cesura, the use of the mot d'ordre, the freedom of expression, the writing of a single Alexandrine, the clever mechanism of prosody, the turn of the stanza and the strophe—whatever its individual formula, its tabulated structure, its secrets of metre—bear the stamp of Baudelaire's sleight of hand, if one may express it thus. His signature, C. B., claims each rhyme he has made. Among his poems there are many pieces which have the apparent disposition and exterior design of a sonnet, though "sonnet" is not written at the head of each of them. That undoubtedly comes from a literary scruple, and a prosodical conscience, the origin of which seems to us traceable to an article where he recounts his visit to us and relates our conversation. It must not be forgotten that he had just brought us a volume of verses of two absent friends, that he was commissioned to make known, and we remarked these[Pg 53] lines in his narrative: "After having rapidly run through the volume, he remarked to me that the poets in question allowed themselves too often to write libertine sonnets, that is to say unorthodox, willingly breaking through the rule of the quadruple rhyme." At this period the greater part of the "Flowers of Evil" was already composed, and in it there are to be found a large number of libertine sonnets, which not only have the quadruple rhyme, but in which also the rhymes are alternated in a quite irregular manner. The young scholar always allows himself a number of libertine sonnets, and we avow it is particularly disagreeable to us. Why, if one wishes to be free and to arrange the rhyme according to individual fancy, choose a fixed form which admits of no digression, no caprice? The irregular in what should be regular, lack of form in what should be symmetrical—what can be more illogical and annoying? Each infraction of a rule disturbs us like a doubtful or a false note. The sonnet is a sort of poetical fugue in which the theme ought to pass and repass until its final resolution in a given form. One must be absolutely subservient to law, or else, if one finds these laws antiquated, pedantic, cramping, not write sonnets at all. Baudelaire often sought musical effect by one[Pg 54] or more particularly melodious lines recurring alternately, as in the Italian strophe called sextine, of which M. le Comte de Gramont offers in his poetry several happy examples. He applied this form, which has the vague, rocking sound of a magical incantation half heard in a dream, to the subjects of melancholy memory and unhappy loves. The stanzas, with their monotonous rustling, carry and express the thoughts, balancing them as the waves carry on their crests a drowning flower fallen from the shore. Like Longfellow and Poe, Baudelaire sometimes employed alliteration; that is to say, the repetition of a certain consonant to produce in the interior of the verse a harmonious effect. Sainte-Beuve, to whom none of these delicate touches is unknown, and who continually practises them in his exquisite art, has once said in an Italian sonnet of deep gentleness: "Sorrente m'a rendu mon doux reve infini." Any sensitive ear can understand the charm of this liquid sound four times repeated, and which seems to sweep one away to the infinity of a dream, like the wing of a gull in the surging blue of a Neapolitan sea. Alliteration is often to be found in the prose of Beaumarchais, and the Scandinavian poets make great use of it. These trifles will undoubtedly appear frivolous to utilitarians, progressive and practical men who think,[Pg 55] with Stendhal, that verse is a childish form, good for primitive ages, and ask that poetry should be written in prose to suit a reasonable age. Yet all the same, these are details which make verse good or bad, and which make a man a poet or not. Many-syllabled and full-sounding words pleased Baudelaire, and, with three or four of these, he often makes a line which seems immense, the sound of which is vibrant and prolongs the metre. For the poet, words have in themselves, and apart from the meanings they express, intrinsic beauty and value, like precious stones still uncut and not set in bracelets, in necklaces or in rings. They charm the connoisseur who watches and sorts them in the little chalice where they are put in reserve, as a goldsmith would his jewels. There are words of diamond, ruby, sapphire, emerald, and others which glisten phosphorescently when struck. The great Alexandrines of which we have spoken, that come in times of lull and calm to die on the shore in the tranquillity and gentle undulation of the swelling surge, sometimes dash themselves to pieces in the foam and throw up their white spray against the sullen rocks, only to be tossed back immediately into the salt sea. The lines of eight feet are brisk, strong, striking, like a cat-o'-nine-tails, lashing the shoulders of[Pg 56] those who, with a wicked conscience, perform hypocritical actions. They also display strange caprices; the author encases in his metre, as in a frame of ebony, the nightly sights of a cemetery where the eyes of the owls shine in the shadows; and, behind the bronze-green curtains of the yew-trees, slide, with spectral steps, pick-pockets, devastators of tombs, thieves of the dead. In these eight-feet lines he paints sinister skies where, above the gibbet, rolls a moon, grown sickly from the incantations of Canidies. He describes the chill ennui of a dead person, who has exchanged his bed of luxury for the coffin, who dreams in his solitude, starting at each drop of icy rain that filters through his coffin-lid. He shows us, in his curiously disordered bouquet of faded flowers, old letters, ribbons, miniatures, pistols, daggers, and phials of laudanum. We see the room of the coward gallant where, in his absence, the ironical spectre of suicide comes, for Death itself cannot quench the fires of lust. IV From the composition of the verses let us pass to the style. Baudelaire intertwines his silken and golden threads with strong, rude hemp, as in a cloth worked by Orientals, at the same time gorgeous and coarse, where the most delicate ornamentations run in charming caprice on the[Pg 57] fine camel's-hair, or on a cloth coarse to the touch like the sail of a boat. The most delicate, the most precious even, is hurled in with savage brutalities; and, from the scented boudoir and voluptuously languorous conversations, one falls into ignoble inns where drunkards, mixing blood with wine, dispute at the point of their knives for some HÃ©lÃ¨ne from the streets. "The Flowers of Evil" are the brightest gem in Baudelaire's crown. In them he has given play to his originality, and shown that one is able, after incalculable volumes of verse where every variety of subject seems to be exhausted, to bring to light something new and unexpected, without hauling down the sun and the stars, or making universal history file past as in a German fresco. But what has especially made his name famous is his translation of Edgar Poe; for in France little is read of the poet except his prose, and it is the feuilletons that make the poems known. Baudelaire has almost naturalised for us this singular and rare individuality, so pregnant, so exceptional, who at first rather scandalised than charmed America. Not that his work is in any way morally shocking—he is, on the contrary, of virginal and seraphic chastity; but because he disturbed accepted principles and practical common sense, and, also, because there was no criterion by which to judge him. [Pg 58] Edgar Poe had none of the American ideas on progress, perfectibility, democratic institutions, and other subjects of declamation dear to the Philistines of the two worlds. He was not a worshipper of the god of gold; he loved poetry for itself and preferred beauty to utility—enormous heresy! Still, he had the good fortune to write well things that made the hair of fools in all countries stand on end. A grave director of a review or journal—a friend of Poe, moreover, and well-intentioned—avowed that it was difficult to employ him, and that one was obliged to pay him less than others, because he wrote above the heads of the vulgar—admirable reason! The biographer of the author of the "Raven" and "Eureka," said that Edgar Poe, if he had regulated his genius and applied his creative powers in a way more appropriate to America, would have become a money-making author; but he was undisciplined, worked only when he liked, and on what subjects he pleased. His roving disposition made him roll like a comet out of its orbit from Baltimore to New York, from New York to Philadelphia, from Philadelphia to Boston or Richmond, without being able to settle anywhere. In his moments of ennui, distress, or breakdown, when to excessive excitement, caused by some feverish work, succeeded that despondency known to authors, he drank brandy, a fault for which he has[Pg 59] been bitterly reproached by Americans, who, as every one knows, are models of temperance. He was not under any delusion as to the effects of this disastrous vice, he who has written in the "Black Cat" this prophetic phrase: "What illness is comparable to alcohol!" He drank without drunkenness, just to forget, to find himself in a happy mood in regard to his work, or even to end an intolerable life in evading the scandal of a direct suicide. Briefly, one day, seized in the street by an attack of delirium tremens, he was carried to the hospital where he died, still young and with no signs of decaying power. The deplorable habit had had no influence on his intellect or his manners, which remained always those of an accomplished gentleman; nor on his beauty, which was remarkable to the end. We indicate but rapidly some traits of Edgar Poe, as we are not writing his life. The American author held so high a place in the intellectual esteem of Baudelaire that we must speak of him in a more or less developed way, and give, if not an account of his life, at least of his doctrines. Edgar Poe has certainly influenced Baudelaire, his translator, especially during the latter part of his life, which was, alas! so short. "The Extraordinary Histories," "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," "The Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," "Eureka," have been[Pg 60] translated by Baudelaire with so exact a correspondence in style and thought, a freedom so faithful yet so supple, that the translations produce the effect of original work, and are almost perfect. "The Extraordinary Histories" are preceded by a piece of high criticism, in which the translator analyses the eccentric and novel talent of Poe, which France, with her utter heedlessness of the originalities of foreigners, ignored profoundly till Baudelaire revealed them. He brought to bear upon this work, necessary to explain a nature so beyond the vulgar idea, a metaphysical sagacity of the rarest delicacy. The pages may be counted the most remarkable he has ever written. Great excitement was created by these histories, so mathematically fantastic, deduced in algebraical formulÃ¦, and in which the expositions resemble some judiciary led by the most subtle and perspicacious magistrates. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," "The Gold-Bug," enigmas more difficult to divine than those of the Sphinx, and in which the interest, sustained to the very end, excites to delirium the public, surfeited with romances and adventures. One feels deeply for Auguste Dupin, with his strange, divinatory lucidity, who seems to hold between his hands the threads, drawing one to the other, of thoughts most opposed, and who arrives at his conclusions[Pg 61] by deductions of a marvellous correctness. One admires Legrand, cleverer still at deciphering cryptograms than Claude Jacquet, employed by the Ministry, who read to Desmarets, in the history of the "13," the letter deciphered by Ferrango; and the result of this reading is the discovery of the treasures of Captain Kidd! Every one will confess that he would have had to be very clear-sighted to trace in the glimmer of the flame, in the red characters on yellow parchment, the death's-head, the kid, the lines and points, the cross, the tree and its branches, and to guess where the corsair had buried the coffer full of diamonds, jewels, watches, golden chains, ounces, doubloons, dollars, piastres, and money from all countries, the discovery of which recompensed the sagacity of Legrand. The "Pit and the Pendulum" caused terror equal to the blackest inventions of Anne Radcliffe, of Lewis, and of the Rev. Father Mathurin, while one gets giddy watching the tearing whirlpool of the Maelstrom, colossal, funnel-like walls upon which ships run like pieces of straw in a tempest. "The Truth of the Case of M. Waldemar," shakes the nerves even of the most robust, and the "Fall of the House of Usher" inspires profound melancholy. Imaginative natures were deeply touched by the faces of women, so vaporous, transparent, romantically pale, and of almost spiritual beauty,[Pg 62] that the poet named Morelia, Ligeia, Lady Rowena, Trevanion, de Tremaine, Lenore; but who are in reality only the incarnations under different forms of a unique love surviving the death of the adored one. Henceforth, in France, the name of Baudelaire is inseparable from that of Edgar Poe, and the memory of the one immediately awakes thoughts of the other. It seems sometimes that the ideas of the American were really of French origin. Baudelaire, like the greater number of the poets of his time, when the Arts, less separated than they were formerly, mingled more one with another and allowed of frequent transposition, had the taste for, sentiment and knowledge of, painting. He wrote noteworthy articles in the "Salon," and, amongst others, pamphlets on Delacroix, which analysed with clear penetration and subtlety the nature of a great romantic painter. He thought deeply, and we find, in some reflections on Edgar Poe, this significant phrase: "Like our Delacroix, who has raised his art to the height of great poetry, Edgar Poe likes to place his subjects on violet and green backgrounds which reveal the phosphorescence and the fragrance of the storm." How just is this sentiment, so simply phrased, incidental to the passionate and feverish colour of the painter! Delacroix, in effect, charmed Baudelaire by the[Pg 63] "maladie" even of his talent, so troubled, restless, nervous, excitable, and so tormented with uneasiness, melancholy, febrile ardour, convulsive efforts, and the vague dreams of modern times. At one time, the realistic school believed it could monopolise Baudelaire. Certain outrageously crude and truthful pictures in the "Flowers of Evil," pictures in which the poet had not hesitated before any ugliness, might have made some superficial minds think he leaned towards that doctrine. They did not note that these pictures, so-called real, were always ennobled by character, effect, or colour, and also served as a contrast to the smooth and idealistic work. Baudelaire, allowing himself to be drawn by these realists, visited their studios and was to have written an article on Courbet, the painting-master of Ornans, which, however, never appeared. Nevertheless, to one of the later Salons, Fantin, in the odd frame where he united round the medallion of EugÃ¨ne Delacroix, like the supernumeraries of an apotheosis, the painters, and writers known as realists, placed Baudelaire in a corner of it with his serious look and ironical smile. Certainly Baudelaire, as an admirer of Delacroix, had a right to be there. But did he intellectually and sympathetically make a part of this company, whose tendencies were not in accord with his aristocratic tastes and aspirations towards the beautiful? In him, as we have[Pg 64] already said, the employment of trivial and natural ugliness was only a sort of manifestation and protestation of horror; and we doubt if the Venus de Courbet had ever much charm for him, the amateur of exquisite elegance, refined mannerisms, and mannered evasions. Not that he was incapable of admiring grandiose beauty; he who has written "La GÃ©ante" ought to love "The Night" and the "Dawn," those magnificent colossal females that Michelangelo has placed on the voluta of the tombs of the Medici. Baudelaire had, moreover, metaphysical and philosophical tenets which could not but alienate him from this school, to which he had no pretext for attaching himself. Far from being satisfied with reality, he sought diligently for the bizarre, and, if he met with some singular, original type, he followed it, studied it, and learnt how to find the end of the thread on the bobbin and so to unravel it. Thus he was familiar with Guys, a mysterious individual, who occupied his time in going to all the odd corners of the universe where anything was taking place to obtain sketches for English illustrated journals. This Guys, whom we knew, was at one time a great traveller, a profound and quick observer, and a perfect humorist. In the flash of an eye he seized upon the characteristic side of men and things; in a few strokes of the pencil he[Pg 65] silhouetted them in his album, tracing the cursive lines with the pen like a stenographer, and washing them over with a flat tint to indicate the colour. Guys was not what is properly called an artist, but he had the particular gift of sketching the chief points of things rapidly. In a flash of the eye, with an unequalled clear-sightedness, he disentangled from all the traits—just the one. He placed it in prominence, instinctively or designedly, rejecting the merely complementary parts. No one was more reproachful than he of a pose, a "cassure," to use a vulgar word which exactly expresses our thought, whether in a dandy or in a voyou, in a great lady or in a daughter of the people. He possessed in a rare degree the sense of modern corruptions, in high as in low society, and he also culled, under the form of sketches, his flowers of evil. No one could render like Guys the elegant slenderness and sleekness of the race-horse, the dainty border on the skirt of a little lady drawn by her ponies, the pose of the powdered and befurred coachman on the box of a great chariot, with panels emblazoned with the coat of arms, going to a "drawing-room" accompanied by three footmen. He seems, in this style of drawing, fashionable and cursive, consecrated to the scenes of high life, to have been the precursor of the intelligent artists of "La Vie Parisienne," Marcelin, Hadol, Morin, Crafty. But, if Guys[Pg 66] expressed, according to the principles of Brummel, dandyism and the allurements of the duckery, he excelled no less in portraying the venal nymphs of Piccadilly and the Argyle Rooms with their flash toilets and bold eyes. He was not afraid to occupy himself with the deserted lanes, and to sketch there, under the light of the moon or in the flickering glimmer of a gas-jet, a silhouette of one of the spectres of pleasure who haunt the streets of London. If he found himself in Paris, he followed the extreme fashions of the wicked place and what is known as the "coqueterie du ruisseau." You can imagine that Guys sought there only "character." It was his passion, and he separated with astonishing certainty the picturesque and singular side of the types from the allurements and costume of the time. Talent of this kind could not but charm Baudelaire, who, in effect, greatly esteemed Guys. We possessed about sixty drawings, sketches, aquarelles of this humorist, and we gave some of them to the poet. The present gave him great pleasure, and he carried it joyfully away. Certainly he realised all that was lacking in these rough sketches, to which Guys himself attached not the slightest importance once they had been traced on wood by the clever engravers of the "Illustrated London News." But Baudelaire was struck by the spirit, the clear-sightedness,[Pg 67] and powerful observation they displayed, literary qualities graphically translated in the language of line. He loved in these drawings the complete absence of antiquity—that is to say, of classical tradition—and the deep sentiment of what we call "decadence," for lack of a word more expressive of our meaning. But we know what Baudelaire understood by "decadence." Did he not say somewhere, Ã propos of these literary distinctions:—"It seems to me that two women are presented to me; the one a rustic matron, rude in health and virtue, without allurement or worth; briefly, owing nothing except to simple nature; the other, one of those beauties who dominate and fascinate the mind, uniting, with her powerful and original charm, all the eloquence of the toilet, mistress of her bearing, conscious and queen of herself, with a voice of harmonious melody, and dreamy gaze allowed to travel whither it will. My choice cannot be doubted, however many pedagogues reproach me with lack of classical honour?" This so original comprehension of modern beauty turns the question, for it regards antique beauty as primitive, coarse, barbarous; a paradoxical opinion undoubtedly, but one which can be upheld. Balzac much preferred, to the Venus of Milo, a Parisienne Ã©lÃ©gante, delicate, coquettish, draped in cashmere, going furtively on foot to some[Pg 68] rendezvous, her chantilly violet held to her nose, her head bent in such a way as to display, between the brim of her hat and the last fold of her shawl, the nape of a neck like a column of ivory, over which some stray curl glistens in the sunlight. This has its charms; but, for our part, we prefer the Venus of Milo. With such ideas as these one can imagine that for some time Baudelaire was inclined towards the realistic school of which Courbet is the god and Manet the high-priest. But if certain sides of his nature were such as could be satisfied by direct, and not traditional, representation of ugliness, or at least of contemporary triviality, his aspirations for Art, elegance, luxury, and beauty led him towards a superior sphere. And Delacroix, with his febrile passion, his stormy colours, his poetical melancholy, his palette of the setting sun, and his clever expression of the decadence, was, and remained, his master by election. We come now to a singular work of Baudelaire's, half translation, half original, entitled, "The artificial Paradises, Opium and Hashish," and at which we must pause; for it has contributed not a little to the idea among the public, who are always happy in spreading unfavourable reports of authors, that the writer of the "Flowers of Evil" was in the habit of seeking inspiration in these stimulants. His death, following upon a[Pg 69] stroke of paralysis which made him powerless to express the thoughts in his brain, only confirmed this belief. This paralysis, so it was said, came undoubtedly from excess in hashish or opium, to which the poet first gave himself up out of love of peculiarity, and then from that fatal craving these drugs produce. His illness was caused by nothing but the fatigue, ennui, sorrow, and embarrassments inherent in literary people whose talent does not admit of regular work, easy to sell, like journalism, and whose works, by their originality, frighten the timid directors of reviews. Baudelaire was as sober as all other workers, and, while admitting a taste for the creation of an "artificial paradise," by means of some stimulant, opium, hashish, wine, alcohol, or tobacco, seems to follow the nature of man—since one finds it in all periods, in all conditions, in all countries, barbarous or civilised—he saw in it the proof of original perversity, a means of escaping necessary sorrow, a satanical suggestion for usurping, even in the present, the happiness reserved as a recompense for resignation, virtue, and the persistent effort towards the good and the beautiful. He thought that the devil said to the eaters of hashish, the smokers of opium, as in the olden times to our first parents, "If you taste of the fruit you will be as the gods," and that he no more[Pg 70] kept his word than he did to Adam and Eve; for, the next day, the god, tempted, weakened, enervated, descended lower than the beast and remained isolated in an immense space, having no other resource to escape himself than by recourse to his poison, the doses of which he gradually increases. That he once or twice tried hashish, as a psychological experience, is possible and even probable; but he did not make continuous use of it. This happiness, bought at the chemist's and carried in the pocket, was repugnant to him, and he compared the ecstasy that it produced to that of a maniac, for whom painted cloth and coarse decorations replaced real furniture and the garden enriched with living flowers. He came but rarely, and then only as a spectator, to the sÃ©ances at the HÃ´tel Pimodan, where our circle met to take the "dawamesk"; sÃ©ances that we have already described in the "Review of the Two Worlds," under this title: "The Club of the Hashishins." After some ten experiments we renounced once and for all this intoxicating drug, not only because it made us ill physically, but also because the true littÃ©rateur has need only of natural dreams, and he does not wish his thoughts to be influenced by any outside agency. Balzac came to one of these soirÃ©es, and Baudelaire related his visit thus: "Balzac undoubtedly thought that there is no greater shame or keener[Pg 71] suffering than the abdication of the will. I saw him once at a reunion when he was contemplating the prodigious effects of hashish. He listened and questioned with attention and amusing vivacity. People who knew him would guess that he was bound to be interested. The idea shocked him in spite of himself. Some one presented him with the dawamesk. He examined it, smelt it, and gave it back without touching it. The struggle between his almost infantile curiosity and his repugnance for the abdication, betrayed itself in his expressive face; love of dignity prevailed. In effect, it is difficult to imagine the theorist of 'will' the spiritual twin of Louis Lambert, consenting to lose even a particle of this precious substance." We were at the HÃ´tel Pimodan that evening, and therefore can relate this little anecdote with perfect accuracy. Only, we would add this characteristic detail: in giving back the spoonful of hashish that was offered him, Balzac only said that the attempt would be useless, and that hashish, he was sure, would have no action on his brain. That was possible. This powerful brain, in which will power was enthroned and fortified by study, saturated with the subtle aroma of moka, and never obscured by even a few bottles of the lightest of wine of Vouvray, would perhaps have been capable of resisting the passing intoxication of Indian hemp.[Pg 72] For hashish, or dawamesk, we have forgotten to say, is only a concoction of cannabis indica, mixed to a fleshy substance with honey and pistachio-nuts, to give it the consistence of a paste or preserve. The analysis of hashish is medically very well done in the "Artificial Paradises," and science is able to cull from them certain information; for Baudelaire prided himself on his accuracy, and on no consideration whatever would he slur over the least technical ornamentation of this habit in which he had himself indulged. He specifies perfectly the real character of the hallucinations produced by hashish, which of itself creates nothing, simply developing the particular disposition of the individual, exaggerating it to the very last degree. What one sees is oneself, aggrandised, made sensitive, excited, immoderately outside time and space, at one time real but soon deformed, accentuated, enlarged, and in which each detail, with extreme intensity, becomes of supernatural importance. Yet all this is easily understandable to the hashish-eater, who divines the mysterious corres
5097	dbpedia	2	16	https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/06/marvelous-moment-french-writers-artists/	en	A Marvelous Moment for French Writers and Artists \| Julian Barnes	https://www.nybooks.com/…2017/03/nana.jpg	https://www.nybooks.com/…2017/03/nana.jpg	[ "https://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/nyrb081524.jpg?w=360", "https://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/nyrb081524.jpg?w=652", "http://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/barnes_1-040617.jpg", "http://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/barnes_2-040617.jpg", "https://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/nyrb040617.png?w=165", "https://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/nyrb040617.png?w=165", "https://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Art_ParisRevNYRoB_Sum2024.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "JULIAN BARNES" ]	2017-04-06T00:00:00	The close friendship, interaction, and parallelism between writers and artists in nineteenth-century France are the subject of Anka Muhlstein’s The Pen and the Brush. Balzac put more painters into his novels than he did writers, constantly name-checking artists and using them as visual shorthand (old men looked like Rembrandts, innocent girls like Raphaels). Zola, as a young novelist, lived much more among painters than writers, and told Degas that when he needed to describe laundresses he had simply copied from the artist’s pictures. Victor Hugo was a fine Gothicky-Romantic artist in his own right, and an innovative one too, mixing onto his palette everything from coffee grounds, blackberry juice, and caramelized onion to spit and soot.	en	https://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/themes/nyrb_2020/img/favicon.ico	The New York Review of Books	https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/06/marvelous-moment-french-writers-artists/	You see her from a distance, at the end of a long enfilade of rooms. As you approach, you notice that she is already turned toward you. She is in her fortified underwear: a light blue bodice, white slip, light blue stockings; in her raised right hand, a powder puff like a vast carnation. To the left, over a chair, is the blue dress she will soon put on. To the right, though you might not at first observe him, is an impatient, mustachioed figure in evening dress, his top hat still—or already—on his head. But once again, you are aware that she has eyes only for you. She is Manet’s Nana, in the Hamburg Kunsthalle, benefiting from a recent rehang that makes her even more of a cynosure. Nana is the courtesan protagonist of Zola’s 1880 novel of the same name, and you might reasonably assume that Manet’s painting is, apart from anything else, one of the great book illustrations. But it is more interesting than this. Nana first appeared as a minor character in Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877). Manet spotted her there, and painted his portrait of her. When Zola saw it, he realized that, yes indeed, she was worth a novel in her own right. So, far from Manet illustrating Zola, what actually happened was that Zola was illustrating Manet. The close friendship, interaction, and parallelism between writers and artists in nineteenth-century France are the subject of Anka Muhlstein’s The Pen and the Brush. Balzac put more painters into his novels than he did writers, constantly name-checking artists and using them as visual shorthand (old men looked like Rembrandts, innocent girls like Raphaels). Zola, as a young novelist, lived much more among painters than writers, and told Degas that when he needed to describe laundresses he had simply copied from the artist’s pictures. Victor Hugo was a fine Gothicky-Romantic artist in his own right, and an innovative one too, mixing onto his palette everything from coffee grounds, blackberry juice, and caramelized onion to spit and soot, not to mention what his biographer Graham Robb tactfully terms “even less respectable materials.” Flaubert’s favorite living painter (also that of Huysmans’s Des Esseintes) was Gustave Moreau, and his Salammbô is like a massive, bejeweled, wall-threatening Salon exhibit—this being both the novel’s strength and its weakness. Baudelaire, Zola, Goncourt, Maupassant, and Huysmans were excellent art critics (Monet thought Huysmans the best of all). The subject is enormous, and might threaten to go off in every direction. What about photography? And book illustration? And sculpture? What about poets and pictures, both real and imaginary? Anka Muhlstein wisely limits herself to prose writers, and to five who speak to her most clearly: Balzac, Zola, Huysmans, Maupassant, and—a slight chronological cheat—Proust. The result is a personal, compact, intense book that provokes both much warm nodding and occasional friendly disagreement. Of all the arts, writers most envy music, for being both abstract and immediate, and also in no need of translation. But painting might come a close second, for the way that the expression and the means of expression are coterminous—whereas novelists are stuck with the one-damn-thing-after-another need for word and sentence and paragraph and background and psychological buildup in order to heftily construct that climactic scene. On the other hand, it is much easier for writers (and composers, for that matter) to work in subtle, or not-so-subtle, homages to other art forms than it is for painters. Thus Zola gives a friendly nod to Manet in his novel Thérèse Raquin, where a murdered girl in the morgue is described as resembling a “languishing courtesan” offering up her breasts to us, while the black line around her neck (evidence of strangulation) recalls the black ribbon around the neck of Olympia; just to confirm the homage, Zola also includes that rather sinister black cat from the painting. Zola’s public support for Manet and the Impressionists was loud and vigorous, and came at just the right time. (Sometimes there seems to be a logical assembly of rallying forces, at others it is a matter of fortune. When Tom Stoppard spoke at Kenneth Tynan’s funeral, he addressed the critic’s children on behalf of his own generation of playwrights: “Your father,” he told them, “was part of the luck we had.”) Manet certainly expressed his—equally public—gratitude to Zola, painting a celebrated portrait of the novelist at his desk: pinned on the wall behind is a print of Olympia, and clearly visible on the desk is Zola’s pamphlet in praise of the painter. Zola was a forceful, detailed, and brightly colored critic, though he didn’t exactly deal in the quiet hint; art was there to describe and to change society—both his and its functions were combative. If the aesthetic argument shaded into the political, so much the better. Advertisement And Zola could be just as keen on having things both ways as his opponents were. In 1869, when Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian was about to be translated into mass-media form as a lithograph, the authorities banned it. The reasons were clear: the event was a key moment of geopolitical humiliation for Napoleon III’s regime, in which France had abandoned its Mexican puppet to his fate. Zola, in an unsigned article in La Tribune, piously claimed (as had Manet) that the picture was totally nonpolitical, with the subject treated “from a purely artistic point of view.” When this didn’t work, four days later he was pointing out the opposite: the “cruel irony” of Manet’s picture, which could be read as “France shooting Maximilian” (see illustration on page 26). So there was allusion, name-checking, and boosterism, either discreetly worked into fiction or overtly shouted from newspapers. Balzac’s treatment of painters, as Muhlstein points out, is much more admiring than his treatment of his fellow writers. Whereas Daniel d’Arthez, the most significant writer he invented, is “a cold, gray, virtuous character…all his painters are jolly, attractive, unpredictable, and often practical jokers.” This hardly applies, however, to the Balzacian painter who made the most impact on real-life artists: Frenhofer, the protagonist of “The Unknown Masterpiece.” This twenty-page text sets the fictitious Frenhofer (elderly, so inevitably like “a Rembrandt”) against the established, middle-aged Pourbus—court painter to Henri IV—and the aspiring young Poussin. Frenhofer, sole pupil of Mabuse, is the driven genius with impossibly high standards to whom the others defer; for ten years he has been secretly working on a portrait that expresses all he has learned about art. Poussin gulls him into showing it, whereupon the supposed masterpiece is revealed—at least to Poussin’s and Pourbus’s eyes—as “haphazardly accumulated colors contained by a multitude of peculiar lines, creating a wall of paint.” Either Frenhofer’s conception of art is so lofty that it is untranslatable into pigment; or, perhaps, what he has produced is so far ahead of its time that it can be appreciated only centuries later. In a rage (with himself, or the others?), he destroys all his paintings, and dies that night. As a short story, it is somehow both rickety and overdense; as a narrative about the nature of art, it has a grasping intensity, which gave it the longest afterlife of any art fiction of the century. In his translation Anthony Rudolf enumerates the recognition from, and even influence over, Cézanne, Picasso, Giacometti, and de Kooning. (The story was also a great favorite of Karl Marx.) Picasso illustrated a livre d’artiste with choices that suggest, according to Rudolf, that he might not have read the text very carefully. The link between writers and artists in nineteenth-century France was strong and largely cordial. But some writers went further—or imagined, or claimed, they did. Balzac described himself as “a literary painter.” Muhlstein calls Zola a “writer-painter.” Maupassant hymns the superiority of painting over fiction (though he was mainly talking about color). Proust is in Muhlstein’s eyes occasionally a kind of Cubist. Muhlstein charts the sudden irruption of the visual arts into the lives of nonelite Parisians: first, by the opening of the Louvre as a Central Museum of Arts in 1793; later, by the arrival of vast booty from Napoleon’s conquests (and the tenacious holding on to it after the empire fell). It was not just the thrilling, democratic availability of great art that excited writers; it was also that painters were “making it new” as much, if not more so, than writers. So writers now looked at how painters looked. Though Muhlstein’s claim that “the visual novel dates from this period” suggests too much. When was the novel—and before it, poetry—not “visual”? You could say, perhaps, that writers look, whereas painters see. Muhlstein tells of Proust telling of Ruskin telling of Turner: how the English painter once did a drawing of some ships silhouetted against a bright sky and showed it to a naval officer. The sailor indignantly pointed out that the ships’ portholes were missing; the painter demonstrated that, given the light, they were in fact invisible; the officer replied that this might very well be the case, but he knew that the portholes were there. Writers look as hard as they can, but they may well falsely remember a porthole that is missing from the reality in front of them. Whereas painters have it both ways: they might Turnerishly omit the portholes, or choose to put them in, because they can also see what the rest of us can’t. Advertisement Perhaps the social closeness of French writers to painters in the nineteenth century made some of them think of themselves more self-consciously as writer-painters. Some of Muhlstein’s examples are very striking. So, Zola, in Une page d’amour (1877), gives five different descriptions of the same view of Paris, varying by time of day and season: the link to Monet’s (future) sequence-painting seems inescapable. (And he uses the same ploy in L’Oeuvre.) Then there is his picturish fascination with mirrors; and the way he justifies architectural anachronism in a Parisian cityscape because he needs the as-yet-unbuilt Opéra and the as-yet-unbuilt church of Saint-Augustin to give visual structure to his description. But when, for instance, Muhlstein notes parallels in Zola between the representation of landscape and a character’s state of mind, this is not something new to literature: this is the Wordsworthian “egotistical sublime”—or, to take a more local example, the pantheistic trance of Emma Bovary after she has been seduced by Rodolphe in the forest. Contact with painters doubtless suggested new angles of looking and tweaks of lighting. But the book’s subtitle—“How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French Novels”—is overreaching. The fact remains that we don’t read Maupassant for the colors, or Zola for the lighting. We read Zola for the psychological truth, the social observation, and the tragic working-out of determinism. Further, the world of Zola—that “Homer of the sewers,” as the duchess so jauntily puts it in À la Recherche—is essentially one of darkness; the world of Impressionism essentially one of light. While many of France’s nineteenth-century painters, from Delacroix to Monet to Cézanne, were very well read, and some of them drew inspiration from literature, not many of them—with the exception of Odilon Redon (“Writing is the greatest art”)—directly envied the form. As for what they made of their literary friends’ and supporters’ work, there is often more nuance and less full-heartedness in their response than you might expect. Indeed, some, like Van Gogh, writing in 1883, were very unnuanced: “Zola has this in common with Balzac, that he knows little about painting…. Balzac’s painters are enormously tedious, very boring.” Balzac and Delacroix, who met around 1829–1830, initially had much admiration for each another; Balzac dedicated La Fille aux yeux d’or to the painter, and over the years Delacroix copied into his journal twenty pages’ worth of quotes from Balzac, from thirteen different novels. But a cooling-off happened around 1842, and thereafter Delacroix’s opinion of the novelist became harsher. By 1854, four years after Balzac’s death, the painter was fulminating into his journal against the panegyrical preface to Le Provincial à Paris, which boasted of Balzac’s “colossal reputation” and compared him to Molière. (Delacroix seems not to have known that “The Editor” was almost certainly Balzac himself.) And the next day, the painter went into detail: works like Eugénie Grandet hadn’t stood the test of time, he wrote, because of the “incurable imperfection” of Balzac’s talent. “No sense of balance, of structure, of proportion.” You sense that Balzac was usually the wooer, Delacroix the wooed. Also that Balzac perhaps imagined Delacroix to be an artist other than he was. (When a flatterer congratulated him on being “the Victor Hugo of painting,” Delacroix chilled him with the response, “You are mistaken, Monsieur, I am a purely classical artist.”) It was Balzac, rather than the supposedly Romantic Delacroix, who was the more constant dreamer. He imagined giving his lover Mme Hańska Delacroix’s Les Femmes d’Alger—if only he could have afforded it. One of his saddest dreams took place in 1838 when, already on the run from creditors, he decided to build a country house called Les Jardies with a view over the woods of Versailles. His colossal initial plans were quickly scaled back to a “skinny three-storey chalet,” but within it, Balzac carried on dreaming, with everything from electric bells to a fireplace of Carrara marble. And the decor? That too Balzac had planned. As Robb explains in his richly observed biography: The walls were bare except for Balzac’s charcoal graffiti, which became a permanent feature: “Here an Aubusson tapestry.” “Here some doors in the Trianon style.” “Here a ceiling painted by Eugène Delacroix.” “Here a mosaic parquet made of all the rare woods from the Islands.” There was also a charcoal Raphaël facing a charcoal Titian and a charcoal Rembrandt, none of which ever turned into the real thing: all signifiers and no signifieds. Whether Delacroix knew he was down to do a ceiling for the novelist is doubtful. As for Zola, his support for Manet and the Impressionists was much more public, and more publicity-conscious, and the painters were properly grateful. But their response to his L’Oeuvre (1885), the century’s most famous novel about art, was complicated. Its protagonist, Claude Lantier—the brother of Nana—has a succès de scandale at the Salon des Refusés, and founds a plein-air school, but ends up sacrificing fortune, wife, and child for his art. It was loosely assumed for some time that Lantier was based on Cézanne (though Lantier, like Zola, is a “naturalist”); further, that the book’s publication had caused a breach between the two old friends. This theory was based on the last-known letter from Cézanne to Zola, which reads in full: Mon cher Émile, I’ve just received L’Oeuvre, which you were kind enough to send me. I thank the author of the Rougon-Macquart for this kind token of remembrance, and ask him to allow me to wish him well, thinking of years gone by. Ever yours, with the feeling of time passing, Paul Cezanne As Alex Danchev wisely comments in his 2013 edition of the letters: Cézanne’s words have been combed for any hint of telltale emotion—offence, anger, antagonism, rancour, shock, sorrow, bitterness, or merely coolness—as if the letter might contain the key to the rift. This exercise in runecraft has yielded remarkably little, except for wildly varying assessments of these few lines, and a tendency to read back into them the knowledge of what came later. Indeed, it’s not even clear from the letter whether Cézanne had even started reading the novel when he acknowledged its arrival, let alone taken any offense. And as it turned out, this wasn’t the painter’s last letter to the writer: Muhlstein points out that a later one has very recently turned up. Even so, it wouldn’t be fanciful to scent some ambiguity or polite withholding in Cézanne’s words: the more so because such ambiguity was perfectly expressed by Monet, in his letter to Zola. Here is a fuller version than the one Muhlstein gives: How kind of you to send me L’Oeuvre. Thank you very much. I always find it a great pleasure to read your books and this interested me all the more since it raises questions to do with art for which we have struggled for so many years. I have just finished reading it and I have to confess that it left me perplexed and somewhat anxious. You took great care to avoid any resemblance between us and your characters; all the same I am very much afraid that our enemies in the Press and among the general public will bandy about the name of Manet, or at least our names, and equate them with failure, which I’m sure was not your intention. Forgive me for mentioning it. I don’t intend it as a criticism; I read L’Oeuvre with a great deal of pleasure, and every page recalled some fond memory. You must know, moreover, what a fan I am of yours and how much I admire you. My battle has been a long one, and my worry is that, just as we reach our goal, this book will be used by our enemies to deal us a final blow. Forgive me for rambling on, remember me to Madame Zola and thank you again. This is fascinating, for many reasons: the gentleness of the reproach; the similar mention of the “fond memory” evoked by the book, rather than praise for its representation of art and artists; the assumption that the public will identify Lantier with Manet (rather than Cézanne); and perhaps, above all, the sense of vulnerability bordering on paranoia about the damage the novel might do to the cause of Impressionism, which had already been going strong for fifteen years. The fear that a “final blow” might be dealt to the movement—and worse, by a friend and ally, rather than a traditional enemy—is revelatory. When Monet writes of “failure” being associated with the names of the Impressionists, he is also using it in a narrower sense. Lantier exemplifies what Muhlstein calls a “destructive perfectionism”—not unlike Balzac’s Frenhofer (though Zola furiously denied any Balzacian influence). Zola’s friend Paul Alexis, in advance of the writing of L’Oeuvre, noted that the novelist was “planning to explore the appalling psychology of artistic impotence.” Zola himself, writing about the “hysteria” of modern life, noted: Artists are no longer big, powerful men, sane of mind and strong of limb, like the Veroneses and the Titians. The cerebral machine has gone off the rails. Nerves have gained the upper hand, and weak, wearied hands now try to create only the mind’s hallucinations. Lantier, always a slasher of his own canvasses (like Manet, like Cézanne), is a creator with too much ambition, one who, as Zola put it, “fails to deliver his own genius,” and as a result goes mad and kills himself; not a single picture of his survives. Pissarro didn’t think Zola’s book would do much harm to the Impressionists, even if it was “just not a great novel, that’s all”; but you can understand Monet’s “anxiety.” If this was how their great advocate presented his idea of the modern painter—as crazy, destructive, and self-destructive—what might Joseph Publique think? The truth was that most of the Impressionists worked hard and constantly, destroying only what they considered unworthy, and were far from crazy (the malleable myth of Van Gogh had yet to be constructed). The further truth remained that in describing artistic pathology, Zola’s actual model was neither Manet nor Cézanne, but himself. As he put it in his preparatory notes for the novel, “In a word, I will describe my own private experience of creativity, the constant agonizing labor pains; but I will expand the subject with tragedy.” And then—jamais deux sans trois—along came Maupassant to compound the fiction writers’ well-intentioned sinning. Maupassant was also an excellent art critic, sympathetic to and appreciated by the Impressionists. In 1889, three years after L’Oeuvre, he published Fort comme la mort, his most underappreciated novel. Its central figure, Olivier Bertin, is a modern, fashionable society portraitist—a “conservative Impressionist” in Muhlstein’s words—who sounds more than a little like Jacques-Émile Blanche avant la lettre. He is taken into the household of the Comte de Guilleroy; he paints the comtesse’s portrait and, perhaps inevitably—this being a French novel—becomes her lover; the affair lasts ten years, and his portrait of her has pride of place in the house. What could be more suave, more fashionable, more Parisian? Except that the comtesse has a daughter, who grows up to resemble her mother (and therefore the portrait), and as the mother (unlike her portrait) ages, the painter finds himself becoming obsessed by the daughter. Muhlstein mentions a recent theory that Maupassant’s source was a literary one: the rumor that Turgenev, for a long time in a contented ménage à trois with Pauline Viardot and her husband, had fallen disastrously in love with Mme Viardot’s daughter. Certainly, the novel had a literary consequence of some magnitude: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915). Looking back some years later, Ford wrote that “I had in those days an ambition that was to do for the English novel what in Fort comme la Mort Maupassant had done for the French.” He took from Maupassant the idea of violently transgressive passion; also the flaying difference between the easy love of youth and the desperate love of age. As Bertin puts it, trying to understand if not lessen his pain, “It’s the fault of our hearts for not growing old.” Faced with an impossible emotional—and social—dilemma, the painter throws himself beneath the wheels of a bus. And so another sympathetic novelist’s painter dies in torment: you might expect the Impressionists to get up a petition against such repeated libels. Frenhofer, Lantier, Bertin… At least Proust’s Elstir doesn’t go mad and kill himself. Proust’s (and Swann’s) way of looking at pictures avoided addressing the work head-on, instead preferring to comment on which painted characters reminded them of which real people they knew in society. Indirection is all. There is a change of gear in this final section of Muhlstein’s book. Proust himself was more interested in classical than contemporary painting (though he approved of some Impressionists). Elstir—who is first introduced as a young prankster, then vanishes from the narrative for six hundred pages, emerging later as a “major artist”—is barely seen at work. Also, he is confected from many painters, and thus, as Muhlstein says, represents “the artist” rather than “an artist”—though he has many sly groundings in reality. Mme de Guermantes—while at the same time making a sign to the servants to give Marcel some more mousseline sauce for his asparagus—remembers that “Wait now, I do believe that Zola has actually written an essay on Elstir.” (And the asparagus is another hint: Elstir, just like Manet, painted a bunch of them.) However, it is not one of Elstir’s pictures that everyone thinks of in connection with À la Recherche, but rather Vermeer’s View of Delft, “the most beautiful painting in the world,” according to Proust, with its famous little section of “yellow wall.” I confess that the first time I saw this painting I thought it not even the best Vermeer in the show, and then failed for a while to guess which bit of wall I was meant to be looking at. The most likely patch of pigment turned out to be a roof; but confusingly, although the roof was yellow, the thin sliver of actual vertical wall beneath it was more of an orange color (which all somehow confirmed what I had already suspected, that I shall never make a paid-up Proustian). The dying writer, faced with the picture, comments, “This was how I should have written…. My last books are too spare, I should have applied several layers of color, made my sentences precious in themselves, like this little section of wall.” Would this have been a good idea? That question (since the writer is fictional) remains unanswerable. But Bergotte’s words act as a gentle underlining of what Muhlstein’s book often implies: that writers, of all artists, are the most anxious, and the most envious, about other forms of art.
5097	dbpedia	1	14	https://allpoetry.com/Theophile-Gautier	en	Poems by the Famous Poet	https://ap-pics2.gotpoem…3big.jpg?158x190	https://ap-pics2.gotpoem…3big.jpg?158x190	[ "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/863big.jpg?158x190", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/863big.jpg?158x190", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/863.jpg?158x190", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/863.jpg?158x190", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/863.jpg?158x190", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/553.jpg?images1jpg35", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/345.jpg?Sylviaplathjpg", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4911/555.jpg?imagesjpg341", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/321.jpg?downloadjpg978", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4911/817.jpg?104x131", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4911/577.jpg?134x190", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4911/569.jpg?110x128", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/255.jpg?eecummings1jpg", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/411.jpg?156x190", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4911/573.jpg?cbrwotgrmdca10l", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4911/865.jpg?143x190", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/287.jpg?130x190", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/225.jpg?163x190", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/293.jpg?190x188", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4911/505.jpg?EmilyDickinsonj", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4911/547.jpg?download1jpg989", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4911/579.jpg?134x190", "https://ap-pics2.gotpoem.com/ap-pics/user/4912/717.jpg?148x190" ]	[]	[]	[ "Theophile", "Gautier", "poems", "poets", "poetry", "biograpy", "resources", "poet", "books", "comments", "works", "information", "literature" ]	null	[]	null	Poems by Theophile Gautier.	en	/apple-touch-icon.png		null	Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. He is most remembered today for his short stories and his poetry, which represent some of the finest examples of French Romantic literature. Gautier's poetry is characterized by its precise imagery, formal perfection, and evocative language. He was a master of versification and sought to achieve a sense of painterly beauty in his work. Gautier’s commitment to the “art for art’s sake” movement, which emphasized aesthetic beauty over social or moral messages, distinguished his work.
5097	dbpedia	2	57	https://crimefictionlover.com/2018/02/five-of-the-best-french-crime-authors/	en	Five of the best French crime authors	https://crimefictionlove…inVarenne300.jpg	https://crimefictionlove…inVarenne300.jpg	[ "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Cabaret-Macabre_Crime-Fiction-Lover-Ad-.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/01_Zero_Rik_Billboard.png", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Shrouded_billboard.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CFL-Logo-300px.png", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CFL-Logo-300px.png", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/leaderboard_ianmoore.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Blood_Betrayal_leaderboard.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/AntoninVarenne300.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/BernardMinier300.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/PascalGarnier300.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/PierreLemaitre300.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/FredVargas300.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Cabaret-Macabre_Crime-Fiction-Lover-Ad-.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/01_Zero_Rik_Billboard.png", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Shrouded_billboard.jpg", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e03f3406596144ddbe2578eed45bfb17?s=100&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/9f77119a3e4da900306e2e00545c90a7?s=100&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/dc3dea981b8b027dab40e820c10f0c23?s=100&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/30cd3b286c2ac4e67e459f536be361d8?s=100&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/87a52afe1916c398cbd72fdcd77cb2c9?s=100&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/386de3208c0e1c31aa16658587da6f78?s=100&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/ad3e5b330f3e7592ae3bb625d9775732?s=100&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/87a52afe1916c398cbd72fdcd77cb2c9?s=100&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/634f14156b464aa32332ca248e12f2ab?s=100&d=mm&r=g", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Shrouded_leftsquare.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Shrouded_middlesquare.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Shrouded_rightsquare.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/leaderboard_ianmoore.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Blood_Betrayal_leaderboard.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/01_Zero_Rik_Billboard.png", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Shrouded_billboard.jpg", "https://crimefictionlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Cabaret-Macabre_Crime-Fiction-Lover-Ad-.jpg" ]	[ "https://www.youtube.com/embed/19-Yxn4momU" ]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "crimefictionlover", "Elizabeth Bell", "Marina Sofia", "Anwyn Jehler", "Frank Malone", "Christy Cannello", "E A Simmons", "Vicki Weisfeld", "Paul Burke" ]	2018-02-16T16:13:04+00:00		en		Crime Fiction Lover \| The site for die hard crime & thriller fans	https://crimefictionlover.com/2018/02/five-of-the-best-french-crime-authors/	Who’s the best French crime author? Plenty will probably jump to the name Georges Simenon. Although he was Belgian, he set most of his novels in France and enjoyed a prolific career writing stories about his detective Maigret. They’re even on the telly. Those with more of a noir sensibility might point to Jean-Patrick Manchette. They are both a good shout, but here we want to look at the best current French crime authors – writers whose books are coming out in translation and causing excitement in the English-speaking world. France has a great literary tradition, the polar noir is part of that, and you can find plenty more French crime authors here. However, the ones listed below are truly magnifique and deserve your reading attention… 5 – Antonin Varenne This relatively new talent in French crime fiction writes about eccentric characters who face unusual assignments – often by choice. In Bed of Nails, for instance, you’ll meet Richard Guérin whose description sounds a little bit like that of Detective Columbo. He wears a crumpled old raincoat and uses maverick methods, but add to that the fact that he only investigates suicides and has a talking parrot. The interplay between the characters is intriguing and as the story progresses Varenne is not afraid to tackle some darker and existential themes as his outsider characters tread the very edges of polite society. When you’re done with Bed of Nails, take the turnoff onto Retribution Road. Going back to 1852, it’s a very different offering with the action beginning during the Second Anglo-Burmese War. Some readers have likened it to the TV series Taboo… which is a very good thing indeed. 4 – Bernard Minier Atmospheric writing and edge-of-the-seat suspense combine in Bernard Minier’s debut The Frozen Dead to help drive forward a bizarre mystery that takes place in the snowy peaks of the Pyrenees. The crux of it is the body of a decapitated horse, found near a hydroelectric station. The horse was the property of a rich industrialist, but even more peculiar is the discovery of human DNA on the cadaver – that of the notorious Swiss serial killer Julian Hirtmann who is meant to be a resident in a nearby insane asylum. Forensics psychologist Diane Berg is at the heart of things, with Commandant Servaz from the Toulouse police and his assistant Irene Ziegler also investigating. A French production company has turned the book into a crime drama which has been dubbed into English by Netflix, while for readers a sequel is available in the form of Don’t Turn Out the Lights. 3 – Pascal Garnier The ennui of life, a clock ticking down until we die, the tension that lies beneath the surface in every one of us – these are the themes that Pascal Garnier set out to explore in his crime novels and his work is the very epitome of French noir. The writer passed away in 2010, but his books feel very contemporary – mainly because Gallic Press has continued faithfully translating them for English-speaking audiences. The author lived in the mountainous Ardèche region and you might catch a hint of isolation in the stories he wrote. We’ve reviewed three novels here on the site and each has landed a five-star rating. How’s the Pain involves a hitman who wants to retire, The Front Seat Passenger is about a man whose wife is killed in a car accident, and Low Heights is about an elderly man who has retired to the mountains only for bad things to happen up there… As bleak as they sound, Garnier’s books are mixed with a tablespoon or two of black humour and are well worth reading. 2 – Pierre Lemaitre This author’s books have suffered from TOOO syndrome in English, meaning that they were translated out of order. You’ll probably want to start at the beginning of Pierre Lemaitre’s Verhoeven series, so grab yourself a copy of Irène where you’ll meet Commandant Camille Verhoeven who is called to a crime scene where two prostitutes lie dead. ‘The Novelist Murder’ is copying what he reads in famous crime novels like The Black Dahlia and American Psycho. With the book taking its title from the name of Verhoeven’s wife, you can guess where things are heading… The second novel, Alex, was translated to English before Irène. It ramps things up even further, with the author subverting the kidnap-kill MO so often seen in crime novels in a unique way, and the series concludes with Camille, which involves a gang of armed robbers who badly injure someone close to the detective. Lemaitre writes with finesse and is a fine storyteller not shy of describing the bad stuff in graphic detail. But his work is not without nuance and his most recent novel, Three Days and a Life, offers a thorough change of pace, taking place in a down at heel community where a young boy has disappeared. We interviewed him a few years back. 1 – Fred Vargas Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau is the best current French crime author available in English at the moment, and there are two flavours of her writing to choose from. First, there are the novels featuring her series character Commissaire Adamsberg, beginning with The Chalk Circle Man, which came out in 1991 in France and 2009 in translation, winning the CWA’s International Dagger. Dressing completely in black, Adamsberg’s method is somewhat tangential. He has a gift for talking to people, and often picks up as many clues listening to gossip in cafes as he does scrutinising crime scenes. The stories he appears in often have a sinister, superstitious or other-worldly side to them. The Ghost Riders of Ordebec is a good example. If that is Fred Vargas’ rich, dark chocolate flavour, then for some sherbety zing try her Three Evangelists Trilogy. It begins, unsurprisingly, with The Three Evangelists, also an International Dagger winner when translated in 2006. A trio of historians named Marc, Mathias and Lucien set out to solve the mystery of a beech tree that has mysteriously appeared in their neighbour’s garden. Then, she disappears. Marc’s uncle, disgraced detective Armand Vandoosler, eventually comes to the fore. However, in the two subsequent books, Dog Will Have His Day and The Accordionist, it is another retired investigator, Louis Kehlweiler, who becomes the hero as the evangelists themselves drift into the background. Each case is esoteric and thought-provoking, and picks away at the whole idea of a mystery and even why we bother to investigate. Which is pretty interesting in itself…
5097	dbpedia	1	1	https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Theophile_Gautier	en	New World Encyclopedia	https://www.newworldency…avicon-32x32.png	https://www.newworldency…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/images/nwe_header.jpg", "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/d/images/thumb/b/bd/Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier_by_Nadar_c1856-1.jpg/200px-Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier_by_Nadar_c1856-1.jpg", "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/d/images/thumb/d/d6/Th%C3%A9ophil_Gautier_1856_Nadar.jpg/300px-Th%C3%A9ophil_Gautier_1856_Nadar.jpg", "https://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/skins/common/images/Cc.logo.circle.png", "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/resources/assets/poweredby_mediawiki_88x31.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	https://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/favicon.ico		https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Theophile_Gautier	Théophile Gautier Théophile Gautier photographed by Nadar Born: August 30 1811(1811-08-30) Tarbes, France Died: October 23 1872 (aged 61) Neuilly-sur-Seine, France Occupation(s): Writer, poet, painter, art critic Literary movement: Parnassianism, Romanticism Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (August 30, 1811 – October 23, 1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and literary critic whose life spans two major phases in the development of French literature. Gautier was born in the height of French Romanticism; he was a friend of Victor Hugo, and in his early years he wrote poems that effused the highly sentimental and overwrought style of the Romantics. In mid-life, however, Gautier made a dramatic about-face; he became one of Romanticism's fiercest critics, spending most of his time in the middle-period of his career satirizing Romantic poets. By the time he had come into his own as a poet and completely outgrown his youthful Romantic tendencies, Gautier had evolved into an entirely unique voice in French literature. Famous as one of the earliest champions of "Art for art's sake," Gautier's aesthetic attitudes and lean style—reminiscent of Balzac's—would herald a number of developments in late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature, among them the development of the schools of Naturalism and Modernism, as well as French Symbolist and Surrealist poetry. Gautier's eclectic output and changing opinions makes him one of the most protean figures in French literature. He left behind no single magnum opus—whether play, poem, novel, or essay—that defined his opinions and solidified his position amidst his contemporaries. Having lived in a period of major transition in French artistic and literary tastes, it is difficult to characterize Gautier in any of the typical historical periods. Although his output may be in some degrees uneven, Gautier's sheer prolificness, as well as his endless creativity and iconoclasm, makes him one of the most engaging, beguiling, and important literary figures of his era. Life Théophile Gautier was born on August 30, 1811, in Tarbes, capital of Hautes-Pyrénées département in southwestern France. His father, Pierre Gautier, was a fairly cultured minor government official, and his mother was Antoinette-Adelaïde Concarde. The family moved to Paris in 1814, taking residence in the ancient Marais district. Gautier’s education commenced at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris (alumni include Charles Baudelaire and Voltaire), which he attended for three months before being brought home due to illness. Although he completed the remainder of his education at Collège Charlemagne, Gautier’s most significant instruction came from his father, whose love of classical literature inspired Gautier to undertake the study of Latin. While at school, Gautier befriended Gérard de Nerval and the two became lifelong friends. It is through Nerval that Gautier was introduced to Victor Hugo, one of the most influential Romantic writers of the age. Hugo became a major influence on Gautier; it is believed that Hugo convinced him to attempt a career as a writer. Towards the end of 1830, Gautier began to frequent meetings of Le Petit Cénacle, a group of artists who met in the studio of Jehan Du Seigneur. The group was a more young and cynical version of Hugo’s Cénacle, a similar, older group of artists and writers which had a major influence over the development of Romanticism in France. Gautier's Cénacle consisted of such artists as Gérard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, Petrus Borel, Alphonse Brot, Joseph Bouchardy, and Philothée O’Neddy. Le Petit Cénacle soon gained a reputation for extravagance and eccentricity, but also as a unique refuge from society. Gautier began writing poetry as early as 1826, but the majority of his life was spent as a contributor to various journals, mainly for La Presse, which also gave him the opportunity for foreign travel and meeting many influential contacts in high society and in the world of the arts. During his career as a reporter, Gautier became a well-traveled man, taking trips to Spain, Italy, Russia, Egypt, and Algeria. Gautier would later gain a good deal of fame and popularity through his series of travel books, including Voyage en Espagne (1843), Trésors d’Art de la Russie (1858), and Voyage en Russie (1867). Gautier's travel literature is considered by many as some of the best from the nineteenth century, often written in a personal style, providing a glimpse not only of the world, but also of the mind of one of the most gifted writers of the nineteenth century. In 1848, Paris erupted in revolution; King Louis Philippe would be forced to abdicate the throne and, after a period of anarchy and a brief experiment in democratic rule, Louis Napoleon would seize control of France, founding the Second Empire. During these tumultuous days, Gautier wrote at a fever-pitch. 497 newspapers were founded in Paris during the Revolution of 1848, and Gautier participated directly in the explosive growth of French journalism; within nine months, Gautier had written four solid volumes worth of journalism. Following the revolution, Gautier's talents as a journalist would continue to be recognized. His prestige was confirmed by his role as director of Revue de Paris from 1851-1856. During these years Gautier first began to gravitate away from Romanticism; he began to publish essays and editorials that toyed with his idea of "art for art's sake." During these years he also began to develop a serious reputation as a gifted poet. The 1860s were years of assured literary fame for Gautier. Although he was rejected by the French Academy three times (1867, 1868, 1869), Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the most influential critic of the day, set the seal of approval on the poet by devoting no less than three major articles to a review of Gautier’s entire published work in 1863. In 1865, Gautier was admitted into the prestigious salon of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, cousin of Napoleon II and a niece to Bonaparte. The Princess offered Gautier a sinecure as her librarian in 1868, a position which gave him access to the court of Napoleon III. During the Franco-Prussian war, Gautier made his way back to Paris upon hearing of the Prussian advance on the capital. He remained with his family throughout the invasion and the aftermath of the Paris Commune, eventually dying on October 23, 1872, due to a long-standing cardiac disease. Gautier was sixty-two years old. He was interred at the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris. Works Criticism Gautier spent the majority of his career as a journalist at La Presse and later at Le Moniteur universel. He saw journalistic criticism as a means to a middle-class standard of living, although he complained that his work writing for newspapers drained his creative energy and prevented him from writing more poetry. Gautier’s literary criticism is notably poetic, almost lyrical, in nature: His reviews often seem to be as much about Gautier and his own thoughts and tastes as they are about the book or person being reviewed. Nevertheless, in his roundabout way, Gautier always manages to be an insightful and generous critic of many of the writers of his generation. Later in life Gautier also wrote extensive monographs on such giants as Gérard de Nerval, Honore de Balzac, and Charles Baudelaire, which have become touchstones for scholarly work on these figures. Art Criticism: At a very young age Gautier dreamed of becoming a painter, an ambition he did not abandon until he met Victor Hugo and was inspired instead to become a writer. Ironically, despite his early background in the visual arts, Gautier did not contribute a great volume of essays to the world of art criticism. Nevertheless, Gautier is one of the more important figures in the evolution of art criticism in France. Gautier had a peculiar style of art criticism which was, at its time, rather controversial. Strongly influenced by Denis Diderot’s idea that the critic should have the ability to describe the art so as the reader can “see” it through description alone, Gautier wrote art criticism without any reference to the classical principles of line, form, color and so on; rather he attempted, as much as possible, to recreate or "transpose" the painting into prose. Although today Gautier is less well known as an art critic than Baudelaire, he was more highly regarded by the painters of his time. In 1862, he was elected chairman of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts through which he became a close associate of such painters as Eugène Delacroix, Edouard Manet, Gustave Doré, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Theatre Criticism: The majority of Gautier’s career was spent writing a weekly column of theatrical criticism. Because Gautier wrote so frequently on plays, he began to consider the nature of the plays and developed the criteria by which they should be judged. His principles for the structure of drama have gone on to influence a number of playwrights and theater critics in France and abroad. Gautier suggested that the traditional five acts of a play could be reduced to three: an exposition, a complication, and a dénouement. Gautier also attacked the classical idea that tragedy is the superior genre, arguing that comedy was, at its greatest, of equal artistic merit. In addition to this, Gautier argued strongly against "realistic" theater; he believed that theater, as a medium, was best suited to the portrayal of fantasy, and that attempting to mimic reality was simply, in his own words, "undesireable." Early poetry Poésies (1830) Poésies, published in 1830, is a collection of forty-two poems that Gautier composed at the age of 18. However, as the publication took place during the July Revolution, no copies were sold and the volume was eventually withdrawn. In 1832, the poems were reissued, printed in the same volume with Gautier's epic Albertus. Another publication was released in 1845, that included revisions of some of the poems. The most significant aspect of these early poems is that they are written in a wide variety of verse forms, documenting Gautier's wide knowledge of French poetry as well as his attempts to imitate other more established Romantic poets such as Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, and Hugo. Albertus (1831) Albertus, published in 1832, is a long narrative poem of one hundred and twenty-two stanzas, each consisting of twelve lines of alexandrine (twelve-syllable) verse, except for the last line of each stanza, which is octosyllabic. Albertus is a parody of Romantic literature, especially of tales of the macabre and the supernatural. The poems tell a story of an ugly witch who magically transforms at midnight into an alluring young woman. Albertus, the hero, falls deeply in love and agrees to sell his soul, only to discover his mistake—and the hideousness of the witch—after his soul has already been lost. The publication of this poem marks Gautier's sharp turn away from Romantic sentiments. La Comédie de la Mort (1838) La Comédie de la Mort, published in 1838, is a period piece much like Albertus. In this work, Gautier focuses on the theme of death, which for Gautier is a terrifying, stifling, and irreversible finality. Unlike many Romantics before him, Gautier’s vision of death is solemn and portentous, proclaiming death as the definitive escape from life’s torture. During the time this text was written, Gautier was frequenting many cemeteries; France itself was at that time plagued by epidemics, and death was a daily reality in Paris. In the poem, Gautier transforms death into a curiously exhilarating experience that delivers the poet, however briefly, from the gruesome reality of life on earth. Mature poetry España (1845) España is usually considered the transitional volume between the two phases of Gautier’s poetic career. It is a collection of 43 miscellaneous poems inspired by Gautier’s journeys through Spain during the summer of 1840. In these poems, Gautier writes of not only the Spanish language, but also the conventional aspects of Spanish culture and traditions such as music and dance. Emaux et Camées (1852) Emaux et Camées was published when Gautier was touring the Middle-East and is considered to be his supreme poetic achievement. The title, translated, "Enamels and Camoes," reflects Gautier’s abandonment of the Romantic ambition to create a kind of "total" art in favor of a more modern approach which focuses on miniatures, and on the form of poem rather than its content. Emaux et Camees started off as a collection of 18 poems in 1852, but further editions contained up to 47 poems. Plays Between the years 1839 and 1850, Gautier wrote all or part of nine different plays: Un Voyage en Espagne (1843) La Juive de Constantine (1846)—(lost) Regardez mais ne touchez pas (1847)—(written primarily by collaborators) Pierrot en Espagne (1847)—(attribution uncertain) L’Amour soufflé ou il veut (1850)—(unfinished) Théophile Gautier did not consider himself to be dramatist, though he would dabble in the form, motivated primarily by his thoughts on drama that arose from his theater criticism. His plays, unfortunately, saw very few productions. During the Revolution of 1848, many theaters were closed. Most of the plays that dominated the mid-century were written by playwrights who insisted on conformity and conventional formulas and catered to cautious middle-class audiences. As a result, most of Gautier’s rather experimental plays were never published or performed. Novels Mademoiselle du Maupin (1835) In September 1833, Gautier was solicited to write a historical romance based on the life of French opera star Mlle. Maupin, who was a first-rate swordsman and often went about disguised as a man. Originally, the story was to be about the historical la Maupin, who set fire to a convent for the love of another woman, but later retired to a convent herself, shortly before dying in her thirties. The novel was rather popular in Gautier's time for its taboo-breaking subject-matter, but modern critics consider it to be of little interest to contemporary readers. The preface to the novel, however, is considered to be of great importance by scholars, as it is in the preface that Gautier first explicitly states his philosophy of "art for art's sake." In the preface, Gautier argues that art is inherently useless and unreal: "Everything useful," Gautier famously quips, "is ugly;" and art, according to Gautier, is able to transcend the ordinary, "useful," world, thus becoming beautiful. Chronology of Works 1830: Poésies(Volume I) 1831: First article in Le Mercure de France au XIXe siècle 1832: Albertus 1833: Les Jeunes France, roman goguenards 1834-5: Published articles which will later form Les Grotesques 1835-6: Mademoiselle de Maupin 1836: Published "Fortunio" under the title "El Dorado" 1838: La Comédie de la mort 1839: Une Larme du diable 1841: Premiere of the ballet, "Giselle" 1843: Voyage en Espagne, Premiere of ballet, "La Péri" 1845: Poésies(complete) first performance of comedy "Le Tricorne enchanté" 1847: First performance of comedy "Pierrot posthume" 1851: Premiere of the ballet, "Pâquerette" 1852: Un Trio de romans, Caprices et zigzag, Emaux et camées, Italia 1853: Constantinople 1851: Premiere of the ballet, "Gemma" 1855: Les Beaux-Arts en Europe 1856: L’Art moderne 1858: Le Roman de la momie, Honoré de Balzac 1858-9: Histoire de l’art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans 1861: Trésors d’art de a Russie ancienne et moderne 1863: Le Captaine Fracasse, Romans et contes 1865: Loin de Paris 1867: Voyage en Russie 1871: Tableaux de siée 1872: Emaux et camées, Théâtre, Histoire du romantisme References ISBN links support NWE through referral fees Grant, Richard. Théophile Gautier. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. ISBN 0805762132 Richardson, Joanna. Théophile Gautier: His Life and Times. Nabu Press, 2010 (original 1958). ISBN 978-1178076486 Tennant, Phillip Ernest. Théophile Gautier. London: The Athalone Press, 1975. ISBN 0485122049 All links retrieved April 30, 2023.
5097	dbpedia	0	19	https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/95/margot95.htm	en	Margot: #95 (A Jules Verne Centenary)			[ "https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/covers/moonbut.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null	#95 = Volume 32, Part 1 = March 2005 Jean-Michel Margot Jules Verne, Playwright During his lifetime, Jules Verne had only one publisher for his novels, Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814-1886). The most important French publisher of the nineteenth century, Hetzel also published the literary works of Alphonse Daudet, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and Théophile Gautier.1 His stable of illustrators included, among many others, Léon Benett, Emile Bayard, Georges Bertall, Gustave Doré, Eugène Froment, Tony Johannot, and Ernest Meissonier.2 In 1873, Hetzel handed over the management of the publishing company to his son, Louis-Jules Hetzel, who continued to publish Verne’s well-known geographic and scientific novels until he sold the company to the publishing giant Hachette in 1914.3 Although he is best known as a writer of extraordinary adventures, Jules Verne—one of the most translated novelists in the world—was also a prolific playwright. At the age of thirty-four, he achieved international fame with the publication of his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863). Before that, however, the majority of his literary activity was devoted to the theater. Verne’s theatrical productions can be divided into three categories: the plays he wrote during his youth (before he met Hetzel), his operas and operettas, and the pièces à grand spectacle (great spectacle plays) inspired by his novels. Plays written before 1863. Verne’s biographers mention several plays, both tragedies and vaudeville-like comedies, written before he was twenty.4 At age seventeen, Verne supposedly submitted a tragedy in verse to a puppet theater in Nantes, his birthplace. The piece was rejected, which is all that we know of it. The text is lost and even the title is unknown. In 1981, the city of Nantes bought Verne’s manuscripts from the Verne family. To consolidate the copyrights on the unpublished texts, the Municipal Library of Nantes published thirty typed copies of these manuscripts—known as Manuscrits nantais—in three volumes that totalled 1,787 pages. Thus scholars have access to most of the writings of the young Verne, including short plays such as Alexandre VI, La Conspiration des poudres (The Powder Conspiracy), Le Quart d’heure de Rabelais (The Fifteen Minutes of Rabelais), and Don Galaor.5 In 1848—at the age of twenty and still a student—Verne was sent to Paris by his father to attend law school (he graduated in 1850 with a licence en droit). The young Verne’s first priority, however, was to become known in theatrical circles. Through one of his uncles, Verne met Alexandre Dumas père, who “adopted” him and who so impressed him that, forty years later, Alexandre Dumas fils wrote to Verne to say that Verne was, more than himself, the true son of the elder Dumas.6 Dumas opened his Théâtre Historique with La Jeunesse des Mousquetaires (The Youth of the Musketeers) on February 17, 1849, with Verne as a guest in Dumas’s own box. Mentored by Dumas, Verne produced his first staged play, Les Pailles rompues (The Broken Straws), in 1850. Inspired by Marivaux, this short play is a witty and affected conversation between a coquettish woman and her jealous husband.7 In the dedication, Verne expressed his gratitude to Dumas, who obviously helped him both to write the play and to stage it in his theater. After Marivaux, the young playwright took Musset as a model.8 Still exploring various dramatic possibilities, Verne wrote Leonardo da Vinci in 1851, which became Monna Lisa at a reading at the Académie d’Amiens in 1874 and in its first printing in 1974.9 In this bittersweet explanation of the sibylline smile of La Giaconda, Leonardo is so immersed in his art that he forgets the beautiful Lisa, who would so willingly respond to his slightest attention. The description of Leonardo, unskillful with the woman he still loves, is a metaphor for Verne, the shy introvert. Verne himself acknowledged that he was helped in writing the Vinci play by Michel Carré, the prolific librettist, who with Jules Barbier produced many well-known French operas between 1850 and 1870.10 Interestingly, in 1851, Barbier and Carré brought to the Odéon a fantastic drama, Les Contes d’Hoffman (The Tales of Hoffmann). Thirty years later, Jacques Offenbach11 produced his own version—the last and one of the most remarkable French opéras comiques12—and this production inspired Jules Verne’s work on his own Voyage à travers l’impossible (Journey through the Impossible, 1882). In the 1850s, it was common to stage so-called “comedy proverbs,” short pieces that illustrated various proverbs. One such piece written by Verne remained unstaged, but it was published in 1852 in a French family magazine, Le Musée des familles, under the title of Les Châteaux en Californie, ou, Pierre qui roule n’amasse pas mousse (The Castles in California, or, A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss). In this piece, Verne played with words and told jokes that, while perhaps innocent, nevertheless were often full of racy humor. Taking advantage of similar sounding words such as coeur (heart) and queue (tail), Verne inserted many double meanings into his text. The most astonishing fact is that such a play was printed in the serious Musée des familles, whose targeted readership, the French family, necessarily also included children. In Les Heureux du jour (The Happy of the Day, 1853), Verne criticized Parisian society, ridiculing its vanity and greed. His style was already more mature and his writing more solid than in previous works. In Onze jours de siège (Eleven Days of Siege, 1861), Verne returned to vaudeville (light comedy). Learning that her marriage is invalid, Madame refuses to sleep with Monsieur, who keeps her captive. This is a modest plot upon which to hang three acts, but the one-act piece that preceded it—Un Mari à la Porte (A Husband at the Door), written in 1859 by Delacour and Morand and with music by Offenbach—is delightful.13 Robert Pourvoyeur, the specialist in Vernian theater, points out that among the many plays written in the 1850s, several, especially Un Neveu d’Amérique, ou, les deux Frontignac (An American Nephew), demonstrate how Verne’s writing improved (5-30). This play was written in 1861, but it was never staged and it remained unpublished by Hetzel until 1873.14 Based upon the original and hilarious idea of taking out a life annuity and death insurance on the same character, it is without a doubt Verne’s best play. The brilliantly funny yet natural dialogue is delivered at breakneck speed even as it maintains the depth of the characters. By 1861, Verne had fully mastered his talent as a playwright, after having tried out several literary routes (plays, operas, operettas, and opéras comiques). An American Nephew, an excellent satiric work, suggests what kind of playwright Verne could have become with a little more maturity and experience. But Verne’s fateful meeting with Hetzel was just around the corner and Verne’s literary career was destined to explore “Known and Unknown Worlds,” to recall the subtitle of the Voyages Extraordinaires.15 Musical theater. Many scholars and biographers rightly insist on Verne’s strong interest in music. So it is no wonder that the future novelist should insert music into his plays, producing pieces such as operas, operettas, and opéras comiques. In so doing he was completely of his time, since operas were considered, at least in France during the second half of the nineteenth century, to be the highest form of both music and theater. In his novels as well, Verne often makes references to musical pieces, mainly to operas. Characters and narrators in his novels often quote the operas and operettas of his time, some of which are still well known today, while others have been completely forgotten. Pourvoyeur notes eighteen instances in Claudius Bombarnac (1892); even in Propeller Island (1895), several pages are dedicated to Mozart and Gounod’s study of Don Juan (Pourvoyeur 12). Let us now turn our attention to Aristide Hignard, who, like Verne, was born in Nantes.16 Hignard and Verne had apartments on the same floor in Paris. They became friends and Verne wrote the lyrics for Hignard’s music. Although some Verne biographers suggest that Hignard was a talented musician, there is no doubt that, without his friendship with Verne, he would be completely forgotten today. He was also unlucky—like the Marquis of Ivry, who produced Les Amants de Vérone (The Lovers of Verona) in the same year that Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette (Romeo and Juliet) appeared—in writing a Hamlet, his best (or perhaps least worst?) piece in 1868, the same year as the official musician Ambroise Thomas produced an opéra comique, also entitled Hamlet.17 Verne wrote four pieces with Hignard and it is likely that they would have enjoyed greater success if the composer had been, for example, an Offenbach. In the meantime, Dumas lost his Théâtre Historique, which was remodeled and named the Théâtre Lyrique in 1852. The new director, Seveste,18 was looking for a secretary and, on the recommendation of Dumas and Talexy, he hired Jules Verne.19 So, with his first job, Verne was directly confronted with the life of the theater, with the various personalities of its musicians and artists, with financial problems, and with bills to pay. It is likely that he did a good job: in three years some fifty pieces were staged in his theater. Verne’s own first musical piece performed on stage is an opéra comique in one act, Le Colin-Maillard (The Blind Man’s Buff, 1853). Inspired by Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), and with the collaboration of Michel Carré, the plot involves four couples playing the title game in the woods on a Sunday afternoon. Two years later, in 1855, with the collaboration of the same Michel Carré and again with music by Aristide Hignard, Verne produced Les Compagnons de la Marjolaine (The Knights of the Daffodil), another one-act opéra comique. The story is simple: a young ferryman gets over his cowardice—with the help of numerous drinks—to save the woman he loves from being raped. This piece is better than the first one. Verne’s talent for writing lyrics has improved and the text generates the music.20 In 1855, Offenbach opened his own theater in Paris and gave Verne the opportunity to stage his musical Monsieur de Chimpanzé (Mr. Chimpanzee) at Les Bouffes Parisiens. With music by Hignard, this one-act operetta concerns the problem of evolution: is the character in question a human or a monkey? Verne treated this subject in a hilarious, even slapstick, way and he would later tackle it again in his 1901 novel, The Aerial Village. In 1861 Verne was back on stage at the Théâtre Lyrique with another show written with Carré and Hignard, L’Auberge des Ardennes (The Inn of the Ardennes). This opéra comique uses the familiar situation of an inn with no rooms available. A young newlywed wants a room for himself and his bride and the only solution is to frighten another tourist into fleeing and making his room available. Of course, the other tourist is an attorney who has papers which make the newlywed wealthy. If Lecoq, who specialized in comedies about thwarted wedding nights, had written the music instead of Hignard, perhaps L’Auberge des Ardennes would still be on stage today. Plays inspired by the Voyages Extraordinaires. Following the appearance of Verne’s first four novels—Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866)—Verne’s publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel gave them the collective title of Voyages Extraordinaires, announcing this in his Preface to Hatteras.21 Eight years later, on November 7, 1874, Verne suddenly became famous as a playwright as well as a novelist, thanks to his production of Le Tour du monde en 80 jours (Around the World in 80 Days) at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris. This hugely successful production had a first run of 415 performances. After more than ten years as Hetzel’s employee, and barely making a living, Verne became virtually overnight a successful and wealthy playwright. Newspaper and magazine articles written by his contemporaries indicate that he was almost better known during this period as a playwright than as a novelist.22 Why and how could Verne produce such successful plays adapted from his novels? In the 1870s and 1880s, there was no television, no movies, no radio. In cities like Paris, theaters and opera were the only entertainment. The Third Republic wanted to forget the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and the Commune; plays and operas offered the best “escape” entertainment possible. While the dazzling opéra bouffe23 of the Second Empire was being replaced by pleasant bourgeois reductions of republican opéras comiques, fairy plays and pièces à grand spectacle were also flourishing. Around the World in 80 Days24 brought something new and extravagant to the Paris stage: it featured new landscapes, exotic people, live elephants and serpents, natural cataclysms, and strange transportational vehicles for the audience to enjoy without leaving the comfort of their theater seats. The so-called pièce à grand spectacle was born, and for decades Parisians went to see these plays just as the public goes to see blockbuster movies today. Around the World in 80 Days was the most successful of those numerous pièces à grand spectacle of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with more than two thousand performances between 1874 and 1900. For that reason, it is considered to be the prototype of this kind of play. Nothing was neglected, including ballets and music written especially for it, sumptuous sets, and clever machinery. The effects produced by these grand dramatic spectacles were the forerunners of what Hollywood special effects offer to audiences today. How Around the World in 80 Days came to exist is still a controversial point in literary history. The story was first developed in 1872 as a play and not a novel. Although the concept was Verne’s, he wrote the first draft of the play with Edouard Cadol.25 It was rejected by several theater directors. Cadol, who was not easy to work with, became angry and impatient and was soon replaced by Adolphe d’Ennery,26 who was to pièces à grand spectacle what Ray Harryhausen later was to Hollywood special effects. At the end of the nineteenth century in Paris, having the collaboration of d’Ennery was a guarantee of success for any playwright. In the meantime, without any help or input from Cadol, Verne wrote the novel Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1873. It was already a bestseller by the time the play premiered in November 1874.27 As well as Around the World in 80 Days, D’Ennery helped Verne bring several other plays to the stage: Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (The Children of Captain Grant, 1875), Michael Strogoff (1878), and Voyage à travers l’impossible (Journey through the Impossible,1882). The first three are inspired by novels with the same titles and are part of Verne’s series of Voyages Extraordinaires. The last is by far the most interesting and warrants further discussion. Journey through the Impossible is an intriguing play—one that could still be produced today. Unique among Verne’s works for containing the greatest number of science-fiction elements, it is the only one of the four pièces à grand spectacle written with d’Ennery that was not adapted from a previously published Verne novel. Journey through the Impossible is an original story. Unlike most of Verne’s work, and irrespective of its science-fictional features, its plot is not just “extraordinary,” it is wholly impossible. And, as the title suggests, it constitutes a fundamental departure from Verne’s other work.28 In most of Verne’s novels, the heroes never reach their goal: in Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Lidenbrock, Axel, and Hans travel far beneath the Earth’s surface, but never reach the Center. Captain Hatteras and his crew of the Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras are unable to set foot on the North Pole because of a huge, active volcano located there. Barbicane, Nicholl, and Michel Ardan travel From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon without actually landing. For once in Jules Verne’s works, however, all the travelers of Journey through the Impossible reach their goals. Between the prologue and the epilogue, the hero goes to the center of the Earth in the first act, to the bottom of the seas in the second act, and to the Planet Altor in the third. As such, this play stands in stark contrast to everything Verne represents in terms of his legendary attention to scientific verisimilitude. For example, in an interview with the British journalist Gordon Jones in 1904, Verne insisted that he was not a visionary and that the futuristic aspects of his fiction are merely the natural outcome of the scientific trend of modern thought, and as such have doubtless been predicted by scores of others besides myself. Their coming was inevitable, whether anticipated or not, and the most that I can claim is to have looked perhaps a little farther into the future than the majority of my critics. (666) To drive this point home, Verne then contrasted his own approach to that of his literary rival H.G. Wells, saying I consider him, as a purely imaginative writer, to be deserving of very high praise, but our methods are entirely different. I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact.... The creations of Mr. Wells, on the other hand, belong unreservedly to an age and degree of scientific knowledge far removed from the present. (670) And yet here stands the fantastical Journey through the Impossible, a play in three acts, performed over two decades earlier—a play that completely contradicts the above statements! Using the same structure as The Tales of Hoffmann, where the hero has to choose between love and art, Journey through the Impossible dramatizes a struggle between love and knowledge. Its hero is George Hatteras—the son of Captain Hatteras who discovered the North Pole in Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras—who has to choose between love and knowledge, good and evil, happiness and science. The Tempter is Doctor Ox, resurrected by Verne from his short story of the same name. The Guardian Angel is Volsius, who appears in the first act as Otto Lidenbrock, the main character of Journey to the Center of the Earth. In the second act, he appears as Captain Nemo, the main character of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and in the third act as Michel Ardan, traveler From the Earth to the Moon. Inventing no new characters, Verne took existing heroes from the Voyages Extraordinaires and let them travel “through the impossible.” George Hatteras is accompanied by his fiancée, Eva, who shares his adventures—another exception in Verne’s works, where usually the women stay home and send the hero alone on his extraordinary voyage—and helps Volsius to save him from the evil scientific knowledge proffered by Doctor Ox. Journey through the Impossible was written by Verne at a turning point in his life and literary career. In the first half of his life, he wrote novels and plays in which science was a positive good and engineers and scientists worked to improve the future of humanity. The typical character of this first period is Cyrus Smith, the engineer of The Mysterious Island (1875). In the second half of his life, Verne wrote novels (and very few plays) in which science was morally questionable, used as it was by evil characters to create human misfortune in works such as Robur the Conqueror (1886), Master of the World (1904), and The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz (1910). Journey through the Impossible is one of the most intriguing, surprising, and important later works by Jules Verne. It is greatly ironic that the most overtly science-fictional narrative in Verne’s vast oeuvre is a play, not a novel, and that it remains largely forgotten today.29 NOTES 1. Louis Marie Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) was a French novelist of the naturalist literary school. Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), one of the most famous French writers of the nineteenth century, is best known today for historical adventure novels including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. The works of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the great Victorian novelist, are characterized by attacks on social evils, injustice, and hypocrisy. George Sand (1804-1876) was the pseudonym of Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, French Romantic novelist and also a member of the naturalist literary current. Victor Hugo (1802-1885), nineteenth-century France’s most important Romantic writer, is best known in the Anglo-Saxon world for his novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Miserables. Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) was a French poet, novelist, and critic. 2. Léon Benett (1838-1917) was the pseudonym of Hippolyte Léon Benet, French illustrator and civil servant who contributed illustrations to more than twenty-five of Verne’s novels. Emile Bayard (1837-1891) was a French painter and illustrator who was Victor Hugo’s favorite illustrator. Georges Bertall (1820-1882) was the pseudonym of Albert Arnoux, French humorist and illustrator who illustrated works by, among others, Hans Christian Andersen and James Fenimore Cooper. Gustave Doré (1832-1883) was the most popular and successful French illustrator of the mid-nineteenth century, widely known for his illustrations of texts such as Dante’s Inferno, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and the Bible. Eugène Froment (1844-1900) was a French illustrator and engraver. Tony Johannot (1803-1852) was a French illustrator whose drawings enriched the works of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891) was a French academic painter whose works hang today in most of the world’s major museums. 3. One of the most important French publishing companies, Hachette was founded in 1824 and is still in business today. 4. The two best English biographies on Verne are by Jean Jules-Verne and Herbert R. Lottman. 5. The titles of Verne’s novels are given only in English; original French titles with English translations are given for all theatrical works. 6. Alexandre Dumas the younger (1824-1895), French playwright and novelist, was the illegitimate son of Dumas the elder and the chief creator of the nineteenth-century comedy of manners. His first important play, La Dame aux camélias, known in English as Camille, was a sensation. 7. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763), French playwright and novelist, was popular for his numerous comedies, including Love in Livery and The Legacy, which analyze the sentiments and complications of love in a graceful, albeit often precious, style. 8. Alfred de Musset (1810-1857), French Romantic poet and playwright, is best remembered for his poetry. Much influenced by Shakespeare and Schiller, he wrote the first modern dramas in the French language. 9. Situated north of Paris, Amiens is the capital city of the Picardie and the site of the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Verne lived in Amiens during the second half of his life and, as a member of the Municipality and of the local Academy, was one of its most eminent citizens. 10. Michel Carré (1819-1872), a successful French writer of libretti, worked with Gounod, Offenbach, Meyerbeer, and Bizet. Paul Jules Barbier (1825-1901) was a French poet and a prolific librettist. With Carré, he wrote the lyrics of Galatea, Romeo and Juliet, Paul and Virginie, The Queen of Saba, and Gounod’s Faust. 11. Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880), son of a Cologne synagogue cantor, was trained as a violinist at the Paris Conservatoire and initially found employment as a cellist at the Opéra-Comique. He followed this with a successful early career as a virtuoso on the instrument, for which he wrote a number of works, including a concerto militaire and a concertino. Offenbach was conductor at the Théâtre Français for five years, but in 1855 he rented his own theatre, Les Bouffes Parisiens, where his early light-hearted works for the stage were performed. His successful career, devoted largely to operettas and opéras comiques, continued until his death in 1880. 12. The opéra comique (comic opera), an exclusively French style of opera, developed from earlier popular shows performed by troupes entertaining spectators at fairs. An opéra comique consists of spoken dialogue alternating with musical numbers, including arias and orchestral music. The Opéra-Comique theater in Paris was founded in 1715. The repertoire of the opéra comique contains works as well known as Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte, Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, Berlioz’s Les Troyens, Bizet’s Carmen, Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Verdi’s Falstaff, and Debussy’s Pelléas et Melisande. 13. A. Charles Delacour was the pseudonym of Alfred Charlemagne Lartigue (1817-1883). He and Léon Morand (182?-191?) were French librettists. 14. It was probably written with Charles Wallut (1829-?), French writer and director of the Musée des familles (Family Museum) between 1863 and 1881. Un Neveu d’Amérique ou les deux Frontignac is available in a 2004 English translation by Frank Morlock at <http://jv.gilead.org.il/morlock/adopt.html>. 15. Until recently, scholars and journalists could only speculate upon the relationship between Verne and his publisher, on the meager basis of the fictionalized 1928 biography by Marguerite Allotte de la Fuye, Jules Verne, sa vie, son oeuvre. Now three volumes of the letters between Verne and the elder Hetzel have been made available, Correspondance inédite de Jules Verne et de Pierre-Jules Hetzel, edited by Olivier Dumas, Piero Gondolo della Riva, and Volker Dehs. See Arthur B. Evans’s review-essay of these volumes, “Hetzel and Verne: Collaboration and Conflict.” Two more volumes, which will include correspondence between Verne and the younger Hetzel, are scheduled to appear in 2005 and 2006. Taken together, this voluminous correspondence allows a much better understanding of—and raises new questions about—the complex relationship between the publisher and his author. 16. Aristide Hignard (1822-1898), the son of a Nantes ship owner, was a French composer who also taught musical writing; Emmanuel Chabrier was one of his students. 17. Ambroise Thomas (1811-1896) was a French composer of operas. 18. Edmond Sébastien Seveste (?-1852) hired Jules Verne and died shortly afterward. His brother, Jules-Henri (?–1854), took over the direction of the Théâtre Lyrique, but died two years later, leaving Verne unemployed. 19. Adrien Talexy (1821-1880) was a French composer of popular music, mainly polkas and mazurkas. 20. Les Compagnons de la Marjolaine is available in a 2004 English translation by Frank Morlock at <http://jv.gilead.org.il/morlock/knights.html>. 21. This Preface was not included in either the British or American editions of the novel; it remained available only in French until it was translated by Arthur B. Evans and included in his Jules Verne Rediscovered (29-30). 22. See, for example, some of the articles by Verne’s contemporaries collected in my Jules Verne en son temps (2004). 23. Opéra bouffe, originated by Offenbach when he was director of Les Bouffes Parisiens, is a type of witty and cynical lyrical composition that evolved out of the opéra comique and, during the final years of the Second Empire, became the French operetta. That period of transition was characterized by a spirit of easygoing skepticism that seemed to permeate society. Everything was approached with a light heart, possibly to hide any feelings of disquietude caused by the instability of the régime. After the war of 1870 the taste of the public appeared to undergo a change, and the operetta, which combined certain characteristics of the opéra bouffe with those of the older opéra comique, came into vogue. 24. Verne scholars and specialists refer to the novel as Around the World in Eighty Days and to the play as Around the World in 80 Days. 25. Edouard Cadol (1831-1898) was a playwright, a lecture-examiner of the Comédie française, and author of Les Inutiles (1868; The Unnecessaries). 26. Adolphe Philippe (1811-1899), alias Adolphe d’Ennery (also written Dennery), was a playwright whose best known play remains Les Deux orphelines (The Two Orphans). By turn a lawyer’s clerk, a painter, and a journalist, in 1831 he made his début as a dramatist as part author of Emile, ou le fils d’un Pair de France. From that date he was sole or part author of more than 280 plays, no less than five of them having been produced on the Paris stage at one time. He adapted his work to the taste of the public and achieved success upon success, rapidly making a fortune. His plays were written mainly in collaboration with others. Before his death he donated to the state one of his houses, containing a collection of Chinese and Japanese vases of great value. This collection of oriental art gathered by his wife can be seen today at the d’Ennery Museum in Paris. 27. Cadol and Verne each received 25% of the play’s profits, while d’Ennery received 50%. 28. Journey through the Impossible opened in Paris at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin—where Around the World in 80 Days played eight years earlier—on November 25, 1882. The play was presented 97 times (43 in 1882 and 54 in 1883). No original manuscript copy is known to exist and the text was considered lost until a copy was discovered in the Archives of the Censorship Office of the Third Republic in 1978. (The Censorship Office was a heritage of the Second Empire and every play was copied by anonymous clerks before being performed.) 29. An English translation of Journey through the Impossible was published by Prometheus Books in 2003 (<www.prometheusbooks.com>). WORKS CITED Allotte de la Fuye, Marguerite. Jules Verne, sa vie, son oeuvre. Paris: Simon Kra, 1928. Dumas, Olivier, Piero Gondolo della Riva, and Volker Dehs, eds. Correspondance inédite de Jules Verne et de Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1863-1886). 3 Vols. Geneva: Slatkine, 1999-2002. Evans, Arthur B. “Hetzel and Verne: Collaboration and Conflict.” SFS 28.1 (March 2001): 97-106. ─────. Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. Jones, Gordon. “Jules Verne at Home.” Temple Bar 129 (June 1904): 664-71. Jules-Verne, Jean. Jules Verne: A Biography. Trans. Roger Greaves. New York: Taplinger,1976. Lottman, Herbert R. Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Margot, Jean-Michel, ed. Jules Verne en son temps. Amiens: Encrage, 2004. Pourvoyeur, Robert. “Introduction: Jules Verne et le théâtre.” Clovis Dardentor by Jules Verne. Paris: Union générale d’éditions (coll. 10/18, no. 1308), série Jules Verne inattendu, 1979. 5-30. THE THEATRICAL WORKS OF JULES VERNE Titles, in both French and English, are organized chronologically. Annotations include the following information: a) type of work (e.g., comedy, tragedy, opera); b) possible Verne collaborators; c) date and place of the premiere performance; d) number of first-run performances; e) miscellaneous comments; and f) publication information where relevant. MN = Manuscrits nantais, BSJV = Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne 1845 Untitled verse tragedy; for the Puppet Théâtre Riquiqui in Nantes; the text, mentioned in biographies, is lost. Untitled vaudeville piece; only Act 2 remains; published in MN I (51-82). 1847 Alexandre VI; five-act verse tragedy; dated mid-1847; alternate title: Cesar Borgia; published in MN II (441-553). 1848 La Conspiration des poudres (The Powder Conspiracy); five-act verse tragedy; published in MN II (555-725). Une Promenade en mer (An Excursion at Sea); one-act vaudeville piece; published in MN I (83-145). Le Quart d’heure de Rabelais (The Fifteen Minutes of Rabelais); one-act verse comedy; published in MN I (147-71). Don Galaor; one-act comedy; published in MN I (9-20; synopsis only). 1849 Les Pailles rompues (The Broken Straws); one-act verse comedy; possible collaboration with Alexandre Dumas, both père and fils; premiered at the Théâtre Historique on June 12, 1850; 12 or 15 performances through June 25, 1850; revival in Nantes on November 7, 1850; revival at the Théâtre du Gymnase from 1853 to 1857 (45 performances); revival at the Théâtre du Gymnase in 1871 and 1872 (40 performances); published by Beck (1850), and in Revue JV 11 (2001): 33-94. Un Drame sous Louis XV (A Drama under Louis XV); five-act verse tragedy; alternate title: A Drama under the Regency; published in MN II (727-841). Abd’allah; two-act vaudeville piece; published in MN I (39-43; 173-252). Le Coq de bruyère (The Wood Grouse); published in MN I (21-27; synopsis only). On a souvent besoin d’un plus petit que soi (Little Friends May Prove Great Friends); published in MN I (29-37; synopsis only). 1850 La Guimard (The Guimard); two-act comedy; published in MN I (289-360). Quiridine et Quiridnerit (Quiridine and Quiridnerit); three-act “Italian Comedy” in verse; published in MN II (843-956). La Mille et deuxième nuit (The Thousand and Second Night); one-act libretto; music by Aristide Hignard. 1851 Les Savants (The Scholars); three-act “Observation Comedy”; manuscript is lost. Les Fiancés bretons (The Fiancés of Britanny); manuscript is lost. De Charybde en Scylla (From Charybdis to Scylla); comic one-act “Character Study” in verse; published in MN II (957-1005). Monna Lisa (1851-1855); one-act verse comedy; reading at the Academy of Amiens on May 22, 1874; alternate titles: The Jocund, Leonardo da Vinci; published in Cahiers de l’Herne (Paris 1974); published by L’Herne (1995). Les Châteaux en Californie, ou, Pierre qui roule n’amasse pas mousse (Castles in California, or A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss); one-act proverb comedy; collaboration with Pitre-Chevalier; staged in Torino, Italy, on April 28, 1969; published in Musée des familles (June 1852). 1852 La Tour de Montlhéry (Tower of Monthléry); five-act drama; collaboration with Charles Wallut; prologue published in MN I (361-97); complete manuscript is in Amiens, in the former della Riva collection. Le Colin-Maillard (The Blind Man’s Buff); one-act opéra comique; collaboration with Michel Carré; music by Aristide Hignard; premiered at the Théâtre lyrique on April 28, 1853; 45 performances; libretto published by Lévy (1853); score published by Alfred Ikelmer (1853); published in BSJV 120 (1996). 1853 Un Fils adoptif (The Adoptive Son); comedy; collaboration with Charles Wallut; broadcast on French radio on April 5, 1950; published in BSJV 140 (2001); English translation by Frank Morlock available at <http://jv.gilead.org.il/morlock/adopt. html>. Les Compagnons de la Marjolaine (The Knights of the Daffodil); one-act opéra comique; collaboration with Michel Carré; music by Aristide Hignard; premiered at the Théâtre lyrique on June 6, 1855; 24 performances; libretto published by Lévy (1855); published in BSJV 143 (2002); English translation by Frank Morlock available at <http://jv.gilead.org.il/ morlock/knights.html>. Les Heureux du jour (The Happy of the Day, 1853, 1855-1856); five-act comic “Study of Manners” in verse; published in MN II (1007-1136). 1854 Guerre aux tyrans (War to Tyrants); one-act verse comedy; published in MN II (1137-1208). 1855 Au bord de l’Adour (On the Bank of the Adour); one-act verse comedy; published in MN II (1209-55). 1857 Monsieur de Chimpanzé (Mr. Chimpanzee); one-act operetta; possible collaboration with Michel Carré; music by Aristide Hignard; premiered at the Bouffes-Parisiens on February 17, 1858; ran until March 3, 1858; published in BSJV 57 (1981); English translation by Frank Morlock available at <http://www.blackmask.com/books110c/ chimpdex.htm>. 1858 Le Page de Madame Malbrough (Madame Malbrough’s Page); one-act operetta; written under the pseudnoym E. Vierne; music by Frédéric Barbier; premiered at the Théâtre des Folies-Nouvelles on October 28, 1858; alternate title: Une Robe de Madame Malbrough (A Dress of Madame Malbrough). 1859 L’Auberge des Ardennes (The Inn of the Ardennes); one-act opéra comique; collaboration with Michel Carré; music by Aristide Hignard; premiered at the Théâtre lyrique on September 1, 1860 (20 performances); published by Lévy (1860). 1860 Onze jours de siège (Eleven Days of Siege,1854-1860); three-act comedy; collaboration with Charles Wallut; premiered at the Théâtre du vaudeville on June 1, 1861; published by Lévy (1861); English translation by Frank Morlock available at <http://www.blackmask.com/thatway/books129c/elevendex.htm>. 1861 Un Neveu d’Amérique ou les deux Frontignac (An American Nephew, or, The Two Frontignac); three-act comedy; perhaps reworked by Edouard Cadol and Eugène Labiche; premiered at the Théâtre Cluny on April 17, 1873; ran for two months; published by Hetzel (1873); published with with Clovis Dardentor (10/18, 1979). 1867 Les Sabines (The Sabines, 1857, 1867); opéra-bouffe, or two- or three-act operetta (only the first act still exists); collaboration with Charles Wallut; published in MN I (399-438). 1871 Le Pôle Nord (The North Pole); published in MN I (45-48; synopsis only). 1873 Le Tour du monde en 80 jours (Around the World in 80 Days, 1873-1874); five-act pièce à grand spectacle with prologue (15 tableaux); collaboration with Adolphe d’Ennery; music by J.-J. Debillemont; premiered at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on November 7, 1874 (415 performances); published by Hetzel (1879). 1875 Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (The Children of Captain Grant); five-act pièce à grand spectacle with prologue (13 tableaux); collaboration with Adolphe d’Ennery; music by J.-J. Debillemont; premiered at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on December 26, 1878 (113 performances); published by Hetzel (1881). 1877 Le Docteur Ox (Doctor Ox); three-act opéra-bouffe (6 tableaux); libretto by Philippe Gille and Arnold Mortier (with Verne’s approval); music by Jacques Offenbach; premiered at the Théâtre des Variétés (42 performances). 1878 Michael Strogoff; five-act pièce à grand spectacle with prologue (16 tableaux); collaboration with Adolphe d’Ennery; premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet on November 17, 1880 (386 performances); published by Hetzel (1881); English translation by Frank Morlock available at <http://www.blackmask. com/books123c/ strogoffdex.htm>. 1882 Voyage à travers l’impossible (Journey through the Impossible); three-act fantasy pièce à grand spectacle (20 tableaux); collaboration with Adolphe d’Ennery; music by Oscar de Lagoanère; premiered at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on November 25, 1882 (43 performances in 1882; 54 performances in 1883); published in Paris by Pauvert (1981); published in Amherst, NY, by Prometheus Books (2003). 1883 Kéraban-le-Têtu (Keraban the Headstrong); five-act play (20 tableaux); premiered at the Théâtre de la Gaîté lyrique on September 3, 1883 (49 performances); published in BSJV 85-86 (1988). 1887 Mathias Sandorf; five-act pièce à grand spectacle (16 tableaux); libretto by William Busnach and Georges Maurens; premiered at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu (85 performances); published in Paris by Société Jules Verne (1992); published in Pazin, Croatia, by Jules Verne Klub (2002). 1888 Les Tribulations d’un Chinois en Chine (The Tribulations of a Chinese Man in China); the manuscript is lost; collaboration declined by Adolphe d’Ennery. Date Unknown Les Tribulations d’un Chinois en Chine (The Tribulations of a Chinese Man in China); three-act comedy by Claude Farrère and Charles Méré; published in Paris by Hachette (1931). This play was inspired by one of Verne’s novels. Since Verne’s death, there have been many plays and operas based on his novels, such as Henri Varna and Jack Ledru’s Michael Strogoff (1965), Gavin Bryars and Blake Morrison’s Doctor Ox (1998), and Philippe Hersant’s The Castle in the Carpathians (1992). The complete listing of these posthumous productions remains to be written.
5097	dbpedia	0	81	https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18918922-one-of-cleopatra-s-nights-and-other-fantastic-romances	en	One of Cleopatra's Nights and Other Fantastic Romances	https://images-na.ssl-im…87i/18918922.jpg	https://images-na.ssl-im…87i/18918922.jpg	[ "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/siteheaderbannerimages/1723667883i/433.jpg", "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1385256687i/18918922.jpg", "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1385256687i/18918922.jpg", "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/authors/1620282139i/103384._UX200_CR0,32,200,200_.jpg", "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1704884171i/7708524._UX200_CR0,26,200,200_.jpg", "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1628864956i/35564681._UY200_CR33,0,200,200_.jpg", "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1453246877i/5866774._UX200_CR0,0,200,200_.jpg", "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1423720298i/40196289.jpg", "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1358086728i/12039608._UY200_CR33,0,200,200_.jpg", "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1610690787i/37752603._UX200_CR0,0,200,200_.jpg", "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1649829072i/149902385._UX200_CR0,33,200,200_.jpg", "https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1564738242i/100767831._UY200_CR1,0,200,200_.jpg", "https://dryofg8nmyqjw.cloudfront.net/images/badge-apple_app_store@2x.png", "https://dryofg8nmyqjw.cloudfront.net/images/badge-google_play_store@2x.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Théophile Gautier" ]	null	Read 10 reviews from the world’s largest community for readers. This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of v…	en	/favicon.ico	Goodreads	https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18918922-one-of-cleopatra-s-nights-and-other-fantastic-romances	April 30, 2019 A little repetitive, Gautier has a bit of a one track mind although you might see that as the collection being nicely themed. The main issue is Gautier's languidly descriptive style which can be quite infuriating unless your in a very patient mood. Still worth the price of admission for the very early vampire tale Clarimonde, aka La Morte Amoureuse (1836). October 10, 2014 Though hyperbolic to a fault, Gautier's collection of stories showed no shortage of color or vocabulary in its parade of fantastic and seemingly anti-realistic characters. Each tale explores a common theme of impossible love grasped at by different men, each readily asserting that the heart above all else is worth living and dying for. The objects of their affection are just that, described for their physical attributes at lengths that definitely tried my patience, and who show little dimension beyond murderous and/or sexual aims. But, this particular artifact of (mostly) bygone misogyny still showed an expertise with language and ancient times that wholly immersed me in the worlds Gautier created. The tapestries he raises are thick with profusions of vocabulary that scale the loftiest levels of indulgence and posturing. It's fun to watch an obvious master dance so well, but the enjoyment is skin-deep (so to speak) when any social or gender awareness is found wanting. Read June 2, 2014 Gautier is now chiefly known for Mademoiselle de Maupin, and even there the preface - wherein was immortalised that bold slogan of the aesthetics, "art for art's sake" - is better known than the tale itself. A shame, for it's as fine and ridiculous a decadent edifice as one could ever hope to lose oneself inside. These tales...well, hunting in a pack may mean they'll all go hungry. Any one of them, in isolation, might haunt. Taken together, you have half a dozen peculiar young men, each stricken by love for a beautiful woman unattainable through royalty, death or supernatural status (if not some combination of the three). Even read with extensive breaks between stories, the initial sense of strangeness soon becomes a bathetic awareness of the formula. They may feature visions of orgiastic excess, but Gautier's short stories should clearly be taken sparingly. March 15, 2016 I stopped reading this book when the main characters in the first story - One of Cleopatra's Nights - began to seem like nightmare versions of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. The author, Theophile Gautier, paints beautiful word pictures. But no matter how spectacular his imagery, too many passages like the following made it impossible for me to persevere: "The banks [of the Nile] were desolate, a solemn and mighty sadness weighed upon this land, which was never aught else than a vast tomb, and in which the living appeared to be solely occupied in the work of burying the dead. It was an arid sadness, dry as pumice stone, without melancholy, without reverie, without one pearly gray cloud to follow toward the horizon, one secret spring wherein to lave one's dusty feet; the sadness of a sphinx weary of eternally gazing upon the desert, and unable to detach herself from the granite socle upon which she has sharpened her claws for twenty centuries". That's just two sentences worth! November 18, 2022 One of Cleopatra's nights--2 Clarimonde (aka La Morte Amoureuse, aka The Beautiful Vampire, aka The Dreamland Bride)--2 Arria Marcella--2 The mummy's foot--3 Omphale: a rococo story--3 King Candaules--2 *** The nest of nightingales--2 January 21, 2021 Modern English readers may likely find "King Candaules" the most exciting of the stories in terms of the strength of its narrative, but much of Gautier's writing is so compelling because of his spectacular descriptions and elaborate style, which befits the extravagance of the subject matter, especially in "One of Cleopatra's Nights". The shorter stories in between are worth reading for reasons which are unique to each of them, but "Clarimonde" deserves special mention: it is of a genre that is well-known to modern readers, and has to be considered one of the greatest of its kind. April 4, 2021 I read this for a reading challenge and was entertained- well when I remember this was a male from the 1800s, and he had very little idea of what women really wanted or were like. I did read that some of these stories were the first of 'supernatural' love ... where the woman wasn't the victim, the man was. I different look at the world, from a different time. October 8, 2022 This collection has given me complicated & mixed feelings, review to come. November 18, 2022 I love his style and artistic sense. Male perspective, lack of respect for culture I hate.
5097	dbpedia	1	22	https://academic.oup.com/fs/article-abstract/64/2/213/628256	en				[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null
5097	dbpedia	2	20	https://ugapress.manifoldapp.org/read/the-french-enlightenment-in-america-essays-on-the-times-of-the-founding-fathers/section/967db360-d305-4a16-b15e-33bab7b091b8	en				[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	https://ugapress.manifol…a23e4ccb21b3.png		null	Manifold uses cookies We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.
5097	dbpedia	0	39	http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/5271	en	Books about Authors, French -- 19th century -- Biography (sorted by popularity)	http://www.gutenberg.org/pics/logo-144x144.png	http://www.gutenberg.org/pics/logo-144x144.png	[ "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2523/pg2523.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51977/pg51977.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24553/pg24553.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/37635/pg37635.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/20398/pg20398.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16245/pg16245.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18473/pg18473.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/gutenberg/ibiblio-logo.png", "http://www.gutenberg.org/gutenberg/pg-logo-129x80.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "ebook", "ebooks", "free ebooks", "free books", "book", "books", "audio books" ]	null	[]	null	Project Gutenberg offers 74,165 free eBooks for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Android, and iPhone.	en	/gutenberg/favicon.ico	Project Gutenberg	http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/5271
5097	dbpedia	3	83	https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book//lookupid%3Fkey%3Dha001795962	en	The Online Books Page			[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	Listing over 3 million free books on the Web - Updated Wednesday, August 28, 2024 BOOKS ONLINE Search our Listings -- New Listings -- Authors -- Titles -- Subjects -- Serials NEWS Celebrating Many Years of Online Books -- Blog (Everybody's Libraries) -- Latest Book Listings FEATURES A Celebration of Women Writers -- Banned Books Online -- Prize Winners Online ARCHIVES AND INDEXES General -- Non-English Language -- Specialty THE INSIDE STORY About Us -- FAQ -- Get Involved! -- Suggest a Book -- In Progress/Requested -- More Links
5097	dbpedia	1	75	https://books.google.com/books/about/Enamels_and_Cameos.html%3Fid%3DljFWzwEACAAJ	en	Google Books			[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					https://books.google.com/	Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books. My library
5097	dbpedia	2	36	https://qwiklit.com/2013/06/01/le-mot-juste-25-great-french-novels/	en	Le Mot Juste: 25 Classic French Novels	http://www.pierre-marteau.com/images/books/e-1679-0001.gif	http://www.pierre-marteau.com/images/books/e-1679-0001.gif	[ "https://i0.wp.com/www.pierre-marteau.com/images/books/e-1679-0001.gif", "https://i0.wp.com/payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/19605/1803551/candide_cover.jpeg", "https://i0.wp.com/www.meillerie.com/medias/images/la-nouvelle-heloise-page-de-garde-collection-jc-deroudilhe.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/3.bp.blogspot.com/-hylIWOYZfbc/UNEcIJYwdwI/AAAAAAAAAP0/9b1OOKI2bUo/s1600/Les+Liaisons+Dangereuses+cover.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/1.bp.blogspot.com/-oijxok0inCM/T120iO7fJMI/AAAAAAAABXQ/t_36RLX2ewI/s1600/img107.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/www.penguin.com.au/jpg-large/9780140443530.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/cdn101.iofferphoto.com/img/item/193/990/184/the-charterhouse-of-parma-by-stendhal-f2d9a.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/CC_No_03_Count_of_Monte_Cristo.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/www.delphiclassics.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/BALZAC.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/4.bp.blogspot.com/-4c2sDgcLnEk/Tb2WW4ek5vI/AAAAAAAABi0/-JtjpkLF9S0/s1600/flaubert_madame+bovary_tapa+en+franc%25C3%25A9s.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/www.images-booknode.com/book_cover/2748/full/germinal-d-emile-zola-2748432.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/www.penguin.com.au/jpg-large/9780140443158.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71YcApRCL6L._SL1500_.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5nl7dmsSM1r9bdhro1_500.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/www.catscradlebks.net/pictures/2140004.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/2.bp.blogspot.com/-c1sHGyiphIY/USqsB9HC5BI/AAAAAAAAGa4/Qs2cTGgvZ6g/s1600/Les+caves+du+Vatican.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/www.planetebook.com/images/cover/full-size/Book-Cover-Swanns-Way.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/observatory.designobserver.com/media/images/Nadja1_525.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/www.penguin.com.au/jpg-large/9780141183749.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/1.bp.blogspot.com/-uEhkxQdXgAs/UHh2zeJ2vVI/AAAAAAAAARk/6xmB57eA9aI/s1600/Sartre+1938+-+Nausea.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7c6l08xuD1qir0m6o1_1280.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/3.bp.blogspot.com/-Cqolx43x1Vo/T2SAsZ3SGmI/AAAAAAAAHl0/csho2dguzs4/s1600/gigi+and+the+cat.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/1.bp.blogspot.com/-j2Xaa-JAK1U/T0_URuOBj_I/AAAAAAAAAps/xdNueLySuls/s1600/The+Erasers.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/1.bp.blogspot.com/_BseaLMuSYMk/S_L1u-Rt5XI/AAAAAAAAEAo/XKvRt-SSgkY/s1600/perec5.jpg", "https://trashcomplex.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/the-lover.jpeg?w=760", "https://i0.wp.com/ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/714pl0NKA2L._SL1500_.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/media.fontsinuse.com/static/use-media-items/10/9106/upto-700xauto/50e0b394/Map%20and%20Territory%201-2_640.jpeg", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/20f194642f952482dc25d842d4c12d7da29d0d76fc70cb7f5b556b5551a37891?s=140&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/f219a29d5dd3af6c4dfb97e19d448fbb0ea16b56243cbeacec62317465c30f7e?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/8f44d50e63eea06b9c6dab94d45415b8b8794420bab27d6fdcc3482a11b86210?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/b36d225df5fd4979d2768378d3ce1ef4096c4fd363e6cd0f3c304c312ac3a253?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/41c682693c2b2e370a32d848d40e2e1850da5dd60cb941ca1a95eb77df35f0e6?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/255531c2d9bf056c596cfd07c049b69428de14d9877071246c4075ede1d02873?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/8b6f54a4b6b8cfc822405f7a16746e105daafbf9ee9c68085d36c10aac2b65f5?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/46f871cb7ba521410b0766f9c588f44add557087fdff8cdea760f8c9642e9b93?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/4bfa269e72845f23fdaae860eb7e773ec70715189d982de201102592dac99028?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/57ba23d7be0322ec3544b0ecc4f3339c67f29c8c92589daab183f010085eee10?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0f62542b31fffd371f07e5073d77935920a62eeac9d7145e4eda29b25b112428?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0f62542b31fffd371f07e5073d77935920a62eeac9d7145e4eda29b25b112428?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/75e4100482b00e2b993c27d98a562276ee3026cbf5a2d2e8e8c7885607c210fb?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/f72a02bc92f082fb1bff7541cb55ec8252312d8ee7f5d625367ed73d86ff666e?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/13093a18b28a2e7937ed036e60c86963eb7bb80c70f415708acb16bbc6ec4663?s=50&d=identicon&r=G", "https://qwiklit.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/screen-shot-2020-07-29-at-9.43.53-am.png", "http://i.imgur.com/hRA2vtM.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/EtwvrcI.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/69k45qp.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/BeOWiGh.jpg", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1b8eed1668b575bab2ae855f1dda0b35cb261c8ed26bf08407750c0ac8fdf9d0?s=50&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Flogo%2Fwpcom-gray-white.png", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1b8eed1668b575bab2ae855f1dda0b35cb261c8ed26bf08407750c0ac8fdf9d0?s=50&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Flogo%2Fwpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2013-06-01T00:00:00	France has consistently maintained its place as one of the most active hotbeds of literature. Like many other countries, its cultural sphere is devoted to understanding and challenging social mores, and novelists like Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, Camus and Sartre have blended their art with politics, philosophy, sociology. Here is a list of some of the…	en	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1b8eed1668b575bab2ae855f1dda0b35cb261c8ed26bf08407750c0ac8fdf9d0?s=32	Qwiklit	https://qwiklit.com/2013/06/01/le-mot-juste-25-great-french-novels/	France has consistently maintained its place as one of the most active hotbeds of literature. Like many other countries, its cultural sphere is devoted to understanding and challenging social mores, and novelists like Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, Camus and Sartre have blended their art with politics, philosophy, sociology. Here is a list of some of the most influential French novels from the past 350 years: 1. Madame de La Fayette – The Princess of Cleves (1678) One of the very first novels published in France, La Fayette’s exploration of courtly French life during l’Ancien Regime is as remarkable today as it was back then. Deeply psychological and painfully tragic, it follows a young french woman from her entry into court to her inevitable disgracing at the hands of gossiping aristocracy. 2. Voltaire – Candide (1759) Voltaire wrote this philosophical novella after a series of cataclysms, including the Lisbon Earthquake and the Seven Years War, wracked Europe. Several other events put a damper on his personal life, too, and as the adventures of the title character suggest, finding happiness in blind optimism is a harmful way of thinking, as we are just as often the subject of cruel events as we are of good ones. 3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Julie, or The New Heloise (1762) At first cynical of the emerging novel form in England and France, Rousseau sought to modify the philosophical and didactic approach to fiction by suggesting that our human impulses were just as if not more important than our virtuous character. Julie, having chosen to act upon her passions instead of preventing their release, would end up influencing Romanticism and the Novel form for the 19th century and beyond. 4. Pierre Chardelos de Laclos – Dangerous Liaisons (1782) Dangerous Liasons is an epistolary novel written at the height of the form, but the parallel rise of libertinism in France gives this work its particular flavor and lasting qualities. Following the relationship between the seductive Mme de Merteuil and the libertine Valmont, Laclos places us in a time period where the regular conventions of morality and sexuality were, for a brief time, thrown out the window. 5. Marquis de Sade – Justine (1791) The Marquis de Sade is often misinterpreted today as a licentious and pornographic author who defied the boundaries of censorship time and again with graphic descriptions of sex and violence at the hands of libertines and aristocrats. While Justine’s fight to find virtue in a world of vice is tragic and hard to stomach, Sade’s work would end up being read as a precursor to Europe’s defiance toward the Enlightenment’s supposed amorality. 6. Victor Hugo – Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1831) Victor Hugo brought the streets of Paris to life with this epic novel about finding love and compassion in the oddest of places while the rest of the world tries to prevent its very existence. While Hugo’s work is encyclopedic in its descriptions of Gothic architecture and Parisian culture, it is his Romantic outlook of “love overcoming all” that makes Quasimodo’s plight to save Esmeralda all that more memorable. 5. Stendhal – The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) From the battlefield of Waterloo to the aristocratic courts of Milan, Stendhal captured the Zeitgeist of post-Napoleonic Europe from the point of view of its youth, many of whom had trouble finding themselves in such a turbulent world. Stendhal’s biggest innovation, however, was not his subject matter, but rather how he explored it; instead of focusing on the specifics of era and location, he instead sought the internal pressures of forging one’s identity in the performative societies of upper-class Europe. 6. Alexandre Dumas – The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) . The Count of Monte-Cristo was originally written to capture the romantic fever of Napoleonic France that became popular in the 1840’s, but the novel ended up surpassing expectations to become the great revenge novel. When Edmund Dantes escapes from prison after he gets betrayed by the evil Villefort, he commits himself to exact revenge on those who have wronged him. 7. Honore de Balzac – The Human Comedy (1832-1854) Honore de Balzac’s 16-volume work known as The Human Comedy is still seen as one of the landmarks of realist literature, but the exhaustive catalog of Parisian life that is this collection is in itself a marvel worth enjoying. Following the rise and fall of hundreds of varying characters in the French capital, Balzac’s economic approach to man’s internal motivations would end up influencing authors like Charles Dickens and Emile Zola, as well as philosophers like Karl Marx. 8. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary (1856) Arguably the masterpiece of the entire realist genre, Madame Bovary was one of the most finely-wrought pieces of literature of its time, but that didn’t stop it from nearly getting banned for its salacious content. Following Emma Bovary’s tragic need to escape her rural ennui, the novel is both a cautionary tale and an ode to romanticized, forbidden love. 9. Emile Zola – Germinal (1885) Just like Balzac, Emile Zola connected the majority of his novels into one generation-spanning piece of literature. Germinal, probably the most powerful selection from his series The Rougon-Macquart, depicts the brutal strife of the French mining industry during the rise of the Industrial revolution. Following a familiar pattern in French literature, Germinal is graphic, violent and ultimately tragic. 10. Guy de Maupassant – Bel Ami (1885) Although he is more commonly known as a writer of short stories, Maupassant’s Roman-a-clef about the life of a Parisian journalist in the bawdy world of late-nineteenth century France revisits the joys and repulsion of anti-heroic libertinism. The protagonist Duroy was both admired and hated at the time of the novel’s publication, but it is his indifference to common social mores that makes him so unforgettable. 11. Anatole France – The Gods are Athirst (1912) Set at the height of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, Anatole France’s The Gods are Athirst is historical fiction at its best, sublimely describing the conditions of a country at a standstill without turning it into a documentary. What is surprising about this novel is its place among others of its time; far from examining current social conditions, Anatole France is doing what many other European authors would do in the coming decades: look back towards the individual for answers. 12. Alain-Fournier – Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) A book that famed novelist John Fowles claims has “haunted” him all of his life, this mysterious novel from this even more mysterious novelist has shown up in the oddest of places, appearing in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and even being the supposed influence for F.Scott Fitzgerald’s naming of The Great Gatsby. When a 15 year-old boy arrives at a school in the countryside, his adventures to a lost mansion filled with aristocratic extravagance enamors the narrator to no end, yet it marks the pivotal turning point of his youth, where the mysteries of love and the unknown painfully fade away before his eyes. 13. Roger Martin du Gard – Jean Barois (1913) Martin du Gard is seldom read these days in the English-speaking world, but his novel Jean Barois presents us with a strikingly deep meditation upon free will in an era that seems subject to the vicissitudes of history. Jean Barois looks back at the “liberated” figures of bygone France and tries to find his own freedom, but when he chooses to give up his ideals for comfort, it results in his dramatic fall from grace. 14. Andre Gide – The Vatican Cellars (1914) Today’s critics may consider Gide an experimenter of genre and style, but as a man of many a literary medium, it is his mock-epics that are the most memorable and accessible. The Vatican Cellars is about a man who pushes someone from a train and must subsequently suffer the consequences thereof. A satire of the church and common morality, the work would push Gide further towards the fringes, but it is his subversion that now prompts contemporary revisiting of his work. 15. Marcel Proust – Remembrance of Thing’s Past (1913-1927) Marcel Proust’s seven-book masterpiece redefined European literature in ways only Kafka, Joyce and TS Eliot could do. By breaking all conventions of novelistic ‘time’, Remembrance of Things Past is a introspective look at the life of an imaginative and authorial narrator who frequently loses himself in sensory experience and memory. Such séances layer the novel, but within Proust’s impressionist approach to fiction can be found an endless trove of wisdom that has not since been matched. 16. Andre Breton – Nadja (1928) Andre Breton was one of the leading voices in the burgeoning surrealist movement of the 1920’s, and Nadja was one of its most exemplary works. A metafictional story about a man’s ten-day relationship with a woman named Nadja, the novel weaves between experience and fantasy to create confusing but unique work of art. 17. Antoine de Saint Exupery – Southern Mail (1929) While Antoine de Saint-Exupery is better known today for his children’s book The Little Prince, his aviation-themed adventure novels were nevertheless quite popular in the 1930’s. Night Flight is one such example of this; Set in the snowy and mountainous Patagonia region of Argentina, it tells the story of a pilot’s daring attempt to get a piece of mail sent at night during a thunderstorm. One part action and one part philosophical reflection, Saint-Exupery uses the subject matter he knows to create a beautifully cerebral experience. 18. Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea (1938) Jean-Paul Sartre was a philosopher, essayist, critic, playwright and of course, novelist, and his 1944 work about a man in the throes of his own existential crisis helped him reinforce his literary reputation as he rose in popularity. Fortunately, Sartre treats the troubling breakdown and sickness of his character with the slight addition of humor, reminding us that there is little to confirm our existence but the nauseating realization of our own emptiness. 19. Albert Camus – The Stranger (1942) Albert Camus’ short novel about a character coming to terms with the absurdity of his existence while remaining curiously indifferent to his own actions is today regarded as one of great 20th century works of fiction. The anti hero Mersault does not seem to have a care in the world–he’s not sure when his mother died, and also vague about a brazen murder he committed. The Stranger, though, trudges through this “meaningless” world and actually manages to find a positive silver lining to the absurdist conditions of living. 20. Colette – Gigi (1944) Colette had been well-established on the French literary scene for quite some time, but her short novella about a young and naive Parisian woman coerced into the courtship games of her grandmother and great-aunt is a testament to the most prevalent themes in her fiction. Not only does she discuss the superficial vagaries of modern-day courtship, but her lighthearted prose cleverly conceals the biting satire of French society hidden beneath the glossy prose. 21. Alain Robbe-Grillet – The Erasers (1953) Alain Robbe-Grillet would reinvigorate the French literary scene with what he called the “Nouveau Roman”, or novels that use the architecture of fiction to confuse, deceive and force the reader to make close readings of the material. The Erasers is one of the hallmarks of the subgenre. As a detective begins his quest to find the culprit of a series of brazen killings, he soon realizes that not is all as it seems, and that perhaps his oedipal inquiry into the murders will lead him right back to where he began. 22. George Perec – W, or The Memory of Childhood (1975) Following in the footsteps of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Perec crafted his own type of novel using what he called the “Oulipo” method, or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop of potential literature). W is one of his more personal efforts, where his exploration of the past comes in direct conflict with historical narratives that may subsume his own story into oblivion. Drawing on several of the French theorists of the 1960’s and 70’s, his work confronts esoteric topics in a surprisingly playful manner. 23. Marguerite Duras – The Lover (1984) Marguerite Duras achieved high praise and even greater popularity for The Lover, but it was her revelations of the autobiographical nature of the novel that gave it its notoriety. About a 15 year-old girl who engages in an affair with a 27 year-old Chinese magnate, the novel replicates many of Duras’ most common themes–sexuality, desire and the discovery of identity in a world where transcendence is seemingly impossible. 24. Caroline Lamarche – The Day of the Dog (1996) Belgian-born author Caroline Lamarche used the simple image of a dog running through traffic to create an ambitiously-crafted work of fiction. The dog’s movement through a rush-hour traffic jam leads the reader through the stories of the driver who must interminably wait. However, as many other French novels execute so well, the most despairing moments conceal within them the possibility of redemption. 25. Michel Houllebecq – The Map and the Territory Houellebecq’s fiction is without argument some of the most divisive in the world. Harsh but lucid, encyclopedic but humorous, many have berated him in the same places some have championed him. It is difficult to argue against his latest effort, however, as this critique of artistic commercialism explores today’s cynical view of “culture” with a unique, tactful wit few authors in the world can match
5097	dbpedia	1	63	https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/oscar-wilde-in-context/wilde-and-paris/7D7E43CEBBE9FD501D5327279DA99DD2	en	Wilde and Paris (Chapter 6)	https://www.cambridge.or…hare_600x600.jpg	https://www.cambridge.or…hare_600x600.jpg	[ "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/icn_circle__btn_close_white.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.png", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.svg", "https://assets.cambridge.org/97813166/47585/cover/9781316647585.jpg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/page-component/img/share-icon.cbcfad8.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/page-component/img/close-icon.194b28a.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/page-component/img/cite-icon.44eaaa4.svg", "https://static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn%3Acambridge.org%3Aid%3Abook%3A9781139060103/resource/name/firstPage-9781139060103c7_p60-70_CBO.jpg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/cambridge_logo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Kerry Powell", "Miami University", "Peter Raby", "Homerton College" ]	null	Oscar Wilde in Context - December 2013	en	/core/cambridge-core/public/images/favicon.ico	Cambridge Core	https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/oscar-wilde-in-context/wilde-and-paris/7D7E43CEBBE9FD501D5327279DA99DD2	To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle. Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
5097	dbpedia	0	4	https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/authors.html	en	Paris: Capital of the 19th Century			[ "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/banner-90px.gif", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001461.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001466.gif", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001465.gif", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001464.gif", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001458.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001467.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001459.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001463.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001456.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001457.gif", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001460.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001462.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	19th Century Authors The City Observed: Paris in Fiction, Poetry, and Autobiographical works Henry Majewski, Professor Emeritus of French Studies, Brown University Represented here are authors who have written about Paris during the 19th century. Works mentioned below are solely those which portray the capital. Suggestions for additional authors or works are welcomed. Select an Entry: Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850. One of the greatest novelists in the nineteenth century, Balzac proposed to give a portrait of society in its complexity. He attempted to study all levels of his society from the peasants to the aristocrats and find the underlying laws and principles which governed it. His novels, almost 90 in number, include studies of the political, military, economic aspects of society as well as the customs, philosophy and lifestyles of the representative characters he creates. A major section of Balzac's series of novels entitled La Comédie humaine is devoted to studies of life in Paris. They have the subtitle: Scènes de la Vie Parisienne. l. Histoire des Treize: 1. Ferragus (1833). Paris itself is the veritable protagonist of this novel. 2. La Duchesse de Langeais (1833-1834) 3. La Fille aux yeux d'or (1834-35). The novel begins with a detailed description of the city of Paris from a sociological perspective (analysis of the class structure of the city in 1815 when the action takes place). Balzac transforms this presentation into a personal vision of the city as a modern hell. It becomes a series of concentric circles, in which the energy of each class of citizens is dissipated in a destructive effort to move upward from one social category to the next circle of life in Paris. II. Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Décadence de César Birotteau (1837). The story of the rise and fall of the great bourgeois man of the business world during the period of the Restauration (1819-1823). III. La Maison Nucingen (1838). The novel of the great Parisian banking family in the years from 1826 to 1836. IV. Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1839-1847). A study of the life of Parisian courtisanes or high-class prostitutes. It includes a section on the career of a major recurring character in Balzac's novels, Vautrin. He eventually becomes a chief of police after having been a notorious criminal. The sections of this long novel are entitled: 1. "Comment aiment les filles." 2. "À combien l'amour revient aux vieillards." 3. "Ou mènent les mauvais chemins." 4. "La dernière incarnation de Vautrin." V. Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan (1839). VI. Facino Cane (1836). VII. Sarrasine (1831). A short novel about the life of a castrato who sang in the opera in the 18th century. This text became the basis for Roland Barthes' influential study of the role of literary codes in the analysis of narrative in fiction entitled S/Z. VIII. Pierre Grassou (1840). IX. Les Parents pauvres: 1. La Cousine Bette (1846). Balzac's masterpiece about the fall of the great aristocratic family of the Baron Hulot in the period 1838-1844. 2. Le Cousin Pons (1847). Balzac's last completed novel deals in part with music and especially art. A central role is played by the important art collection owned by the protagonist and coveted by his family and others. Balzac's own ideas about painting and the art world are also clearly presented. This novel offers a very bleak portrait of human greed on all levels of society. X. Un homme d'affaires (1845). XI. Un prince de la Bohème (1840). XII. Gaudissart II (1844). XIII. Les Employés (1837). XIV. Les Comédiens sans le savoir (1846). XV. Les petits bourgeois (posthumous, 1854). XVI. L'Envers de l'histoire contemporaine (1842-1846). The story of a group of religious people surviving in an enclave of medieval Paris in a changing world near the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. In some of the other major divisions of La Comédie humaine there are novels situated in Paris. The novels of the Scènes de la vie politique contain at least two of these — Un Épisode sous la Terreur (1830) takes place in 1793, and Une Ténébreuse affaire (1841) during the Restauration and The July Monarchy. XVII. The Études philosophiques: 1. La Physiologie du mariage (1829). Before the concept of the Comédie humaine had taken form, Balzac wrote a series of historical novels and a work entitled La Physiologie du mariage published in 1829. This novel was a kind of sociological study of contemporary marriage that proposed a code of behavior for husbands and wives. It was already based on Balzac's ideas about the influence of milieu and physical conditions on institutions and the lives of individuals. It was considered scandalous at the time because of some of Balzac's recommendations. It is important as an early example of the 19th century tradition of Physiologies, or texts which describe the influence of the physical environment on the individual. 2. La Peau de chagrin (l831). A study of the relationship between desire and human energy that is centered upon a talisman in a Parisian shop of antiques. 3. Le Chef d'œuvre inconnu (l831). This famous study of the painter and his desire to create a perfect masterpiece has inspired many later writers, illustrators, and film makers including Zola and Picasso. Zola's novel entitled L'Œuvre also concerns a painter who is struggling to produce a great painting in spite of his own inherited limitations. Balzac's short novel takes place in 1612 and features historical painters like Poussin and Mabuse. The central argument concerning the relative values of color or line in painting has often been compared to the contemporary debate between the supporters of Delacroix (color) and those who favored Ingres and the classical emphasis on drawing and line. XVIII. Scènes de la vie privée: 1. Le Père Goriot (1834-1835). The great novel about the difficult progress of a young provincial aristocrat, Eugène de Rastignac, in Parisian society. As he follows the young man's rise in the social sphere, the narrator describes life in several different sections of the city in Restauration Paris from 1818 to 1819. The poor quarter in the 5th Arrondissement is the home of the pension Vauquer where Eugène lives with an assortment of Parisian types. Among these is the infamous criminal Vautrin, one of Balzac's major recurring characters. The quarter of the wealthy bankers and the section inhabited by the aristocrats, the area called Saint-Germain, are also presented. 2. Le Colonel Chabert (1832). A study of the difficult return of a soldier of Napoleon's army to Parisian society. It contains an important portrait of contemporary legal practices and lawyers and could be compared to similar descriptions of the legal profession in Dickens. 3. Illusions perdues (1837-1839, 1843). This novel was placed by Balzac in his Scènes de la vie de province but it deals mainly with the life of Lucien de Rubempré, a young provincial aristocrat who comes to Paris to become a poet and find success in the Paris of the Restauration (1819-1823). It presents the worlds of book publishing, journalism, and the aristocratic society which Lucien attempts to enter and which finally rejects him. The story of his downfall is seen in the context of the world of the courtisans and prostitution. His fate in the corrupted atmosphere of the city is contrasted with that of his provincial friend David Suchard, an engraver and sculptor, who remains in the country. The famous character Vautrin plays an important role in one of his later incarnations. This long novel is divided into three parts: 1. "Les deux poètes." 2. "Un grand homme de province à Paris." 3. "Les Souffrances de l'inventeur." [Top] Banville, Théodore Fauillain de, 1823-1891. A prolific poet of the Parnassian school. Among his many collections of poetry and plays is a volume of poems entitled L'Âme de Paris. His best known volume of poetry dealt with the milieu of the clowns in the entertainment world and the circus, Les Odes funambulesques (1857). The theme of the melancholy saltimbanque would become important to Baudelaire and to later painters and artists from the Belle Époque to Picasso. [Top] Barbey D'Aurevilly, J. (Jules), 1808-1889. An important novelist who wanted to be the Walter Scott of Normandy; however, his many novels included studies of aristocratic life in Paris. His major collection of short stories, Les Diaboliques (1871), develops his major theme of the diabolical presence of evil in contemporary society. His pessimistic preoccupation with the corruption of society is often compared to similar thematic concerns in the poetry of Baudelaire. [Top] Barbier, Auguste, 1805-1882. A minor poet who became the political satirist of the July Monarchy. His most important collection of poetry entitled Iambes et poèmes (1831) recalls Andre Chénier and his poems about the French Revolution of 1789; they also anticipate Victor Hugo's bitter criticism of the regime of Napoleon III in Les Châtiments. His collection Iambes includes a poem entitled "Paris." [Top] Barrès, Maurice, 1862-1923. An important novelist, art critic and chronicler of life in France, he moved from a cult of the self and individual energy, to a profound solidarity with his fellow countrymen which can be seen as the basis for strong nationalistic feeling. His most famous novel is Les Déracinés (1897) whose title includes the phrase Le Roman de l'énergie nationale. [Top] Bashkirtseff, Marie, 1860-1884. This painter and writer left an important diary that plays a role in Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième sexe. A Russian aristocrat, she came to France as a child and died young of tuberculosis. [Top] Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867. One of the most important collections of poetry in the 19th century, Les Fleurs du mal (1857) contains many poems concerning the life of the city. The poet is an uneasy witness to the transformations the city is undergoing ("Le Cygne") in its modernization, and celebrates the life of the flâneur who observes his impressions of life in the city as he strolls along the streets and boulevards. The Petits poèmes en prose, originally entitled Le Spleen de Paris, develops the themes of idealism and despair in relation to the poet's daily existence in a city of beauty and suffering. As an important art critic he published annual reviews of the official salons in journals. He admired the painting of Delacroix especially, and has left a valuable account of romantic painting which is presented in L'Art romantique and Curiosités esthétiques published in the complete edition of his works in 1868. In an important essay entitled "Le Peintre de la vie moderne" from Curiosités esthétiques, he defines the modern artist, painter or poet, as one who records the complexity of current life in the city, and makes these observations the substance of his work. He rejects the traditional emphasis in art on classical subjects, history and myth in favor of the richness of contemporary manners and mores. The essay is dedicated to the painter Constantin Guys. Many readers, however, interpret the text as a justification of the painting of Édouard Manet who treated many facets of contemporary life in Paris from the cafés and musical halls to scenes of the street. [Top] Becque, Henry, 1837-1899. A dramatist of the realist school whose plays examine scenes of Parisian life in the tradition of Balzac. He was a very severe critic of his society whose plays include Les Corbeaux (1882), a bitter portrait of the business world; La Parisienne (1886), a satire of bourgeois marriage and love, and Les Polichinelles (1910), an unfinished play dealing with the immorality of the world of finance. His plays offer a dark portrait of French society during the Third Republic. [Top] Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 1780-1857. A Parisian poet who was beloved by the public and many important writers, including Stendhal. He is mainly the author of chansons and minor poems which however reflect the views of the middle class in France from the Napoleonic period to the Second Empire. He played a role in the political life of the times when he was elected to the Assemblée Nationale during the Revolution of 1848. His early reputation as a great poet has not survived. [Top] Berlioz, Hector, 1803-1869. The great composer of the French romantic school wrote his memoirs — Mes Mémoires — published in 1858-1859. This work is an invaluable account of the musical and personal life of a rebellious, romantic musician who struggles to survive and prosper in the artistic world of the monarchy of Louis-Philippe, characterized by its conservative, academic institutions. [Top] Blanchecotte, Auguste 1830-1895. She was a poet from the working class whose first collection of poetry was awarded a prize by the Académie Française (Rêves et réalités, 1855). Her works include Tablettes d'une femme pendant la Commune (1872) and Les Militantes (1875). [Top] Bloy, Léon, 1846-1917. A prolific Catholic writer whose work includes literary studies, autobiographical essays and mystical meditations. Histoires désobligeantes can be considered a portrait of contemporary society. [Top] Boigne, Louise-Eléonore-Charlotte-Adélaide d'Osmond, comtesse de, 1781-1866. She was primarily a memoir-writer whose souvenirs are an important document concerning the history of her time, from the perspective of a woman who was also an aristocrat. Although begun in 1835, her memoirs, Récits d'une tante, were not published until 1907. [Top] Bourget, Paul, 1852-1935. A novelist and essayist who becomes a strong advocate for traditional values — monarchy, Catholicism and nationalism. He represents a conservative view in his anti-Dreyfus stance. He vigorously criticizes contemporary materialism and science, which he condemns for its denial of mystery and the religious bases of morality. His most famous novels are Le Disciple (1889) and L'Étape (1902); the first illustrates his thesis of the recklessness of scientific experiment without moral concerns, and the emptiness of life without religious values; the second, the dangers of democracy and the importance of maintaining traditions. [Top] Céard, Henry, 1851-1924. He was an important literary figure known for his friendship with the naturalist writers and especially Zola, which resulted in a long correspondence published in the complete edition of Zola's letters. His best known story is La Saignée; it deals with his personal experience of the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 and appeared in Les Soirées de Médan. Among his novels is the naturalist work Une belle journée (1891). [Top] Champfleury, 1821-1889. As a novelist and essayist he is remembered most for his defense of realism in art and his friendship with Flaubert. His esthetic ideas are collected in the essays of Le Réalisme (1857); among his novels in the tradition of Balzac, most deal with the people and the lower classes in the provinces. A novel set in the capital is La Mascarade de la vie parisienne (1860). [Top] Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de, 1768-1848. The great master of early romantic literature was known for his exotic novels about Native Americans and his melancholy hero René who became a prototype of the romantic outsider. He did not write about the city of Paris but in his influential treatise on religion, Le Génie du Christianisme, he re-established the value and beauty of gothic art, especially the cathedrals such as Notre-Dame de Paris. In his most celebrated work, Mémoires d'outre-tombe, published posthumously, there are many descriptions of his life in Paris, and his famous literary and political friendships. His political career during the Restauration is presented. This memoir is an essential text as the personal description of the experience of life in the first part of the nineteenth century of an influential writer, traveler and political figure. [Top] Colet, Louise, 1810-1876. A poet and friend of great writers, especially Flaubert, with whom she exchanged an important correspondence. Among her novels is Lui (1859), a fictionalized version of the poet Musset's life in Paris, especially his struggles with alcohol and many love affairs. [Top] Constant, Benjamin, 1767-1830. An important writer and political figure whose novel Adolphe offered the prototype of the suffering romantic hero. He was perhaps the leading exponent of liberalism during his political career; he opposed Napoleon and was an elected deputy during the Restauration. His famous friendships with Madame Récamier and the novelist Madame de Staël have been often studied. His Mémoires sur les Cent-Jours (1820) offer an important portrait of Napoleon's brief return to power in Paris after his first exile. [Top] Corbière, Tristan, 1845-1875. An important poet of the last quarter of the century, his neglected work was recognized by Verlaine who included him in his book on the "poètes maudits" of his time. His only published volume of poetry, Les Amours jaunes (1845-1875), contains a section devoted to poems about Paris. He is considered to be a precursor of the symbolists and modernist experimental poetry. [Top] Daudet, Alphonse, 1840-1897. Known primarily for his stories and plays about Provence, Daudet became a serious chronicler of life in Paris after the Commune. Zola considered him a naturalist who observed and described Parisian manners and morals with precision and insight. The Contes du lundi (1873) present the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune as background for bitter personal experiences. Froment jeune et Risler aîné (1874) and the following novels deal with various aspects of Parisian life: Le Nabab (1877) presents the business world; Numa Rumestan (1881) the world of politicians; L'Immortel (1890), the Académie française; Les Rois en exil (1879), the dissolution of contemporary society. Parallel to Zola he becomes the painter of life during the Second Empire and beyond. Stylistically he has been called an impressionist as well as a naturalist for his sensitive notations of sensations and impressions. [Top] Daumier, Honoré, 1808-1879. The great painter, illustrator and caricaturist of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe and the Second Empire, wrote a personal journal entitled Actualités of great interest due to his perceptive observations of historical events. [Top] Delacroix, Eugène, 1799-1863. The most important painter of the romantic period in France recorded in the Journal his life as a painter in Paris and his relations with many famous artists and writers such as George Sand and Baudelaire. [Top] Du Camp, Maxime, 1822-1894. Known primarily as an important witness of the Second Empire and the society of his time, this great friend of Flaubert wrote travel literature, art criticism, poetry and novels. Les Chants modernes (1855) represents a new social poetry concerned with the industrial revolution and modernity. His novel Les Forces perdues (1867) criticizes the experience of romantic anguish, and predates Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale which it may have influenced. A study of contemporary Paris, Paris, ses organes, ses functions et sa vie (1869) was a great success and earned him election to the Académie française. [Top] Dumas, Alexandre, 1802-1870. The great, prolific popular novelist wrote primarily historical novels and plays which did not deal with contemporary Paris. His very successful play Antony (1831) was one of the first, however, to present the suffering of the anguished romantic hero. One of his last novels is entitled Les Mohicans de Paris (1854). [Top] Dumas, Alexandre, 1824-1895. Son of the popular novelist, he is best known for his novel La Dame aux camélias (1848) which he presented as a drama with the same title. As a dramatist he wrote a series of plays dealing with contemporary life and current issues, such as the demi-monde. The problem of illegitimacy, which is the subject of Les Idées de Madame Aubray (1867), is inspired by his friendship with George Sand and her feminist viewpoint. [Top] Duranty, Edmond, 1833-1880. Novelist, playwright and critic, he was a friend of Zola and wrote controversial reviews of the impressionist painters in a series of "salons." [Top] Duras, Claire de Durfort, duchesse de, 1777-1828. Currently a highly regarded novelist, she is remembered especially for Ourika (1823). Her portrait of a young black woman who is brought to France and suffers the anguish of an impossible, romantic love for a white Frenchman is an early study of an interracial romance. Her other published novel is Édouard (1825). [Top] Duval, Georges, b. 1772. Playwright of comedies who also left souvenirs of the Revolutionary period in Paris — Souvenirs de la Terreur de 1788 à 1793, 4 Vols. (1841). [Top] Faguet, Émile, 1847-1916. A very influential literary critic who maintained academic traditions during his long career and whose work is characterized by a humanistic insistence on the importance of the personality of the writer. He is responsible for the traditional critical methodology referred to as L'homme et l'œuvre. He also wrote essays on political and social issues. [Top] Feydeau, Georges, 1862-1921. This celebrated author of comedies and vaudeville theater satirized the customs and manners of his day. His plays are still widely performed in France and in translation elsewhere. La Dame de chez Maxim (1899) and La puce à l'oreille (1907) are among the best known of his farcical works. [Top] Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880. The great novelist, often considered to be at the origins of modernism in literature, wrote one important novel dealing with Paris, L'Éducation sentimentale (1869). The protagonist of this novel is a version of the dandy or the flâneur. He arrives from the provinces to search for love and success in the city, much like Balzac's Eugène de Rastignac, but he is profoundly bored with existence in the city. He is totally lacking in the energy of Balzac's protagonists and is mainly characterized by his ennui. Ironically, he is absent from the city during the first days of the Revolution of 1848, which he spends in Fontainebleau with his mistress. Nevertheless, Frédéric is an excellent observer of the worlds of the middle class, art and the demi-monde. For many critics this is the essential novel for an understanding of the city at the beginnings of the dominance of the bourgeoisie economically and socially. His other fiction treats primarily subjects taken from history, myth and provincial life. He also left a very important correspondence with many important writers of the day including George Sand. [Top] Fourier, Charles, 1772-1837. An important critic of contemporary society, his utopian thought influenced many writers such as George Sand. He is distinguished from the Saint-Simoniens since he did not propose a radical transformation of the economic life of France; instead he emphasized the need to form small utopian societies called phalansteries where each individual performed necessary tasks and no central authority is needed. He is remembered for his contribution to the ideas of romantic socialism after 1830. [Top] France, Anatole, 1844-1924. He was a poet of the Parnassian School, a novelist and critic whose many books were highly appreciated during his lifetime. A humanist and satirist he is often compared to Voltaire. He won the Nobel Prize for literature and was a strong supporter of Dreyfus. Proust used him as a basis for the character of Bergotte the novelist. The novel M. Bergeret à Paris (1901) features a provincial professor in the city. [Top] Fromentin, Eugène, 1820-1876. He was a painter as well as a novelist and an art critic. His only novel, Dominique (1863), partly takes place in the student milieu of Paris. It is an important novel of romantic, impossible love. His painting is valued for his scenes of Algeria, and his major work of art history, the Maîtres d'autrefois (1876) is still considered to be one of the earliest and most important studies of its kind. [Top] Gautier, Judith, 1845-1917. The daughter of Théophile Gautier, she was a novelist, playwright and famous salonnière. Since she was an oriental scholar her works deal mainly with travel and "exotic" subject matter. [Top] Gautier, Théophile, 1811-1872. He was an important figure in the development of romanticism and the founder of the aesthetic movement in France usually referred to as art for art's sake ("l'art pour l'art"). He is the author of important poetry which marked the beginnings of the Parnassian school of poetry in France, primarily the collection entitled Émaux et Camées (1852). His Poésies complètes, published first in 1844 contains many poems dealing with contemporary Paris. L'Histoire du Romantisme (1872) is a valuable account of Gautier's understanding of the romantic movement in France. It includes portraits of the major literary and artistic figures of the period, and describes some of the principal events in which he participated such as the infamous opening night of Hernani (1830) by Victor Hugo. This play caused a scandal and announced the battle between the classicists and the romantics. He was a prominent member of several groups of young romantics — called cenacles — and wrote a humorous satire of the attitudes and aspirations of the young generation of romantic artists in Paris, entitled Les Jeunes France (1831). [Top] Gay, Sophie, 1776-1852. The mother of Delphine de Girardin, she was a novelist and playwright as well as a salonnière who was famous for her wit. Among her many novels is Un Mariage sous l'Empire (1832). [Top] Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité, comtesse de, 1746-1830. She was a prominent educational writer, novelist and memoir-writer whose views were a mixture of progressive ideas and reactionary attitudes. Among her 80 published works are De l'Influence des femmes sur la littérature française comme protectrices des lettres et comme auteurs (1811). Her 10 volume memoirs were published in 1825. [Top] Girardin, Émile de, Mme., 1804-1855. A successful poet and dramatist, she maintained a famous salon which brought together the major romantic writers of her generation. In her Lettres parisiennes (1836-1848) she chronicled the important events of her time. Her fiction includes La Canne de Monsieur de Balzac (1836). [Top] Goncourt, Edmond de, 1822-1896 [Top] Goncourt, Jules de, 1830-1870 They are usually referred to as the "frères Goncourt" since they composed their works together. The two brothers were very influential writers who were largely responsible for the revival of interest in French 18th century art and letters after a period of neglect. In addition to their important works of art criticism they maintained a Journal which is an invaluable resource for an intimate knowledge of the lives of artists and painters in the second half of the 19th century. It was not published in its entirety until 1956. They established the literary society now called the Académie Goncourt to serve as an alternative to the Académie française, perceived in their time to be excessively conventional and opposed to all new trends including realism and symbolism in art and fiction. The main function of the Academy is to award an annual prize to the best novel of the year. The brothers are also known as novelists who wanted to continue the tradition of Balzac and give a truthful, scientific portrayal in an artistic style of the complex aspects of contemporary society. They did not limit themselves to life in Paris. Their long list of novels includes descriptions of the milieu of medicine (Sœur Philomène, 1861), the middle class (Renée Maupertin, 1864), the world of writers (Charles Demailly, 1860), the lives of artists and painters (Manette Salomon, 1867). After the death of his brother, Jules continued to produce novels which were an artistic documentation of contemporary customs and manners. [Top] Hugo, Victor, 1802-1885. Probably the greatest writer of the romantic era who excelled in all genres: theater, fiction, poetry, memoirs, and was an excellent painter as well. He became a national institution and his funeral in Paris was an event of great proportions. His list of works dealing with Paris is extensive; they cover most of the major events in the 19th century in which he was a participant and prime witness. Among his novels there are several important texts about life in Paris. Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) presents Paris in the Middle Ages; Le Dernier jour d'un condamné (1829) uses new narrative techniques (such as the inner monologue) to study the last day in the life of a prisoner in the infamous Parisian prison of Bicêtre. Claude Gueux (1834) and Les Misérables (1861) offer powerful and sympathetic portrayals of the suffering of the poor people of Paris. Hugo's many volumes of poetry include individual poems that treat the history of France and especially events from the Revolution of 1789 through the Commune in 1871. Throughout the volumes of lyric poetry there are also many poems devoted to the city; in Les Contemplations (1856), for example, is found the masterpiece "Melancholia" which offers a series of portraits of the poor and marginalized inhabitants of Paris, including the poet who is alienated and misunderstood. Hugo also wrote poetry with political themes from the beginning to the end of his career. There are poems glorifying Napoleon and the Revolution of 1889; works dealing with the events of 1830 and 1848 when Hugo played a political role in the life of his country as an elected senator. The poetry about political issues traces his own development from a young royalist in the first collections, to a centrist after 1830, and then a socialist who exiled himself during the entire reign of Napoleon III in the Second Empire. His volume entitled Les Châtiments (1853), preceded by the prose work Napoléon le Petit (1852), offers bitter, strong indictments of the tyranny of the new Emperor's dictatorship. He lived to write about yet another revolution, that of the Commune which he describes in L'Année terrible (1872). Many of his works in prose present his views on the recent history of the city; Choses Vues (posthumous, 1900) is a valuable document offering his perspective on historical figures he knew and important events which he had witnessed himself. Littérature et Philosophie mêlées (1834) is an earlier text in which Hugo also presents portraits of literary figures of his time. Hugo's theater was very influential in establishing the romantic tradition, and the new admiration for Shakespeare, as opposed to the classical French dramatic conventions; it does not deal with contemporary life but presents history plays often dealing with Spain and the Renaissance period in France. [Top] Huysmans, J.-K. (Joris-Karl), 1848-1907. An important novelist and art critic whose work evolved from novels written in the style and philosophy of naturalism. Les Sœurs Vatard (1879) is a portrait like those of Zola, of the unfortunate and underprivileged. He was known as a major writer of the decadence, the disillusioned generation after the Revolution of 1870. His most famous novel À Rebours (1884) has become one of the best illustrations of the decadent temperament. Its protagonist, Des Esseintes, lives a solitary life in a Paris suburb in which he has created a totally artificial existence to counteract the meaninglessness of life. His final novels illustrate his development into a religious and mystical phase. Là-bas (1891), En route (1895) and La Cathédrale (1898) (a glorification of Chartres and Christian symbolism) trace his journey to religious certainty. While his novels deal little with the city of Paris (with the notable exception of À rebours), a collection of sketches aptly entitled Croquis Parisiens proves him to be an astute observer of the capital's social life and customs. [Top] Janin, Jules Gabriel, 1804-1874. He is best known as a witty critic of theater and Parisian life whose most important work was his series of newspaper articles appearing weekly in the Journal des Débats. An important chronicle of the literary history of his time, they were published together in 1858 under the title Histoire de la littérature dramatique. He also wrote studies of writers and actors like Alexandre Dumas and the celebrated actress Rachel. His prose works about Parisian customs include Un été à Paris (1843), Les Beautés de l'opéra (1844); L'Américain à Paris (184?) is concerned with the theme of the flâneur in the city. [Top] Jarry, Alfred, 1873-1907. As a playwright he is best known for Ubu-roi (1896) a satire of the bourgeoisie and the monarchy which became an important precursor of the theater of the absurd. [Top] Jaurès, Jean, 1859-1914. He was a leading socialist thinker, a director of the French workers' mouvement , and probably the greatest orator of the 3rd Republic. His major writings are articles and essays on socialism, the Dreyfus affair, and the history of revolution in France. His Histoire socialiste appeared from 1901-1908. [Top] Kahn, Gustave, 1859-1936. An important poet in the symbolist school, he produced many volumes of poetry influenced by Baudelaire and Verlaine as well as art criticism. A dramatic poem in one act entitled La Pépinière du Luxembourg was published in 1923. [Top] Kock, Paul de, 1793-1871. He and his son, Henri, wrote many successful light comedies and vaudeville characterized by their bourgeois taste and clever observations of contemporary life and customs in Paris and its suburbs. A typical example of his boulevard style comedy is La Pucelle de Belleville (1834). He also wrote a series of sketches of Parisian life. [Top] Krysinska, Marie, 1857-1908. She came to Paris from Poland at the age of 16. Primarily a poet she is credited to be the first to develop free verse in France. She died in poverty. Her collected works include Rythmes pittoresques (1890) and Joies errantes (1894). [Top] La Tour du Pin Gouvernet, Henriette Lucie Dillon, marquise de, 1770-1853. She left an important memoir that describes her youth at Court, her experiences during the Revolution, emigration and life under Napoleon. Journal d'une femme de cinquante ans was first published in 1906. [Top] Labiche, Eugène, 1815-1888. An excellent playwright of comedies and vaudeville who produced one hundred plays about French life and manners. [Top] Laforgue, Jules, 1860-1887. He was an important member of the symbolist school of poetry who published in contemporary journals and is remembered for melancholic, ironic poems in collections like Les complaintes (1885). [Top] Lamartine, Alphonse de, 1790-1869. Lamartine is considered the first great poet of the romantic era. His collection Les Méditations poétiques (1820) inaugurated a new kind of poetic sensibility; melancholic, religious, escapist, forever seeking an impossible love and refuge in nature. His successive collections reaffirmed his position as the great French romantic poet, but have little to do with Paris. However, he also had an important political career and became the provisional president of the Second Republic after the Revolution of 1848. He incarnated the romantic ideal of the poet, a spiritual leader and humanitarian guide of the people. His term was brief because he was unable to act decisively and choose between the right and the left politically. His most important prose work L'Histoire des Girondins (1848) was very popular and influential at the time of the Revolution of 1848; it was a political manifesto presenting the Girondin group of the first Revolution (1879), a centrist party of moderation, as a kind of model for political action. In 1849 after his fall from power he published L'Histoire de la Revolution de 1848. He prepared a series of autobiographical works called Les Confidences after 1849. He also wrote novels that are strongly personal in nature, especially Raphaël (1849). They present the point of view of the poet- politician during this time of revolution and change. [Top] Leroux, Pierre, 1797-1871. The romantic philosopher who proclaimed himself a socialist exerted an important influence on Hugo and especially George Sand in her utopian, socialist novels. His influential writings included De l'Égalité (1838) and De l'Humanité (1840). He played a role in the Revolution of 1848 but always insisted on the need for solidarity among the classes instead of conflict. He was primarily for the elevation of the poorer classes through reform not violence, and advocated democratic principles to favor the extension of property to the proletariat, not the abolition of traditional values like the followers of Saint-Simon. [Top] Lévi, Eliphas, 1810-1875. He was one of the mystic, occultist thinkers who influenced the romantic writers, especially Victor Hugo in his later religious works such as La Fin de Satan. He and a circle of his friends, including Esquiros, were known as les Illuminés, the theosophists of their time. La Clef des grands mystères (1869) is typical of his work. [Top] Lorrain, Jean, 1855-1906. A poet and novelist usually considered as a member of the decadent school, he was influenced by Baudelaire and the symbolist poets. He is best known for his novel M. De Phocas (1901) that seems to be modeled on the life of the elegant dandy and friend of Proust, Robert de Montesquiou. He also wrote a series of memoirs entitled Poussières de Paris (1899). They are a valuable source of portraits and documents that illustrate the mentality of the fin de siècle. [Top] Loti, Pierre, 1850-1923. Loti was a well-known novelist whose works are primarily about travel to lands considered exotic at the time. He did not write about the city, but his works illustrate the desire for escape from contemporary society characteristic of the fin de siècle temperament. Pêcheur d'Islande (1886) and Madame Chrysanthème (1887) about Japan (the source for Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly), are major examples. [Top] Mallarmé, Stéphane, 1842-1898. One of the greatest French poets, he was a leader of the symbolist school and wrote rich, complex works with little attention to the city. He did, however, edit a journal about current fashion in 1874 and 1875, La Dernière mode, which is a precious document presenting the great poet and dandy's reactions to contemporary Parisian style in clothes, furniture and jewelry. [Top] Maupassant, Guy de, 1850-1893. He is celebrated for his short stories about his native province, Normandy, and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. He also has a cycle of Parisian short stories in which he depicted the world of the working middle class (La Parure, En Famille), or the world of leisure (Yvette, La Femme de Paul). He is also the author of important novels which make him the contemporary Balzac; he presents the life of the ambitious opportunist in Bel-Ami (1885) in a historical portrait of Parisian life like those of Balzac. The protagonist has indeed been called the Rastignac of the Third Republic. Other important novels are Pierre et Jean (1888) which treats the world of middle class shopkeepers, and Fort comme la mort (1889); it presents the loves of a contemporary painter. [Top] Meilhac, Henri, 1831-1897. A popular playwright of light comedies who collaborated with the composer Offenbach on several operettas such as La Vie Parisienne (1867). He wrote several plays that dealt seriously with customs of fin de siècle Paris (Tricoche et Cacolet, 1872). [Top] Mérimée, Prosper, 1803-1870. He was a very important writer of short fiction and plays during the romantic period. He frequented the other famous writers of his time in Paris, but is best known for his stories with a foreign or exotic setting such as the Spain of Carmen (1845). Very few of his short works concern Paris with the exception of "Arsène Guillot" (1844); it deals with the theme of the prostitute or courtesan in Paris and anticipates Dumas' La Dame aux Camélias (1848). [Top] Michel, Louise, 1830-1905. She was a teacher who played a role in the uprising of the Commune. An activist and anarchist, Michel wrote a series of books about the plight of the poor and the inferior condition of women. Among her works are La Misère (1881), Les Méprisées (1882), La Fille du peuple (1889) and La Commune (1889). She wrote her souvenirs in Souvenirs et aventures de ma vie (1905). [Top] Michelet, Jules, 1798-1874. Perhaps the greatest of French historians, he wrote a Histoire de la Révolution (1847) in addition to his voluminous Histoire de France (1833, 1855-1867). His study of the people of France (Le Peuple, 1846), also presents the life of the city. [Top] Millevoye, Charles, 1782-1816. A minor poet of the pre-romantic period whose volumes of poetry include Les Embellissements de Paris (1807). [Top] Mirbeau, Octave, 1848-1917. He was a novelist, playwright and journalist of the realist and naturalist school who is best known for his naturalist novel, Journal d'une femme de chambre (1900). His plays Les Corbeaux and Les Affaires sont les Affaires (1903) are virulent satires of the moneyed classes. [Top] Murger, Henri, 1822-1861. One of the most important writers of popular literature, he initiated a journal of criticism entitled La Muse française (1823-1824). The journal published many writings of the young romantics, their manifestoes and articles of criticism. He is best known for his sentimental stories of the lives of young artists in Paris during the romantic period, Scènes de la vie de bohème (1848), later produced as a play. Finally, in the opera version by Verdi it became perhaps the most famous story in opera about 19th century artistic life. The expression popular bohemia is now used to express his version of the suffering but optimistic artist living on the margins of bourgeois society. [Top] Musset, Alfred de, 1810-1857. He remains the archetypical French romantic poet whose works define the young romantic generation of Paris in 1830. He excelled as a playwright; his works often dealt with Renaissance themes (Lorenzaccio, Andrea del Sarto) or the pursuit of a perfect but impossible love (On ne badine pas avec l'amour). His importance as a writer of Paris lies in his ability to define the malaise of his generation; the term "l'enfant du siècle" is used to identify the young romantics of 1830 who were disenchanted with contemporary bourgeois life and dreamed of evasion and spiritual fulfillment. In his personal memoir, Confession d'un enfant du siècle (1836), he generalizes his experience in love and art to include the young people of his generation; according to Musset their anguish and sense of failure can best be understood in terms of the historical context. They are victims of the failures of their fathers — the revolution and the restoration left the young generation with the feeling of helplessness and lack of meaning. The text is thus an essential document describing the situation of the young Parisian artist in 1830. His best poetry also presents the emotions and anguish of the young poet especially the series entitled Les Nuits and Rolla. In addition to his very personal poetry based on his emotions and love experiences, he wrote art criticism and a series of satirical letters gently mocking his own generation of writers; the Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet is an important document about the contemporary condition of artists in Paris to be compared with Les Jeunes-France of Gautier. His correspondence should be consulted, especially the letters between him and Goerge Sand. Their failed love is the major theme of his Confession de l'enfant du siècle. [Top] Musset, Paul de, 1804-1880. A prolific writer of novels and plays no longer read, he is best known for his passionate defense of his brother Alfred in the novel Lui et Elle (1849). It was published in the same year as George Sand's presentation of her side of the famous love affair between her and Alfred de Musset (Elle et Lui) which took place in Venice. These two works and Musset's Confession constitute important cultural documents concerning romantic attitudes and the psychology of love. [Top] Nadar, Félix, 1820-1910. The great French photographer captured images of the famous writers and celebrities of his time. He also wrote plays and short stories of a satirical, comic nature. [Top] Nerval, Gérard de, 1808-1855. He was one of the most important poets of his time whose influence extends to the surrealists; his work makes extensive use of myth, the worlds of dream and madness. Paris was not really his subject, and yet he is remembered, like Verlaine later, as a Parisian poet. He was a member of the Cenacle of artists associated with Gautier, and for some is the quintessential romantic artist living in the world of his own imagination. His short stories, collected under the title Les Filles du feu (1853), and the poetry, including the sonnets Les Chimères (1854), are considered masterpieces in their genres. He wrote texts about his many travels such as Le Voyage en Orient, and is associated with the countryside outside of Paris around Senlis which he immortalized in his short story "Sylvie." [Top] Nodier, Charles, 1780-1844. The famous short story writer developed a French brand of the genre of the fantastic, le conte fantastique, in which the world of dreams predominates. He is not a writer of the city, but gives a portrait of the romantic poet of his time, lost in reverie and mystical contemplation, in Jean-François les bas bleus (1832). [Top] Pixérécourt, R.-C. Guilbert de (René-Charles Guilbert), 1773-1844. The melodrama was the most popular genre in the theater during the first half of the 19th century. He was known as the king of the boulevard for his innumerable plays and particularly melodramas. [Top] Planche, Gustave, 1808-1857. He was a friend of the great romantics, including Vigny and G. Sand, and is best known for his many articles and portraits of contemporary artists and writers in the important literary journal, La Revue des Deux Mondes. His Portraits littéraires (1836) were followed by Nouveaux portraits littéraires in 1854. [Top] Ponsard, François, 1814-1867. A minor poet and playwright he wrote several comedies of interest to those who would study the customs of the business world in Paris in the middle of the 19th century, L'Honneur et l'argent (1853) and La Bourse (1856). [Top] Proudhon, P.-J. (Pierre-Joseph), 1809-1865. He is a philosopher, socialist and student of art whose thought had a great influence in the middle years of the century. He defined a kind of French version of socialism that stresses solidarity, equality and justice without the presence of a state bureaucracy. His influence waned with the advent of Marxism and the rise of industrialization in France. A close friend of the realist painter Courbet, his treatise on art and literature is entitled Du principe de l'art et de sa destination sociale (1865). [Top] Quatremère de Quincy, M. (Antoine-Chrysostome), 1755-1849. Known as the influential esthetician of neo-classicism, he was called the French Winckelmann. He defended the classical ideal in art and esthetics during his entire career against the development of romantic art. One of his many treatises on art and esthetics is Essai sur la nature, le but et les moyens de l'imitation dans les beaux-arts (1823). [Top] Quinet, Edgar, 1803-1875. An important political figure, as a deputy he was exiled at the beginning of the Second Empire for his impassioned support of the Revolution of 1848. He was also a prolific writer who produced many texts about the history of France and especially the Revolution. Among his works are Histoire de la campagne de 1815 (1862) and La Révolution (1865). [Top] Rabbe, Alphonse, 1786-1830. He is an important precursor of a group of poets who specialized in the poem in prose, including Baudelaire. A melancholy poet who committed suicide, his works are imbued with the anguish of the mal du siècle of the young romantics. His best works are included in the posthumous edition of 1835-1836 entitled L'Album d'un pessimiste. [Top] Rachilde, 1860-1953. Marguerite Eymery wrote under the pseudonym of Rachilde. Primarily a novelist she was also a dramatist and journalist. She is now considered to be one of the most important fin de siècle writers whose works exemplify the decadent imagination. Her very well-written novels treat gender transpositions, sadism and the love of the artificial; they were often considered to be scandalous. Her novels include Monsieur Venus (1884), La Marquise de Sade (1887) and Les Hors Nature (1897). [Top] Régnier, Henri de, 1864-1936. He wrote short fiction and novels not primarily concerned with the city. His poetry evolved from the Parnassian and classical trends to the symbolist impulse under the influence of his friend Mallarmé. It is interesting for his efforts to transpose art works, mainly marble sculpture and metal pieces into poetic form in collections such as Les Medailles d'argile. [Top] Renard, Jules, 1864-1910. A writer of fiction best known for Poil de Carotte (1894), he became an important representative of theater in Paris at the turn of the century with theatrical adaptations of his works. [Top] Rimbaud, Arthur, 1854-1891. One of the greatest French poets, he became a visionary whose rebellion from bourgeois values and natural genius revitalized French poetry. He was born in the provinces and died in Marseille. While most of his poems celebrate forms of evasion from the stifling confines of contemporary life, several deal with the Paris Commune, while The Illuminations contain pieces with urban themes, ostensibly inspired by a trip to London. His major works include the extraordinary poem « Le Bateau ivre » and the collections Les Illuminations and Une saison en enfer. [Top] Rochefort, Victor-Henri, 1830-1913. An important journalist, he was considered to be the very incarnation of the Parisian temperament at the end of the century. He founded La Chronique parisienne in 1858 and later was editor of Charivari. He wrote many plays and satirical novels; he published his Chroniques in 3 volumes entitled Les Français de la décadence (1866-1868). [Top] Rostand, Edmond, 1868-1918. He was a very important playwright whose plays often featured the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt. His best known works are Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), and L'Aiglon (1900) his play about the tragic life of Napoleon's son which was a favorite role of the great actress. One of his last plays was Chantecler (1910) a poetic fable. His works are not particularly concerned with the city but seem to continue the romantic tradition of history and poetic theater. [Top] Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 1804-1869. He was the most influential critic of his age; he strongly supported the first romantic generation, especially Victor Hugo, and lived to befriend the generation of Flaubert and Baudelaire. His criticism was primarily based on historical fact and the lives of the writers. The Causeries du Lundi (1851-1860) contain the major texts of his criticism of writers and works gathered from journal publications. Proust wrote a famous study Contre Sainte-Beuve in which he stressed the need for a new kind of criticism based on the texts instead of the approach that emphasized treating the work as a disguised biography (the infamous l'homme et l'œuvre method which dominated literary studies until the 20th century). His poetry and novels are very personal in nature and appear now as romantic expressions of his own experiences and inner sentimental life. Poésies de Joseph Delorme (1829) is a typical example of romantic sensibility, and "Les Rayons jaunes" attempts an interesting kind of ekphrastic correspondence between color and poetic form. Les Consolations (1830) perfect this vein of intimist poetry and provide an excellent example of the romantic temperament. His most important novel is Volupté (1834), a fictional transposition of his love affair with the wife of Victor Hugo, Adèle. It offers a penetrating portrait of the young romantic generation and of French society in Paris at the time of the royalist reaction against Napoleon, the period of Sainte-Beuve's youth. [Top] Saint-Hilaire, Émile-Marco de, d. 1887. A novelist without much success, he devoted most of his talent to a long series of memoirs and studies of the age of Napoleon. He is recognized for his contribution to the creation of the legend of Napoleon that influenced literature throughout the century. Some of his titles are: Souvenirs intimes du temps de l'Empire (1838-1840), 6 vols. and Les Deux Empereurs, Napoleon Ier et Napoleon III (1853). [Top] Saint-Simon, Henri, comte de, 1760-1825. He was a very important social philosopher whose ideas influenced thinkers and writers for several generations. His utopic plans for the future included a religion of universal harmony and a new social order based on the reorganization of the economy with emphasis on new means of production and technology. One of his major works is De la réorganisation de la société européenne, ou De la nécessité et des moyens de rassembler les peuples de l'Europe en un seul corps politique, en conservant à chacun son indépendence nationale (1814). [Top] Sand, George, 1804-1876. The great romantic novelist produced almost 60 novels in her long career ranging from feminist texts (Indiana, 1832), to books about the country province where she lived, Le Berry, such as Les Maîtres sonneurs (1853), to novels for children and works influenced by socialist thought such as Le Compagnon du tour de France (1840). Under the influence of Pierre Leroux, the socialist thinker, she wrote utopian novels and played an important political role in the early phases of the Revolution of 1848. She wrote about the city of Paris in a few texts including La Ville noire (1861) whose background is the city and the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Her novel Horace (1842) describes the bohemian milieu of artists and writers in Paris around 1830. Elle et Lui is a biographical text presenting her point of view concerning the failed love affair between George Sand and the poet Alfred de Musset after their trip to Venice in 1834. Her autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (1855), is the best source of information about her career as a writer in the city as well as a detailed chronicle of 50 years of her life. She contributed articles on Paris in at least 2 important documents — in Le Diable à Paris (1844) which includes texts by Balzac and engravings of Gavarni, and in Paris Guide, prepared for the exposition of 1867. In the former, she writes a harsh criticism of the city; in the latter, she prepared a very positive and praiseworthy introduction to Paris. Victor Hugo and Gautier also contributed to this publication. [Top] Sardou, Victorien, 1831-1908. He was an important playwright whose well-made comedies and satires were extremely popular during the Second Empire and the Third Republic. Several plays were political satires from a fairly conservative point of view (Les Ganaches, 1862); his plays became portraits of life at the fin de siècle (Théodora, 1884 and Madame Sans Gêne, 1893). They were often interpreted by the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. La Tosca (1887) became the source for Puccini's greatest opera. He also wrote plays dealing with French history. [Top] Schwob, Marcel, 1867-1905. A poet and fiction writer, his knowledge was encyclopedic and his writing showed the influence of the symbolist tradition. His best work is considered to be Les Vies imaginaires (1896) that announces modernist works like Gide's Les Nourritures terrestres. [Top] Scribe, Eugène, 1791-1861. His comedies for the boulevard and dramas were very popular during the Restauration period and the July Monarchy. He is best known as the writer of well-made plays for the middle class; he represents their social and political views without romantic anguish or liberal views. [Top] Ségur, Sophie, comtesse de, 1799-1874. A prolific author of novels of manners for young women, she is still read today. Les Malheurs de Sophie (1864) is one of her best known. [Top] Senancour, Etienne Pivert de, 1770-1846. He was a writer of autobiographical texts who exerted a very important influence on the romantic generation; his emphasis on solitude, melancholy reverie and personal introspection , especially in his masterpiece Oberman (1804), is to be found in the romantic heroes and their disenchantment with life. He did not write about the city, and is best remembered for his description, new in fiction, of the mountains, particularly the Swiss Alps, as a place of refuge and sublime beauty. [Top] Séverine, 1855-1929. Caroline Rémy de Guébhard was a journalist who wrote under the pseudonym of Séverine for the newspaper of her lover, the revolutionary socialist, Jules Vallès. She directed the newspaper, Le Cri du peuple, after his death. Her writings include Pages rouges (1893) and Notes d'une Frondeuse (1894). [Top] Staël, Madame de (Anne-Louise-Germaine), 1766-1817. One of the most important woman writers in French literature, Mme de Staël wrote two influential novels Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807) which are considered to be early feminist works. She played a political role and was exiled for her courageous refusal to accept the dictatorship of Napoleon. In the history of letters she is especially admired for her two treatises on the development of literature in Europe from the ancients to the moderns; De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800) and De l'Allemagne (1810) were influential as theoretical foundations for the new romantic literature. She developed the distinction between Northern literature of mystery and introspection (the romantic impulse) and the literature of the South dominated by rational clarity and the epic spirit (the classical tradition). She does not deal with the city as subject, but her political writings evoke Paris and its history — Considerations sur la Révolution française (1818) and Dix années d'exil (1821). [Top] Stendhal, 1783-1842. He is considered by many to be the greatest of French novelists. La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) situated at the court of Parma in Italy is probably his masterpiece. Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) and Lucien Leuwen (1834-1835) both have sections of the novels which deal with Paris. The first treats the complexities of the ecclesiastical world but takes place primarily in the provinces. Lucien Leuwen is the major text of Stendhal that treats the city in a detailed way. The novel is often compared to Balzac's Illusions perdues; both novels present a young man from the provinces who must confront the harsh realities of the city. It offers a satirical panorama of Parisian society in the central portion of its triptych structure. The novelist caricatures the government ministers and the police; he uncovers the machinations of the political machine in the city. Unlike Balzac, who attempts to analyze the causes and laws governing society, he does not deal with the economic and social forces behind the machines. In addition to his fiction Stendhal wrote important autobiographical works (Souvenirs d'égotisme, 1832), and La Vie de Henri Brulard (1835). He also produced studies of musicians such as Haydn and Rossini, and essays on art and Romanticism (Racine et Shakespeare, 1825). During his years in Paris he also composed an illuminating essay on the psychology of love, De l'Amour, 1822. [Top] Stern, Daniel, 1805-1876. A talented writer, Marie d'Agoult wrote under the pseudonym of Daniel Stern. She was a member of the court of Charles X and had a famous love affair with the musician Franz Liszt. She was the basis of one of the main characters in Balzac's novel about Brittany entitled Béatrix. She established an influential salon for artists and reformers, and was a strong advocate for the emancipation of women, democratic politics and the elimination of poverty. Her many works include fiction, articles on music and literature, a history of the revolution of 1848 and her memoirs. Nélida is an autobiographical novel; Mes souvenirs was published posthumously in 1877; Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 was published between 1850 and 1853. [Top] Sue, Eugène, 1804-1857. One of the most important writers of popular fiction, he began his career with novels about the sea. He became the master of the feuilleton novel (published in weekly installments in the newspapers), and represented a very democratic, anti-clerical, anti-monarchical point of view. His best known works are Les Mystères de Paris (1842-1843), which treats the Paris underworld, Le Juif errant (1844-1845), and Les Mystères du peuple (1849-1856). Because he could not accept the legitimacy of the Second Empire, he exiled himself in Savoy until the end of his life. Balzac and other contemporary novelists also published many of their novels in the weekly newspaper or magazine format. [Top] Sully Prudhomme, 1839-1907. He was a well-known poet of his time who dealt with philosophical generalities. In spite of his association with the Parnassians and even the early representatives of the symbolist school, he is regarded as a mediocre poet of bourgeois views and values. [Top] Taine, Hippolyte, 1828-1893. He was an important historian, philosopher and theorist of aesthetics. In six volumes he studied the history of France from the Ancien Régime to the Revolution and the modern period (Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1877-1894)). His many texts on art were brought together in 1882 under the title La Philosophie de l'art. The guiding principle in his criticism of literature and the arts was to study the determining influences of three major factors — race, environment and the moment. His theories provided the basis for much naturalistic and determinist analysis of writers and their works, and were often misinterpreted and narrowly conceived as scientific. [Top] Tastu, Amable. She was a poet, a writer about education and a literary critic. She is known mainly for her poetry in which she occasionally expressed personal doubts concerning her role as a woman writer. Her principal collections are Poésies (1826) and Poésies nouvelles (1835). [Top] Thiers, Adolphe, 1797-1877. The famous statesman (Minister under Louis-Philippe) was also an important journalist who wrote for the Globe, and an important historian. He published a six-volume study of the French Revolution in 1830, followed by the 20 volumes of his Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire (1869). He was the primary representative of the "juste milieu," the point of view of the bourgeoisie of business and banking; during the Commune in 1871 he became the temporary head of the government that repressed the revolutionary uprising. [Top] Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859. He was a famous political thinker who wrote the influential study La Démocratie en Amérique (1840). In addition to other studies of the political regimes in France he left an admirable portrait of the Revolution of 1848 in Paris in his Souvenirs published posthumously in 1893. [Top] Tristan, Flora, 1803-1844. An early feminist she worked for the moral and judicial improvement in the status of women. She was a strong advocate for the formation of union organizations for the workers in every country and actively participated in the socialist movement of her time. She was the grandmother of the painter Gauguin. Her works include Nécessité de faire bon accueil aux femmes étrangères (1835), Les Pérégrinations d'une paria (1838) which related her efforts to find the roots of her family in Peru, and L'Union ouvrière (1843). This last work is a sophisticated study of the working class and proposes a form of social security. [Top] Ulliac-Trémadeure, Sophie, 1794-1862. She was a translator, novelist and journalist who wrote primarily for a young audience. Some of her works deal with the problems facing a young woman writer in a society which expects her to conform to a life of convention. Some titles are Valérie ou la jeune artiste (1836) and Émilie ou la jeune fille auteur (1837). Her memoirs are entitled Souvenirs d'une vieille femme (1861). [Top] Vallès, Jules, 1832-1885. Much of his work is autobiographical; his most famous text is L'Enfant (1879) in which he relates a rather fictionalized version of his very unhappy childhood near Puy. He was active in politics especially during the Commune when he played the role of moderate but staunch supporter of the working class. He records the events of 1870-1871 in L'Insurgé, and then founded the journal Le Cri du peuple in Paris in 1871. He was an elected member of the Commune for the XVe arrondissement and took refuge in Belgium when he was condemned to death after the collapse of the insurrection. Without being ideologically a socialist or a communist, he was truly a man of revolt who struggled in his life and writing to further the cause of the poor and the worker. [Top] Varin, Victor, 1798-1869. One of the famous writers of vaudeville during the reigns of Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III. Among his numerous plays often dealing with life in the city is Paris, Orléans et Rouen (1843). [Top] Verhaeren, Émile, 1855-1916. He was a great Flemish poet who lived in France and founded the unanimist school of poetry which emphasized the solidarity of man with nature and his fellow man in the manner of Victor Hugo and Walt Whitman. His best known volume is Les Villes tentaculaires (1895). [Top] Verlaine, Paul, 1844-1896. The great French poet of the fin de siècle temperament did not write specifically about the city as subject. In his life and art, however, he became the symbol of the tragic, melancholy poet of Paris who suffered from the rare and tormented form of "mal du siècle" associated with the end of an era. He is known for his association with the poet Rimbaud. His changing states of being from conversion to Catholicism to expressions of decadent sensibility are expressed in his many volumes of poetry. He is also credited with emphasizing the role of music in poetry that became a basic tenet of the symbolists. His poetry includes Les Romances sans paroles (1874) and Sagesse (1880); among his prose works is the important text Les Poètes maudits (1884). [Top] Verne, Jules, 1828-1905. He was the author of more than 63 novels, destined for a young audience and anticipating the concerns of science fiction today. His interest in exploration of unknown regions and knowledge of contemporary science are found in a series of novels including De la terre à la lune (1864). His Paris au XXe siècle, published in 1995 long after his death, depicts a futuristic Parisian society in which arts and letters have been all but abandoned. [Top] Veuillot, Louis-François, 1818-1883. He was an important and prolific journalist and Catholic writer. Among his many works there are several which deal with Paris and the history of revolution and empire: Les Francais en Algérie (1845), Waterloo (1861), Les Odeurs de Paris (1866), Paris pendant les deux sièges (1871). [Top] Vigny, Alfred de, 1797-1863. He was one of the greatest poets of the romantic generation who also wrote plays, novels and prose works. Usually termed a philosophical poet he was an aristocrat by birth who thought the poem should illustrate an important idea through its images and symbols. In his first collection of poetry, Poèmes antiques et modernes (1822-1837), there is a meditation about the city of Paris entitled simply "Paris," in which he comes to terms with the nascent transformations of the city into a modern metropolis. As a playwright he was influential in bringing Shakespeare to the French stage through his translations and adaptations. His novels do not deal directly with the city, but are concerned with contemporary issues. Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835) presents three stories about military life, and Les Consultations du Docteur Noir; Stello ou les diables bleus (1832) offers the portrait of a young romantic poet afflicted with "le mal du siècle," a melancholic disenchantment with life. Stello is the idealistic, suffering poet while the Docteur Noir represents the realist, pragmatic doctor whom he consults. He is patterned after the famous Docteur Blanche who offered consultations to several famous poets in Paris including Nerval. The book thus presents an early version of psychiatrics therapy. Le Journal d'un poète published in 1867 is an important document in which Vigny reveals the complexity of his own personality. His best known work is the collection of poetry entitled Les Destinées (1864) in which his concept of poetry and his stoical philosophy are expressed most profoundly. [Top] Villemot, Auguste, 1811-1870. An important journalist, he wrote a series of articles about Parisian life in the newspaper, Le Figaro, which were brought together in two volumes in 1858 under the title La Vie à Paris. [Top] Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Auguste, comte de, 1838-1889. He was an important writer of the fin de siècle sensibility. An idealist, a dandy and an aristocrat, he wrote novels, short stories and plays which satirized the customs and materialism of the ruling bourgeois class, and presented his fervent idealism about love and spirituality. His short stories are sometimes set in Paris (Contes cruels, 1883, 1888) among the jaded aristocrats. His most important novel L'Ève future (1886) anticipates modernist themes as the inventor Edison creates an artificial woman who incarnates the feminine ideal. His best known play Axël (1890) was first performed four years after his death and represents his thought in its most accomplished representation. The conflict between the real world he disdains and the cult of the ideal and the spiritual is given a vivid dramatic form. [Top] Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, 1814-1879. The famous architect who designed romantic additions and repairs for many gothic monuments in Paris and Carcassonne. He has been criticized for embellishing medieval gothic excessively and creating a kind of false romantic gothic. Among his many volumes concerning architecture is Entretiens sur l'architecture (1858-1872). [Top] Willy, 1859-1931. Before collaborating with his wife, the great novelist Colette, on the series of novels about the young Claudine, he wrote fiction bordering on the pornographic. Among the titles are Lettres de l'ouvreuse (1890) and Un Vilain monsieur (1898). [Top] Zola, Emile, 1840-1902. The greatest novelist of the last quarter of the 19th century, Zola was also an art critic and a journalist. He wrote a famous study of the painter, Manet, which stressed the formal aspects of his modernity. As a journalist he was the courageous advocate of Dreyfus; in 1898 he came to the defense of the falsely condemned captain in a famous tract entitled "J'accuse," in which he exposes the anti-semitism of those involved in the trial. He exiled himself to England for a year after being condemned himself. He is also an important literary critic who developed his ideas about naturalism and his methodology in a series of works such as Le Roman expérimental (1880) and Les Romanciers naturalistes (1881). His most important work is the 20-volume series of novels concerning the history of the family Rougon-Maquart, L'Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire. Zola studies the rise and fall of several generations of this family involving all levels of society; in effect, he continues Balzac's project to record the complex life of his society, but with a methodology he considered to be scientific. He believes his novels to be experimental studies of the effects of biological heredity on the successive members of the family; most of their lives have been determined by a fatal, hereditary flaw such as alcoholism or madness. In many of the 20 novels the city of Paris is the important scene of the family's life and in some novels Paris is the veritable protagonist. A list follows of the novels in which Paris plays a major role: 1. La Curée (1871). This novel depicts the frenzy of economic speculation during the years of Haussman's transformations of the city. Rich speculators build, destroy and reconstruct entire quarters of the city; Zola describes their graft, greed and general moral degradation. 2. Le Ventre de Paris (1873). Zola's novel of the Halles section of the city is an important document that portrays the rich, colorful life of the market center of the city, now destroyed. The plot concerns an outlaw, a member of the former revolutionary Commune, who now serves as an inspector in the market. 3. L'Assommoir (1877). This novels describes the effects of alcoholism on the lives of a poor branch of the family. Gervaise is a washerwoman married to Coupeau a roofer; they are the parents of Nana who live on the street ironically named la Goutte d'or. They both are destroyed by excessive drinking. The poor quarter of the city in which they live, with its many bars that absorb the meager salaries of the workers, is minutely observed. 4. Nana (1880). The great novel of the role of the courtisan in Second Empire society in Paris. The daughter of Gervaise, corrupt and diseased, she occupies an important position in her luxurious mansion on the Boulevard de Villiers from which she achieves the destruction of an entire society of wealthy, influential men of the Second Empire. 5. Pot-Bouille (1882). This novel presents the successful bourgeois class on the Rue de Choiseul in a single apartment building. From floor to floor live the magistrates, stock brokers and other members of the reigning class; Zola exposes their hypocrisy, false values and corruption. 6. Au Bonheur des dames (1883). An important novel about the beginnings of mass consumption and commodification. This prescient, first novel about a department store illustrates the deleterious effects of big commerce on the small merchants of the neighborhood. Its heroine, married to the owner of the enterprise, succeeds, however, in transforming her husband into a philanthropist and supporter of the working class. 7. Germinal (1885). Zola's masterpiece about the strike of the miners in the provinces has nothing to do with Paris, but it illustrates the novelist's increasing use of mythical structures in his narrative (the mine is a devouring beast) and the evolution of his socialist ideology. 8. L'Œuvre (1866). Zola's great novel about art presents a group of writers and painters in Paris who are often considered to be representations of the realist and impressionist schools. His protagonist Claude Lantier, the painter, is struggling to create a masterpiece. He is, however, tragically limited by a hereditary flaw in his physical and moral being which leads to misery and finally death. Lantier is sometimes compared to Cézanne, who was deeply offended by the reference; in effect the characters are probably composite figures of artists prominent at the time and imagined by Zola. The paintings Lantier is trying to realize actually suggest Manet, especially the portrait of the painter's mistress Christine and the scenes of Paris. The writer Sandoz is often seen as a projection of Zola himself. Some critics interpret the text as a critique of impressionism. The narrator would seem to be suggesting that these painters failed to produce a truly great art because they lacked a strong theoretical basis for their work. In any case the novel provides an excellent fictional representation of the lives of artists in the city during the last part of the 19th century, and suggests many of Zola's own ideas about painting and literature. 9. La Bête humaine (1890). This novel presents the effects of the baser instincts and desires in human beings that lead to murder and assassination. It is one of his darkest portraits of the role of biological determinism in society. 10. L'Argent (1891). The story of the negative effects of unscrupulous speculation and banking, it presents the opposition between a bank owned by powerful Catholics and one by Jewish capitalists. It traces the financial ruin of many small investors, and suggests the necessary rise of the socialist concepts of work, revolution and egalitarianism that will finally overcome the capitalist reliance on speculation and profit. Zola completes the cycle of the family Rougon-Maquart with the story of the defeat of the French in the war of 1870 (La Débâcle, 1892), and the concluding novel Le Docteur Pascal (1893) which presents his philosophy of heredity. His next project is the cycle of Les Trois villes (Lourdes, Rome and Paris), and the Quatre Évangiles: Fécondité (1899), Travail (1901), Vérité (1903); he only completed three in the second cycle. He attempts to trace the social progress of an ex-priest who now devotes himself to humanity and its material and intellectual progress. Paris (1897) offers the story of Pierre Froment the ex-priest now married, whose brother has become an anarchist with the plan to destroy the bourgeois society with explosives he has invented. It is therefore a novel of anarchy in the city, and a resounding faith in science and progress. It also deals with the counter current, the resurgence of idealism and religiosity in the fin de siècle spirit. Zola comes to terms with this new attitude which he cannot accept both in this novel and in the final sequence of the Quatre Évangiles. He proposes socialist values in these works — Fécondité (the creation of a renewed family structure), Travail (he glorifies the new factory organized according to just and equal social values) and Vérité (a juridical drama of justice like the Dreyfus affair). These goals and values, according to the author, will replace those of the Christian gospels or Évangiles of the past. Panoramic literature Les Français par eux-mêmes. 8 vols. 1840-1842. A collaborative work published by L. Curmer. A comprehensive survey of French society including many illustrations. The first five volumes deal with Paris and the remaining ones with the provinces. Le Diable à Paris, Paris et les Parisiens. Edited by Hertzel. 2 vols., 1845-1846. These volumes contain essays by well-known writers including Balzac, Gautier, Musset, Sand and others. They cover a wide range of topics concerning the city and include many stories about Parisian subjects. The books contain important engravings by Gavarni. References The following sources were consulted in the preparation of this presentation of writers and texts in the 19th century: Littérature française. Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, vol. 5. The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature. Paris, Capital of the World, Patrice Higgonet.
5097	dbpedia	3	56	https://poets.org/poet/theophile-gautier	en	Academy of American Poets	https://poets.org/themes/custom/stanza/favicon.ico	https://poets.org/themes/custom/stanza/favicon.ico	[ "https://poets.org/themes/custom/stanza/assets/images/optimized/hero/Large-White-RGB-Poets.org-Logo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "poetry", "poets", "Théophile Gautier" ]	null	[ "Poets.org - Academy of American Poets", "Related Poets" ]	2012-08-30T00:00:00	Théophile Gautier -	en	/themes/custom/stanza/favicon.ico	Poets.org	https://poets.org/poet/theophile-gautier	Poets Search more than 3,000 biographies of contemporary and classic poets.
5097	dbpedia	1	18	https://fineartebooks.wordpress.com/tag/theophile-gautier/	en	Fineartebooks's Blog	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/cca05a64ce1e2a789025c20313d982d5129fae0ff64dfe3a06dda95cdb959745?s=200&ts=1723700294	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/cca05a64ce1e2a789025c20313d982d5129fae0ff64dfe3a06dda95cdb959745?s=200&ts=1723700294	[ "https://s2.wp.com/wp-content/themes/pub/chateau/images/chateau-default.jpg", "https://fineartebooks.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/love_and_pain.jpg?w=529", "https://fineartebooks.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/karen-roze.jpg?w=300&h=194", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/737afb3512480929b11de17a8ff822afbafda7f0088cd2f5441d39b011130fdb?s=32&d=identicon&r=G", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/cca05a64ce1e2a789025c20313d982d5129fae0ff64dfe3a06dda95cdb959745?s=50&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Flogo%2Fwpcom-gray-white.png", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/cca05a64ce1e2a789025c20313d982d5129fae0ff64dfe3a06dda95cdb959745?s=50&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Flogo%2Fwpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[ "https://www.youtube.com/embed/-W5OAQDti_A?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" ]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Postromantic Art" ]	null	Posts about Théophile Gautier written by Romantic and Postromantic Art	en	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/cca05a64ce1e2a789025c20313d982d5129fae0ff64dfe3a06dda95cdb959745?s=32	Fineartebooks's Blog	https://fineartebooks.wordpress.com/tag/theophile-gautier/	It’s only since the nineteenth century that art became its own autonomous domain, separated from education and politics. Before that, the art world was shaped by the tastes of rich patrons, the Church, the Salons, and the art Academies. In the early nineteenth century, the French writer, Théophile Gautier, coined the term “l’art pour l’art”, or art for art’s sake. Although this concept doesn’t describe all art during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it had an enormous impact upon the attitudes of modern artists, critics and viewers. And yet, there were significant exceptions. Even the most modern of the moderns, Pablo Picasso, made a spectacular political statement in his painting Guernica. This painting represented a cri du coeur against the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian forces at the behest of the Spanish Nationalistists in 1937. Picasso’s Guernica brought the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War to the public’s attention and stood as an anti-war symbol for years to come. Today I’d like to introduce a contemporary American artist, Michael Bell, who perpetuates the long-lost tradition of seeing art as a means of educating the public and of changing society for the better. Michael Bell’s paintings seamlessly combine aesthetic talent, educational value and political activism. Michael is best known for painting some of the most famous–and infamous–celebrities of our time, such as John Gotti and other actors from popular gangster movies like “The Sopranos,” Goodfellas” and “A Bronx Tale.” The artist has also won numerous awards in the field of art education as one of the pioneers of the Visual Journaling movement. He gives free workshops that educate the general public about art and art history. Michael also participates in charity benefits. He raises thousands of dollars for worthwhile social causes from his painting sales. As an art critic who also writes about domestic abuse, what caught my attention most was his contribution to raising public awareness about domestic violence. On October 1, 2005, Michael Bell received the Good Shepherd Community Service Award at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles for his activism in raising domestic violence awareness. Michael Bell’s series of paintings, Voices of Violence, expose the vicious cycle of love filled with pain, abuse and reconciliation, which many victims go through. These paintings follow the gaze of the model, ex-mafia wife and Hollywood stunt actress Georgia Durante, as she attempts to cope with years of abuse and free herself from the painful cycle of love filled with violence, which isn’t really love after all, but an expression of dominance and possession. Michael’s painting Love and Pain (see above) executed, appropriately enough, on two separate, fractured canvases, reveals the ambivalence that victims of domestic violence experience, as they remain hopelessly attached to the very person that causes them most pain. Please find below the link to the youtube video I made featuring Michael’s Voices of Violence paintings: http://www.youtube.com/user/ClaudiaMoscovici#p/a/u/0/NS75xHKgjp4 It’s relatively rare for an artist in our times to use his talent for the social good. Even though, truth be told, art is not just for art’s sake. Art is a human creation by talented human beings for the benefit of other human beings. For as long as we continue to view art as completely detached from our nature, our struggles, our mistakes and our goals, we’ll alienate viewers, as they’ll become detached from the world of art as well. An artist through and through–as well as an educator and a humanitarian–Michael Bell eloquently states: “All I am is what I create. It’s my blessing to share with the world.” Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com Before the nineteenth-century, originality and individuality were not the most highly prized qualities of art. As for autonomy, or regarding art as separate from social functions, this notion didn’t even exist. During the Renaissance, the artist emerged as an individual assumed to have a unique talent that was in some way useful to those in power—by helping elevate the status of the Church or the State through art—and to society in general, by providing works of rare and incredible beauty that all could enjoy. Nonetheless, Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo perceived their paintings and sculptures as a means of elevating and preserving the social order of their times not only as a mark of their individual genius. No doubt, both Leonardo and Michelangelo could afford to select among patrons and to aggravate those they did serve by postponing deadlines to perfect their masterpieces. In this way, they created the blueprint of the temperamental and independent “artistic” personality that would emerge more fully with Romanticism. Despite the increased prestige of masterful artists, however, Renaissance art contributed to the glory of the patrons and the community or the nation it was created for. In other words, art’s undeniable beauty was inseparable from its social usefulness. As artists’ prestige increased during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so did their relative power and independence from patrons. Romanticism marked this transformation by explicitly declaring the artist to be a creative genius and by regarding individuality and originality as the supreme qualities of true art. Yet for most Romantic poets, writers and artists, as for the Renaissance masters, art was still bound to its social function. The artist or writer imagined by poets like Wordsworth, Lamartine and Hugo spread to the public, through his unique aesthetic sensibility, imagination, discernment and talent, not only aesthetic pleasure but also a heightened and more empathetic moral and political consciousness. While earlier forms of Romanticism couple social utility and beauty, late Romantic and Modern art and literature would come to disassociate them. As early as the 1830’s, the autonomy of art from society was proclaimed by Théophile Gautier’s phrase, “art for art’s sake,” and by his criticism of the notion that art had to be in any way useful to society. In his writings on art in the 1860’s, Emile Zola transformed Gautier’s provocative and amusing Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin into a characteristically serious, polemical argument. Yet despite the difference in style, his message is resonant with Gautier’s, since Zola also defends the autonomy of art and the individuality and originality of true artists. I’m interested in reexamining here Gautier’s and particularly Zola’s arguments concerning the originality, individuality and autonomy of art because they mark a turning point—and a moment of incredible ambivalence—in what we can call the cultural logic of art. Retrospectively, we can say that these authors articulated the standards that would both establish the autonomy and importance of art as a separate domain and those that would undo the very notion of originality, genius and individuality in art. Today, these concepts seem almost as dated as the even older notion of artistic genius. Such notions are occasionally resurrected, but usually only to be critiqued, pastiched and spoofed rather than taken seriously. Gautier’s well-known polemic in his 1834 preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin—“the most useful place of a house is the latrine”—seems to have turned into a twisted prophecy almost a hundred years later, when Marcel Duchamp, under the pseudonym R. Mutt, exhibited a urinal as an objet d’art at the 1917 Independents’ Exhibition in New York City. With this partly joking provocation, art took a seemingly irreversible conceptual turn. As the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto convincingly demonstrates, what constitutes art can no longer be discerned visually. Let’s begin to see how the notion of art for art’s sake contributed both to the rise and the fall of art as a privileged domain. Gautier: L’art pour l’art Théophile Gautier’s (1811-72) contributions to Parisian culture spanned almost half a century, beginning with his youthful defense of Romanticism, to the aestheticism of his famous Préface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, to his leadership in the circle of formalist poets associated with Le Parnasse. Although he wrote on a wide range of topics, including literature, art and dance, he’s best known for his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834), where he proposes his model of art for art’s sake. With characteristic panache and irony, Gautier begins his preface with a provocation: “One of the most ridiculous things of the glorious epoch which we have the fortune to live in is without question the rehabilitation of virtue by all the newspapers, no matter what color they are, red, green or tri-colored.” (Préface a Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1834, Théophile Gautier, Flammarion, Paris, 1966, 25) It’s not only the literature and journalism of his day that Gautier attacks, but the whole history of French literature from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. He locates the source of the reduction of literature to utility in Neoclassicism, latching on in particular to Molière’s comedy as guilty of infusing morality in art. In Molière’s writing, Gautier charges, every play has a moral; the lovers are duly beautiful and good; the duped appropriately ridiculous and bad yet somehow endearingly human; while the women with common sense show the good sense to be both beautiful and moral. Gautier considers this infusion of morality into literature ridiculous and even dangerous. To sever art from social utility in general, he maintains, one has to disassociate it first from morality in particular. For, Gautier suggests, it’s in fact the moralizing impulse which modern art preserved from Neoclassicism—the tendency to elevate nature and cultivate bienséance (good manners) in the reading and viewing public—that has degenerated even further during the nineteenth-century into a translation of art into moral and social lessons. Rather than looking at its aesthetic qualities, Gautier charges, modern critics and readers read literature only to ask themselves utilitarian questions such as: “What good is this book? How can we apply it to the moralization and good of the most numerous and impoverished class?” (42) With the advent of the industrial revolution, increase in readership and the broadening of public education to all social classes of men, what was the inculcation of etiquette or bienséance during the seventeenth-century mostly for the benefit and entertainment of the social elite is transformed, during the nineteenth-century, into a broader moral education of all social classes: of what was rather abstractly called humanity itself. This explains why, Gautier complains, modern literature is no longer literary. Like journalism and conduct books, it brainwashes the working classes into adopting middle class values in the name of social progress. In the face of such “serious” goals, Gautier suggests facetiously, the creation of an art that does not aim at improving the human condition seems downright frivolous and irrelevant. (42) But only if we accept these erroneous premises, the author adds. Gautier proposes an expedient solution to this conflation of literature and utility: severing art from its social function once and for all. To defend this radical and new proposition, Gautier relies upon the conventional and old philosophical concept of Beauty: “Nothing which is beautiful is indispensable to life… Nothing is truly beautiful except that which is useless; all that is useful is ugly, because it’s the expression of some need, and those of mankind are ignoble and disgusting, as is his poor and weak nature—The most useful place of a house is the latrines.” (45) Gautier assumes that we all know what the concept of Beauty is from the commonplace examples he gives: pretty women and lovely flowers. In the absence of a more specific definition that might unite these particular examples, Gautier presents a negative definition that fits his argument: beauty is not opposed to ugliness, as we might believe, but rather to usefulness. Which is why, the author playfully suggests, the most useful place of a house–the toilet–is also the ugliest. His logic implies: a pretty young woman is beautiful; a useful old toilet is ugly. Wouldn’t you prefer the former to the latter? An obvious answer to this question—it depends on what you want to do– is prosaically utilitarian by Gautier’s standards. Fortunately, his argument isn’t meant to be reasonable or systematic, but rather polemical: it serves as a battle cry for a new attitude towards art and literature. Even his examples–pardon the pun–aren’t meant to hold water. To offer just one example, there’s nothing about Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel’s social usefulness as a place of worship and as a celebration of the glory of the Roman state that takes away from its beauty. Gautier’s preface is less notable for its argumentation than for its poignancy, novelty and influence upon subsequent currents in art and literature. It left a particularly strong impression upon the poets of Le Parnasse, who used his arguments to defend aesthetic formalism in poetry both against the impassioned lyricism of Romanticism and against the proclamations of the social value of art made by realist and naturalist literature. This legacy was perpetuated by formalism and by certain trends in modern and postmodern literature, art and criticism. We find traces of it even in Clement Greenberg’s influential defense of conceptual art and even in Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. In these later currents, Gautier’s original appeal to beauty was, for the most part, dropped. What remained was the notion that art owes nothing to society. The principle of the autonomy of art made plausible by Gautier’s preface has come to carry with it several corollaries: 1. Art is a separate domain all unto itself; 2. Art cannot be judged by common standards of morality or utility. Art is therefore separate from morality and religion as well; 3. In being a separate aesthetic realm, art is not easily accessible. Often it takes a very refined, sensitive temperament and perhaps even a team of experts trained in that art to explain it to the broader public. Art may seem to be within everyone’s grasp, but in fact appreciating it requires a deeper, elite understanding; 4. When judged by the standards of social utility—does it lead to an improvement of the human condition; does it teach us anything useful—art is irrelevant. In the next few posts, I’ll explain how these tenets have become the blessing and the curse inherited by modern and contemporary art. Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754
5097	dbpedia	0	42	https://www.pennpress.org/9780812244496/the-decadent-republic-of-letters/	en	The Decadent Republic of Letters – Penn Press	https://pennsylvania-pre…uto=format&w=298	https://pennsylvania-pre…uto=format&w=298	[ "https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/14140741/PPTAsset-3.png", "https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/14141556/e4a6f1e2-5912-11ec-b6d5-525400a0165e.png", "https://www.pennpress.org/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://www.pennpress.org/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://www.pennpress.org/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://www.pennpress.org/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://www.pennpress.org/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://www.pennpress.org/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://www.pennpress.org/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://www.pennpress.org/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://www.pennpress.org/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://www.pennpress.org/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://www.pennpress.org/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2021-11-09T11:08:43+00:00	While scholars have long associated the group of nineteenth-century French and English writers and artists known as the decadents with alienation, escapism, ...	en	https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cl…235ba8-32x32.png	University of Pennsylvania Press	https://www.pennpress.org/9780812244496/the-decadent-republic-of-letters/	While scholars have long associated the group of nineteenth-century French and English writers and artists known as the decadents with alienation, escapism, and withdrawal from the social and political world, Matthew Potolsky offers an alternative reading of the movement. In The Decadent Republic of Letters, he treats the decadents as fundamentally international, defined by a radically cosmopolitan ideal of literary sociability rather than an inward turn toward private aesthetics and exotic sensation. The Decadent Republic of Letters looks at the way Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, and Algernon Charles Swinburne used the language of classical republican political theory to define beauty as a form of civic virtue. The libertines, an international underground united by subversive erudition, gave decadents a model of countercultural affiliation and a vocabulary for criticizing national canon formation and the increasing state control of education. Decadent figures such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Aubrey Beardsley, and Oscar Wilde envisioned communities formed through the circulation of art. Decadents lavishly praised their counterparts from other traditions, translated and imitated their works, and imagined the possibility of new associations forged through shared tastes and texts. Defined by artistic values rather than language, geography, or ethnic identity, these groups anticipated forms of attachment that are now familiar in youth countercultures and on social networking sites. Bold and sophisticated, The Decadent Republic of Letters unearths a pervasive decadent critique of nineteenth-century notions of political community and reveals the collective effort by the major figures of the movement to find alternatives to liberalism and nationalism.
5097	dbpedia	3	17	https://oxfordsong.org/poet/th%25C3%25A9ophile-gautier	en	Théophile Gautier	https://assets-cdn.oxfor…359f1c6c351a598f	https://assets-cdn.oxfor…359f1c6c351a598f	[ "https://oxfordsong.org/assets/layout/logo.svg", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827419&s=1edc5644cde40d7603ac44ad77e95f31", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/Portrait_of_Percy_Bysshe_Shelley_by_Curran_1819.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1684922872&s=3310e2faa36a0d6520dd6b6b44399c52", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/Wilhelm%20M%C3%BCller.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827053&s=7f045f21ca7329f35c12a8c469d2ad3b", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/330px-Wilhelm_Zimmermann.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827108&s=5e02d3d4152c0ad79f8edabb6717467b", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/330px-Uhland.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827134&s=9079d8e0422ff012fc8ff4d94683a1d9", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/330px-Mary_Stuart_Queen.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827125&s=6bb0f6d1053399caa52db53c6587094f", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/330px-Moritz_Karl_Wilhelm_Strachwitz_Litho.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827116&s=ab392d9588b953c26ee36b52763534b5", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/Gustav_schwab.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827108&s=7a4d301867053d95a6a2268dbde47eea", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/MarieSchumann_30Jahre-4ba8b459.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827095&s=66a435cbbc4e297a9cd70faba6f36ab5", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/330px-Ernst_Schulze.png?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827087&s=84c7a4fd95f38a82f9fd061ecccba818", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/Friedrich_R%C3%BCckert.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827134&s=d6e38570c71f0758a1695a1964289f3f", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/330px-Robert_Reinick.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827124&s=adbda1b5cf87ba0b18415b5c29f66315", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/August_von_Platen_by_Moritz_Rugendas.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827116&s=f3d1a17594577ae4ac5b86890175f796", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/330px-Gustav_Pfarrius.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827106&s=536fb8ef4cfe09e619746d637a1fe880", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/SuhrlandtOverbeck.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827085&s=518d82381c0000714a503c4ae4cb72fc", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/Julius_Mosen.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827071&s=f347aa2328ca578c8a493872a52593cb", "https://assets-cdn.oxfordsong.org/production/images/Artists/330px-Thomas_Moore_2.jpg?w=200&h=200&q=90&auto=format&fit=crop&dm=1695827133&s=3db2f80992c98d2a7a0f4ffff4810b5c", "https://oxfordsong.org/assets/layout/logo.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2015-09-30T00:00:00+01:00	Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic.	en	/apple-touch-icon.png	Oxford Song	https://oxfordsong.org/poet/théophile-gautier	Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. While Gautier was an ardent defender of Romanticism, his work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He was widely esteemed by writers as diverse as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Proust and Oscar Wilde.
5097	dbpedia	0	15	https://blog.oup.com/2013/07/travel-writing-in-19th-century-france/	en	Armchair travels	https://oupblog.wpengine…e-1200x675-1.jpg	https://oupblog.wpengine…e-1200x675-1.jpg	[ "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/themes/oup-blog-usa//images/oup-logo.png", "http://fh.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/2.cover.gif", "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Théophile-Gautier-by-Nadar-c1856-1.jpg", "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/TOP-10-HISTORY-BLOG-POSTS-OF-2021-480x185.jpg", "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/themes/oup-blog-usa//images/oup-logo-footer.png?ts=3" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "OUPblog" ]	2013-07-21T07:30:38+00:00	By Julie Kalman This is a piece about subjectivity. And while we’re on the topic, let’s just stop for a moment to talk about me. When the weekend paper delivers its fullness at the breakfast table, I don’t stop to read the travel section.	en		OUPblog	https://blog.oup.com/2013/07/travel-writing-in-19th-century-france/	By Julie Kalman This is a piece about subjectivity. And while we’re on the topic, let’s just stop for a moment to talk about me. When the weekend paper delivers its fullness at the breakfast table, I don’t stop to read the travel section. It’s the first to go into the recycling bin. Travel writing bores me. And so do travel photos, ever since I can remember being forced to feign interest through someone else’s slideshow narrative. Perhaps, then, I’m a glutton for punishment, but I have spent the last year reading dozens of travel accounts from the nineteenth century. Travel writing tends to slip between disciplinary cracks. It is not literature of the highest order, nor is it straightforward archival material. Yet travel works were highly popular in nineteenth century France, and this fact, if nothing else, must move the curious cultural historian to ask why. I have an answer, too: life was less than settled in nineteenth-century France. The Revolution may have introduced the concepts of nationhood and citizenship, but French men and women spent much of the next century (and some might argue the one after that), settling on a shared understanding of these terms. While the French drew on tradition and ideology to conceptualise their ideal of the nation, they found inspiration equally in the travel account. Elsewhere could be a site for imagining the nation; ideals and utopias, disgruntlement and desire, all could take shape on a blank, foreign canvas. It is no coincidence that some of the greatest writers in a century when writing was truly great, also wrote travel accounts. Flaubert, du Camp, Nerval, and Gautier can be counted among them. The novel and the travel account were in many ways equal mixes of reality and fiction. Writers would use a fictional or exotic canvas to tell stories of themselves. If their works are fictional, they are also political, and often based on deeply felt impressions of their own world. The tension between fiction and fact is underscored by the fact that Alexandre Dumas produced travel works, but these were written at his desk, at home in France. Edward Said has written, most evocatively and convincingly, about the way the exotic could be shackled to the needs of the political. But he assumed that this was always for the purpose of domination. He was wrong about that. Travel literature might reify the exotic. It might paint Arabs as primitive and lazy. It often did. But it also called on stereotypes of the foreign in order to stereotype the familiar. Elsewhere could be a place for imagining the nation. Travel writing could be a forum for the expression of criticism. Materialism, capitalism, the loss of Catholicism’s legitimacy, individualism: all of these criticisms were levelled at France through the medium of the travel account that could describe how things might be, by describing somewhere else. Théophile Gautier might not figure among the very greatest that creative Paris produced in the nineteenth century. He was, nonetheless, a man of wonderful insight and wit; a keen observer of his age, and an enthusiastic traveller. Gautier worshipped art. He hated the cynical materialism that he felt defined his era. In Italy, Spain, Russia, and Egypt, he found purity. He, himself, wished to be Oriental. “It seems to me,” his friends reported him as saying, that he had “a Muslim soul. I need blue sky. I will go to the Orient and make myself into a Turk!” In the Orient, in fact, Gautier – who so hated the “civilisation of factories and coal,” – found himself. And isn’t that the nature of travel writing? Nineteenth-century French writers travelled not to lose themselves, but for precisely the opposite reason. They went elsewhere for the purpose of self-discovery and self-expression. It is in this sense that travel writing is a deeply subjective genre. And if it was thus in the nineteenth century, arguably, it is still so. This might make for irritation for impatient and intolerant readers such as me, but it’s a golden seam that can lead to a mine for the historian. Julie Kalman is a Senior Lecturer in history at Monash University. She is a specialist of nineteenth-century France and her writing to date has dealt with the interplay between French and Jewish history in this period. Her most recent publications include the articles “The Jew in the Scenery: Historicising Nineteenth-Century French Travel Literature” and “Going Home to the Holy Land: The Jews of Jerusalem in Nineteenth-Century French Catholic Pilgrimage,” and her book, Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France. French History offers an important international forum for everyone interested in the latest research in the subject. It provides a broad perspective on contemporary debates from an international range of scholars, and covers the entire chronological range of French history from the early Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS. Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
5097	dbpedia	2	6	https://www.audible.com/blog/article-best-french-authors	en	J'adore: The Best French Authors to Listen to Now	https://images.ctfassets…thors-social.jpg	https://images.ctfassets…thors-social.jpg	[ "https://images.ctfassets.net/qpn1gztbusu2/4p9OQXksxtqA1deagYzuXf/aeea8d61e3e855e92fcd28ccdb8ccd34/best-french-authors-social.jpg?fm=jpg&w=3840&q=70", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/410o-bugJXL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/410o-bugJXL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91x8z6akOwL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91x8z6akOwL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71W0KWHOKJL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71W0KWHOKJL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71rzmTT2qaL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71rzmTT2qaL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51SvBUddLuL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51SvBUddLuL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/916xYEe+YEL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/916xYEe+YEL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81kZmkuI9wL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81kZmkuI9wL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91x1fxC4yDL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91x1fxC4yDL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91Ws-93CduL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91Ws-93CduL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81nog6EXF0L._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81nog6EXF0L._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/8195oAUUM2L._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/8195oAUUM2L._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81JvjZE7sIL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81JvjZE7sIL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71cPvngFkVL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71cPvngFkVL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81d+VZarW0L._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81d+VZarW0L._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81csuJHHsKL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81csuJHHsKL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/910VNwaq29L._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/910VNwaq29L._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91kB9pNEghL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91kB9pNEghL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/810-U75qQzL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/810-U75qQzL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/917kBzlizlL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/917kBzlizlL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81B-K6DSSEL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81B-K6DSSEL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51fUyF5AzjL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51fUyF5AzjL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71+BFBz5EzL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71+BFBz5EzL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/911Jn6VU2cL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/911Jn6VU2cL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81GziyDvkqL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81GziyDvkqL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/818cG0WK5tL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/818cG0WK5tL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/812lNEoIW5L._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/812lNEoIW5L._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81QPOCJxLIL._SL800_.jpg?w=256 1x, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81QPOCJxLIL._SL800_.jpg?w=384 2x", "https://images.ctfassets.net/qpn1gztbusu2/7mqRsuQC0LdkVBzFWTYHxv/0f26b176605868d7848d2f99f2d7bb0a/audiobooks-to-learn-french-social.jpg?fm=jpg&w=3840&q=70", "https://images.ctfassets.net/qpn1gztbusu2/V1drCNcTYJP1K4iWRd1aF/9c9a7f592ad56f84f82cade25151d43d/best-british-authors-social.jpg?fm=jpg&w=3840&q=70", "https://images.ctfassets.net/qpn1gztbusu2/1MP5xBCNyk6B7LX6cCZzHq/ca0b59d74e8dc46abb7fb7eeb29a8552/best-gay-books-by-queer-authors-social.jpg?fm=jpg&w=3840&q=70", "https://images.ctfassets.net/qpn1gztbusu2/4S7PcwLWIT7RuqCG47e4pk/81b6bf1d9d18dcb10a76a26b9f4cbc25/best-history-podcasts-social.jpg?fm=jpg&w=3840&q=70" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Liberty Hardy", "Honoré de Balzac", "Charles Baudelaire", "Simone de Beauvoir", "Albert Camus", "Colette", "Alexandre Dumas", "Gustave Flaubert", "Victor Hugo", "Anais Nin" ]	2022-10-06T00:00:00+00:00	Whether you're prepping for a trip to Paris or deep diving into famous French literature from home, here are the best French authors you need to know.	en	/blog/favicon-32.jpg	Audible Blog	https://www.audible.com/blog/article-best-french-authors	Ah, France—the food, the wine, the style. And of course, the capital: Paris, hailed as the City of Lights and the City of Love. From the famed Eiffel Tower to the enchanting countryside, France is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. Whether you're busy planning your dream vacation or you're ready for a virtual trip right now, French literature is one of the best ways to become immersed in France’s fascinating history, people, and culture. Without French literature, there would be no Little Prince or Hunchback of Notre Dame, no Man in the Iron Mask or Tartuffe. Children across the USA continue to refer to an inseparable trio as “The Three Musketeers,” and Les Misérables remains one of the most popular musical adaptations of all time. Even if you can’t fly to Paris tout de suite, you can escape into French literature, from celebrated classics to esteemed contemporary novels. Covering three centuries of the best French authors and their greatest works, consider this list your personal travel guide. You'll find action and adventure, romance, history, poetry, and more. You don't even need a passport! Classic French Literature Cousin Bette Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850). A writer, critic, and journalist known for his keen, unfiltered observations of society. His obstinate nature often caused him more drama than you would find in his work. Best work: Cousin Bette, the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots revenge against her family. The Flowers of Evil Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Essayist, art critic, and one of the pioneer French translators of Edgar Allan Poe. His work was incredibly influential to Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, among others. Best work: The Flowers of Evil, a book of poems about beauty in a rapidly changing world. The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986). Writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist. Best work: The Second Sex, a classic work of feminism that analyzed women's oppression. The Stranger Albert Camus (1913-1960). Philosopher, author, and journalist. Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work at the age of 44, making him the second-youngest recipient in history. Best work: The Stranger, an existentialist novel about a man named Meursault, who kills a stranger on the beach. La Vagabonde Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) (1873-1954). Author, actress, and journalist. Colette was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1948; in 1951, Katherine Anne Porter called her “the greatest living French writer of fiction.” Best work: La Vagabonde, an autobiographical novel about Colette's time as a dance hall performer in Paris. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870). Arguably the best French writer of all time. Dumas was of mixed race—his grandmother had once been a slave in Haiti, and his father was one of Napoleon’s generals. Since the early 20th century, his novels have been adapted into nearly 200 movies. Best work: The Count of Monte Cristo, the story of a man who is wrongfully imprisoned and later escapes and sets out to seek revenge on the three men responsible. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). A prominent novelist of the romanticism and realist literary movements. Flaubert is believed to have spearheaded literary realism in his country. Best work: Madame Bovary, about a doctor's wife who takes a lover, with tragic consequences. Released in 1856, the novel was widely deemed immoral and scandalous at the time. Les Misérables: Translated by Julie Rose Victor Hugo (1802-1885). A novelist, artist, and dramatist of the romantic movement, and another contender for the he best French writer of all time. Hugo's portrait has appeared on French currency. Best work: Les Misérables, a sweeping tome about criminal injustices, social inequities, obsession, and misery. Little Birds: Erotica Anaïs Nin (1903-1977). A diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of erotica. Nin began writing her diaries as a young girl and continued for 60 years; many of them have since been published. Best work: Little Birds, 13 short works of erotica, written by Nin in the early 1940s when she was part of a group "writing pornography for a dollar a day." A Season in Hell & The Drunken Boat Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). A young poet—he composed nearly all of his works before the age of 20—credited with influencing much of literature and art in France around his time. Declared “the first punk” by Allen Ginsberg, Rimbaud is known for his contributions to Symbolism. Best work: "A Season in Hell", his most famous and most personal epic poem. Bonjour tristesse Françoise Sagan (1935-2004). A prolific playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Sagan's famous first novel was written while she was a still a teenager. Best work: Bonjour Tristesse, about a teen girl summering with her father, his soon-to-be wife, and an unexpected guest: his mistress. The Devil's Pool George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) (1804-1876). A novelist, memoirist, and Socialist. One of the most popular authors in Europe by the age of 27, Sand defied societal conventions and wore men’s clothing in public—which required a permit at the time. Best work: The Devil's Pool, a novella about a peasant seeking to remarry and find a suitable mother for his child after the death of his wife. Les mots Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). A dramatist, screenwriter, novelist, and critic, and arguably the most famous existentialist philosopher of all time. Best work: Being and Nothingness, the most important work of modern existentialism. (For a concise, enlightening account of the philosopher's life and ideas, listen toSartre in 90 Minutes.) The Red and the Black Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (1783-1842). A 19th-century French novelist who is widely acclaimed as the founder of literary realism. Best work: The Red and the Black, about a young man hoping to rise above his modest station in life through hard work. Candide (AmazonClassics Edition) Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694-1778). A writer, historian, and philosopher famed for his wit and his sharp criticism of Christianity. Voltaire fought for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state, becoming a pivotal figure in the Enlightenment movement. Best work: Candide, a novel about a young man who is exiled from his home and suffers tragedy and catastrophe after falling in love with the wrong woman. Modern French Literature The Elegance of the Hedgehog Muriel Barbery (1969-). A novelist and philosophy teacher. Her second novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, sold over one million copies. Best work: The Elegance of the Hedgehog, about a young girl who befriends her luxury apartment building's concierge. La ronde et autres faits divers J. M. G. Le Clézio (1940-). A professor and prolific writer, with more than 40 published works. Le Clézio was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008. Best work: The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts, a collection of stories about the underprivileged living in a very privileged region of the French Riviera. Simple Passion In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Annie Ernaux (1940-). Active since the 1970s, Ernaux has carved out a place in the global canon for her shrewd and articulate self-regard, which mines her personal memories to make incisive comments on gender, class, and aging . She won the Nobel prize for literature in 2022. Best work: Simple Passion, her 1991 autofiction about a scorching love affair with a diplomat, narrated in audio by Tavia Gilbert. Vernon Subutex 1 Virginie Despentes (1969-). A writer, novelist, and filmmaker known for her work exploring gender, sexuality, and obscenity’s limits, often with unflinching critiques of social and moral conventions. Best work: Vernon Subutex, about the owner of a record shop who loses his business and sinks into a life of excess. Serotonin Michel Houellebecq (1956-). A novelist, poet, essayist, actor, filmmaker, and singer. Houellebecq is widely credited with the renewal of French literature and widely criticized for his controversial works. Best work: Serotonin, about an engineer for the Ministry of Agriculture who, after learning of his girlfriend’s infidelity, sinks into depression and abandons his life for the countryside of his youth and a miracle pill. Just Like Heaven Marc Levy (1961-). A prolific novelist whose first work, If Only It Were True, was turned into a feature film by Steven Spielberg. Best work: Just Like Heaven, about a man who falls for a stranger who swears she is a manifestation of her comatose self across town. The End of Eddy Édouard Louis (1992-). A novelist who made his publishing debut when he was only 22. He was awarded the Pierre Guénin Prize for his work against homophobia. Best work: The End of Eddy, about a young gay man coming of age in a French factory town. Lumières de Pointe-Noire Alain Mabanckou (1966-). A novelist, journalist, poet, and academic. Currently a Professor of Literature at UCLA, he is best known for portraying the experience of contemporary Africa and the African diaspora in France. Best work: The Lights of Pointe-Noire, a memoir about his return to his childhood home in the Republic of the Congo after more than two decades away. Trois femmes puissantes Marie NDiaye (1967-). A novelist and playwright who published her first novel when she was just 17 years old. She won France’s highest literary honor, the Prix Goncourt, in 2009. Best work: Three Strong Women, about three women who stand up for themselves and say "no" to different things in their lives. God of Carnage Yasmina Reza (1959-). A playwright, actor, novelist, and screenwriter whose numerous accolades include a Tony, a Laurence Olivier Award, a César Award, and several Molière Awards. Best work: God of Carnage, a play about the parents of two children who get together to resolve their sons' conflict and end up fighting instead. The Perfect Nanny Leïla Slimani (1981-). A writer and journalist, as well as a personal representative of French president Emmanuel Macron. She has been awarded the Prix Goncourt, and has sold millions of copies of her works. Best work: The Perfect Nanny, about a nanny who seems perfect but is hiding a dark side. Nothing Holds Back the Night Delphine de Vigan (1966-). A novelist who published her first book under the pseudonym Lou Delvig. She has won several prestigious awards, and her work has been adapted into films. Best work: Nothing Holds Back the Night, an autobiographical novel focusing on her luminous and erratic mother, who struggled with mental illness.
5097	dbpedia	1	59	https://www.nndb.com/people/190/000025115/	en	Théophile Gautier			[ "https://www.nndb.com/title.gif", "https://www.nndb.com/red-profile-2.gif", "https://www.nndb.com/people/190/000025115/phototheophile-fix.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null			/silly-nndb-icon.png		null	Born: 30-Aug-1811 Birthplace: Tarbes, Hautes-Pyrénées, France Died: 23-Dec-1872 Location of death: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France Cause of death: Heart Failure Remains: Buried, Cimetière de Montmartre, Paris, France Gender: Male Race or Ethnicity: White Occupation: Poet Nationality: France Executive summary: The Hashish-Eaters' Club French poet and miscellaneous writer, born at Tarbes on the 31st of August 1811. He was educated at the grammar school of that town, and afterwards at the Collège Charlemagne in Paris, but was almost as much in the studios. He very early devoted himself to the study of the older French literature, especially that of the 16th and the early part of the 17th century. This study qualified him well to take part in the Romantic movement, and enabled him to astonish Sainte-Beuve by the phraseology and style of some literary essays which, when barely eighteen years old, he put into the critic's hands. In consequence of this introduction he at once came under the influence of the great Romantic cénacle, to which, as to Victor Hugo in particular, he was also introduced by his gifted but ill-starred schoolmate Gérard de Nerval. With Gérard, Petrus Borel, Camille Corot, and many other less known painters and poets whose personalities he has delightfully sketched in the articles collected under the titles of Histoire du Romantisme, etc., he formed a minor romantic clique who were distinguished for a time by the most extravagant eccentricity. A flaming crimson waistcoat and a great mass of waving hair were the outward signs which qualified Gautier for a chief rank among the enthusiastic devotees who attended the rehearsals of Hernani with red tickets marked "Hierro", performed mocking dances round the bust of Jean Racine, and were at all times ready to exchange word or blow with the perruques and grisâtres of the classical party. In Gautier's case these freaks were not inconsistent with real genius and real devotion to sound ideals of literature. He began (like Thackeray, to whom he presents in other ways some striking points of resemblance) as an artist, but soon found that his true powers lay in another direction. His first considerable poem, Albertus (1830), displayed a good deal of the extravagant character which accompanied rather than marked the movement, but also gave evidence of uncommon command both of language and imagery, and in particular of a descriptive power hardly to be excelled. The promise thus given was more than fulfilled in his subsequent poetry, which, in consequence of its small bulk, may well be noticed at once and by anticipation. The Comédie de la Mort, which appeared soon after (1832), is one of the most remarkable of French poems, and though never widely read has received the suffrage of every competent reader. Minor poems of various dates, published in 1840, display an almost unequalled command over poetical form, an advance even over Albertus in vigor, wealth and appropriateness of diction, and abundance of the special poetical essence. All these good gifts reached their climax in the Emaux et Camées, first published in 1856, and again, with additions, just before the poet's death in 1872. These poems are in their own way such as cannot be surpassed. Gautier's poetical work contains in little an expression of his literary peculiarities. There are, in addition to the peculiarities of style and diction already noticed, an extraordinary feeling and affection for beauty in art and nature, and a strange indifference to anything beyond this range, which has doubtless injured the popularity of his work. But it was not, after all, as a poet that Gautier was to achieve either profit or fame. For the theater, he had but little gift, and his dramatic efforts (if we except certain masques or ballets in which his exuberant and graceful fancy came into play) are by far his weakest. It was otherwise with his prose fiction. His first novel of any size, and in many respects his most remarkable work, was Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). Unfortunately this book, while it establishes his literary reputation on an imperishable basis, was unfitted by its subject, and in parts by its treatment, for general perusal, and created, even in France, a prejudice against its author which he was very far from really deserving. During the years from 1833 onwards, his fertility in novels and tales was very great. Les Jeunes-France (1833), which may rank as a sort of prose Albertus in some ways, displays the follies of the youthful Romantics in a vein of humorous and at the same time half-pathetic satire. Fortunio (1838) perhaps belongs to the same class. Jettatura, written somewhat later, is less extravagant and more pathetic. A crowd of minor tales display the highest literary qualities, and rank with Mérimée's at the head of all contemporary works of the class. First of all must be mentioned the ghost-story of La Morte Amoureuse, a gem of the most perfect workmanship. For many years Gautier continued to write novels. La Belle Jenny (1864) is a not very successful attempt to draw on his English experience, but the earlier Militona (1847) is a most charming picture of Spanish life. In Spirite (1866) he endeavored to enlist the fancy of the day for supernatural manifestations, and a Roman de la Momie (1856) is a learned study of ancient Egyptian ways. His most remarkable effort in this kind, towards the end of his life, was Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863), a novel, partly of the picaresque school, partly of that which Dumas was to make popular, projected nearly thirty years earlier, and before Dumas himself had taken to the style. This book contains some of the finest instances of his literary power. Yet neither in poems nor in novels did the main occupation of Gautier as a literary man consist. He was early drawn to the more lucrative task of feuilleton-writing, and for more than thirty years he was among the most expert and successful practitioners of this art. Soon after the publication of Mademoiselle de Maupin, in which he had not been too polite to journalism, he became irrevocably a journalist. He was actually the editor of L'Artiste for a time: but his chief newspaper connections were with La Presse from 1836 to 1854 and with the Moniteur later. His work was mainly theatrical and art criticism. The rest of his life was spent either at Paris or in travels of considerable extent to Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Turkey, England, Algeria and Russia, all undertaken with a more or less definite purpose of book-making. Having absolutely no political opinions, he had no difficulty in accepting the Second Empire, and received from it considerable favors, in return for which, however, he in no way prostituted his pen, but remained a literary man pure and simple. He died on the 23rd of December 1872. Accounts of his travels, criticisms of the theatrical and literary works of the day, obituary notices of his contemporaries and, above all, art criticism occupied him in turn. It has sometimes been deplored that this engagement in journalism should have diverted Gautier from the performance of more capital work in literature. Perhaps, however, this regret springs from a certain misconception. Gautier's power was literary power pure and simple, and it is as evident in his slightest sketches and criticisms as in Émaux et Camées or La Merle Amoureuse. On the other hand his weakness, if he had a weakness, lay in his almost total indifference to the matters which usually supply subjects for art and therefore for literature. He has thus been accused of "lack of ideas" by those who have not cleared their own minds of cant; and in the recent set-back of the critical current against form an in favor of "philosophic" treatment, comment upon him has sometimes been unfavorable. But this injustice will, beyond all question, be redressed again. He was neither immoral, irreligious nor unduly subservient to despotism, but morals, religion and politics (to which we may add science and material progress) were matters of no interest to him. He was to all intents a humanist, as the word was understood in the 15th century. But he was a humorist as well, and this combination, joined to his singularly kindly and genial nature, saved him from some dangers and depravations as well as some absurdities to which the humanist temper is exposed. As time goes on it may be predicted that, though Gautier may not be widely read, yet his writings will never cease to be full of indescribable charm and of very definite instruction to men of letters. Besides those of his works which have been already cited, we may notice Une Larme du Diable (1839), a charming mixture of humor and tenderness; Les Grotesques (1844), a volume of early criticisms on some oddities of 17th-century literature; Caprices et Zigzags (1845), miscellanies dealing in part with English life; Voyage en Espagne (1845), Constantinople (1854), Voyage en Russie (1866), brilliant volumes of travel; Ménagerie Intime (1869) and Tableaux de Siege (1872), his two latest works, which display his incomparable style in its quietest but not least happy form. Do you know something we don't? Submit a correction or make a comment about this profile
5097	dbpedia	1	52	https://prabook.com/web/pierre.gautier/3737519	en	Pierre Gautier	https://prabook.com/web/…o.jpg?id=1575660	https://prabook.com/web/…o.jpg?id=1575660	[ "https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=954281624993604&ev=PageView &noscript=1", "https://prabook.com/web/img/banner_top_green.gif", "https://prabook.com/web/img/veterans/veterans-logo.png", "https://prabook.com/web/show-photo-icon.jpg?id=1575660&width=220&cache=false", "https://prabook.com/web/assets/ajax-loader.gif", "https://prabook.com/web/img/loading.gif", "https://prabook.com/web/img/loading.gif", "https://prabook.com/web/img/loading.gif", "https://prabook.com/web/show-photo.jpg?id=1575660&cache=false", "https://prabook.com/web/img/loading.gif", "https://prabook.com/web/img/loading.gif", "https://prabook.com/web/img/loading.gif", "https://prabook.com/web/img/loading.gif", "https://prabook.com/web/show-profile-photo-icon.jpg?id=3762277&width=95", "https://prabook.com/web/show-photo.jpg?id=1629665&cache=false", "https://prabook.com/web/show-photo.jpg?id=1629666&cache=false", "https://prabook.com/web/show-photo-icon.jpg?id=1575660&width=220&cache=false", "https://prabook.com/web/img/map-stock.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "Pierre Gautier profile Tarbes", "France critic dramatist journalist novelist poet" ]	null	[]	null	Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet and dramatist whose influence was strongly felt in the period of changing sensibilities in French literature—from the early Romantic period to the aestheticism and naturalism of the end of the 19th century.	en			https://prabook.com/web/pierre.gautier/3737519	Career From 1830 onward Gautier was productive in poetry, novels, short stories, criticism, and travel sketches. He is the great apostle of "art for art's sake. "In February 1830, Gautier was the most brilliant of the young men supporting Victor Hugo against the classical critics; the scarlet doublet which he wore at the premiè repremiere of Hugo's Hernani has become legendary. Rejecting the romantic ideal of grandiose nature, he rejected likewise its ideal love. Rarely a creator but always an impeccable craftsman, Gautier gave a much needed corrective to the undisciplined style of the romantics. Unfortunately, Gautier's verse does not have emotional or intellectual content equal to its perfection of form. É mauxEmaux et Camé esCamees (1852) is his best and most characteristic collection. It includes the famous Art, in which Gautier sets up technical difficulty as a prime requirement of art. Thus his long novel Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863) is a rehandling of the 17th-century Roman comique of Paul Scarron. Gautier's prose works include also the posthumously published Histoire du romantisme (1874).
5097	dbpedia	0	49	http://www.crmoon.com/cresmobaudelaire.html	en	cresmobaudelaire.html			[ "http://www.crmoon.com/Baudelaire%20Symons%20IS%2327172D.jpg", "http://www.crmoon.com/Baudelaire%20Gautier%20I%232721E9.jpg", "http://www.crmoon.com/Baudelaire%20Flowers%20I%232721E7.jpg", "http://www.crmoon.com/Baudelaire%20Symons%20Pr%2327172B.jpg", "http://www.crmoon.com/Baudelaire%20Charles%20b%232721E8.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null	CRESCENT MOON PUBLISHING COMPLETE CATALOGUE poetry - painting - sculpture - arts - literature - cinema - music - media - feminism - cultural studies CHARLES BAUDELAIRE STUDIES Charles Baudelaire: A Study Charles Baudelaire: A Life Flowers of Evil Poems In Prose The Poems and the Prose LIST OF SUBJECTS ORDER INFO Andy Goldsworthy \| Art \| Art in Close-Up Series \| Sculpture \| Painters \| American Painters \| Renaissance Painters \| Renaissance Writers \| Cinema \| Media, Cinema, Culture, Feminism \| Feminism and Gender Studies \| Women Artists and Writers \| Literature \| Poetry \| Contemporary Poetry \| Novelists and Fiction \| 19th Century and Romantic Culture \| European Writers \| Fairy Tales \| British Poets \| Kate Bush \| Shakespeare Studies \| Arthur Rimbaud Studies \| D.H. Lawrence Studies \| John Cowper Powys Studies \| Thomas Hardy Studies \| Hayao Miyazaki \| John Hughes \| Brothers Grimm \| Ursula Le Guin \| J.R.R. Tolkien \| Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling \| Mind, Body, Spirit \| Journals \| Alchemy Records \| Index of Titles, ISBNs, Dates and Prices \| New Titles and Forthcoming Books \| TV arts documentaries on DVD and video \| Creative Writing groups \| Authors' Mentoring and Guidance Service CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY By Arthur Symons Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a celebrated 19th century French poet, author of the famous Flowers of Evil poetic sequence, first published in 1857. Baudelaire is a poets poet par excellence, a brilliant craftsman who produced some of the finest poems in the French language. Baudelaire was known as a dandy who led a bohemian lifestyle; he knew many of the artists of the era (Manet, Nadar, Delacroix, and Gautier). Baudelaires influence on subsequent poets and artists has been immense. This book by Arthur Symons is an important early study of Charles Baudelaire. Arthur Symons offers a biography of the poet, and considers his poetry (using many examples). Illustrated. 148 pages. Paperback, with a full colour cover. www.crmoon.com £9.99 / $15.99 PBK CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: HIS LIFE By Théophile Gautier With poems translated by Guy Thorne Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a celebrated 19th century French poet, author of the famous Flowers of Evil poetic sequence, first published in 1857. Baudelaire is a poets poet par excellence, a brilliant craftsman who produced some of the finest poems in the French language. Baudelaire was known as a dandy who led a bohemian lifestyle; he knew many of the artists of the era (Manet, Nadar, Delacroix, and Gautier). Baudelaires influence on subsequent poets and artists has been immense. This book by Charles Baudelaires friend Théophile Gautier is an important early study of the poet. Gautier offers a biography of the poet, and looks at his work. In the second part, Guy Thorne translates a selections of Baudelaires poems, including from his two best-known collections - the Flowers of Evil and the Little Poems In Prose. A group of letters from Baudelaire are also included, and an essay on Baudelaires influence. Illustrated. 204 pages. Paperback, with a full colour cover. With the French text of Baudelaires poetry. www.crmoon.com £11.99 / $17.99 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE FLOWERS OF EVIL Poems translated by Cyril Scott Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a celebrated 19th century French poet, author of the famous Flowers of Evil poetic sequence, first published in 1857. Baudelaire is a poets poet par excellence, a brilliant craftsman who produced some of the finest poems in the French language. Baudelaire was known as a dandy who led a bohemian lifestyle; he knew many of the artists of the era (Manet, Nadar, Delacroix, and Gautier). Baudelaires influence on subsequent poets and artists has been immense. This edition of Flowers of Evil features translations by Cyril Scott and a note on Baudelaire, including poems such as The Balcony, Correspondences, Hymn To Beauty, Spleen, and Music. Illustrated. 160 pages. Paperback, with a full colour cover. With the French text of Baudelaires poetry. www.crmoon.com £9.99 / $15.99 PBK CHARLES BAUDELAIRE POEMS IN PROSE Poems translated by Arthur Symons Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a celebrated 19th century French poet, author of the famous Flowers of Evil poetic sequence, first published in 1857. Baudelaire is a poets poet par excellence, a brilliant craftsman who produced some of the finest poems in the French language. Baudelaire was known as a dandy who led a bohemian lifestyle; he knew many of the artists of the era (Manet, Nadar, Delacroix, and Gautier). Baudelaires influence on subsequent poets and artists has been immense. This edition of Baudelaires prose poems is a selection by British author Arthur Symons. The book includes two introductions to Baudelaire. With the French text of Baudelaires poetry. Illustrated. 92 pages. Paperback, with a full colour cover. www.crmoon.com £7.99 / $11.99 CONTENTS Note On the Text 11 I The Favours of the Moon 19 II Which Is True? 23 III LInvitation au Voyage 25 IV The Eyes of the Poor 31 V Windows 35 VI Crowds? 37 VII The Cake 41 VIII Evening Twilight 47 IX Anywhere Out of the World 53 X A Heroic Death 57 XI Be Drunken 67 XII Epilogue 69 Charles Baudelaire 74 A Note On Charles Baudelaire 79 Bibliography 82 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE THE POEMS AND THE PROSE POEMS Introduced by James Huneker. Edited by Jeremy Mark Robinson Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a celebrated 19th century French poet, author of the famous Flowers of Evil poetic sequence, first published in 1857. Baudelaire is a poets poet par excellence, a brilliant craftsman who produced some of the finest poems in the French language. Baudelaire was known as a dandy who led a bohemian lifestyle; he knew many of the artists of the era (Manet, Nadar, Delacroix, and Gautier). Baudelaires influence on subsequent poets and artists has been immense. This edition of Baudelaires poems and prose poems is introduced by James Huneker. The book includes a second introduction to Baudelaire. With the French text of Baudelaires poetry facing each poem. Illustrated. 284 pages. Paperback, with a full colour cover. www.crmoon.com £11.99 / $17.99 FORTHCOMING individual studies of: Arthur Rimbaud Rainer Maria Rilke Friedrich Nietzsche Andre Gide Novalis; Friedrich Hölderlin translations of C.P. Cavafy by Edmund Keeley RIMBAUD Arthur Rimbaud: Selected Poems Arthur Rimbaud: A Season in Hell OTHERS Andre Gide: Fiction and Fervour in the Novels Samuel Beckett Goes Into the Silence In the Dim Void: Samuel Beckett's Late Trilogy Julia Kristeva: Art, Love, Melancholy, Philosophy, Semiotics and Psychoanalysis Luce Irigaray: Lips, Kissing, and the Politics of Sexual Difference Helénè Cixous I Love You: The Jouissance of Writing Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism German Romantic Poetry: Goethe, Novalis, Heine, Hölderlin Rainer Maria Rilke: Dance the Orange: Selected Poems Hölderlin's Songs of Light: Selected Poems LIST OF SUBJECTS Harry Potter J.R.R. Tolkien Andy Goldsworthy Art Sculpture Painters American Painters Renaissance Painters Renaissance Writers Media, Cinema, Culture, Feminism Feminism and Gender Studies Literature Poetry Contemporary Poetry Novelists 19th Century and Romantic Culture European Writers British Poets Shakespeare Studies Arthur Rimbaud Studies D.H. Lawrence Studies John Cowper Powys Studies Thomas Hardy Studies Journals Alchemy Records Index of Titles, ISBNs, Dates and Prices SELECTIONS FROM WRITERS AND POETS To read selections from other writers, poets and texts published by Crescent Moon, click on the names below: Alexendria Revisited: Durrell, Cavafy, Keeley and Others Elisabeth Bletsoe, poems Emily Dickinson, poems Lawrence Durrell D.J. Enright, poems H.W. Fawkner on John Cowper Powys Eric Gill and D.H. Lawrence Thomas Hardy, poems Thomas Hardy, from Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles Spirit of Place in Hardy, Lawrence and Powys Robert Herrick, poems Friedrich Hölderlin, poems Wolfgang Iser, interview Julia Kristeva, life and work D.H. Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell D.H. Lawrence's The Escaped Cock D.H. Lawrence, poems Love poetry, a selection Nature poetry, a selection Pagan America: Anthology of New American Poetry John Cowper Powys by Joe Boulter John Cowper Powys, from Rethinking Powys Peter Redgrove, poems Jeremy Reed, poems Rainer Maria Rilke, life and work Rainer Maria Rilke, poems Arthur Rimbaud, poems Arthur Rimbaud, life and work Romantic poetry, a selection William Shakespeare: The Sonnets Arseny Tarkovsky, poems Sir Thomas Wyatt, poems LIST OF SUBJECTS Harry Potter J.R.R. Tolkien Andy Goldsworthy Art Art in Close-Up Series Sculpture Painters American Painters TV arts documentaries on DVD and video Renaissance Painters Renaissance Writers Media, Cinema, Culture, Feminism Cinema Feminism and Gender Studies Literature Poetry Contemporary Poetry Novelists 19th Century and Romantic Culture European Writers British Poets Shakespeare Studies Arthur Rimbaud Studies D.H. Lawrence Studies John Cowper Powys Studies Thomas Hardy Studies Journals Alchemy Records Index of Titles, ISBNs, Dates and Prices New Titles and Forthcoming Books ORDER INFO You can order by telephone, post or e-mail. Please quote the title or ISBN of the book you want, and the quantity. Please write in block capitals. Please make cheques and monies payable to Crescent Moon (in GB pounds sterling, Eurocheques or International Money Orders). Please make US dollar cheques payable to J. Robinson. All titles can be ordered through your local bookseller. Prices include UK postage & packing. Please add £1.50/ $2.00 for overseas p & p for the 1st book, then £1.00/ $1.50 per book. 10% discount on orders over £20.00 / $30.00, 20% on orders over £40.00 / $60.00. Trade discounts on application. BY E-MAIL: : <cresmopub@yahoo.co.uk> BY MAIL: Crescent Moon Publishing, P.O. Box 1312, Maidstone, Kent, ME14 5XU, U.K. BY TELEPHONE: from the UK: 01622-729593 from the US: 01144-1622-729593 from other territories: 0044-1622-729593 ON THE INTERNET: Crescent Moon titles can be ordered via all of the main internet booksellers: Amazon.com, internet bookshop <www.amazon.com> Amazon.co.uk, internet bookshop <www.amazon.co.uk> Play.com www.play.com Tesco www.tesco.com The Internet Bookshop <www.internetbookshop.co.uk> The Book Place <www.thebookplace.com> W.H. Smith bookshop <www.whsmith.co.uk> Waterstone's Booksellers <www.waterstones.co.uk> Barnes and Noble internet bookshop <barnesandnoble.com (www.bn.com)> Borders internet bookshop <www.borders.com> Books Online <www.bol.com> Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk sometimes say our books are either currently unavailable or delivered within 4-6 weeks. That's their system: ignore it: our books are available from Amazon and will be delivered in 2-3 days (try using the 'new & used' section). Alternatively, play.com, tesco.com, and waterstones.co.uk (among others) will deliver in 3-5 days. CRESCENT MOON PUBLISHING P.O. Box 1312, Maidstone, Kent, ME14 5XU, U.K. tel: 01622-729593 (from the UK) 01144-1622-729593 (from the US) 0044-1622-729593 (from other territories) E-MAIL AND INTERNET Orders and enquiries: <cresmopub@yahoo.co.uk> Website: <www.crescentmoon.org.uk> Top Home page \| Links \| Menu \| List of subjects \| Contact us \| Order info Andy Goldsworthy \| Art \| Art in Close-Up Series \| Sculpture \| Painters \| American Painters \| Renaissance Painters \| Renaissance Writers \| Cinema \| Media, Cinema, Culture, Feminism \| Feminism and Gender Studies \| Women Artists and Writers \| Literature \| Poetry \| Contemporary Poetry \| Novelists and Fiction \| 19th Century and Romantic Culture \| European Writers \| Fairy Tales \| British Poets \| Kate Bush \| Shakespeare Studies \| Arthur Rimbaud Studies \| D.H. Lawrence Studies \| John Cowper Powys Studies \| Thomas Hardy Studies \| Hayao Miyazaki \| John Hughes \| Brothers Grimm \| Ursula Le Guin \| J.R.R. Tolkien \| Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling \| Mind, Body, Spirit \| Journals \| Alchemy Records \| Index of Titles, ISBNs, Dates and Prices \| New Titles and Forthcoming Books \| TV arts documentaries on DVD and video \| Creative Writing groups \| Authors' Mentoring and Guidance Service
5097	dbpedia	1	6	https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1868/06/theophile-gautier-a-literary-artist/627978/	en	Théophile Gautier - A Literary Artist	https://cdn.theatlantic.…lt-thumbnail.png	https://cdn.theatlantic.…lt-thumbnail.png	[ "https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/nav-archive-promo-5541b02ae92f1a9276249e1c6c2534ee.png", "https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/images/current-issue.large.jpg", "https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/img/specialreports/lead/2020/10/14/Thumbnail.jpg", "https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/nav-crossword.png", "https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/archive-thumbnail.png", "https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/YourSubscription_300x300.jpg", "https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/-aWL1HmfSjS7E6SdCRYNUw0QQrM=/0x267:2324x3366/96x128/media/img/issues/1868/06/01/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/3ZfwXs6aLdm4NOf4-yidZ2hcLAs=/0x267:2324x3366/192x256/media/img/issues/1868/06/01/original.jpg 2x, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/HCqP_lCUYROSAhSN30pQ2FVY-Jo=/0x267:2324x3366/288x384/media/img/issues/1868/06/01/original.jpg 3x" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Eugene Benson" ]	1868-06-01T04:56:00+00:00	The Atlantic covers news, politics, culture, technology, health, and more, through its articles, podcasts, videos, and flagship magazine.	en	https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/favicon-3888b0e329526a975703e3059a02b92d.ico	The Atlantic	https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1868/06/theophile-gautier-a-literary-artist/627978/	WE have to speak of a writer formed by influences that touch the life of but a few Americans,—a writer whose habitual life is in the midst of things that have no place in our land. We have neither the marbles of Greece, nor the pictures of the Italian masters, nor the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. We have neither Gothic, Moorish, nor Oriental forms to arrest the mind, and fix us in the contemplation of the great types of a lost or abandoned ideal. It makes a vast difference in our mental experience whether we know, or do not know, these things. In France they have formed great literary and artistic types, like Victor Hugo and George Sand and Théophile Gautier. The grotesque forms, the eccentric passions, the wild play of the imagination, fixed for all ages in the stones of cathedrals, we find again in the phrases of Victor Hugo. His very style resembles the bold, sculpturesque, arbitrary forms of the mediæval workers. Victor Hugo had Notre Dame ; Théophile Gautier had the marbles of Greece and Rome, the pictures of the Renaissance, and the whole contemporary art of France acting upon his mind. His literary work is therefore full of artistic forms. Special and varied forms of art abound more in Gautier’s work than anything derived from literature. He is one of those writers who live less in the alcoves of great libraries than in the galleries of great painters, or in the fields. I need not say how this fact separates him from die ordinary thinker or the average literary man. It is enough to say that it gives a form, a color, and a vividness to his literary work which cannot be found in the writer who is more of a thinker than an artist,—a writer who evolves his subject rather than sees it to depict it. The literary result that follows from the combined influence of art and nature habitually acting upon a luxurious, voluptuous, tranquil nature, and a mind so much absorbed with the artistic element that modern civilization, the doctrines of socialists, the mania for positive sciences, are considered only as interruptions and discords in the placid and beautiful world of its habitual contemplation, cannot fail to interest, since it is at once provoking and strange to us. We mast frankly admit that Gautier outrages the common sentiment of the American mind : we hasten to add that the common purpose of the democratic man is strange to Gautier. Gautier represents what has no place in our literature, still less in our life. He represents the supremacy of the artistic. His work is the reaffirmation of the Pagan idea of life in the midst of a debauched society. He is brutally indifferent to all that is held in the purely industrial life, haughty before the Christian idea, and insolent and hopeless in the midst of his idols of flesh, of marble, of color. It would not be difficult to place ourselves, on the ground of common morality, next to Gautier’s work, and scold him, or make phrases bristling with austere reflections as a contrast to the sentiment of his mind ; he would even serve well as the occasion to lower the pride of the artistic nature, to which we are so much indebted for generous emotions of admiration, and the ennobling pleasure of a gratified æsthetic sense. But we should be far from illuminating our subject; we should be a Philistine of the Pharisaic kind, speaking from a provincial idea of literature ; we should betray that our instinct of propriety was the most active and characteristic fact of our nature. To judge Gautier we need not invoke Geneva or Exeter Hall. Either of these would only force us to confess the absence of all the senses that respond to the glory of life, and the absence of all those needs the presence of which grace our nature, and, in the midst of monotonies and trivialities and vices, dignify and adorn it with so much that separates it from that of the brutes. Once knowing the charm, the seduction, the bewildering beauty of all that has triumphed over or possessed the genius of Gautier, — all that has developed in him the voluptuary careless of mankind, we will take a step outside of the sectarian life and its cheap critical effort; we will listen to Gautier as to music. Afterwards it will be well to arraign him before the generous and noble tribuna! in which the lovers of humanity hear the troubles and plead the cause of the poor and weak and deformed ; and then, because Gautier is a man belonging to the universal brotherhood, we must pronounce him to be less than the august and laborious benefactors of the poor in spirit. He is condemned in the highest court, and we can dispense with the tea-table prosecution to which pale Propriety and sectarian Zeal would subject him. We have sufficiently anticipated judgment to give you an idea of the illustrious literary artist who has promenaded through all the epochs of art. taking from each their type of beauty, and who has reaffirmed the pagan thought that a beautiful form is more lovely than virtue. Let us know better, and in less general terms, the typical literary artist who closes the present epoch of French literature. The late Charles Baudelaire, who was a haughty and unique thinker, as well as an intense poet, — a thinker firm and close and clear in the expression of his mind,—wrote several beautiful pages about Gautier. When a man of high literary instincts burns incense before a contemporary, you may know it must be fine and sweet. But with all the respect we have for Baudelaire’s mind, with an equal admiration for his literary faith, we cannot follow him in his fine eulogy of Gautier. Both Baudelaire and Gautier—the former with his mental life troubled by passion, the latter with his mental life held in a calm voluptuousness—have been indifferent to the ideas that must be cherished by the democratic man, even when he tries most to be an artist, that is, a being wholly given up to the beautiful. But the artistic or beautiful, separated from what we ordinarily call the moral, is unknown among us. We cannot follow Baudelaire ; but we shall cite his word to confirm the statement of the high place that Gautier holds in contemporary French literature. Baudelaire calls him “a perfect man of letters, the equal of the most grand in the past, a model for those who shall come, a diamond more and more rare in an epoch drunk with ignorance and matter.” Before taking another step into our subject, let us stop to read a few biographical facts. In criticism, which is very often a highway, they serve like memorial stones, at which we can rest, and talk about forgotten things. Théophile Gautier was born at Tarbes, one of the most ancient cities of France, in the year 1811. He came to Paris at a very early age, and studied at the College of Charlemagne, at which place he became acquainted with Gérard de Nerval, with whom, later, he wrote many of his dramatic criticisms. He was remarked for his size, his beauty, and his carelessness of the ancient classics. The museums of sculpture and painting had more attractions for him than the recitation-rooms of his college. Later, he entered the studio of Rioult. He studied long enough to discover that painting was a means too impersonal and too remote to satisfy the energy of life that was in him demanding an artistic outlet. If painting with colors is too slow a process, why not paint with words ? In the mean time he had kept up his literary studies. He had gone to the source at which the words are the richest, and the ideas the least troublesome; he had studied the French poets of the sixteenth century. He wrote a few verses, and read them to his friends. The success he obtained encouraged him. In 1828 he presented himself to Sainte-Beuve, and asked permission to read a piece in verse called La Tête de Mort. He was more than encouraged ; he was confirmed by Sainte-Beuve, who praised his work, and introduced him to Victor Hugo as a young poet. After his introduction to Victor Hugo he became his most effective recruit in Paris, shaking his magnificent black hair, and showing his great fists to the classicists of the epoch, nightly going forth to the theatre to slay the Parisian Philistines and Traditionalists. He was at all the first representations of Victor Hugo’s powerful and aggressive plays, and took part in the actual struggles characterizing the advent of the revolutionary dramas of Victor Hugo and Dumas, which he defended in the columns of the press. He published his first volume of poetry in 1830. The revolutionary excitement of the day absorbed public attention ; Gautier’s verses were not heard in the din of the fusillade that swept the streets of Paris. Later, 1833 to 1834, he wrote for Figaro, with Gérard de Nerval. Together they made and broke obligations to write for certain papers. They went from La France Littéraire to the Revue de Paris; together they appeared in L’Artist; together they wrote the dramatic feuilleton of La Charte in 1830, and La Presse in 1836. La Presse gave Gautier twelve thousand francs a year for sixty feuilletons on the contemporary theatre and fine arts. In the space of ten years he made several voyages, — in Italy, in Spain, in the East, in Russia, in Holland, in England. After each voyage he gave the Parisians a book full of vim, of color, of pictures in words. Gautier is a hunter of words. His literary fields are the dictionaries. Words have for him the attraction that butterflies have for children who run after them. On the first shelf of his library he has fifty dictionaries,—dictionaries of arts, of sciences, and even of the cuisine of all ages and all countries. He asked Baudelaire, when he called upon him for the first time, if he ever read dictionaries ? Happily for Baudelaire, he could reply that very early he had been struck with lexiconnairie. It may be said that Gautier’s defect is an excess of expression,— it is also his distinguishing excellence. His literary form is crowded, sometimes even embarrassed, though no one could be more neat and defined than Gautier at his best moment, in the midst ot his vast resources of expression. But such exuberance and such display are apt to become barbaric. In Gautier it is a part of his Oriental taste. His cabinet of work is a kind of museum. In it a thousand curious objects are assembled. He has a great Oriental arm-chair, made expressly in honor of his Turkish habits. No less than twelve cals sleep or play about him. He is described as large and majestic in person ; there is a total absence of dryness in his manner. Baudelaire writes that only the beautiful adjectives Oriental and Asiatic can render the kind of temper, at the same time simple, dignified, and soft, of Gautier. On Quai Voltaire we have met him. He is one of the most picturesque and noticed figures, — of a sombre and brooding aspect, seeing nobody, eyes upon the ground, his black hair flowing from under a large-brimmed hat; he goes through the phantombeauty of mist-covered Paris, or walks under its laughing sky,—let us suppose dreaming of the East, or the hand of Rachel, or the shoulders of Grisi, a man full of beautiful memories, yet memories that hold no charm of consolation, but only the bitterness of a lost delight. Gautier has made the talk of all the salons of Paris by his feuilletons on art and the drama. It is always more convenient to speak of that part of his literary work, and of his Voyage en Espagne. It is not so easy to-introduce his poetry or his romances. We will suggest their character. They are the full, neat, artistic, spontaneous expression of all that surprised and outraged many of the readers of Swinburne’s poems. Both Baudelaire and Gautier, as poets, indulge the full and intense expression of passion and voluptuousness that characterizes Laus Veneris, and other poems of Swinburne. In Baudelaire we find an intense, bitter, masculine sense of the mystery and implacability of passion and desire; in Gautier, a free, frank, luxurious, literary expression of physical beauty and voluptuousness. Gautier is without any intensity ; Baudelaire is uncommonly intense. Gautier’s representative romance is Mademoiselle de Maupin. To call it the Confessions of Théophile Gautier would not be far from the truth. The Confessions of Rousseau are less oftensive to the modesty and reserve of human nature than the pages of Mademoiselle de Maupin. Yet it must be spoken of, even critically considered, because it is a typical book. It corresponds with the thoughts, sentiment, and life of thousands of cultivated Parisians, and it is remarkable as a piece of expression. What is called “ its prodigious style,” and the ground it covers, in the literary world, you shall judge in reading the following extract. You probably never read anything like it. But it is characteristic of our epoch to entertain everything ; and, above all, the critical mind, necessarily keeping open house, must be ready to show hospitality even to the most foreign thought. We are not to ask Gantlet to live with us ; we simply shelter him under our roof for the night. In the mean time we can examine what manner of man has his being in Paris, the centre of arts. He speaks : — “ I am a man of the Homeric times ; the world in which I live is not my world, and I do not understand the society that surrounds me. Christ did not come for me ; I am as much a Pagan as Phidias or Alcibiades. I have never been on Golgotha to pluck the flowers of passion ; and the deep river which flows from the Crucified, and puts a red girdle around the world, has never bathed me with its waters ; — my rebellious body cares not to recognize the supremacy of the soul, and my flesh chooses not to be mortified. I find this earth as beautiful as heaven, and I consider the correctness of form as virtue. Spirituality is not my affair, I love a statue better than a phantom, and midday than twilight. Three things please me: gold, marble, and purple, — éclat, solidity, color. My dreams are all made of that, and all the palaces which I build for my chimeras are constructed with these materials. Sometimes I have other dreams, — they are long cavalcades of horses, pure white, without harness or bridle, mounted by fine-looking youths, nude, who defile upon a band of dark blue, as upon the friezes of the Parthenon ; or young girls crowned with bands, and wearing tunics with straight folds, and who keep turning around an immense vase.” These fine word-pictures are copies in the color of Greek marbles. Their beauty powerfully appeals to the artistic mind. And we can imagine how this literary expression was enjoyed bv the artistic public that lives in Paris. But again listen to Gautier: — “ I have gazed at love by the light of the antique, and like a piece of sculpture more or less perfect. How is the arm ? Pretty good. The hands are not wanting in delicacy. What do you think of the foot ? I think that the ankle has no nobility, and that the heel is commonplace. But the bosom is well, of a good form ; the serpentine line is undulating; the shoulders are plump, and of a fine character. That woman would make a passable model, and several parts of her might be moulded. Let us love her. “ I have always been so. I have for women the eyes of a sculptor, not of a lover. I have all my life long worried myself about the form of the flagon, and not about its contents. “ I consider woman in the antique manner, as a beautiful slave destined for our pleasure. Cynthia, you are beautiful ; hasten, who knows if you will be living to-morrow ? Your hair is blacker than the lustrous skin of an Ethiopian virgin : hasten ; in but a few years, thin silvery threads shall glide into those thick locks ; — these roses smell sweet to-day, to-morrow they will have the odor of death, and be nothing more than the cadavers of roses. Let us breathe thy roses as long as they resemble thy cheeks ; and let us kiss thy cheeks as long as they resemble thy roses. When you are old, Cynthia, no one will care to have you, not even the varlets of the lictor, if you should pay them. Wait till Saturn has marked with his nail that brow, pure and shining now, and you will see how your door, so besieged and so flowery, shall be avoided, cursed, covered with grasses and briers. O hasten, Cynthia ! the smallest wrinkle may serve as a grave to the greatest love. “It is in that brutal and imperious formula that is uttered the whole antique elegy ; it always comes back to that; it is its strongest reason ; it is the Achilles of its argument. After that it has not much left to say; and when it has promised a robe of byssus, dyed twice, and a necklace of pearls of equal size, it is at the end of its rôle.” This is Gautier in the fulness of his literary power, in the pride of his artistic strength. He began with art, from art he went into antiquity, in antiquity he discovered a life untouched by pale virtues and sad renunciations, a place where his mind could breathe in the very atmosphere of the religion of pleasure, and he gave himself, body and mind, to all that that world held. With his feet in Paris, it was not difficult. But to do it, he had to do what the ancient Greek did not do, — he had to sink in the scale of his moral nature, and crush utterly the weak life of the moral being that lives by the breath and the example of Christ. The life of enjoyment and the idea of pleasure were good to the Greek. They did not corrupt him, because, to live them, he did not have to resist a more spiritual idea. He did not have to descend in the scale of his moral conception to justify his habits. It is not possible for us to be Greeks, for we face a moral light that was not revealed to them. A few words, and we have done with Mademoiselle de Maupin. It is a book full of remarkable descriptions that illustrate the power and the effrontery of Gautier, but from beginning to end it is deficient in dramatic force and invention. Like all of Gautier’s works, its excellence consists in the fulness and richness of its descriptive passages ; but it holds a series of pictures of more than questionable taste ; in some pages it outrages all the delicate and modest instincts of human nature. As a narrative, it is encumbered by descriptions, as a series of descriptions it is fatiguing ; as a book, it is full of moral audacity, and remarkable for rich and beautiful phrases. We turn from its overloaded pages to one of his early essays in criticism, called L’Art Moderne. It is Gautier in his specialty as a descriptive art critic. Probably he is unequalled in his power of describing a picture, and fixing its rank. Here is a paragraph which we cite from his article on Maribhat, the celebrated French painter. “ The place of l’ Esbekich at Cairo ! No picture ever produced upon me an impression so profound and vibrating. I should be afraid of being called exaggerated if I said that the sight of that picture made me sick, and gave me a home-sickness for the Fast, where I never had set my feet. I believed that I was looking at my veritable country ; and when I turned my eyes from the ardent painting, I felt myself an exile. I see it still, that enormous carob-tree, with the monstrous trunk, pushing into the hot air its branches coiled like knotted serpents, and its tufts of metallic leaves, whose black undulations render so brilliant the indigo sky. The shadow stretches itself, azured upon the tawny ground; the houses lift, with surprising reality, their cabinets trellised with cedar and cypress wood ; a nude child follows its mother, a long phantom enveloped in a blue zalek. The light sparkles, the sun darts arrows of fire, and the heavy silence of burning hours weighs upon the atmosphere.” This is no ordinary description. It is such phrases that have placed Gautier at the head of all word-painters. He is master of the art. It is no common writer who falls upon such an expression of an Oriental day, — “ the light sparkles, the sun darts arrows of fire, and the heavy silence of burning hours weighs upon the atmosphere.” While in Spain he notices two cypresses that rise against the blue sky, next to the red walls of the Alhambra. They strike upon his sense like a sharp note in music. He speaks of them : “ Those two black sighsof foliage, sad, like a thought of death in the midst of general joy ; the only sombre tint in that dazzle of gold, of silver, of azure, of rose.” You remark that the poet speaks in the phrases of the descriptive writer. It must be so. Every fine descriptive talent must draw a word from the heart of the poet, and Gautier is a poet as well as a remarkable word-painter. He is a poet by his word rather than by his thought,— like Tennyson. He is graceful, vivid, distinct, richly colored, but not magnetic. Say he is a descriptive poet. A more profound poetical gift not only speaks from the experience of the eye, but from the experience of the soul. Gautier is a poet who speaks only from the experience of the eye. Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Shelley spoke alike from the experience of the eye and the soul. Gautier, living in sensation, has no utterance from the inner depth. He never goes beyond form and color. They are the two limitations that content his nature. Therefore you cannot discover anything vague or visionary, or anything blank or empty, in his work. No ; he is an artist with words, — an artist contented with form and color, in fact always seeking for both, and never troubling himself with the undefinable and the infinite, which had such fascination and charm for Shelley, and filled with fury the troubled soul of Baudelaire. When the poetical talent of a writer is limited to the word, and does not inhere in the very thought, he is local, and cannot be translated. Such a poet is Gautier. He is therefore limited to French critics. As a poet he cannot have a public outside of France, save among a few men of letters. Only by rising to the level of poetic thought can a poet speak to all men, and be read in all languages. In 1830 Gautier gave Albertus; in 1845, La Comédic de la Mort ; in 1858, Emaux et Camées. We discover that Robert Browning and Swinburne have read to good advantage the poems of Gautier. He is not as dramatic as Browning, nor as loose as Swinburne ; but he is vivid and artistic as the first, and even more pagan and natural than the last. In “ Enamels and Cameos ” we find some remarkable verses under the title,— “ Study of Hands ; Hands of an Empress and of an Assassin contrasted,” which show at once Gautier’s love of the beautiful and fascination before the horrible, — an antithesis that no Frenchman can resist. His poem entitled La Comédie de la Mort is called “a large and sublime page, sombre and fantastic.” Albertus is a poem certainly not to the fashion of the English or American mind, being a medley of arbitrary and fantastic images, and a story of things that do not belong to our latitude. Yet the writer to whom we are indebted for some of our biographical facts says that it is written under the influence of a true poetic breath, and takes a place by the side of the works of Alfred de Musset. A short poem celled Le Lion du Cirque is truly vigorous ; vivid and bold in expression. it is equally vivid and bold in conception. The poet describes a lion of the Roman amphitheatre lashing his flank or drowsily dreaming of life in the spaces of the desert. His keeper tells him to be patient, in his close cell, for on the marrow Cæsar has commanded the door to be opened; he shall have, in the midst of the circus, under the eyes of Rome, saluted by the noise of Roman voices, a Christian virgin, — more white than the Pagan. Venus,— whose body he shall tear in his rage. Then the poet turns upon himself, likens his heart to that chained beast, bound in its cell, yet longing to find a white and virgin victim to slake its lust. The figure is not too strong,and it is true; and Gautier has made a picture and a poem out of the ancient fact and its eternal human correspondence. But enough. We cannot enumerate all Gautier has written, much less characterize particular poems. He has been an incessant writer, — writer of stories, criticisms, and poems ; fantastic and arbitrary and lawless in the first; descriptive, just, expressive, in the second ; vivid and beautiful in the last. Without being a magnetic writer, simply by the fulness and richness of his power of expression and his love of and search for the beautiful, he has made himself the type of a number of contemporary French writers, and by high qualities takes his place as master. He is probably best known to foreigners by Le Roman de la Momie. His rank is, however, fixed by his art feuillotons and poems. In them he exhibits his natural literary traits and qualities. In them we discover how a mind charmed by beautiful forms, warmed by beautiful colors, taking delight in shapes, textures, tones, can itself produce with words corresponding impressions, and without tenderness, without a creative imagination, even without intense mental power, can make a place bv itself, and live by the force of a style that appeals solely to our appreciation of the beautiful. Gautier understands and loves the beautiful, and among critics he is almost purely descriptive, contenting himself in being the literary expression of a picture or a statue that pleases him. He has knowledge without pedantry, and he has dislikes without bad temper. Probably no man living has a more instructed sense of painting and sculpture. Among his earlier essays in criticism is an article on The Beautiful in Art, which, admirable as a just and intelligent exposition of the subject, also derives an additional interest from the fact that it contains a criticism of Töpffer’s reflections on the same subject. In those days Gautier thought seriously ; his palette was not so full of color, but be used his more limited means to express a more active mind than to-day. Then he was less a hunter of words and more a seeker of the best thoughts. Since then he has become a luxurious writer. He folds his subject in a splendid and ample garment of words. He. has become more exuberant with time, because he has always labored to enrich his intellectual soil; in him expression is rapid and full-blown, like vegetation in tropical forests. Simply by the grace, the fulness of his literary talent does he please the mind ; for, we repeat, he is not intense, he is not compact (qualities which the American mind prefers), and he is without a great and unique creative imagination, having written nothing as original and typical as Maurice de Guérinés Centaure, or Keats’s Hyperion. We have sufficiently expressed our understanding of the characteristics of Théophile Gautier the literary artist, — a being preoccupied with art in all its forms, and seeking for all possible means of fine and luxurious sensation. Revolutions, inventions, democracy, Ideas of progress, have no place in his mental experience. He is extraordinary, even in Europe, and would be monstrous in America. We could not forgive his selfishness and indifference to all that for which societies hope and struggle. Victor Hugo may call him a grand poet, and we know that Baudelaire perplexed himself to speak about him in a manner sufficiently noble ; he still remains in our judgment a man and a writer not to be spoken of as on the same level with noble and austere artistic types. He is admirable for his art, for his gift, for the alternate jet and flow of his thoughts, but odious as an example, being selfish, luxurious, Oriental. It is not given to men of the Occident to lie like Hellenic gods in their pleasure, careless of mankind, still less to come from their opium dreams to debauch the senses and seduce the imagination. Yet God lets the rain fall alike on the just and the unjust. Who will dare refuse even the ministrations of the lovers of life, when they hold so large a place in poetry, in art, in all that makes the splendor, the glory of civilization, and without which civilization would be an intolerable burden? We admire Gautier, we listen to his music of words, and to his phrases like pictures. and as after music, as after a beautiful glance, we think only of pleasure and the sweet expansion it has given to our being, and for the time, in a soft climate, under a beautiful sun, forget to be moralists.
5097	dbpedia	1	13	https://landoftales.com/authors/1610-theophile-gautier	en	Land of Tales – Where children become readers	https://landoftales.com/dc/icons/192.png	https://landoftales.com/dc/icons/192.png	[ "https://landoftales.com/dc/logo.png", "https://landoftales.com/dc/img-fl/authors.svg", "https://landoftales.com/dc/img-fl/libraries.svg", "https://landoftales.com/dc/img-fl/family.svg", "https://landoftales.com/dc/img-fl/account.svg", "https://landoftales.com/dc/img-fl/search.svg", "https://landoftales.com/dc/search-header.png", "https://landoftales.com/dc/social/fb.png", "https://landoftales.com/dc/social/yt.png", "https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=2239345553043354&ev=PageView&noscript=1" ]	[]	[]	[ "kids books online", "bedtime reading", "recommended reads", "bedtime stories", "audiobooks", "animated tales", "classic children’s stories", "princess stories", "dragon tales", "witches and wizards", "legends", "moral stories", "fables", "fantasy tales" ]	null	[]	null	Land of Tales is an online reading platform that can turn any child into a reader with its extensive library of animated stories, narrated fairy tales, and modernised classic short stories and novels.	en	/dc/icons/57.png	Land of Tales	null	Let's be friends This website uses cookies to improve your experience.
5097	dbpedia	2	11	https://erasmusplace.com/most-famous-french-authors/	en	Most famous french authors	https://erasmusplace.com…4/01/image-9.jpg	https://erasmusplace.com…4/01/image-9.jpg	[ "https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=181261149235603&ev=PageView&noscript=1", "https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=181261149235603&ev=PageView&noscript=1", "https://erasmusplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/erasmusplace.png", "https://erasmusplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/erasmusplace.png", "https://erasmusplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/image-9-1024x677.jpg", "https://erasmusplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/image-9-1024x677.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "stagiaireerasmusep@gmail.com" ]	2024-01-23T14:44:16+00:00	Explore the brilliance of French literature with our guide to the greatest authors, from Camus to Victor Hugo. Discover their profound impact on culture and storytelling, delving into the essence of French literary greatness.	fr		Erasmus Place	https://erasmusplace.com/most-famous-french-authors/	Embark on a journey into the captivating world of French literature, where we’ll unravel the brilliance of its most celebrated authors. From the philosophical ponderings of Albert Camus to the enchanting tales spun by Victor Hugo, this guide will introduce you to the literary maestros who have shaped the cultural landscape with their words. Get ready to immerse yourself in the boundless creativity and intellectual richness that define the legacy of these celebrated authors. 1- Guy de Maupassant Let’s kick off our literary adventure with Guy de Maupassant, a French naturalist writer known for his short stories and novels. Often hailed as the greatest French short-story writer, he painted vivid pictures of life among the lower and middle classes. His masterpiece, « Boule de Suif » (« Ball of Fat »), and the well-known « La Parure » (« The Necklace ») showcase his storytelling prowess. 2- Molière Next up is Molière, born Jean Baptiste Poquelin, a French actor and playwright celebrated as the king of French comedy. While comedy had its roots before Molière, he brought a fresh perspective, blending normalcy with the absurd. An actor himself, Molière infused his works with a unique style, often dramatizing situations beyond the limits of probability, making him a giant in French literature. 3- Emile Zola Now, let’s delve into the world of Émile Zola, a French novelist, critic, and political activist who dominated the late 19th century. Renowned for his theories of naturalism, exemplified in his monumental series « Les Rougon-Macquart, » Zola also made a mark with his intervention in the Dreyfus affair through the powerful open letter, « J’accuse. » His avant-garde literary style and polemic acts left an indelible imprint on French literature. 4- Albert Camus Meet Albert Camus, a French novelist, essayist, and playwright, famous for works like « The Stranger, » « The Plague, » and « The Fall. » Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus explored the concept of absurdity, a central theme in his writings that questioned the meaning of life. From alienation to challenging traditional values, his clear-sighted earnestness illuminated the problems of the human conscience in our times. 5- Victor Hugo Our literary journey concludes with Victor Hugo, a French poet, novelist, and dramatist, considered a giant of the Romantic movement. While renowned for his novels like « Notre-Dame de Paris » and « Les Misérables, » Hugo’s impact extends beyond France. Remembered for his ability to capture common joys and sorrows with simplicity and power, Hugo’s poetic inventiveness and technical virtuosity make him a literary icon.
5097	dbpedia	1	44	https://muse.jhu.edu/article/767284/summary	en	French Orientalist Literature in Algeria, 1845–1882: Colonial Hauntings by Sage Goellner (review)	https://muse.jhu.edu/art…284/og_image.jpg	https://muse.jhu.edu/art…284/og_image.jpg	[ "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/institution.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/person.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/icon_accessibility.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/muselogo.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/muselogo_notext.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/search_blue.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/search_blue.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/access_icon?type=article&id=767284", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/html_icon.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/pdf.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/access/no_access.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/icon_related.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/article/767284/pdfimage", "https://muse.jhu.edu/access_icon?type=article&id=767284", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/html_icon.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/pdf.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/muselogo_notext.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/footer_icon_fb.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/footer_icon_linkedin.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/footer_icon_twitter.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/muselogoblack.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/muselogo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Maria G. Traub" ]	null		en	/favicon.ico		null	This book traces the trauma of France's colonization of Algeria, which caused Théophile Gautier, Eugène Fromentin, Gustave Flaubert, and Pierre Loti to respond in evocative prose. It seeks "to uncover the layers of disquiet in the above authors' fiction and travelogues" (10) as they experience discomfort remembering their time abroad. Their uneasiness recurs due to moral revulsion at the despoliation after recent warfare. An eerie, haunted aspect pervades their writing. In 1845, Gautier began a récit de voyage with Algeria as its focus. His trip was to be illustrated in pictorial and written format. The more Gautier immersed himself in his new setting, the more ill [End Page 247] at ease he became. His sense of self was challenged, he grew disconnected emotionally. A spectral quality permeates his narration, as when he describes an Aissaoui dancer, writhing in demonic tensions, lips quivering, eyes bulging, as nervous vibrations shook his body from top to bottom. Even twenty years later he writes of "shuddering memories" (38), still shaken by what he saw. Fromentin made three visits to Algeria between 1846 and 1853. On his third visit he traveled to the freshly conquered town of Laghouat, ravaged by the army. Fromentin's epistolary work, Un été dans le Sahara, is a travel account of the striking natural beauty and brutal aftermath of French conquest, citing for example the bodies of dismembered women dancers. Sainte-Beuve applauded this work for its moral reflection on the depiction of extreme violence as practiced by French soldiers. The novel Salammbô, set in the third century B.C., provides an ancient prototype that for Flaubert reflected contemporary French policies and practices. Even if he did not pointedly draw a parallel between France and Carthage, critics have shown similarities between wealthy Carthaginians and the French ruling class. Both shared commercial, materialist, and imperial concerns. In the novel, extreme violence, sexual depravity, and sadism earned it a reputation for decadence. If atrocities during wartime became the best way to crush resistance, many were haunted by the moral gangrene which had taken hold. Loti published articles and drawings in Parisian journals, as had Gautier and Fromentin. Making repeated visits to Algeria, Loti was devastated by the changes he saw each time he returned: "The deserted Kasbah, now a place of prostitution and vulgar debauchery! It bewilders the imagination" (97). Loti's "Les trois dames" is a morality tale. A family whose father perished in the war leaves mother and two daughters starving in the Casbah. Three drunken sailors wander looking for some amusement. They spend the night in the house, each sailor with one of the women. By the end of the story we learn that each sailor contracted a virulent form of syphilis that killed one and infected the offspring of the other two. Thus, the effects of colonization literally haunt France like an infection, harming both victor and vanquished. This book is recommended reading for those interested in colonial or nineteenth-century studies.
5097	dbpedia	2	85	https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/apr/28/10-best-novels-about-france-paris-provence	en	10 of the best novels about France – that will take you there	https://i.guim.co.uk/img…7fd1299ab8e5fb16	https://i.guim.co.uk/img…7fd1299ab8e5fb16	[ "https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6035250&cv=2.0&cj=1&cs_ucfr=0&comscorekw=Literary+trips%2CFrance+holidays%2CEurope+holidays%2CTop+10s%2CTravel%2CFiction%2CBooks", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2e3ffedcafdf08f04bf1a5fe73f0c355f459cefe/0_82_4256_2553/master/4256.jpg?width=465&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2022/11/09/Liz_Boulter_Next_Gen.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0421c31ad363c843728a2d7cb91cc2249b85212d/0_0_417_640/master/417.jpg?width=120&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/75e89b42710aecb7654edcf1e78bead8d67160c1/0_0_1017_1607/master/1017.jpg?width=120&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/01035351fd05836687e170fd984df5b8dc15269e/0_0_5315_3191/master/5315.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/406043d846019be57c1114b1417a708767078549/0_0_1524_2339/master/1524.jpg?width=120&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/036726ed9983c1c898703ad3ca59b17f02b58b21/0_341_5120_3072/master/5120.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f117a5b706260b3c512cf4d5801f5d455e1f7740/0_0_800_1311/master/800.jpg?width=120&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/04f7ef48f334abe84569ac0fd7c450b5569efb70/0_209_5760_3456/master/5760.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2b10bd5d109aeb82988c816bf2721410b767e759/0_0_1400_2265/master/1400.jpg?width=120&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4a350aaba9e3cf149ab68e9e8059887785745713/0_171_5760_3456/master/5760.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5cc2005b2d4a2aaa4b1051e95fdbd8621529ab62/0_0_893_1360/master/893.jpg?width=120&dpr=1&s=none" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Liz Boulter", "www.theguardian.com", "liz-boulter" ]	2020-04-28T00:00:00	From the backstreets of Paris in Perfume to sun-baked Provence in Jean de Florette, visit France through great fiction	en	https://assets.guim.co.u…e-touch-icon.svg	the Guardian	https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/apr/28/10-best-novels-about-france-paris-provence	I’ve written about France for The Guardian for more than a decade and have been visiting for longer: since my days as a teenage au pair and later a language student. I love it mainly for its food and wine, but also for its combative attitude to politics, its love of good living, elegant cities and variety of land- and seascapes. We can still visit it through the pages of literature. So, here are my personal top 10 novels that give une véritable saveur of the country almost nine million British people visited last year. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr This Pulitzer-prize-winning novel seems tailor-made for these days. The title refers to a teacher’s comment in the book about how our brains, locked in our skulls without a spark of light, build for us a luminous world. And today we, in lockdown, can rebuild in our imaginations 1940s Paris and the “open-air fortress” of Saint-Malo. We do this partly through the mind of young Marie-Laure, blind since she was six, who finds her way using scale models her brilliant father builds for her. Characters in the occupied Brittany town come to life, and readers’ hearts go out to Marie-Laure and young German counterpart Werner as they confront a world of hate and horror with grace and integrity Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin, planned a sequence of five novels set in Nazi-occupied France. The first two, in tiny handwriting in a leather-bound notebook, survived her arrest and murder in Auschwitz. Preserved – but unread – by her daughter, they languished for six decades before being published in one volume in 2004. Suite Française offers an amazing backstory and an unflinching look at France and the French. The first part, Storm in June, deals with a cast of Parisians fleeing Paris as the Germans invade. However, the second part, Dolce, might evoke memories of stone-built small towns where we enjoy dinner and a summer stroll, but which we know would be a claustrophobic nightmare to live in – as the fictional town of Bussy is for Lucille, sharing a house with her resentful mother-in-law. The square where village girls are chatted up by soldiers could be the Place de la Mairie in a hundred villages from Normandy to Provence. Perfume by Patrick Süskind This 1985 masterpiece takes us to a Paris very different from today’s City of Light. In 18th century France “there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women … Even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter.” Around this malodorous world prowls the gifted and abominable Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, with his “killer” sense of smell. Yet those familiar with the city’s first arrondissement can follow in their mind’s eye as he “so thoroughly smelled out the quarter between Saint-Eustache and the Hôtel de Ville that he could find his way around in it by pitch-dark night”. Grenouille later leaves Paris and makes his way south via the hills of the Massif Central. The book’s final chapters are played out a few miles from the Côte d’Azur – amid the lavender fields of the world’s perfume capital, Grasse. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery Set in modern-day Paris, this 2006 novel by a philosophy teacher will appeal to those in need of a dose of Gallic high culture, with an unlikely heroine in the form of supposedly dull concierge Renée. Echoing Jane Eyre’s “poor, obscure, plain and little”, Renée is “widowed, short, ugly and plump”, and as such feels she must hide her passion for philosophy and literature beneath a prickly exterior. So, while pretending to favour trash telly and junk food, she’s reading Proust and volumes of philosophy from the university library, watching arty films and cooking up refined dinners for her friend Manuela. There is a sharp eye for humour while it dissects French snobbery, the foibles of rich and poor, the purpose of art and much more, all the while wearing its intellectualism lightly. The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester Go on a literary French road trip with this black satire by the former Observer restaurant critic. The story sees diabolical narrator Tarquin (not his real name) – an anglophobe, francophile, inveterate snob and worse – driving from England to his house in Provence, with diversions through the cuisines of Normandy and Brittany. What he later terms his “gastro-historico-psycho-autobiographico-anthropico-philosophic lucubrations” are organised into seasonal menus. He warns early on that this “is not a conventional cookbook”. Here he is hosting a barbecue for his hapless victims: “A drop of basting juices fell from the sea bass and spluttered on the white charcoals. I could hear the not-quite subliminal tinkling of bubbles in our crystal champagne flutes. ‘Well now,’ I said. ‘This is very pleasant.’” Be not deceived, there is nothing pleasant about this delicious novel. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan This 1954 classic by a precocious 18-year-old takes us to the sun-drenched Riviera, where lazy and selfish 17-year-old Cécile is holidaying with her widowed father and his latest girlfriend. The bright light of summer goes hand in hand with shady morals, as Cécile plots with her older boyfriend to see off the new woman in her father’s life, one who would seek to curb her self-indulgence and even make her do a spot of schoolwork. It all goes horribly wrong, yet we are left in doubt as to whether flighty Cécile has learned anything from her first experience of tristesse. “I saw an exquisite pink and blue shell on the sea-bottom. I dove for it, and held it, smooth and hollow in my hand all the morning. I decided it was a lucky charm, and that I would keep it. I am surprised that I have not lost it, for I lose everything. Today it is still pink and warm as it lies in my palm, and makes me feel like crying.” The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers Taking the A11 towards Brittany and the Vendée, many holidaymakers stop at Chartres, with its cathedral, medieval houses and little bridges. Spend a happy few hours in this picturesque spot by the River Eure by diving into this almost fairytale by therapist-turned-novelist Vickers, whose books display a ‘“tenderness for misfits”. The protagonist is mysterious Agnès Morel, who cleans the cathedral each day and does odd jobs for folk living nearby – until an accidental encounter. The unravelling of her troubled past takes the reader to other historic French towns – Évreux, Rouen and Le Mans – before reaching its redemptive conclusion. Jean de Florette by Marcel Pagnol The fierce sun of Provence beats down on this novel of country lives and intrigues. Indeed, those bright blue skies and cloudless days that many Britons travel south for feel like a curse for the eponymous, hunchbacked Jean, who attempts to raise crops and rabbits on his land, not knowing that scheming neighbours have contrived to block off his only source of water – but read sequel, Manon des Sources, to see everything – finally – turn out OK. The scents of Provençal herbs and descriptions of farmhouses perched on rocky outcrops with vertiginous views of the Med will bring back holiday memories. Ripening Seed by Colette Endless summers in another destination popular with UK visitors – seaside Brittany – are evoked in this short coming-of-age story. Phil and Vinca have holidayed here with their respective families for as long as they can remember, enjoying sunny days, sandy limbs and “the frothy foam-scuds that danced powerlessly up to the edge of man’s dominion”. But now in their teens, they can neither slip back into childish ways nor find a new relationship. When a sophisticated older woman comes on the scene, the sharp airs and strong winds of that blustery Atlantic coast echo the pain of coming adulthood. (The ever-unconventional Colette was writing what she knew – having had a relationship with her teenage stepson, then married a man 16 years her junior.) Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow by Faïza Guène If you prefer gritty streets to rolling hills, this funny tale of immigrant life on a city housing estate by another precocious writer (Guène was 19 when this was published) will fit the bill. Imagine one of Jacqueline Wilson’s wisecracking heroines a little older, transplanted to north-east Paris. The narrator is 15-year-old Doria, living in a high-rise with her mother, her dad having gone back to Morocco to find a new, younger wife. Teachers are ineffectual do-gooders; her mum’s employer wide-rangingly racist. The book’s street argot is rendered into brilliantly believable urban English by translator Sarah Adams. A class nerd is called a “pizza-faced microbe, homosexual and total ego-trip”. The Muslim community are constantly saying inshallah – “But, thing is, you can’t ever know if God’s willing or not,” opines Doria. The city’s fine drizzle is “as if God were spitting on all of us”.
5097	dbpedia	0	73	https://scholarworks.uno.edu/fl_facpubs/45/	en	Less is Gore: Graphic Violence in the Fiction of Judith Gautier			[ "https://scholarworks.uno.edu/assets/md5images/8e240588cf8cd3a028768d4294acd7d3.png", "https://scholarworks.uno.edu/assets/md5images/cc3fdd76ef651c53c7e52716c083c48e.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Juliana Starr" ]	null	The exceptionally beautiful Judith Gautier (1845–1917), daughter of Théophile Gautier and Italian opera diva Ernesta Grisi, was raised in the epicenter of Europe’s literary and artistic avant-garde. Among the weekly visitors to her parents’ home were Flaubert, Baudelaire, Delacroix, Dumas, Taine, Mallarmé, Puivis de Chavannes, and the Goncourt brothers. She became a best-selling novelist, an early champion of Richard Wagner, a successful journalist, musicologist and art critic, a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and the first woman elected to the prestigious Goncourt Academy. She was instrumental in introducing Europeans to both Chinese and Japanese poetry. Yet, despite these fascinating and remarkable achievements, critical studies devoted to her are limited to a handful of articles. I attempt to correct this oversight by examining the prominent place accorded to gore, gruesomeness, and the macabre in her works. In so doing, I hope to show how these texts, through their deft handling of traditionally “masculine” subject matter, not only provided an entrée to the rarefied, male-dominated world of nineteenth-century French letters, but also articulated a unique theory of the novel—one that sees fiction writing above all as the expression of the violence inherent to and existing inside representation itself.	en	/favicon.ico	ScholarWorks@UNO	https://scholarworks.uno.edu/fl_facpubs/45	Abstract The exceptionally beautiful Judith Gautier (1845–1917), daughter of Théophile Gautier and Italian opera diva Ernesta Grisi, was raised in the epicenter of Europe’s literary and artistic avant-garde. Among the weekly visitors to her parents’ home were Flaubert, Baudelaire, Delacroix, Dumas, Taine, Mallarmé, Puivis de Chavannes, and the Goncourt brothers. She became a best-selling novelist, an early champion of Richard Wagner, a successful journalist, musicologist and art critic, a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and the first woman elected to the prestigious Goncourt Academy. She was instrumental in introducing Europeans to both Chinese and Japanese poetry. Yet, despite these fascinating and remarkable achievements, critical studies devoted to her are limited to a handful of articles. I attempt to correct this oversight by examining the prominent place accorded to gore, gruesomeness, and the macabre in her works. In so doing, I hope to show how these texts, through their deft handling of traditionally “masculine” subject matter, not only provided an entrée to the rarefied, male-dominated world of nineteenth-century French letters, but also articulated a unique theory of the novel—one that sees fiction writing above all as the expression of the violence inherent to and existing inside representation itself.
5097	dbpedia	3	4	https://www.maisondeschaumes-paris.com/blog-blogroll-onlinejournal-bandb-paris-suite-de-luxe-view-eiffel-tower-paris-16-th-auteuil/blog-post-title-two-tnh5x	en	Who was Theophile Gautier ? — Maison des Chaumes	http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f47bec279f84a6840b2ebf8/5fa280e65ca2e71611883ce2/5fa280e65ca2e71611883ce7/1604488849769/20140301_Trade-151_0124-copy.jpg?format=1500w	http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f47bec279f84a6840b2ebf8/5fa280e65ca2e71611883ce2/5fa280e65ca2e71611883ce7/1604488849769/20140301_Trade-151_0124-copy.jpg?format=1500w	[ "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f47bec279f84a6840b2ebf8/1600532960515-Q0MHYLCLSLK1WFZZWOIL/Maison-de-Chaumes-neg-txt.png?format=1500w", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f47bec279f84a6840b2ebf8/1600532960515-Q0MHYLCLSLK1WFZZWOIL/Maison-de-Chaumes-neg-txt.png?format=1500w", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v2/namespaces/memberAccountAvatars/libraries/5d4c3da7d8ea9b0001a897b3/310f22320a0e4037a906e5e4d6861a2c/310f22320a0e4037a906e5e4d6861a2c.jpeg?format=300w" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Odile Bidault des chaumes" ]	2019-05-28T17:12:55+02:00	Tout commence par une idée.	fr	https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f47bec279f84a6840b2ebf8/1606252348100-KPBSNI7IULEFEJOZ5U67/favicon.ico?format=100w	Maison des Chaumes-Paris Chambre d'hôtes	https://www.maisondeschaumes-paris.com/blog-blogroll-onlinejournal-bandb-paris-suite-de-luxe-view-eiffel-tower-paris-16-th-auteuil/blog-post-title-two-tnh5x	Who was Théophile Gautier? Sep 24 Théophile Gautier, born August 30, 1811 in Tarbes and died October 23, 1872 in Neuilly-sur-Seine (at the age of 61), is a French poet, painter, writer and art critic. He is notably the author of the collection of poems Enamels and cameos (1852), and of the novels Le Roman de la momie (1858) and Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863), his most famous work. He is the contemporary of the writers Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac (whose biography he wrote in 1859), Gustave Flaubert and Prosper Mérimée. His formula of art for art was taken up by the poets of contemporary Parnassus. Biography Théophile Gautier's family was well-off and well-educated. In 1822, he left for Paris to begin his studies. In 1829, he met Victor Hugo, who liked him and respected him a lot. In 1830 Gautier took an interest in painting and poetry and published his Poésies during the same year. In February 1830, with Gérard de Nerval, he was one of the main actors in the battle of Hernani which, by defending the dramatic play by Victor Hugo, caused a theatrical scandal. But in 1830 during the July Revolution, he was forced to earn a living after his father's bankruptcy. In 1836, Théophile Gautier became a journalist for the review “La Presse”. He writes over 1,200 articles and works tirelessly, like a convict. A great traveler, he has visited Belgium, Spain, England, Algeria, Italy, Constantinople and Russia. He has drawn inspiration from his many travels to write short stories, poems and travelogues.
5097	dbpedia	0	32	http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/8206	en	Books about Novelists, French -- 19th century -- Biography (sorted by popularity)	http://www.gutenberg.org/pics/logo-144x144.png	http://www.gutenberg.org/pics/logo-144x144.png	[ "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14688/pg14688.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/48004/pg48004.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53749/pg53749.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53779/pg53779.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3625/pg3625.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/32138/pg32138.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/36814/pg36814.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53399/pg53399.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46859/pg46859.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53398/pg53398.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17360/pg17360.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9548/pg9548.cover.small.jpg", "http://www.gutenberg.org/gutenberg/ibiblio-logo.png", "http://www.gutenberg.org/gutenberg/pg-logo-129x80.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "ebook", "ebooks", "free ebooks", "free books", "book", "books", "audio books" ]	null	[]	null	Project Gutenberg offers 74,095 free eBooks for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Android, and iPhone.	en	/gutenberg/favicon.ico	Project Gutenberg	http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/8206
5097	dbpedia	3	88	https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Th%25C3%25A9ophile-Gautier-Orator-to-Artists	en	Théophile Gautier, Orator to the Artists: Art Journalism of the Second Republic	https://www.mhra.org.uk/images/covers/	https://www.mhra.org.uk/images/covers/	[ "https://www.mhra.org.uk/images/navigation/MHRA-logo-new.png", "https://www.mhra.org.uk/images/licences/oa.svg", "https://mhra.org.uk/images/covers/S-lgs-p132.jpg", "http://mhra.org.uk/images/subjects/Gautier.gif", "http://mhra.org.uk/images/navigation/see_also_small.jpg", "http://mhra.org.uk/images/navigation/Routledge.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "James Kearns" ]	null	Modern Humanities Research Association - Théophile Gautier, Orator to the Artists: Art Journalism of the Second Republic - James Kearns	en	/favicon.ico	Modern Humanities Research Association	https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Théophile-Gautier-Orator-to-Artists	Legenda (General Series) Legenda 14 November 2007 • 216pp ISBN: 978-1-904350-88-0 (hardback) • RRP £80, $110, €95 ModernFrenchArtJournalism 'Théophile Gautier a envoyé avec un feuilleton plus de trois mille personnes dans l'atelier de M. Ingres', wrote Champfleury in 1848. For artists, critics and readers alike, Gautier was the essential figure in French art journalism in the mid-nineteenth century. During the short-lived but pivotal period of the Second Republic, when the new administration was committed to reforming all the institutions of the fine arts, Gautier deployed the full resources of his brilliant, flexible and authoritative writing to support and direct these developments in ways compatible with his comitment to an idealist aesthetic, itself under growing pressure from alternative trends in an increasingly competitive art market. This first study of all Gautier's art journalism written during the Second Republic provides a long overdue reassessment of Gautier's importance in French nineteenth-century visual culture. Reviews: ‘In this first ever study of all of Théophile Gautier’s art criticism produced during the Second Republic, James Kearns brings us a much-needed reassessment of the art critic’s role in the history of French art... this is a highly accomplished study, which should be essential reading both for the scholar researching the Salon during this period and for the Gautier specialist. The material is well structured and the writing style engaging, making it equally accessible to the student or more seasoned researcher.’ — Catherine Hewitt, French Studies 64.2, April 2010 ‘This highly informed and informative study exposes a breadth of sources that should serve to prompt new enquiries in Gautier scholarship... Analyses [in this book] suggest the role this fine study may play in releasing Gautier’s art journalism ‘from the simplistic art-for-art’s-sake commonplaces to which it has been for so long reduced’ and in reasserting Gautier’s importance in the visual culture of nineteenth-century France.’ — Greg Kerr, Modern Language Review 105.2, 2010, 567-68 (full text online) ‘Focusing on the period of the Second Republic which spans the 1848 Revolution and the 1851 coup d’état, this meticulously researched and engaging study follows Gautier’s reactions to developments in the organisation of the salon and to the artists themselves through a series of 49 articles published in La Presse... Gautier emerges in Kearns’s study not only as a prolific and idiosyncratic critic but also as one who challenges the label of 'art for art’s sake', embracing an overtly Republican artistic agenda.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 46.2, 2010, 247 Cite this volume in standard MHRA style Bibliography entry: Kearns, James, Théophile Gautier, Orator to the Artists: Art Journalism of the Second Republic (Legenda, 2007) First footnote reference: 35 James Kearns, Théophile Gautier, Orator to the Artists: Art Journalism of the Second Republic (Legenda, 2007), p. 21. Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Kearns, p. 47. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) Cite this volume in MHRA author-date style Bibliography entry: Kearns, James. 2007. Théophile Gautier, Orator to the Artists: Art Journalism of the Second Republic (Legenda) Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Kearns 2007: 21). Example footnote reference: 35 Kearns 2007: 21. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) Permanent link to this title: www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Théophile-Gautier-Orator-to-Artists
5097	dbpedia	2	93	https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/napoleon	en	Napoleon Bonaparte ‑ Biography, Facts & Death	https://assets.editorial…crossing-the.jpg	https://assets.editorial…crossing-the.jpg	[ "https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=3005002&cs_ucfr=1&cv=3.6&cj=1", "https://www.history.com/assets/images/history/logo.svg", "https://www.history.com/assets/images/history/logo.svg", "https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2017/05/painting-depicting-napoleon-crossing-the.jpg?width=640&height=426.66666666666663&crop=640%3A426.66666666666663%2Csmart&quality=75&auto=webp 640w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2017/05/painting-depicting-napoleon-crossing-the.jpg?width=750&height=500&crop=750%3A500%2Csmart&quality=75&auto=webp 750w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2017/05/painting-depicting-napoleon-crossing-the.jpg?width=828&height=552&crop=828%3A552%2Csmart&quality=75&auto=webp 828w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2017/05/painting-depicting-napoleon-crossing-the.jpg?width=1080&height=540&crop=1080%3A540%2Csmart&quality=75&auto=webp 1080w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2017/05/painting-depicting-napoleon-crossing-the.jpg?width=1248&height=624&crop=1248%3A624%2Csmart&quality=75&auto=webp 1248w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2017/05/painting-depicting-napoleon-crossing-the.jpg?width=1920&height=960&crop=1920%3A960%2Csmart&quality=75&auto=webp 1920w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2017/05/painting-depicting-napoleon-crossing-the.jpg?width=2048&height=1024&crop=2048%3A1024%2Csmart&quality=75&auto=webp 2048w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2017/05/painting-depicting-napoleon-crossing-the.jpg?width=3840&height=1920&crop=3840%3A1920%2Csmart&quality=75&auto=webp 3840w", "https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/history-article-default.desktop.jpg", "https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/history-article-default.desktop.jpg", "https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/history-article-default.desktop.jpg", "https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=16&quality=75&auto=webp 16w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=32&quality=75&auto=webp 32w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=48&quality=75&auto=webp 48w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=64&quality=75&auto=webp 64w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=96&quality=75&auto=webp 96w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=128&quality=75&auto=webp 128w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=256&quality=75&auto=webp 256w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=392&quality=75&auto=webp 392w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=640&quality=75&auto=webp 640w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=750&quality=75&auto=webp 750w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=828&quality=75&auto=webp 828w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=1080&quality=75&auto=webp 1080w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=1248&quality=75&auto=webp 1248w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=1920&quality=75&auto=webp 1920w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=2048&quality=75&auto=webp 2048w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2023/04/Biography_Napoleon_Bonaparte_The_Glory_of_France_3840x2160_art_only-scaled-1.jpeg?width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp 3840w", "https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=16&quality=75&auto=webp 16w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=32&quality=75&auto=webp 32w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=48&quality=75&auto=webp 48w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=64&quality=75&auto=webp 64w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=96&quality=75&auto=webp 96w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=128&quality=75&auto=webp 128w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=256&quality=75&auto=webp 256w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=392&quality=75&auto=webp 392w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=640&quality=75&auto=webp 640w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=750&quality=75&auto=webp 750w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=828&quality=75&auto=webp 828w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=1080&quality=75&auto=webp 1080w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=1248&quality=75&auto=webp 1248w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=1920&quality=75&auto=webp 1920w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=2048&quality=75&auto=webp 2048w, https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/uploads/2024/06/IHBANNER-1.jpg?width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp 3840w" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Amanda Onion", "History.com Editors" ]	2009-11-09T14:22:12+00:00	Napoleon Bonaparte (1769‑1821), also known as Napoleon I, was a French military leader and emperor who conquered much of Europe in the early 19th century. After seizing political power in France in a 1799 coup d’état, he crowned himself emperor in 1804.	en	https://www.history.com/…e-touch-icon.png	HISTORY	https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/napoleon	Napoleon’s Education and Early Military Career Napoleon Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769, in Ajaccio, on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. He was the second of eight surviving children born to Carlo Buonaparte (1746-1785), a lawyer, and Letizia Romalino Buonaparte (1750-1836). Although his parents were members of the minor Corsican nobility, the family was not wealthy. The year before Napoleon’s birth, France acquired Corsica from the city-state of Genoa, Italy. Napoleon later adopted a French spelling of his last name. As a boy, Napoleon attended school in mainland France, where he learned the French language, and went on to graduate from a French military academy in 1785. He then became a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment of the French army. The French Revolution began in 1789, and within three years revolutionaries had overthrown the monarchy and proclaimed a French republic. During the early years of the revolution, Napoleon was largely on leave from the military and home in Corsica, where he became affiliated with the Jacobins, a pro-democracy political group. In 1793, following a clash with the nationalist Corsican governor, Pasquale Paoli (1725-1807), the Bonaparte family fled their native island for mainland France, where Napoleon returned to military duty. In France, Napoleon became associated with Augustin Robespierre (1763-1794), the brother of revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), a Jacobin who was a key force behind the Reign of Terror (1793-1794), a period of violence against enemies of the revolution. During this time, Napoleon was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the army. However, after Robespierre fell from power and was guillotined (along with Augustin) in July 1794, Napoleon was briefly put under house arrest for his ties to the brothers. In 1795, Napoleon helped suppress a royalist insurrection against the revolutionary government in Paris and was promoted to major general. Napoleon’s Rise to Power Since 1792, France’s revolutionary government had been engaged in military conflicts with various European nations. In 1796, Napoleon commanded a French army that defeated the larger armies of Austria, one of his country’s primary rivals, in a series of battles in Italy. In 1797, France and Austria signed the Treaty of Campo Formio, resulting in territorial gains for the French. The following year, the Directory, the five-person group that had governed France since 1795, offered to let Napoleon lead an invasion of England. Napoleon determined that France’s naval forces were not yet ready to go up against the superior British Royal Navy. Instead, he proposed an invasion of Egypt in an effort to wipe out British trade routes with India. Napoleon’s troops scored a victory against Egypt’s military rulers, the Mamluks, at the Battle of the Pyramids in July 1798; soon, however, his forces were stranded after his naval fleet was nearly decimated by the British at the Battle of the Nile in August 1798. In early 1799, Napoleon’s army launched an invasion of Ottoman Empire-ruled Syria, which ended with a failed siege of Acre, located in modern-day Israel. That summer, with the political situation in France marked by uncertainty, the ever-ambitious and cunning Napoleon opted to abandon his army in Egypt and return to France. The Coup of 18 Brumaire In November 1799, in an event known as the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon was part of a group that successfully overthrew the French Directory. The Directory was replaced with a three-member Consulate, and 5'7" Napoleon became first consul, making him France’s leading political figure. In June 1800, at the Battle of Marengo, Napoleon’s forces defeated one of France’s perennial enemies, the Austrians, and drove them out of Italy. The victory helped cement Napoleon’s power as first consul. Additionally, with the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, the war-weary British agreed to peace with the French (although the peace would only last for a year). Napoleon worked to restore stability to post-revolutionary France. He centralized the government; instituted reforms in such areas as banking and education; supported science and the arts; and sought to improve relations between his regime and the pope (who represented France’s main religion, Catholicism), which had suffered during the revolution. One of his most significant accomplishments was the Napoleonic Code, which streamlined the French legal system and continues to form the foundation of French civil law to this day. In 1802, a constitutional amendment made Napoleon first consul for life. Two years later, in 1804, he crowned himself emperor of France in a lavish ceremony at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Napoleon’s Marriages and Children In 1796, Napoleon married Josephine de Beauharnais (1763-1814), a stylish widow six years his senior who had two teenage children. More than a decade later, in 1809, after Napoleon had no offspring of his own with Empress Josephine, he had their marriage annulled so he could find a new wife and produce an heir. In 1810, he wed Marie Louise (1791-1847), the daughter of the emperor of Austria. The following year, she gave birth to their son, Napoleon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte (1811-1832), who became known as Napoleon II and was given the title king of Rome. In addition to his son with Marie Louise, Napoleon had several illegitimate children. The Reign of Napoleon I From 1803 to 1815, France was engaged in the Napoleonic Wars, a series of major conflicts with various coalitions of European nations. In 1803, partly as a means to raise funds for future wars, Napoleon sold France’s Louisiana Territory in North America to the newly independent United States for $15 million, a transaction that later became known as the Louisiana Purchase. In October 1805, the British wiped out Napoleon’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar. However, in December of that same year, Napoleon achieved what is considered to be one of his greatest victories at the Battle of Austerlitz, in which his army defeated the Austrians and Russians. The victory resulted in the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine. Beginning in 1806, Napoleon sought to wage large-scale economic warfare against Britain with the establishment of the so-called Continental System of European port blockades against British trade. In 1807, following Napoleon’s defeat of the Russians at Friedland in Prussia, Alexander I (1777-1825) was forced to sign a peace settlement, the Treaty of Tilsit. In 1809, the French defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Wagram, resulting in further gains for Napoleon. During these years, Napoleon reestablished a French aristocracy (eliminated in the French Revolution) and began handing out titles of nobility to his loyal friends and family as his empire continued to expand across much of western and central continental Europe. Napoleon’s Downfall and First Abdication In 1810, Russia withdrew from the Continental System. In retaliation, Napoleon led a massive army into Russia in the summer of 1812. Rather than engaging the French in a full-scale battle, the Russians adopted a strategy of retreating whenever Napoleon’s forces attempted to attack. As a result, Napoleon’s troops trekked deeper into Russia despite being ill-prepared for an extended campaign. In September, both sides suffered heavy casualties in the indecisive Battle of Borodino. Napoleon’s forces marched on to Moscow, only to discover almost the entire population evacuated. Retreating Russians set fires across the city in an effort to deprive enemy troops of supplies. After waiting a month for a surrender that never came, Napoleon, faced with the onset of the Russian winter, was forced to order his starving, exhausted army out of Moscow. During the disastrous retreat, his army suffered continual harassment from a suddenly aggressive and merciless Russian army. Of Napoleon’s 600,000 troops who began the campaign, only an estimated 100,000 made it out of Russia. At the same time as the catastrophic Russian invasion, French forces were engaged in the Peninsular War (1808-1814), which resulted in the Spanish and Portuguese, with assistance from the British, driving the French from the Iberian Peninsula. This loss was followed in 1813 by the Battle of Leipzig, also known as the Battle of Nations, in which Napoleon’s forces were defeated by a coalition that included Austrian, Prussian, Russian and Swedish troops. Napoleon then retreated to France, and in March 1814 coalition forces captured Paris. On April 6, 1814, Napoleon, then in his mid-40s, was forced to abdicate the throne. With the Treaty of Fontainebleau, he was exiled to Elba, a Mediterranean island off the coast of Italy. He was given sovereignty over the small island, while his wife and son went to Austria. Hundred Days Campaign and Battle of Waterloo On February 26, 1815, after less than a year in exile, Napoleon escaped Elba and sailed to the French mainland with a group of more than 1,000 supporters. On March 20, he returned to Paris, where he was welcomed by cheering crowds. The new king, Louis XVIII (1755-1824), fled, and Napoleon began what came to be known as his Hundred Days campaign. Upon Napoleon’s return to France, a coalition of allies–the Austrians, British, Prussians and Russians–who considered the French emperor an enemy began to prepare for war. Napoleon raised a new army and planned to strike preemptively, defeating the allied forces one by one before they could launch a united attack against him. In June 1815, his forces invaded Belgium, where British and Prussian troops were stationed. On June 16, Napoleon’s troops defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Ligny. However, two days later, on June 18, at the Battle of Waterloo near Brussels, the French were crushed by the British, with assistance from the Prussians. On June 22, 1815, Napoleon was once again forced to abdicate. Napoleon’s Final Years In October 1815, Napoleon was exiled to the remote, British-held island of Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean. He died there on May 5, 1821, at age 51, most likely from stomach cancer. (During his time in power, Napoleon often posed for paintings with his hand in his vest, leading to some speculation after his death that he had been plagued by stomach pain for years.) Napoleon was buried on the island despite his request to be laid to rest “on the banks of the Seine, among the French people I have loved so much.” In 1840, his remains were returned to France and entombed in a crypt at Les Invalides in Paris, where other French military leaders are interred. Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes
5097	dbpedia	0	12	https://countycat.mcfls.org/Record/.b14013782	en	Famous French authors : biographical portraits of...	https://countycat.mcfls.org/bookcover.php?id=ils:.b14013782&size=medium	https://countycat.mcfls.org/bookcover.php?id=ils:.b14013782&size=medium	[ "https://countycat.mcfls.org/files/original/logoNamelogoNamecountycat-logo-aspencolors-darkergraywords-196.png", "https://countycat.mcfls.org/bookcover.php?id=ils:.b14013782&size=medium", "https://countycat.mcfls.org/files/original/footerLogoCountyCat_Logo-white.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Gautier, Théophile, 1811-1872" ]	1879-08-28T00:00:00		en	/files/original/faviconcropped-mcfls5757-e1542293491254-2-32x32.png	CountyCat	https://countycat.mcfls.org/Record/.b14013782	APA Citation, 7th Edition (style guide) Gautier, T., Mirecourt, E. d., & Shaw, F. A. (1879). Famous French authors: biographical portraits of distinguished French writers . R. Worthington. Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation, 17th Edition (style guide) Gautier, Théophile, 1811-1872, Eugène de Mirecourt and Frances A. Shaw. 1879. Famous French Authors: Biographical Portraits of Distinguished French Writers. R. Worthington. Chicago / Turabian - Humanities (Notes and Bibliography) Citation, 17th Edition (style guide) Gautier, Théophile, 1811-1872, Eugène de Mirecourt and Frances A. Shaw. Famous French Authors: Biographical Portraits of Distinguished French Writers R. Worthington, 1879. MLA Citation, 9th Edition (style guide) Gautier, Théophile, Eugène de Mirecourt, and Frances A Shaw. Famous French Authors: Biographical Portraits of Distinguished French Writers R. Worthington, 1879.
5097	dbpedia	3	10	https://landoftales.com/authors/1610-theophile-gautier	en	Land of Tales – Where children become readers	https://landoftales.com/dc/icons/192.png	https://landoftales.com/dc/icons/192.png	[ "https://landoftales.com/dc/logo.png", "https://landoftales.com/dc/img-fl/authors.svg", "https://landoftales.com/dc/img-fl/libraries.svg", "https://landoftales.com/dc/img-fl/family.svg", "https://landoftales.com/dc/img-fl/account.svg", "https://landoftales.com/dc/img-fl/search.svg", "https://landoftales.com/dc/search-header.png", "https://landoftales.com/dc/social/fb.png", "https://landoftales.com/dc/social/yt.png", "https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=2239345553043354&ev=PageView&noscript=1" ]	[]	[]	[ "kids books online", "bedtime reading", "recommended reads", "bedtime stories", "audiobooks", "animated tales", "classic children’s stories", "princess stories", "dragon tales", "witches and wizards", "legends", "moral stories", "fables", "fantasy tales" ]	null	[]	null	Land of Tales is an online reading platform that can turn any child into a reader with its extensive library of animated stories, narrated fairy tales, and modernised classic short stories and novels.	en	/dc/icons/57.png	Land of Tales	null	Let's be friends This website uses cookies to improve your experience.
5097	dbpedia	0	53	https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/18th-and-19th-century-france-neoclassicism.html	en	18th- and 19th-Century France — Neoclassicism	https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/icons/favicon.ico	https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/icons/favicon.ico	[ "https://media.nga.gov/iiif/00929f5a-c00d-41ca-bb8d-3227a06ffd02/full/!740,560/0/default.jpg", "https://media.nga.gov/iiif/a99f7ca5-feba-4d1e-b0ce-a69d91a6678f/full/!740,560/0/default.jpg", "https://media.nga.gov/iiif/12aab9ab-9927-40a5-b2fe-9737d1a37f05/full/!740,560/0/default.jpg", "https://media.nga.gov/iiif/9d8f80cf-7d2c-455a-9fb9-73e5ce2012b2/full/!740,560/0/default.jpg", "https://media.nga.gov/iiif/96140f3f-0521-47de-9d75-ed0b8b7d30f1/full/!740,560/0/default.jpg", "https://media.nga.gov/iiif/d99afc33-0a0a-49bd-9a7a-9825c4a500bd/full/!740,560/0/default.jpg", "https://media.nga.gov/iiif/7982b222-7b54-4963-aded-bc17f835d59d/full/!740,560/0/default.jpg", "https://media.nga.gov/iiif/f28d9a62-6775-47e1-9d7d-28cc9ecb7fac/full/!740,560/0/default.jpg", "https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/imgs/nga-campus-map-icon.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	National Gallery of Art	en	/content/dam/ngaweb/icons/favicon.ico		null	Overview The French Revolution began in 1789, when citizens stormed the Bastille prison in Paris. Within a few years, France had adopted and overthrown several constitutions and executed its former king. It found itself at war with most of the Continent and endured horrible violence at home during the Reign of Terror. Finally, in 1799, the successful young general Napoleon Bonaparte seized control and, in 1804, proclaimed himself emperor. Though he made important administrative reforms, he was preoccupied by constant warfare and his heroic but failed attempt to unite all of Europe by conquest. After being defeated at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was exiled and the Bourbon monarchy was restored in the person of Louis XVIII. With the revolution, French painting resumed its moral and political purpose and embraced the style known as neoclassicism. Even before 1789, popular taste had begun to turn away from the disarming, lighthearted subjects of rococo; as revolution neared, artists increasingly sought noble themes of public virtue and personal sacrifice from the history of ancient Greece or Rome. They painted with restraint and discipline, using the austere clarity of the neoclassical style to stamp their subjects with certitude and moral truth. Neoclassicism triumphed—and became inseparably linked to the revolution—in the work of Jacques-Louis David, a painter who also played an active role in politics. As virtual artistic dictator, he served the propaganda programs first of radical revolutionary factions and later of Napoleon. As a young man David had worked in the delicate style of his teacher François Boucher, but in Italy he was influenced by ancient sculpture and by the seventeenth-century artists Caravaggio and Poussin, adopting their strong contrasts of color, clear tones, and firm contours. David gave his heroic figures sculptural mass and arranged them friezelike in emphatic compositions that were meant to inspire his fellow citizens to noble action. Among the many artists who studied in David's large studio was Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Unlike his teacher, Ingres did not involve himself in politics and spent most of his youth in Italy, returning to France only after the restoration of the monarchy. During his long life, he came to be regarded as the high priest of neoclassicism, pursuing its perfection after younger artists had become enthralled with romanticism. A superb draftsman, Ingres insisted on the importance of line though he nevertheless was a brilliant master of color. A mathematical precision pushes his work toward formal abstraction despite the meticulous realism of its surfaces. One of his contemporaries noted that Houdon, the most successful portrait sculptor of his day, "pushed truth to the bitter end." This bust captures the fleshy and disheveled scoundrel Cagliostro, who bilked the courts of Europe as an alchemist and mesmerizer. He was implicated in the notorious Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which galvanized public opinion against the French royal family when it appeared that Marie-Antoinette had purchased an extravagant necklace at a time of strained public finances. In fact, an ambitious dupe had made the purchase in hopes of currying the queen's favor. Cagliostro was suspected of acting as a go-between, and though no charges were proven, he was expelled from France in 1786, the same year this bust is dated. He died in a prison in Rome about fifteen years later, condemned by the pope as a heretic. Cagliostro's spirited portrait contrasts with Houdon's cool and impersonal Diana. Cagliostro's eyes, for example, are drilled to indicate the pupil, whereas Diana's blank, undifferentiated gaze reveals neither spirit nor human emotion. Houdon copied Diana from his 1776 plaster model for a full-length statue, a practice he followed frequently. Madame Vigée Le Brun was part of the world she painted and, like her aristocratic patrons, was under threat of the guillotine after the revolution. She was forced to flee Paris in disguise in 1789. She had been first painter to Queen Marie–Antoinette and her personal confidant. The queen had intervened to ensure her election to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, an honor accorded few women. More than two–thirds of Vigée Le Brun's surviving paintings are portraits. Most, like this one, are of women and children who are idealized —flattered—into a kind of family resemblance. These unrelated young women, for example, could easily be mistaken for sisters. Their garments, airy silks and iridescent taffetas, are almost more individual than their faces, although both women were friends of the artist. The picture was hailed as a tribute to friendship and maternal love when it was shown at the Salon of 1787. David described Napoleon's tireless dilligence: "He is in his study. . . . The candles flickering and the clock striking four remind him that the day is about to break. . . . He rises. . . to pass his troops in review." It is unlikely that Napoleon actually posed for this portrait despite its convincing detail. The painting is an artful contrivance to convey three aspects of his public image: soldier, emperor, and administrator. A volume of Plutarch's Lives positions him with the great generals of ancient history and reinforces the meaning of the uniform, sword, and campaign maps. Embroidered on the ceremonial chair are the golden bees and N of his imperial emblem. And on the desk, rolled papers—the Code Napoléon, whose reforms are the basis of French legal theory—recall his civic role. When David married Marguerite-Charlotte Pécoul, the young daughter of a prosperous builder with connections at Louis XVI's court, he was literally twice her age. Their marriage was at times stormy; they separated, divorced, and remarried. David spoke of her as a "woman whose virtues and character had assured the happiness of his life." Political disagreements, particularly his attachment to the ruthless Robespierre, may have exacerbated their personal differences. However, after Robespierre was executed and David himself imprisoned—and threatened with the guillotine—his wife rallied to him with great courage. Her tireless appeals secured his release, and they remained together until her death. David's frank but sympathetic portrait catches not only the homeliness of his wife's features, but her intelligence and directness as well. Unlike many of David's works, this portrait was painted entirely by his own hand. Its technique is freer than the austere style he applied to less intimate subjects. The satiny texture of her dress, unadorned by jewelry as Madame David surrendered hers in support of the revolution, is created with heavy brushes of thick pigment, the plume with lighter strokes of thinner color. These exuberant surfaces contrast with the restrained precision of the accessories in Napoleon's portrait. David Johnston, who was painted at the age of nineteen, became a progressive industrialist in the ceramics business and served as mayor of Bordeaux. This portrait was produced while Prud'hon was at the height of his fame, in the same year that Napoleon awarded him the Legion of Honor. Unlike most other painters in France, Prud'hon did not fall under the influence of David's austere style. His work, by contrast, has the shadowy softness of Italian Renaissance painters Leonardo da Vinci and Correggio, whose works he studied. The firm lines and hard contours of color preferred by his comtemporaries throw their subjects into vivid relief, while Prud'hon's more gentle gradations of tone lend romantic, sometimes erotic ambiguity instead. Compare, for example, this portrait with the sharp intensity of Ingres' Monsieur Marcotte. Prud'hon, his life marred by personal tragedy, was passionately admired by romantic artists of the following generation who saw in his work an alternative to the tyrannie davidienne, the dictates of a neoclassical style that eventually lapsed into rigid dogma. Ingres painted this scene while he was living in Italy. The painting's extreme visual accuracy, which reproduces Michelangelo's Last Judgment at the right, is so precise that the painting would appear to be an eyewitness account; however, at that time the pope was being held virtual prisoner in France after having been brutally removed from Rome by French forces following Napoleon's annexation of the Papal States. The circumstances of the work's commission are somewhat surprising, since Ingres painted it for a prominent French official in Rome who might have been expected to avoid such a potentially controversial subject. He was Charles Marcotte, a good friend of Ingres' and one of his most important patrons, whose portrait is in the Gallery's collection. (Ingres included his self-portrait here on the left, holding a halberd). By the time the painting was exhibited in Paris, events changed dramatically. Napoleon's defeat and exile, the return of Louis XVIII, and the pope's own restoration to Rome removed the controversy from Marcotte's commission. Ingres, unlike David in whose studio he studied, remained blind to politics, devoting himself instead to the perfection of his art. When his friend Marcotte first suggested that Ingres paint Ines Moitessier, the wife of a financier and jurist, he demurred. Ingres changed his mind after being struck by her "terrible et belle tête" (terrible and beautiful head.) The author Théophile Gautier described her as "Junolike," and Ingres presents her with the imposing remoteness of a Roman goddess. Her stance is severe and strongly silhouetted, her monumental shoulders stark ivory against the somber, restricted colors around her. Ingres insisted on painting every detail from life, so he could achieve, in his words, "the faithful rendering of nature that leads to art." With minute accuracy he has recorded the light–absorbing darkness of her lace and velvet costume, the gleam of gold jewelry, the gloss of her elaborate coiffure. The emphatic reality of these details contrasts with her unfocused gaze, contributing to the sense that she is somehow removed from life. Ingres began to pose Madame Moitessier in the 1840s, but the work languished. This second attempt was begun after the aging artist—he was 71—had been roused from depression by the prospect of his remarriage in 1852.
5097	dbpedia	1	48	https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/1044ZD	en	Théophile Gautier (The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection)	https://media.getty.edu/…00/0/default.jpg	https://media.getty.edu/…00/0/default.jpg	[]	[]	[]	[ "Getty Museum collections", "artworks", "art works", "art history", "video", "interpretation of art", "acquisitions", "artists", "Getty art", "collections Getty", "collezioni Getty", "colecciones Getty", "Sammlung Getty", "Getty exhibits", "Getty current exhibitions", "Getty Museum exhibits", "los angeles collections", "antiquities", "decorative arts", "sculpture", "manuscripts", "photography", "paintings", "drawings" ]	null	[]	null	Explore the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center and the Getty Villa.	en	/art/collection/favicon.ico	The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection	https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/1044ZD
5097	dbpedia	1	33	https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/authors.html	en	Paris: Capital of the 19th Century			[ "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/banner-90px.gif", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001461.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001466.gif", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001465.gif", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001464.gif", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001458.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001467.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001459.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001463.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001456.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001457.gif", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001460.jpg", "https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/img/authors/pari001462.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	19th Century Authors The City Observed: Paris in Fiction, Poetry, and Autobiographical works Henry Majewski, Professor Emeritus of French Studies, Brown University Represented here are authors who have written about Paris during the 19th century. Works mentioned below are solely those which portray the capital. Suggestions for additional authors or works are welcomed. Select an Entry: Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850. One of the greatest novelists in the nineteenth century, Balzac proposed to give a portrait of society in its complexity. He attempted to study all levels of his society from the peasants to the aristocrats and find the underlying laws and principles which governed it. His novels, almost 90 in number, include studies of the political, military, economic aspects of society as well as the customs, philosophy and lifestyles of the representative characters he creates. A major section of Balzac's series of novels entitled La Comédie humaine is devoted to studies of life in Paris. They have the subtitle: Scènes de la Vie Parisienne. l. Histoire des Treize: 1. Ferragus (1833). Paris itself is the veritable protagonist of this novel. 2. La Duchesse de Langeais (1833-1834) 3. La Fille aux yeux d'or (1834-35). The novel begins with a detailed description of the city of Paris from a sociological perspective (analysis of the class structure of the city in 1815 when the action takes place). Balzac transforms this presentation into a personal vision of the city as a modern hell. It becomes a series of concentric circles, in which the energy of each class of citizens is dissipated in a destructive effort to move upward from one social category to the next circle of life in Paris. II. Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Décadence de César Birotteau (1837). The story of the rise and fall of the great bourgeois man of the business world during the period of the Restauration (1819-1823). III. La Maison Nucingen (1838). The novel of the great Parisian banking family in the years from 1826 to 1836. IV. Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1839-1847). A study of the life of Parisian courtisanes or high-class prostitutes. It includes a section on the career of a major recurring character in Balzac's novels, Vautrin. He eventually becomes a chief of police after having been a notorious criminal. The sections of this long novel are entitled: 1. "Comment aiment les filles." 2. "À combien l'amour revient aux vieillards." 3. "Ou mènent les mauvais chemins." 4. "La dernière incarnation de Vautrin." V. Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan (1839). VI. Facino Cane (1836). VII. Sarrasine (1831). A short novel about the life of a castrato who sang in the opera in the 18th century. This text became the basis for Roland Barthes' influential study of the role of literary codes in the analysis of narrative in fiction entitled S/Z. VIII. Pierre Grassou (1840). IX. Les Parents pauvres: 1. La Cousine Bette (1846). Balzac's masterpiece about the fall of the great aristocratic family of the Baron Hulot in the period 1838-1844. 2. Le Cousin Pons (1847). Balzac's last completed novel deals in part with music and especially art. A central role is played by the important art collection owned by the protagonist and coveted by his family and others. Balzac's own ideas about painting and the art world are also clearly presented. This novel offers a very bleak portrait of human greed on all levels of society. X. Un homme d'affaires (1845). XI. Un prince de la Bohème (1840). XII. Gaudissart II (1844). XIII. Les Employés (1837). XIV. Les Comédiens sans le savoir (1846). XV. Les petits bourgeois (posthumous, 1854). XVI. L'Envers de l'histoire contemporaine (1842-1846). The story of a group of religious people surviving in an enclave of medieval Paris in a changing world near the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. In some of the other major divisions of La Comédie humaine there are novels situated in Paris. The novels of the Scènes de la vie politique contain at least two of these — Un Épisode sous la Terreur (1830) takes place in 1793, and Une Ténébreuse affaire (1841) during the Restauration and The July Monarchy. XVII. The Études philosophiques: 1. La Physiologie du mariage (1829). Before the concept of the Comédie humaine had taken form, Balzac wrote a series of historical novels and a work entitled La Physiologie du mariage published in 1829. This novel was a kind of sociological study of contemporary marriage that proposed a code of behavior for husbands and wives. It was already based on Balzac's ideas about the influence of milieu and physical conditions on institutions and the lives of individuals. It was considered scandalous at the time because of some of Balzac's recommendations. It is important as an early example of the 19th century tradition of Physiologies, or texts which describe the influence of the physical environment on the individual. 2. La Peau de chagrin (l831). A study of the relationship between desire and human energy that is centered upon a talisman in a Parisian shop of antiques. 3. Le Chef d'œuvre inconnu (l831). This famous study of the painter and his desire to create a perfect masterpiece has inspired many later writers, illustrators, and film makers including Zola and Picasso. Zola's novel entitled L'Œuvre also concerns a painter who is struggling to produce a great painting in spite of his own inherited limitations. Balzac's short novel takes place in 1612 and features historical painters like Poussin and Mabuse. The central argument concerning the relative values of color or line in painting has often been compared to the contemporary debate between the supporters of Delacroix (color) and those who favored Ingres and the classical emphasis on drawing and line. XVIII. Scènes de la vie privée: 1. Le Père Goriot (1834-1835). The great novel about the difficult progress of a young provincial aristocrat, Eugène de Rastignac, in Parisian society. As he follows the young man's rise in the social sphere, the narrator describes life in several different sections of the city in Restauration Paris from 1818 to 1819. The poor quarter in the 5th Arrondissement is the home of the pension Vauquer where Eugène lives with an assortment of Parisian types. Among these is the infamous criminal Vautrin, one of Balzac's major recurring characters. The quarter of the wealthy bankers and the section inhabited by the aristocrats, the area called Saint-Germain, are also presented. 2. Le Colonel Chabert (1832). A study of the difficult return of a soldier of Napoleon's army to Parisian society. It contains an important portrait of contemporary legal practices and lawyers and could be compared to similar descriptions of the legal profession in Dickens. 3. Illusions perdues (1837-1839, 1843). This novel was placed by Balzac in his Scènes de la vie de province but it deals mainly with the life of Lucien de Rubempré, a young provincial aristocrat who comes to Paris to become a poet and find success in the Paris of the Restauration (1819-1823). It presents the worlds of book publishing, journalism, and the aristocratic society which Lucien attempts to enter and which finally rejects him. The story of his downfall is seen in the context of the world of the courtisans and prostitution. His fate in the corrupted atmosphere of the city is contrasted with that of his provincial friend David Suchard, an engraver and sculptor, who remains in the country. The famous character Vautrin plays an important role in one of his later incarnations. This long novel is divided into three parts: 1. "Les deux poètes." 2. "Un grand homme de province à Paris." 3. "Les Souffrances de l'inventeur." [Top] Banville, Théodore Fauillain de, 1823-1891. A prolific poet of the Parnassian school. Among his many collections of poetry and plays is a volume of poems entitled L'Âme de Paris. His best known volume of poetry dealt with the milieu of the clowns in the entertainment world and the circus, Les Odes funambulesques (1857). The theme of the melancholy saltimbanque would become important to Baudelaire and to later painters and artists from the Belle Époque to Picasso. [Top] Barbey D'Aurevilly, J. (Jules), 1808-1889. An important novelist who wanted to be the Walter Scott of Normandy; however, his many novels included studies of aristocratic life in Paris. His major collection of short stories, Les Diaboliques (1871), develops his major theme of the diabolical presence of evil in contemporary society. His pessimistic preoccupation with the corruption of society is often compared to similar thematic concerns in the poetry of Baudelaire. [Top] Barbier, Auguste, 1805-1882. A minor poet who became the political satirist of the July Monarchy. His most important collection of poetry entitled Iambes et poèmes (1831) recalls Andre Chénier and his poems about the French Revolution of 1789; they also anticipate Victor Hugo's bitter criticism of the regime of Napoleon III in Les Châtiments. His collection Iambes includes a poem entitled "Paris." [Top] Barrès, Maurice, 1862-1923. An important novelist, art critic and chronicler of life in France, he moved from a cult of the self and individual energy, to a profound solidarity with his fellow countrymen which can be seen as the basis for strong nationalistic feeling. His most famous novel is Les Déracinés (1897) whose title includes the phrase Le Roman de l'énergie nationale. [Top] Bashkirtseff, Marie, 1860-1884. This painter and writer left an important diary that plays a role in Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième sexe. A Russian aristocrat, she came to France as a child and died young of tuberculosis. [Top] Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867. One of the most important collections of poetry in the 19th century, Les Fleurs du mal (1857) contains many poems concerning the life of the city. The poet is an uneasy witness to the transformations the city is undergoing ("Le Cygne") in its modernization, and celebrates the life of the flâneur who observes his impressions of life in the city as he strolls along the streets and boulevards. The Petits poèmes en prose, originally entitled Le Spleen de Paris, develops the themes of idealism and despair in relation to the poet's daily existence in a city of beauty and suffering. As an important art critic he published annual reviews of the official salons in journals. He admired the painting of Delacroix especially, and has left a valuable account of romantic painting which is presented in L'Art romantique and Curiosités esthétiques published in the complete edition of his works in 1868. In an important essay entitled "Le Peintre de la vie moderne" from Curiosités esthétiques, he defines the modern artist, painter or poet, as one who records the complexity of current life in the city, and makes these observations the substance of his work. He rejects the traditional emphasis in art on classical subjects, history and myth in favor of the richness of contemporary manners and mores. The essay is dedicated to the painter Constantin Guys. Many readers, however, interpret the text as a justification of the painting of Édouard Manet who treated many facets of contemporary life in Paris from the cafés and musical halls to scenes of the street. [Top] Becque, Henry, 1837-1899. A dramatist of the realist school whose plays examine scenes of Parisian life in the tradition of Balzac. He was a very severe critic of his society whose plays include Les Corbeaux (1882), a bitter portrait of the business world; La Parisienne (1886), a satire of bourgeois marriage and love, and Les Polichinelles (1910), an unfinished play dealing with the immorality of the world of finance. His plays offer a dark portrait of French society during the Third Republic. [Top] Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 1780-1857. A Parisian poet who was beloved by the public and many important writers, including Stendhal. He is mainly the author of chansons and minor poems which however reflect the views of the middle class in France from the Napoleonic period to the Second Empire. He played a role in the political life of the times when he was elected to the Assemblée Nationale during the Revolution of 1848. His early reputation as a great poet has not survived. [Top] Berlioz, Hector, 1803-1869. The great composer of the French romantic school wrote his memoirs — Mes Mémoires — published in 1858-1859. This work is an invaluable account of the musical and personal life of a rebellious, romantic musician who struggles to survive and prosper in the artistic world of the monarchy of Louis-Philippe, characterized by its conservative, academic institutions. [Top] Blanchecotte, Auguste 1830-1895. She was a poet from the working class whose first collection of poetry was awarded a prize by the Académie Française (Rêves et réalités, 1855). Her works include Tablettes d'une femme pendant la Commune (1872) and Les Militantes (1875). [Top] Bloy, Léon, 1846-1917. A prolific Catholic writer whose work includes literary studies, autobiographical essays and mystical meditations. Histoires désobligeantes can be considered a portrait of contemporary society. [Top] Boigne, Louise-Eléonore-Charlotte-Adélaide d'Osmond, comtesse de, 1781-1866. She was primarily a memoir-writer whose souvenirs are an important document concerning the history of her time, from the perspective of a woman who was also an aristocrat. Although begun in 1835, her memoirs, Récits d'une tante, were not published until 1907. [Top] Bourget, Paul, 1852-1935. A novelist and essayist who becomes a strong advocate for traditional values — monarchy, Catholicism and nationalism. He represents a conservative view in his anti-Dreyfus stance. He vigorously criticizes contemporary materialism and science, which he condemns for its denial of mystery and the religious bases of morality. His most famous novels are Le Disciple (1889) and L'Étape (1902); the first illustrates his thesis of the recklessness of scientific experiment without moral concerns, and the emptiness of life without religious values; the second, the dangers of democracy and the importance of maintaining traditions. [Top] Céard, Henry, 1851-1924. He was an important literary figure known for his friendship with the naturalist writers and especially Zola, which resulted in a long correspondence published in the complete edition of Zola's letters. His best known story is La Saignée; it deals with his personal experience of the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 and appeared in Les Soirées de Médan. Among his novels is the naturalist work Une belle journée (1891). [Top] Champfleury, 1821-1889. As a novelist and essayist he is remembered most for his defense of realism in art and his friendship with Flaubert. His esthetic ideas are collected in the essays of Le Réalisme (1857); among his novels in the tradition of Balzac, most deal with the people and the lower classes in the provinces. A novel set in the capital is La Mascarade de la vie parisienne (1860). [Top] Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de, 1768-1848. The great master of early romantic literature was known for his exotic novels about Native Americans and his melancholy hero René who became a prototype of the romantic outsider. He did not write about the city of Paris but in his influential treatise on religion, Le Génie du Christianisme, he re-established the value and beauty of gothic art, especially the cathedrals such as Notre-Dame de Paris. In his most celebrated work, Mémoires d'outre-tombe, published posthumously, there are many descriptions of his life in Paris, and his famous literary and political friendships. His political career during the Restauration is presented. This memoir is an essential text as the personal description of the experience of life in the first part of the nineteenth century of an influential writer, traveler and political figure. [Top] Colet, Louise, 1810-1876. A poet and friend of great writers, especially Flaubert, with whom she exchanged an important correspondence. Among her novels is Lui (1859), a fictionalized version of the poet Musset's life in Paris, especially his struggles with alcohol and many love affairs. [Top] Constant, Benjamin, 1767-1830. An important writer and political figure whose novel Adolphe offered the prototype of the suffering romantic hero. He was perhaps the leading exponent of liberalism during his political career; he opposed Napoleon and was an elected deputy during the Restauration. His famous friendships with Madame Récamier and the novelist Madame de Staël have been often studied. His Mémoires sur les Cent-Jours (1820) offer an important portrait of Napoleon's brief return to power in Paris after his first exile. [Top] Corbière, Tristan, 1845-1875. An important poet of the last quarter of the century, his neglected work was recognized by Verlaine who included him in his book on the "poètes maudits" of his time. His only published volume of poetry, Les Amours jaunes (1845-1875), contains a section devoted to poems about Paris. He is considered to be a precursor of the symbolists and modernist experimental poetry. [Top] Daudet, Alphonse, 1840-1897. Known primarily for his stories and plays about Provence, Daudet became a serious chronicler of life in Paris after the Commune. Zola considered him a naturalist who observed and described Parisian manners and morals with precision and insight. The Contes du lundi (1873) present the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune as background for bitter personal experiences. Froment jeune et Risler aîné (1874) and the following novels deal with various aspects of Parisian life: Le Nabab (1877) presents the business world; Numa Rumestan (1881) the world of politicians; L'Immortel (1890), the Académie française; Les Rois en exil (1879), the dissolution of contemporary society. Parallel to Zola he becomes the painter of life during the Second Empire and beyond. Stylistically he has been called an impressionist as well as a naturalist for his sensitive notations of sensations and impressions. [Top] Daumier, Honoré, 1808-1879. The great painter, illustrator and caricaturist of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe and the Second Empire, wrote a personal journal entitled Actualités of great interest due to his perceptive observations of historical events. [Top] Delacroix, Eugène, 1799-1863. The most important painter of the romantic period in France recorded in the Journal his life as a painter in Paris and his relations with many famous artists and writers such as George Sand and Baudelaire. [Top] Du Camp, Maxime, 1822-1894. Known primarily as an important witness of the Second Empire and the society of his time, this great friend of Flaubert wrote travel literature, art criticism, poetry and novels. Les Chants modernes (1855) represents a new social poetry concerned with the industrial revolution and modernity. His novel Les Forces perdues (1867) criticizes the experience of romantic anguish, and predates Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale which it may have influenced. A study of contemporary Paris, Paris, ses organes, ses functions et sa vie (1869) was a great success and earned him election to the Académie française. [Top] Dumas, Alexandre, 1802-1870. The great, prolific popular novelist wrote primarily historical novels and plays which did not deal with contemporary Paris. His very successful play Antony (1831) was one of the first, however, to present the suffering of the anguished romantic hero. One of his last novels is entitled Les Mohicans de Paris (1854). [Top] Dumas, Alexandre, 1824-1895. Son of the popular novelist, he is best known for his novel La Dame aux camélias (1848) which he presented as a drama with the same title. As a dramatist he wrote a series of plays dealing with contemporary life and current issues, such as the demi-monde. The problem of illegitimacy, which is the subject of Les Idées de Madame Aubray (1867), is inspired by his friendship with George Sand and her feminist viewpoint. [Top] Duranty, Edmond, 1833-1880. Novelist, playwright and critic, he was a friend of Zola and wrote controversial reviews of the impressionist painters in a series of "salons." [Top] Duras, Claire de Durfort, duchesse de, 1777-1828. Currently a highly regarded novelist, she is remembered especially for Ourika (1823). Her portrait of a young black woman who is brought to France and suffers the anguish of an impossible, romantic love for a white Frenchman is an early study of an interracial romance. Her other published novel is Édouard (1825). [Top] Duval, Georges, b. 1772. Playwright of comedies who also left souvenirs of the Revolutionary period in Paris — Souvenirs de la Terreur de 1788 à 1793, 4 Vols. (1841). [Top] Faguet, Émile, 1847-1916. A very influential literary critic who maintained academic traditions during his long career and whose work is characterized by a humanistic insistence on the importance of the personality of the writer. He is responsible for the traditional critical methodology referred to as L'homme et l'œuvre. He also wrote essays on political and social issues. [Top] Feydeau, Georges, 1862-1921. This celebrated author of comedies and vaudeville theater satirized the customs and manners of his day. His plays are still widely performed in France and in translation elsewhere. La Dame de chez Maxim (1899) and La puce à l'oreille (1907) are among the best known of his farcical works. [Top] Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880. The great novelist, often considered to be at the origins of modernism in literature, wrote one important novel dealing with Paris, L'Éducation sentimentale (1869). The protagonist of this novel is a version of the dandy or the flâneur. He arrives from the provinces to search for love and success in the city, much like Balzac's Eugène de Rastignac, but he is profoundly bored with existence in the city. He is totally lacking in the energy of Balzac's protagonists and is mainly characterized by his ennui. Ironically, he is absent from the city during the first days of the Revolution of 1848, which he spends in Fontainebleau with his mistress. Nevertheless, Frédéric is an excellent observer of the worlds of the middle class, art and the demi-monde. For many critics this is the essential novel for an understanding of the city at the beginnings of the dominance of the bourgeoisie economically and socially. His other fiction treats primarily subjects taken from history, myth and provincial life. He also left a very important correspondence with many important writers of the day including George Sand. [Top] Fourier, Charles, 1772-1837. An important critic of contemporary society, his utopian thought influenced many writers such as George Sand. He is distinguished from the Saint-Simoniens since he did not propose a radical transformation of the economic life of France; instead he emphasized the need to form small utopian societies called phalansteries where each individual performed necessary tasks and no central authority is needed. He is remembered for his contribution to the ideas of romantic socialism after 1830. [Top] France, Anatole, 1844-1924. He was a poet of the Parnassian School, a novelist and critic whose many books were highly appreciated during his lifetime. A humanist and satirist he is often compared to Voltaire. He won the Nobel Prize for literature and was a strong supporter of Dreyfus. Proust used him as a basis for the character of Bergotte the novelist. The novel M. Bergeret à Paris (1901) features a provincial professor in the city. [Top] Fromentin, Eugène, 1820-1876. He was a painter as well as a novelist and an art critic. His only novel, Dominique (1863), partly takes place in the student milieu of Paris. It is an important novel of romantic, impossible love. His painting is valued for his scenes of Algeria, and his major work of art history, the Maîtres d'autrefois (1876) is still considered to be one of the earliest and most important studies of its kind. [Top] Gautier, Judith, 1845-1917. The daughter of Théophile Gautier, she was a novelist, playwright and famous salonnière. Since she was an oriental scholar her works deal mainly with travel and "exotic" subject matter. [Top] Gautier, Théophile, 1811-1872. He was an important figure in the development of romanticism and the founder of the aesthetic movement in France usually referred to as art for art's sake ("l'art pour l'art"). He is the author of important poetry which marked the beginnings of the Parnassian school of poetry in France, primarily the collection entitled Émaux et Camées (1852). His Poésies complètes, published first in 1844 contains many poems dealing with contemporary Paris. L'Histoire du Romantisme (1872) is a valuable account of Gautier's understanding of the romantic movement in France. It includes portraits of the major literary and artistic figures of the period, and describes some of the principal events in which he participated such as the infamous opening night of Hernani (1830) by Victor Hugo. This play caused a scandal and announced the battle between the classicists and the romantics. He was a prominent member of several groups of young romantics — called cenacles — and wrote a humorous satire of the attitudes and aspirations of the young generation of romantic artists in Paris, entitled Les Jeunes France (1831). [Top] Gay, Sophie, 1776-1852. The mother of Delphine de Girardin, she was a novelist and playwright as well as a salonnière who was famous for her wit. Among her many novels is Un Mariage sous l'Empire (1832). [Top] Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité, comtesse de, 1746-1830. She was a prominent educational writer, novelist and memoir-writer whose views were a mixture of progressive ideas and reactionary attitudes. Among her 80 published works are De l'Influence des femmes sur la littérature française comme protectrices des lettres et comme auteurs (1811). Her 10 volume memoirs were published in 1825. [Top] Girardin, Émile de, Mme., 1804-1855. A successful poet and dramatist, she maintained a famous salon which brought together the major romantic writers of her generation. In her Lettres parisiennes (1836-1848) she chronicled the important events of her time. Her fiction includes La Canne de Monsieur de Balzac (1836). [Top] Goncourt, Edmond de, 1822-1896 [Top] Goncourt, Jules de, 1830-1870 They are usually referred to as the "frères Goncourt" since they composed their works together. The two brothers were very influential writers who were largely responsible for the revival of interest in French 18th century art and letters after a period of neglect. In addition to their important works of art criticism they maintained a Journal which is an invaluable resource for an intimate knowledge of the lives of artists and painters in the second half of the 19th century. It was not published in its entirety until 1956. They established the literary society now called the Académie Goncourt to serve as an alternative to the Académie française, perceived in their time to be excessively conventional and opposed to all new trends including realism and symbolism in art and fiction. The main function of the Academy is to award an annual prize to the best novel of the year. The brothers are also known as novelists who wanted to continue the tradition of Balzac and give a truthful, scientific portrayal in an artistic style of the complex aspects of contemporary society. They did not limit themselves to life in Paris. Their long list of novels includes descriptions of the milieu of medicine (Sœur Philomène, 1861), the middle class (Renée Maupertin, 1864), the world of writers (Charles Demailly, 1860), the lives of artists and painters (Manette Salomon, 1867). After the death of his brother, Jules continued to produce novels which were an artistic documentation of contemporary customs and manners. [Top] Hugo, Victor, 1802-1885. Probably the greatest writer of the romantic era who excelled in all genres: theater, fiction, poetry, memoirs, and was an excellent painter as well. He became a national institution and his funeral in Paris was an event of great proportions. His list of works dealing with Paris is extensive; they cover most of the major events in the 19th century in which he was a participant and prime witness. Among his novels there are several important texts about life in Paris. Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) presents Paris in the Middle Ages; Le Dernier jour d'un condamné (1829) uses new narrative techniques (such as the inner monologue) to study the last day in the life of a prisoner in the infamous Parisian prison of Bicêtre. Claude Gueux (1834) and Les Misérables (1861) offer powerful and sympathetic portrayals of the suffering of the poor people of Paris. Hugo's many volumes of poetry include individual poems that treat the history of France and especially events from the Revolution of 1789 through the Commune in 1871. Throughout the volumes of lyric poetry there are also many poems devoted to the city; in Les Contemplations (1856), for example, is found the masterpiece "Melancholia" which offers a series of portraits of the poor and marginalized inhabitants of Paris, including the poet who is alienated and misunderstood. Hugo also wrote poetry with political themes from the beginning to the end of his career. There are poems glorifying Napoleon and the Revolution of 1889; works dealing with the events of 1830 and 1848 when Hugo played a political role in the life of his country as an elected senator. The poetry about political issues traces his own development from a young royalist in the first collections, to a centrist after 1830, and then a socialist who exiled himself during the entire reign of Napoleon III in the Second Empire. His volume entitled Les Châtiments (1853), preceded by the prose work Napoléon le Petit (1852), offers bitter, strong indictments of the tyranny of the new Emperor's dictatorship. He lived to write about yet another revolution, that of the Commune which he describes in L'Année terrible (1872). Many of his works in prose present his views on the recent history of the city; Choses Vues (posthumous, 1900) is a valuable document offering his perspective on historical figures he knew and important events which he had witnessed himself. Littérature et Philosophie mêlées (1834) is an earlier text in which Hugo also presents portraits of literary figures of his time. Hugo's theater was very influential in establishing the romantic tradition, and the new admiration for Shakespeare, as opposed to the classical French dramatic conventions; it does not deal with contemporary life but presents history plays often dealing with Spain and the Renaissance period in France. [Top] Huysmans, J.-K. (Joris-Karl), 1848-1907. An important novelist and art critic whose work evolved from novels written in the style and philosophy of naturalism. Les Sœurs Vatard (1879) is a portrait like those of Zola, of the unfortunate and underprivileged. He was known as a major writer of the decadence, the disillusioned generation after the Revolution of 1870. His most famous novel À Rebours (1884) has become one of the best illustrations of the decadent temperament. Its protagonist, Des Esseintes, lives a solitary life in a Paris suburb in which he has created a totally artificial existence to counteract the meaninglessness of life. His final novels illustrate his development into a religious and mystical phase. Là-bas (1891), En route (1895) and La Cathédrale (1898) (a glorification of Chartres and Christian symbolism) trace his journey to religious certainty. While his novels deal little with the city of Paris (with the notable exception of À rebours), a collection of sketches aptly entitled Croquis Parisiens proves him to be an astute observer of the capital's social life and customs. [Top] Janin, Jules Gabriel, 1804-1874. He is best known as a witty critic of theater and Parisian life whose most important work was his series of newspaper articles appearing weekly in the Journal des Débats. An important chronicle of the literary history of his time, they were published together in 1858 under the title Histoire de la littérature dramatique. He also wrote studies of writers and actors like Alexandre Dumas and the celebrated actress Rachel. His prose works about Parisian customs include Un été à Paris (1843), Les Beautés de l'opéra (1844); L'Américain à Paris (184?) is concerned with the theme of the flâneur in the city. [Top] Jarry, Alfred, 1873-1907. As a playwright he is best known for Ubu-roi (1896) a satire of the bourgeoisie and the monarchy which became an important precursor of the theater of the absurd. [Top] Jaurès, Jean, 1859-1914. He was a leading socialist thinker, a director of the French workers' mouvement , and probably the greatest orator of the 3rd Republic. His major writings are articles and essays on socialism, the Dreyfus affair, and the history of revolution in France. His Histoire socialiste appeared from 1901-1908. [Top] Kahn, Gustave, 1859-1936. An important poet in the symbolist school, he produced many volumes of poetry influenced by Baudelaire and Verlaine as well as art criticism. A dramatic poem in one act entitled La Pépinière du Luxembourg was published in 1923. [Top] Kock, Paul de, 1793-1871. He and his son, Henri, wrote many successful light comedies and vaudeville characterized by their bourgeois taste and clever observations of contemporary life and customs in Paris and its suburbs. A typical example of his boulevard style comedy is La Pucelle de Belleville (1834). He also wrote a series of sketches of Parisian life. [Top] Krysinska, Marie, 1857-1908. She came to Paris from Poland at the age of 16. Primarily a poet she is credited to be the first to develop free verse in France. She died in poverty. Her collected works include Rythmes pittoresques (1890) and Joies errantes (1894). [Top] La Tour du Pin Gouvernet, Henriette Lucie Dillon, marquise de, 1770-1853. She left an important memoir that describes her youth at Court, her experiences during the Revolution, emigration and life under Napoleon. Journal d'une femme de cinquante ans was first published in 1906. [Top] Labiche, Eugène, 1815-1888. An excellent playwright of comedies and vaudeville who produced one hundred plays about French life and manners. [Top] Laforgue, Jules, 1860-1887. He was an important member of the symbolist school of poetry who published in contemporary journals and is remembered for melancholic, ironic poems in collections like Les complaintes (1885). [Top] Lamartine, Alphonse de, 1790-1869. Lamartine is considered the first great poet of the romantic era. His collection Les Méditations poétiques (1820) inaugurated a new kind of poetic sensibility; melancholic, religious, escapist, forever seeking an impossible love and refuge in nature. His successive collections reaffirmed his position as the great French romantic poet, but have little to do with Paris. However, he also had an important political career and became the provisional president of the Second Republic after the Revolution of 1848. He incarnated the romantic ideal of the poet, a spiritual leader and humanitarian guide of the people. His term was brief because he was unable to act decisively and choose between the right and the left politically. His most important prose work L'Histoire des Girondins (1848) was very popular and influential at the time of the Revolution of 1848; it was a political manifesto presenting the Girondin group of the first Revolution (1879), a centrist party of moderation, as a kind of model for political action. In 1849 after his fall from power he published L'Histoire de la Revolution de 1848. He prepared a series of autobiographical works called Les Confidences after 1849. He also wrote novels that are strongly personal in nature, especially Raphaël (1849). They present the point of view of the poet- politician during this time of revolution and change. [Top] Leroux, Pierre, 1797-1871. The romantic philosopher who proclaimed himself a socialist exerted an important influence on Hugo and especially George Sand in her utopian, socialist novels. His influential writings included De l'Égalité (1838) and De l'Humanité (1840). He played a role in the Revolution of 1848 but always insisted on the need for solidarity among the classes instead of conflict. He was primarily for the elevation of the poorer classes through reform not violence, and advocated democratic principles to favor the extension of property to the proletariat, not the abolition of traditional values like the followers of Saint-Simon. [Top] Lévi, Eliphas, 1810-1875. He was one of the mystic, occultist thinkers who influenced the romantic writers, especially Victor Hugo in his later religious works such as La Fin de Satan. He and a circle of his friends, including Esquiros, were known as les Illuminés, the theosophists of their time. La Clef des grands mystères (1869) is typical of his work. [Top] Lorrain, Jean, 1855-1906. A poet and novelist usually considered as a member of the decadent school, he was influenced by Baudelaire and the symbolist poets. He is best known for his novel M. De Phocas (1901) that seems to be modeled on the life of the elegant dandy and friend of Proust, Robert de Montesquiou. He also wrote a series of memoirs entitled Poussières de Paris (1899). They are a valuable source of portraits and documents that illustrate the mentality of the fin de siècle. [Top] Loti, Pierre, 1850-1923. Loti was a well-known novelist whose works are primarily about travel to lands considered exotic at the time. He did not write about the city, but his works illustrate the desire for escape from contemporary society characteristic of the fin de siècle temperament. Pêcheur d'Islande (1886) and Madame Chrysanthème (1887) about Japan (the source for Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly), are major examples. [Top] Mallarmé, Stéphane, 1842-1898. One of the greatest French poets, he was a leader of the symbolist school and wrote rich, complex works with little attention to the city. He did, however, edit a journal about current fashion in 1874 and 1875, La Dernière mode, which is a precious document presenting the great poet and dandy's reactions to contemporary Parisian style in clothes, furniture and jewelry. [Top] Maupassant, Guy de, 1850-1893. He is celebrated for his short stories about his native province, Normandy, and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. He also has a cycle of Parisian short stories in which he depicted the world of the working middle class (La Parure, En Famille), or the world of leisure (Yvette, La Femme de Paul). He is also the author of important novels which make him the contemporary Balzac; he presents the life of the ambitious opportunist in Bel-Ami (1885) in a historical portrait of Parisian life like those of Balzac. The protagonist has indeed been called the Rastignac of the Third Republic. Other important novels are Pierre et Jean (1888) which treats the world of middle class shopkeepers, and Fort comme la mort (1889); it presents the loves of a contemporary painter. [Top] Meilhac, Henri, 1831-1897. A popular playwright of light comedies who collaborated with the composer Offenbach on several operettas such as La Vie Parisienne (1867). He wrote several plays that dealt seriously with customs of fin de siècle Paris (Tricoche et Cacolet, 1872). [Top] Mérimée, Prosper, 1803-1870. He was a very important writer of short fiction and plays during the romantic period. He frequented the other famous writers of his time in Paris, but is best known for his stories with a foreign or exotic setting such as the Spain of Carmen (1845). Very few of his short works concern Paris with the exception of "Arsène Guillot" (1844); it deals with the theme of the prostitute or courtesan in Paris and anticipates Dumas' La Dame aux Camélias (1848). [Top] Michel, Louise, 1830-1905. She was a teacher who played a role in the uprising of the Commune. An activist and anarchist, Michel wrote a series of books about the plight of the poor and the inferior condition of women. Among her works are La Misère (1881), Les Méprisées (1882), La Fille du peuple (1889) and La Commune (1889). She wrote her souvenirs in Souvenirs et aventures de ma vie (1905). [Top] Michelet, Jules, 1798-1874. Perhaps the greatest of French historians, he wrote a Histoire de la Révolution (1847) in addition to his voluminous Histoire de France (1833, 1855-1867). His study of the people of France (Le Peuple, 1846), also presents the life of the city. [Top] Millevoye, Charles, 1782-1816. A minor poet of the pre-romantic period whose volumes of poetry include Les Embellissements de Paris (1807). [Top] Mirbeau, Octave, 1848-1917. He was a novelist, playwright and journalist of the realist and naturalist school who is best known for his naturalist novel, Journal d'une femme de chambre (1900). His plays Les Corbeaux and Les Affaires sont les Affaires (1903) are virulent satires of the moneyed classes. [Top] Murger, Henri, 1822-1861. One of the most important writers of popular literature, he initiated a journal of criticism entitled La Muse française (1823-1824). The journal published many writings of the young romantics, their manifestoes and articles of criticism. He is best known for his sentimental stories of the lives of young artists in Paris during the romantic period, Scènes de la vie de bohème (1848), later produced as a play. Finally, in the opera version by Verdi it became perhaps the most famous story in opera about 19th century artistic life. The expression popular bohemia is now used to express his version of the suffering but optimistic artist living on the margins of bourgeois society. [Top] Musset, Alfred de, 1810-1857. He remains the archetypical French romantic poet whose works define the young romantic generation of Paris in 1830. He excelled as a playwright; his works often dealt with Renaissance themes (Lorenzaccio, Andrea del Sarto) or the pursuit of a perfect but impossible love (On ne badine pas avec l'amour). His importance as a writer of Paris lies in his ability to define the malaise of his generation; the term "l'enfant du siècle" is used to identify the young romantics of 1830 who were disenchanted with contemporary bourgeois life and dreamed of evasion and spiritual fulfillment. In his personal memoir, Confession d'un enfant du siècle (1836), he generalizes his experience in love and art to include the young people of his generation; according to Musset their anguish and sense of failure can best be understood in terms of the historical context. They are victims of the failures of their fathers — the revolution and the restoration left the young generation with the feeling of helplessness and lack of meaning. The text is thus an essential document describing the situation of the young Parisian artist in 1830. His best poetry also presents the emotions and anguish of the young poet especially the series entitled Les Nuits and Rolla. In addition to his very personal poetry based on his emotions and love experiences, he wrote art criticism and a series of satirical letters gently mocking his own generation of writers; the Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet is an important document about the contemporary condition of artists in Paris to be compared with Les Jeunes-France of Gautier. His correspondence should be consulted, especially the letters between him and Goerge Sand. Their failed love is the major theme of his Confession de l'enfant du siècle. [Top] Musset, Paul de, 1804-1880. A prolific writer of novels and plays no longer read, he is best known for his passionate defense of his brother Alfred in the novel Lui et Elle (1849). It was published in the same year as George Sand's presentation of her side of the famous love affair between her and Alfred de Musset (Elle et Lui) which took place in Venice. These two works and Musset's Confession constitute important cultural documents concerning romantic attitudes and the psychology of love. [Top] Nadar, Félix, 1820-1910. The great French photographer captured images of the famous writers and celebrities of his time. He also wrote plays and short stories of a satirical, comic nature. [Top] Nerval, Gérard de, 1808-1855. He was one of the most important poets of his time whose influence extends to the surrealists; his work makes extensive use of myth, the worlds of dream and madness. Paris was not really his subject, and yet he is remembered, like Verlaine later, as a Parisian poet. He was a member of the Cenacle of artists associated with Gautier, and for some is the quintessential romantic artist living in the world of his own imagination. His short stories, collected under the title Les Filles du feu (1853), and the poetry, including the sonnets Les Chimères (1854), are considered masterpieces in their genres. He wrote texts about his many travels such as Le Voyage en Orient, and is associated with the countryside outside of Paris around Senlis which he immortalized in his short story "Sylvie." [Top] Nodier, Charles, 1780-1844. The famous short story writer developed a French brand of the genre of the fantastic, le conte fantastique, in which the world of dreams predominates. He is not a writer of the city, but gives a portrait of the romantic poet of his time, lost in reverie and mystical contemplation, in Jean-François les bas bleus (1832). [Top] Pixérécourt, R.-C. Guilbert de (René-Charles Guilbert), 1773-1844. The melodrama was the most popular genre in the theater during the first half of the 19th century. He was known as the king of the boulevard for his innumerable plays and particularly melodramas. [Top] Planche, Gustave, 1808-1857. He was a friend of the great romantics, including Vigny and G. Sand, and is best known for his many articles and portraits of contemporary artists and writers in the important literary journal, La Revue des Deux Mondes. His Portraits littéraires (1836) were followed by Nouveaux portraits littéraires in 1854. [Top] Ponsard, François, 1814-1867. A minor poet and playwright he wrote several comedies of interest to those who would study the customs of the business world in Paris in the middle of the 19th century, L'Honneur et l'argent (1853) and La Bourse (1856). [Top] Proudhon, P.-J. (Pierre-Joseph), 1809-1865. He is a philosopher, socialist and student of art whose thought had a great influence in the middle years of the century. He defined a kind of French version of socialism that stresses solidarity, equality and justice without the presence of a state bureaucracy. His influence waned with the advent of Marxism and the rise of industrialization in France. A close friend of the realist painter Courbet, his treatise on art and literature is entitled Du principe de l'art et de sa destination sociale (1865). [Top] Quatremère de Quincy, M. (Antoine-Chrysostome), 1755-1849. Known as the influential esthetician of neo-classicism, he was called the French Winckelmann. He defended the classical ideal in art and esthetics during his entire career against the development of romantic art. One of his many treatises on art and esthetics is Essai sur la nature, le but et les moyens de l'imitation dans les beaux-arts (1823). [Top] Quinet, Edgar, 1803-1875. An important political figure, as a deputy he was exiled at the beginning of the Second Empire for his impassioned support of the Revolution of 1848. He was also a prolific writer who produced many texts about the history of France and especially the Revolution. Among his works are Histoire de la campagne de 1815 (1862) and La Révolution (1865). [Top] Rabbe, Alphonse, 1786-1830. He is an important precursor of a group of poets who specialized in the poem in prose, including Baudelaire. A melancholy poet who committed suicide, his works are imbued with the anguish of the mal du siècle of the young romantics. His best works are included in the posthumous edition of 1835-1836 entitled L'Album d'un pessimiste. [Top] Rachilde, 1860-1953. Marguerite Eymery wrote under the pseudonym of Rachilde. Primarily a novelist she was also a dramatist and journalist. She is now considered to be one of the most important fin de siècle writers whose works exemplify the decadent imagination. Her very well-written novels treat gender transpositions, sadism and the love of the artificial; they were often considered to be scandalous. Her novels include Monsieur Venus (1884), La Marquise de Sade (1887) and Les Hors Nature (1897). [Top] Régnier, Henri de, 1864-1936. He wrote short fiction and novels not primarily concerned with the city. His poetry evolved from the Parnassian and classical trends to the symbolist impulse under the influence of his friend Mallarmé. It is interesting for his efforts to transpose art works, mainly marble sculpture and metal pieces into poetic form in collections such as Les Medailles d'argile. [Top] Renard, Jules, 1864-1910. A writer of fiction best known for Poil de Carotte (1894), he became an important representative of theater in Paris at the turn of the century with theatrical adaptations of his works. [Top] Rimbaud, Arthur, 1854-1891. One of the greatest French poets, he became a visionary whose rebellion from bourgeois values and natural genius revitalized French poetry. He was born in the provinces and died in Marseille. While most of his poems celebrate forms of evasion from the stifling confines of contemporary life, several deal with the Paris Commune, while The Illuminations contain pieces with urban themes, ostensibly inspired by a trip to London. His major works include the extraordinary poem « Le Bateau ivre » and the collections Les Illuminations and Une saison en enfer. [Top] Rochefort, Victor-Henri, 1830-1913. An important journalist, he was considered to be the very incarnation of the Parisian temperament at the end of the century. He founded La Chronique parisienne in 1858 and later was editor of Charivari. He wrote many plays and satirical novels; he published his Chroniques in 3 volumes entitled Les Français de la décadence (1866-1868). [Top] Rostand, Edmond, 1868-1918. He was a very important playwright whose plays often featured the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt. His best known works are Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), and L'Aiglon (1900) his play about the tragic life of Napoleon's son which was a favorite role of the great actress. One of his last plays was Chantecler (1910) a poetic fable. His works are not particularly concerned with the city but seem to continue the romantic tradition of history and poetic theater. [Top] Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 1804-1869. He was the most influential critic of his age; he strongly supported the first romantic generation, especially Victor Hugo, and lived to befriend the generation of Flaubert and Baudelaire. His criticism was primarily based on historical fact and the lives of the writers. The Causeries du Lundi (1851-1860) contain the major texts of his criticism of writers and works gathered from journal publications. Proust wrote a famous study Contre Sainte-Beuve in which he stressed the need for a new kind of criticism based on the texts instead of the approach that emphasized treating the work as a disguised biography (the infamous l'homme et l'œuvre method which dominated literary studies until the 20th century). His poetry and novels are very personal in nature and appear now as romantic expressions of his own experiences and inner sentimental life. Poésies de Joseph Delorme (1829) is a typical example of romantic sensibility, and "Les Rayons jaunes" attempts an interesting kind of ekphrastic correspondence between color and poetic form. Les Consolations (1830) perfect this vein of intimist poetry and provide an excellent example of the romantic temperament. His most important novel is Volupté (1834), a fictional transposition of his love affair with the wife of Victor Hugo, Adèle. It offers a penetrating portrait of the young romantic generation and of French society in Paris at the time of the royalist reaction against Napoleon, the period of Sainte-Beuve's youth. [Top] Saint-Hilaire, Émile-Marco de, d. 1887. A novelist without much success, he devoted most of his talent to a long series of memoirs and studies of the age of Napoleon. He is recognized for his contribution to the creation of the legend of Napoleon that influenced literature throughout the century. Some of his titles are: Souvenirs intimes du temps de l'Empire (1838-1840), 6 vols. and Les Deux Empereurs, Napoleon Ier et Napoleon III (1853). [Top] Saint-Simon, Henri, comte de, 1760-1825. He was a very important social philosopher whose ideas influenced thinkers and writers for several generations. His utopic plans for the future included a religion of universal harmony and a new social order based on the reorganization of the economy with emphasis on new means of production and technology. One of his major works is De la réorganisation de la société européenne, ou De la nécessité et des moyens de rassembler les peuples de l'Europe en un seul corps politique, en conservant à chacun son indépendence nationale (1814). [Top] Sand, George, 1804-1876. The great romantic novelist produced almost 60 novels in her long career ranging from feminist texts (Indiana, 1832), to books about the country province where she lived, Le Berry, such as Les Maîtres sonneurs (1853), to novels for children and works influenced by socialist thought such as Le Compagnon du tour de France (1840). Under the influence of Pierre Leroux, the socialist thinker, she wrote utopian novels and played an important political role in the early phases of the Revolution of 1848. She wrote about the city of Paris in a few texts including La Ville noire (1861) whose background is the city and the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Her novel Horace (1842) describes the bohemian milieu of artists and writers in Paris around 1830. Elle et Lui is a biographical text presenting her point of view concerning the failed love affair between George Sand and the poet Alfred de Musset after their trip to Venice in 1834. Her autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (1855), is the best source of information about her career as a writer in the city as well as a detailed chronicle of 50 years of her life. She contributed articles on Paris in at least 2 important documents — in Le Diable à Paris (1844) which includes texts by Balzac and engravings of Gavarni, and in Paris Guide, prepared for the exposition of 1867. In the former, she writes a harsh criticism of the city; in the latter, she prepared a very positive and praiseworthy introduction to Paris. Victor Hugo and Gautier also contributed to this publication. [Top] Sardou, Victorien, 1831-1908. He was an important playwright whose well-made comedies and satires were extremely popular during the Second Empire and the Third Republic. Several plays were political satires from a fairly conservative point of view (Les Ganaches, 1862); his plays became portraits of life at the fin de siècle (Théodora, 1884 and Madame Sans Gêne, 1893). They were often interpreted by the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. La Tosca (1887) became the source for Puccini's greatest opera. He also wrote plays dealing with French history. [Top] Schwob, Marcel, 1867-1905. A poet and fiction writer, his knowledge was encyclopedic and his writing showed the influence of the symbolist tradition. His best work is considered to be Les Vies imaginaires (1896) that announces modernist works like Gide's Les Nourritures terrestres. [Top] Scribe, Eugène, 1791-1861. His comedies for the boulevard and dramas were very popular during the Restauration period and the July Monarchy. He is best known as the writer of well-made plays for the middle class; he represents their social and political views without romantic anguish or liberal views. [Top] Ségur, Sophie, comtesse de, 1799-1874. A prolific author of novels of manners for young women, she is still read today. Les Malheurs de Sophie (1864) is one of her best known. [Top] Senancour, Etienne Pivert de, 1770-1846. He was a writer of autobiographical texts who exerted a very important influence on the romantic generation; his emphasis on solitude, melancholy reverie and personal introspection , especially in his masterpiece Oberman (1804), is to be found in the romantic heroes and their disenchantment with life. He did not write about the city, and is best remembered for his description, new in fiction, of the mountains, particularly the Swiss Alps, as a place of refuge and sublime beauty. [Top] Séverine, 1855-1929. Caroline Rémy de Guébhard was a journalist who wrote under the pseudonym of Séverine for the newspaper of her lover, the revolutionary socialist, Jules Vallès. She directed the newspaper, Le Cri du peuple, after his death. Her writings include Pages rouges (1893) and Notes d'une Frondeuse (1894). [Top] Staël, Madame de (Anne-Louise-Germaine), 1766-1817. One of the most important woman writers in French literature, Mme de Staël wrote two influential novels Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807) which are considered to be early feminist works. She played a political role and was exiled for her courageous refusal to accept the dictatorship of Napoleon. In the history of letters she is especially admired for her two treatises on the development of literature in Europe from the ancients to the moderns; De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800) and De l'Allemagne (1810) were influential as theoretical foundations for the new romantic literature. She developed the distinction between Northern literature of mystery and introspection (the romantic impulse) and the literature of the South dominated by rational clarity and the epic spirit (the classical tradition). She does not deal with the city as subject, but her political writings evoke Paris and its history — Considerations sur la Révolution française (1818) and Dix années d'exil (1821). [Top] Stendhal, 1783-1842. He is considered by many to be the greatest of French novelists. La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) situated at the court of Parma in Italy is probably his masterpiece. Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) and Lucien Leuwen (1834-1835) both have sections of the novels which deal with Paris. The first treats the complexities of the ecclesiastical world but takes place primarily in the provinces. Lucien Leuwen is the major text of Stendhal that treats the city in a detailed way. The novel is often compared to Balzac's Illusions perdues; both novels present a young man from the provinces who must confront the harsh realities of the city. It offers a satirical panorama of Parisian society in the central portion of its triptych structure. The novelist caricatures the government ministers and the police; he uncovers the machinations of the political machine in the city. Unlike Balzac, who attempts to analyze the causes and laws governing society, he does not deal with the economic and social forces behind the machines. In addition to his fiction Stendhal wrote important autobiographical works (Souvenirs d'égotisme, 1832), and La Vie de Henri Brulard (1835). He also produced studies of musicians such as Haydn and Rossini, and essays on art and Romanticism (Racine et Shakespeare, 1825). During his years in Paris he also composed an illuminating essay on the psychology of love, De l'Amour, 1822. [Top] Stern, Daniel, 1805-1876. A talented writer, Marie d'Agoult wrote under the pseudonym of Daniel Stern. She was a member of the court of Charles X and had a famous love affair with the musician Franz Liszt. She was the basis of one of the main characters in Balzac's novel about Brittany entitled Béatrix. She established an influential salon for artists and reformers, and was a strong advocate for the emancipation of women, democratic politics and the elimination of poverty. Her many works include fiction, articles on music and literature, a history of the revolution of 1848 and her memoirs. Nélida is an autobiographical novel; Mes souvenirs was published posthumously in 1877; Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 was published between 1850 and 1853. [Top] Sue, Eugène, 1804-1857. One of the most important writers of popular fiction, he began his career with novels about the sea. He became the master of the feuilleton novel (published in weekly installments in the newspapers), and represented a very democratic, anti-clerical, anti-monarchical point of view. His best known works are Les Mystères de Paris (1842-1843), which treats the Paris underworld, Le Juif errant (1844-1845), and Les Mystères du peuple (1849-1856). Because he could not accept the legitimacy of the Second Empire, he exiled himself in Savoy until the end of his life. Balzac and other contemporary novelists also published many of their novels in the weekly newspaper or magazine format. [Top] Sully Prudhomme, 1839-1907. He was a well-known poet of his time who dealt with philosophical generalities. In spite of his association with the Parnassians and even the early representatives of the symbolist school, he is regarded as a mediocre poet of bourgeois views and values. [Top] Taine, Hippolyte, 1828-1893. He was an important historian, philosopher and theorist of aesthetics. In six volumes he studied the history of France from the Ancien Régime to the Revolution and the modern period (Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1877-1894)). His many texts on art were brought together in 1882 under the title La Philosophie de l'art. The guiding principle in his criticism of literature and the arts was to study the determining influences of three major factors — race, environment and the moment. His theories provided the basis for much naturalistic and determinist analysis of writers and their works, and were often misinterpreted and narrowly conceived as scientific. [Top] Tastu, Amable. She was a poet, a writer about education and a literary critic. She is known mainly for her poetry in which she occasionally expressed personal doubts concerning her role as a woman writer. Her principal collections are Poésies (1826) and Poésies nouvelles (1835). [Top] Thiers, Adolphe, 1797-1877. The famous statesman (Minister under Louis-Philippe) was also an important journalist who wrote for the Globe, and an important historian. He published a six-volume study of the French Revolution in 1830, followed by the 20 volumes of his Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire (1869). He was the primary representative of the "juste milieu," the point of view of the bourgeoisie of business and banking; during the Commune in 1871 he became the temporary head of the government that repressed the revolutionary uprising. [Top] Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859. He was a famous political thinker who wrote the influential study La Démocratie en Amérique (1840). In addition to other studies of the political regimes in France he left an admirable portrait of the Revolution of 1848 in Paris in his Souvenirs published posthumously in 1893. [Top] Tristan, Flora, 1803-1844. An early feminist she worked for the moral and judicial improvement in the status of women. She was a strong advocate for the formation of union organizations for the workers in every country and actively participated in the socialist movement of her time. She was the grandmother of the painter Gauguin. Her works include Nécessité de faire bon accueil aux femmes étrangères (1835), Les Pérégrinations d'une paria (1838) which related her efforts to find the roots of her family in Peru, and L'Union ouvrière (1843). This last work is a sophisticated study of the working class and proposes a form of social security. [Top] Ulliac-Trémadeure, Sophie, 1794-1862. She was a translator, novelist and journalist who wrote primarily for a young audience. Some of her works deal with the problems facing a young woman writer in a society which expects her to conform to a life of convention. Some titles are Valérie ou la jeune artiste (1836) and Émilie ou la jeune fille auteur (1837). Her memoirs are entitled Souvenirs d'une vieille femme (1861). [Top] Vallès, Jules, 1832-1885. Much of his work is autobiographical; his most famous text is L'Enfant (1879) in which he relates a rather fictionalized version of his very unhappy childhood near Puy. He was active in politics especially during the Commune when he played the role of moderate but staunch supporter of the working class. He records the events of 1870-1871 in L'Insurgé, and then founded the journal Le Cri du peuple in Paris in 1871. He was an elected member of the Commune for the XVe arrondissement and took refuge in Belgium when he was condemned to death after the collapse of the insurrection. Without being ideologically a socialist or a communist, he was truly a man of revolt who struggled in his life and writing to further the cause of the poor and the worker. [Top] Varin, Victor, 1798-1869. One of the famous writers of vaudeville during the reigns of Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III. Among his numerous plays often dealing with life in the city is Paris, Orléans et Rouen (1843). [Top] Verhaeren, Émile, 1855-1916. He was a great Flemish poet who lived in France and founded the unanimist school of poetry which emphasized the solidarity of man with nature and his fellow man in the manner of Victor Hugo and Walt Whitman. His best known volume is Les Villes tentaculaires (1895). [Top] Verlaine, Paul, 1844-1896. The great French poet of the fin de siècle temperament did not write specifically about the city as subject. In his life and art, however, he became the symbol of the tragic, melancholy poet of Paris who suffered from the rare and tormented form of "mal du siècle" associated with the end of an era. He is known for his association with the poet Rimbaud. His changing states of being from conversion to Catholicism to expressions of decadent sensibility are expressed in his many volumes of poetry. He is also credited with emphasizing the role of music in poetry that became a basic tenet of the symbolists. His poetry includes Les Romances sans paroles (1874) and Sagesse (1880); among his prose works is the important text Les Poètes maudits (1884). [Top] Verne, Jules, 1828-1905. He was the author of more than 63 novels, destined for a young audience and anticipating the concerns of science fiction today. His interest in exploration of unknown regions and knowledge of contemporary science are found in a series of novels including De la terre à la lune (1864). His Paris au XXe siècle, published in 1995 long after his death, depicts a futuristic Parisian society in which arts and letters have been all but abandoned. [Top] Veuillot, Louis-François, 1818-1883. He was an important and prolific journalist and Catholic writer. Among his many works there are several which deal with Paris and the history of revolution and empire: Les Francais en Algérie (1845), Waterloo (1861), Les Odeurs de Paris (1866), Paris pendant les deux sièges (1871). [Top] Vigny, Alfred de, 1797-1863. He was one of the greatest poets of the romantic generation who also wrote plays, novels and prose works. Usually termed a philosophical poet he was an aristocrat by birth who thought the poem should illustrate an important idea through its images and symbols. In his first collection of poetry, Poèmes antiques et modernes (1822-1837), there is a meditation about the city of Paris entitled simply "Paris," in which he comes to terms with the nascent transformations of the city into a modern metropolis. As a playwright he was influential in bringing Shakespeare to the French stage through his translations and adaptations. His novels do not deal directly with the city, but are concerned with contemporary issues. Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835) presents three stories about military life, and Les Consultations du Docteur Noir; Stello ou les diables bleus (1832) offers the portrait of a young romantic poet afflicted with "le mal du siècle," a melancholic disenchantment with life. Stello is the idealistic, suffering poet while the Docteur Noir represents the realist, pragmatic doctor whom he consults. He is patterned after the famous Docteur Blanche who offered consultations to several famous poets in Paris including Nerval. The book thus presents an early version of psychiatrics therapy. Le Journal d'un poète published in 1867 is an important document in which Vigny reveals the complexity of his own personality. His best known work is the collection of poetry entitled Les Destinées (1864) in which his concept of poetry and his stoical philosophy are expressed most profoundly. [Top] Villemot, Auguste, 1811-1870. An important journalist, he wrote a series of articles about Parisian life in the newspaper, Le Figaro, which were brought together in two volumes in 1858 under the title La Vie à Paris. [Top] Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Auguste, comte de, 1838-1889. He was an important writer of the fin de siècle sensibility. An idealist, a dandy and an aristocrat, he wrote novels, short stories and plays which satirized the customs and materialism of the ruling bourgeois class, and presented his fervent idealism about love and spirituality. His short stories are sometimes set in Paris (Contes cruels, 1883, 1888) among the jaded aristocrats. His most important novel L'Ève future (1886) anticipates modernist themes as the inventor Edison creates an artificial woman who incarnates the feminine ideal. His best known play Axël (1890) was first performed four years after his death and represents his thought in its most accomplished representation. The conflict between the real world he disdains and the cult of the ideal and the spiritual is given a vivid dramatic form. [Top] Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, 1814-1879. The famous architect who designed romantic additions and repairs for many gothic monuments in Paris and Carcassonne. He has been criticized for embellishing medieval gothic excessively and creating a kind of false romantic gothic. Among his many volumes concerning architecture is Entretiens sur l'architecture (1858-1872). [Top] Willy, 1859-1931. Before collaborating with his wife, the great novelist Colette, on the series of novels about the young Claudine, he wrote fiction bordering on the pornographic. Among the titles are Lettres de l'ouvreuse (1890) and Un Vilain monsieur (1898). [Top] Zola, Emile, 1840-1902. The greatest novelist of the last quarter of the 19th century, Zola was also an art critic and a journalist. He wrote a famous study of the painter, Manet, which stressed the formal aspects of his modernity. As a journalist he was the courageous advocate of Dreyfus; in 1898 he came to the defense of the falsely condemned captain in a famous tract entitled "J'accuse," in which he exposes the anti-semitism of those involved in the trial. He exiled himself to England for a year after being condemned himself. He is also an important literary critic who developed his ideas about naturalism and his methodology in a series of works such as Le Roman expérimental (1880) and Les Romanciers naturalistes (1881). His most important work is the 20-volume series of novels concerning the history of the family Rougon-Maquart, L'Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire. Zola studies the rise and fall of several generations of this family involving all levels of society; in effect, he continues Balzac's project to record the complex life of his society, but with a methodology he considered to be scientific. He believes his novels to be experimental studies of the effects of biological heredity on the successive members of the family; most of their lives have been determined by a fatal, hereditary flaw such as alcoholism or madness. In many of the 20 novels the city of Paris is the important scene of the family's life and in some novels Paris is the veritable protagonist. A list follows of the novels in which Paris plays a major role: 1. La Curée (1871). This novel depicts the frenzy of economic speculation during the years of Haussman's transformations of the city. Rich speculators build, destroy and reconstruct entire quarters of the city; Zola describes their graft, greed and general moral degradation. 2. Le Ventre de Paris (1873). Zola's novel of the Halles section of the city is an important document that portrays the rich, colorful life of the market center of the city, now destroyed. The plot concerns an outlaw, a member of the former revolutionary Commune, who now serves as an inspector in the market. 3. L'Assommoir (1877). This novels describes the effects of alcoholism on the lives of a poor branch of the family. Gervaise is a washerwoman married to Coupeau a roofer; they are the parents of Nana who live on the street ironically named la Goutte d'or. They both are destroyed by excessive drinking. The poor quarter of the city in which they live, with its many bars that absorb the meager salaries of the workers, is minutely observed. 4. Nana (1880). The great novel of the role of the courtisan in Second Empire society in Paris. The daughter of Gervaise, corrupt and diseased, she occupies an important position in her luxurious mansion on the Boulevard de Villiers from which she achieves the destruction of an entire society of wealthy, influential men of the Second Empire. 5. Pot-Bouille (1882). This novel presents the successful bourgeois class on the Rue de Choiseul in a single apartment building. From floor to floor live the magistrates, stock brokers and other members of the reigning class; Zola exposes their hypocrisy, false values and corruption. 6. Au Bonheur des dames (1883). An important novel about the beginnings of mass consumption and commodification. This prescient, first novel about a department store illustrates the deleterious effects of big commerce on the small merchants of the neighborhood. Its heroine, married to the owner of the enterprise, succeeds, however, in transforming her husband into a philanthropist and supporter of the working class. 7. Germinal (1885). Zola's masterpiece about the strike of the miners in the provinces has nothing to do with Paris, but it illustrates the novelist's increasing use of mythical structures in his narrative (the mine is a devouring beast) and the evolution of his socialist ideology. 8. L'Œuvre (1866). Zola's great novel about art presents a group of writers and painters in Paris who are often considered to be representations of the realist and impressionist schools. His protagonist Claude Lantier, the painter, is struggling to create a masterpiece. He is, however, tragically limited by a hereditary flaw in his physical and moral being which leads to misery and finally death. Lantier is sometimes compared to Cézanne, who was deeply offended by the reference; in effect the characters are probably composite figures of artists prominent at the time and imagined by Zola. The paintings Lantier is trying to realize actually suggest Manet, especially the portrait of the painter's mistress Christine and the scenes of Paris. The writer Sandoz is often seen as a projection of Zola himself. Some critics interpret the text as a critique of impressionism. The narrator would seem to be suggesting that these painters failed to produce a truly great art because they lacked a strong theoretical basis for their work. In any case the novel provides an excellent fictional representation of the lives of artists in the city during the last part of the 19th century, and suggests many of Zola's own ideas about painting and literature. 9. La Bête humaine (1890). This novel presents the effects of the baser instincts and desires in human beings that lead to murder and assassination. It is one of his darkest portraits of the role of biological determinism in society. 10. L'Argent (1891). The story of the negative effects of unscrupulous speculation and banking, it presents the opposition between a bank owned by powerful Catholics and one by Jewish capitalists. It traces the financial ruin of many small investors, and suggests the necessary rise of the socialist concepts of work, revolution and egalitarianism that will finally overcome the capitalist reliance on speculation and profit. Zola completes the cycle of the family Rougon-Maquart with the story of the defeat of the French in the war of 1870 (La Débâcle, 1892), and the concluding novel Le Docteur Pascal (1893) which presents his philosophy of heredity. His next project is the cycle of Les Trois villes (Lourdes, Rome and Paris), and the Quatre Évangiles: Fécondité (1899), Travail (1901), Vérité (1903); he only completed three in the second cycle. He attempts to trace the social progress of an ex-priest who now devotes himself to humanity and its material and intellectual progress. Paris (1897) offers the story of Pierre Froment the ex-priest now married, whose brother has become an anarchist with the plan to destroy the bourgeois society with explosives he has invented. It is therefore a novel of anarchy in the city, and a resounding faith in science and progress. It also deals with the counter current, the resurgence of idealism and religiosity in the fin de siècle spirit. Zola comes to terms with this new attitude which he cannot accept both in this novel and in the final sequence of the Quatre Évangiles. He proposes socialist values in these works — Fécondité (the creation of a renewed family structure), Travail (he glorifies the new factory organized according to just and equal social values) and Vérité (a juridical drama of justice like the Dreyfus affair). These goals and values, according to the author, will replace those of the Christian gospels or Évangiles of the past. Panoramic literature Les Français par eux-mêmes. 8 vols. 1840-1842. A collaborative work published by L. Curmer. A comprehensive survey of French society including many illustrations. The first five volumes deal with Paris and the remaining ones with the provinces. Le Diable à Paris, Paris et les Parisiens. Edited by Hertzel. 2 vols., 1845-1846. These volumes contain essays by well-known writers including Balzac, Gautier, Musset, Sand and others. They cover a wide range of topics concerning the city and include many stories about Parisian subjects. The books contain important engravings by Gavarni. References The following sources were consulted in the preparation of this presentation of writers and texts in the 19th century: Littérature française. Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, vol. 5. The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature. Paris, Capital of the World, Patrice Higgonet.
5097	dbpedia	0	90	https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/Parnassianism	en	Parnassianism	https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ucp-internal-test-starter-commons/images/a/aa/FandomFireLogo.png/revision/latest?cb=20210713142711	https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ucp-internal-test-starter-commons/images/a/aa/FandomFireLogo.png/revision/latest?cb=20210713142711	[ "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/6a181c72-e8bf-419b-b4db-18fd56a0eb60", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/6c42ce6a-b205-41f5-82c6-5011721932e7", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/464fc70a-5090-490b-b47e-0759e89c263f", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/f7bb9d33-4f9a-4faa-88fe-2a0bd8138668" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Penny's poetry pages Wiki" ]	2024-07-29T22:27:06+00:00	Template:Unreferenced Template:Expand French Parnassianism (or less commonly, Parnassism) is a French literary style which began during the positivist period of the 19th century. The style was influenced by the author Théophile Gautier as well as the philosophical work of Arthur Schopenhauer...	en	/skins-ucp/mw139/common/favicon.ico	Penny's poetry pages Wiki	https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/Parnassianism	Template:Unreferenced Template:Expand French French literatureBy categoryFrench literary history Medieval 16th century\| 17th century 18th century\| 19th century 20th century\| Contemporary French writers Chronological list Writers by category Novelists\| Playwrights Poets\| Essayists Short story writers PortalsFrance\| Literature Parnassianism (or less commonly, Parnassism) is a French literary style which began during the positivist period of the 19th century. The style was influenced by the author Théophile Gautier as well as the philosophical work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Parnassianism[] Parnassianism was a literary style characteristic of certain French poetry during the positivist period of the 19th century, occurring after romanticism and prior to symbolism. The name is derived from the original Parnassian poets' journal, Le Parnasse contemporain, itself named after Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses of Greek mythology. The anthology was first issued during 1866, then again during 1869 and 1876, including poems by Charles Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Sully Prudhomme, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, François Coppée and José María de Heredia. The Parnassians were influenced by Théophile Gautier and his doctrine of "art for art's sake". As a reaction to the less disciplined types of romantic poetry, and what they considered the excessive sentimentality and undue social and political activism of Romantic works, the Parnassians strove for exact and faultless workmanship, selecting exotic and classical subjects which they treated with rigidity of form and emotional detachment. Elements of this detachment were derived from the philosophical work of Arthur Schopenhauer . Despite its French origins, Parnassianism was not restricted to French authors. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of Parnassians, Olavo Bilac (Alberto de Oliveira's disciple) was an author from Brazil who managed carefully to craft verses and metre while maintaining a strong emotionalism in them. Polish Parnassians included Antoni Lange, Felicjan Faleński, Cyprian Kamil Norwid and Leopold Staff. The most important Romanian poet with Paranassian influences was Alexandru Macedonski. Gerard Manley Hopkins used the term Parnassian to describe competent but uninspired poetry. He identified this trend particularly with the work of Alfred Tennyson, citing the poem "Enoch Arden" as an example. References[] In France Maurice Souriau, Histoire du Parnasse, ed. Spes, 1929 Louis-Xavier de Ricard, Petits mémoires d'un Parnassien Adolphe Racot, Les Parnassiens, introduction and commentaries by M. Pakenham, presented by Louis Forestier, Aux Lettres modernes: collection avant-siècle, 1967. Yann Mortelette, Histoire du Parnasse, Paris : Fayard, 2005, 400 p. Le Parnasse. Mémoire de la critique, ed. Yann Mortelette, Paris : PUPS, 2006, 444 p. André Thérive, Le Parnasse, ed. PAUL-DUVAL, 1929. Luc Decaunes, La Poésie parnassienne Anthologie, Seghers, 1977. In Brazil Poets Bilac, Olavo. Complete Works CORREIA, Raimundo. 15 poems OLIVEIRA, Alberto. 20 sonets Essays and Criticisms AZEVEDO, Sanzio de. Parnasianismo na poesia brasileira. Fortaleza: Ceará University, 2000. BOSI, Alfredo. A intuição da passagem em um soneto de Raimundo Correia, in --- (org). Leitura de Poesia. São Paulo: Ática, 2003. CANDIDO, Antonio. No coração do silêncio. in: ---. Na sala de aula. São Paulo: Ática, 1985. CAVALCANTI, Camillo. Fundamentos modernos das Poesias de Alberto de Oliveira, doctoral thesis at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 2008. FISCHER, Luis Augusto. Parnasianismo brasileiro. Porto Alegre: Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, 2003. MAGALHÃES Jr., Raymundo. Olavo Bilac. Rio de Janeiro: Americana, 1974. MARTINO, Pierre. Parnasse et symbolisme. Armand Colin, 1967. (Parnaso y symbolismo, Ed. Ateneo) Notes[] This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia. (view article). (view authors).
5097	dbpedia	2	66	https://www.henryharvin.com/blog/must-read-books-by-famous-french-authors/	en	Discover 10 Must-Read Books by Famous French Authors	https://hh-certificates.…6661c38dc1d1.png	https://hh-certificates.…6661c38dc1d1.png	[ "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/01155105/logo-1.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/01155105/logo-1.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/15024148/IMG_20220319_151346-150x150.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/15024148/IMG_20220319_151346-150x150.jpg", "https://d1d5cy0fmpy9m8.cloudfront.net/images/1711974196exitepopupcb.webp", "https://d1d5cy0fmpy9m8.cloudfront.net/images/1711974196exitepopupcb.webp", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28105448/Gustave-Flaubert.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28105448/Gustave-Flaubert.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28105739/Albert-Camus.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28105739/Albert-Camus.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28105942/Victor-Hugo-833x1024.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28105942/Victor-Hugo-833x1024.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28110124/Colette.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28110124/Colette.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28112147/Marcel-Proust.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28112147/Marcel-Proust.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28113139/Simone-de-Beauvoir.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28113139/Simone-de-Beauvoir.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28113306/Antoine-de-Saint-Exupery.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28113306/Antoine-de-Saint-Exupery.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28113353/Jean-Paul-Sartre.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28113353/Jean-Paul-Sartre.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28113450/Alexandre_Dumas.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28113450/Alexandre_Dumas.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28113534/Francois-Mauriac.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28113534/Francois-Mauriac.jpg", "https://www.henryharvin.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/1608536043HH-web-1.png", "https://www.henryharvin.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/1608536043HH-web-1.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/15024148/IMG_20220319_151346-150x150.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/15024148/IMG_20220319_151346-150x150.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/13072808/blog247-150x150.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/13072808/blog247-150x150.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/15120303/a1e9e308-6fcb-418c-80de-358638598221-1-150x150.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/15120303/a1e9e308-6fcb-418c-80de-358638598221-1-150x150.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/14084146/French-Fi-270x180.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/14084146/French-Fi-270x180.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/29094714/pasted-image-0-2022-11-29T142606.352-1-270x180.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/29094714/pasted-image-0-2022-11-29T142606.352-1-270x180.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/15094914/pasted-image-0-2022-12-15T151901.695-270x180.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/15094914/pasted-image-0-2022-12-15T151901.695-270x180.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/14095138/pasted-image-0-2022-12-14T152125.895-270x180.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/14095138/pasted-image-0-2022-12-14T152125.895-270x180.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/20084744/pasted-image-0-2022-12-20T141731.756-270x180.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/20084744/pasted-image-0-2022-12-20T141731.756-270x180.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08122223/pasted-image-0-28-2-270x180.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08122223/pasted-image-0-28-2-270x180.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/28101418/live-3.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/28101418/live-3.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/28104745/Zoom-5_12-icon-6.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/28104745/Zoom-5_12-icon-6.png", "https://www.henryharvin.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/whatsapp-for-wordpress/assets/img/whatsapp_logo.svg", "https://www.henryharvin.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/whatsapp-for-wordpress/assets/img/whatsapp_logo.svg", "https://www.henryharvin.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/1608536043HH-web-1.png", "https://www.henryharvin.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/1608536043HH-web-1.png", "https://sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/hh-certificates/images/1606193800ezgif.com-gif-maker (7).webp", "https://sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/hh-certificates/images/1606193800ezgif.com-gif-maker (7).webp", "https://s3.amazonaws.com/provely-public/images/ico-7.png", "https://s3.amazonaws.com/provely-public/images/ico-7.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/11133241/afe31999-966e-45dc-8dc4-35e6439f7fff-87x67.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/11133241/afe31999-966e-45dc-8dc4-35e6439f7fff-87x67.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/16134531/7b6ae0d0-823a-49f7-9a2b-52c258253f4f-87x67.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/16134531/7b6ae0d0-823a-49f7-9a2b-52c258253f4f-87x67.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/17131934/051c95cd-54fd-45de-b3a7-e509d1199fca-87x67.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/17131934/051c95cd-54fd-45de-b3a7-e509d1199fca-87x67.png", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/30101138/pasted-image-0-2022-09-30T154101.414-87x67.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/30101138/pasted-image-0-2022-09-30T154101.414-87x67.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/13100254/pasted-image-0-2023-01-13T153237.846-87x67.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/13100254/pasted-image-0-2023-01-13T153237.846-87x67.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/01124836/pasted-image-0-2022-10-01T181819.592-87x67.jpg", "https://hh-certificates.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/01124836/pasted-image-0-2022-10-01T181819.592-87x67.jpg" ]	[ "https://www.youtube.com/embed/IU5H9ULuEM8?si=oxpQ3jfUZL3nE8tP" ]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Vaishali" ]	2023-05-13T07:10:21+00:00	French literature has a rich history that has produced some of the greatest literary works of all time. Read them now.	en	https://hh-certificates.…2x72-1-48x48.png	Henry Harvin Blog	https://www.henryharvin.com/blog/must-read-books-by-famous-french-authors/	Table of Contents 29 nations recognize French as their official language. It is a member of the European Union and used by organizations like UNESCO, NATO, and others. France holds the record for the most literary Nobel Prizes of any nation. Marcel Proust, the novels of Gustave Flaubert, the plays of Molière and others are considered major literary masterpieces. Discover 10 must-read books by famous French authors by reading this blog. France produces great dining experiences in wine and foods like consommé, mayonnaise, and julienne. It is the second most taught second language in Europe and the world after English. French Language Course 45-min online masterclass with skill certification on completion Mentored By Chetan Bhagat $99 FREE Access Expires in 24Hrs Register Now for Free Famous French Authors and Their Must-Read Books 1. Gustave Flaubert French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote novels. He is regarded as the most prominent representative of literary realism both domestically and internationally. His best-known works are “Madame Bovary,” and “Sentimental Education.” Flaubert was a disciple of the renowned short story writer Guy de Maupassant. Flaubert wrote a lot of letters, which have been collected in several publications. 2. Albert Camus Albert Camus was a French dramatist, reporter, theorist, novelist, and political activist. He was the alternate-young Nobel Prize recipient in Literature in 1957, at the age of 44. Among his many works are The Plague, The Fall, The Revolutionary, and The Myth of Sisyphus. Another great read by this famous French writer is, “The Plague,” a novel about a city hit by a deadly epidemic. 3. Victor Hugo Victor Hugo is a French poet, dramatist and novelist. His renowned novels include “Les Misérables,”. “Les Misérables, is a novel about social injustice. Two of his later plays were Ruy Blas and Le Roi s’amuse. The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables his best-known works depicts life in the Middle Ages “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” is another novel about a deformed hunchback and his love for a beautiful dancer. Hugo was a key figure in French Romanticism, and his writings inspired social and political activism in France, particularly against poverty and injustice. 4. Colette French writer and lady of letters Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, better known by her pen name Colette. Her birthday was January 28, 1873, and she passed away on August 3, 1954. She was a mime, an actress, and a journalist. The two main literature pieces are Mitsou and Cheri. Colette’s 1944 novella Gigi is her most well-known work; it was the basis for both the 1973 theatrical adaptation and the 1958 movie of the same name. Another well-known collection of short stories is The Tendrils of the Vine. 5. Marcel Proust In the 20th century, Proust was the most well-known French author. À la recherche du temps perdu, Remembrance of effects history, his seven-volume masterwork, innovated new approaches to the study of the nature of individual identity, the psychology of space and time, and the expansiveness of style and theme. Literary review’s conventional shoes have been widened in part by Proust’s notice and fabrication. 6. Simone de Beauvoir French existentialist writer Simone de Beauvoir lived from 1908 to 1986. Her essay The Second Sex, argued against the “eternal feminine myth,” is what made her well-known. It turned become a feminist literary classic. For her 1954 book The Mandarins, she was also awarded the Prix Goncourt. 7. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French philosopher and pilot best known for his philosophical writings and the children’s novel. His most famous work, “The Little Prince”, is a novella that tells the story of a young prince who travels the universe. “The Little Prince” has become a French children’s literature classic. A lot of the time, Saint-Exupéry would use the theme of flying to introduce more abstract subjects like the pursuit of wisdom and the meaning of life. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre was a famous French philosopher and novelist. His most famous include “Nausea“, a novel about a young writer’s sorrow and disappointment. Another very famous novel is “The Age of Reason,“ a novel about a philosophy professor’s struggle to come to terms with his life choices and relationships. His existentialist proposition also was important. His drama No Exit, new Nausea, and other workshops are among his many published workshops. 9. Alexandre Dumas Alexandre Dumas or Alexandre Dumas père is a French author and playwright. His renowned works include “The Three Musketeers,” an adventure novel about a young swordsman and his musketeer friends. “The Count of Monte Cristo“, is another well-known novel. It is about “a man’s quest for revenge after being falsely imprisoned. His published jottings comprised 100,000 runners, including colourful magazine papers and trip books. Paris’s Théâtre Historique was established by Dumas in the 1840s. 10. Francois Mauriac Francois Mauriac was a French novelist, playwright, and essayist known for his writing about Catholicism and ethical dilemmas. His famous works include “Thérèse Desqueyroux,” a novel that explores themes of guilt and redemption. He was awarded the Grand Cross of theLégiond’honneur in 1958. At the heart of every work, Mauriac placed a religious soul grappling with the problems of grace and deliverance. He was given the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952 for his “deep and compassionate grasp of the drama of human life.” Best French language course: Henry Harvin Contact No: +91 9891953953 \| Chat on WhatsApp with Henry Harvin Rating: 9.9/10 About Henry Harvin Institute: Henry Harvin is a renowned institute that offers various courses, like French language courses, to enhance the skills of individuals. The perfect teaching atmosphere for French language instruction is provided by Henry Harvin®. Fluency and linguistic mastery are obtained after completing the French language levels A1 to C2. Additionally, this course will help you pass important exams related to French language proficiency, such as the DILF, DELF and so on. Benefits of Henry Harvin The 9-in-1 curriculum includes seminars, hackathons, e-learning, projects, internships, certification, placement, and much more. Practical instruction, projects that promote learning by doing, hands-on French language instruction, and current GCAO pedagogy are available. Mobile access to the Learning Management System. Recorded videos, weekly job assistance, exam support, masterclass sessions, internships, live projects and interview techniques are accessible every time. Conclusion: In today’s globalised society, learning a language is perhaps one of the most crucial abilities. It gives you a distinct advantage and opens doors to well-paying work options in addition to allowing you to travel and interact with locals. Adding French to your English-speaking skills will increase your chances of getting a lucrative career if you are considering applying to universities abroad. Learning French includes a range of professional options. Enroll in a French language course right now. Recommended Reads: Top 10 French Speaking Countries in The World Top 20 French Language Interview Questions and Answers 10 Best French Language Courses in Delhi: 2023 [Updated] Top 15 French Language Courses in India with Scope, Classes & Jobs: 2023 [Updated] Top 15+ French Language Courses in Hyderabad: 2023 [Updated] Top 10+ French Language Courses in Chennai: 2023 Updated Top 15+ French Language Online Courses / Classes in Kolkata with Jobs 15 Good Reasons to Learn the French Language FAQs Ques 1. Who speaks French? Ans. French is the official language of 29 countries, including France, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, and many African countries. Ques 2. Who is considered to be the greatest French author of all time? Ans. Many consider Marcel Proust to be the greatest French author of all time, known for his monumental work “In Search of Lost Time.” Ques 3. What is the significance of the Académie Française? Ans. The Académie Française is a prestigious organization in France that is responsible for regulating the French language and preserving its purity and clarity. Ques 4. Who was Marcel Proust? Ans. Marcel Proust was a famous French author and essayist who is best known for his monumental work “In Search of Lost Time,” considered one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century. Ques 5. Which is the best Institute to learn the French language? Ans. Henry Harvin Is the best institute to learn the French language. It also provides guidance to ace important French language exams such as DILF, DELF, and TCF. Post Graduate Program in French Language by Henry Harvin® Ranks Amongst Top #5 Upskilling Courses of all time in 2021 by India Today View Course Recommended Programs French Language Training Certification Course Ranks Amongst Top #1 Lifetime Access* Henry Harvin® provides the best platform for French Language \| Many multinational companies use French as their working language\| We help you to acquire knowledge of this language that will help you to touch skyscrapers in your career \| Gain Fluency with the Completion of A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 Levels of French Language \| Master the French Language and Ace the important French Language Exams such as DILF, DELF, DALF, DCL, & TCF Spanish Language Training Certification Course Ranks Amongst Top #1 Lifetime Access* Designed as per the DELE and SIELE Exams conducted by Instituto Cervantes \| Native Speaking Trainers to help your overall Spanish Language Skills \| Converse fluently with peers \| Multiple Simulation Exams \| 100% Practical Training German Language Training Certification Course Ranks Amongst Top #1 Lifetime Access* Henry Harvin® provides the best platform for the German Language Course \| Werden Sie Spezialist für die Deutsche Sprache \| One of the 10 most commonly spoken languages in the world and official language in Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland \| Master the German Language Course and Ace all the important German language exams such as DSH, the TestDaF, Goethe- Institut Examinations Explore Popular Category Recommended videos for you French Language Course for Beginners Watch Now Henry Harvin Reviews: Facts Exposed Watch Now Hi, I’m Vaishali – an avid reader and passionate writer. I enjoy crafting stories and essays that inspire and captivate others. I believe ‘Writing is a way to explore the power of language and connect with people in new and exciting ways’. Related Posts
5097	dbpedia	0	3	https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Theophile_Gautier	en	New World Encyclopedia	https://www.newworldency…avicon-32x32.png	https://www.newworldency…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/images/nwe_header.jpg", "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/d/images/thumb/b/bd/Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier_by_Nadar_c1856-1.jpg/200px-Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier_by_Nadar_c1856-1.jpg", "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/d/images/thumb/d/d6/Th%C3%A9ophil_Gautier_1856_Nadar.jpg/300px-Th%C3%A9ophil_Gautier_1856_Nadar.jpg", "https://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/skins/common/images/Cc.logo.circle.png", "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/resources/assets/poweredby_mediawiki_88x31.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	https://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/favicon.ico		https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Theophile_Gautier	Théophile Gautier Théophile Gautier photographed by Nadar Born: August 30 1811(1811-08-30) Tarbes, France Died: October 23 1872 (aged 61) Neuilly-sur-Seine, France Occupation(s): Writer, poet, painter, art critic Literary movement: Parnassianism, Romanticism Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (August 30, 1811 – October 23, 1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and literary critic whose life spans two major phases in the development of French literature. Gautier was born in the height of French Romanticism; he was a friend of Victor Hugo, and in his early years he wrote poems that effused the highly sentimental and overwrought style of the Romantics. In mid-life, however, Gautier made a dramatic about-face; he became one of Romanticism's fiercest critics, spending most of his time in the middle-period of his career satirizing Romantic poets. By the time he had come into his own as a poet and completely outgrown his youthful Romantic tendencies, Gautier had evolved into an entirely unique voice in French literature. Famous as one of the earliest champions of "Art for art's sake," Gautier's aesthetic attitudes and lean style—reminiscent of Balzac's—would herald a number of developments in late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature, among them the development of the schools of Naturalism and Modernism, as well as French Symbolist and Surrealist poetry. Gautier's eclectic output and changing opinions makes him one of the most protean figures in French literature. He left behind no single magnum opus—whether play, poem, novel, or essay—that defined his opinions and solidified his position amidst his contemporaries. Having lived in a period of major transition in French artistic and literary tastes, it is difficult to characterize Gautier in any of the typical historical periods. Although his output may be in some degrees uneven, Gautier's sheer prolificness, as well as his endless creativity and iconoclasm, makes him one of the most engaging, beguiling, and important literary figures of his era. Life Théophile Gautier was born on August 30, 1811, in Tarbes, capital of Hautes-Pyrénées département in southwestern France. His father, Pierre Gautier, was a fairly cultured minor government official, and his mother was Antoinette-Adelaïde Concarde. The family moved to Paris in 1814, taking residence in the ancient Marais district. Gautier’s education commenced at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris (alumni include Charles Baudelaire and Voltaire), which he attended for three months before being brought home due to illness. Although he completed the remainder of his education at Collège Charlemagne, Gautier’s most significant instruction came from his father, whose love of classical literature inspired Gautier to undertake the study of Latin. While at school, Gautier befriended Gérard de Nerval and the two became lifelong friends. It is through Nerval that Gautier was introduced to Victor Hugo, one of the most influential Romantic writers of the age. Hugo became a major influence on Gautier; it is believed that Hugo convinced him to attempt a career as a writer. Towards the end of 1830, Gautier began to frequent meetings of Le Petit Cénacle, a group of artists who met in the studio of Jehan Du Seigneur. The group was a more young and cynical version of Hugo’s Cénacle, a similar, older group of artists and writers which had a major influence over the development of Romanticism in France. Gautier's Cénacle consisted of such artists as Gérard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, Petrus Borel, Alphonse Brot, Joseph Bouchardy, and Philothée O’Neddy. Le Petit Cénacle soon gained a reputation for extravagance and eccentricity, but also as a unique refuge from society. Gautier began writing poetry as early as 1826, but the majority of his life was spent as a contributor to various journals, mainly for La Presse, which also gave him the opportunity for foreign travel and meeting many influential contacts in high society and in the world of the arts. During his career as a reporter, Gautier became a well-traveled man, taking trips to Spain, Italy, Russia, Egypt, and Algeria. Gautier would later gain a good deal of fame and popularity through his series of travel books, including Voyage en Espagne (1843), Trésors d’Art de la Russie (1858), and Voyage en Russie (1867). Gautier's travel literature is considered by many as some of the best from the nineteenth century, often written in a personal style, providing a glimpse not only of the world, but also of the mind of one of the most gifted writers of the nineteenth century. In 1848, Paris erupted in revolution; King Louis Philippe would be forced to abdicate the throne and, after a period of anarchy and a brief experiment in democratic rule, Louis Napoleon would seize control of France, founding the Second Empire. During these tumultuous days, Gautier wrote at a fever-pitch. 497 newspapers were founded in Paris during the Revolution of 1848, and Gautier participated directly in the explosive growth of French journalism; within nine months, Gautier had written four solid volumes worth of journalism. Following the revolution, Gautier's talents as a journalist would continue to be recognized. His prestige was confirmed by his role as director of Revue de Paris from 1851-1856. During these years Gautier first began to gravitate away from Romanticism; he began to publish essays and editorials that toyed with his idea of "art for art's sake." During these years he also began to develop a serious reputation as a gifted poet. The 1860s were years of assured literary fame for Gautier. Although he was rejected by the French Academy three times (1867, 1868, 1869), Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the most influential critic of the day, set the seal of approval on the poet by devoting no less than three major articles to a review of Gautier’s entire published work in 1863. In 1865, Gautier was admitted into the prestigious salon of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, cousin of Napoleon II and a niece to Bonaparte. The Princess offered Gautier a sinecure as her librarian in 1868, a position which gave him access to the court of Napoleon III. During the Franco-Prussian war, Gautier made his way back to Paris upon hearing of the Prussian advance on the capital. He remained with his family throughout the invasion and the aftermath of the Paris Commune, eventually dying on October 23, 1872, due to a long-standing cardiac disease. Gautier was sixty-two years old. He was interred at the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris. Works Criticism Gautier spent the majority of his career as a journalist at La Presse and later at Le Moniteur universel. He saw journalistic criticism as a means to a middle-class standard of living, although he complained that his work writing for newspapers drained his creative energy and prevented him from writing more poetry. Gautier’s literary criticism is notably poetic, almost lyrical, in nature: His reviews often seem to be as much about Gautier and his own thoughts and tastes as they are about the book or person being reviewed. Nevertheless, in his roundabout way, Gautier always manages to be an insightful and generous critic of many of the writers of his generation. Later in life Gautier also wrote extensive monographs on such giants as Gérard de Nerval, Honore de Balzac, and Charles Baudelaire, which have become touchstones for scholarly work on these figures. Art Criticism: At a very young age Gautier dreamed of becoming a painter, an ambition he did not abandon until he met Victor Hugo and was inspired instead to become a writer. Ironically, despite his early background in the visual arts, Gautier did not contribute a great volume of essays to the world of art criticism. Nevertheless, Gautier is one of the more important figures in the evolution of art criticism in France. Gautier had a peculiar style of art criticism which was, at its time, rather controversial. Strongly influenced by Denis Diderot’s idea that the critic should have the ability to describe the art so as the reader can “see” it through description alone, Gautier wrote art criticism without any reference to the classical principles of line, form, color and so on; rather he attempted, as much as possible, to recreate or "transpose" the painting into prose. Although today Gautier is less well known as an art critic than Baudelaire, he was more highly regarded by the painters of his time. In 1862, he was elected chairman of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts through which he became a close associate of such painters as Eugène Delacroix, Edouard Manet, Gustave Doré, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Theatre Criticism: The majority of Gautier’s career was spent writing a weekly column of theatrical criticism. Because Gautier wrote so frequently on plays, he began to consider the nature of the plays and developed the criteria by which they should be judged. His principles for the structure of drama have gone on to influence a number of playwrights and theater critics in France and abroad. Gautier suggested that the traditional five acts of a play could be reduced to three: an exposition, a complication, and a dénouement. Gautier also attacked the classical idea that tragedy is the superior genre, arguing that comedy was, at its greatest, of equal artistic merit. In addition to this, Gautier argued strongly against "realistic" theater; he believed that theater, as a medium, was best suited to the portrayal of fantasy, and that attempting to mimic reality was simply, in his own words, "undesireable." Early poetry Poésies (1830) Poésies, published in 1830, is a collection of forty-two poems that Gautier composed at the age of 18. However, as the publication took place during the July Revolution, no copies were sold and the volume was eventually withdrawn. In 1832, the poems were reissued, printed in the same volume with Gautier's epic Albertus. Another publication was released in 1845, that included revisions of some of the poems. The most significant aspect of these early poems is that they are written in a wide variety of verse forms, documenting Gautier's wide knowledge of French poetry as well as his attempts to imitate other more established Romantic poets such as Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, and Hugo. Albertus (1831) Albertus, published in 1832, is a long narrative poem of one hundred and twenty-two stanzas, each consisting of twelve lines of alexandrine (twelve-syllable) verse, except for the last line of each stanza, which is octosyllabic. Albertus is a parody of Romantic literature, especially of tales of the macabre and the supernatural. The poems tell a story of an ugly witch who magically transforms at midnight into an alluring young woman. Albertus, the hero, falls deeply in love and agrees to sell his soul, only to discover his mistake—and the hideousness of the witch—after his soul has already been lost. The publication of this poem marks Gautier's sharp turn away from Romantic sentiments. La Comédie de la Mort (1838) La Comédie de la Mort, published in 1838, is a period piece much like Albertus. In this work, Gautier focuses on the theme of death, which for Gautier is a terrifying, stifling, and irreversible finality. Unlike many Romantics before him, Gautier’s vision of death is solemn and portentous, proclaiming death as the definitive escape from life’s torture. During the time this text was written, Gautier was frequenting many cemeteries; France itself was at that time plagued by epidemics, and death was a daily reality in Paris. In the poem, Gautier transforms death into a curiously exhilarating experience that delivers the poet, however briefly, from the gruesome reality of life on earth. Mature poetry España (1845) España is usually considered the transitional volume between the two phases of Gautier’s poetic career. It is a collection of 43 miscellaneous poems inspired by Gautier’s journeys through Spain during the summer of 1840. In these poems, Gautier writes of not only the Spanish language, but also the conventional aspects of Spanish culture and traditions such as music and dance. Emaux et Camées (1852) Emaux et Camées was published when Gautier was touring the Middle-East and is considered to be his supreme poetic achievement. The title, translated, "Enamels and Camoes," reflects Gautier’s abandonment of the Romantic ambition to create a kind of "total" art in favor of a more modern approach which focuses on miniatures, and on the form of poem rather than its content. Emaux et Camees started off as a collection of 18 poems in 1852, but further editions contained up to 47 poems. Plays Between the years 1839 and 1850, Gautier wrote all or part of nine different plays: Un Voyage en Espagne (1843) La Juive de Constantine (1846)—(lost) Regardez mais ne touchez pas (1847)—(written primarily by collaborators) Pierrot en Espagne (1847)—(attribution uncertain) L’Amour soufflé ou il veut (1850)—(unfinished) Théophile Gautier did not consider himself to be dramatist, though he would dabble in the form, motivated primarily by his thoughts on drama that arose from his theater criticism. His plays, unfortunately, saw very few productions. During the Revolution of 1848, many theaters were closed. Most of the plays that dominated the mid-century were written by playwrights who insisted on conformity and conventional formulas and catered to cautious middle-class audiences. As a result, most of Gautier’s rather experimental plays were never published or performed. Novels Mademoiselle du Maupin (1835) In September 1833, Gautier was solicited to write a historical romance based on the life of French opera star Mlle. Maupin, who was a first-rate swordsman and often went about disguised as a man. Originally, the story was to be about the historical la Maupin, who set fire to a convent for the love of another woman, but later retired to a convent herself, shortly before dying in her thirties. The novel was rather popular in Gautier's time for its taboo-breaking subject-matter, but modern critics consider it to be of little interest to contemporary readers. The preface to the novel, however, is considered to be of great importance by scholars, as it is in the preface that Gautier first explicitly states his philosophy of "art for art's sake." In the preface, Gautier argues that art is inherently useless and unreal: "Everything useful," Gautier famously quips, "is ugly;" and art, according to Gautier, is able to transcend the ordinary, "useful," world, thus becoming beautiful. Chronology of Works 1830: Poésies(Volume I) 1831: First article in Le Mercure de France au XIXe siècle 1832: Albertus 1833: Les Jeunes France, roman goguenards 1834-5: Published articles which will later form Les Grotesques 1835-6: Mademoiselle de Maupin 1836: Published "Fortunio" under the title "El Dorado" 1838: La Comédie de la mort 1839: Une Larme du diable 1841: Premiere of the ballet, "Giselle" 1843: Voyage en Espagne, Premiere of ballet, "La Péri" 1845: Poésies(complete) first performance of comedy "Le Tricorne enchanté" 1847: First performance of comedy "Pierrot posthume" 1851: Premiere of the ballet, "Pâquerette" 1852: Un Trio de romans, Caprices et zigzag, Emaux et camées, Italia 1853: Constantinople 1851: Premiere of the ballet, "Gemma" 1855: Les Beaux-Arts en Europe 1856: L’Art moderne 1858: Le Roman de la momie, Honoré de Balzac 1858-9: Histoire de l’art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans 1861: Trésors d’art de a Russie ancienne et moderne 1863: Le Captaine Fracasse, Romans et contes 1865: Loin de Paris 1867: Voyage en Russie 1871: Tableaux de siée 1872: Emaux et camées, Théâtre, Histoire du romantisme References ISBN links support NWE through referral fees Grant, Richard. Théophile Gautier. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. ISBN 0805762132 Richardson, Joanna. Théophile Gautier: His Life and Times. Nabu Press, 2010 (original 1958). ISBN 978-1178076486 Tennant, Phillip Ernest. Théophile Gautier. London: The Athalone Press, 1975. ISBN 0485122049 All links retrieved April 30, 2023.
5097	dbpedia	2	89	https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/25-great-novelists-affirm-faith/	en	25 Great Novelists Who Affirm Faith	https://media.thegospelc…Affirm-Faith.jpg	https://media.thegospelc…Affirm-Faith.jpg	[ "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14200743/Thomas_Kidd_500x500-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14200743/Thomas_Kidd_500x500-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14200743/Thomas_Kidd_500x500-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14200743/Thomas_Kidd_500x500.jpg 502w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14200743/Thomas_Kidd_500x500-150x150.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182458/krugermelissa-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182458/krugermelissa-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182458/krugermelissa-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182458/krugermelissa.jpg 500w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182458/krugermelissa-150x150.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182634/Ortlund-Ray--150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182634/Ortlund-Ray--300x298.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182634/Ortlund-Ray--470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182634/Ortlund-Ray-.jpg 500w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182634/Ortlund-Ray--150x150.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182700/ErikRaymond2019_550x550-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182700/ErikRaymond2019_550x550-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182700/ErikRaymond2019_550x550-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182700/ErikRaymond2019_550x550.jpg 549w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182700/ErikRaymond2019_550x550-150x150.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182550/Smith-Scotty-150x150.jpeg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182550/Smith-Scotty-300x300.jpeg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182550/Smith-Scotty.jpeg 350w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182550/Smith-Scotty-150x150.jpeg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182222/Taylor-Justin-150x150.jpeg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182222/Taylor-Justin-300x300.jpeg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182222/Taylor-Justin-768x768.jpeg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182222/Taylor-Justin-1472x1472.jpeg 1472w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182222/Taylor-Justin-1104x1104.jpeg 1104w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182222/Taylor-Justin-912x912.jpeg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182222/Taylor-Justin-550x550.jpeg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182222/Taylor-Justin-470x470.jpeg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182222/Taylor-Justin.jpeg 1536w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/14182222/Taylor-Justin-150x150.jpeg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/19131530/Wax-Trevin-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/19131530/Wax-Trevin-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/19131530/Wax-Trevin-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/19131530/Wax-Trevin-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/19131530/Wax-Trevin.jpg 500w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/19131530/Wax-Trevin-150x150.jpg", "https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/themes/luther/images/tgc_logo.png", "https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/themes/luther/images/tgc_logo.png", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11215921/abundantly_more-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11215921/abundantly_more-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11215921/abundantly_more-912x912.jpg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11215921/abundantly_more-550x550.jpg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11215921/abundantly_more-470x470.jpg 470w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11215921/abundantly_more-150x150.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/26122211/In-a-Distracted-Age-Art-Helps-Us-Pay-Attention-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/26122211/In-a-Distracted-Age-Art-Helps-Us-Pay-Attention-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/26122211/In-a-Distracted-Age-Art-Helps-Us-Pay-Attention-912x912.jpg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/26122211/In-a-Distracted-Age-Art-Helps-Us-Pay-Attention-550x550.jpg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/26122211/In-a-Distracted-Age-Art-Helps-Us-Pay-Attention-470x470.jpg 470w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/26122211/In-a-Distracted-Age-Art-Helps-Us-Pay-Attention-150x150.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/15231854/why-we-need-great-art-150x150.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/15231854/why-we-need-great-art-150x150.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/01054405/Surviving-Religion-101-Cropped-3-253x300.png 253w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/01054405/Surviving-Religion-101-Cropped-3-1621x1920.png 1621w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/01054405/Surviving-Religion-101-Cropped-3-768x910.png 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/01054405/Surviving-Religion-101-Cropped-3-1297x1536.png 1297w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/01054405/Surviving-Religion-101-Cropped-3.png 1655w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/01054405/Surviving-Religion-101-Cropped-3-253x300.png", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/05100833/teenagers-768x432.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/05100833/teenagers-300x169.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/05100833/teenagers-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/05100833/teenagers.jpg 1920w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/05100833/teenagers-768x432.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/08171750/baby-300x169.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/08171750/baby-768x432.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/08171750/baby-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/08171750/baby.jpg 1920w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/08171750/baby-300x169.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/14205806/relational-boundaries-300x169.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/14205806/relational-boundaries-768x432.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/14205806/relational-boundaries-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/14205806/relational-boundaries.jpg 1920w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/14205806/relational-boundaries-300x169.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/25170053/seal-forehead-300x169.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/25170053/seal-forehead-768x432.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/25170053/seal-forehead-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/25170053/seal-forehead.jpg 1920w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/25170053/seal-forehead-300x169.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/14192339/trump-shooting-300x169.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/14192339/trump-shooting-768x432.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/14192339/trump-shooting-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/14192339/trump-shooting.jpg 1920w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/14192339/trump-shooting-300x169.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/10100443/bible-divorce-remarriage-300x169.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/10100443/bible-divorce-remarriage-768x432.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/10100443/bible-divorce-remarriage-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/10100443/bible-divorce-remarriage.jpg 1920w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/10100443/bible-divorce-remarriage-300x169.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/17225443/civil-magistrate-presbyterians-1-300x169.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/17225443/civil-magistrate-presbyterians-1-768x432.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/17225443/civil-magistrate-presbyterians-1-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/17225443/civil-magistrate-presbyterians-1.jpg 1920w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/17225443/civil-magistrate-presbyterians-1-300x169.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/01102659/As-In-Heaven-500x500.jpg 500w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/01102659/As-In-Heaven-500x500-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/01102659/As-In-Heaven-500x500-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/01102659/As-In-Heaven-500x500-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/01102659/As-In-Heaven-500x500-470x470.jpg 470w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/01102659/As-In-Heaven-500x500.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-768x768.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-1920x1920.jpg 1920w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-1536x1536.jpg 1536w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-2048x2048.jpg 2048w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-1472x1472.jpg 1472w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-1104x1104.jpg 1104w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-912x912.jpg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-550x550.jpg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-scaled.jpg 2000w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/04144941/Carson-Sermon-Podcast-Cover-768x768.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28100912/Glo-flat-cover-art-2000x2000-768x768.jpeg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28100912/Glo-flat-cover-art-2000x2000-150x150.jpeg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28100912/Glo-flat-cover-art-2000x2000-300x300.jpeg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28100912/Glo-flat-cover-art-2000x2000-1920x1920.jpeg 1920w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28100912/Glo-flat-cover-art-2000x2000-75x75.jpeg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28100912/Glo-flat-cover-art-2000x2000-1472x1472.jpeg 1472w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28100912/Glo-flat-cover-art-2000x2000-1104x1104.jpeg 1104w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28100912/Glo-flat-cover-art-2000x2000-912x912.jpeg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28100912/Glo-flat-cover-art-2000x2000-550x550.jpeg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28100912/Glo-flat-cover-art-2000x2000-470x470.jpeg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28100912/Glo-flat-cover-art-2000x2000.jpeg 2000w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/28100912/Glo-flat-cover-art-2000x2000-768x768.jpeg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20164917/Gospelbound-Podcast-Artwork-768x768.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20164917/Gospelbound-Podcast-Artwork-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20164917/Gospelbound-Podcast-Artwork-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20164917/Gospelbound-Podcast-Artwork-1920x1920.jpg 1920w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20164917/Gospelbound-Podcast-Artwork-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20164917/Gospelbound-Podcast-Artwork-1472x1472.jpg 1472w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20164917/Gospelbound-Podcast-Artwork-1104x1104.jpg 1104w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20164917/Gospelbound-Podcast-Artwork-912x912.jpg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20164917/Gospelbound-Podcast-Artwork-550x550.jpg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20164917/Gospelbound-Podcast-Artwork-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20164917/Gospelbound-Podcast-Artwork.jpg 2000w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20164917/Gospelbound-Podcast-Artwork-768x768.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art-768x768.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art-1920x1920.jpg 1920w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art-1536x1536.jpg 1536w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art-1472x1472.jpg 1472w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art-1104x1104.jpg 1104w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art-912x912.jpg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art-550x550.jpg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art.jpg 2000w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/11172239/Post-Christianity-cover-art-768x768.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/29193446/YoureNotCrazy-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-768x768.png 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/29193446/YoureNotCrazy-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-150x150.png 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/29193446/YoureNotCrazy-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-300x300.png 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/29193446/YoureNotCrazy-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-1920x1920.png 1920w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/29193446/YoureNotCrazy-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-75x75.png 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/29193446/YoureNotCrazy-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-1472x1472.png 1472w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/29193446/YoureNotCrazy-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-1104x1104.png 1104w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/29193446/YoureNotCrazy-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-912x912.png 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/29193446/YoureNotCrazy-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-550x550.png 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/29193446/YoureNotCrazy-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-470x470.png 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/29193446/YoureNotCrazy-Podcast-Branding-Artwork.png 2000w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/29193446/YoureNotCrazy-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-768x768.png", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/31184052/Recorded-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-A-1x1-FINAL-768x768.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/31184052/Recorded-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-A-1x1-FINAL-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/31184052/Recorded-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-A-1x1-FINAL-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/31184052/Recorded-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-A-1x1-FINAL-1920x1920.jpg 1920w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/31184052/Recorded-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-A-1x1-FINAL-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/31184052/Recorded-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-A-1x1-FINAL-1472x1472.jpg 1472w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/31184052/Recorded-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-A-1x1-FINAL-1104x1104.jpg 1104w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/31184052/Recorded-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-A-1x1-FINAL-912x912.jpg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/31184052/Recorded-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-A-1x1-FINAL-550x550.jpg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/31184052/Recorded-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-A-1x1-FINAL-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/31184052/Recorded-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-A-1x1-FINAL.jpg 2000w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/31184052/Recorded-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-A-1x1-FINAL-768x768.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15004855/TGC-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-768x768.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15004855/TGC-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15004855/TGC-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15004855/TGC-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-1920x1920.jpg 1920w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15004855/TGC-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15004855/TGC-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-1472x1472.jpg 1472w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15004855/TGC-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-1104x1104.jpg 1104w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15004855/TGC-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-912x912.jpg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15004855/TGC-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-550x550.jpg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15004855/TGC-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15004855/TGC-Podcast-Branding-Artwork.jpg 2000w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15004855/TGC-Podcast-Branding-Artwork-768x768.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/16154208/preview-full-QnA-Podcast-Artwork.jpg 600w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/16154208/preview-full-QnA-Podcast-Artwork-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/16154208/preview-full-QnA-Podcast-Artwork-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/16154208/preview-full-QnA-Podcast-Artwork-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/16154208/preview-full-QnA-Podcast-Artwork-550x550.jpg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/16154208/preview-full-QnA-Podcast-Artwork-470x470.jpg 470w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/16154208/preview-full-QnA-Podcast-Artwork.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/29092607/Lets-Talk-Season-Two-768x768.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/29092607/Lets-Talk-Season-Two-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/29092607/Lets-Talk-Season-Two-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/29092607/Lets-Talk-Season-Two-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/29092607/Lets-Talk-Season-Two-1104x1104.jpg 1104w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/29092607/Lets-Talk-Season-Two-912x912.jpg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/29092607/Lets-Talk-Season-Two-550x550.jpg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/29092607/Lets-Talk-Season-Two-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/29092607/Lets-Talk-Season-Two.jpg 1400w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/29092607/Lets-Talk-Season-Two-768x768.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15005637/HMTTB-Artwork-768x768.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15005637/HMTTB-Artwork-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15005637/HMTTB-Artwork-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15005637/HMTTB-Artwork-1920x1920.jpg 1920w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15005637/HMTTB-Artwork-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15005637/HMTTB-Artwork-1472x1472.jpg 1472w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15005637/HMTTB-Artwork-1104x1104.jpg 1104w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15005637/HMTTB-Artwork-912x912.jpg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15005637/HMTTB-Artwork-550x550.jpg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15005637/HMTTB-Artwork-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15005637/HMTTB-Artwork-e1599699474945.jpg 1500w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15005637/HMTTB-Artwork-768x768.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15010756/WoTW-Artwork-768x768.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15010756/WoTW-Artwork-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15010756/WoTW-Artwork-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15010756/WoTW-Artwork-1920x1920.jpg 1920w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15010756/WoTW-Artwork-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15010756/WoTW-Artwork-1472x1472.jpg 1472w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15010756/WoTW-Artwork-1104x1104.jpg 1104w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15010756/WoTW-Artwork-912x912.jpg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15010756/WoTW-Artwork-550x550.jpg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15010756/WoTW-Artwork-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15010756/WoTW-Artwork.jpg 2000w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/15010756/WoTW-Artwork-768x768.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/29092748/Acts-29-Churches-Planting-Churches-768x768.jpg 768w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/29092748/Acts-29-Churches-Planting-Churches-150x150.jpg 150w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/29092748/Acts-29-Churches-Planting-Churches-300x300.jpg 300w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/29092748/Acts-29-Churches-Planting-Churches-75x75.jpg 75w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/29092748/Acts-29-Churches-Planting-Churches-912x912.jpg 912w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/29092748/Acts-29-Churches-Planting-Churches-550x550.jpg 550w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/29092748/Acts-29-Churches-Planting-Churches-470x470.jpg 470w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/29092748/Acts-29-Churches-Planting-Churches-311x311.jpg 311w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/29092748/Acts-29-Churches-Planting-Churches-100x100.jpg 100w, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/29092748/Acts-29-Churches-Planting-Churches.jpg 1000w", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/29092748/Acts-29-Churches-Planting-Churches-768x768.jpg", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/11135157/tgc_logo_footer-300x135.png", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/11135157/tgc_logo_footer-300x135.png", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/11135157/tgc_logo_footer-300x135.png", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/11135157/tgc_logo_footer-300x135.png", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/11135157/tgc_logo_footer-300x135.png", "https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/11135157/tgc_logo_footer-300x135.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Terry Glaspey" ]	2021-02-26T05:02:27+00:00	Terry Glaspey lists 25 great novelists who affirm Christianity through their work.	en	/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png	The Gospel Coalition	https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/25-great-novelists-affirm-faith/	I’m always on the lookout for something new to read or watch or listen to. That’s why, in the last chapter of my new book, Discovering God Through the Arts, I provide many such lists that might prove interesting and helpful for the spiritual searcher. Here is an expanded version of one list: 25 great novelists who reflect on Christian faith through their work. As you read through my picks, please understand I am not arguing these are the very best 25. I’m only doing what the title suggests—list 25 novelists who are worth your time and exploration. If I’ve left off some of your favorites, I’d love to hear your recommendations. I hope some of these will be new to you and spark a fruitful journey into theologically rich literature. 1. Jane Austen Austen’s novels of manners advance high moral ideals, but without a whiff of preachiness or sentimentality. She was a keen observer of human relationships and the complexity of the class system, and her writing shows a deep distrust of the romantic love celebrated in modern films and books. She was all about good character. Start with Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. 2. Georges Bernanos The Diary of a Country Priest is a deceptively simple novel of doubt, faith, and self-sacrifice. His hero is a young priest whose mind is riddled with self-doubt and questioning, but who nonetheless provides those around him with a powerful witness to the love and mercy of God. It is hopeful and heartrending at the same time. His other novels are also worth a look. 3. Wendell Berry Berry’s novels and short stories about Port William create a world of their own. His inimitable style catches the rhythm of life lived at a slower, more thoughtful pace, and his characters seem as real as your friends and relations. There is a gentle wisdom to be discovered in Berry’s world, a wisdom that reflects a simple faith in God and kindness toward others. Start with Jayber Crow and A Place in Time. 4. Frederick Buechner The subtitle of Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Comedy, Tragedy, and Fairy Tale pretty neatly sums up the flavor of his novels as well. A raucous sense of humor and aptitude for seeing God at work in the mundane circumstances of everyday life give the reader a mirror for self-examination. These are deeply human meditations on faith and doubt. Start with Godric and The Book of Bebb. 5. Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop is a novel that reveals Cather’s twin obsessions: the American Southwest and Catholicism. Like the landscape she describes, the prose has a sparse and elegant simplicity. Its pace is languid and stately, its emotion understated and intense. What unfolds is the story of a missionary to the Mexicans and Native Americans—a story of quiet and humble heroism. Simply breathtaking. 6. G. K. Chesterton Chesterton could pack more paradox and truth into a single sentence than possibly any other writer in history. His rollicking novels and short stories are a joy to read for their insight and their infectious cleverness. His swashbuckling faith, plain common sense, and startling observations keep readers turning the pages. Start with The Man Who Was Thursday and The Complete Father Brown Stories. 7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky’s novels run the full gamut of human emotions and religious experiences. He struggles with vexing intellectual and spiritual issues, but never at the expense of the storytelling. His writing demonstrates a haunting awareness of the depth to which human beings can sink and the heights of self-sacrifice of which we are capable. Start with The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. 8. Shūsaku Endō Writing as a Christian in Japan, a culture where Christianity is a minority religion, Endo received critical acclaim from believers and unbelievers alike. His Silence is a harrowing consideration of persecution and martyrdom without a hint of romanticization. Start with Silence and then explore his other novels and plays. 9. Gail Godwin With the graceful pace of a 19th-century novel, Father Melancholy’s Daughter tells the moving story of a faithful Episcopal priest who struggles with doubt and depression, the wife who leaves him, and his relationship with an almost-grown daughter. Its themes of family, faith, and forgiveness are brought forward with gentle and artful storytelling. Its sequel, Evensong, is a worthy successor. 10. Ron Hansen What happens when an attractive 17-year-old girl enters a convent in upstate New York and begins to experience, just as Christ once did, bleeding from her hands, feet, and side? Hansen’s vivid and restrained novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, shows the turmoil these manifestations cause and the questions they raise about her sanity, integrity, and relationship with God. Among Hansen’s other fine novels is Exiles, which draws on a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. 11. Susan Howatch Howatch’s series of novels about clergy in the English village of Starbridge might seem to be, on the surface, merely emotional potboilers. But their psychological exploration of the relationship between the spirit and the flesh provides an engrossing glimpse into the struggles of faith in the modern world. Her Anglican priests are not plaster-cast saints; they struggle against the temptations of power, status, and sex. Start with Glittering Images and Glamorous Powers. 12. C. S. Lewis What can one say about Lewis that hasn’t already been said? His combination of a vigorous commitment to the reasonableness of faith and soaring creativity produced a body of work that has nourished and challenged innumerable readers. His effortless storytelling makes the gospel come alive in fresh ways. Start with The Chronicles of Narnia and The Great Divorce. 13. George MacDonald George MacDonald’s writings combine a childlike sense of what is truly important and a rich sense of the mystery of holiness. In his fairy tales and his adult fiction, he sets forth a compelling vision of goodness and beauty. So powerful is that vision that Lewis wrote that one of MacDonald’s books “baptized his imagination.” Start with The Princess and the Goblin and At the Back of the North Wind. 14. François Mauriac The many searingly introspective and psychologically probing works of this award-winning French novelist center on sin and grace. He uses the realities of the human condition as a springboard for profound theological musings in fictional form. Start with Vipers’ Tangle and Therese Desqueyroux. 15. Flannery O’Connor Many may find O’Connor’s novels and short stories perplexing and even off-putting until they understand that she intends to shock readers into realizing their sin and self-deceit. Peopled with unforgettable characters and outlandish situations, her writing is startling and unforgettable. It will haunt your imagination long after you finish reading her. Start with The Complete Stories. 16. Walker Percy Quite possibly my favorite modern novelist, Walker Percy brings to his work sharp powers of observation, quirky Southern humor, a vast intelligence, and a commitment to the Christian worldview. They focus on the existential quandaries of modern life and lay bare the aimlessness and ennui of our times. Did I mention he is extremely funny? Start with The Second Coming and Love in the Ruins. Or sample the brilliant mix of fiction and philosophy in Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. 17. Marilynne Robinson One of the most esteemed novelists of our day, Robinson is also theologically sophisticated. Her series of novels about a humble and imperfect saint of a pastor and the struggles with his family and congregation are beautifully crafted and rich in humane insight. Over the course of four novels, she writes of the same set of events from four different perspectives. The result brims with insight into the human heart and the triumph of grace. Start with Gilead and read them all. 18. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Solzhenitsyn’s life is a paradigm of moral courage, and he used his experiences in a Soviet concentration camp to lay bare the twin capacity in human beings for unspeakable cruelty and unimaginable bravery. With his characters, it’s usually faith in God that gives them the strength to persist in the worst of circumstances. Start with Cancer Ward and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. 19. J. R. R. Tolkien Recently chosen as the most popular fictional work of our time, The Lord of the Rings is an epic adventure of good and evil and a personal mythology that stands supreme in its themes of heroism, loyalty, courage, and sacrifice. And though it portrays little faith, a powerful sense of providence resonates through its pages, and an ultimate triumph of good over evil—even if it comes at a cost. Start with the prequel, The Hobbit. 20. Leo Tolstoy Tolstoy’s ability to create memorable characters, and to illustrate how their hearts and souls change, are two of the many qualities that make him one of the very finest novelists. Whether through his short parables or dramatic epics recounted against a vast sprawling canvas, he makes the emotional and spiritual lives of his characters come alive. Start with The Death of Ivan Illych and Anna Karenina. 21. Anthony Trollope Trollope’s charming tales of rural clerical life show keen insight into human nature. Touching and humorous, the first two books in his series, The Warden and Barchester Towers, reveal the political intrigue of an English parish. Every pastor or priest will recognize the internal battles of church politics as Trollope describes them. 22. Sigrid Undset Kristin Lavransdatter is the Nobel Prize–winning masterpiece of this Norwegian novelist. It is part of a grand historical epic set in 14th-century Norway that tells the story of a passionate and strong-willed woman who chooses love over duty and familial approval. Few writers have captured the world of the Middle Ages so well, which is a testament to her research and her literary skill. 23. Walter Wangerin Jr. Wangerin, a Lutheran pastor, has the enviable ability to craft one beautiful sentence after another and to move the reader’s heart toward faith without resorting to mawkish sentimentality. The Book of God manages the herculean task of telling the whole narrative of the Bible in the form of a novel. Works like The Book of the Dun Cow and Ragman also deserve notice. 24. Evelyn Waugh An elegance and a deft comic touch mark all the work of this important British novelist. His constant theme is the vacuity of life without God. Rather than concentrate on the joys of faith, this talented curmudgeon emphasizes the boredom and stifling meaninglessness of a life focused on this world’s attractions. Start with Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust. 25. Charles Williams
5097	dbpedia	3	8	https://www.britannica.com/summary/Theophile-Gautier	en	Théophile Gautier summary	https://cdn.britannica.c…e.jpg?v=3.124.12	https://cdn.britannica.c…e.jpg?v=3.124.12	[ "https://cdn.britannica.com/mendel/eb-logo/MendelNewThistleLogo.png", "https://cdn.britannica.com/mendel/eb-logo/MendelNewThistleLogo.png", "https://cdn.britannica.com/12/185412-050-6F2208E1/Misty-Copeland-American-Ballet-Theatre-audiences-role-June-24-2015.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/34/114834-050-F5310205/Liberty-Leading-the-People-oil-canvas-Eugene-1830.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/12/29712-050-D2404533/Charles-Baudelaire-photograph-Etienne-Carjat-1863.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/81/11581-004-8016B8D2/woodcut-George-Gascoigne-1576.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/81/98181-050-F79738A1/Poems-poetry-line-International-Festival-of-Poetry.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/20/99420-050-A8C679CA/Dust-jacket-edition-Vanessa-Bell-Virginia-Woolf-1927.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/23/181923-131-76FC0CA5/poet-clothing-poetry-festival-Heian-Kyoto-shrine.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/94/159994-131-8E828D22/Battle-of-New-Orleans-oil-painting-E-1910.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/70/191970-131-A85628DA/Color-wheel-light-color-spectrum.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/47/190947-131-FCF3F960/Olympic-torch-illustration-sports-summer-games.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/41/166941-131-E27FD3A6/Yingxiu-school-China-Sichuan-earthquake-May-2008.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/70/62770-131-C97CD1F7/Black-widow-spider.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/71/196471-131-8FEA8DDD/Daily-Police-Bulletin-Elizabeth-Short-Black-Dahlia-January-1947.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/12/185412-050-6F2208E1/Misty-Copeland-American-Ballet-Theatre-audiences-role-June-24-2015.jpg?w=100&h=75&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/34/114834-050-F5310205/Liberty-Leading-the-People-oil-canvas-Eugene-1830.jpg?w=100&h=75&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/12/29712-050-D2404533/Charles-Baudelaire-photograph-Etienne-Carjat-1863.jpg?w=100&h=75&c=crop", "https://cdn.britannica.com/81/11581-004-8016B8D2/woodcut-George-Gascoigne-1576.jpg?w=100&h=75&c=crop" ]	[]	[]	[ "britannica", "reference", "online", "encyclopedia", "encyclopaedia", "store", "dictionary", "thesaurus" ]	null	[]	null	Théophile Gautier, (born Aug. 31, 1811, Tarbes, France—died Oct. 23, 1872, Neuilly-sur-Seine), French poet, novelist, critic, and journalist.	en	/favicon.png	Encyclopedia Britannica	https://www.britannica.com/summary/Theophile-Gautier	Théophile Gautier, (born Aug. 31, 1811, Tarbes, France—died Oct. 23, 1872, Neuilly-sur-Seine), French poet, novelist, critic, and journalist. He lived most of his life in Paris, where he initially studied painting. He insisted on the sovereignty of the beautiful in such works as the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). He developed a poetic technique for recording his exact impressions of works of art, as in the formally perfect poems of Émaux et camées (1852). Travel inspired some of his best poetry, in España (1845), and finest prose, in Voyage en Espagne (1845). He also wrote copious art and drama criticism. His works inspired such poets as Charles Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du Mal was dedicated to him, and his prodigious and varied output influenced literary sensibilities for decades.
5097	dbpedia	3	92	https://adpprod1.library.ucsb.edu/names/102434	en	Théophile Gautier	https://upload.wikimedia…hile_Gautier.jpg		[ "https://adpprod1.library.ucsb.edu/themes/h5bp/static/adp-logo.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Portrait_de_Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier.jpg", "https://adpprod1.library.ucsb.edu/themes/h5bp/static/audio-available.png", "https://adpprod1.library.ucsb.edu/themes/h5bp/static/pressedonly.png", "https://adpprod1.library.ucsb.edu/themes/h5bp/static/uclogo-new4.png", "https://adpprod1.library.ucsb.edu/themes/h5bp/static/neh-seal-2024.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null			/themes/h5bp/favicon.ico	Discography of American Historical Recordings	null	Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (US: goh-TYAY, French: [pjɛʁ ʒyl teɔfil ɡotje]; 30 August 1811 – 23 October 1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. While an ardent defender of Romanticism, Gautier's work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He was widely esteemed by writers as disparate as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, James, Proust and Wilde.
5097	dbpedia	2	31	https://earlybirdbooks.com/french-authors	en	10 French Authors, From Modern to Classic	https://orion-uploads.op…ench-authors.jpg	https://orion-uploads.op…ench-authors.jpg	[ "https://earlybirdbooks.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Forion-uploads.openroadmedia.com%2Fmd_cea2cf6cd383-french-authors.jpg&w=828&q=75 1x, /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Forion-uploads.openroadmedia.com%2Fmd_cea2cf6cd383-french-authors.jpg&w=1920&q=75 2x", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781504062138.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781504062138.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781504064149.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781504064149.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781504063135.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781504063135.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781453244685.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781453244685.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9780544128088.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9780544128088.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781609452421.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781609452421.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781620970003.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781620970003.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781609451653.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781609451653.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781609454913.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781609454913.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781609453732.jpg", "https://d1pwnu15mzvjms.cloudfront.net/210x320/9781609453732.jpg", "https://orion-uploads.openroadmedia.com/icon_fb.png", "https://orion-uploads.openroadmedia.com/icon_insta.png", "https://orion-uploads.openroadmedia.com/icon_x.png", "https://orion-uploads.openroadmedia.com/icon_pinterest.png", "https://orion-uploads.openroadmedia.com/icon_tiktok.png", "https://orion-uploads.openroadmedia.com/logo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Orrin Grey" ]	2021-11-17T00:00:00+00:00	These French authors will cover everything from ennui to joie de vivre in plays, mysteries, biographical fiction and more.	en	https://orion-uploads.openroadmedia.com/1-favicon.ico	earlybirdbooks.com	https://earlybirdbooks.com/french-authors	When it comes to Francophone authors of science fiction and adventure, they don’t come much more famous than Jules Verne, author of such classics as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days. Before any of those legendary volumes, however, he penned his first great popular success, and the first of his “voyages extraordinaires” books, this “classic piece of French speculative fiction” (Los Angeles Review of Books) in which a trio of Englishmen travel over Africa in a hot air balloon in a tale that is “both a travelogue and a picaresque series of adventures.” (Strange Horizons) Born in 1622, the poet, playwright, and actor known by his stage name of Molière became one of the most famous writers in the French language—or, indeed, the world. In fact, so great is Molière’s legend that even today French is sometimes referred to as the “language of Molière.” Among his most famous plays, The Misanthrope chronicles the comedic misadventures of one Alceste, the misanthrope of the title, who constantly bemoans the flaws of those he sees around himself in Parisian high society. Written in verse, the play premiered in 1666 and has remained one of the most beloved stage satires for all the centuries since, while also asking questions that remain as pertinent today as they were three hundred years ago. Everyone has heard of Alexandre Dumas’ most famous creation—there’s even a candy bar named after it! The author of The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, and The Count of Monte Cristo, to name a few, was one of the best-known French authors of the 19th century. He was a prolific writer, and while those are some of his best-known works, they are far from the only classics he has penned. Take, for example, this 1845 tale of court intrigue and forbidden romance, set in the Paris of 1572. Protestants and Catholics vie for control of France, and the eponymous Margot – forced into an arranged marriage with a man she doesn’t love – is caught in the middle, torn by loyalty, love, and the machinations of her scheming mother, Catherine de Medici. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Andre Gide was “France’s greatest contemporary man of letters” at the time of his death in 1951. His work, which was often either autobiographical or – as is the case with Urien’s Voyage – semi-autobiographical, frequently dealt with attempts at intellectual honesty and finding out how to be fully oneself. Beginning in the symbolist movement, his work evolved considerably over the course of his life, and Urien’s Voyage, in which several sailors depart for places unknown, is regarded as a key text in his impressive oeuvre, as well as marking a turning point in Gide’s own fiction and development as a writer and a human being. Related: 13 Translated Books That Will Expand Your Horizons Though he is best known today for his children’s book, The Little Prince, the author who became known as the “Winged Poet” was also a pilot who flew in World War II, and many of his books feature aeronautic themes. Take Airman’s Odyssey, which combines several of Saint-Exupery’s most personal works, including memoirs of his time flying airmail across the Sahara and a harrowing aerial reconnaissance mission that he undertook during the Battle of France in World War II, in addition to the classic novel Night Flight, which was adapted into the 1933 film of the same name, starring Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Lionel Barrymore, and others. Begum Hazrat Mahal was a queen in India in the 1800s and one of the leaders in the revolution that led to Indian independence from Britain, yet her story is rarely told. Fortunately, French journalist and author Kenize Mourad is here to set the record straight. Having spent many years as a reporter for Le Nouvel Observateur (later renamed L’Obs), the most prominent general information magazine in France, Mourad worked extensively in the Middle East, from which her mother’s family originally hailed. Drawing from the lessons taught by her own family history and her years of journalistic experience in the region, she takes on the fascinating tale of Begum Hazrat Mahal in his unforgettable book. In 1927, legendary French composer Maurice Ravel departed Europe aboard the SS France, embarking upon a triumphant tour of the United States. Unbeknownst to him, he was also departing into the last decade of his life. In this “tiny miracle of a biographical novel” (Booklist), acclaimed French author Jean Echenoz, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, tackles the twilight of Ravel’s life and career, turning a slyly satiric eye not just on the great composer himself, but on the folly of the age. In the first of his acclaimed Inspector Sebag mysteries, “Georget provides great details along with a pace that lets the reader soak up those late-night swims and wine-soaked dinners in the end-of-summer Mediterranean heat.” (Star Tribune) Set against the backdrop of a beach town on the French Mediterranean, one jammed with tourists and under-policed by tired cops, a shocking murder is followed by a disappearance, drawing Inspector Sebag into a diabolical game with more than one life on the line. This “stylish debut novel” (Booklist) kicks off an acclaimed series and introduces readers around the world to a new voice in mystery and suspense. Related: 10 Mystery and Thriller Books by International Authors There’s a lot going on in Pascale Pujol’s farcical novel set in the famous Parisian quarter of Montmartre. Focused on Sandrine, a would-be chef with a volcanic personality who is just waiting for her chance to shine, “The plot adds characters like ingredients in a recipe until everything finally sets like a creamy quiche.” (Star Tribune) With an unforgettable cast of characters, a dynamic protagonist, “sexy encounters, irreverent humor, and subtle twists” (Publishers Weekly), this hilarious novel nonetheless tackles some heady themes including immigration and economic policy. Jean-Christophe Rufin was one of the founding members of Doctors Without Borders, so he’s no stranger to the world of humanitarian aid. And it is into this world that he plunges readers in this “enthralling, cleverly told novel” (Elle) that asks challenging questions about the nature of war, the role of humanitarian aid, and the most fundamental dilemmas of our age. While that could prove a dry read, Rufin offers up a “taut thriller” that is “distinguished by its literary polish and moral heft.” (Publishers Weekly) Related: 9 Literary Suspense Books That'll Keep You on Edge
5097	dbpedia	0	28	https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-portrait-of-thophile-gautier-1811-1872-a-french-poet-dramatist-novelist-104172950.html	en	1872) a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. Dated 19th Century Stock Photo	https://c7.alamy.com/com…elist-G1DDJE.jpg	https://c7.alamy.com/com…elist-G1DDJE.jpg	[ "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/mastercard.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/visa.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/amex.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/paypal.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/apple-pay.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/google-pay.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "19th century", "19th century ad", "19th century ce", "ad", "art", "art critic", "ce", "critic", "dramatist", "france" ]	null	[ "Alamy Limited" ]	null	Download this stock image: Portrait of Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. Dated 19th Century - G1DDJE from Alamy's library of millions of high resolution stock photos, illustrations and vectors.	en	https://s.alamy.com/logo…avicon-16x16.png		https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-portrait-of-thophile-gautier-1811-1872-a-french-poet-dramatist-novelist-104172950.html	Portrait of Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. Dated 19th Century Captions are provided by our contributors. RMID:Image ID :G1DDJE Image details Contributor : World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo Image ID : G1DDJE File size : 60 MB (3 MB Compressed download) Open your image file to the full size using image processing software. Releases : Model - no \| Property - noDo I need a release? Dimensions : 4462 x 4700 px \| 37.8 x 39.8 cm \| 14.9 x 15.7 inches \| 300dpi Date taken : 1856 More information : This image could have imperfections as it’s either historical or reportage. Taxes may apply to prices shown.
5097	dbpedia	3	84	https://classiques-garnier.com/curiosites-esthetiques-suivies-de-l-art-romantique-xiv-theophile-gautier-en.html	en	XIV. Théophile Gautier	https://classiques-garni…/CgpMSP0057b.png	https://classiques-garni…/CgpMSP0057b.png	[ "https://classiques-garnier.com/assets/frontOffice/modern/template-assets/assets/dist/img/ec2e86a.png", "https://classiques-garnier.com/images/Vignette/CgpMSP0057b.png", "https://classiques-garnier.com/export/imgpreview/curiosites-esthetiques-suivies-de-l-art-romantique-xiv-theophile-gautier-en.html", "https://classiques-garnier.com/images/Vignette/JlkMSP01b.png", "https://classiques-garnier.com/images/Vignette/MgiMSP02b.png", "https://classiques-garnier.com/images/Vignette/MfyMSP01b.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2024-08-29T00:00:00		en	https://classiques-garni…/img/fcda30d.png	Classiques Garnier	https://classiques-garnier.com/curiosites-esthetiques-suivies-de-l-art-romantique-xiv-theophile-gautier.html	Publication type: Book chapter Book: Curiosités esthétiques suivies de L’Art romantique Pages: 659 to 688 Reprint of the edition of: 1999 Collection: Classiques Jaunes (The 'Yellow' Collection), n° 479 Series: Littératures francophones Book chapter: Previous 36/45 Next Purchase book Availability: Available Temporarily unavailable Out of print Sorry but this combination does not exist. Digital 2.00 € Download your contribution Your download code is reusable and gives you the right to up to 15 downloads of your contribution. CLIL theme: 3633 -- LITTÉRATURE GÉNÉRALE -- Poésie ISBN: 978-2-8124-1493-0 EAN: 9782812414930 ISSN: 2417-6400 DOI: 10.15122/isbn.978-2-8124-1493-0.p.0759 Publisher: Classiques Garnier Online publication: 04-08-2014 Language: French
5097	dbpedia	2	27	https://evelyneholingue.com/2017/03/14/french-writers-from-a-to-z/	en	French Writers From A to Z	https://evelyneholingue.…uflers.jpg?w=300	https://evelyneholingue.…uflers.jpg?w=300	[ "https://evelyneholingue.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/chateauflers.jpg?w=300&h=169", "https://evelyneholingue.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/atozbadge2017.jpg?w=300&h=300", "https://evelyneholingue.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/l1010969.jpg?w=300&h=200", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/7c365a1d06c7696fa05327a22a3b783ba17b5cfec2294815a0fcc737b901d07d?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/25215076b56059c186a4059c6489b60eb378bacfd34793424c1a0cb065094ffc?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/27fd50f346e4dcf05f5e0cfec8a2d04b60c94959c9a318553b8f7b4dee812dcd?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/8e0dcd46bb1925b3d01de948889b0374b69e44c710a7388046462e4f0a3aae7b?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/b2d3cf8eec60cc3f25df20eb974b3c4dbb211acbea6d40d6f7e0e3072e552c2f?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/2d67e941eb5437234d194e0e96e980e33c7936a1e9568e863011210aeb51ae3a?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/4b489bc51fd134811f1d11794db3a923676dceef30c6f83beafb23c08099f601?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0051e8af714cea87e158d4031b971263c754882da91f40c313cf5445edc4dd1d?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/1b5382fbbd728a89a05386bb644580aab049e2a5d1181092a6306d832733cef3?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/23f29b6cc4f69041b3e130a1eeddf0508e58370a3f81e4eb08bb294befbc7a2b?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/4bf829a672f8dba6437f5b406fda2df4729979384365fec01dff32c395c3a047?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/72b76c3ac88efe0939d0feba6db04bb10024f0bef4a2071b189d9121cb6f5a13?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/432acb8c2e7df22e67e2b766d55c991b4e07e93f52a9abbb6d4a02b5809555c3?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0339a2d3d0082d37f578258557733a9dff9d07d9cf31832d6109feaa6dfe8167?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/432acb8c2e7df22e67e2b766d55c991b4e07e93f52a9abbb6d4a02b5809555c3?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://evelyneholingue.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/dsc_01741.jpg?w=213", "https://s0.wp.com/i/badges/freshly-pressed-rectangle.png", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2017-03-14T00:00:00	My Childhood Public Library Was Located in this Castle In December 2016, Wordpress asked writers, photographers, artists, poets, and business and website owners a simple question: what’s in store f…	en	https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico	Evelyne Holingue	https://evelyneholingue.com/2017/03/14/french-writers-from-a-to-z/	My Childhood Public Library Was Located in this Castle In December 2016, WordPress asked writers, photographers, artists, poets, and business and website owners a simple question: what’s in store for you and your blog/website in 2017? A few months later, I would offer the same response I did back then. Through my blog, I open a window on my life spent between two languages and cultures (French and American English). With this goal in mind I decided to participate once again to the A to Z Challenge. Here is what you can expect to find every day but Sundays for the month of April: A selection of French authors, a man and a woman, for each letter of the alphabet. A couple of facts related to this challenge: 1- Here in the US, I don’t find too many French books translated in American English. The most famous French writers remain Camus with The Stranger and Victor Hugo with Les Misérables. Some Francophiles know the contemporary work of a few authors, Michel Houellbecq, for example. However, the vast majority of Americans see France either as an old country or as a pink-chic land. 2- With the support of Livrophage extraordinaire, a French avid reader I’ve only met through our mutual blogs and our e-mail correspondence, I was convinced to build a list of contemporary French authors. We decided that this challenge should focus on writers from the 20th century with books published in the 20th and 21st century. In an interesting way, my French virtual friend devours American literature. Coming up with a list of French authors from A to Z will be a challenge for her, too. In a natural way, she decided to write in French while I will write in English. Our posts won’t be translated and won’t alternate regularly between the two languages. They will depend on our knowledge and interest for a specific author. So… My hope is that everyone of you will find something, in either language. After all, this is the life I live every day. It’s a way of life that carries its own challenges but offers countless surprises. And I love it just the way it is. I hope you will enjoy this challenge and will stop by once in a while, maybe to refresh your French 🙂 and perhaps to discover a new French writer and fall in love with her/his words. Meanwhile, for everyone dealing today with the spring nor’easter, a photo taken a few years ago along a snowy California trail, also in the spring.
5097	dbpedia	2	70	https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia_of_history/N/novel_and_press_19th_century.html	en	the novel and press in the 19th century	http://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/Nicholas_Nickleby.jpg	http://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/Nicholas_Nickleby.jpg	[ "https://www.daviddarling.info/image/claro-load.gif", "https://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/Kenilworth_Scott.jpg", "https://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/Nicholas_Nickleby.jpg", "https://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/Balzac_by_Rodin.jpg", "https://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/Germinal_Zola.jpg", "https://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/Universal_Primer_Green.jpg", "https://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/Les_Rougon-Macquart.jpg", "https://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/Temple_of_the_Muses.jpg", "https://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/Jane_Austen.jpg", "https://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/The_Times_Crimean_War.jpg", "https://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/sensational_journalism.jpg", "https://www.daviddarling.info/images_history/Tolstoy.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "David Darling" ]	null	There were many technical innovations in printing between 1800 and 1900 that had important effects on newspapers and novels.				http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia_of_history/N/noveL_and_press_19th_century.html	There were many technical innovations in printing between 1800 and 1900 that had important effects on newspapers and novels. The use of metal presses, steel engraving and, after 1848, of stereotypes and mechanical presses completely altered the production process. Marketing techniques changed too: circulating libraries (Figure 7), railway station bookstalls and cheap reprints of successful titles helped to establish and satisfy a market that expanded with the rising population, increased literacy (Figure 5) and greater educational opportunities. In Britain, newspapers were hampered by taxation until 1855, but by the end of the century mass circulation newspapers had developed. Changes in the novel The novel never suffered taxation problems but was otherwise similarly affected by these changes. The huge problems of the new industrial cities offered fresh subject-matter to be interpreted in the new intellectual climate of Europe after the French Revolution. Even two such early novelists as Jane Austen (1775–1817) and Walter Scott (1771–1832) (Figure 1) reveal a distinct if conservative responsiveness to change. Jane Austin's domestic comedies, carefully structured in six novels, are at once amusing and deeply serious. Scott virtually invented the historical novel. His popular success brought him a considerable personal fortune. Jane Austen concentrated on witty, incisive descriptions of rural English society. Her sense of form had its roots in the classical English comedy of Congreve and Jonson. She was the first of a remarkable line of women novelists whose lives were otherwise provincial and obscure. During her lifetime she earned only Â£250 for six novels, but time has discriminated in her favor and she is now regarded as an immortal of English literature. Two of her best works are Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816), both about ordinary people unaffected by world events. Popular success was also enjoyed by his Victorian successors William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863), Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) and above all by Charles Dickens (1812–1870) (Figure 2) and George Eliot (1819–1880). Dickens built up an astonishingly close relationship with his readers in his sentimental but brilliantly funny and sometimes despairing vision of city life. George Eliot, on the other hand, was provincial in her subjects and European in the range and discipline of her thought. The mid-century also saw the publication of the Bronte sisters' novels. Charlotte (1816–1855), author of significant poems as well as of the novel Wuthering Heights, has since been more highly regarded. Important later novelists include George Meredith (1828–1909), George Gissing (1857–1903), Samuel Butler (1835–1902) and Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). Hardy's novels frequently express a passionate feeling for man's tragic involvement in nature and estrangement from it. Mass circulation newspapers became possible after the development of new printing techniques and the ending of the newspaper tax in 1855. Serious, major journalistic innovations, like The Times' coverage of the Crimean War (top), probably had less influence on novels than "gutter press" sensationalism (bottom). The novel in Western Europe French fiction in this period was much more urbane and less prudish than English. The realists, Stendhal (1783–1842), Honore de Balzac (1799–1850) (Figure 3) and Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), depicted French history and bourgeois life at a great length and in minute detail. Romantic experience and attitudes, however, were given vivid expression in the works of Victor Hugo (1802–1885) and George Sand (1804–1876). Emile Zola (1840–1902) (Figure 6), leader of the naturalists, produced franker and more painfully pessimistic studies of the workings of heredity and environment in human affairs (Figure 4). The enormous popular success of Alexandre Dumas the father (1802–1870) and his historical romances were matched by that of his son of the same name (1824–1895). The giant figure of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) overshadows nineteenth- century German literature. In his wake the regionalist anti-romanticism of Theodore Storm (1817–1888) and Fritz Reuter (1810–1874) seems relatively less significant. Italian prose in this period was dominated not by one great man but by one great book, The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873), a patriotic Romantic who was greatly influenced by Scott. The task of modernizing the Italian novel fell to Giovanni Verga (1840–1922) and Antonio Fogazzaro (1842–1911). The literary tradition in Russia In some ways the most surprising national achievement in the evolution of the novel was that of Russia. The first major Russian novelists were Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) and Nikolai Gogol (1818–1852); their successors, Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) were to make a deep impression on Western European culture when their works were translated into French, German and English. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina are among the greatest of all literary works. Tolstoy's funeral was the first non-religious Russian funeral, yet he died with the reputation of a saint because of his religious and political devotion to the ideal "simple peasant" life. In What is Art? (1897) he had repudiated most of European literature including his own and Shakespeare's works, yet in his own ascetic and prophetic old age he demonstrated the same sort of passion and contradictory idealism with which he had invested his fictional heroes.. While Dostoevsky's intellectual perspectives are significantly modern it was Henry James (1843–1916) who introduced modern techniques into the novel. Although he spent most of his life in Europe, he remained in important ways American. The formal complexity and ironic indirectness of his work is also characteristic of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1806–1864), Herman Melville (1819–1891) and Mark Twain (1835–1910). In his own fiction James abandoned the convention that the author knows everything and selected one or two characters from whose point of view he told his story. Although most of his own novels are long, this technique led on to the writing of shorter, more economical works. As well as the artistic reasons for this development there were also strictly commercial ones: with the advent of cheap editions that readers could buy for themselves the great circulating libraries were in decline and publishers became less interested in length alone. The age of the Victorian novel was over.
5097	dbpedia	2	71	https://apps.npr.org/best-books/	en	Books We Love	https://apps.npr.org/bes…23.jpg?fbreset=1	https://apps.npr.org/bes…23.jpg?fbreset=1	[ "https://apps.npr.org/best-books/assets/books-we-love.svg", "https://apps.npr.org/best-books/assets/thoughtfully-curated.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "NPR Staff" ]	2024-01-26T04:58:22.042000+00:00	Here are 380+ great reads from 2023 hand-picked just for you by NPR staff and trusted critics.	en	https://media.npr.org/te…icon-180x180.png	NPR	https://apps.npr.org/best-books/	What would you like to read? Mix and match the filters below and the years above to explore more than 3,600 recommendations from NPR staff and trusted critics.
5097	dbpedia	1	24	https://www.bookey.app/quote-author/theophile-gautier	en	30 Best Theophile Gautier Quotes With Image	https://cdn.bookey.app/w…series/share.png	https://cdn.bookey.app/w…series/share.png	[ "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/logo.c1ef962f.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/logo3.3a93bda5.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/logo3.3a93bda5.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/contetList.55e8a744.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "Theophile GautierQuotes", "Theophile GautierQuotes With Image" ]	null	[]	2023-11-06T10:00:53+08:00	1.To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.2.Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.	en	/favicon.ico		https://www.bookey.app/quote-author/theophile-gautier	Theophile Gautier \| Introduction Théophile Gautier was a prominent French poet, novelist, journalist, and critic who lived during the 19th century. Born on August 31, 1811, in Tarbes, France, Gautier was raised in a literary family that nurtured his early interest in the arts. His father was an amateur painter and his mother came from a family of writers and musicians. Gautier's love for literature and poetry emerged at a young age, and he began writing poetry and plays during his adolescence. After completing his education, he moved to Paris in 1829 to pursue a career in writing. In the French capital, Gautier soon became associated with a group of young artists and writers later known as the Romantic Circle, which included Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Théodore Géricault, among others. Gautier quickly earned a reputation for his poetic talents and began publishing poems and reviews in various literary magazines. His poetic style was characterized by its musicality, rich imagery, and a strong emphasis on aesthetic beauty. He was often inspired by the works of the Romantic poets, and his early poems often explored themes of love, nature, and dreams. In addition to his poetry, Gautier also proved himself as a skillful novelist. His first novel, "Mademoiselle de Maupin," published in 1835, created a stir in the literary circles due to its daring and sensual content. The novel, which tells the story of a young noblewoman who disguises herself as a man, explores themes of gender identity and sexuality, which were considered taboo at the time. Gautier's talent as a critic also played an important role in his literary career. He wrote extensively on art, literature, and theater, and his critical essays were highly regarded for their perceptive analysis and eloquent prose. He was one of the leading advocates of the doctrine of "art for art's sake," arguing that art should be valued purely for its own sake, independent of any moral or educational purpose. Throughout his life, Gautier remained a prominent figure in French literary and cultural circles. He traveled extensively, gathering inspiration from his journeys to places such as Spain, Italy, and Egypt, and incorporating elements of these cultures into his works. He also became a renowned travel writer, sharing his experiences and observations in books and articles. Théophile Gautier's influence on literature and art cannot be overstated. His work greatly contributed to the development of the Romantic movement in France, and his emphasis on sensual beauty and aestheticism paved the way for the Symbolist and Decadent movements that followed. His writing continues to be studied and appreciated for its elegance, creativity, and innovative approaches to form and content. Gautier died on October 23, 1872, leaving a lasting legacy as one of the foremost literary figures of his time. His varied body of work, which includes poetry, novels, plays, and critical essays, showcases his versatility and immense talent, solidifying his place in the pantheon of great French writers. 5 Facts About Theophile Gautier 1. Theophile Gautier was not only a renowned poet and writer, but he was also a passionate painter. He exhibited his artworks at the prestigious Paris Salon, gaining recognition for his skills in the visual arts. 2. Gautier had a fondness for exotic and unusual pets. He owned a pet alligator, which he kept in the bathtub, as well as a monkey that would accompany him on his walks around Paris. 3. Despite his reputation as a poet and dandy, Gautier was an avid traveler and a passionate advocate for exploring the world. He journeyed extensively, visiting places like Spain, Italy, Egypt, and Algeria, which greatly inspired his writings. 4. Gautier was a pioneer of "art for art's sake" movement, which believed that art should be created solely for its own sake, without any moral or didactic purpose. This concept challenged the prevailing notion of art being primarily a tool for social or political commentary. 5. Gautier had a deep fascination with the supernatural and the macabre. He was one of the first writers to explore the theme of vampirism in his short story "La Morte Amoureuse" (The Dead Lover), which later became a significant influence on the vampire genre.
5097	dbpedia	1	73	https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/critical-and-biographical-introduction-by-robert-louis-sanderson-18511922-3/	en	Critical and Biographical Introduction by Robert Louis Sanderson (18511922)	https://legacy-cms-media…2x32-1-32x32.png	https://legacy-cms-media…2x32-1-32x32.png	[ "https://legacy-cms-assets.bartleby.com/wp-content/themes/bartleby-legacy-theme/assets/images/dots-menu.png", "https://legacy-cms-media.bartleby.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2022/11/14172410/bartleby-white.png", "https://legacy-cms-assets.bartleby.com/wp-content/themes/bartleby-legacy-theme/assets/images/facebook-icon.svg", "https://legacy-cms-assets.bartleby.com/wp-content/themes/bartleby-legacy-theme/assets/images/instagram-icon.svg", "https://legacy-cms-assets.bartleby.com/wp-content/themes/bartleby-legacy-theme/assets/images/twitter-icon.svg", "https://legacy-cms-assets.bartleby.com/wp-content/themes/bartleby-legacy-theme/assets/images/youtube-icon.svg", "https://legacy-cms-assets.bartleby.com/wp-content/themes/bartleby-legacy-theme/assets/images/apple-store-badge.svg", "https://legacy-cms-assets.bartleby.com/wp-content/themes/bartleby-legacy-theme/assets/images/google-play-badge.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2022-07-01T07:16:37+00:00	THÉOPHILE GAUTIER was born in Tarbes (Department of the Hautes-Pyrénées) in Southern France, August 31st, 1811. Like all French boys, he	en	https://legacy-cms-media…2x32-1-32x32.png	Collection at Bartleby.com	https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/critical-and-biographical-introduction-by-robert-louis-sanderson-18511922-3/	C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917. Critical and Biographical Introduction by Robert Louis Sanderson (18511922) By Théophile Gautier (18111872) THÉOPHILE GAUTIER was born in Tarbes (Department of the Hautes-Pyrénées) in Southern France, August 31st, 1811. Like all French boys, he was sent to the lycée (academy), where he promised to be a brilliant scholar; but his father was really his tutor, and to him Gautier attributed his instruction. Young Théophile showed marked preference for the so-called authors of the Decadence—Claudianus, Martial, Petronius, and others; also for the old French writers, especially Villon and Rabelais, whom he says he knew by heart. This is significant, in view of the young man’s strong tendencies, later on, towards the new romantic school. The artistic temperament was very strong in him; and while still carrying on his studies at college he entered the painter Rioult’s studio. His introduction to Victor Hugo in 1830 may be considered the decisive point in Gautier’s career: from that day he gave up painting and became a fanatic admirer of the romantic leader. A short time afterwards, the first representation of ‘Hernani’ took place (February 25th, 1830), an important date in the life of Gautier. It was on this occasion that he put on for the only time that famous red waistcoat, which, with his long black mane streaming down his back, so horrified the staid Parisian bourgeois. This red waistcoat turns out, after all, not to have been a waistcoat at all, but a doublet; nor was it red, but pink. No truer is the legend, according to Gautier, that on this memorable occasion, armed with his two formidable fists, he felled right and left the terrified bourgeois. He says that he was at that time rather delicate, and had not yet developed that prodigious strength which later on enabled him to strike a 520-pound blow on a Turk’s-head. In appearance Gautier was a large corpulent man with a leonine countenance, swarthy complexion, long black hair falling over his shoulders, black beard, and brilliant black eyes; an Oriental in looks as well as in some of his tastes. He had a passion for cats. His house was overrun by them, and he seldom wrote without having one on his lap. The privations he underwent during the siege of Paris, doubly hard to a man of Gautier’s Gargantuesque appetite, no doubt hastened his death. He died on October 23d, 1872, of hypertrophy of the heart. Gautier is one of those writers of whom one may say a vast deal of good and a vast deal of harm. His admirers think that justice has not been done him, that his fame will go on rising and his name will live as one of the great writers of France; others think that his name may perhaps not entirely disappear, but that if he is remembered at all it will be solely as the author of ‘Émaux et Camées’ (Enamels and Cameos). He wrote in his youth a book that did him great harm in the eyes of the public; but he has written something else besides ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin,’ and both in prose and poetry we shall find a good deal to admire in him. One thing is certain: he is a marvelous stylist. In his earliest poems Gautier already possesses that admirable artistic skill that prompts him to choose his words as a painter his colors, or a jeweler his gems and stones, so as to produce the most brilliant effects: these first compositions also have a grace, a charm, that we shall find lacking later on, for as he proceeds with his work he pays more and more attention to form and finish. ‘Albertus, or Soul and Sin,’ the closing poem of Gautier’s first collection, is a “semi-diabolic, semi-fashionable” legend. An old witch, Veronica, a second Meg Merrilies, transforms herself into a beautiful maiden and makes love to Albertus, a young artist—otherwise Gautier himself. He cares for nothing but his art, but falls a victim to the spell cast over him by the siren. At the stroke of midnight, Veronica, to the young man’s horror, from a beautiful woman changes back to the old hag she was, and carries him off to a place where witches, sorcerers, hobgoblins, harpies, ghouls, and other frightful creatures are holding a monstrous saturnalia; at the end of which, Albertus is left for dead in a ditch of the Appian Way with broken back and twisted neck. What does it all mean? the reader may ask. That “the wages of sin is death” seems to be the moral contained in this poem, if indeed any moral is intended at all. Be that as it may, ‘Albertus’ is a literary gem in its way; a work in which the poet has given free scope to his brilliant imagination, and showered by the handful the gems and jewels in his literary casket. Gautier may be said to have possessed the poetry of Death—some would say its horrors. This sentiment of horror at the repulsive manner of man’s total destruction finds most vivid expression in ‘The Comedy of Death,’ a fantastic poem divided into two parts, ‘Death in Life’ and ‘Life in Death.’ The dialogue between the bride and the earth-worm is of a flesh-creeping nature. It is however as the poet of ‘Émaux et Camées’ (Enamels and Cameos) that Théophile Gautier will be chiefly remembered. Every poem but one in this collection is written in short octosyllabic verse, and every one is what the title implies,—a precious stone, a chiseled gem. Gautier’s wonderful and admirable talent for grouping together certain words that produce on one’s eye and mind the effect of a beautiful picture, his intense love of art, of the outline, the plastic, appear throughout this work. You realize on reading ‘Émaux et Camées,’ more perhaps than in any other work by this writer, that the poet is fully conscious of his powers and knows just how to use them. Any poem may be selected at random, and will be found a work of art. The same qualities that distinguish Gautier as a poet are to be found in his novels, narratives of travels, criticisms,—in short, in everything he wrote; intense love for the beautiful,—physically beautiful,—wonderful talent for describing it. Of his novels, properly speaking, there are four that stand out prominently, each very different in its subject,—a proof of Gautier’s great versatility,—all perfect in their execution. The first is ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin’; it is an immoral book, but it is a beautiful book, not only because written with a rare elegance of style, but also because it makes you love beauty. Briefly, ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin’ may be called a pæan to beauty, sung by its high priest Théophile Gautier. The other remarkable novels by this writer are ‘Le Capitaine Fracasse’ (Captain Smash-All), ‘Le Roman de la Momie’ (The Romance of the Mummy), and ‘Spirite.’ ‘Captain Fracasse,’ although not published until 1863, had been announced long beforehand; and Gautier had worked at it, off and on, for twenty years. It belongs to that class of novel known as picaresque—romances of adventures and battles. ‘Captain Fracasse’ is certainly the most popular of Gautier’s works. ‘The Romance of the Mummy’ is a very remarkable book, in which science and fiction have been blended in the most artistic and clever manner; picturesque, like all of Gautier’s writings, but the work of a savant as well as of a novelist. Here more than in any other book by this author,—with the exception perhaps of ‘Arria Marcella,’—Gautier has revived in a most lifelike way an entire civilization, so long extinct. ‘The Romance of the Mummy’ abounds in beautiful descriptions. The description of the finding of the mummy, that of the royal tombs, of Thebes with its hundred gates, the triumphal entrance of Pharaoh into that city, the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites, are all marvelous pictures, that not only fill the reader with the same admiration he would evince at the sight of a painting by one of the great masters, but give him the illusion of witnessing in the body the scenes so admirably described. ‘Spirite,’ a fantastic story, is a source of surprise to readers familiar with Gautier’s other works: they find it hard to conceive that so thorough a materialist as Gautier could ever have produced a work so spiritualistic in its nature. The clever handling of a mystic subject, the richness and coloring of the descriptions, together with a certain ideal and poetical vein that runs through the book, make of ‘Spirite’ one of Gautier’s most remarkable works. Théophile Gautier has also written a number of nouvelles or short novels, and tales, some of which are striking compositions. ‘Arria Marcella’ is one of these; a brilliant, masterly composition, in which Gautier gives us such a perfect illusion of the past. Under his magic pen we find ourselves walking the streets of Pompeii and living over the life of the Romans in the first century of our era; and ‘Une Nuit de Cléopâtre’ (A Night with Cleopatra) is a vivid resurrection of the brilliant Egyptian court. Of his various journeys to Spain, Italy, and the Orient, Gautier has given us the most captivating relations. To many this is not the least interesting portion of Gautier’s work. The same qualities that are so striking in his poems and novels—vividness of description, love of the picturesque, wonderful power of expression—are likewise apparent in his relations of travels. As a literary and especially as an art critic, Gautier ranks high. Bringing to this branch of literature the same qualities that distinguish him in others, he created a descriptive and picturesque method of criticism peculiarly his own. Of his innumerable articles on art and literature, some have been collected under the names of ‘Les Grotesques,’ a series of essays on a number of poets of the end of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, ridiculed by Boileau, but in whom Gautier finds some wheat among the chaff. The ‘History of Dramatic Art in France for the Last Twenty-five Years,’ beginning with the year 1837, will be consulted with great profit by those who are curious to follow the dramatic movement in that country. Of his essays on art, one is as excellent as the other; all the great masters are treated with a loving and admiring hand. Among the miscellaneous works of this prolific writer should be mentioned ‘Ménagerie Intime’ (Home Menagerie), in which the author makes us acquainted in a most charming and familiar way with his home life, and the various pets, cats, dogs, white rats, parrots, etc., that in turn shared his house with him; la Nature chez elle (Nature at home), that none but a close observer of nature could have written. The last book written by Gautier before his death was ‘Tableaux de Siège’ (Siege Pictures, 1871). The subjects are treated just in the way we might expect from such a writer, from a purely artistic point of view. Gautier has written for the stage only short plays and ballets; but if all he ever wrote were published, his works would fill nearly three hundred volumes. In spite of the quantity and quality of his books, the French Academy did not open her doors to him; but no more did it to Molière, Beaumarchais, Balzac, and many others. Opinions still vary greatly as to Théophile Gautier’s literary merits; but his brilliant descriptive powers, his eminent qualities as a stylist, together with the influence he exercised over contemporary letters as the introducer of the plastic in literature, would seem sufficient to rank him among the great writers of France.
5097	dbpedia	3	85	https://www.everand.com/book/461037534/7-best-short-stories-by-Theophile-Gautier	en	7 best short stories by Théophile Gautier by Théophile Gautier, August Nemo (Ebook)	https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/word_document/461037534/original/1c9f2bd86b/1724883044?v=1	https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/word_document/461037534/original/1c9f2bd86b/1724883044?v=1	[ "https://s-f.scribdassets.com/webpack/assets/images/content_preview/everand_subscription_banner/evarand_eng_desktop_1x.f0d8b73f.png", "https://imgv2-1-f.scribdassets.com/img/audiobook_square/237882614/76x76/3806dcfe03/1724627153?v=1", "https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/word_user/542155271/72x72/eb5b1e3b2f/1724731700?v=1", "https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/word_user/542155271/72x72/eb5b1e3b2f/1724731700?v=1", "https://imgv2-1-f.scribdassets.com/img/word_user/711059859/72x72/908c43acf6/1724560491?v=1", "https://imgv2-1-f.scribdassets.com/img/word_user/711059859/72x72/908c43acf6/1724560491?v=1", "https://imgv2-1-f.scribdassets.com/img/audiobook_square/390806353/76x76/67f5931007/1724711959?v=1", "https://imgv2-1-f.scribdassets.com/img/audiobook_square/448302927/76x76/a9e9126523/1724711714?v=1", "https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/audiobook_square/237976000/76x76/c67e41ad22/1724860833?v=1", "https://imgv2-1-f.scribdassets.com/img/audiobook_square/424681468/76x76/6e9565541d/1724861079?v=1", "https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/audiobook_square/390618673/76x76/80556b2868/1724625486?v=1" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Théophile Gautier" ]	2020-05-15T00:00:00	Read 7 best short stories by Théophile Gautier by Théophile Gautier,August Nemo with a free trial. Read millions of eBooks and audiobooks on the web, iPad, iPhone and Android.	en	https://s-f.scribdassets.com/everand.ico?a8b0030f2?v=5	Everand	https://www.everand.com/book/461037534/7-best-short-stories-by-Theophile-Gautier	Publisher The Author Gautier was born on 30 August 1811 in Tarbes, capital of Hautes-Pyrénées département (southwestern France). His father was Jean-Pierre Gautier, a fairly cultured minor government official, and his mother was Antoinette-Adelaïde Cocard. The family moved to Paris in 1814, taking up residence in the ancient Marais district. Gautier's education commenced at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris (fellow alumni include Voltaire, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, and the Marquis de Sade), which he attended for three months before being brought home due to illness. Although he completed the remainder of his education at Collège Charlemagne (alumni include Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve), Gautier's most significant instruction came from his father, who prompted him to become a Latin scholar by age eighteen. Gautier began writing poetry as early as 1826, but the majority of his life was spent as a contributor to various journals, mainly La Presse, which also gave him the opportunity for foreign travel and for meeting many influential contacts in high society and in the world of the arts. Throughout his life, Gautier was well-traveled, taking trips to Spain, Italy, Russia, Egypt and Algeria. Gautier's many travels inspired many of his writings including Voyage en Espagne (1843), Trésors d’Art de la Russie (1858), and Voyage en Russie (1867). Gautier's travel literature is considered by many as being some of the best from the nineteenth century; often written in a personal style, it provides a window into Gautier's own tastes in art and culture. Gautier was a celebrated abandonné (one who yields or abandons himself to something) of the Romantic Ballet, writing several scenarios, the most famous of which is Giselle, whose first interpreter, the ballerina Carlotta Grisi, was the great love of his life. She could not return his affection, so he linked her sister Ernestina, a singer. The 1860s were years of assured literary fame for Gautier. Although he was rejected by the French Academy three times (1867, 1868, 1869), Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the most influential critic of the day, set the seal of approval on the poet by devoting no less than three major articles in 1863 to reviews of Gautier's entire published works. In 1865, Gautier was admitted into the prestigious salon of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, cousin of Napoleon III and niece to Bonaparte. The Princess offered Gautier a sinecure as her librarian in 1868, a position that gave him access to the court of Napoleon III. During the Franco-Prussian War, Gautier made his way back to Paris upon hearing of the Prussian advance on the capital. He remained with his family throughout the invasion and the aftermath of the Commune, eventually dying on 23 October 1872 due to a long-standing cardiac disease. Gautier was sixty-one years old. He is interred at the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris. Clarimonde Brother, you ask me if I have ever loved. Yes. My story is a strange and terrible one; and though I am sixty-six years of age, I scarcely dare even now to disturb the ashes of that memory. To you I can refuse nothing; but I should not relate such a tale to any less experienced mind. So strange were the circumstances of my story, that I can scarcely believe myself to have ever actually been a party to them. For more than three years I remained the victim of a most singular and diabolical illusion. Poor country priest though I was, I led every night in a dream—would to God it had been all a dream!—a most worldly life, a damning life, a life of Sardanapalus. One single look too freely cast upon a woman well-nigh caused me to lose my soul; but finally by the grace of God and the assistance of my patron saint, I succeeded in casting out the evil spirit that possessed me. My daily life was long interwoven with a nocturnal life of a totally different character. By day I was a priest of the Lord, occupied with prayer and sacred things; by night, from the instant that I closed my eyes I became a young nobleman, a fine connoisseur in women, dogs, and horses; gambling, drinking, and blaspheming; and when I awoke at early daybreak, it seemed to me, on the other hand, that I had been sleeping, and had only dreamed that I was a priest. Of this somnambulistic life there now remains to me only the recollection of certain scenes and words which I cannot banish from my memory; but although I never actually left the walls of my presbytery, one would think to hear me speak that I were a man who, weary of all worldly pleasures, had become a religious, seeking to end a tempestuous life in the service of God, rather than a humble seminarist who has grown old in this obscure curacy, situated in the depths of the woods and even isolated from the life of the century. Yes, I have loved as none in the world ever loved—with an insensate and furious passion—so violent that I am astonished it did not cause my heart to burst asunder. Ah, what nights—what nights! From my earliest childhood I had felt a vocation to the priesthood, so that all my studies were directed with that idea in view. Up to the age of twenty-four my life had been only a prolonged novitiate. Having completed my course of theology I successively received all the minor orders, and my superiors judged me worthy, despite my youth, to pass the last awful degree. My ordination was fixed for Easter week. I had never gone into the world. My world was confined by the walls of the college and the seminary. I knew in a vague sort of a way that there was something called Woman, but I never permitted my thoughts to dwell on such a subject, and I lived in a state of perfect innocence. Twice a year only I saw my infirm and aged mother, and in those visits were comprised my sole relations with the outer world. I regretted nothing; I felt not the least hesitation at taking the last irrevocable step; I was filled with joy and impatience. Never did a betrothed lover count the slow hours with more feverish ardour; I slept only to dream that I was saying mass; I believed there could be nothing in the world more delightful than to be a priest; I would have refused to be a king or a poet in preference. My ambition could conceive of no loftier aim. I tell you this in order to show you that what happened to me could not have happened in the natural order of things, and to enable you to understand that I was the victim of an inexplicable fascination. At last the great day came. I walked to the church with a step so light that I fancied myself sustained in air, or that I had wings upon my shoulders. I believed myself an angel, and wondered at the sombre and thoughtful faces of my companions, for there were several of us. I had passed all the night in prayer, and was in a condition wellnigh bordering on ecstasy. The bishop, a venerable old man, seemed to me God the Father leaning over His Eternity, and I beheld Heaven through the vault of the temple. You well know the details of that ceremony—the benediction, the communion under both forms, the anointing of the palms of the hands with the Oil of Catechumens, and then the holy sacrifice offered in concert with the bishop. Ah, truly spake Job when he declared that the imprudent man is one who hath not made a covenant with his eyes! I accidentally lifted my head, which until then I had kept down, and beheld before me, so close that it seemed that I could have touched her—although she was actually a considerable distance from me and on the further side of the sanctuary railing—a young woman of extraordinary beauty, and attired with royal magnificence. It seemed as though scales had suddenly fallen from my eyes. I felt like a blind man who unexpectedly recovers his sight. The bishop, so radiantly glorious but an instant before, suddenly vanished away, the tapers paled upon their golden candlesticks like stars in the dawn, and a vast darkness seemed to fill the whole church. The charming creature appeared in bright relief against the background of that darkness, like some angelic revelation. She seemed herself radiant, and radiating light rather than receiving it. I lowered my eyelids, firmly resolved not to again open them, that I might not be influenced by external objects, for distraction had gradually taken possession of me until I hardly knew what I was doing. In another minute, nevertheless, I reopened my eyes, for through my eyelashes I still beheld her, all sparkling with prismatic colours, and surrounded with such a penumbra as one beholds in gazing at the sun. Oh, how beautiful she was! The greatest painters, who followed ideal beauty into heaven itself, and thence brought back to earth the true portrait of the Madonna, never in their delineations even approached that wildly beautiful reality which I saw before me. Neither the verses of the poet nor the palette of the artist could convey any conception of her. She was rather tall, with a form and bearing of a goddess. Her hair, of a soft blonde hue, was parted in the midst and flowed back over her temples in two rivers of rippling gold; she seemed a diademed queen. Her forehead, bluish-white in its transparency, extended its calm breadth above the arches of her eyebrows, which by a strange singularity were almost black, and admirably relieved the effect of sea-green eyes of unsustainable vivacity and brilliancy. What eyes! With a single flash they could have decided a man’s destiny. They had a life, a limpidity, an ardour, a humid light which I have never seen in human eyes; they shot forth rays like arrows, which I could distinctly see enter my heart. I know not if the fire which illumined them came from heaven or from hell, but assuredly it came from one or the other. That woman was either an angel or a demon, perhaps both. Assuredly she never sprang from the flank of Eve, our common mother. Teeth of the most lustrous pearl gleamed in her ruddy smile, and at every inflection of her lips little dimples appeared in the satiny rose of her adorable cheeks. There was a delicacy and pride in the regal outline of her nostrils bespeaking noble blood. Agate gleams played over the smooth lustrous skin of her half-bare shoulders, and strings of great blonde pearls—almost equal to her neck in beauty of colour—descended upon her bosom. From time to time she elevated her head with the undulating grace of a startled serpent or peacock, thereby imparting a quivering motion to the high lace ruff which surrounded it like a silver trellis-work. She wore a robe of orange-red velvet, and from her wide ermine-lined sleeves there peeped forth patrician hands of infinite delicacy, and so ideally transparent that, like the fingers of Aurora, they permitted the light to shine through them. All these details I can recollect at this moment as plainly as though they were of yesterday, for notwithstanding I was greatly troubled at the time, nothing escaped me; the faintest touch of shading, the little dark speck at the point of the chin, the imperceptible down at the corners of the lips, the velvety floss upon the brow, the quivering shadows of the eyelashes upon the cheeks—I could notice everything with astonishing lucidity of perception. And gazing I felt opening within me gates that had until then remained closed; vents long obstructed became all clear, permitting glimpses of unfamiliar perspectives within; life suddenly made itself visible to me under a totally novel aspect. I felt as though I had just been born into a new world and a new order of things. A frightful anguish commenced to torture-my heart as with red-hot pincers. Every successive minute seemed to me at once but a second and yet a century. Meanwhile the ceremony was proceeding, and I shortly found myself transported far from that world of which my newly born desires were furiously besieging the entrance. Nevertheless I answered ‘Yes’ when I wished to say ‘No,’ though all within me protested against the violence done to my soul by my tongue. Some occult power seemed to force the words from my throat against my will. Thus it is, perhaps, that so many young girls walk to the altar firmly resolved to refuse in a startling manner the husband imposed upon them, and that yet not one ever fulfils her intention. Thus it is, doubtless, that so many poor novices take the veil, though they have resolved to tear it into shreds at the moment when called upon to utter the vows. One dares not thus cause so great a scandal to all present, nor deceive the expectation of so many people. All those eyes, all those wills seem to weigh down upon you like a cope of lead, and, moreover, measures have been so well taken, everything has been so thoroughly arranged beforehand and after a fashion so evidently irrevocable, that the will yields to the weight of circumstances and utterly breaks down. As the ceremony proceeded the features of the fair unknown changed their expression. Her look had at first been one of caressing tenderness; it changed to an air of disdain and of mortification, as though at not having been able to make itself understood. With an effort of will sufficient to have uprooted a mountain, I strove to cry out that I would not be a priest, but I could not speak; my tongue seemed nailed to my palate, and I found it impossible to express my will by the least syllable of negation. Though fully awake, I felt like one under the influence of a nightmare, who vainly strives to shriek out the one word upon which life depends. She seemed conscious of the martyrdom I was undergoing, and, as though to encourage me, she gave me a look replete with divinest promise. Her eyes were a poem; their every glance was a song. She said to me: ‘If thou wilt be mine, I shall make thee happier than God Himself in His paradise. The angels themselves will be jealous of thee. Tear off that funeral shroud in which thou art about to wrap thyself. I am Beauty, I am Youth, I am Life. Come to me! Together we shall be Love. Can Jehovah offer thee aught in exchange? Our lives will flow on like a dream, in one eternal kiss. ‘Fling forth the wine of that chalice, and thou art free. I will conduct thee to the Unknown Isles. Thou shalt sleep in my bosom upon a bed of massy gold under a silver pavilion, for I love thee and would take thee away from thy God, before whom so many noble hearts pour forth floods of love which never reach even the steps of His throne!’ These words seemed to float to my ears in a rhythm of infinite sweetness, for her look was actually sonorous, and the utterances of her eyes were reechoed in the depths of my heart as though living lips had breathed them into my life. I felt myself willing to renounce God, and yet my tongue mechanically fulfilled all the formalities of the ceremony. The fair one gave me another look, so beseeching, so despairing that keen blades seemed to pierce my heart, and I felt my bosom transfixed by more swords than those of Our Lady of Sorrows. All was consummated; I had become a priest. Never was deeper anguish painted on human face than upon hers. The maiden who beholds her affianced lover suddenly fall dead at her side, the mother bending over the empty cradle of her child, Eve seated at the threshold of the gate of Paradise, the miser who finds a stone substituted for his stolen treasure, the poet who accidentally permits the only manuscript of his finest work to fall into the fire, could not wear a look so despairing, so inconsolable. All the blood had abandoned her charming face, leaving it whiter than marble; her beautiful arms hung lifelessly on either side of her body as though their muscles had suddenly relaxed, and she sought the support of a pillar, for her yielding limbs almost betrayed her. As for myself, I staggered toward the door of the church, livid as death, my forehead bathed with a sweat bloodier than that of Calvary; I felt as though I were being strangled; the vault seemed to have flattened down upon my shoulders, and it seemed to me that my head alone sustained the whole weight of the dome. As I was about to cross the threshold a hand suddenly caught mine—a woman’s hand! I had never till then touched the hand of any woman. It was cold as a serpent’s skin, and yet its impress remained upon my wrist, burnt there as though branded by a glowing iron. It was she. ‘Unhappy man! Unhappy man! What hast thou done?’ she exclaimed in a low voice, and immediately disappeared in the crowd. The aged bishop passed by. He cast a severe and scrutinising look upon me. My face presented the wildest aspect imaginable: I blushed and turned pale alternately; dazzling lights flashed before my eyes. A companion took pity on me. He seized my arm and led me out. I could not possibly have found my way back to the seminary unassisted. At the corner of a street, while the young priest’s attention was momentarily turned in another direction, a negro page, fantastically garbed, approached me, and without pausing on his way slipped into my hand a little pocket-book with gold-embroidered corners, at the same time giving me a sign to hide it. I concealed it in my sleeve, and there kept it until I found myself alone in my cell. Then I opened the clasp. There were only two leaves within, bearing the words, ‘Clarimonde. At the Concini Palace.’ So little acquainted was I at that time with the things of this world that I had never heard of Clarimonde, celebrated as she was, and I had no idea as to where the Concini Palace was situated. I hazarded a thousand conjectures, each more extravagant than the last; but, in truth, I cared little whether she were a great lady or a courtesan, so that I could but see her once more. My love, although the growth of a single hour, had taken imperishable root. I did not even dream of attempting to tear it up, so fully was I convinced such a thing would be impossible. That woman had completely taken possession of me. One look from her had sufficed to change my very nature. She had breathed her will into my life, and I no longer lived in myself, but in her and for her. I gave myself up to a thousand extravagancies. I kissed the place upon my hand which she had touched, and I repeated her name over and over again for hours in succession. I only needed to close my eyes in order to see her distinctly as though she were actually present; and I reiterated to myself the words she had uttered in my ear at the church porch: ‘Unhappy man! Unhappy man! What hast thou done?’ I comprehended at last the full horror of my situation, and the funereal and awful restraints of the state into which I had just entered became clearly revealed to me. To be a priest!—that is, to be chaste, to never love, to observe no distinction of sex or age, to turn from the sight of all beauty, to put out one’s own eyes, to hide for ever crouching in the chill shadows of some church or cloister, to visit none but the dying, to watch by unknown corpses, and ever bear about with one the black soutane as a garb of mourning for oneself, so that your very dress might serve as a pall for your coffin. And I felt life rising within me like a subterranean lake, expanding and overflowing; my blood leaped fiercely through my arteries; my long-restrained youth suddenly burst into active being, like the aloe which blooms but once in a hundred years, and then bursts into blossom with a clap of thunder. What could I do in order to see Clarimonde once more? I had no pretext to offer for desiring to leave the seminary, not knowing any person in the city. I would not even be able to remain there but a short time, and was only waiting my assignment to the curacy which I must thereafter occupy. I tried to remove the bars of the window; but it was at a fearful height from the ground, and I found that as I had no ladder it would be useless to think of escaping thus. And, furthermore, I could descend thence only by night in any event, and afterward how should I be able to find my way through the inextricable labyrinth of streets? All these difficulties, which to many would have appeared altogether insignificant, were gigantic to me, a poor seminarist who had fallen in love only the day before for the first time, without experience, without money, without attire. ‘Ah!’ cried I to myself in my blindness, ‘were I not a priest I could have seen her every day; I might have been her lover, her spouse. Instead of being wrapped in this dismal shroud of mine I would have had garments of silk and velvet, golden chains, a sword, and fair plumes like other handsome young cavaliers. My hair, instead of being dishonoured by the tonsure, would flow down upon my neck in waving curls; I would have a fine waxed moustache; I would be a gallant.’ But one hour passed before an altar, a few hastily articulated words, had for ever cut me off from the number of the living, and I had myself sealed down the stone of my own tomb; I had with my own hand bolted the gate of my prison! I went to the window. The sky was beautifully blue; the trees had donned their spring robes; nature seemed to be making parade of an ironical joy. The Place was filled with people, some going, others coming; young beaux and young beauties were sauntering in couples toward the groves and gardens; merry youths passed by, cheerily trolling refrains of drinking-songs—it was all a picture of vivacity, life, animation, gaiety, which formed a bitter contrast with my mourning and my solitude. On the steps of the gate sat a young mother playing with her child. She kissed its little rosy mouth still impearled with drops of milk, and performed, in order to amuse it, a thousand divine little puerilities such as only mothers know how to invent. The father standing at a little distance smiled gently upon the charming group, and with folded arms seemed to hug his joy to his heart. I could not endure that spectacle. I closed the window with violence, and flung myself on my bed, my heart filled with frightful hate and jealousy, and gnawed my fingers and my bedcovers like a tiger that has passed ten days without food. I know not how long I remained in this condition, but at last, while writhing on the bed in a fit of spasmodic fury, I suddenly perceived the Abbé Sérapion, who was standing erect in the centre of the room, watching me attentively. Filled with shame of myself, I let my head fall upon my breast and covered my face with my hands. ‘Romuald, my friend, something very extraordinary is transpiring within you,’ observed Sérapion, after a few moments’ silence; ‘your conduct is altogether inexplicable. You—always so quiet, so pious, so gentle—you to rage in your cell like a wild beast! Take heed, brother—do not listen to the suggestions of the devil The Evil Spirit, furious that you have consecrated yourself for ever to the Lord, is prowling around you like a ravening wolf and making a last effort to obtain possession of you. Instead of allowing yourself to be conquered, my dear Romuald, make to yourself a cuirass of prayers, a buckler of mortifications, and combat the enemy like a valiant man; you will then assuredly overcome him. Virtue must be proved by temptation, and gold comes forth purer from the hands of the assayer. Fear not. Never allow yourself to become discouraged. The most watchful and steadfast souls are at moments liable to such temptation. Pray, fast, meditate, and the Evil Spirit will depart from you.’ The words of the Abbé Sérapion restored me to myself, and I became a little more calm. ‘I came,’ he continued, ‘to tell you that you have been appointed to the curacy of C———. The priest who had charge of it has just died, and Monseigneur the Bishop has ordered me to have you installed there at once. Be ready, therefore, to start to-morrow.’ I responded with an inclination of the head, and the Abbé retired. I opened my missal and commenced reading some prayers, but the letters became confused and blurred under my eyes, the thread of the ideas entangled itself hopelessly in my brain, and the volume at last fell from my hands without my being aware of it. To leave to-morrow without having been able to see her again, to add yet another barrier to the many already interposed between us, to lose for ever all hope of being able to meet her, except, indeed, through a miracle! Even to write to her, alas! would be impossible, for by whom could I dispatch my letter? With my sacred character of priest, to whom could I dare unbosom myself, in whom could I confide? I became a prey to the bitterest anxiety. Then suddenly recurred to me the words of the Abbé Sérapion regarding the artifices of the devil; and the strange character of the adventure, the supernatural beauty of Clarimonde, the phosphoric light of her eyes, the burning imprint of her hand, the agony into which she had thrown me, the sudden change wrought within me when all my piety vanished in a single instant—these and other things clearly testified to the work of the Evil One, and perhaps that satiny hand was but the glove which concealed his claws. Filled with terror at these fancies, I again picked up the missal which had slipped from my knees and fallen upon the floor, and once more gave myself up to prayer. Next morning Sérapion came to take me away. Two mules freighted with our miserable valises awaited us at the gate. He mounted one, and I the other as well as I knew how. As we passed along the streets of the city, I gazed attentively at all the windows and balconies in the hope of seeing Clarimonde, but it was yet early in the morning, and the city had hardly opened its eyes. Mine sought to penetrate the blinds and window-curtains of all the palaces before which we were passing. Sérapion doubtless attributed this curiosity to my admiration of the architecture, for he slackened the pace of his animal in order to give me time to look around me. At last we passed the city gates and commenced to mount the hill beyond. When we arrived at its summit I turned to take a last look at the place where Clarimonde dwelt. The shadow of a great cloud hung over all the city; the contrasting colours of its blue and red roofs were lost in the uniform half-tint, through which here and there floated upward, like white flakes of foam, the smoke of freshly kindled fires. By a singular optical effect one edifice, which surpassed in height all the neighbouring buildings that were still dimly veiled by the vapours, towered up, fair and lustrous with the gilding of a solitary beam of sunlight—although actually more than a league away it seemed quite near. The smallest details of its architecture were plainly distinguishable—the turrets, the platforms, the window-casements, and even the swallow-tailed weather-vanes. ‘What is that palace I see over there, all lighted up by the sun?’ I asked Sérapion. He shaded his eyes with his hand, and having looked in the direction indicated, replied: ‘It is the ancient palace which the Prince Concini has given to the courtesan Clarimonde. Awful things are done there!’ At that instant, I know not yet whether it was a reality or an illusion, I fancied I saw gliding along the terrace a shapely white figure, which gleamed for a moment in passing and as quickly vanished. It was Clarimonde. Oh, did she know that at that very hour, all feverish and restless—from the height of the rugged road which separated me from her, and which, alas! I could never more descend—I was directing my eyes upon the palace where she dwelt, and which a mocking beam of sunlight seemed to bring nigh to me, as though inviting me to enter therein as its lord? Undoubtedly she must have known it, for her soul was too sympathetically united with mine not to have felt its least emotional thrill, and that subtle sympathy it must have been which prompted her to climb—although clad only in her nightdress—to the summit of the terrace, amid the icy dews of the morning. The shadow gained the palace, and the scene became to the eye only a motionless ocean of roofs and gables, amid which one mountainous undulation was distinctly visible. Sérapion urged his mule forward, my own at once followed at the same gait, and a sharp angle in the road at last hid the city of S——— for ever from my eyes, as I was destined never to return thither. At the close of a weary three-days’ journey through dismal country fields, we caught sight of the cock upon the steeple of the church which I was to take charge of, peeping above the trees, and after having followed some winding roads fringed with thatched cottages and little gardens, we found ourselves in front of the façade, which certainly possessed few features of magnificence. A porch ornamented with some mouldings, and two or three pillars rudely hewn from sandstone; a tiled roof with counterforts of the same sandstone as the pillars—that was all. To the left lay the cemetery, overgrown with high weeds, and having a great iron cross rising up in its centre; to the right stood the presbytery under the shadow of the church. It was a house of the most extreme simplicity and frigid cleanliness. We entered the enclosure. A few chickens were picking up some oats scattered upon the ground; accustomed, seemingly, to the black habit of ecclesiastics, they showed no fear of our presence and scarcely troubled themselves to get out of our way. A hoarse, wheezy barking fell upon our ears, and we saw an aged dog running toward us. It was my predecessor’s dog. He had dull bleared eyes, grizzled hair, and every mark of the greatest age to which a dog can possibly attain. I patted him gently, and he proceeded at once to march along beside me with an air of satisfaction unspeakable. A very old woman, who had been the housekeeper of the former curé, also came to meet us, and after having invited me into a little back parlour, asked whether I intended to retain her. I replied that I would take care of her, and the dog, and the chickens, and all the furniture her master had bequeathed her at his death. At this she became fairly transported with joy, and the Abbé Sérapion at once paid her the price which she asked for her little property. As soon as my installation was over, the Abbé Sérapion returned to the seminary. I was, therefore, left alone, with no one but myself to look to for aid or counsel. The thought of Clarimonde again began to haunt me, and in spite of all my endeavours to banish it, I always found it present in my meditations. One evening, while promenading in my little garden along the walks bordered with box-plants, I fancied that I saw through the elm-trees the figure of a woman, who followed my every movement, and that I beheld two sea-green eyes gleaming through the foliage; but it was only an illusion, and on going round to the other side of the garden, I could find nothing except a footprint on the sanded walk—a footprint so small that it seemed to have been made by the foot of a child. The garden was enclosed by very high walls. I searched every nook and corner of it, but could discover no one there. I have never succeeded in fully accounting for this circumstance, which, after all, was nothing compared with the strange things which happened to me afterward. For a whole year I lived thus, filling all the duties of my calling with the most scrupulous exactitude, praying and fasting, exhorting and lending ghostly aid to the sick, and bestowing alms even to the extent of frequently depriving myself of the very necessaries of life. But I felt a great aridness within me, and the sources of grace seemed closed against me. I never found that happiness which should spring from the fulfilment of a holy mission; my thoughts were far away, and the words of Clarimonde were ever upon my lips like an involuntary refrain. Oh, brother, meditate well on this! Through having but once lifted my eyes to look upon a woman, through one fault apparently so venial, I have for years remained a victim to the most miserable agonies, and the happiness of my life has been destroyed for ever. I will not longer dwell upon those defeats, or on those inward victories invariably followed by yet more terrible falls, but will at once proceed to the facts of my story. One night my door-bell was long and violently rung. The aged housekeeper arose and opened to the stranger, and the figure of a man, whose complexion was deeply bronzed, and who was richly clad in a foreign costume, with a poniard at his girdle, appeared under the rays of Barbara’s lantern. Her first impulse was one of terror, but the stranger reassured her, and stated that he desired to see me at once on matters relating to my holy calling. Barbara invited him upstairs, where I was on the point of retiring. The stranger told me that his mistress, a very noble lady, was lying at the point of death, and desired to see a priest. I replied that I was prepared to follow him, took with me the sacred articles necessary for extreme unction, and descended in all haste. Two horses black as the night itself stood without the gate, pawing the ground with impatience, and veiling their chests with long streams of smoky vapour exhaled from their nostrils. He held the stirrup and aided me to mount upon one; then, merely laying his hand upon the pommel of the saddle, he vaulted on the other, pressed the animal’s sides with his knees, and loosened rein. The horse bounded forward with the velocity of an arrow. Mine, of which the stranger held the bridle, also started off at a swift gallop, keeping up with his companion. We devoured the road. The ground flowed backward beneath us in a long streaked line of pale gray, and the black silhouettes of the trees seemed fleeing by us on either side like an army in rout. We passed through a forest so profoundly gloomy that I felt my flesh creep in the chill darkness with superstitious fear. The showers of bright sparks which flew from the stony road under the ironshod feet of our horses remained glowing in our wake like a fiery trail; and had any one at that hour of the night beheld us both—my guide and myself—he must have taken us for two spectres riding upon nightmares. Witch-fires ever and anon flitted across the road before us, and the night-birds shrieked fearsomely in the depth of the woods beyond, where we beheld at intervals glow the phosphorescent eyes of wild cats. The manes of the horses became more and more dishevelled, the sweat streamed over their flanks, and their breath came through their nostrils hard and fast. But when he found them slacking pace, the guide reanimated them by uttering a strange, gutteral, unearthly cry, and the gallop recommenced with fury. At last the whirlwind race ceased; a huge black mass pierced through with many bright points of light suddenly
5097	dbpedia	0	29	https://yalebooks.yale.edu/9780300181555/selected-lyrics	en	Selected Lyrics	https://yale-press-us.im…uto=format&w=298	https://yale-press-us.im…uto=format&w=298	[ "https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/yup-wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/02164734/YUP_logo_tranparentbg-1.png", "https://yalebooks.yale.edu/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://yalebooks.yale.edu/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://yalebooks.yale.edu/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://yalebooks.yale.edu/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://yalebooks.yale.edu/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://yalebooks.yale.edu/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://yalebooks.yale.edu/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://yalebooks.yale.edu/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://yalebooks.yale.edu/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://yalebooks.yale.edu/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://yalebooks.yale.edu/wp-content/themes/university_press_theme/img/lazy-load-image.jpg", "https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/yup-wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/19164841/YUP_logo_white.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2018-08-10T13:41:55+00:00	The selected poems of one of the most important nineteenth-century French writers, masterfully translated In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound begins his short ...	en	https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cl…on-228-32x32.png	Yale University Press	https://yalebooks.yale.edu/9780300181555/selected-lyrics	The selected poems of one of the most important nineteenth-century French writers, masterfully translated In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound begins his short list of nineteenth-century French poets to be studied with Théophile Gautier. Widely esteemed by figures as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Gustave Flaubert, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and T. S. Eliot, Gautier was one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent French writers, famous for his virtuosity, his inventive textures, and his motto “Art for art’s sake.” His work is often considered a crucial hinge between High Romanticism—idealistic, sentimental, grandiloquent—and the beginnings of “Parnasse,” with its emotional detachment, plasticity, and irresistible surfaces. His large body of verse, however, is little known outside France. This generous sampling, anchored by the complete Émaux et Camées, perhaps Gautier’s supreme poetic achievement, and including poems from the vigorously exotic España and several early collections, not only succeeds in bringing these poems into English but also rediscovers them, renewing them in the process of translation. Norman Shapiro’s translations have been widely praised for their formal integrity, sonic acuity, tonal sensitivities, and overall poetic qualities, and he employs all these gifts in this collection. Mining one of the crucial treasures of the French tradition, Shapiro makes a major contribution to world letters.
5097	dbpedia	3	93	https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6795/th%25C3%25A9ophile-gautier	en	1872) – Find a Grave Gedenkstätte	https://images.findagrav…84085067657.jpeg	https://images.findagrav…84085067657.jpeg	[ "https://www.findagrave.com/assets/images/logo-fff.png", "https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2023/56/6795_a8433b25-68ba-463b-ae92-d84085067657.jpeg?size=photos250", "https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2019/238/166477547_d4efbf4f-b1f9-499b-a25a-cebe84b6aebc.png?size=photoThumbnails", "https://images.findagrave.com/default-image.png", "https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2023/56/6795_a8433b25-68ba-463b-ae92-d84085067657.jpeg", "https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2001/222/gautiertheophil.jpg", "https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2006/126/6795_114706684214.jpg", "https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2014/133/6795_1400067444.jpg", "https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2015/209/6795_1438233058.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Full name Pierre-Jules Theophile Gautier. Critic (advocate of 'art for art's sake), poet and novelist (Mlle. de Maupin (1835), Le Capitaine Fracasse (1853)).	de	/assets/images/fg-icon.svg		https://de.findagrave.com/memorial/6795/th%C3%A9ophile-gautier	Es gibt ein Problem mit Ihrer E-Mail bzw. Ihrem Passwort. Es gibt ein Problem mit Ihrer E-Mail bzw. Ihrem Passwort. Es gibt ein Problem mit Ihrer E-Mail bzw. Ihrem Passwort. Wir sind auf ein unbekanntes Problem gestoßen. Warten Sie einige Minuten und versuchen Sie es noch einmal. Wenn das Problem weiterhin besteht, kontaktieren Sie Find a Grave. Wir haben die Sicherheit auf der Seite aktualisiert. Sie müssen Ihr Passwort zurücksetzen. Ihr Konto wurde wegen zu vieler fehlgeschlagener Anmeldeversuche für 30 Minuten gesperrt. Bitte kontaktieren Sie Find a Grave unter [email protected], wenn Sie Hilfe beim Zurücksetzen Ihres Passworts benötigen. Dieses Konto wurde deaktiviert. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie bitte [email protected] Dieses Konto wurde deaktiviert. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie bitte [email protected] E-Mail nicht gefunden. Bitte füllen Sie das Captcha aus, damit wir wissen, dass Sie eine echte Person sind. Mehr als einen Datensatz für eingegebene E-Mail gefunden. Wir haben Ihnen zur Aktivierung eine E-Mail geschickt. Sign in to your existing Find a Grave account. You’ll only have to do this once—after your accounts are connected, you can sign in using your Ancestry sign in or your Find a Grave sign in. We found an existing Find a Grave account associated with your email address. Sign in below with your Find a Grave credentials to link your Ancestry account. After your accounts are connected you can sign in using either account. Geben Sie zum Anmelden Ihre E-Mail-Adresse ein. Geben Sie zum Anmelden Ihr Passwort ein. Geben Sie zum Anmelden Ihre E-Mail-Adresse und Ihr Passwort ein. Es gibt ein Problem mit Ihrer E-Mail bzw. Ihrem Passwort. Es ist ein Systemfehler aufgetreten. Bitte versuchen Sie es später erneut. Eine E-Mail zum Zurücksetzen des Passworts wurde an Email-ID gesendet. Wenn Sie keine E-Mail erhalten haben, durchsuchen Sie bitte Ihren Spam-Ordner. Wir sind auf ein unbekanntes Problem gestoßen. Warten Sie einige Minuten und versuchen Sie es noch einmal. Wenn das Problem weiterhin besteht, kontaktieren Sie Find a Grave.
5097	dbpedia	0	91	https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/decadence/rather-a-delicate-subject/C1055646C2262AEE178C69CC350DEFA9	en	‘Rather a Delicate Subject’ (Chapter 3)	https://www.cambridge.or…hare_600x600.jpg	https://www.cambridge.or…hare_600x600.jpg	[ "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/icn_circle__btn_close_white.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.png", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.svg", "https://assets.cambridge.org/97811084/45016/cover/9781108445016.jpg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/page-component/img/share-icon.cbcfad8.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/page-component/img/close-icon.194b28a.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/page-component/img/cite-icon.44eaaa4.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/cambridge_logo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Alex Murray", "Queen's University Belfast" ]	null	Decadence - October 2020	en	/core/cambridge-core/public/images/favicon.ico	Cambridge Core	https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/decadence/rather-a-delicate-subject/C1055646C2262AEE178C69CC350DEFA9	To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle. Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
5097	dbpedia	2	67	http://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0227	en	Destins de femmes: French Women Writers, 1750-1850	https://blogs.openbookpu…in_-_Libert-.jpg	https://blogs.openbookpu…in_-_Libert-.jpg	[ "https://analytics.openbookpublishers.com/matomo.php?idsite=5&rec=1", "https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/content/images/2019/10/OBP_logo_color.png", "https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/content/images/2019/10/OBP_logo_color.png", "https://cdn.openbookpublishers.com/favicon_e70e5e5e85.png", "https://cdn.openbookpublishers.com/small_obp_logo_high_res_8ad3ef43d4.jpg", "http://doi.org/content/images/size/w300/2021/05/Spring-Newsletter--1-.png 300w, /content/images/size/w600/2021/05/Spring-Newsletter--1-.png 600w, /content/images/size/w1000/2021/05/Spring-Newsletter--1-.png 1000w, /content/images/size/w2000/2021/05/Spring-Newsletter--1-.png 2000w", "http://doi.org/content/images/size/w100/2019/10/logo220-1.png", "http://doi.org/content/images/size/w100/2019/10/Laura-Website.jpg", "http://doi.org/content/images/size/w100/2019/10/lucy.jpg", "http://doi.org/content/images/size/w300/2024/04/attila-janosi-xlO4V1RRFIY-unsplash-1.jpg 300w, /content/images/size/w600/2024/04/attila-janosi-xlO4V1RRFIY-unsplash-1.jpg 600w, /content/images/size/w1000/2024/04/attila-janosi-xlO4V1RRFIY-unsplash-1.jpg 1000w, /content/images/size/w2000/2024/04/attila-janosi-xlO4V1RRFIY-unsplash-1.jpg 2000w", "http://doi.org/content/images/size/w100/2019/10/logo220-1.png", "http://doi.org/content/images/size/w300/2024/03/obp.0334.jpg 300w, /content/images/size/w600/2024/03/obp.0334.jpg 600w, /content/images/size/w1000/2024/03/obp.0334.jpg 1000w, /content/images/size/w2000/2024/03/obp.0334.jpg 2000w", "http://doi.org/content/images/size/w100/2019/10/logo220-1.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Open Book Publishers", "www.facebook.com" ]	2023-07-24T09:04:52+00:00	Read now a blog post by John Claiborne Isbell on his latest Open Access title 'Destins de femmes: French Women Writers, 1750-1850'	en	https://blogs.openbookpu…9/10/logo250.png	Open Book Publishers Blog	http://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0227	by John Claiborne Isbell Who gets to speak and who does not? One fine day in 1950-something, the Comtesse de Pange, President of the Société staëlienne, put on her best and went to meet the head of the Pléiade, that gatekeeper of the French literary canon, only to be told that Staël would never appear in their series. Well, now she has. But constructing this anthology of French women writers, 1750-1850, still involved consulting more than one worn Second Empire edition: perhaps half its thirty women authors have barely been republished since 1900. What is going on? A sample of thirty leading male authors, 1750-1850, would not encounter this difficulty. Several – Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Chateaubriand, Musset, Hugo – have earned handsome complete works, and journals and societies proliferate. But the powers that be, it seems reasonable to say, which after 1793 banned the word citoyenne and women wearing trousers, have by and large been more comfortable sending Frenchwomen to the guillotine than seeing what they had to write. In French, femme publique and homme public mean two different things. Aux grand hommes la patrie reconnaissante, “To great men the thankful fatherland,” reads the inscription above the Panthéon in Paris. The building contains just six women, with Marie Curie, who won her two Nobel Prizes in 1903 and 1911, entering only in 1995. The French establishment, like others, has evidently preferred celebrating predominantly male achievement, and the patriarchy that complicated our thirty women’s lives – from works left in manuscript to beheading – has been remarkably at ease erasing them from its national narrative. It seems time, in short, for a new century of French women’s voices. These women range from duchesses to butcher’s daughters, from royalists like Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun to socialists like Flora Tristan. Confronting the Revolution, they span the political spectrum from left to right, as their publishing choices here stretch from resolutely public work – Olympe de Gouges’s ringing Déclaration des droits de la femme, in 1791 – to private memoirs and correspondence, even personal diaries like Louise Colet’s Mementos. The anthology includes love letters – Juliette Drouet – and philosophy – Sophie de Condorcet, and its authors range from Suzanne Necker, who condemned divorce in 1794, to Flora Tristan, shot in the chest by the husband she could not be free of. From this diversity, in turn, a fascinating narrative emerges, one of women’s multiple responses to patriarchy’s dead hand. Certain themes recur – wet nurse, convent, unhappy marriage – as do certain decisions – a focus, for instance, on ‘female’ genres, like Sophie Cottin who published anonymous novels and left her poetry unpublished, or like the great memoirists of Revolution and Empire – Lucie de La Tour du Pin, Sophie de Rémusat, Adèle de Boigne. And yet, more than one woman defied that male pressure to swim against the current, like Sophie de Condorcet adding her own eight letters to her translation of Adam Smith, or Marceline Desbordes-Valmore giving up acting for a career as a major, though still-understudied, Romantic poet; like Marie Jeanne Riccoboni or Sophie Gay writing theater; like Germaine de Staël, Olympe de Gouges, or Flora Tristan writing and publishing politics. 1750-1850 is the Romantic period writ large, and this anthology was born out of the insight that French Romantic historiography remains conspicuously lopsided. Aside from George Sand and Germaine de Staël, women writers are often name-checked at best, if not passed over in silence, including figures like Félicité de Genlis, who published over 140 books and educated Louis-Philippe. The women of the age deserve better of posterity; frankly, they deserve better of France. My hope is that this anthology of women’s destinies will encourage scholars to reopen those old Second Empire volumes, as I have, and maybe bring out a new edition; to speak of Sophie Cottin at a Nineteenth-Century French Studies conference, instead of feminism in, say, Flaubert (who trashed Louise Colet) or the misogynist Baudelaire; to ask, finally, whether French Romanticism has a missing planet, one raising questions less urgent to its male practitioners. Victor Hugo told Juliette Drouet that she was not to leave her apartment without him, and the two stayed that way for fifty years. Today, the splendid French National Library files Drouet’s letters not under D, for Drouet, but under H. This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
5097	dbpedia	0	2	https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Th%25C3%25A9ophile-Gautier/324366	en	Théophile Gautier	https://kids.britannica.…-07-14-17-A2.jpg	https://kids.britannica.…-07-14-17-A2.jpg	[ "https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=160638381132823&ev=PageView&noscript=1", "https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/activity;dc_iu=/15510053/DFPAudiencePixel;ord=1;dc_seg=806891421", "https://kids.britannica.com/resources/img/BkidsLogoDesktop.png", "https://kids.britannica.com/resources/img/BkidsLogoTruncated.png", "https://cdn.britannica.com/96/96896-004-619935C4.jpg?w=300&h=300&q=85", "https://cdn.britannica.com/20/19320-004-3CF3513D.jpg?w=300&h=300&q=85", "https://kids.britannica.com/resources/img/tour/icon-inspire.png", "https://kids.britannica.com/resources/img/tour/icon-inform.png", "https://kids.britannica.com/resources/img/tour/icon-educate.png", "https://kids.britannica.com/resources/img/tour/icon-subscribe-yellow.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "Théophile Gautier", "encyclopedia", "encyclopaedia", "article" ]	null	[]	null	(1811–72). The French poet, novelist, critic, and journalist Théophile Gautier exerted a strong influence in the period of changing sensibilities in French literature—from…	en	/resources/icons/favicons/bkids/bkids-favicon-57c.png	Britannica Kids	https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Théophile-Gautier/324366	(1811–72). The French poet, novelist, critic, and journalist Théophile Gautier exerted a strong influence in the period of changing sensibilities in French literature—from the early Romantic period to the aestheticism and naturalism of the end of the 19th century. His literary output was prodigious, but his art and dramatic criticism alone—partly reprinted in Les Beaux-Arts en Europe (1855) and in the six-volume Histoire de l’art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans (1858–59; History of Drama in France for Twenty-Five Years)—would ensure his reputation. Théophile Gautier, sometimes known as Le Bon Théo, was born on Aug. 31, 1811, in Tarbes, France, and lived most of his life in Paris. At the Collège de Charlemagne he met Gérard de Nerval and began a lasting friendship. He studied painting but soon decided that his true vocation was poetry. Sympathetic to the Romantic movement, he took part in the cultural battle that ensued when Victor Hugo’s play Hernani was first performed in Paris in 1830. He humorously recalled this period in Histoire du romantisme (1874; History of Romanticism) and in Portraits contemporains (1874; Contemporary Portraits), in which he gave an excellent description of his friend Honoré de Balzac. He satirized his own extravagances, as well as those of other Romanticists, in Les Jeunes-France (1833; Young France). Les Grotesques (1834–36) is about more obscure earlier writers whose individualism anticipated that of the Romantics. Gautier’s first poems appeared in 1830. Albertus, a long narrative about a young painter who falls into the hands of a sorcerer, was published in 1832. At this time he turned from the doctrines of Romanticism and became an advocate of art for art’s sake. The preface to Albertus and the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) express his views, which caused a considerable stir in literary circles by their disregard of conventional morality and insistence on the sovereignty of the beautiful. His pessimism and fear of death were expressed in the narrative poem La Comédie de la mort (1838; The Comedy of Death). In 1840 Gautier visited Spain; the color of the land and people inspired some of his best poetry, in España (1845), and prose, in Voyage en Espagne (1845). After this trip he found traveling to be a welcome escape from the constant pressures of his journalistic work, which he pursued to support himself, two mistresses, and his three children, as well as his two sisters. From 1836 to 1855 he was a weekly contributor to La Presse and Le Moniteur Universel. Besides this work he contributed to many other periodicals and papers. Traveling, especially in Greece, strengthened his theory of art, his admiration of classical forms. He felt that art should be impersonal and free from the obligation of teaching moral lessons and that the aim of the artist is to concentrate on achieving perfection of form. He developed a technique in poetry that he called transposition d’art (transposing art), recording his exact impressions when experiencing a painting or other work of art. These poems, published in Émaux et camées (1852; Enamels and Cameos), are among his finest, and the book was a point of departure for the writers Théodore de Banville and Leconte de Lisle. Charles Baudelaire paid tribute to Gautier in the dedication of his verse collection Les Fleurs du mal. Gautier’s poetic and fantastic imagination is seen to advantage in his short fiction such as the evocations of ancient Pompeii in “Arria Marcella” (1852) and the vampire story “La Mort amoureuse” (1857; The Dead Lover). He also wrote plays and the popular ballet Giselle, written in collaboration with Vernoy de Saint-Georges.
5097	dbpedia	2	88	https://untappedcities.com/2013/01/31/visit-homes-of-four-french-writers/	en	Visit the Homes of Four Famous French Writers	https://untappedcities.c…Paris-Marais.jpg	https://untappedcities.c…Paris-Marais.jpg	[ "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/featured-speakeasy-tour-2024-collage-untapped-new-york1-360x250.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/featured-speakeasy-magick-untapped-new-york1-360x250.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/featured-book-list-untapped-new-york0-360x250.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/olympic-village-long-island-city-2004-nyc-untapped-cities-360x250.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Untapped-New-York-Logo-03.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Untapped-New-York-Logo-02.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Maison-Victor-Hugo-Places-des-Voges-Paris-Marais.jpg", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/de1a4a14eebd7d3e3fce780a3938d3cb?s=50&d=mm&r=g", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Maison-Victor-Hugo-Places-des-Voges-Paris-Marais.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Maison-de-Balzac-Paris-France-Courtyard-3.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Musee-de-la-Vie-Romantique-Paris-France.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Musee-Carnavalet-Le-Marais-Paris.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/featured-speakeasy-tour-2024-collage-untapped-new-york1-360x250.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/featured-giant-oyster-river-project-nyc-untapped-cities1-1-360x250.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/featured-ellis-island-tour-klaus-2024-untapped-new-york2-360x250.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Become-an-Insider-Ad-Box-300x219.jpg", "https://untappedcities.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Untapped-New-York-Logo-Small-2-01.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "samantha schnell", "Untapped New York", "Will Fainaru", "Thomas Hynes" ]	2013-01-31T00:00:00	Visit the "Untapped" homes-turned-museums of four famous French writers in Paris.	en	https://untappedcities.c…York-Favicon.jpg	Untapped New York	https://untappedcities.com/2013/01/31/visit-homes-of-four-french-writers/	In Paris, we are constantly passing by the former homes and haunts of famous French writers. Part of the city’s magic comes from knowing that the cobblestones beneath our feet once bore the weight of some of the most brilliant and eccentric authors who ever lived. The real treat is when we get to go inside these writers’ homes; it is here that we truly travel back through time, gaining access to their inner worlds and maybe even coming to understand what their lives were really like. In Paris, you can visit the homes-turned-museums of four famous French writers: Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, George Sand and Marcel Proust. Follow the Untapped guide and get to know some of the greatest literary spirits of the past. 1. Maison de Victor Hugo, 6 Place des Vosges When Les Misérables was first published in 1862, copies of the book sold out within a few hours. Victor Hugo was on vacation at the time, and his publisher sent him a telegram consisting of a single character: “!”. One hundred-fifty years later, the public is still responding to Les Misérables with an exclamation point (the recent film adaption, starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, broke the record for the number of advance ticket sales for a movie opening on Christmas day). In Paris, fans can get a Les Mis-fix by visiting the Maison de Victor Hugo, where the author lived from 1832 to 1848. A trip to the Maison is worthwhile, even for those who aren’t so fond of Les Misérables; the museum is free, and it’s located in the Place des Vosges, one of the most beautiful squares in all of Paris. And don’t leave without paying a visit to the Chinese art and artifacts in the Salon Chinois. Hugo designed the room for his mistress, Juliette Drouet, while he was living in exile in Guernsey, when Asian art was all the rage. In addition to collecting Chinese art, Hugo apparently also made a hobby out of carving furniture–with this teeth! It sounds crazy, but we have a reliable source. 2. Maison de Balzac, 47 Rue Raynouard Tucked away in the 16th arrondissement, about 20 minutes east of the Bois du Boulogne on foot, sits the house where Balzac lived from 1840 to 1847. In 1849, a year before his death, the city of Paris acquired the author’s former residence and preserved it as a literary museum. Now, visitors can poke around the garden and gaze at the desk where Balzac wrote La Comédie humaine, an enormous multi-volume masterpiece containing more than 2,000 characters and spanning over 30 years, for which he became known as the father of realism. For Balzac, writing a work of such magnitude took time, determination and a massive amount of caffeine. On a typical workday, he would rise at 12 a.m and write through the night, pausing only to pour himself yet another cup of tea or coffee. Balzac’s tea kettle—which he nicknamed the “screech-owl”—is on display at the museum. 3. Musée de la Vie Romantique (George Sand), 16 Rue Chaptal) George Sand is the most famous—perhaps the only famous—female French writer from the 19th century. Even today, the details of Sand’s personal life—her bisexuality, her love affairs, her cross-dressing—receive more attention than her writing does. It’s no wonder that she published her books under a male pseudonym; if she hadn’t, her works may not have been taken seriously at all. The ground floor of the Musée de la Vie Romantique, housed in a former artist’s studio at the foot of Monmartre, is devoted to Sand’s life and work. The museum has collected much of her furniture, personal belongings and original watercolor paintings. The creepiest items on display are the ghostly plaster casts of Sand’s hand and the composer Chopin’s arm which, suspended in their case, look like they belong in a scene from Grey’s Anatomy. Sand and Chopin had a love affair that lasted ten years, and so the arrangement of their plaster hands side by side is a bit ironic. They ended their affair on ugly terms because Sand suspected that Chopin had a crush on her daughter, Solange. In fact, when Chopin was on his deathbed, Solange was the one holding his hand. 4. Musée Carnavalet (Marcel Proust), 23 Rue de Sévigné One of the highlights of the Musée Carnavalet is the replica of Marcel Proust’s cork-lined bedroom, complete with the bed in which he wrote and edited his seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time. It’s amazing—and sad—to think that someone who had such a powerful and lively imagination spent the last three years of his life cooped up in his tiny bedroom, confined to the bed that he owned since childhood. Proust suffered from severe allergies and asthma and, in the days before Allegra and Claritin, the only thing that protected him from the outside world was the layer of cork that lined his walls, designed to keep out the dust and pollen. Proust died before he finished editing the final volumes of his novel but, even in its unpolished form, In Search of Lost Time is widely considered to be one of the greatest works of literature of all time. “It’s Proust who ended the novel,” the American author Andrew Holleran once wrote, “simply by doing something so complete, monumental, perfect, that what the fuck can you do afterwards?” If you want to see the neighborhood where Proust lived, you can walk by his former apartment building at 102 Boulevard Haussmann and take a leisurely stroll through Parc Monceau, the quiet, gated patch of green where Proust took his daily walks.
5097	dbpedia	1	32	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_literature	en	French literature	https://en.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico	https://en.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico	[ "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/icons/wikipedia.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-wordmark-en.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-tagline-en.svg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/99/Question_book-new.svg/50px-Question_book-new.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c3/Flag_of_France.svg/70px-Flag_of_France.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c3/Flag_of_France.svg/16px-Flag_of_France.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fe/Henri_Fantin-Latour_-_By_the_Table_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg/300px-Henri_Fantin-Latour_-_By_the_Table_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/Walk_Samuel_Beckett%2C_Paris_%28France%29_-_Philippe_Binant_Archives.JPG/220px-Walk_Samuel_Beckett%2C_Paris_%28France%29_-_Philippe_Binant_Archives.JPG", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/Jean_Ricardou_and_Claude_Simon_%28Cerisy%2C_France%29_-_Philippe_Binant_Archives.jpg/220px-Jean_Ricardou_and_Claude_Simon_%28Cerisy%2C_France%29_-_Philippe_Binant_Archives.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b0/Litt%C3%A9rature_contemporaine%2C_France%2C_1980_-_Philippe_Binant_Archives.jpg/220px-Litt%C3%A9rature_contemporaine%2C_France%2C_1980_-_Philippe_Binant_Archives.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg/38px-Wikisource-logo.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg/30px-Commons-logo.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/Books-aj.svg_aj_ashton_01.svg/21px-Books-aj.svg_aj_ashton_01.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/10px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png", "https://login.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/wikimedia-button.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/poweredby_mediawiki.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Wikimedia projects" ]	2003-01-22T07:52:17+00:00		en	/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_literature	French Language and Literature Authors • Lit categories French literary history Medieval 16th century • 17th century 18th century • 19th century 20th century • Contemporary Literature by country France • Quebec Postcolonial • Haiti Franco-American Portals France • Literature French literature (French: littérature française) generally speaking, is literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in the French language by citizens of other nations such as Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Senegal, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, etc. is referred to as Francophone literature. For centuries, French literature has been an object of national pride for French people, and it has been one of the most influential aspects of the literature of Europe.[1][2] France ranks first on the list of Nobel Prizes in literature by country. One of the first known examples of French literature is the Song of Roland, the first major work in a series of poems known as, "chansons de geste".[3] The French language is a Romance language derived from Latin and heavily influenced principally by Celtic and Frankish. Beginning in the 11th century, literature written in medieval French was one of the oldest vernacular (non-Latin) literatures in western Europe and it became a key source of literary themes in the Middle Ages across the continent. Although the European prominence of French literature was eclipsed in part by vernacular literature in Italy in the 14th century, literature in France in the 16th century underwent a major creative evolution, and through the political and artistic programs of the Ancien Régime, French literature came to dominate European letters in the 17th century. In the 18th century, French became the literary lingua franca and diplomatic language of western Europe (and, to a certain degree, in America), and French letters have had a profound impact on all European and American literary traditions while at the same time being heavily influenced by these other national traditions. Africa and the far East have brought the French language to non-European cultures that are transforming and adding to the French literary experience today. Under the aristocratic ideals of the Ancien Régime (the "honnête homme"), the nationalist spirit of post-revolutionary France, and the mass educational ideals of the Third Republic and modern France, the French have come to have a profound cultural attachment to their literary heritage. Today, French schools emphasize the study of novels, theater and poetry (often learnt by heart). The literary arts are heavily sponsored by the state and literary prizes are major news. The Académie française and the Institut de France are important linguistic and artistic institutions in France, and French television features shows on writers and poets (one of the most watched shows on French television was Apostrophes,[4] a weekly talk show on literature and the arts). Literature matters deeply to the people of France and plays an important role in their sense of identity. As of 2022, fifteen French authors have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature which is more than novelists, poets and essayists of any other country. In 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he declined it, stating that "It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form."[5] French Nobel Prize in Literature winners [edit] For most of the 20th century, French authors had more Literature Nobel Prizes than those of any other nation.[6] The following French or French language authors have won a Nobel Prize in Literature: 1901 – Sully Prudhomme (The first Nobel Prize in Literature) 1904 – Frédéric Mistral (wrote in Occitan) 1915 – Romain Rolland 1921 – Anatole France 1927 – Henri Bergson 1937 – Roger Martin du Gard 1947 – André Gide 1952 – François Mauriac 1957 – Albert Camus 1960 – Saint-John Perse 1964 – Jean-Paul Sartre (declined the prize) 1969 – Samuel Beckett (Irish, wrote in English and French) 1985 – Claude Simon 2008 – J. M. G. Le Clézio 2014 – Patrick Modiano 2022 - Annie Ernaux French literary awards [edit] Grand Prix de Littérature Policière – created in 1948, for crime and detective fiction. Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française – created 1918. Prix Décembre – created in 1989. Prix Femina – created 1904, decided each year by an exclusively female jury, although the authors of the winning works do not have to be women. Prix Goncourt – created 1903, given to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year". Prix Goncourt des Lycéens – created in 1987. Prix Littéraire Valery Larbaud – created in 1957. Prix Médicis – created 1958, awarded to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent." Prix Renaudot – created in 1926. Prix Tour-Apollo Award – 1972–1990, given to the best science fiction novel published in French during the preceding year. Prix des Deux Magots – created in 1933. Key texts [edit] Fiction [edit] Middle Ages anonymous – La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) Chrétien de Troyes – Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain, the Knight of the Lion), Lancelot, ou le Chevalier à la charrette (Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart) various – Tristan et Iseult (Tristan and Iseult) anonymous – Lancelot-Graal (Lancelot-Grail), also known as the prose Lancelot or the Vulgate Cycle Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung – Roman de la Rose ("Romance of the Rose") Christine de Pizan – "The Book of the City of Ladies" 16th century François Rabelais – La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel ("Gargantua and Pantagruel") 17th century Honoré d'Urfé – L'Astrée Madame de Lafayette – La Princesse de Clèves 18th century Abbé Prévost – Manon Lescaut Voltaire – Candide, Zadig ou la Destinée Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse Denis Diderot – Jacques le fataliste (Jacques the Fatalist) Montesquieu – Persian Letters Pierre Choderlos de Laclos – Les Liaisons dangereuses Marquis de Sade – Justine (Sade) 19th century François-René de Chateaubriand – Atala, René Benjamin Constant – Adolphe Stendhal – Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black), La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) Honoré de Balzac – La Comédie humaine ("The Human Comedy", a novel cycle which includes Père Goriot, Lost Illusions, and Eugénie Grandet) Alexandre Dumas – The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers Victor Hugo – Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), Les Misérables Théophile Gautier – Mademoiselle de Maupin Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary, Salammbô, L'Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education) Jules Verne – Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas), Voyage au centre de la Terre (A Journey to the Center of the Earth), Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days) Edmond and Jules de Goncourt – Germinie Lacerteux George Sand – La Petite Fadette Joris-Karl Huysmans - "À rebours" Guy de Maupassant – Bel Ami, La Parure (The Necklace), other short stories Émile Zola – Thérèse Raquin, Les Rougon-Macquart (a novel cycle which includes L'Assommoir, Nana and Germinal) 20th century André Gide – Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), L'Immoraliste (The Immoralist) Marcel Proust – À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) Albert Cohen François Mauriac Louis Aragon Blaise Cendrars Samuel Beckett - Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, How It Is André Breton – Nadja Gaston Leroux – Le Fantôme de l'Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera) Roger Martin du Gard – Les Thibault (The Thibaults) Louis-Ferdinand Céline – Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) Colette – Gigi Jean Genet – Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs Julien Gracq – Le Rivage des Syrtes (The Opposing Shore) André Malraux – La Condition Humaine (Man's Fate), L'Espoir (Man's Hope) Albert Camus – L'Étranger (The Stranger or The Outsider) Michel Butor – La Modification Marguerite Yourcenar – Mémoires d'Hadrien Alain Robbe-Grillet – Dans le labyrinthe Georges Perec – La vie mode d'emploi Claude Simon - Les Géorgiques (The Georgics) Robert Pinget – Passacaille Jean-Paul Sartre – La Nausée (Nausea), L´Âge de Raison (The Age of Reason) Françoise Sagan – Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) 21st century Michel Houellebecq – La carte et le territoire (The Map and the Territory) Léonora Miano – La Saison de l'ombre Kamel Daoud – Meursault, contre-enquête (The Meursault Investigation) Poetry [edit] Middle Ages William IX (1071–1127) Jaufre Rudel (1113–70) Bernart de Ventadorn (1130–90) Bertran de Born (1140–1215) Rutebeuf (1245–85) Jean Froissart (1337–1405) François Villon (1431–63) – Le Testament La Pléiade Clément Marot (1496–1544) Joachim du Bellay (1522–60) Pontus de Tyard (1521–1605) Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) Baroque Agrippa d'Aubigné (1552–1630) – Les Tragiques Théophile de Viau (1590–1626) Classicism François de Malherbe (1555–1628) Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95) – The Fables Nicolas Boileau (1636–1711) Romanticism André Chénier (1762–1794) Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) – Méditations poétiques Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863) Victor Hugo (1802–85) – Les Contemplations Gérard de Nerval (1808–55) – The Chimeras Alfred de Musset (1810–57) Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) – Les Fleurs du mal Parnassianism Théophile Gautier (1811–72) Leconte de Lisle (1818–94) Théodore de Banville (1823–91) Symbolism and Decadence Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1838–89) Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) Paul Verlaine (1844–96) Comte de Lautréamont (1846–70) Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) – Une Saison en Enfer Paul Valéry (1871–1945) Paul Fort (1872–1960) Modernism Charles Péguy (1873–1914) Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) – Alcools Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) Saint-John Perse (1887–1975) – Vents Dada and Surrealism Paul Éluard (1895-1952) Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) André Breton (1896–1966) Louis Aragon (1897–1982) Henri Michaux (1899–1984) Robert Desnos (1900–45) René Char (1907–88) Postmodernism Jules Supervielle (1884–1960) Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) Francis Ponge (1899–1988) – Le Parti Pris des Choses Jacques Prévert (1900–77) Raymond Queneau (1903–76) Négritude Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) Birago Diop (1906–89) Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) Theatre [edit] Pierre Corneille (1606–84)- Le Cid (1636), Horace Molière – Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, Dom Juan, L'Avare (The Miser), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, L'École des femmes (The School for Wives), Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid) Jean Racine – Phèdre, Andromaque, Bérénice, Athalie Marivaux – Jeu de l'amour et du hasard Beaumarchais – Le Barbier de Séville (The Barber of Seville), La Folle journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) Alfred Jarry – King Ubu Edmond Rostand – Cyrano de Bergerac Jean Giraudoux – The Trojan War Will Not Take Place Jean Anouilh – Becket, Antigone Jean-Paul Sartre – No Exit Eugène Ionesco – La Cantatrice chauve' (The Bald Soprano), Les Chaises (The Chairs), La Leçon (The Lesson), Rhinoceros Jean Genet – The Maids, The Balcony Samuel Beckett – En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), Fin de Partie (Endgame) and other works in French Nonfiction [edit] Michel de Montaigne – The Essays Blaise Pascal – Les Pensées René Descartes – Meditations on First Philosophy, Discourse on Method François de La Rochefoucauld – The Maxims Jean de la Bruyère - Les Caractères ou les Mœurs de ce siècle Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon - Mémoires Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, The Social Contract, Les Confessions (Confessions) François-René de Chateaubriand – Genius of Christianity, Memoirs from Beyond Grave Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America Frédéric Bastiat – The Law Jules Michelet – Histoire de France, La Sorcière Henri Bergson – Creative Evolution Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus Jean-Paul Sartre – Existentialism is a Humanism, Being and Nothingness Simone de Beauvoir – The Second Sex Claude Lévi-Strauss – Tristes Tropiques Emil Cioran – A Short History of Decay, The Trouble with Being Born and other works in French Paul Ricœur – Freedom and Nature. The Voluntary and the Involuntary Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish Pierre Bourdieu – La Distinction Literary criticism [edit] Nicolas Boileau Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve Hippolyte Taine Jacques Lacan Maurice Blanchot Paul Bénichou Roland Barthes Jean Ricardou Paul Ricœur Michel Foucault Jean-François Lyotard Jacques Derrida Julia Kristeva Poetry [edit] Main article: French poetry Parnassianism Romanticism Symbolism (arts) See also [edit] French culture French art List of French language authors List of French language poets French science fiction Fantastique Media of France Books in France Notes and references [edit] Further reading [edit] Main article: Bibliography of France § Literature
5097	dbpedia	1	49	https://bookaroundthecorner.com/category/author/g/gautier-theophile/	en	Book Around the Corner	https://bookaroundthecor…vatar.jpeg?w=200	https://bookaroundthecor…vatar.jpeg?w=200	[ "https://bookaroundthecorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/gautier_momie_librio.jpg?w=595", "https://bookaroundthecorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/exposition-pompei.jpg?w=105&h=150", "https://bookaroundthecorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/corps_pompei.jpg?w=300&h=225", "https://bookaroundthecorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/cropped-mafalda_avatar.jpeg?w=50", "https://bookaroundthecorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/cropped-mafalda_avatar.jpeg?w=50", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Posts about Gautier Théophile written by Emma	en	https://bookaroundthecor…avatar.jpeg?w=32	Book Around the Corner	https://bookaroundthecorner.com/category/author/g/gautier-theophile/	The Romance of a Mummy by Théophile Gautier (1858) Original French title: Le roman de la momie. Note: I read The Romance of a Mummy in French. For the translation of the quote, I used the English translation by F. C. de Sumichrast that is available at Gutenberg Project. I am totally unable to translate Gautier myself. The Romance of a Mummy was our Book Club choice for February, so I’m a little late with my billet but it doesn’t matter. Here’s the blurb on my book: Pharaoh loves Tahoser who loves Poëri. Pharaoh is back from Ethiopia when he casts a lustful glance at Tahoser, the daughter of a high priest. He is covered with glory, he has nothing to expect from the world and he suddenly feels that he’s a slave to this young Egyptian. But gorgeous and graceful Tahoser longs for a man with dark eyes, a man she had a glimpse of from the terrace of a luxuriant house. She doesn’t hesitate to shed away her rich clothes and jewels to conquer the heart of Poëri, this exiled Hebrew man. A sumptuous love story that a young English Lord will discover on the papyrus he found in an inviolate grave in the Valley of the Kings. There rests for eternity but with all the appearance of life, a young woman who’s been dead for thirty centuries. That’s the summary. What the summary won’t tell you is that, in a book of 159 pages, 40 are eaten by a prolog that describes with great minutiae the discovery of the papyrus. This prolog has been removed from the version on Project Gutenberg, btw. Then 30 pages are devoted to the description of Thebes, of Tahoser’s palace and of Pharaoh’s triumphal return. All this is aimed at French readers who want to bask into Ancient Egypt. Consequently, it doesn’t feel at all like a story from a papyrus written thirty centuries ago but like a lecture on pharaonic architecture and Ancient Egypt’s ways. True, Gautier can write, as you can see in this description of heat in Thebes: Oph (c’est le nom égyptien de la ville que l’antiquité appelait Thèbes aux cent portes ou Diospolis Magna) semblait endormie sous l’action dévorante d’un soleil de plomb. Il était midi ; une lumière blanche tombait du ciel pâle sur la terre pâmée de chaleur ; le sol brillanté de réverbérations luisait comme du métal fourbi, et l’ombre ne traçait plus au pied des édifices qu’un mince filet bleuâtre, pareil à la ligne d’encre dont un architecte dessine son plan sur le papyrus ; les maisons, aux murs légèrement inclinés en talus, flamboyaient comme des briques au four ; les portes étaient closes, et aux fenêtres, fermées de stores en roseaux clissés, nulle tête n’apparaissait. Oph (that is the name of the city which antiquity called Thebes of the Hundred Gates, or Diospolis Magna), seemed asleep under the burning beams of the blazing sun. It was noon. A white light fell from the pale sky upon the baked earth; the sand, shimmering and scintillating, shone like burnished metal; shadows there were none, save a narrow, bluish line at the foot of buildings, like the inky line with which an architect draws upon papyrus; the houses, whose walls sloped well inwards, glowed like bricks in an oven; every door was closed, and no one showed at the windows, which were closed with blinds of reeds. Believe me, it sounds a lot less bombastic in English. The translator erased a lot of the pomposity and sensuality of the original text. Alas, I had to endure it in French. And Gautier does use and abuse of bombast. All the time. For everything. He loves longs sentences made of lists of things to describe anything. The palace, the city, Tahoser’s jewels. He can’t say something is full of flowers. He has to write the list of all the flowers. This is really not my type of prose. I feel smothered in words, irritated by his useless show-off of the breadth of his knowledge of the French language. The man must have been a walking dictionary. Such prose should end up in a five hundred pages book and here, it’s only 159 pages. This means that the pages he wasted on endless descriptions are missing for characterization. The book is sick with architectural grandeur but the characters are papyrus thin. They see someone beautiful, they fall madly in love, it’s the man/woman of their dream. It’s full of unrealistic feelings and behaviors. The last part of the novel couples this improbable love triangle to the train of the biblical tale of Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt. Unbelievable. I get that The Romance of a Mummy was part of the Egyptomania current in the 19th century. I understand that in 1858, the lengthy descriptions might have been helpful to help the reader see the setting in their mind, since there was no films. Unfortunately, it didn’t age well. In 2017, it sounds like a half-baked Hollywood peplum. Arria Marcella. Souvenir de Pompéi by Théophile Gautier. 1852 Cela produit un singulier effet d’entrer ainsi dans la vie antique et de fouler avec des bottes vernies des marbres usés par les sandales et les cothurnes des contemporains d’Auguste et de Tibère. It produces a strange impression to penetrate thus into the life of antiquity, and to walk in patent-leather boots upon the marble pavement worn by the sandals and cothurns of the contemporaries of Augutus and Tiberius. I’ve been to the exhibition Pompeii, an art of living in Paris. It shows frescoes, mosaics, vases, statues and objects from everyday life in a Roman city of the 1st Century. Before visiting the exhibition, I had listened to an interview with an archeologist on France Inter; she explained that we’d rather live in a Roman house than in an 18thC mansion. Why? Because in Pompeii rich houses (that can be compared to mansions) had tap water, bathrooms and sewers. The Roman idea of hygiene was closer to ours than in Voltaire’s times—at least in France. I’ve always marveled at the Roman way of life, even if it was also brutal and cruel. Their civilization crumbled and disappeared within a few centuries and lots of their techniques were lost. I understand that the Christian societies fought against the ancient beliefs. What I don’t understand is why they needed to discard engineering, medicine and other useful knowledge as well. It makes me think about our civilization. Could it fall apart that easily? I guess it could. Apart from the beautiful and so modern objects, the public could also see moldings of humans and dogs. In 1863, Giuseppe Fiorelli managed to pour plaster into the cavities left in the lava ashes by disintegrated bodies. We see the shapes of these men and dogs during their last moment, writhing with agony. It’s really moving. I’m often more touched by statues than by paintings. But this is totally different. It looks like a statue but it’s not, the model didn’t walk away. They died. It’s the three dimensional picture of agonies. Chilling. I stared for a while, unable to move, knowing I was gazing at the negative of people who had died in a catastrophe in 79. Then I stumbled upon a sign explaining that Théophile Gautier had been so upset by the same kind of moldings that he wrote a short-story, Arria Marcella, Souvenir de Pompeii. I had to read it. Three friends, Fabio, Max and Octavien visit a museum in Napoli. Among the vestiges from Pompeii, Octavien comes across a molding of a beautiful woman. He feels a connection with her and stays there, bewitched and upset. The three friends go to Pompeii, visit the site with a guide and come back to their lodgings. Sleepless, Octavien decides to pay a nightly visit to Pompeii. When he arrives in the ancient city, it seems intact and he’s taken back into 79. He goes to the theatre, hears Latin spoken as a living language, watches a play by Plautus, walks in the street and finds the woman from the museum. Alive. Octavien has a Roman name, which reinforces the feeling he can only be connected to this ancient civilization. The usual French name is more Octave than Octavien. Théophile Gautier describes this time-travel experience with many details. It’s a pretext to resurrect Pompeii to our eyes and he manages extremely well. I was there. Perhaps my imagination was fueled by other readings and documentaries; perhaps it’s just his literary gift. Of course, in Gautier’s time, educated people knew a lot about Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece. They learnt Latin, knew the writers and the history. But still, he captures the feeling we have when we visit old places, the conscience that men long times gone used to live there. I tried to read Gautier once; it was Le Capitaine Fracasse and I abandoned it. Too pompous. This one isn’t pompous at all and makes me want to try something else by him. And now also I want to get to De Vita Caesarum (Twelve Caesars) by Suetonius which has been sitting on the shelves for a while. If anyone is interested in Ancient Rome, I’ve reviewed Ars Amatoria by Ovid and I highly recommend the crime fiction series Roma Sub Rosa by Steven Saylor.
5097	dbpedia	0	52	https://www.routledge.com/Models-of-Collaboration-in-Nineteenth-Century-French-Literature-Several-Authors-One-Pen/Whidden/p/book/9780754666431	en	Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature Several Authors, One Pen	https://images.routledge…780754666431.jpg	https://images.routledge…780754666431.jpg	[ "https://secure.ride8stir.com/202702.png", "https://www.routledge.com/images/routledge-logo.png", "https://images.routledge.com/common/jackets/crclarge/978075466/9780754666431.jpg", "https://images.routledge.com/common/jackets/crclarge/978131559/9781315595832.jpg", "https://www.routledge.com/images/vs.png", "https://www.routledge.com/img/covers/loading-image-sm.png", "https://www.routledge.com/images/routledge-logo-lg.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Seth Whidden" ]	2009-10-27T00:00:00	Contributing to the current lively discussion of collaboration in French letters, this collection raises fundamental questions about the limits and definition o	en	/favicon.ico	Routledge & CRC Press	https://www.routledge.com/Models-of-Collaboration-in-Nineteenth-Century-French-Literature-Several-Authors-One-Pen/Whidden/p/book/9780754666431	Contributing to the current lively discussion of collaboration in French letters, this collection raises fundamental questions about the limits and definition of authorship in the context of the nineteenth century's explosion of collaborative ventures. While the model of the stable single author that prevailed during the Romantic period dominates the beginning of the century, the authority of the speaking subject is increasingly in crisis through the century's political and social upheavals. Chapters consider the breakdown of authorial presence across different constructions of authorship, including the numerous cenacles of the Romantic period; collaborative ventures in poetry through the practice of the "Tombeaux" and as seen in the Album zutique; the interplay of text and image through illustrations for literary works; the collective ventures of literary journals; and multi-author prose works by authors such as the Goncourt brothers and Erckmann-Chatrian. Interdisciplinary in scope, these essays form a cohesive investigation of collaboration that extends beyond literature to include journalism and the relationships and tensions between literature and the arts. The volume will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French literature, and more generally, any scholar interested in what's at stake in redefining the role of the French author
5097	dbpedia	0	44	https://academic.oup.com/book/2094/chapter/142022523	en				[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null
5097	dbpedia	3	11	https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/french/french-literature/theophile-gautier/	en	Théophile Gautier: Life & Works	https://website-cdn.stud…rter-bg-icon.svg	https://website-cdn.stud…rter-bg-icon.svg	[ "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/logos/vaia.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/subject-other.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/book-closed.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/flashcard.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/ai.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/note.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/calendar.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/folder-plus.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/file-question-02.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/Flashcards-Image.jpg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/Study-Set-Image.jpg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/Notes-Image.jpg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/Study-Plan-Image.jpg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/book-open-01.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/briefcase-01.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/phone-01.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/Magazine-Image.jpg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/Our-App-Image.jpg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/subject-other.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/book-closed.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/flashcard.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/ai.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/note.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/calendar.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/folder-plus.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/file-question-02.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/book-open-01.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/briefcase-01.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/phone-01.svg", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/welcome-laptop.png", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/welcome-mobile.png", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme//dist/assets/images/ai-flashcards.svg", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme//dist/assets/images/ai-summarize.svg", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme//dist/assets/images/ai-flashcards.svg", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/flashcards-listx2.png", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/flashcards-list-mobile.png", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/src/assets/images/va-signup-laptop.png", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/about.webp", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/about-logo.png", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/sidebar-logo.webp", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/tbs/cta-desktop@1x.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/03/Vaia_Logo_Single-Colour-1.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2022/08/us-flag.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2022/08/en-flag.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2022/08/es-flag.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2022/08/de-flag.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2022/08/fr-flag.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2022/08/it-flag.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2021/12/LKVIUFzH-0t5upqTu-app-store.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2021/12/hiXi9mY6-jhXhbghR-google-play.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Théophile Gautier: ✓ Literary Works ✓ Romanticism ✓ Influence ✓ Biography ✓ Style ✓ Legacy \| VaiaOriginal!	en	https://website-cdn.stud…rter-bg-icon.svg	Vaia	https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/french/french-literature/theophile-gautier/	Who Was Théophile Gautier? Théophile Gautier was a pivotal figure in 19th-century French literature, known for his dedication to the principle of "art for art's sake." This philosophy emphasised the importance of aesthetics over moral or political messages in art and literature, marking a significant departure from the trends of his time. Gautier's work spans across poetry, novels, and criticism, showcasing his versatility and influence in shaping French literary traditions. Théophile Gautier Biography: An Overview Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) lived through a vibrant period of French history, witnessing the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, and the early years of the Third Republic. Born in Tarbes, France, Gautier's family moved to Paris in his early childhood, a move that would later enable his immersion into the literary and artistic milieu of the capital. Initially aspiring to be a painter, Gautier soon veered towards literature under the influence of his mentor, Victor Hugo. His early adoption of Romanticism was evident in his debut work, but as his career progressed, Gautier evolved to espouse the doctrines of Parnassianism, emphasizing perfection of form and expression. Major Works: Some of Gautier's significant contributions include Les Grotesques (The Grotesques), Mademoiselle de Maupin, a novel celebrating androgyny and platonic love, and Émaux et Camées (Enamels and Cameos), a collection of poetry that epitomises the Parnassian movement's ideals. Legacy: Beyond his literary achievements, Gautier's critiques and travel writings offered insights into the art and culture of his era, influencing contemporaries and future generations alike. The Influence of Théophile Gautier on French Literature Théophile Gautier's impact on French literature is both diverse and profound. His advocacy for l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake) heralded a shift in artistic sensibilities, paving the way for subsequent movements like Symbolism and Modernism. Gautier argued that the value of art lies in its beauty and form, rather than in moral or didactic purposes. This principle resonated with many artists and writers, influencing their approaches to creative expression. Gautier's literary style, characterized by rich imagery and precise craftsmanship, set new standards for literary aesthetics. His work demonstrated that literature could be both profound and beautiful without serving a political or moral agenda. ContributionImpact on French LiteraturePoetryRevived poetic form, introducing Parnassian aestheticsProse and CriticismChampioned artistic freedom, influencing the development of novel and critical stylesTravel WritingsOffered a new lens on cultural and geographical exploration Théophile Gautier's Key Literary Themes Théophile Gautier's literary output, influential in the 19th-century French literary landscape, is marked by several recurring themes. His body of work spans a wide range of genres, including poetry, novels, and literary criticism, each suffused with themes of beauty, perfection in art, and an unyielding advocacy for the art for art's sake movement. As readers explore Gautier's work, they encounter an artist fiercely devoted to aesthetics, whose themes transcend the confines of his era and continue to resonate with audiences today.Through his exploration of these themes, Gautier not only left a lasting mark on French literature but also contributed significantly to the development of modern literary and artistic movements. Exploring Théophile Gautier Literary Themes Beauty and Aesthetics: Gautier's works frequently explore the theme of beauty, not as a mere superficial trait but as an ideal to be pursued in both art and life. He believed that beauty itself could be a subject for art, devoid of moral or educational intentions. Exoticism and Escape: Many of Gautier’s writings offer a departure from reality, transporting readers to exotic locales and fantastical realms. This theme reflects Gautier's desire to escape the mundanity of daily life and explore unknown worlds through his imagination. Perfection in Art: A definitive aspect of Gautier’s oeuvre is his quest for perfection in art. For Gautier, true art required meticulous craft and unwavering dedication to form and aesthetics. Gautier's emphasis on beauty and perfection influenced not just his contemporaneous peers but also had a reverberating impact on future art and literary movements. The Concept of 'L'art pour l'art' in Théophile Gautier's Works The principle of l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake) pervades Théophile Gautier's works and is pivotal to understanding his artistic ethos. This concept, which advocates for art's independence from moral, political, or utilitarian functions, positioned Gautier as a counter to the didactic literature prevalent in his time. Instead, Gautier championed art that exists solely for its beauty and inherent value, separating it from external obligations or purposes.Through his poetry, novels, and critical essays, Gautier exemplified this principle, arguing that the primary role of art and literature is to evoke beauty, regardless of any societal or ideological demands. L'art pour l'art: A French term meaning 'art for art's sake'. It is a philosophy that holds the value of art to be separate from social, political, or moral messages, advocating that art's primary purpose is to be beautiful and to inspire appreciation purely through its form and aesthetic. Example: Gautier’s Émaux et Camées (Enamels and Cameos), a collection of poems, serves as a quintessential example of the l'art pour l'art movement. The precision of form and the focus on aesthetic beauty evident in these poems clearly reflect Gautier's commitment to art for its own sake. Significance of L'art pour l'art in the 19th Century:In the broader context of 19th-century Europe, the adoption of l'art pour l'art was revolutionary. It marked a departure from the idea that art must serve a moral or educational purpose. Gautier's staunch advocacy for this principle influenced the trajectory of modern art, helping to pave the way for movements such as Decadence and Symbolism. As such, Gautier is not only remembered for his own work but also for his foundational role in the evolution of artistic and literary thought. Théophile Gautier and Romanticism Théophile Gautier stands as a significant yet complex figure within the Romantic movement, a literary and artistic period that sought to emphasise emotion, individualism, and the splendour of the natural world. His contributions, while initially rooted in Romanticism, gradually evolved, showcasing a rich interplay between adherence to and deviation from Romantic ideals. This dual stance not only highlights Gautier's nuanced understanding of Romanticism but also his role in transitioning towards new literary movements.Understanding Gautier's relationship with Romanticism offers a unique lens through which to explore the multifaceted nature of 19th-century French literature. Theophile Gautier's Role in the Romantic Movement Théophile Gautier was initially embraced as a romantic writer, enjoying the vibrant enthusiasm and philosophical depth of the Romantic movement. His earliest works, imbued with the emotional intensity and passion characteristic of Romanticism, celebrated the movement's ideals of individualism and creativity. Among his contributions, Mademoiselle de Maupin stands out, both for its lyrical beauty and its exploration of themes such as love, art, and the duality of human nature. This novel, alongside his vivid poetry, positioned Gautier as a prominent voice within the Romantic movement, capable of capturing its spirit and energy. Impact on the Romantic Movement:Through his literary output and critical works, Gautier exerted a profound influence on the development of Romantic thought. His criticism, particularly, served as a bridge connecting Romantic ideals with the emerging principles of Parnassianism and Symbolism. Gautier’s detailed analysis of Romantic art and literature provided insightful reflections on the movement's achievements and limitations, marking a significant contribution to the discourse of 19th-century art and literature. How Théophile Gautier Deviated from Romanticism While deeply influenced by Romanticism, Théophile Gautier gradually distanced himself from some of its core tenets, pioneering a new direction that favoured art's aesthetic qualities over its emotional or moral content. This shift is evident in his later works, which emphasise beauty and form, embodying the idea of l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake).Gautier's deviation from Romanticism involved a departure from its focus on emotion and social commentary, steering towards an appreciation for the 'pure' beauty found in art and literature. This philosophical evolution highlights Gautier's pivotal role in the transition from Romanticism to movements such as Parnassianism and Symbolism, which prioritised aesthetic considerations. Example: Gautier’s Émaux et Camées, a collection of poems, epitomises this shift. Unlike his earlier romantic works that delved into emotional depth and individualism, this collection revels in the beauty of form and precision of language, illustrating his departure from Romanticism. Gautier's evolution from a Romantic to a champion of l'art pour l'art reflects broader shifts within 19th-century French literature, from prioritising emotional expression to valuing aesthetic perfection. Key Works of Théophile Gautier Théophile Gautier was a versatile French writer whose body of work includes poetry, novels, and criticism. His contributions to literature are celebrated for their rich descriptions, elaborate language, and commitment to aesthetic beauty. Gautier’s key works, such as Mademoiselle de Maupin and his poetry collections, have left a lasting impact on the literary world, influencing various artistic movements and challenging the conventions of his time.Exploring Gautier's key works offers insight into his artistic evolution and the consistent themes of beauty and escapism that underpin his oeuvre. Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier: A Closer Look Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) is among Théophile Gautier’s most renowned novels, celebrated for its exploration of love, beauty, and art. Based on the life of the 17th-century opera singer and swordsman Julie d'Aubigny, the novel is a significant work of French literature that delves into themes of duality, desire, and the nature of truth.The narrative is presented as a series of letters between two main characters, exploring their emotional and philosophical contemplations. Beyond its narrative intrigue, Mademoiselle de Maupin is noted for its Preface, which serves as a manifesto for the art for art's sake movement, advocating for artistic freedom and the separation of art from moral judgment. Reflections on Gender and Identity:In Mademoiselle de Maupin, Gautier avant-gardely addresses the fluidity of gender and identity years ahead of his time. Through the titular character, who cross-dresses and navigates both masculine and feminine identities, Gautier challenges conventional gender norms and notions of desire. The novel's ambiguity and complexity regarding gender identity and love have intrigued readers and scholars alike, contributing to its status as a groundbreaking work of French literature. Théophile Gautier Poetry Analysis: Unpacking the Beauty. Théophile Gautier's poetry is a repository of his artistic beliefs, characterised by meticulous craftsmanship, vivid imagery, and a relentless pursuit of beauty. His poems are remarkable for their ability to evoke vivid scenes and emotions through precise language and rhythm.A notable collection, Émaux et Camées (1852), emblematises Gautier’s dedication to the principle of 'l'art pour l'art' (art for art's sake). The poems in this collection highlight the poet's skilful use of forms such as the sonnet, employing classical references and a deep appreciation for aesthetics to create enduring works of art. Example: One of Gautier’s poems, Le Pin des Landes (The Pine of the Landes), exemplifies his masterful ability to transform a simple landscape into an evocative, almost sacred tableau. Through vivid imagery and meticulous structure, Gautier elevates the natural scene to a symbol of timeless beauty, showcasing his unique vision and poetic talent. Despite the intricate formality of his verse, Gautier’s poetry harbours a profound simplicity, capturing the essence of his subjects with elegance and clarity. Théophile Gautier - Key takeaways Théophile Gautier was a key figure in 19th-century French literature who espoused the principle of l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake), prioritising aesthetics over moral and political messages. Théophile Gautier Biography: Born in 1811, originally aspiring to be a painter, influenced by Victor Hugo, and an important contributor to the movements of Romanticism and Parnassianism. Main works include Mademoiselle de Maupin, exploring themes of androgyny and platonic love, and Émaux et Camées, encapsulating Parnassian aesthetics. Gautier's Literary Themes: Emphasised beauty and aesthetics, exoticism and escapism, and sought perfection in art, significantly impacting French literature and subsequent artistic movements. Gautier's role in Romanticism was initially embraced, but he gradually moved towards celebrating the aesthetic qualities of art, exemplified by his collection Émaux et Camées, marking a transition towards movements such as Parnassianism and Symbolism.
5097	dbpedia	0	13	https://www.art.com/products/p55968635716-sa-i9382258/theophile-gautier-french-poet-dramatist-novelist-journalist-and-literary-critic-19th-century.htm	en	'Theophile Gautier, French Poet, Dramatist, Novelist, Journalist, and Literary Critic, 19th Century' Giclee Print	https://www.art.com/favicon.ico	https://www.art.com/favicon.ico	[ "https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/theophile-gautier-french-poet-dramatist-novelist-journalist-and-literary-critic-19th-century_u-l-q1mmxsx0.jpg?artHeight=550&artPerspective=n&artWidth=550&background=fbfbfb", "https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/theophile-gautier-french-poet-dramatist-novelist-journalist-and-literary-critic-19th-century_u-l-q1mmxsx0.jpg?artHeight=550&artPerspective=n&artWidth=550&background=fbfbfb", "https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/u-l-Q1MMXSX0.jpg?artHeight=550&artLifeStyle=216&artWidth=550&background=fbfbfb", "https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/u-l-Q1MMXSX0.jpg?artHeight=550&artLifeStyle=217&artWidth=550&background=fbfbfb", "https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/u-l-Q1MMXSX0.jpg?artHeight=550&artLifeStyle=208&artWidth=550&background=fbfbfb", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/1153333/corner/1153333.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/5092343/corner/5092343.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/1209694/corner/1209694.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/1209742/corner/1209742.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/15534771/corner/15534771.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/3632251/corner/3632251.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/2548328/corner/2548328.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/1153397/corner/1153397.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/5095424/corner/5095424.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/8905668/corner/8905668.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/8911484/corner/8911484.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/8301242/corner/8301242.jpg", "https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/theophile-gautier-french-poet-dramatist-novelist-journalist-and-literary-critic-19th-century_u-l-q1mmxsx0.jpg?artHeight=80", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/1537633/corner/1537633.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/10853098/corner/10853098.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/1537632/corner/1537632.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/2923140/corner/2923140.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/2923139/corner/2923139.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/15234602/corner/15234602.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/15534777/corner/15534777.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/15234603/corner/15234603.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/Framing/hires/15234604/corner/15234604.jpg", "https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/theophile-gautier-french-poet-dramatist-novelist-journalist-and-literary-critic-19th-century_u-l-q1mmxswo1zoo.jpg?artHeight=80", "https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/theophile-gautier-french-poet-dramatist-novelist-journalist-and-literary-critic-19th-century_u-l-q1mmxsxo1zop.jpg?artHeight=80", "https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/theophile-gautier-french-poet-dramatist-novelist-journalist-and-literary-critic-19th-century_u-l-q1mmxsxo1zoq.jpg?artHeight=80", "https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/theophile-gautier-french-poet-dramatist-novelist-journalist-and-literary-critic-19th-century_u-l-q1mmxsx0.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/pdp/quality/frame-corner.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/pdp/quality/frame-back-corner.jpg", "https://cache1.artprintimages.com/images/pdp/quality/frame-sawtooth.jpg", "https://www.art.com/mobify/bundle/623/static/img/logo.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "Theophile", "Gautier", "French", "Poet", "Dramatist", "Novelist", "Journalist", "and", "Literary", "Critic", "19th", "Century", "Giclee", "Print", "art" ]	null	[]	null	Theophile Gautier, French Poet, Dramatist, Novelist, Journalist, and Literary Critic, 19th Century Giclee Print. Find art you love and shop high-quality art prints, photographs, framed artworks and posters at Art.com. 100% satisfaction guaranteed.	en	/apple-touch-icon.png	art.com	https://www.art.com/products/p55968635716-sa-i9382258/theophile-gautier-french-poet-dramatist-novelist-journalist-and-literary-critic-19th-century.htm	Professionally Crafted Framed Wall Art Attention to detail is at the heart of our process, as we exclusively use 100% solid wood frames that include 4-ply white core matboard and durable, frame-grade clear acrylic for clarity, long-lasting protection of the artwork and unrivaled quality. With a thoughtfully selected frame and mat combination, this piece is designed to complement your art and create a visually appealing display. Easy-to-Hang & Ready-to-Display Artwork Each framed art piece comes with hanging hardware affixed to the back of the frame, allowing for easy and convenient installation. Handcrafted in the USA. Ready to display right out of the box. Handcrafted in the USA.
5097	dbpedia	2	0	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_novelists	en	List of French novelists	https://en.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico	https://en.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico	[ "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/icons/wikipedia.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-wordmark-en.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-tagline-en.svg", "https://login.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/wikimedia-button.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/poweredby_mediawiki.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Wikimedia projects" ]	2003-05-30T01:43:08+00:00		en	/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_novelists	French Language and Literature Authors • Lit categories French literary history Medieval 16th century • 17th century 18th century • 19th century 20th century • Contemporary Literature by country France • Quebec Postcolonial • Haiti Franco-American Portals France • Literature This is a list of novelists from France. Novelists in this list should be notable in some way, and have Wikipedia articles on them. See also French novelists Category Index.
5097	dbpedia	1	28	https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/2nd-november-1872/13/theophile-gautier	en	The Spectator Archive	http://archive.spectator.co.uk/images/Archive_beta.png	http://archive.spectator.co.uk/images/Archive_beta.png	[ "https://archive.spectator.co.uk/images/Archive_beta2.png", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/13.jpg?size=280x410&token=24d7b52a57d3f27e14fbf3d2678b4ff0", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/14.jpg?size=280x410&token=3aff136501d5fb4e330528c635745178", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/1.jpg?size=60x&token=982b2a5a9562b035930361961cc4e967", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/2.jpg?size=60x&token=e9e21b239fc6b7c10d10929c71002329", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/3.jpg?size=60x&token=cc7eede1b329c2815f5af4d21962c04f", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/4.jpg?size=60x&token=687adfdbccf11bf245b9d47abab2a226", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/5.jpg?size=60x&token=f43e089362248dc3b67e66f165530ac7", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/6.jpg?size=60x&token=edbe57b09cb65fb8356221d53fc53b2c", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/7.jpg?size=60x&token=9f04ea6202d601ef87e8dea3265928d4", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/8.jpg?size=60x&token=0efdd165bc31f743117e14938aa0f53f", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/9.jpg?size=60x&token=2985ff80e36d8919615484b6de016ae7", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/10.jpg?size=60x&token=ebfc7f532736a77b502c3f8444fbda49", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/11.jpg?size=60x&token=7074301828f8bf3362e643d337df2b74", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/12.jpg?size=60x&token=ef83fd9219e13d35e82fe0a6904ae278", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/13.jpg?size=60x&token=d60a383cf9e6ef7b3eb66ff8db077818", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/14.jpg?size=60x&token=229ec22e820c9fcd03ab7529f1789390", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/15.jpg?size=60x&token=351dacbab7049ca75f06ff2b6e7c9c0c", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/16.jpg?size=60x&token=c89f1d8169985046e8b77483ec5a9ef3", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/17.jpg?size=60x&token=2c0146f20325bd96eb766c763a579068", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/18.jpg?size=60x&token=386e06d2a442ea3ee45a630c291d4436", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/19.jpg?size=60x&token=e715e9f073418bee7eb70b3f8004ddf6", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/20.jpg?size=60x&token=65040d6ccd54fcaba860ad606dee4eda", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/21.jpg?size=60x&token=c9d2e19e85ee1c6f94f471e8a7e2a565", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/22.jpg?size=60x&token=acc20015ea188acbd945ce19f188bb89", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/23.jpg?size=60x&token=0fac3d5ec4244f4af217a1865aae4aea", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/24.jpg?size=60x&token=9dd48f9c33e2aca88f5e56b7c2bfc263", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/25.jpg?size=60x&token=381648ffd816072603a2ffe169a88c9c", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/26.jpg?size=60x&token=d40a3c5cc63f612549321b9230886baa", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/27.jpg?size=60x&token=36a149b42e68dd32b650d64a71cf11f1", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/28.jpg?size=60x&token=f780ff4f08a75de9390e548e663ce6d4", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/29.jpg?size=60x&token=84006c1ac91dc88f5596647b1d3a58ea", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/30.jpg?size=60x&token=882548a8f6fb3a43cae4047bc40e07c0", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/31.jpg?size=60x&token=436170b5d38db64ed88377b0e713f319", "http://archive-images.spectator.co.uk/issues/2nd-november-1872/32.jpg?size=60x&token=050acd981c0301a28dc1b8436bf311f3", "https://archive.spectator.co.uk/images/icons/navigate-left.png", "https://archive.spectator.co.uk/images/icons/navigate-right.png", "https://archive.spectator.co.uk/images/arrow-previous.png", "https://archive.spectator.co.uk/images/arrow-next.png", "https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5d302e6d8e44ebe26db141bb/5d3056dce883217891132cd0_spectator-logo.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Jr was little thought, when			The Spectator Archive	http://spprd.insec.netcopy.thompsonjames.co.uk/article/2nd-november-1872/13/theophile-gautier	THEOPHILE GAUTIER. Jr was little thought, when " Emma et Camees " were but a short time ago reviewed in these columns, that Theophile 'Gautier's premature death would add yet greater interest to the last poetical productions he wrote and inserted in the reprint of his masterpiece. The siege of Paris blew an ill wind among Trench litterateurs and artists ; it witnessed the death of many a promising genius, and many a declining one. Theophile Gautier seems to have fallen also, a victim to the privations and dangers of Paris's bitter time of isolation ; the athletic combatant of " Hernani," who was reputed one of the strongest men in Paris, 'never recovered from the effects of a bronchial congestion, and struggled for two years with the malady before he finally yielded last week. Theophile Gautier is not one of those whose works die with them ; his influence on the literature of his country has been more decisive than that of any man we know of. He took for object as much the amelioration of the language as the -creation of everlasting poetry. As one of the four great French poets of the age, he deserves more than the few lines of an -obituary record. It is a pity that, of a remarkable writer's productions, the -common run of the public should seek and gloat over his most objectionable writingsâthose that he gives forth in moments of weaknessâand then regard him through his defects and eccen- tricities, and qualify him from the very worst specimens of his talent. No book of Gautier's has been more extensively read than -" Mademoiselle de Maupin ;" this weird novel and its author have, -for superficial students, become all but synonymous, and Gautier was a synonyme for lewdness and elegant corruption. "Ile pours poison in a diamond cup," says one of the poet's biographers ; the expression would be happy if it were true. No one would think of justifying "Mademoiselle de Manpin ;" but no equitable -critic will ever dream of judging Theophile Gautier by the worst characteristic of a talent that has so many other seductive aspects. This book was written at the debut of his literary career, that is, at a time when the rival schools of literary orthodoxy and "Romantisme" had attained so passionate a climax that the young and boiling Romantiques a tons cries, like Gautier, delighted in sheer recklessness, in defiance of Boileau's worthy descendants. We will therefore lay aside "Mademoiselle de Maupin," albeit that it is worthy of commendation in a purely artistic point of view. Theophile Gautier was on the verge of mistaking his vocation. Like Ingres, who believed himself born for the career of a Paganini ; and Gavarni, who lamented that circumstances had forced him to .draw caricatures instead of writing verses (which he wrote exe- crably), Theophile Gautier took to painting when he arrived in " la grand vine," as a simple provincial, in quest of fortune ; nor did he -ever relinquish his mania for graphic art, and in the last period of his life, he was more gratified by some slight encomium bestowed on a picture or aqua-forte than by the most enthusiastic praises of 'his literary works. Theophile Gautier was an Oriental (if we can use the expression), born in Gascony ; he came from Tarbes, and was the compatriot of the conventional Barrere, as also his antithesis ; and he presented the strange phenomenon of a Gascon full of the native penetration and brilliancy of wit appertaining to Southerners, without their grimacing propensities and garrulous disposition. Happily for him and for others, his leaning for letters was soon too apparent to allow of his suppressing it in favour of a calling in which he would have scarcely attained honourable mediocrity. He eschewed with superb disdain Racine, Corneille, Malherbe, Duels, and all the ,gods at whose shrine the Classiques fervently sacrificed, and studied Ronsard, Theophile de Viau, Lemoine, Clement Marot, and Bait'. The result was great freedom, and, at the same time, ease of rhyme and measure in his first literary attempts. To use Theodore de Banville's expression, "Des perlea et des dmerandes Tombaient de see levres d'enfant;" and when the young man of twenty read these jottings of a 'beginner to Sainte Beuve, the author of " Volupte " embraced him with enthusiasm, and predicted that he would become a def d'dcole. En attendant, the young poet made himself conspicuous among the phalanx of innovators who supported Victor Hugo with pen and fist. These were fine times indeed, and Theophile Gautier was wont to say that it was the happiest period of his life. His extraordinary vigour generally designated him as the leader of the Clievelusat the performances of "Hernani," "Marion de Lorme," -and Alexandre Dumas' fine dramas. He dressed in red velvet pour- points, sat in the middle of the pit, and bounded on the dissenters with the leap of a tiger. Theophile Gautier's fists were the terror of Classiques, and they contributed in no small degree to Victor Hugo's stage successes. Wherever his long hair and luxuriant beard were descried, the adversaries of innovation fled in disorder. But Theophile Gautier soon tired of sustaining others, and thought of himself ; and although he ever remained a passionate admirer of Victor Hugo, he receded from him very materially, and devoted himself to "art for art." He excluded politics and progress from his programme, and restricted himself to artistic perfection. He expressed later his ideal in these verses :â " Oui, l'aiuvre sort plus belle D'une forme iv tout travail rebelle Vera, marbre, onyx, email. "Point de contraintes faunas, Mais quo pour marcher droll Ta chausses, Muse, uu cothurne etroit." In 1830 he wrote his first serious poem, " Albertus," which con- tains some fine verses and remarkable dramatic conception, but bears unmistakable marks of inexperience. Take up " Albertus " and "La Comedic de la Mort," and compare them with the weakest strophes of " Emaux et Camees ; " the origin is obviously the same, but what an immense stride there is between these pro- ductions of youth and manhood ! Certain poets, as Theodore de Banville, for example, precociously reach the farthermost summit of their excellence, and remain immovable ; never falling, but never progressing, the prey of the despair that must assail those writers who labour under the fatal impossibility of advancing an inch further than their original standard. Theophile Gautier was an essentially progressive genius ; he examined his work with the critical eye of a censor ; his instinct permitted him to discover the fli ws, and he minutely corrented them. Each successive work progresses towards perfection, until the poet reaches his ideal in " Emaux et Cameea." Thus, "La Comedic) do la Mort," which followed " Alberti's," was incomparably superior to its predecessor ; and " Mademoiselle de Maupin," composed when be was not quite twenty-five years old, left far in the rear everything he had hitherto written,âwe allude, of course, to the form, not to the matter. The preface to Made- moiselle de Maupin," one of the most audacious and dashing affirmations of artistic realism that were ever penned, had for effect to reveal M. Gautier as something more than a hero-wor- shipper and a literary dilettante. Victor Hugo himself, although intimately acquainted with the brilliant scoffer at respectability, was startled by the power of language and imagination of a youth who showed more disposition for the throne of a master than for the humble attitude of a disciple. "Lea Jeune France" followed this, and then come some witty, and, at the same time, profound studies on the poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, In his "Grotesques" he rehabilitated a host of poets forgotten or overlooked. It is, perhaps, to Theophile Gautier that we are indebted for some knowledge of Theophile de Viau ; and by a singular coincidence the analogy between the poet of the seven- teenth century and his admirer and discoverer is not restricted to names only. Without imitating Ronsard and his followers, Gautier studied them as grammars, and added to their deli- cacy and tenderness the rich gifts of an extraordinary imagi- nation and a taste that defies rivalry. In 1833, Theophile Gautier was counted among the writers of the Figaro, which was not what it is now. It was also about that time that he began his intimacy with the unfortunate Gerard de Nerval. In aspiration and turn of mind they were entirely at vari- ance; it was perhaps for this very reason that they wrote and thought together until the latter's death. The alliance was anything but an unhappy one ; the old readers of the Artiste and Presse remember the dashing feats of the two young feuilletonistes, who alternated and at times" collaborated " uuder the com mon signa- ture of "(I. G." Gerard de Norval died, and Theophile Gautier, bereft of his literary twin, yielded to his passion for travel. He visited successively Spain, Italy, England, and the East, and reaped a rich harvest of impressions, which gave birth to most of his finest verses. These stanzas,â "Pour le bat Venise s'habille De paillettes tout itoilde Fourniille,scintille et babille Le carnaval bariold." and others equally charming in idea and form, were written in Italy. The poet followed his truant disposition for several years ; in Turkey he remained so long, adopting the Oriental dress and manners, that his friends began to fear that he would not return at all. The attractions of Paris proved, however, greater than those of Constantinople, and the French capital saw him at work again on different novels and fantastic tales in the Poe style, and sundry theatrical attempts which met with but little success, for he seems to have been all but entirely void of dramatic intelligence. "Le Capitaine Fracasse" and "IA Roman de la Momie" are too well known to need more particular mention. TheophileGautierpossessed the faculty of guessing the couleur locale by mere instinct and read- ing. Who has not followed him with wonder in his magnificent descriptions of Eastern splendour? Landscapes, palaces, ruins, Oriental towns, with their pagodas and minarets, appear slowly as the writer unfolds the rich fluency of his language, and evokes in a few phrases scenes of delightful harmony. His recent production, "La Nature chez Elle," was, perhaps, the supreme expression of linguistic beauty. It is a poem written in prose, in a soft, undu- lating tongue, where a painter could find thousands of ideal images striking enough to be reproduced with the brush as faith- fully as from nature itself. We should like to digress at greater length on many other works of his as worthy of mention. Th6ophile Gautier is a poet in the fullest meaning of the term ; he cannot be taxed with cynicism, for he constantly proclaimed that he excluded art from politics, and devoted himself to the tender expression of sentiment, and not to the more manly and uncouth rendering of human passions. If it were only because he has added some four hundred new expressions to the French language, and freed French poetry from what he was wont to call "the Racinian vocabulary of 1,500 words," his part would be a less ungrateful one than Alfred de Musset's, and in any case, suffi- cient to insure him a place among the first writers of the time. C. B.
5097	dbpedia	2	92	https://www.ncl.ac.uk/library/special-collections/teaching-research-and-engagement/research/cabinet-of-curiosities/a-yellow-book-that-was-not-yellow-at-all/	en	A yellow book that was not yellow at all			[ "https://www.ncl.ac.uk/mediav8/library/headers/HEADER Special Collections.jpg", "https://www.ncl.ac.uk/mediav8/library/general-x2f-full-width/cse-logo-footer.png", "https://www.ncl.ac.uk/mediav8/library/general-x2f-full-width/LOGO Accredited Archives service - light.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	The Yellow Book was one of the leading journals of the fin de siècle: its contributors were distinguished authors and artists, including: W.B. Yeats; Max Beerbohm; Ella d’Arcy; H.G. Wells; Henry James; Walter Sickert; and John Singer Sargent. Different to other periodicals and journals, it was issued clothbound and it contained no advertising (aside from publisher’s lists). It was priced at 5 shillings (roughly the equivalent of £20 today). Although it has a reputation for being shocking, the content is often fairly conservative, and certainly not radical. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) famously (and dismissively) declared that the publication was “not yellow at all”. Beardsley (1872-1898), a leading proponent of the Aesthetic Movement and critic of what he perceived to be Victorian prudishness, was the periodical’s first Art Editor. It is his drawings – including the cover design – which helped the journal to garner its shocking reputation as he was interested in depicting the macabre, the extraordinary, and the sexually-titillating. Beardsley had illustrated Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) and when Wilde was arrested in 1895, the two men became unfortunately linked in the public consciousness. Wilde was carrying a copy of Aphrodite by Pierre Louys when he was arrested for indecency with men: a yellow book. The media mistakenly reported that it was The Yellow Book and so it came to be associated not only with decadence but also with homosexuality. The periodical’s offices were attacked, Beardsley was sacked and all traces of his involvement were removed after volume 5.
5097	dbpedia	3	66	https://fineartebooks.wordpress.com/tag/theophile-gautier/	en	Fineartebooks's Blog	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/cca05a64ce1e2a789025c20313d982d5129fae0ff64dfe3a06dda95cdb959745?s=200&ts=1723700294	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/cca05a64ce1e2a789025c20313d982d5129fae0ff64dfe3a06dda95cdb959745?s=200&ts=1723700294	[ "https://s2.wp.com/wp-content/themes/pub/chateau/images/chateau-default.jpg", "https://fineartebooks.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/love_and_pain.jpg?w=529", "https://fineartebooks.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/karen-roze.jpg?w=300&h=194", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/737afb3512480929b11de17a8ff822afbafda7f0088cd2f5441d39b011130fdb?s=32&d=identicon&r=G", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/cca05a64ce1e2a789025c20313d982d5129fae0ff64dfe3a06dda95cdb959745?s=50&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Flogo%2Fwpcom-gray-white.png", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/cca05a64ce1e2a789025c20313d982d5129fae0ff64dfe3a06dda95cdb959745?s=50&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Flogo%2Fwpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[ "https://www.youtube.com/embed/-W5OAQDti_A?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" ]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Postromantic Art" ]	null	Posts about Théophile Gautier written by Romantic and Postromantic Art	en	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/cca05a64ce1e2a789025c20313d982d5129fae0ff64dfe3a06dda95cdb959745?s=32	Fineartebooks's Blog	https://fineartebooks.wordpress.com/tag/theophile-gautier/	It’s only since the nineteenth century that art became its own autonomous domain, separated from education and politics. Before that, the art world was shaped by the tastes of rich patrons, the Church, the Salons, and the art Academies. In the early nineteenth century, the French writer, Théophile Gautier, coined the term “l’art pour l’art”, or art for art’s sake. Although this concept doesn’t describe all art during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it had an enormous impact upon the attitudes of modern artists, critics and viewers. And yet, there were significant exceptions. Even the most modern of the moderns, Pablo Picasso, made a spectacular political statement in his painting Guernica. This painting represented a cri du coeur against the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian forces at the behest of the Spanish Nationalistists in 1937. Picasso’s Guernica brought the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War to the public’s attention and stood as an anti-war symbol for years to come. Today I’d like to introduce a contemporary American artist, Michael Bell, who perpetuates the long-lost tradition of seeing art as a means of educating the public and of changing society for the better. Michael Bell’s paintings seamlessly combine aesthetic talent, educational value and political activism. Michael is best known for painting some of the most famous–and infamous–celebrities of our time, such as John Gotti and other actors from popular gangster movies like “The Sopranos,” Goodfellas” and “A Bronx Tale.” The artist has also won numerous awards in the field of art education as one of the pioneers of the Visual Journaling movement. He gives free workshops that educate the general public about art and art history. Michael also participates in charity benefits. He raises thousands of dollars for worthwhile social causes from his painting sales. As an art critic who also writes about domestic abuse, what caught my attention most was his contribution to raising public awareness about domestic violence. On October 1, 2005, Michael Bell received the Good Shepherd Community Service Award at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles for his activism in raising domestic violence awareness. Michael Bell’s series of paintings, Voices of Violence, expose the vicious cycle of love filled with pain, abuse and reconciliation, which many victims go through. These paintings follow the gaze of the model, ex-mafia wife and Hollywood stunt actress Georgia Durante, as she attempts to cope with years of abuse and free herself from the painful cycle of love filled with violence, which isn’t really love after all, but an expression of dominance and possession. Michael’s painting Love and Pain (see above) executed, appropriately enough, on two separate, fractured canvases, reveals the ambivalence that victims of domestic violence experience, as they remain hopelessly attached to the very person that causes them most pain. Please find below the link to the youtube video I made featuring Michael’s Voices of Violence paintings: http://www.youtube.com/user/ClaudiaMoscovici#p/a/u/0/NS75xHKgjp4 It’s relatively rare for an artist in our times to use his talent for the social good. Even though, truth be told, art is not just for art’s sake. Art is a human creation by talented human beings for the benefit of other human beings. For as long as we continue to view art as completely detached from our nature, our struggles, our mistakes and our goals, we’ll alienate viewers, as they’ll become detached from the world of art as well. An artist through and through–as well as an educator and a humanitarian–Michael Bell eloquently states: “All I am is what I create. It’s my blessing to share with the world.” Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com Before the nineteenth-century, originality and individuality were not the most highly prized qualities of art. As for autonomy, or regarding art as separate from social functions, this notion didn’t even exist. During the Renaissance, the artist emerged as an individual assumed to have a unique talent that was in some way useful to those in power—by helping elevate the status of the Church or the State through art—and to society in general, by providing works of rare and incredible beauty that all could enjoy. Nonetheless, Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo perceived their paintings and sculptures as a means of elevating and preserving the social order of their times not only as a mark of their individual genius. No doubt, both Leonardo and Michelangelo could afford to select among patrons and to aggravate those they did serve by postponing deadlines to perfect their masterpieces. In this way, they created the blueprint of the temperamental and independent “artistic” personality that would emerge more fully with Romanticism. Despite the increased prestige of masterful artists, however, Renaissance art contributed to the glory of the patrons and the community or the nation it was created for. In other words, art’s undeniable beauty was inseparable from its social usefulness. As artists’ prestige increased during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so did their relative power and independence from patrons. Romanticism marked this transformation by explicitly declaring the artist to be a creative genius and by regarding individuality and originality as the supreme qualities of true art. Yet for most Romantic poets, writers and artists, as for the Renaissance masters, art was still bound to its social function. The artist or writer imagined by poets like Wordsworth, Lamartine and Hugo spread to the public, through his unique aesthetic sensibility, imagination, discernment and talent, not only aesthetic pleasure but also a heightened and more empathetic moral and political consciousness. While earlier forms of Romanticism couple social utility and beauty, late Romantic and Modern art and literature would come to disassociate them. As early as the 1830’s, the autonomy of art from society was proclaimed by Théophile Gautier’s phrase, “art for art’s sake,” and by his criticism of the notion that art had to be in any way useful to society. In his writings on art in the 1860’s, Emile Zola transformed Gautier’s provocative and amusing Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin into a characteristically serious, polemical argument. Yet despite the difference in style, his message is resonant with Gautier’s, since Zola also defends the autonomy of art and the individuality and originality of true artists. I’m interested in reexamining here Gautier’s and particularly Zola’s arguments concerning the originality, individuality and autonomy of art because they mark a turning point—and a moment of incredible ambivalence—in what we can call the cultural logic of art. Retrospectively, we can say that these authors articulated the standards that would both establish the autonomy and importance of art as a separate domain and those that would undo the very notion of originality, genius and individuality in art. Today, these concepts seem almost as dated as the even older notion of artistic genius. Such notions are occasionally resurrected, but usually only to be critiqued, pastiched and spoofed rather than taken seriously. Gautier’s well-known polemic in his 1834 preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin—“the most useful place of a house is the latrine”—seems to have turned into a twisted prophecy almost a hundred years later, when Marcel Duchamp, under the pseudonym R. Mutt, exhibited a urinal as an objet d’art at the 1917 Independents’ Exhibition in New York City. With this partly joking provocation, art took a seemingly irreversible conceptual turn. As the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto convincingly demonstrates, what constitutes art can no longer be discerned visually. Let’s begin to see how the notion of art for art’s sake contributed both to the rise and the fall of art as a privileged domain. Gautier: L’art pour l’art Théophile Gautier’s (1811-72) contributions to Parisian culture spanned almost half a century, beginning with his youthful defense of Romanticism, to the aestheticism of his famous Préface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, to his leadership in the circle of formalist poets associated with Le Parnasse. Although he wrote on a wide range of topics, including literature, art and dance, he’s best known for his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834), where he proposes his model of art for art’s sake. With characteristic panache and irony, Gautier begins his preface with a provocation: “One of the most ridiculous things of the glorious epoch which we have the fortune to live in is without question the rehabilitation of virtue by all the newspapers, no matter what color they are, red, green or tri-colored.” (Préface a Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1834, Théophile Gautier, Flammarion, Paris, 1966, 25) It’s not only the literature and journalism of his day that Gautier attacks, but the whole history of French literature from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. He locates the source of the reduction of literature to utility in Neoclassicism, latching on in particular to Molière’s comedy as guilty of infusing morality in art. In Molière’s writing, Gautier charges, every play has a moral; the lovers are duly beautiful and good; the duped appropriately ridiculous and bad yet somehow endearingly human; while the women with common sense show the good sense to be both beautiful and moral. Gautier considers this infusion of morality into literature ridiculous and even dangerous. To sever art from social utility in general, he maintains, one has to disassociate it first from morality in particular. For, Gautier suggests, it’s in fact the moralizing impulse which modern art preserved from Neoclassicism—the tendency to elevate nature and cultivate bienséance (good manners) in the reading and viewing public—that has degenerated even further during the nineteenth-century into a translation of art into moral and social lessons. Rather than looking at its aesthetic qualities, Gautier charges, modern critics and readers read literature only to ask themselves utilitarian questions such as: “What good is this book? How can we apply it to the moralization and good of the most numerous and impoverished class?” (42) With the advent of the industrial revolution, increase in readership and the broadening of public education to all social classes of men, what was the inculcation of etiquette or bienséance during the seventeenth-century mostly for the benefit and entertainment of the social elite is transformed, during the nineteenth-century, into a broader moral education of all social classes: of what was rather abstractly called humanity itself. This explains why, Gautier complains, modern literature is no longer literary. Like journalism and conduct books, it brainwashes the working classes into adopting middle class values in the name of social progress. In the face of such “serious” goals, Gautier suggests facetiously, the creation of an art that does not aim at improving the human condition seems downright frivolous and irrelevant. (42) But only if we accept these erroneous premises, the author adds. Gautier proposes an expedient solution to this conflation of literature and utility: severing art from its social function once and for all. To defend this radical and new proposition, Gautier relies upon the conventional and old philosophical concept of Beauty: “Nothing which is beautiful is indispensable to life… Nothing is truly beautiful except that which is useless; all that is useful is ugly, because it’s the expression of some need, and those of mankind are ignoble and disgusting, as is his poor and weak nature—The most useful place of a house is the latrines.” (45) Gautier assumes that we all know what the concept of Beauty is from the commonplace examples he gives: pretty women and lovely flowers. In the absence of a more specific definition that might unite these particular examples, Gautier presents a negative definition that fits his argument: beauty is not opposed to ugliness, as we might believe, but rather to usefulness. Which is why, the author playfully suggests, the most useful place of a house–the toilet–is also the ugliest. His logic implies: a pretty young woman is beautiful; a useful old toilet is ugly. Wouldn’t you prefer the former to the latter? An obvious answer to this question—it depends on what you want to do– is prosaically utilitarian by Gautier’s standards. Fortunately, his argument isn’t meant to be reasonable or systematic, but rather polemical: it serves as a battle cry for a new attitude towards art and literature. Even his examples–pardon the pun–aren’t meant to hold water. To offer just one example, there’s nothing about Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel’s social usefulness as a place of worship and as a celebration of the glory of the Roman state that takes away from its beauty. Gautier’s preface is less notable for its argumentation than for its poignancy, novelty and influence upon subsequent currents in art and literature. It left a particularly strong impression upon the poets of Le Parnasse, who used his arguments to defend aesthetic formalism in poetry both against the impassioned lyricism of Romanticism and against the proclamations of the social value of art made by realist and naturalist literature. This legacy was perpetuated by formalism and by certain trends in modern and postmodern literature, art and criticism. We find traces of it even in Clement Greenberg’s influential defense of conceptual art and even in Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. In these later currents, Gautier’s original appeal to beauty was, for the most part, dropped. What remained was the notion that art owes nothing to society. The principle of the autonomy of art made plausible by Gautier’s preface has come to carry with it several corollaries: 1. Art is a separate domain all unto itself; 2. Art cannot be judged by common standards of morality or utility. Art is therefore separate from morality and religion as well; 3. In being a separate aesthetic realm, art is not easily accessible. Often it takes a very refined, sensitive temperament and perhaps even a team of experts trained in that art to explain it to the broader public. Art may seem to be within everyone’s grasp, but in fact appreciating it requires a deeper, elite understanding; 4. When judged by the standards of social utility—does it lead to an improvement of the human condition; does it teach us anything useful—art is irrelevant. In the next few posts, I’ll explain how these tenets have become the blessing and the curse inherited by modern and contemporary art. Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754
5097	dbpedia	1	90	https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/8/article/543986	en	Théophile Gautier entre enthousiasme et mélancolie by Alain Montandon (review)	https://muse.jhu.edu/art…986/og_image.jpg	https://muse.jhu.edu/art…986/og_image.jpg	[ "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/institution.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/person.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/icon_accessibility.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/muselogo.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/muselogo_notext.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/search_blue.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/search_blue.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/access/no_access.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/icon_related.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/article/543986/pdfimage", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/muselogo_notext.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/footer_icon_fb.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/footer_icon_linkedin.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/footer_icon_twitter.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/muselogoblack.png", "https://muse.jhu.edu/images/muselogo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "David Evans" ]	null		en	/favicon.ico		null	This study of Gautier’s fictional prose takes as its central pillar the familiar tension between the notion of enthousiasme, ‘la marque de l’artiste authentique’, offered by Romantic writers as proof of a quintessentially artistic sensibility in literature, painting, and music, and its inevitable corollary, ‘la plus intense mélancolie, suivant une logique du trop-plein, d’un trop-plein indigeste’ (p. 217). At the same time, the book focuses on Gautier’s love of E. T. A. Hoffmann and presents many of its themes as stemming from [End Page 257] the German writer’s influence. None of these themes is analysed in any great depth — the longest chapter weighs in at about twenty pages — but taken together they provide an effective introduction to many of the key themes of nineteenth-century French literature as they appear in Gautier’s stories, with reference also to his feuilletons and Salons and less frequently to his verse. While the short chapter on music, for instance, cannot probe the mechanisms of inter-art metaphoricity as thoroughly as recent monographs by François Brunet or Peter Dayan, it offers an interesting reading of the Romantic topos of the nightingale but leaves the well-known nineteenth-century cliché of ‘la supériorité de la musique sur le langage’ (p. 33) undeveloped. Elsewhere, the book gives an overview of Gautier’s treatment of key Romantic themes such as the outsider artist, the transgression of social norms, le voyage, historical ruins, and the visionary nature of the writer of fantastic tales. The artist appears as Prometheus or Icarus, both allegories of the aesthetic paradox in the book’s title, as the enthusiasm of creation and the movement towards the ideal lead to the melancholy provoked by the ensuing fall. A longer section examines the motifs of hieroglyphics and arabesques as metaphors for writing, especially in the fantastic genre, while the themes of magic, masks, and carnivals are all related to the practice of writing and a sense of a ‘secret indéchiffrable’ (p. 154) at the heart of Romantic aesthetics. Gautier’s immense body of art criticism perhaps deserves more than a short chapter on the different manifestations of the adjective admirable, but a chapter on Poe demonstrates effectively how Baudelaire introduced the American author to a French readership through comparison with Gautier, despite the different nature of each writer’s particular ivresse — alcoholic and artistic respectively. The book closes with a satisfying close reading of Gautier’s final novel, Spirite, as a return to the influence of Hoffmann, a ‘roman de la neige’ (p. 201) that provides a fitting ‘allégorie de la sublimation’ (p. 214). Since both Hoffmann and the international nature of Romanticism are so important to this study, it is odd that a chapter entitled ‘Lectures d’Hoffmann’, which begins ‘On ne saurait aucunement sous-estimer l’importance jouée par les lectures d’Hoffmann dans l’inspiration créatrice et l’imaginaire de Théophile Gautier’ (p. 69), is barely three pages long. Yet, despite the fact that some rather short chapters do not allow much extended development of key ideas, this monograph offers both a useful introduction to Gautier’s aesthetics and an effective overview of the main themes of French Romanticism.
5097	dbpedia	3	89	http://www.artnet.com/artists/th%25C3%25A9ophile-gautier/	en				[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null
5097	dbpedia	0	33	https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/french/french-literature/	en	French Literature: History & Themes	https://website-cdn.stud…rter-bg-icon.svg	https://website-cdn.stud…rter-bg-icon.svg	[ "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/logos/vaia.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/subject-other.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/book-closed.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/flashcard.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/ai.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/note.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/calendar.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/folder-plus.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/file-question-02.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/Flashcards-Image.jpg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/Study-Set-Image.jpg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/Notes-Image.jpg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/Study-Plan-Image.jpg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/book-open-01.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/briefcase-01.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/phone-01.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/Magazine-Image.jpg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/Our-App-Image.jpg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/subject-other.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/book-closed.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/flashcard.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/ai.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/note.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/calendar.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/folder-plus.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/file-question-02.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/book-open-01.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/briefcase-01.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/07/phone-01.svg", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/welcome-laptop.png", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/welcome-mobile.png", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme//dist/assets/images/ai-flashcards.svg", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme//dist/assets/images/ai-summarize.svg", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme//dist/assets/images/ai-flashcards.svg", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/flashcards-listx2.png", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/flashcards-list-mobile.png", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/src/assets/images/va-signup-laptop.png", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/about.webp", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/about-logo.png", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/explanations/sidebar-logo.webp", "https://www.vaia.com/app/themes/studypress-core-theme/dist/assets/images/tbs/cta-desktop@1x.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de/sites/21/2024/03/Vaia_Logo_Single-Colour-1.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2022/08/us-flag.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2022/08/en-flag.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2022/08/es-flag.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2022/08/de-flag.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2022/08/fr-flag.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2022/08/it-flag.png", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2021/12/LKVIUFzH-0t5upqTu-app-store.svg", "https://website-cdn.studysmarter.de//sites/5/sites/5/2021/12/hiXi9mY6-jhXhbghR-google-play.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	French Literature: ✓ Terms ✓ History ✓ Authors ✓ Movements ✓ Explanation ✓ VaiaOriginal!	en	https://website-cdn.stud…rter-bg-icon.svg	Vaia	https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/french/french-literature/	French literature, encompassing a rich tapestry of written works from France, has left an indelible mark on the global literary landscape, offering profound insights into French society, culture, and history. Renowned for its remarkable contributions across a multitude of genres, including the pioneering novels of Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust, the poignant plays of Molière, and the pioneering poetry of Charles Baudelaire, French literature continues to captivate and inspire readers around the world. To truly understand the nuances of human thought and emotion, delving into the depths of French literary masterpieces is an essential journey for any avid reader or student of literature. Overview of French Literature French literature, encompassing a myriad of texts written in the French language, is known for its rich history, diversity, and significant influence on world culture. From medieval times to the contemporary period, French writers have explored an array of themes and employed various styles, contributing to the development of literature globally. Key themes in French Literature French literature is marked by its exploration of certain central themes that reflect both the changing times and the timeless concerns of humanity. These include love, power, society, human nature, freedom, and existential questions. Each era, from the Middle Ages to modern times, has seen these themes developed in unique ways, influenced by the social, political, and philosophical concerns of the time. Love and Passion: Portrayed in various forms, from the courtly love of medieval romances to the intense, often tragic passion of 19th-century novels. Power and Corruption: A recurring theme, especially in works that critique societal and political structures, such as those during the Enlightenment. Human Nature and Society: Explored through character studies and societal critiques, highlighting the complexities of social interactions and institutions. Existential Questions: Particularly prominent in the 20th century, questions about the meaning of life, freedom, and human existence are central themes. French Literature History through the ages The evolution of French literature is a journey that spans many centuries, each marked by significant works that have contributed to the canon and reflected the changing times. From the epic tales of the Middle Ages, through the intellectual inquiries of the Enlightenment, to the existential musings of the 20th century, the fabric of French literature is woven with diverse threads. The table below highlights some of the key periods and their contributions to French literature. PeriodCharacteristicsNotable WorksMedieval (8th-14th Century)Epic poems, chivalry, and courtly loveLa Chanson de Roland, Tristan and IseultRenaissance (14th-17th Century)Humanism, exploration, and poetryGargantua and Pantagruel by RabelaisEnlightenment (18th Century)Rationalism, critique of societal normsCandide by Voltaire19th Century (Romanticism, Realism, Symbolism)Emotion, detailed realism, and aesthetic beautyLes Misérables by Hugo, Madame Bovary by Flaubert20th Century (Existentialism, Modernism)Existential questions, innovation in narrativeThe Stranger by Camus, In Search of Lost Time by Proust French Literature Classics Exploring French Literature offers a journey through a remarkable repository of human thought, artistry, and emotion, captured in the written word. The classics of French Literature not only underscore the development of French language and culture but also have exerted a profound influence on literary traditions worldwide. The pillars of French Literary movements French Literary movements have historically been at the forefront of philosophical, political, and artistic shifts in Western culture. These movements, from the Enlightenment to Existentialism, have shaped how stories are told and ideas are explored through literature. French Literary Movements: These are identified periods within French literature characterised by shared stylistic, thematic, or philosophical traits among writers. Enlightenment (18th Century): This period emphasised reason, individualism, and scepticism towards traditional societal institutions. Writers like Voltaire and Rousseau critiqued the status quo, contributing to revolutionary ideologies.Romanticism (Late 18th to Early 19th Century): Romantic writers focused on emotion, nature, and individuality, contrasting sharply with the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas were central figures, blending deep emotional themes with historical narratives.Realism and Naturalism (19th Century): In reaction to Romanticism, these movements sought to portray life as it was, unembellished. Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola depicted everyday life and social conditions with painstaking detail.Existentialism and Modernism (20th Century): Characterised by a focus on individual experience and the absurdity of existence, existentialist writers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre explored themes of freedom, angst, and despair. Iconic novels and poets of French Literature The vast expanse of French literature is dotted with iconic novels and poets whose works have traversed national boundaries, contributing to the global literary heritage. These works reflect the breadth of human experience, capturing the complexities of the human heart and mind. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: A seminal work of literary realism, Madame Bovary explores the life of Emma Bovary, a woman trapped in a tedious marriage, whose search for passionate love and excitement leads to tragedy.Les Misérables by Victor Hugo: An epic tale that presents a panoramic view of 19th-century French society, Hugo’s masterpiece delves into themes of justice, morality, and redemption through the lives of its diverse characters. The French poet Charles Baudelaire, best known for his work Les Fleurs du mal, is often considered the father of modern criticism for his exploration of the complexities of modern life and the darker aspects of the human experience. Contemporary French Literature Contemporary French literature reflects a vibrant and evolving literary scene that continues to play a significant role in shaping the cultural landscape of France and beyond. It ranges from experimental works that challenge traditional genres to narratives that explore pressing global issues, all while maintaining a deep connection to the rich literary traditions of the past. Understanding French Literary Movements The journey through French literary movements is a captivating exploration of how literature has evolved in France from its classic origins to its modern form. Engaging with this evolution provides insight into not only the literary history of France but also the broader cultural and social developments that have shaped the nation and, by extension, the world. Evolution of French Literature: From classic to modern The transformation of French literature from its classical roots to its present-day manifestations showcases the dynamic nature of literary expression and the enduring impact of socio-political changes. Beginning with the structured elegance of classicism, moving through the romanticism that emphasised individual emotion, to the realism that sought to depict life without artifice, each movement has contributed uniquely to the rich tapestry of French literature. The 20th century saw the emergence of existentialism and modernism, highlighting complex narratives of human experience and innovation in narrative techniques. Classicism (17th Century): Emphasised harmony, order, and restraint, reflecting the ideals of the French court. Romanticism (Late 18th to Early 19th Century): Focused on emotion, nature, and the individual, reacting against Enlightenment rationalism. Realism (Mid-19th Century): Aimed to depict everyday life and society with uncompromising accuracy. Existentialism and Modernism (20th Century): Explored themes of existential angst, absurdity, and the breakdown of social norms, often using innovative narrative structures. The transition from Romanticism to Realism marks a pivotal moment in French literary history, illustrating a profound shift in artistic and social sensibilities. This was not merely a change in thematic focus but also a revolution in how literature could serve as a mirror to society, reflecting its virtues and vices with unprecedented candour. The realism movement, embodied by authors like Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola, challenged romantic idealism, paving the way for subsequent literary innovations. The impact of French literary movements on global literature French literary movements have not only shaped the nation's own cultural identity but have also exerted a profound influence on global literature. The export of French literary concepts and genres has facilitated a cross-cultural exchange, enriching literary traditions around the world. Romanticism: Sparked a global literary revolution, influencing English poets like Wordsworth and Keats. Surrealism: Originating in France, this movement played a crucial role in liberating the creative and subconscious elements of art and literature across the globe. Existentialism: French existentialist writers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, provided intellectual scaffolding for global discussions on freedom, existence, and ethics. Modernism: French innovations in narrative structure and literary form have inspired authors worldwide, pushing the boundaries of what literature can convey. The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to French authors more than any other nationality, testament to France's enduring influence on the world's literary landscape. French Literature - Key takeaways French Literature: Texts in the French language with a rich history, diverse themes, and global influence spanning from the Middle Ages to the contemporary period. French Literature Themes: Recurring themes include love, power, society, human nature, freedom, and existential questions. Each era explores these themes influenced by the time's specific social, political, and philosophical concerns. French Literature History: Evolution of literature across periods such as Medieval (8th-14th Century), Renaissance (14th-17th Century), Enlightenment (18th Century), Romanticism, Realism, Symbolism (19th Century), and Existentialism, Modernism (20th Century), with significant works influencing the French literature classics. French Literary Movements: Include Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Existentialism, and Modernism, characterised by shared stylistic, thematic, or philosophical traits that have significantly impacted Western culture. Contemporary French Literature: Reflects a vibrant, evolving scene with diverse voices addressing multicultural identities, the impact of technology, and environmental concerns, while continuing to lead with literary innovations and critical acclaim.
5097	dbpedia	3	5	https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1887/03/theophile-gautier/633541/	en	Théophile Gautier	https://cdn.theatlantic.…lt-thumbnail.png	https://cdn.theatlantic.…lt-thumbnail.png	[ "https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/nav-archive-promo-5541b02ae92f1a9276249e1c6c2534ee.png", "https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/images/current-issue.large.jpg", "https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/img/specialreports/lead/2020/10/14/Thumbnail.jpg", "https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/nav-crossword.png", "https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/archive-thumbnail.png", "https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/YourSubscription_300x300.jpg", "https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/bkDSSfA69-oId86mwAVksEvnrU4=/0x271:2357x3414/96x128/media/img/issues/1887/03/01/original.jpg, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/9zn-4SnH35nk06MatP40zhCd8lI=/0x271:2357x3414/192x256/media/img/issues/1887/03/01/original.jpg 2x, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/wspJX_EUSmnSXuN6SVN8i6q1_2k=/0x271:2357x3414/288x384/media/img/issues/1887/03/01/original.jpg 3x" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "James Breck Perkins" ]	1887-03-01T04:56:00+00:00	The Atlantic covers news, politics, culture, technology, health, and more, through its articles, podcasts, videos, and flagship magazine.	en	https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/favicon-3888b0e329526a975703e3059a02b92d.ico	The Atlantic	https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1887/03/theophile-gautier/633541/	IT is certain that Théophile Gautier has taken a high place in French literature, and it seems probable that his reputation will be a permanent one. The permanency of any literary reputation is, indeed, a question as to which the oracles are dumb, or send an uncertain answer. Nothing is more melancholy than to see that authors famous in their own day are but a short time known ; they heap up books and cannot tell who shall read them. First the works are forgotten, and then even the name of him who wrote them goes out of men’s minds. But it is possible that some few, at least, will still read what was written by Gautier, when a hundred years shall have passed away. Within a somewhat restricted range of literary endeavor, he attained very nearly to artistic perfection : he was the most brilliant representative of a school of thought and style; he was one of the most active and most influential leaders in a literary revolution. It was as a lieutenant in the great contest between classicism and romanticism that Gautier first gained prominence ; it was as one of the intellectual body-guard of Victor Hugo that he pledged himself to art and to the literature of the future. The battle is long over, and has gone into history as much as Nancy and Bunker Hill. All now admit that in the early part of the century French literature was held in bonds, and that the revolt was a just uprising for freedom. Tt was crowned with success ; it is no longer called a rebellion, but is recognized as a revolution. The romantic movement was largely one for freedom of style; but so intimate is the relation between the words in which thoughts are uttered and the thoughts that seek utterance, that a freer style brought with it the fruits of a richer imagination, a more artistic sense, a deeper insight into life and passion. The laws of the French drama had become as strict and unchangeable as those of the Medes and Persians ; what had been a garment of beauty was now the cerement of death. The romanticists claimed that a literature which was to life what Chinese painting was to nature could not be the ultimate expression of human thought. The conflict was between effete traditions and a fresh and vigorous school. It is curious that amid all the havoc of the French Revolution, when thrones and governments and social classes and religious beliefs were involved in a common overthrow, the traditions of literature should have remained unquestioned. The revolution swept over France and French life, but a deviation from certain rules of prosody was still regarded as a mortal sin. The Napoleonic era was not fertile in literary genius, and at its close formalism in poetry and on the stage sought to atone for the invention which was lacking. Châteaubriand would, perhaps, be claimed as the first apostle of romanticism in France, had not the gift of verse been denied him. But both from Germany and from England, from Goethe, Scott, and Byron, more than all from the eager study of Shakespeare, came the intoxicating breezes of a more vigorous literature. Before a body of ardent and artistic young Frenchmen there seemed to open a new world, rich in thought, passion, and expression. But to Victor Hugo belongs the chief glory of the revolt against literary methods that had become inane and dead, devoid of color or originality. In his play of Hernani, Hugo set at defiance the established rules of the drama, and its representation became one of the great battle-grounds between the followers of the classic and those of the romantic schools. Though this piece is still represented, its glory has somewhat waned, and to us it seems hardly to have deserved the prodigious reputation which it gained. Perhaps the success of the romantic movement dulls our ears to what once were thought rare and extraordinary beauties. Its first representation at the Français was to be on the 25th of February, 1830. There it was expected that the factions would meet: the classicists to damn the play, the romanticists to applaud it and insure its success. Among the former were found the conservatives, the middleaged, the men of established reputation, all those who were execrated by their opponents as bourgeois and Philistines. The band that formed around Victor Hugo was composed of very different material. In the army of romanticism, as in the army of Italy, all were young. Victor Hugo was but twenty-eight, and few of those who gathered to defend Hernani had reached their majority. There were among them painters, sculptors, poets, architects, dramatists, youths of every taste and every vagary, but all united by a common contempt for the rules by which ordinary men were bound, and united also by a love for poetry and art, which was always sincere, even if its manifestations sometimes seemed eccentric and excessive. Many a youth, on that first night, swore to devote himself to the fearless pursuit of the ideal in art and of truth in literature, and kept his vow well. It would have been difficult to find another body of young men possessing so much brilliancy and so much genius, and it would have been impossible to find another body of young men so badly dressed. In length of hair and lack of shirt collar they stood unequaled. To heighten the contrast between themselves and the bald heads of self-satisfied Academicians and prosperous bourgeois, they cultivated a “ Merovingian prolixity of hair.” A youth upon whom no spot of linen could be seen might claim high rank in the scale of romantic elegance. Hats à la Rubens, doublets à la Van Dyck, garments such as were worn in Spain a century back, or in Hungary or Bohemia before Paris tailors had conquered the world delighted the hearts of those who, in dusky taverns, drank confusion to the bourgeois, and rejoiced to style themselves the brigands of thought. It was from such enthusiasts that the recruits were gathered who were to defend the cause of romanticism. No hired stipendiaries — the curse then, as now, of Paris theatres — were to give purchased applause to the sentiments of Don Carlos and Doña Sol. The claqueurs, said Gautier, like the Academicians, were all classicists. Gautier was then a youth under twenty, and was engaged in his studies as a painter, but he received from Gérard de Nerval six tickets for the representation, with instructions to choose for his associates bold and trusty men, who would give no quarter to the Philistines. He selected five who would gladly have breakfasted on broiled Academician, and they joined their comrades of battle at the appointed time. They were admitted to the theatre some hours before the play began, and they occupied the long interval with singing ballads of Victor Hugo, and feasting on rolls and Bologna sausage. At last the hour drew near. The youths stationed themselves in various parts of the theatre, where danger to the cause might be apprehended. From the wildness of their dress and the ferocity of their countenances, they were easily recognized among the amiable gentlemen, in correct Parisian toilet, who thronged the house. The brigands of thought worshiped beauty, whether found in life or poetry, and when any lady entered who pleased their artistic taste she was received with tumultuous acclamation. Such manifestations were condemned as in the worst of taste, but not by those who were the objects of them. They blushed, frowned, and forgave. When she who afterwards became Madame de Girardin appeared in her box, a triple salvo of applause greeted her superb beauty. Every eccentricity of costume marked the romantic youth, but among them all Gautier appeared preeminent and gained fame in a night. He thought the revolt against effete usages should speak in the trousers and the waistcoat, as well as in the rhythm of poetry or the construction of Alexandrines. He was arrayed in a coat richly trimmed with velvet, an overcoat of gray faced with green satin, trousers of a faded green, a ribbon about his neck answering for collar and cravat, and a red waistcoat cut after the fashion of a Milan cuirass. At that time, to appear in a red waistcoat at the Français required courage equal to that of him who seeks reputation at the cannon’s mouth; but Gautier chose the color as one rich, hold, full of life and light and warmth, dear to art and hateful to Philistines. Those bourgeois bulls, he swore, should see the red flag and listen to the verses of Hugo. In later life he sadly admitted that on this dress chiefly rested his fame. If his name were pronounced before any Philistine, who had never read a line of his writings, he would at once say, with a satisfied air, “ Oh, yes, the young man with the red waistcoat and the long hair.” His poetry would be forgotten, but his waistcoat would go down to posterity. At last the play began, and the battle of applause and condemnation was fought at every passage. The advocates of the rival school, were almost ready to come to blows. An early line ran : — . . . “ C’est bien à l’escalier Dérobé.” The completion of the sense in the next line, in this manner, was a daring violation of the rules of dramatic verse, and the battle at once began. No ground was yielded on either side. The line, “ Est-il minuit ? Minuit bientôt,” was contested for three days. The opponents of Hugo said it was trivial and vulgar, — a king asking the hour like a shopkeeper, and being answered in words that would be appropriate for the shopboy. His admirers found in this, as in all the play, life, nature, and lyric art. In thirty hard-fought representations such as this Gautier won his spurs, and was thought worthy of presentation to the demi-god of romanticism. Victor Hugo was then in the first glow of fame and genius, and his followers regarded him with an idolatry which seems excessive to those for whom his great achievements are somewhat obscured by much that is unworthy of his name. But he was deemed then, and justly deemed, one who had breathed into the body of French poetry a soul of fire, who had touched the cold ashes and quickened them into life and beauty. Gautier’s courage forsook him when he was to meet the great leader of a triumphant cause. Twice he mounted the stairway with tremulous step, and fled away in a panic when he had reached the door. But at the third attempt the door was open, and he saw the great poet. Gautier’s speech failed him when he was presented, and the lyrical apostrophes with which he had planned to hail the chief remained unspoken. His mute admiration was perhaps more flattering to the great man, and the friendship thus begun was never interrupted. Gautier soon abandoned his palette for literature. He sometimes professed to regret that he had ceased the portrayal of crimsons and yellows, the gorgeousness of Eastern palaces and fiery clouds, only to put black upon white. But the traces of his studies as a painter can be found in his writings. It is hardly a metaphor to say that his is a pictorial style. His love for color speaks on the page, as it would have done on the canvas. With his pen he has depicted all things that the eye can see, with a vividness that the brush could not excel, in words that produce upon the mind an impression of varied tints and harmonious colors, such as glow from the paintings of Correggio and Del Sarto. Gautier’s wealth of style drew attention to him from the first. One of his earliest articles was shown to SainteBeuve, the best judge of style in France, and the great critic was at once interested by the extraordinary variety and richness of expression appearing in a novice. Albertus, Gautier’s first poem of importance, appeared when he was twentytwo, and though not a perfect nor a very pleasing production according to our tastes, it is full of power. But the publication of Mademoiselle de Maupin, three years later, was a literary sensation. It seems strange to us to read that Gautier’s parents kept him at his task, and would lock him in his room until he had finished his daily ten pages. Most American parents would think a son en route for perdition who was engaged in the announcement of views so pernicious, and would fear lest they should accompany him, if they encouraged his labors. The romanticists of the day were not lacking in courage, but the boldness of Mademoiselle de Maupin frightened some of the long-haired applauders of Hernani. The critics indulged in vigorous reprobation ; the general public was scandalized; the book ran through edition after edition, and made its author famous. There is much in Mademoiselle de Maupin that is unpleasant, and is saved only by beauty of expression from being vulgar. Though Gautier’s style reached in this novel its full perfection, it is far from his best work, and it is unfortunate that it is probably the one best known. Much of its offensiveness should be attributed to the effervescence of an exuberant and unrestrained youth, and the views which Gautier advanced with the confidence of twenty-five did not deserve the attention which his critics gave them. They were, indeed, of sufficient boldness, and lost nothing in the presentation. The young author disclaimed any hostility towards religion or virtue, but he announced that they were hardly worth much consideration; their advocates were canting Philistines, and the critics who prated and groaned about an immoral literature were themselves the bourgeoisie of letters and the eunuchs of thought. After a preface in which he defended these views with vigor, Gautier wrote a novel which was constructed in accordance with them. In fact, Gautier was neither a very irreligious nor a very immoral man. Undoubtedly, he did not resemble closely either St. Augustine or St. Francis, but an amiable and æsthetic indifference as to religious questions was the extent of his revolt, and his long life was for the most part characterized by social and domestic virtues. He viewed a follower of Voltaire with quite as much aversion as he could have felt towards a disciple of Loyola, and he inclined rather to a mild and semi-contemptuous sympathy for every form of religion, with an artistic preference for the faiths which were best fitted to retard modern civilization. His friend, Gérard de Nerval, claimed that he believed in seventeen religions, and that while he was respectful towards Jehovah he always had a good word for Jupiter. Gautier, perhaps, had the same elasticity of faith, and clung to his beliefs with equal looseness. His newly earned reputation soon resulted in his choosing journalism as a regular profession. For the remaining thirty-six years of his life he gained his living by constant and assiduous writing, as a critic of art and literature for the Paris journals. The work which he did for the papers far exceeds in volume that which was published in book form. He wrote with untiring industry, and poured out a copious and ever-pleasing stream of amiable though discriminating criticism. If all Gautier’s writings were gathered together, it is said they would fill three hundred volumes. Life is too short to read three hundred volumes of any man, but there is buried in old Paris newspapers a vast amount of valuable and brilliant criticism on the art and the literature of almost forty years. It would, perhaps, have been better for Gautier’s fame if he had devoted his time to the production of work less in amount and less ephemeral in character. But so rich was the quality of his style that the articles which he turned off almost daily, written in haste, and sent to the journals without an interlineation or a change, without even a punctuation mark, — for the poet regarded punctuation as an ignoble detail, fit only for type setters, — were as full of imagery, as finished in their style, as marked by a varied, copious, and exquisite choice of words, as if the writer had corrected and labored with painful elaboration. He is one of many illustrations that the great masters of style can work at their best with ease and swiftness. With tedious toil, some that write poorly by nature make their labors pleasing at last, but genius has often little need to be painstaking. Gautier is also one of the writers who prove how largely the form of expression gives literature its charm and ideas their interest. When the French say that the style is all important, they come much nearer the truth than a class of English writers who regard it as unimportant. Gautier was a critic of much delicacy and justness of feeling, but he had no new ideas to bring into the realm of art or thought. No man had less claim to be regarded as a philosopher or a sage. His views of life were often intended to be amusing, and when not so intended they usually furnish amusement from their naïveté and their simplicity. They please us, as the sayings of children please us, by the ignorance of life which they display. Gautier looked at life with the glance of a child, who finds in it much that is pretty, and is wholly unconcerned as to whether there is aught to existence but picking flowers and chasing butterflies. But the style made every page that he wrote full of charm. He said of himself that his was a style of adjectives. He thought that the complications of modern life demanded a supple and complex mode of expression, that should seek words in all dictionaries, colors from all palettes, harmonies from all lyres; his should be like the light of the setting sun, that reflects through burning clouds its varied hues. Few men knew or used so many words. He had studied the contents of the dictionaries from A to Z. With an eye that saw all things, and a command of words that few could equal, he excelled in a gorgeous richness of description. The things which the eye could see, he saw more clearly, he described more vividly, than any other writer of his day. Of the things not visible to the eye, the whole world could show no one else so oblivious. His power of perception was the more intense, because he had no conception of the things which were beyond his observation. He never dealt with the thoughts of men, their inner life, their mental or moral development, with the mysteries of life or the problems of the future. For him such questions had no existence. But all things in life, of which the impression could strike the optic nerve, were to him things of joy. Spanish muleteers singing over the passes of the Pyrenees, Russian princes wrapped in sables amidst the snows that enveloped far-rolling steppes, the minarets of St. Sophia, the sun setting over the lagoons of the Adriatic, where the cry of the gondolier breaks upon the traveler standing in the shadow of St. Mark’s, — such things he could describe with a vividness and richness which no one else could equal. He possessed also the two qualities which are found in almost all literature that can hope to survive its author, imagination and humor. His imagination was a pictorial imagination, one that was excited by subtle resemblances of form more than of feeling; but it gave life to every line he wrote, from a poem on love to a government report. Men like to be amused, and wit, more than thought, keeps books alive. Gautier’s writings have not the wit of the great works, which are read forever because they forever entertain, but he had the humor which delights in the delicate congruities and incongruities of words and things, — the humor that always pleases and never pierces. However fierce Gautier’s zeal had been to assist other red-breasted and long-haired youths in the overthrow of literary traditions, his own style showed the virtues of the new régime, and was little affected by its abuses. Moderation and calm came when the struggle was over, and the despotism of classicism had been succeeded by a free government. But the exuberance of a freed literature has not always been pleasing. The lurid intensity of a diseased genius like Baudelaire has been succeeded by the squalid and unlovely delineations of a diseased imagination like Zola’s. Alfred de Musset, whose genius was not controlled by the tenets of any school, has noted that while the classicists feared calling a spade a spade, their successors sometimes dwelt too fondly on the sordid and revolting phases of life. In the old school, the stately marching and remarching of words choked the struggling idea, but in the new school, a deluge of adjectives weighed down the overloaded noun with shades of meaning as mingled as the variegated hues of the rainbow. It is in his poetry that the finish of Gautier’s style and the delicacy of his imagination are best seen. In the little poems where he tells of marbles mingling under Attic suns their white dreams, or obelisks amid the pale hues of Paris weeping tears of granite for the skies and sphinxes of the Nile, there is the perfection of a certain kind of literary art. Among Gautier’s strongest passions was a love of travel. He rejoiced in strange sights and strange peoples ; new visions for the eye brought new happiness to the mind. He has written of his wanderings in Spain, Russia, Italy, and the East, and his books of travel are among the most delightful of their class. In them are seen all the eccentricities of his bizarre character. In each country where he travelled, he sought to become one of the people ; he followed the national customs, he ate of the national dishes. He watched with special interest the national millinery, when this indulged in bright colors, and eschewed broadcloth and trousers. Nothing in what he styled our pretended civilization disturbed him so much as the fact that men wore black coats and gray trousers instead of crimson cloaks and slashed yellow breeches. “ Our efforts in 1830 were in vain,” he wrote ; “ the black coat has triumphed over romanticism.” The picturesque phases of national life, the provincial customs, whatever possessed local color, he described with never failing zeal and never ceasing charm. But forms of government, religious beliefs, industrial development, all that constitutes the strength and greatness of a people, possessed no interest for him. He thought the skill with which the matadore planted the sword in the neck of an infuriated bull more important than the decay of the Spanish monarchy ; the contortions of a dervish excited his attention more than the fate of Constantinople or the destinies of Greece; he was moved by the new decorations at the opera house, but not by the question of Italian unity. Few men are more unlike than the author of the Stones of Venice and the author of Mademoiselle de Maupin, but they show a common dislike towards the phases of modern life, and from a similar feeling that these are lacking in picturesqueness. Ruskin, indeed, bewails the fate of the operative, who has become a soulless machine in some factory with starry-pointing chimneys, while Gautier would have been indifferent to his lot, if only his rags had been yellow and red instead of grimy and gray. All feelings of scorn and hatred were for Gautier embodied in the word “ bourgeois ; ” yet no Parisian shop-keeper gave less heed to the deep problems of life, to the fate of nations or the growth of ideas, than this apostle of romanticism. The bourgeois cared for his shop and his money chest, and Gautier cared for picturesque bull-fighters and Russian palaces with traces of Cossack taste. The bourgeois liked his wife and children, and Gautier liked the ballet dancer who could accomplish the most rhythmical pas. In the long lifetime which he devoted to literature and art criticism, he was always brilliant, always pleasing, and always hovering about the surface of things. Perhaps, indeed, we who are absorbed in material advancement need not look down upon one whose existence was given to the study of what was beautiful and artistic in the work of the brush, the chisel, and the pen. There are so many who are interested in the question of suffrage, the condition of the laborer, and the extension of railroads, that it is well that there should be some who care only for the development of new schools of painting and the establishment of new rules of rhythm. While democrats talked of progress and Saint Simonians planned new social contracts, Gautier listened only to the murmur of art. He said that he lived with a constant homesickness for another age ; that his lot should have been cast in Venice in the sixteenth century, or in the remote East in its days of splendor. The merit of his novels lies in the exhibition of the literary qualities of which we have spoken, rather than in any interest they excite in the characters or their development. His women have beauty, which is so portrayed that they stand before us like the Venuses of the Tribune. His heroes are blessed with unlimited wealth and strength ; they live in palaces such as are not made with hands, they are clad in clothes such as are not made by tailors. Everything is bizarre, picturesque, and delicious, and through the varied descriptions the story meanders in its little rivulet. Gautier began his literary life as one of the youngest in the revolutionary school, but he came to he regarded as a patriarch and a sage by a later generation of enthusiastic young Frenchmen. He maintained his influence among them by his talk, as well as by his writings. His conversation was brilliant, and every phase of life was discussed from the standpoint of dogmatic paradox. In some peculiarities there is a certain resemblance between him and the great English talker. Not in their talk, for Gautier’s was as full of whimsey and fantasy as Johnson’s was of pith and common sense. But the famous believer in the Cock Lane Ghost was surpassed in credulity by the leader of the romanticists. Gautier claimed to believe in every religion ; he certainly believed in every superstition. He attached importance to lots, and spells, and omens ; he had faith in magic and in dreams; he avoided crossed knives ; he fled from an overturned salt-cellar ; he grew pale with terror before three lighted candles. He greatly admired Offenbach, but he would not speak his name nor even put it on paper, for Offenbach was possessed of the evil eye. Another journalist had to write for the Moniteur the criticisms on the Grande Duchesse and Belle Hélène. Gautier broke his arm during his journey in Egypt, and he said that was because he must needs play the esprit fort, and begin his trip on a Friday. He thrilled his auditors as be told of his listening in Paris to the fateful croaking of a mysterious crow, and how the same bird met his friend Gérard de Nerval on the plains of Syria, and cast a terrible enchantment over his mind. Superstition is out of vogue among sound modern thinkers, and that fact, perhaps, strengthened the superstitious beliefs of one who regarded rational views as bourgeois modes of thought. Voltaire had sneered at superstitions, and though the romanticists discarded Christianity they disdained Voltairism, and Gautier himself regarded its disciples as mere imbeciles. Gautier’s appetite, like that of Dr. Johnson, was a thing long to be remembered. He traveled in Spain, where the people practice the abstinence common among southern nations. His gastronomic feats were viewed there, he tells us, with wonder mingled with respectful admiration. His appetite was prodigious and even gigantic, ever fresh and never weary. The quality as well as the amount of his fare was to him a subject of careful thought. He invented rare and curious dishes, and pointed with pride to his spinach flavored with pounded apricot stones. Bread he declared to be a stupid and dangerous invention, unfit for a carnivorous animal, and which served only as a rallying word for rioters and communists. His talents for aesthetic gourmandizing commanded the respect of the greatest masters in Europe. The chef of the Emperor of Russia was among his admirers, and was conquered by a stroke of genius. A favorite dish of the Czar, which was usually flavored with pounded almonds, was served at the imperial table. The other guests were loud in their admiration, hut Gautier remained stern and silent. The chef at last asked for his opinion. “ My friend,” said the great poet to the great cook, “ I looked for a flavor of almonds, and I find a flavor of macaroons. Sir, you abuse the confidence of the Czar.” The fear of death haunted Gautier as it did Dr. Johnson. There was always about him, he said, an odor of dissolution, and death, and nothingness. But Johnson’s fear was largely a religious fear, a shrinking from the dreadful problems of the future life, from the mystery that lies beyond the grave. Gautier’s dread was that of the child who plays in the sunlight, and is afraid to be taken away to a dark chamber. He dreaded the hour when he should no longer walk the Boulevard des Italiens, when the door of the Français should no longer open to him, when the pages of the Moniteur should no longer be filled with his wit. He clung to the sensuous things of life, and beyond them there was nothing that he desired. He lived for the day that was. In literature and the theatre, in the sculptures of the Louvre and the paintings of the Salon, in the familiar sights of Paris streets and the strange sights of foreign lands, in light and color, in beauty of face and form, by pyramids and sphinxes resting forever under a cloudless sky, or by mediæval towers and cathedrals rich in the endless variety of the Middle Ages, he found the bliss of life. He wished for no other existence, he sighed for no mysterious future, he harbored no spiritual longings for something that could not be found in French boulevards or Spanish piazzas. The ugliness of death, also, offended him. He had for beauty in the human form a love which exceeded that of the Greeks. It was horrible to think of himself as an object hideous to the eye and revolting to his fellow-men, and the terror of this idea clung about his mind. We have suggested that, with all the eccentricities of Gautier’s character and the artistic devotion of his nature, he had many qualities which might have been found in a disciple of Philistinism. Among these, perhaps, should be classed his great desire to be chosen a member of the Academy. If that body wished to include the chief names of literature, Gautier would certainly have been numbered among the Immortals. But he was left, with Dumas and Balzac, outside of the sacred circle. It is said that Mademoiselle de Maupin was the cause of his rejection, and that, though the French are not prudish, the Academicians would not admit its author into their midst. Its youthful faults might well have been overlooked in one who had so enriched French prose and verse, and who ranked among the great masters of style in this century. Many of the immortal names of French literature are not found on the official list, but Gautier lamented his rejection in a manner one would expect in a bourgeois, rather than in a romanticist. He sought consolation in attributing his misfortune to the decrees of fate. Men were predestined to be Academicians, he said ; they were born Academicians, as they were born poets, archbishops, or cooks. Thirty-nine ballots, he felt certain, bore his name when they were dropped into the box, but when they were opened his rival was found to have been unanimously elected. It is not strange that one so devoid of political beliefs should have been well content with the era of imperialism. If the government was corrupt, it did not concern him. The end of government was to furnish plenty of money for the encouragement of art, the support of authors, and the building of opera houses, and in these respects Napoleon III. did much better than could be expected from a republic controlled by bourgeois. Gautier’s private life was tranquil and free from incident. He lived in Paris, writing industriously, and surrounded by a circle whose tastes were like his, and whom he delighted by his brilliant and exuberant conversation. His little house at Neuilly was furnished with the objects which appealed to his sensibilities, and every phase of luxury was felt by him as are the chemical rays of light by a plant. His beauty as a young man, of which he delighted to boast, was not wholly destroyed by years. He lived with his sisters and daughters, and guests at his table found also the black cat, who had her chair at dinner, like any other member of the family. He delighted in cats, and praised their tender, silent, feminine caresses, their phosphorescent eyes, and their mysterious and cabalistic manners, which suggested meetings with phantoms and sorcerers, and companionship with Mephistopheles and the Evil One. The siege of Paris made a terrible inroad into Gautier’s peaceful life, and swept away much of the moderate property which he had slowly acquired ; but he bore his misfortunes with philosophic equanimity, and displayed his powers of description in his vivid Pictures of the Siege. He did not long survive its calamities. His superstitious dread of death and its cold unloveliness haunted him to the last, and he was almost frightened out of a life which could not, however, have been long continued. His family wished to conceal from him the existence of a disease of the heart, and sought to remove the newspapers in which he might see any reference to his condition. But he stumbled upon one which told the nature of his malady, and from that day he resigned himself to death. On the 23d of October, 1872, he died, at the age of sixty-one. His individuality was such that, though he had many disciples, he could have few imitators; and while this century in France has been rich in literary genius, Gautier will be remembered as one of its rarest products. James Breck Perkins.
5097	dbpedia	3	70	https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719085895	en	Theophile Gautier, Conteur Fantastique et Merveilleux	https://dam.bibliolive.com/mup/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=77055&cat=default&size=largeweb&id=6858	https://dam.bibliolive.com/mup/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=77055&cat=default&size=largeweb&id=6858	[ "https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/wp-content/themes/mup/public/img/logos/logowithouttext.png 1.5x, https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/wp-content/themes/mup/public/img/logos/logowithouttext.png 2x", "https://dam.bibliolive.com/mup/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=77055&cat=default&size=largeweb&id=6858", "https://dam.bibliolive.com/mup/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=590221&cat=default&size=largeweb&id=17069", "https://dam.bibliolive.com/mup/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=590249&cat=default&size=largeweb&id=17070", "https://dam.bibliolive.com/mup/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=590277&cat=default&size=largeweb&id=17071", "https://dam.bibliolive.com/mup/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=590680&cat=default&size=largeweb&id=17079", "https://dam.bibliolive.com/mup/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=590009&cat=default&size=largeweb&id=16949", "https://dam.bibliolive.com/mup/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=589559&cat=default&size=largeweb&id=16693", "https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/wp-content/themes/mup/public/img/logos/amazon-logo.png", "https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/wp-content/themes/mup/public/img/logos/waterstones-logo.png", "https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/wp-content/themes/mup/public/img/logos/blackwells-logo.png", "https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/wp-content/themes/mup/public/img/logos/bookshop.jpg", "https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/wp-content/themes/mup/public/img/logos/logowithouttext.png 1.5x, https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/wp-content/themes/mup/public/img/logos/logowithouttext.png 2x" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2015-10-22T10:32:11+00:00	Theophile Gautier, Conteur Fantastique et Merveilleux - Browse and buy the Paperback edition of Theophile Gautier, Conteur Fantastique et Merveilleux by Peter Whyte	en	https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/wp-content/themes/mup/public/img/favicon.ico	Manchester University Press	https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719085895	We would like to place cookies on your computer to improve your viewing experience and help us make this website better. By using our site you accept the terms of our Privacy Policy.
5097	dbpedia	0	25	https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Gautier%252C%2BTh%25C3%25A9ophile	en	Gautier%2C+Th%C3%A9ophile	http://img.tfd.com/TFDlogo1200x1200.png	http://img.tfd.com/TFDlogo1200x1200.png	[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Looking for Gautier%2C+Th%C3%A9ophile? Find out information about Gautier%2C+Th%C3%A9ophile. Explanation of Gautier%2C+Th%C3%A9ophile		https://img.tfd.com/favicon.ico	TheFreeDictionary.com	null
5097	dbpedia	2	84	https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/the-monument/history	en	Eiffel Tower history, architecture, design & construction	https://www.toureiffel.p…70601-014_1.JPEG	https://www.toureiffel.p…70601-014_1.JPEG	[ "https://www.toureiffel.paris/themes/custom/tour_eiffel/logo.png", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/themes/custom/tour_eiffel/logo.png", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/themes/custom/tour_eiffel/build/images/logo.svg", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/largeur_450px/public/2017-10/070601-014_1.JPEG?itok=PmM6c78H", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/inline-images/070202-003-vf.jpg", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/369x204/public/paragraphe/image_texte/img/070201-010_2.jpg?itok=ncVk-iCK", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/369x204/public/paragraphe/image_texte/img/070103-067_1.jpg?itok=UhahI6fa", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/inline-images/070202-005%20rec_0.jpg", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/mobile_350/public/2022-01/070601-014_0_1.jpg?itok=IWzCZwIS", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/mobile_350/public/2022-01/070601-017%20TE_1.jpeg?itok=UPWL8SWE", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/mobile_350/public/2022-01/070601-019-TE_1.jpg?itok=DrAyHJHO", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/mobile_h385/public/2022-01/PL9_1.jpg?itok=h9aRa-A4", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/mobile_h385/public/2022-01/PL8_2_1.jpg?itok=Wd5MyUrF", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/mobile_350/public/2022-01/planche_1_1.jpg?itok=sCz0B0Vp", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/mobile_350/public/2022-01/planche_2_1.jpg?itok=AyYCIYuP", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/mobile_350/public/2022-01/planche_3_1.jpg?itok=C-e0bre1", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/inline-images/exposition-1889.jpg", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/inline-images/charles-garnier.jpg", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/inline-images/alexandre-dumas.jpg", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/1200x675/public/2024-03/gustave_eiffel_new.jpg?itok=txxS_gQ_", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/1200x675/public/2022-01/header_chiffre_0.jpg?itok=AqOWVzRt", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/sites/default/files/styles/1200x675/public/2017-11/RV_2012-13.jpg?itok=GXXPx2VV", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/themes/custom/tour_eiffel/build/images/logo-golden.svg", "https://www.toureiffel.paris/themes/custom/tour_eiffel/build/images/logo-golden.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2017-10-30T11:59:31+11:59	It was at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the date that marked the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, that a great competition was launched in the Journal Officiel. The first digging ...	en	/themes/custom/tour_eiffel/favicons/apple-touch-icon.png	La Tour Eiffel	https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/the-monument/history	The Design of the Eiffel Tower The plan to build a tower 300 metres high was conceived as part of preparations for the World's Fair of 1889. The wager was to "study the possibility of erecting an iron tower on the Champ-de-Mars with a square base, 125 metres across and 300 metres tall". Selected from among 107 projects, it was that of Gustave Eiffel, an entrepreneur, Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, both engineers, and Stephen Sauvestre, an architect, that was accepted. Emile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, the two chief engineers in Eiffel's company, had the idea for a very tall tower in June 1884. It was to be designed like a large pylon with four columns of lattice work girders, separated at the base and coming together at the top, and joined to each other by more metal girders at regular intervals. The tower project was a bold extension of this principle up to a height of 300 metres - equivalent to the symbolic figure of 1000 feet. On September 18 1884 Eiffel registered a patent "for a new configuration allowing the construction of metal supports and pylons capable of exceeding a height of 300 metres". In order to make the project more acceptable to public opinion, Nouguier and Koechlin commissioned the architect Stephen Sauvestre to work on the project's appearance. The rivet workers All the metal pieces of the tower are held together by rivets, a well-refined method of construction at the time the Tower was constructed. First the pieces were assembled in the factory using bolts, later to be replaced one by one with thermally assembled rivets, which contracted during cooling thus ensuring a very tight fit. A team of four men was needed for each rivet assembled: one to heat it up, another to hold it in place, a third to shape the head and a fourth to beat it with a sledgehammer. Only a third of the 2,500,000 rivets used in the construction of the Tower were inserted directly on site. The uprights rest on concrete foundations installed a few metres below ground-level on top of a layer of compacted gravel. Each corner edge rests on its own supporting block, applying to it a pressure of 3 to 4 kilograms per square centimetre, and each block is joined to the others by walls. On the Seine side of the construction, the builders used watertight metal caissons and injected compressed air, so that they were able to work below the level of the water. Debate and controversy surrounding the Eiffel Tower Even before the end of its construction, the Tower was already at the heart of much debate. Enveloped in criticism from the biggest names in the world of Art and Literature, the Tower managed to stand its ground and achieve the success it deserved. Various pamphlets and articles were published throughout the year of 1886, le 14 février 1887, la protestation des Artistes. The "Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel", published in the newspaper Le Temps, is addressed to the World's Fair's director of works, Monsieur Alphand. It is signed by several big names from the world of literature and the arts : Charles Gounod, Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas junior, François Coppée, Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, William Bouguereau, Ernest Meissonier, Victorien Sardou, Charles Garnier and others to whom posterity has been less kind. Other satirists pushed the violent diatribe even further, hurling insults like : "this truly tragic street lamp" (Léon Bloy), "this belfry skeleton" (Paul Verlaine), "this mast of iron gymnasium apparatus, incomplete, confused and deformed" (François Coppée), "this high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this giant ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of Cyclops, but which just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney" (Maupassant), "a half-built factory pipe, a carcass waiting to be fleshed out with freestone or brick, a funnel-shaped grill, a hole-riddled suppository" (Joris-Karl Huysmans). Once the Tower was finished the criticism burnt itself out in the presence of the completed masterpiece, and in the light of the enormous popular success with which it was greeted. It received two million visitors during the World's Fair of 1889. "We come, we writers, painters, sculptors, architects, lovers of the beauty of Paris which was until now intact, to protest with all our strength and all our indignation, in the name of the underestimated taste of the French, in the name of French art and history under threat, against the erection in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower which popular ill-feeling, so often an arbiter of good sense and justice, has already christened the Tower of Babel. (...) Is the City of Paris any longer to associate itself with the baroque and mercantile fancies of a builder of machines, thereby making itself irreparably ugly and bringing dishonour ? (...). To comprehend what we are arguing one only needs to imagine for a moment a tower of ridiculous vertiginous height dominating Paris,just like a gigantic black factory chimney, its barbarous mass overwhelming and humiliating all our monuments and belittling our works of architecture, which will just disappear before this stupefying folly. And for twenty years we shall see spreading across the whole city, a city shimmering with the genius of so many centuries, we shall see spreading like an ink stain, the odious shadow of this odious column of bolted metal. Gustave Eiffel’s Response In an interview in the newspaper Le Temps of February 14 1887, Eiffel gave a reply to the artists' protest, neatly summing up his artistic doctrine: "For my part I believe that the Tower will possess its own beauty. Are we to believe that because one is an engineer, one is not preoccupied by beauty in one's constructions, or that one does not seek to create elegance as well as solidity and durability ? Is it not true that the very conditions which give strength also conform to the hidden rules of harmony ? (...) Now to what phenomenon did I have to give primary concern in designing the Tower ? It was wind resistance. Well then ! I hold that the curvature of the monument's four outer edges, which is as mathematical calculation dictated it should be (...) will give a great impression of strength and beauty, for it will reveal to the eyes of the observer the boldness of the design as a whole. Likewise the many empty spaces built into the very elements of construction will clearly display the constant concern not to submit any unnecessary surfaces to the violent action of hurricanes, which could threaten the stability of the edifice. Moreover there is an attraction in the colossal, and a singular delight to which ordinary theories of art are scarcely applicable".
5097	dbpedia	0	72	http://jv.gilead.org.il/sfs/Margot.html	en	Jules Verne, Playwright	http://jv.gilead.org.il/pics/bertrand.png	http://jv.gilead.org.il/pics/bertrand.png	[ "http://jv.gilead.org.il/pics/quill.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null			../pics/bertrand.png		null	SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, XXXII:1 #95 (March 2005): 150-162. Jean-Michel Margot Jules Verne, Playwright During his lifetime, Jules Verne had only one publisher for his novels, Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814-1886). The most important French publisher of the nineteenth century, Hetzel also published the literary works of Alphonse Daudet, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and ThÃ©ophile Gautier.1 His stable of illustrators included, among many others, LÃ©on Benett, Emile Bayard, Georges Bertall, Gustave DorÃ©, EugÃ¨ne Froment, Tony Johannot, and Ernest Meissonier.2 In 1873, Hetzel handed over the management of the publishing company to his son, Louis-Jules Hetzel, who continued to publish Verneâs well-known geographic and scientific novels until he sold the company to the publishing giant Hachette in 1914.3 Although he is best known as a writer of extraordinary adventures, Jules Verneâone of the most translated novelists in the worldâwas also a prolific playwright. At the age of thirty-four, he achieved international fame with the publication of his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863). Before that, however, the majority of his literary activity was devoted to the theater. Verneâs theatrical productions can be divided into three categories: the plays he wrote during his youth (before he met Hetzel), his operas and operettas, and the piÃ¨ces Ã grand spectacle (great spectacle plays) inspired by his novels. Plays written before 1863. Verneâs biographersmention several plays, both tragedies and vaudeville-like comedies, written before he was twenty.4 At age seventeen, Verne supposedly submitted a tragedy in verse to a puppet theater in Nantes, his birthplace. The piece was rejected, which is all that we know of it. The text is lost and even the title is unknown. In 1981, the city of Nantes bought Verneâs manuscripts from the Verne family. To consolidate the copyrights on the unpublished texts, the Municipal Library of Nantes published thirty typed copies of these manuscriptsâknown as Manuscrits nantaisâin three volumes that totalled 1,787 pages. Thus scholars have access to most of the writings of the young Verne, including short plays such as Alexandre VI, La Conspiration des poudres (The Powder Conspiracy), Le Quart dâheure de Rabelais (The Fifteen Minutes of Rabelais), and Don Galaor.5 In 1848âat the age of twenty and still a studentâVerne was sent to Paris by his father to attend law school (he graduated in 1850 with a licence en droit). The young Verneâs first priority, however, was to become known in theatrical circles. Through one of his uncles, Verne met Alexandre Dumas pÃ¨re, who âadoptedâ him and who so impressed him that, forty years later, Alexandre Dumas fils wrote to Verne to say that Verne was, more than himself, the true son of the elder Dumas.6 Dumas opened his ThÃ©Ã¢tre Historique with La Jeunesse des Mousquetaires (The Youth of the Musketeers) on February 17, 1849, with Verne as a guest in page 151 Dumasâs own box. Mentored by Dumas, Verne produced his first staged play, Les Pailles rompues (The Broken Straws), in 1850. Inspired by Marivaux,this short play is a witty and affected conversation between a coquettish woman and her jealous husband.7 In the dedication, Verne expressed his gratitude to Dumas, who obviously helped him both to write the play and to stage it in his theater. After Marivaux, the young playwright took Musset as a model.8 Still exploring various dramatic possibilities, Verne wrote Leonardo da Vinci in 1851, which became Monna Lisa at a reading at the AcadÃ©mie dâAmiens in 1874 and in its first printing in 1974.9 In this bittersweet explanation of the sibylline smile of La Giaconda, Leonardo is so immersed in his art that he forgets the beautiful Lisa, who would so willingly respond to his slightest attention. The description of Leonardo, unskillful with the woman he still loves, is a metaphor for Verne, the shy introvert. Verne himself acknowledged that he was helped in writing the Vinci play by Michel CarrÃ©, the prolific librettist, who with Jules Barbier produced many well-known French operas between 1850 and 1870.10 Interestingly, in 1851, Barbier and CarrÃ© brought to the OdÃ©on a fantastic drama, Les Contes dâHoffman (The Tales of Hoffmann). Thirty years later, Jacques Offenbach11 produced his own versionâthe last and one of the most remarkable French opÃ©ras comiques12âand this production inspired Jules Verneâs work on his own Voyage Ã travers lâimpossible (Journey through the Impossible, 1882). In the 1850s, it was common to stage so-called âcomedy proverbs,â short pieces that illustrated various proverbs. One such piece written by Verne remained unstaged, but it was published in 1852 in a French family magazine, Le MusÃ©e des familles, under the title of Les ChÃ¢teaux en Californie, ou, Pierre qui roule nâamasse pas mousse (The Castles in California, or, A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss). In this piece, Verne played with words and told jokes that, while perhaps innocent, nevertheless were often full of racy humor. Taking advantage of similar sounding words such as coeur (heart) and queue (tail), Verne inserted many double meanings into his text. The most astonishing fact is that such a play was printed in the serious MusÃ©e des familles, whose targeted readership, the French family, necessarily also included children. In Les Heureux du jour (The Happy of the Day, 1853), Verne criticized Parisian society, ridiculing its vanity and greed. His style was already more mature and his writing more solid than in previous works. In Onze jours de siÃ¨ge (Eleven Days of Siege, 1861), Verne returned to vaudeville (light comedy). Learning that her marriage is invalid, Madame refuses to sleep with Monsieur, who keeps her captive. This is a modest plot upon which to hang three acts, but the one-act piece that preceded itâUn Mari Ã la Porte (A Husband at the Door), written in 1859 by Delacour and Morand and with music by Offenbachâis delightful.13 Robert Pourvoyeur, the specialist in Vernian theater, points out that among the many plays written in the 1850s, several, especially Un Neveu dâAmÃ©rique, ou, les deux Frontignac (An American Nephew), demonstrate how Verneâs writing improved (5-30). This play was written in 1861, but it was never staged and it remained unpublished by Hetzel until 1873.14 Based upon the original and page 152 hilarious idea of taking out a life annuity and death insurance on the same character, it is without a doubt Verneâs best play. The brilliantly funny yet natural dialogue is delivered at breakneck speed even as it maintains the depth of the characters. By 1861, Verne had fully mastered his talent as a playwright, after having tried out several literary routes (plays, operas, operettas, and opÃ©ras comiques). An American Nephew, an excellent satiric work, suggests what kind of playwright Verne could have become with a little more maturity and experience. But Verneâs fateful meeting with Hetzel was just around the corner and Verneâs literary career was destined to explore âKnown and Unknown Worlds,â to recall the subtitle of the Voyages Extraordinaires.15 Musical theater. Many scholars and biographers rightly insist on Verneâs strong interest in music. So it is no wonder that the future novelist should insert music into his plays, producing pieces such as operas, operettas, and opÃ©ras comiques. In so doing he was completely of his time, since operas were considered, at least in France during the second half of the nineteenth century, to be the highest form of both music and theater. In his novels as well, Verne often makes references to musical pieces, mainly to operas. Characters and narrators in his novels often quote the operas and operettas of his time, some of which are still well known today, while others have been completely forgotten. Pourvoyeur notes eighteen instances in Claudius Bombarnac (1892); even in Propeller Island (1895), several pages are dedicated to Mozart and Gounodâs study of Don Juan (Pourvoyeur 12). Let us now turn our attention to Aristide Hignard, who, like Verne, was born in Nantes.16 Hignard and Verne had apartments on the same floor in Paris. They became friends and Verne wrote the lyrics for Hignardâs music. Although some Verne biographers suggest that Hignard was a talented musician, there is no doubt that, without his friendship with Verne, he would be completely forgotten today. He was also unluckyâlike the Marquis of Ivry, who produced Les Amants de VÃ©rone (The Lovers of Verona) in the same year that Gounodâs RomÃ©o et Juliette (Romeo and Juliet) appearedâin writing a Hamlet, his best (or perhaps least worst?) piece in 1868, the same year as the official musician Ambroise Thomasproduced an opÃ©ra comique, also entitled Hamlet.17 Verne wrote four pieces with Hignard and it is likely that they would have enjoyed greater success if the composer had been, for example, an Offenbach. In the meantime, Dumas lost his ThÃ©Ã¢tre Historique, which was remodeled and named the ThÃ©Ã¢tre Lyrique in 1852. The new director, Seveste,18 was looking for a secretary and, on the recommendation of Dumas and Talexy, he hired Jules Verne.19 So, with his first job, Verne was directly confronted with the life of the theater, with the various personalities of its musicians and artists, with financial problems, and with bills to pay. It is likely that he did a good job: in three years some fifty pieces were staged in his theater. Verneâs own first musical piece performed on stage is an opÃ©ra comique in one act, Le Colin-Maillard (The Blind Manâs Buff, 1853). Inspired by Beaumarchaisâs Le Mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), and with the page 153 collaboration of Michel CarrÃ©, the plot involves four couples playing the title game in the woods on a Sunday afternoon. Two years later, in 1855, with the collaboration of the same Michel CarrÃ© and again with music by Aristide Hignard, Verne produced Les Compagnons de la Marjolaine (The Knights of the Daffodil), another one-act opÃ©ra comique. The story is simple: a young ferryman gets over his cowardiceâwith the help of numerous drinksâto save the woman he loves from being raped. This piece is better than the first one. Verneâs talent for writing lyrics has improved and the text generates the music.20 In 1855, Offenbach opened his own theater in Paris and gave Verne the opportunity to stage his musicalMonsieur de ChimpanzÃ© (Mr. Chimpanzee) at Les Bouffes Parisiens. With music by Hignard, this one-act operetta concerns the problem of evolution: is the character in question a human or a monkey? Verne treated this subject in a hilarious, even slapstick, way and he would later tackle it again in his 1901 novel, The Aerial Village. In 1861 Verne was back on stage at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre Lyrique with another show written with CarrÃ© and Hignard, LâAuberge des Ardennes (The Inn of the Ardennes). This opÃ©ra comique uses the familiar situation of an inn with no rooms available. A young newlywed wants a room for himself and his bride and the only solution is to frighten another tourist into fleeing and making his room available. Of course, the other tourist is an attorney who has papers which make the newlywed wealthy. If Lecoq, who specialized in comedies about thwarted wedding nights, had written the music instead of Hignard, perhaps LâAuberge des Ardennes would still be on stage today. Plays inspired by the Voyages Extraordinaires. Following the appearance of Verneâs first four novelsâFive Weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon(1865), and Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866)âVerneâs publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel gave them the collective title of Voyages Extraordinaires, announcing this in his Preface to Hatteras.21 Eight years later, on November 7, 1874, Verne suddenly became famous as a playwright as well as a novelist, thanks to his production of Le Tour du monde en 80 jours (Around the World in 80 Days) at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris. This hugely successful production had a first run of 415 performances. After more than ten years as Hetzelâs employee, and barely making a living, Verne became virtually overnight a successful and wealthy playwright. Newspaper and magazine articles written by his contemporaries indicate that he was almost better known during this period as a playwright than as a novelist.22 Why and how could Verne produce such successful plays adapted from his novels? In the 1870s and 1880s, there was no television, no movies, no radio. In cities like Paris, theaters and opera were the only entertainment. The Third Republic wanted to forget the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and the Commune; plays and operas offered the best âescapeâ entertainment possible. While the dazzling opÃ©ra bouffe23 of the Second Empire was being replaced by pleasant bourgeois reductions of republican opÃ©ras comiques, fairy plays and piÃ¨ces Ã grand spectacle were also flourishing. page 154 Around the World in 80 Days24 brought something new and extravagant to the Paris stage: it featured new landscapes, exotic people, live elephants and serpents, natural cataclysms, and strange transportational vehicles for the audience to enjoy without leaving the comfort of their theater seats. The so-called piÃ¨ce Ã grand spectacle was born, and for decades Parisians went to see these plays just as the public goes to see blockbuster movies today. Around the World in 80 Days was the most successful of those numerous piÃ¨ces Ã grand spectacle of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with more than two thousand performances between 1874 and 1900. For that reason, it is considered to be the prototype of this kind of play. Nothing was neglected, including ballets and music written especially for it, sumptuous sets, and clever machinery. The effects produced by these grand dramatic spectacles were the forerunners of what Hollywood special effects offer to audiences today. How Around the World in 80 Days came to exist is still a controversial point in literary history. The story was first developed in 1872 as a play and not a novel. Although the concept was Verneâs, he wrote the first draft of the play with Edouard Cadol.25 It was rejected by several theater directors. Cadol, who was not easy to work with, became angry and impatient and was soon replaced by Adolphe dâEnnery,26 who was to piÃ¨ces Ã grand spectacle what Ray Harryhausen later was to Hollywood special effects. At the end of the nineteenth century in Paris, having the collaboration of dâEnnery was a guarantee of success for any playwright. In the meantime, without any help or input from Cadol, Verne wrote the novel Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1873. It was already a bestseller by the time the play premiered in November 1874.27 As well as Around the World in 80 Days, DâEnnery helped Verne bring several other plays to the stage: Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (The Children of Captain Grant, 1875), Michael Strogoff (1878), and Voyage Ã travers lâimpossible (Journey through the Impossible,1882). The first three are inspired by novels with the same titles and are part of Verneâs series of Voyages Extraordinaires. The last is by far the most interesting and warrants further discussion. Journey through the Impossible is an intriguing playâone that could still be produced today. Unique among Verneâs works for containing the greatest number of science-fiction elements, it is the only one of the four piÃ¨ces Ã grand spectacle written with dâEnnery that was not adapted from a previously published Verne novel. Journey through the Impossible is an original story. Unlike most of Verneâs work, and irrespective of its science-fictional features, its plot is not just âextraordinary,â it is wholly impossible. And, as the title suggests, it constitutes a fundamental departure from Verneâs other work.28 In most of Verneâs novels, the heroes never reach their goal: in Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Lidenbrock, Axel, and Hans travel far beneath the Earthâs surface, but never reach the Center. Captain Hatteras and his crew of the Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras are unable to set foot on the North Pole because of a huge, active volcano located there. Barbicane, Nicholl, and Michel Ardan travel From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon without actually landing. For once in Jules Verneâs works, however, all the travelers of Journey through the Impossible reach their goals. Between the prologue and the page 155 epilogue, the hero goes to the center of the Earth in the first act, to the bottom of the seas in the second act, and to the Planet Altor in the third. As such, this play stands in stark contrast to everything Verne represents in terms of his legendary attention to scientific verisimilitude. For example, in an interview with the British journalist Gordon Jones in 1904, Verne insisted that he was not a visionary and that the futuristic aspects of his fiction are merely the natural outcome of the scientific trend of modern thought, and as such have doubtless been predicted by scores of others besides myself. Their coming was inevitable, whether anticipated or not, and the most that I can claim is to have looked perhaps a little farther into the future than the majority of my critics. (666) To drive this point home, Verne then contrasted his own approach to that of his literary rival H.G. Wells, saying I consider him, as a purely imaginative writer, to be deserving of very high praise, but our methods are entirely different. I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact.... The creations of Mr. Wells, on the other hand, belong unreservedly to an age and degree of scientific knowledge far removed from the present. (670) And yet here stands the fantastical Journey through the Impossible, a play in three acts, performed over two decades earlierâa play that completely contradicts the above statements! Using the same structure as The Tales of Hoffmann, where the hero has to choose between love and art, Journey through the Impossible dramatizes a struggle between love and knowledge. Its hero is George Hatterasâthe son of Captain Hatteras who discovered the North Pole in Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatterasâwho has to choose between love and knowledge, good and evil, happiness and science. The Tempter is Doctor Ox, resurrected by Verne from his short story of the same name. The Guardian Angel is Volsius, who appears in the first act as Otto Lidenbrock, the main character of Journey to the Center of the Earth. In the second act, he appears as Captain Nemo, the main character of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and in the third act as Michel Ardan, traveler From the Earth to the Moon. Inventing no new characters, Verne took existing heroes from the Voyages Extraordinaires and let them travel âthrough the impossible.â George Hatteras is accompanied by his fiancÃ©e, Eva, who shares his adventuresâanother exception in Verneâs works, where usually the women stay home and send the hero alone on his extraordinary voyageâand helps Volsius to save him from the evil scientific knowledge proffered by Doctor Ox. Journey through the Impossible was written by Verne at a turning point in his life and literary career. In the first half of his life, he wrote novels and plays in which science was a positive good and engineers and scientists worked to improve the future of humanity. The typical character of this first period is Cyrus Smith, the engineer of The Mysterious Island (1875). In the second half of his life, Verne wrote novels (and very few plays) in which science was morally questionable, used as it was by evil characters to create human misfortune in works such page 156 as Robur the Conqueror (1886), Master of the World (1904), and The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz (1910). Journey through the Impossible is one of the most intriguing, surprising, and important later works by Jules Verne. It is greatly ironic that the most overtly science-fictional narrative in Verneâs vast oeuvre is a play, not a novel, and that it remains largely forgotten today.29 NOTES Louis Marie Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) was a French novelist of the naturalist literary school. Alexandre Dumas(1802-1870), one of the most famous French writers of the nineteenth century, is best known today for historical adventure novels including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. The works of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the great Victorian novelist, are characterized by attacks on social evils, injustice, and hypocrisy. George Sand (1804-1876) was the pseudonym of Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, French Romantic novelist and also a member of the naturalist literary current. Victor Hugo (1802-1885), nineteenth-century Franceâs most important Romantic writer, is best known in the Anglo-Saxon world for his novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Miserables. ThÃ©ophile Gautier (1811-1872) was a French poet, novelist, and critic. LÃ©on Benett (1838-1917) was the pseudonym of Hippolyte LÃ©on Benet, French illustrator and civil servant who contributed illustrations to more than twenty-five of Verneâs novels. Emile Bayard (1837-1891) was a French painter and illustrator who was Victor Hugoâs favorite illustrator. Georges Bertall (1820-1882) was the pseudonym of Albert Arnoux, French humorist and illustrator who illustrated works by, among others, Hans Christian Andersen and James Fenimore Cooper. Gustave DorÃ© (1832-1883) was the most popular and successful French illustrator of the mid-nineteenth century, widely known for his illustrations of texts such as Danteâs Inferno, Cervantesâs Don Quixote, and the Bible. EugÃ¨ne Froment (1844-1900) was a French illustrator and engraver. Tony Johannot (1803-1852) was a French illustrator whose drawings enriched the works of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891) was a French academic painter whose works hang today in most of the worldâs major museums. One of the most important French publishing companies, Hachette was founded in 1824 and is still in business today. The two best English biographies on Verne are by Jean Jules-Verne and Herbert R. Lottman. The titles of Verneâs novels are given only in English; original French titles with English translations are given for all theatrical works. Alexandre Dumas the younger (1824-1895), French playwright and novelist, was the illegitimate son of Dumas the elder and the chief creator of the nineteenth-century comedy of manners. His first important play, La Dame aux camÃ©lias, known in English as Camille, was a sensation. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763), French playwright and novelist, was popular for his numerous comedies, including Love in Livery and The Legacy, which analyze the sentiments and complications of love in a graceful, albeit often precious, style. Alfred de Musset (1810-1857), French Romantic poet and playwright, is best remembered for his poetry. Much influenced by Shakespeare and Schiller, he wrote the first modern dramas in the French language. Situated north of Paris, Amiens is the capital city of the Picardie and the site of the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Verne lived in Amiens during the second half of his page 157 life and, as a member of the Municipality and of the local Academy, was one of its most eminent citizens. Michel CarrÃ© (1819-1872), a successful French writer of libretti, worked with Gounod, Offenbach, Meyerbeer, and Bizet. Paul Jules Barbier (1825-1901) was a French poet and a prolific librettist. With CarrÃ©, he wrote the lyrics of Galatea, Romeo and Juliet, Paul and Virginie, The Queen of Saba, and Gounodâs Faust. Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880), son of a Cologne synagogue cantor, was trained as a violinist at the Paris Conservatoire and initially found employment as a cellist at the OpÃ©ra-Comique. He followed this with a successful early career as a virtuoso on the instrument, for which he wrote a number of works, including a concerto militaire and a concertino. Offenbach was conductor at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre FranÃ§ais for five years, but in 1855 he rented his own theatre, Les Bouffes Parisiens, where his early light-hearted works for the stage were performed. His successful career, devoted largely to operettas and opÃ©ras comiques, continued until his death in 1880. The opÃ©ra comique (comic opera), an exclusively French style of opera, developed from earlier popular shows performed by troupes entertaining spectators at fairs. An opÃ©ra comique consists of spoken dialogue alternating with musical numbers, including arias and orchestral music. The OpÃ©ra-Comique theater in Paris was founded in 1715. The repertoire of the opÃ©ra comique contains works as well known as Mozartâs Cosi Fan Tutte, Donizettiâs La Fille du RÃ©giment, Berliozâs Les Troyens, Bizetâs Carmen, Offenbachâs Les Contes dâHoffmann, Verdiâs Falstaff, and Debussyâs PellÃ©as et Melisande. A. Charles Delacour was the pseudonym of Alfred Charlemagne Lartigue (1817-1883). He and LÃ©on Morand (182?-191?) were French librettists. It was probably written with Charles Wallut (1829-?), French writer and director of the MusÃ©e des familles (Family Museum) between 1863 and 1881. Un Neveu dâAmÃ©rique ou les deux Frontignac is available in a 2004 English translation by Frank Morlock at <http://jv.gilead.org.il/morlock/adopt.html>. Until recently, scholars and journalists could only speculate upon the relationship between Verne and his publisher, on the meager basis of the fictionalized 1928 biography by Marguerite Allotte de la Fuye, Jules Verne, sa vie, son oeuvre. Now three volumes of the letters between Verne and the elder Hetzel have been made available, Correspondance inÃ©dite de Jules Verne et de Pierre-Jules Hetzel, edited by Olivier Dumas, Piero Gondolo della Riva, and Volker Dehs. See Arthur B. Evansâs review-essay of these volumes, âHetzel and Verne: Collaboration and Conflict.â Two more volumes, which will include correspondence between Verne and the younger Hetzel, are scheduled to appear in 2005 and 2006. Taken together, this voluminous correspondence allows a much better understanding ofâand raises new questions aboutâthe complex relationship between the publisher and his author. Aristide Hignard (1822-1898), the son of a Nantes ship owner, was a French composer who also taught musical writing; Emmanuel Chabrier was one of his students. Ambroise Thomas (1811-1896) was a French composer of operas. Edmond SÃ©bastien Seveste (?-1852) hired Jules Verne and died shortly afterward. His brother, Jules-Henri (?â1854), took over the direction of the ThÃ©Ã¢tre Lyrique, but died two years later, leaving Verne unemployed. Adrien Talexy (1821-1880) was a French composer of popular music, mainly polkas and mazurkas. Les Compagnons de la Marjolaine is available in a 2004 English translation by Frank Morlock at <http://jv.gilead.org.il/morlock/knights.html>. page 158 This Preface was not included in either the British or American editions of the novel; it remained available only in French until it was translated by Arthur B. Evans and included in his Jules Verne Rediscovered (29-30). See, for example, some of the articles by Verneâs contemporaries collected in my Jules Verne en son temps (2004). OpÃ©ra bouffe, originated by Offenbach when he was director of Les Bouffes Parisiens, is a type of witty and cynical lyrical composition that evolved out of the opÃ©ra comique and, during the final years of the Second Empire, became the French operetta. That period of transition was characterized by a spirit of easygoing skepticism that seemed to permeate society. Everything was approached with a light heart, possibly to hide any feelings of disquietude caused by the instability of the rÃ©gime. After the war of 1870 the taste of the public appeared to undergo a change, and the operetta, which combined certain characteristics of the opÃ©ra bouffe with those of the older opÃ©ra comique, came into vogue. Verne scholars and specialists refer to the novel as Around the World in Eighty Days and to the play as Around the World in 80 Days. Edouard Cadol (1831-1898) was a playwright, a lecture-examiner of the ComÃ©die franÃ§aise, and author of Les Inutiles (1868; The Unnecessaries). Adolphe Philippe (1811-1899), alias Adolphe dâEnnery (also written Dennery), was a playwright whose best known play remains Les Deux orphelines (The Two Orphans). By turn a lawyerâs clerk, a painter, and a journalist, in 1831 he made his dÃ©but as a dramatist as part author of Emile, ou le fils dâun Pair de France. From that date he was sole or part author of more than 280 plays, no less than five of them having been produced on the Paris stage at one time. He adapted his work to the taste of the public and achieved success upon success, rapidly making a fortune. His plays were written mainly in collaboration with others. Before his death he donated to the state one of his houses, containing a collection of Chinese and Japanese vases of great value. This collection of oriental art gathered by his wife can be seen today at the dâEnnery Museum in Paris. Cadol and Verne each received 25% of the playâs profits, while dâEnnery received 50%. Journey through the Impossible opened in Paris at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre de la Porte Saint-Martinâwhere Around the World in 80 Days played eight years earlierâon November 25, 1882. The play was presented 97 times (43 in 1882 and 54 in 1883). No original manuscript copy is known to exist and the text was considered lost until a copy was discovered in the Archives of the Censorship Office of the Third Republic in 1978. (The Censorship Office was a heritage of the Second Empire and every play was copied by anonymous clerks before being performed.) An English translation of Journey through the Impossible was published by Prometheus Books in 2003 (<www.prometheusbooks.com>). WORKS CITED Allotte de la Fuye, Marguerite. Jules Verne, sa vie, son oeuvre. Paris: Simon Kra, 1928. Dumas, Olivier, Piero Gondolo della Riva, and Volker Dehs, eds. Correspondance inÃ©dite de Jules Verne et de Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1863-1886). 3 Vols. Geneva: Slatkine, 1999-2002. Evans, Arthur B. âHetzel and Verne: Collaboration and Conflict.â SFS 28.1 (March 2001): 97-106. âââââ. Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. Jones, Gordon. âJules Verne at Home.â Temple Bar 129 (June 1904): 664-71. Jules-Verne, Jean. Jules Verne: A Biography. Trans. Roger Greaves. New York: Taplinger, 1976. Lottman, Herbert R. Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography. New York: St. Martinâs, 1996. Margot, Jean-Michel, ed. Jules Verne en son temps. Amiens: Encrage, 2004. Pourvoyeur, Robert. âIntroduction: Jules Verne et le thÃ©Ã¢tre.â Clovis Dardentor by Jules Verne. Paris: Union gÃ©nÃ©rale dâÃ©ditions (coll. 10/18, no. 1308), sÃ©rie Jules Verne inattendu, 1979. 5-30. THE THEATRICAL WORKS OF JULES VERNE Titles, in both French and English, are organized chronologically. Annotations include the following information: a) type of work (e.g., comedy, tragedy, opera); b) possible Verne collaborators; c) date and place of the premiere performance; d) number of first-run performances; e) miscellaneous comments; and f) publication information where relevant. MN = Manuscrits nantais, BSJV = Bulletin de la SociÃ©tÃ© Jules Verne 1845 Untitled verse tragedy; for the Puppet ThÃ©Ã¢tre Riquiqui in Nantes; the text, mentioned in biographies, is lost. Untitled vaudeville piece;only Act 2 remains; published in MN I (51-82). 1847 Alexandre VI; five-act verse tragedy; dated mid-1847; alternate title: Cesar Borgia; published in MN II (441-553). 1848 La Conspiration des poudres (The Powder Conspiracy); five-act verse tragedy; published in MN II (555-725). Une Promenade en mer (An Excursion at Sea); one-act vaudeville piece; published in MN I (83-145). Le Quart dâheure de Rabelais(The Fifteen Minutes of Rabelais); one-act verse comedy; published in MN I (147-71). Don Galaor; one-act comedy; published in MN I (9-20; synopsis only). 1849 Les Pailles rompues (The Broken Straws); one-act verse comedy; possible collaboration with Alexandre Dumas, both pÃ¨re and fils; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre Historique on June 12, 1850; 12 or 15 performances through June 25, 1850; revival in Nantes on November 7, 1850; revival at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre du Gymnase from 1853 to 1857 (45 performances); revival at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre du Gymnase in 1871 and 1872 (40 performances); published by Beck (1850), and in Revue JV 11 (2001): 33-94. Un Drame sous Louis XV (A Drama under Louis XV); five-act verse tragedy; alternate title: A Drama under the Regency; published in MN II (727-841). Abdâallah; two-act vaudeville piece; published in MN I (39-43; 173-252). Le Coq de bruyÃ¨re (The Wood Grouse); published inMN I (21-27; synopsis only). On a souvent besoin dâun plus petit que soi (Little Friends May Prove Great Friends); published in MN I (29-37; synopsis only). 1850 La Guimard (The Guimard); two-act comedy; published inMN I (289-360). Quiridine et Quiridnerit (Quiridine and Quiridnerit); three-act âItalian Comedyâ in verse; published in MN II (843-956). La Mille et deuxiÃ¨me nuit (The Thousand and Second Night); one-act libretto; music by Aristide Hignard. page 160 1851 Les Savants (The Scholars); three-act âObservation Comedyâ; manuscript is lost. Les FiancÃ©s bretons (The FiancÃ©s of Britanny); manuscript is lost. De Charybde en Scylla (From Charybdis to Scylla); comic one-act âCharacter Studyâ in verse; published in MN II (957-1005). Monna Lisa (1851-1855); one-act verse comedy; reading at the Academy of Amiens on May 22, 1874; alternate titles: The Jocund, Leonardo da Vinci; published in Cahiers de lâHerne (Paris 1974); published by LâHerne (1995). Les ChÃ¢teaux en Californie, ou, Pierre qui roule nâamasse pas mousse (Castles in California, or A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss); one-act proverb comedy; collaboration with Pitre-Chevalier; staged in Torino, Italy, on April 28, 1969; published in MusÃ©e des familles (June 1852). 1852 La Tour de MontlhÃ©ry (Tower of MonthlÃ©ry); five-act drama; collaboration with Charles Wallut; prologue published in MN I (361-97); complete manuscript is in Amiens, in the former della Riva collection. Le Colin-Maillard (The Blind Manâs Buff); one-actopÃ©ra comique; collaboration with Michel CarrÃ©; music by Aristide Hignard; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre lyrique on April 28, 1853; 45 performances; libretto published by LÃ©vy (1853); score published by Alfred Ikelmer (1853); published in BSJV120 (1996). 1853 Un Fils adoptif (The Adoptive Son); comedy; collaboration with Charles Wallut; broadcast on French radio on April 5, 1950; published in BSJV 140 (2001); English translation by Frank Morlock available at <http://jv.gilead.org.il/morlock/adopt.html>. Les Compagnons de la Marjolaine (The Knights of the Daffodil); one-act opÃ©ra comique; collaboration with Michel CarrÃ©; music by Aristide Hignard; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre lyrique on June 6, 1855; 24 performances; libretto published by LÃ©vy (1855); published in BSJV 143 (2002); English translation by Frank Morlock available at <http://jv.gilead.org.il/morlock/knights.html>. Les Heureux du jour (The Happy of the Day, 1853, 1855-1856); five-act comic âStudy of Mannersâ in verse; published inMN II (1007-1136). 1854 Guerre aux tyrans (War to Tyrants); one-act verse comedy; published inMN II (1137-1208). 1855 Au bord de lâAdour (On the Bank of the Adour); one-act verse comedy; published inMN II (1209-55). 1857 Monsieur de ChimpanzÃ© (Mr. Chimpanzee); one-act operetta; possible collaboration with Michel CarrÃ©; music by Aristide Hignard; premiered at the Bouffes-Parisiens on February 17, 1858; ran until March 3, 1858; published in BSJV 57 (1981); English translation by Frank Morlock available at <http://jv.gilead.org.il/morlock/chimp.html>. 1858 Le Page de Madame Malbrough (Madame Malbroughâs Page); one-act operetta; written under the pseudnoym E. Vierne; music by FrÃ©dÃ©ric Barbier; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre des Folies-Nouvelles on October 28, 1858; alternate title: Une Robe de Madame Malbrough (A Dress of Madame Malbrough). page 161 1859 LâAuberge des Ardennes (The Inn of the Ardennes); one-act opÃ©ra comique; collaboration with Michel CarrÃ©; music by Aristide Hignard; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre lyrique on September 1, 1860 (20 performances); published by LÃ©vy (1860). 1860 Onze jours de siÃ¨ge (Eleven Days of Siege,1854-1860); three-act comedy; collaboration with Charles Wallut; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre du vaudeville on June 1, 1861; published by LÃ©vy (1861); English translation by Frank Morlock available at <http://jv.gilead.org.il/morlock/eleven/>. 1861 Un Neveu dâAmÃ©rique ou les deux Frontignac(An American Nephew, or, The Two Frontignac); three-act comedy; perhaps reworked by Edouard Cadol and EugÃ¨ne Labiche; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre Cluny on April 17, 1873; ran for two months; published by Hetzel (1873); published with with Clovis Dardentor (10/18, 1979). 1867 Les Sabines(The Sabines, 1857, 1867); opÃ©ra-bouffe, or two- or three-act operetta (only the first act still exists); collaboration with Charles Wallut; published in MN I (399-438). 1871 Le PÃ´le Nord (The North Pole); published in MN I (45-48; synopsis only). 1873 Le Tour du monde en 80 jours (Around the World in 80 Days, 1873-1874); five-act piÃ¨ce Ã grand spectacle with prologue (15 tableaux); collaboration with Adolphe dâEnnery; music by J.-J. Debillemont; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre de la Porte Saint-Martin on November 7, 1874 (415 performances); published by Hetzel (1879). 1875 Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (The Children of Captain Grant); five-act piÃ¨ce Ã grand spectacle with prologue (13 tableaux); collaboration with Adolphe dâEnnery; music by J.-J. Debillemont; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre de la Porte Saint-Martin on December 26, 1878 (113 performances); published by Hetzel (1881); English translation by Frank Morlock available at <http://jv.gilead.org.il/morlock/ChGrant/>. 1877 Le Docteur Ox (Doctor Ox); three-act opÃ©ra-bouffe (6 tableaux); libretto by Philippe Gille and Arnold Mortier (with Verneâs approval); music by Jacques Offenbach; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre des VariÃ©tÃ©s (42 performances). 1878 Michael Strogoff; five-act piÃ¨ce Ã grand spectacle with prologue (16 tableaux); collaboration with Adolphe dâEnnery; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre du ChÃ¢telet on November 17, 1880 (386 performances); published by Hetzel (1881); English translation by Frank Morlock available at <http://jv.gilead.org.il/morlock/strogoff/>. 1882 Voyage Ã travers lâimpossible (Journey through the Impossible); three-act fantasy piÃ¨ce Ã grand spectacle (20 tableaux); collaboration with Adolphe dâEnnery; music by Oscar de LagoanÃ¨re; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre de la Porte Saint-Martin on November 25, 1882 (43 performances in 1882; 54 performances in 1883); published in Paris by Pauvert (1981); published in Amherst, NY, by Prometheus Books (2003). page 162 1883 KÃ©raban-le-TÃªtu (Keraban the Headstrong); five-act play (20 tableaux); premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre de la GaÃ®tÃ© lyrique on September 3, 1883 (49 performances); published in BSJV 85-86 (1988). 1887 Mathias Sandorf; five-act piÃ¨ce Ã grand spectacle (16 tableaux); libretto by William Busnach and Georges Maurens; premiered at the ThÃ©Ã¢tre de lâAmbigu (85 performances); published in Paris by SociÃ©tÃ© Jules Verne (1992); published in Pazin, Croatia, by Jules Verne Klub (2002). 1888 Les Tribulations dâun Chinois en Chine (The Tribulations of a Chinese Man in China); the manuscript is lost; collaboration declined by Adolphe dâEnnery. Date Unknown Les Tribulations dâun Chinois en Chine (The Tribulations of a Chinese Man in China); three-act comedy by Claude FarrÃ¨re and Charles MÃ©rÃ©; published in Paris by Hachette (1931). This play was inspired by one of Verneâs novels. Since Verneâs death, there have been many plays and operas based on his novels, such as Henri Varna and Jack Ledruâs Michael Strogoff (1965), Gavin Bryars and Blake Morrisonâs Doctor Ox (1998), and Philippe Hersantâs The Castle in the Carpathians (1992). The complete listing of these posthumous productions remains to be written. ABSTRACT Jules Verne is known today as a writer of early sf and adventure novels, many of which have become the source for lucrative Hollywood scripts. It is less well known that Verne was also a prolific playwright who authored a variety of plays, operas, operettas, and opÃ©ras comiques before the publication of his first successful novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon. Plays that he later adapted from his novels were among the greatest successes of the Parisian stage. Le Tour du monde en 80 jours (Around the World in 80 Days), Michael Strogoff, Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (The Children of Captain Grant), and Voyage Ã travers lâimpossible (Journey through the Impossible) made the already-famous Verne a wealthy man. All four were piÃ¨ces Ã grand spectacle (great spectacle plays) with special effects that anticipated todayâs commercial sf films. The play Voyage Ã travers lâimpossible, Verneâs most science-fictional work, is also his most intriguing.
5097	dbpedia	2	10	https://sightseekersdelight.com/3189/	en	12 Best French Authors Of All Time	https://sightseekersdeli…ench-authors.jpg	https://sightseekersdeli…ench-authors.jpg	[ "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/nav-logo-new2.png", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/best-french-authors.jpg", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/camus-goodreads-1.jpg", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/sartre-goodreads.jpg", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/simone.jpg", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/proust-wikicommons.jpg", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/hugo-goodreads.jpg", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/baudelaire-fleurs-mal.jpg", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/george.jpg", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/J_accuse-zola.jpg", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/flaubert-goodreads.jpg", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/voltaire-goodreads.jpg", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/maupassant-goodreads.jpg", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/gigi.jpg", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/49c27cd3b88f7469bdcc8eb098a65d61?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/234bca1420b3bf3220e5f082d38333c6?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/908f9c96667501424a79c379f07dae95?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7bde75a0b8080234a2f4640a86afd22d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/bfefd34a7a1c7623475d89612a8ff8f0?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7bde75a0b8080234a2f4640a86afd22d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/70115576ac5e29d2221f38c7019dfcfc?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7bde75a0b8080234a2f4640a86afd22d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/a2258c2bbdbb9bc108c0445603a8963a?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7bde75a0b8080234a2f4640a86afd22d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6b4a41bb29d0c9f7135bf15226a07fea?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7bde75a0b8080234a2f4640a86afd22d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e3cea05a05e0356b7e0e0341cceae2ce?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7bde75a0b8080234a2f4640a86afd22d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/66f5a55f2474320c664a54d6eadc8fbe?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7bde75a0b8080234a2f4640a86afd22d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/591b7d5da5923e4c8a00d0929988a4b8?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/0fc505f4ebfa0ff74d4ca49cc1526b0d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7bde75a0b8080234a2f4640a86afd22d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/efd3feb724590e7486c39041567252a0?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7bde75a0b8080234a2f4640a86afd22d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/66c3bd30b6483f791b6d0070e304d996?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7bde75a0b8080234a2f4640a86afd22d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6c3d92ce94e30d502295413715a3f5d4?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7bde75a0b8080234a2f4640a86afd22d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/0b6e59e3427ae2e41a70969c59d9fc36?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7bde75a0b8080234a2f4640a86afd22d?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/db4274cdb314fbc193d40b21ec186db3?s=32&d=mm&r=g", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/envelope4-green1.png", "https://sightseekersdelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/telephone65-blue1.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Molli" ]	2017-01-16T23:40:21-05:00	The French have given us more than just good wine and sweet treats... turns out they have a way with words, as well. Here are 9 of the best French authors.	en	https://sightseekersdeli…vicon2-32x32.png	Sight Seeker's Paris	https://sightseekersdelight.com/3189/	The French have given us more than just good wine and sweet treats… turns out they have a way with words, as well. You really can’t discuss literature without mentioning a few of the French greats. And why not get some reading in while you’re planning your Paris trip?! It’s hard to imagine where would we be without one-liners like ‘Love is a reciprocal torture’, right? Thanks for your optimism, Monsieur Proust… Read on below to see my take, (in no particular order!) on the 12 best French authors of all time. If I’ve missed any, you’ll have to let me know in the comments below! Albert Camus Image: Goodreads.com If you recognize the name Albert Camus, it’s most likely because you have heard of (or maybe read!) his groundbreaking novel, The Stranger. The book really delves into Camus’ thoughts on existentialism and the philosophy of the absurd, two things he spent his entire life studying and writing about. Camus was also one of the regulars at the infamous Parisian café, Café de Flore (it’s not our favorite cafe, but it certainly has a lot of history). Camus could often be spotted there rubbing shoulders with the next author on our list, Jean-Paul Sartre. Favorite quote: “Still, obviously, one can’t be sensible all the time.” Jean-Paul Sartre Image: Goodreads.com Sigh. One of the things that this French author is most famous for may not be his amazing literary and philosophical works, but his love affair with fellow philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir. (You may say it’s mushy, but I’m telling you: it’s hard not to be romantic in Paris)! But I digress, Sartre and de Beauvoir did challenge the cultural and social expectations expected of them in both lifestyle and thought, and they did this together. What is important to take away from both Sartre and de Beauvoir is that you are in charge of your own destiny, no matter where you come from. A good read to get started is his novel called No Exit. Favorite quote: “I’m going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.” Simone de Beauvoir Image: goodreads.com Sartre cannot be mentioned without giving recognition to his fellow scholar, Simone de Beauvoir. There’s power in numbers, is there not?! De Beauvoir is not a writer to ignore. Her rich corpus includes writings on ethics, politics, and for what she may be the most famous for: feminism. The Second Sex (one of her most recognized books), in which she “produced an articulate attack on the fact that throughout history women have been relegated to a sphere of “immanence,” and the passive acceptance of roles assigned to them by society.” (source.) Oh, YES! Get started on The Second Sex ASAP and start getting informed! Favorite quote: “I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself” Marcel Proust Image: wikimedia.com Well, we gave you a little taste of what Marcel Proust is all about already, and that’s just the beginning of what you’ll discover if you begin reading the classic French author. Proust is probably most well known for his novel In Search of Lost Time. The massive work is a whopping 3,200 pages, meaning it may take you more than a few Sundays curled up on the couch to finish. Cake lovers rejoice: the guy uses the famous madeleine cake to compare involuntary memory to voluntary memory…WOAH. Now all you have to do is let us buy you some real, live, Parisian madelines, to FULLY understand! Bonus for those of you planning to visit Paris – this legend is buried in the legendary Père Lachaise cemetery. Favorite quote: “If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.” Victor Hugo Image: Goodreads.com Ah, Mr. Hugo. Ever heard of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame? You have French author Victor Hugo to thank for that masterpiece. And no, we’re not talking about the Disney classic. You also have him to thank for the incredible Les Miserables… and no matter how you felt about THAT movie, it’s easy to see why the story is so timeless. So, read these books if you haven’t yet! and next time you find yourself in Paris, take a wander around (with us, for example, and with a special discount if you use promo code AUTHORS while booking) and see what you can recognize from the stories! Favorite quote: “To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.” Charles Baudelaire Image: Goodreads.com French poet Charles Baudelaire is perhaps most well known for his book of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). Baudelaire’s works were the jumping off point for many other very well respected French poets such as Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Said protégés have called Baudelaire a ‘true god’ and the ‘king of poets’, if that gives you an idea of how well loved this guy is. Crack open a copy of The Flowers of Evil and get back to us with what you think: god? king? Or just full of the feels? Favorite quote: “…and the lamp having at last resigned itself to death. / There was nothing now but firelight in the room, / And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath / It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom.” George Sand Image: Goodreads.com George Sand isn’t who who may think she is…because this George is actually named Aurore! The French author was forced to publish her works under the ‘nom de plume’ (French for pen name!) of George in order to begin actually making money off of her works. At the time, women as writers were generally looked down upon, and Sand found herself really struggling to be paid and recognized justly. While Sand may be also known for her lovers (Alfred de Musset and Frédéric Chopin to name a few), her writings need to be appreciated. She mastered the rustic novel, with her real life experiences in the French countryside serving as her inspiration. I suggest you pick up her novel The Devil’s Pool to get started! Favorite quote: “Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness. ” Émile Zola Image: wikipedia.com Okay – bear with me as I go into detail but, when famous French painter Paul Cézanne is your best friend, you must be pretty cool (at least in our opinion). Who’s Cezanne do you ask? That’s a story for another time (but hey, want to join us at Orsay? Use promo code AUTHORS to receive a 10% discount). The key thing to know here is… he was writer Émile Zola’s BFF. He has multiple published novels, short stories, and plays under his belt. Beyond that though, Zola is perhaps most famous for his involvement in the Dreyfus case, arguably the biggest scandal in 19th century France To make a long story short, Captain Dreyfus was a French captain who was wrongly accused of giving top secret information to the Germans. Zola saw this wrongfulness, and penned a seething letter to the French president accusing the government of antisemitism. The letter was published on the front page of a Parisian newspaper. The letter entitled J’accuse (I accuse) was read by thousands and caused a deep divide in France between conservatives and liberals. Eventually (and by eventually we mean about 8 years later) Dreyfus was exonerated by the French court. This would have never happened without the powerful effect of Zola’s letter. Pay tribute to the great by reading one of his greats, namely I accuse! Favorite quote: If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way. Gustave Flaubert Image: Goodreads.com Literary critic James Wood once said of author Gustave Flaubert, ‘Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring; it all begins again with him.’ Another French literary star on our list (Guy de Maupassant) was his protégé, and famous Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov counts Flaubert as inspiration as well. Not too shabby Mr. Flaubert! This French novelist is most well known for the classic Madame Bovary. If you haven’t read it, you have our permission to start. Favorite quote: “One’s duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.” Voltaire Image: Goodreads.com A list of the best 10 French Authors of all time would not be complete without the great historian and author Voltaire. He is most well known for his involvement in the Age of Enlightenment intellectual movement that took place across Europe in the 18th century. A good book to start with if you would like to dive into the world of Voltaire is called Candide. Sidenote, something we can appreciate about Voltaire: he was known for his unhealthy obsession with coffee (and frankly, we can relate.). He reportedly drank up to 50 cups per day! When you’re out trying to enlighten the world with your philosophies I guess a lot of caffeine is necessary… Sidenote: this legend is buried in the Pantheon in Paris, which we just happen to touch upon in our Secrets of the Night tour through the Latin Quarter – just in case you want to hear even more about what makes Voltaire so special. Oh and psst, use promo code AUTHORS to receive a 10% discount. Favorite quote: “Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.” Guy de Maupassant Image: Goodreads.com We already mentioned that French author Guy Maupassant was the protégé of Gustave Flaubert, but there are a few other important things to know. Maupassant is considered to be the father of the modern short story. And, get this: Maupassant’s stories have been the inspiration for countless movies… in terms of numbers, he is second in number only to Shakespeare. To be on the same list as the great Shakespeare? This means something in our book! Our recommendation? Bel-Ami. Favorite quote: “They had moved closer to one another to watch the dying moments of the day, this beautiful bright May day.” Colette Image: Goodreads.com Nominated for the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature, author Colette can not be left off our list. Colette is most known for her stories of love, an the pain that can sometimes come along with it. It is said that her greatest strength as a writer is her ability to take hold of the reader through descriptions of smells, sounds, and tastes, making them feel like they have completely entered into her written world. Colette’s most famous work is her novella Gigi, so I suggest you give that a peak first! Favorite quote: “You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.” Well, there you have it! My list of the 12 Best French Authors of All Time. Want to learn more with us by joining a few of the tours we mentioned above? Visit our Tours page to check out what we have to delight you with in Paris. Use that promo code AUTHORS to receive a 10% discount! I hope after seeing our list, you feel inspired to get out there and start reading! This article was originally published 16 January 2016 but has been updated for accuracy. .
5097	dbpedia	1	12	https://www.thephilroom.com/blog/2024/01/03/theophile-gautier/	en	Theophile Gautier	https://www.thephilroom.…e-Gautier-01.png	https://www.thephilroom.…e-Gautier-01.png	[ "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/TPR-logo-2.png", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/TPR-logo-e1640168773875.png", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/plugins/ultimate-member/assets/img/default_avatar.jpg", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Jonathan-Edwards-01-360x180.png", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ibn-al-bawwab-01-360x180.png", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Baldassare-Castiglione-01-360x180.png", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/antoine-meillet-01-360x180.png", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Alfred-Sloan-01-360x180.png", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Aimé-Bonpland-01-360x180.png", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/012318-04-Black-Color-Art-History-Philosophy-350x250.jpg", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Being-in-itself-and-Being-For-Itself-01-350x250.png", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Emile-Zola-01-350x250.png", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Islamic-Existentialism-01-350x250.png", "https://www.thephilroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/TPR-logo-2-75x75.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "admin" ]	2024-01-03T00:00:00	1) His Biography Theophile Gautier, a prominent figure in 19th-century French literature, was born on August 30, 1811, in the	en	https://www.thephilroom.…132783-32x32.png	The Philosophy Room	https://www.thephilroom.com/blog/2024/01/03/theophile-gautier/	1) His Biography Theophile Gautier, a prominent figure in 19th-century French literature, was born on August 30, 1811, in the city of Tarbes, located in the south of France. Raised in a family with artistic inclinations, Gautier developed a keen interest in literature and the arts from an early age. His parents encouraged his passions, which led him to write poetry and essays even as a young boy. In 1822, the Gautier family moved to Paris, a city that would play a crucial role in shaping Theophile’s literary career. During his teenage years, Gautier’s talent blossomed, and he garnered attention for his exceptional poetry and prose. In 1830, at the age of 19, he published his first collection of poetry titled “Poésies,” which received mixed reviews from critics. However, it marked the beginning of his journey as a writer. Gautier’s works often explored themes of beauty, art, and aesthetics, reflecting his deep appreciation for Romanticism. In the years that followed, Theophile Gautier established himself as a leading literary figure in Parisian literary circles. He contributed extensively to various influential publications, including La Presse and Le Moniteur Universel, where he worked as a critic and journalist. His literary criticism showcased his profound insights into art, theatre, and literature, earning him widespread respect in intellectual circles. Throughout his life, Gautier remained an adventurous soul, with a penchant for travel and exploration. He embarked on journeys to Spain, Algeria, and the Middle East, drawing inspiration from these experiences for his writings. His travelogue “Voyage en Espagne” (1845) and his collection of short stories “Caprices et Zigzags” (1852) stand as testaments to his wanderlust and diverse literary prowess. Gautier’s most famous novel, “Mademoiselle de Maupin” (1835), challenged conventional norms and explored themes of gender and sexuality. Though controversial at the time, the novel has been recognized as a significant work in French literature. Additionally, his plays, including “One of Cleopatra’s Nights” and “King Candaules,” further displayed his versatility as a writer. In his later years, Theophile Gautier remained committed to his literary pursuits, but he also developed an interest in visual arts. He became an accomplished art critic, supporting and promoting the works of artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet. His contributions to the world of art and literature earned him a place among the key figures of the French Romantic movement. On October 23, 1872, Theophile Gautier passed away in Neuilly-sur-Seine, leaving behind a remarkable legacy as a celebrated poet, novelist, and critic. 2) Main Works Poésies (1830): Gautier’s debut poetry collection, “Poésies,” introduced his lyrical and romantic style to the literary world. Although it received mixed reviews, it laid the foundation for his future poetic endeavours. Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835): One of Gautier’s most celebrated works, this novel caused a stir for its exploration of gender, sexuality, and love. The story revolves around a love triangle and challenges societal norms, making it both controversial and influential. La Comédie de la Mort (1838): This collection of short stories delves into themes of mortality, the supernatural, and human passions. Gautier’s vivid imagination and poetic prose are on full display in these captivating tales. Emaux et Camées (1852): Translated as “Enamels and Cameos,” this collection of poems is considered one of Gautier’s finest achievements. It showcases his mastery of language and imagery, drawing inspiration from art, nature, and love. Voyage en Espagne (1845): This travelogue recounts Gautier’s journey to Spain and vividly captures the country’s culture, landscapes, and art. His observations and descriptions reveal his keen eye for detail and appreciation for beauty. Histoire du Romantisme (1874): In this non-fiction work, Gautier provides a historical account of the Romantic movement in literature and the arts, drawing from his own experiences and interactions with fellow Romantic writers. Albertus (1832): A poetic drama, “Albertus” showcases Gautier’s experimentation with the supernatural and macabre. The play delves into themes of forbidden knowledge and ambition, displaying his literary versatility. 3) Main Themes Beauty and Aesthetics: A prominent theme in Gautier’s works is the celebration of beauty and aesthetics. He possessed a deep appreciation for art, literature, and the visual arts, and this reverence is evident in his writings. Gautier often described scenes and characters with vivid and sensory-rich language, bringing out the beauty in even the most mundane aspects of life. His focus on aesthetics extended to the portrayal of nature, architecture, and the human form, as he sought to capture and convey the sublime in all its forms. Romanticism and Passion: As a key figure of the French Romantic movement, Gautier’s works are infused with themes of romanticism and passionate emotions. He delved into intense love, desire, and longing, often crafting narratives that revolved around forbidden or unrequited love. Gautier’s exploration of human passions and emotions added depth and complexity to his characters, making them relatable and compelling to readers. Art for Art’s Sake: Gautier was a proponent of the “art for art’s sake” philosophy, which emphasised the intrinsic value of art and the pursuit of beauty without any moral or didactic purpose. This theme is evident in his works, where he often presented art and poetry as independent entities, existing for the sole purpose of aesthetic pleasure. Gautier’s own dedication to his craft exemplified his belief in the autonomy of art and its ability to transcend utilitarian objectives. Travel and Exoticism: Theophile Gautier’s adventurous spirit and love for travel influenced several of his works. He embarked on journeys to various countries, including Spain, Algeria, and the Middle East, and his experiences from these travels found their way into his writing. Gautier’s travelogues and literary works often showcased exotic locations, cultures, and landscapes, adding an element of fascination and intrigue to his narratives. Supernatural and Macabre: In some of his works, Gautier explored the realms of the supernatural and the macabre. His poetic dramas and short stories featured elements of fantasy, ghosts, and mysterious occurrences. These tales allowed Gautier to weave intricate and atmospheric narratives, blurring the line between reality and the supernatural, captivating readers with their eerie allure. 4) His Place in French Literature Theophile Gautier holds a significant and enduring place in French literature as a key figure of the Romantic movement. His literary contributions, spanning poetry, prose, drama, and criticism, have left an indelible mark on the cultural landscape of 19th-century France. Gautier’s unwavering pursuit of beauty, his advocacy for “art for art’s sake,” and his exploration of human emotions and passions have cemented his reputation as a master of aesthetics. As a poet, Gautier’s lyrical and evocative verses captured the essence of beauty in both the natural world and the realm of art. His poetry resonated with readers, and he was highly regarded for his ability to infuse words with profound emotion and sensory imagery. Moreover, his role as a critic and journalist allowed him to shape public opinion on art, literature, and theatre, wielding significant influence in intellectual circles. Gautier’s contribution to the novel genre was equally impactful. “Mademoiselle de Maupin,” with its daring exploration of gender and sexuality, challenged societal norms and established him as a daring and innovative novelist. His novel “Le Capitaine Fracasse” demonstrated his versatility, captivating readers with its adventurous plot and engaging characters. Beyond his fictional works, Gautier’s travelogues brought exotic locales to life, enticing readers with vivid descriptions of foreign lands and cultures. His literary travels to Spain, Algeria, and the Middle East added a sense of adventure and curiosity to his body of work. Furthermore, his advocacy for the visual arts and his keen eye for aesthetics made him a prominent art critic, championing the works of artists like Delacroix and Courbet. Gautier’s writings on art not only provided valuable insights but also influenced the development of the art world during his time. 5) His Legacy The legacy of Theophile Gautier in the realm of literature is profound and far-reaching. As a leading figure of the French Romantic movement, Gautier’s influence on subsequent generations of writers, poets, and artists cannot be overstated. His unwavering commitment to beauty and aesthetics, his advocacy for the autonomy of art, and his exploration of passionate emotions have left an indelible mark on the world of letters. Gautier’s legacy as a poet endures through his rich and evocative verses, which continue to captivate readers with their sensory imagery and emotional depth. His poetic language and exploration of themes such as love, nature, and art have inspired poets across the ages and have shaped the development of poetic expression in French literature. As a novelist, Gautier’s daring approach to storytelling and his exploration of complex human relationships have left a lasting impact. “Mademoiselle de Maupin” remains a seminal work that challenged societal norms and paved the way for more nuanced and daring portrayals of love and desire in literature. His influence can be seen in the works of later French novelists, who drew inspiration from his innovative narrative techniques and exploration of human psychology. Gautier’s contributions as an art critic have also left an enduring legacy. His writings on visual arts not only supported and promoted the works of his contemporaries but also played a role in shaping the trajectory of the art world during his time. His belief in the importance of artistic freedom and creativity resonates with modern artistic sensibilities, and his critiques continue to be studied for their perceptive insights. Moreover, Gautier’s travelogues and exotic tales have added a sense of adventure and wonder to the literary canon. His vivid descriptions of foreign lands and cultures have inspired the imaginations of readers and have contributed to a broader appreciation of global literature and diverse perspectives. Beyond the realms of literature and art, Gautier’s legacy extends to his role as a pioneer in the philosophy of “art for art’s sake.” His belief in the intrinsic value of art, divorced from any didactic or moral purpose, laid the groundwork for the Aesthetic movement of the late 19th century and influenced subsequent movements such as Symbolism and Decadence. 6) Few Verses In hues of dawn, the sky ablaze, With golden threads, the sun’s embrace, A symphony of colours plays, In nature’s art, we find our grace. – Theophile Gautier Like flowers dancing in the breeze, Their petals soft, a gentle tease, Love’s fragrance lingers, hearts at ease, In passion’s garden, time shall freeze. – Theophile Gautier A canvas painted by the night, With stars that shimmer, pure and bright, In dreams, we soar to wondrous height, Where fantasy and reality unite. – Theophile Gautier The moon, a pearl in velvet skies, Reflects the secrets in your eyes, In whispered vows, our souls arise, Two hearts entwined, love never dies. – Theophile Gautier Through distant lands and foreign climes, In verse, I roam through space and times,
5097	dbpedia	2	47	https://pantheon.world/profile/occupation/writer/country/france	en	Greatest French Writers	http://localhost:3000/api/screenshot/occupation-country?occupation=writer&country=fra	http://localhost:3000/api/screenshot/occupation-country?occupation=writer&country=fra	[ "https://pantheon.world/images/icons/icon-nav.svg", "https://pantheon.world/images/logos/logo_pantheon.svg", "https://pantheon.world/images/icons/icon-search.svg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/32375.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/42146.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/15770.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/51465.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/16340.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/63174.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/8199.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/157272.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/ui/profile-w.svg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/32375.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/42146.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/15770.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/51465.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/42368.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/16340.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/63174.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/8199.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/157272.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/5804.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/ui/tri-left-b.svg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/3854049.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/881804.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/6731930.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/776066.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/5976869.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/40203874.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/4821028.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/8780261.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/3002947.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/416709.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/2405983.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/2841756.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/ui/tri-right-b.svg", "https://pantheon.world/images/ui/tri-left-b.svg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/32375.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/42146.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/15770.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/51465.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/42368.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/16340.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/63174.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/8199.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/157272.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/5804.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/44980.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/26773.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/ui/tri-right-b.svg", "https://pantheon.world/images/ui/tri-left-b.svg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/27343551.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/649257.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/1340018.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/865486.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/2920026.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/973213.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/1583854.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/279723.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/2413954.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/235956.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/987318.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/profile/people/617742.jpg", "https://pantheon.world/images/ui/tri-right-b.svg", "https://pantheon.world/_next/image?url=%2Fimages%2Flogos%2Flogo_datawheel.png&w=256&q=75 1x, /_next/image?url=%2Fimages%2Flogos%2Flogo_datawheel.png&w=640&q=75 2x", "https://pantheon.world/images/logos/logo_CL.svg", "https://pantheon.world/_next/image?url=%2Fimages%2Flogos%2Flogo_creative_commons.png&w=96&q=75 1x, /_next/image?url=%2Fimages%2Flogos%2Flogo_creative_commons.png&w=256&q=75 2x", "https://pantheon.world/images/logos/logo_facebook.svg", "https://pantheon.world/images/logos/logo_twitter.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	/images/favicon.ico		null	1. Voltaire ( 1694 - 1778 ) With an HPI of 86.81 , Voltaire is the most famous French Writer . His biography has been translated into 170 different languages on wikipedia. François-Marie Arouet (French: [fʁɑ̃swa maʁi aʁwɛ]; 21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume M. de Voltaire (; also US: ; French: [vɔltɛːʁ]), was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher (philosophe), satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit and his criticism of Christianity (especially of the Roman Catholic Church) and of slavery, Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, histories, but also scientific expositions. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. Voltaire was one of the first authors to become renowned and commercially successful internationally. He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties and was at constant risk from the strict censorship laws of the Catholic French monarchy. His polemics witheringly satirized intolerance and religious dogma, as well as the French institutions of his day. His best-known work and magnum opus, Candide, is a novella which comments on, criticizes and ridicules many events, thinkers and philosophies of his time, most notably Gottfried Leibniz and his belief that our world is the "best of all possible worlds". 2 . Victor Hugo ( 1802 - 1885 ) With an HPI of 86.20 , Victor Hugo is the 2nd most famous French Writer . His biography has been translated into 174 different languages. Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo (French pronunciation: [viktɔʁ maʁi yɡo] ; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885), sometimes nicknamed the Ocean Man, was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms. His most famous works are the novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). In France, Hugo is renowned for his poetry collections, such as Les Contemplations (The Contemplations) and La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages). Hugo was at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement with his play Cromwell and drama Hernani. Many of his works have inspired music, both during his lifetime and after his death, including the opera Rigoletto and the musicals Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris. He produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, and campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment and slavery. Although he was a committed royalist when young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, serving in politics as both deputy and senator. His work touched upon most of the political and social issues and the artistic trends of his time. His opposition to absolutism, and his literary stature, established him as a national hero. Hugo died on 22 May 1885, aged 83. He was given a state funeral in the Panthéon of Paris, which was attended by over 2 million people, the largest in French history. 3 . Jules Verne ( 1828 - 1905 ) With an HPI of 85.10 , Jules Verne is the 3rd most famous French Writer . His biography has been translated into 122 different languages. Jules Gabriel Verne (; French: [ʒyl ɡabʁijɛl vɛʁn]; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well-researched according to the scientific knowledge then available, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time. In addition to his novels, he wrote numerous plays, short stories, autobiographical accounts, poetry, songs, and scientific, artistic, and literary studies. His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music and video games. Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in the Anglosphere where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed. Since the 1980s, his literary reputation has improved. Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "father of science fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. In the 2010s, he was the most translated French author in the world. In France, 2005 was declared "Jules Verne Year" on the occasion of the centenary of the writer's death. 4 . Molière ( 1622 - 1673 ) With an HPI of 83.86 , Molière is the 4th most famous French Writer . His biography has been translated into 158 different languages. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ batist pɔklɛ̃]; 15 January 1622 (baptised) – 17 February 1673), known by his stage name Molière (UK: , US: , French: [mɔljɛʁ]), was a French playwright, actor, and poet, widely regarded as one of the great writers in the French language and world literature. His extant works include comedies, farces, tragicomedies, comédie-ballets, and more. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed at the Comédie-Française more often than those of any other playwright today. His influence is such that the French language is often referred to as the "language of Molière". Born into a prosperous family and having studied at the Collège de Clermont (now Lycée Louis-le-Grand), Molière was well suited to begin a life in the theatre. Thirteen years as an itinerant actor helped him polish his comedic abilities while he began writing, combining Commedia dell'arte elements with the more refined French comedy. Through the patronage of aristocrats including Philippe I, Duke of Orléans—the brother of Louis XIV—Molière procured a command performance before the King at the Louvre. Performing a classic play by Pierre Corneille and a farce of his own, The Doctor in Love, Molière was granted the use of salle du Petit-Bourbon near the Louvre, a spacious room appointed for theatrical performances. Later, he was granted the use of the theatre in the Palais-Royal. In both locations, Molière found success among Parisians with plays such as The Affected Ladies, The School for Husbands, and The School for Wives. This royal favour brought a royal pension to his troupe and the title Troupe du Roi ("The King's Troupe"). Molière continued as the official author of court entertainments. Despite the adulation of the court and Parisians, Molière's satires attracted criticism from other circles. For Tartuffe's impiety, the Catholic Church in France denounced this study of religious hypocrisy, which was followed by a ban by the Parlement, while Dom Juan was withdrawn and never restaged by Molière. His hard work in so many theatrical capacities took its toll on his health and, by 1667, he was forced to take a break from the stage. In 1673, during a production of his final play, The Imaginary Invalid, Molière, who suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis, was seized by a coughing fit and a haemorrhage while playing the hypochondriac Argan; he finished the performance but collapsed again and died a few hours later. 5 . Honoré de Balzac ( 1799 - 1850 ) With an HPI of 83.46 , Honoré de Balzac is the 5th most famous French Writer . His biography has been translated into 109 different languages. Honoré de Balzac ( BAL-zak, more commonly US: BAWL-, French: [ɔnɔʁe d(ə) balzak]; born Honoré Balzac; 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James, and filmmakers François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films and continue to inspire other writers. James called him "really the father of us all." An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was apprenticed in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie Humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience. Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly owing to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal drama, and he lost more than one friend over critical reviews. In 1850, Balzac married Ewelina Hańska (née Contessa Rzewuska), a Polish aristocrat and his longtime love. He died in Paris six months later. 6 . Jean-Paul Sartre ( 1905 - 1980 ) With an HPI of 83.36 , Jean-Paul Sartre is the 6th most famous French Writer . His biography has been translated into 140 different languages. Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, US also ; French: [saʁtʁ]; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution." Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, 'bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture. 7 . Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ( 1900 - 1944 ) With an HPI of 82.92 , Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is the 7th most famous French Writer . His biography has been translated into 111 different languages. Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, Vicomte de Saint-Exupéry, known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (UK: , US: , French: [ɑ̃twan də sɛ̃t‿ɛɡzypeʁi]; (29 June 1900;– c. 31 July 1944), was a French writer, poet, journalist and aviator. He received several prestigious literary awards for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) and for his lyrical aviation writings, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight (Vol de nuit). His works have been translated into many languages. Saint-Exupéry was a successful commercial pilot before World War II, working airmail routes in Europe, Africa, and South America. He joined the French Air Force at the start of the war, flying reconnaissance missions until France's armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilised by the French Air Force, he travelled to the United States to help persuade its government to enter the war against Nazi Germany. Saint-Exupéry spent 28 months in the United States of America, during which he wrote three of his most important works, then joined the Free French Air Force in North Africa, even though he was far past the maximum age for such pilots and in declining health. He disappeared and is believed to have died while on a reconnaissance mission from the French island of Corsica over the Mediterranean on 31 July 1944. Although the wreckage of his plane was discovered off the coast of Marseille in 2000, the ultimate cause of the crash remains unknown. 8 . Denis Diderot ( 1713 - 1784 ) With an HPI of 82.08 , Denis Diderot is the 8th most famous French Writer . His biography has been translated into 97 different languages. Denis Diderot (; French: [dəni did(ə)ʁo]; 5 October 1713 – 31 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominent figure during the Age of Enlightenment. Diderot initially studied philosophy at a Jesuit college, then considered working in the church clergy before briefly studying law. When he decided to become a writer in 1734, his father disowned him. He lived a bohemian existence for the next decade. In the 1740s he wrote many of his best-known works in both fiction and non-fiction, including the 1748 novel Les Bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels). In 1751 Diderot co-created the Encyclopédie with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. It was the first encyclopedia to include contributions from many named contributors and the first to describe the mechanical arts. Its secular tone, which included articles skeptical about Biblical miracles, angered both religious and government authorities; in 1758 it was banned by the Catholic Church and, in 1759, the French government banned it as well, although this ban was not strictly enforced. Many of the initial contributors to the Encyclopédie left the project as a result of its controversies and some were even jailed. D'Alembert left in 1759, making Diderot the sole editor. Diderot also became the main contributor, writing around 7,000 articles. He continued working on the project until 1765. He was increasingly despondent about the Encyclopédie by the end of his involvement in it and felt that the entire project might have been a waste. Nevertheless, the Encyclopédie is considered one of the forerunners of the French Revolution. Diderot struggled financially throughout most of his career and received very little official recognition of his merit, including being passed over for membership in the Académie française. His fortunes improved significantly in 1766, when Empress Catherine the Great, who had heard of his financial troubles, generously bought his 3,000-volume personal library, amassed during his work on the Encyclopédie, for 15,000 livres, and offered him in addition a thousand more livres per year to serve as its custodian while he lived. He received 50 years' "salary" up front from her, and stayed five months at her court in Saint Petersburg in 1773 and 1774, sharing discussions and writing essays on various topics for her several times a week. Diderot's literary reputation during his life rested primarily on his plays and his contributions to the Encyclopédie; many of his most important works, including Jacques the Fatalist, Rameau's Nephew, Paradox of the Actor, and D'Alembert's Dream, were published only after his death.: 678–679 9 . Alexandre Dumas ( 1802 - 1870 ) With an HPI of 81.33 , Alexandre Dumas is the 9th most famous French Writer . His biography has been translated into 112 different languages. Alexandre Dumas (born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870), also known as Alexandre Dumas père, was a French novelist and playwright. His works have been translated into many languages and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Many of his historical novels of adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. Since the early 20th century, his novels have been adapted into nearly 200 films. Prolific in several genres, Dumas began his career by writing plays, which were successfully produced from the first. He wrote numerous magazine articles and travel books; his published works totalled 100,000 pages. In the 1840s, Dumas founded the Théâtre Historique in Paris. His father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, was born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) to Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an African slave. At age 14, Thomas-Alexandre was taken by his father to France, where he was educated in a military academy and entered the military for what became an illustrious career. Alexandre acquired work with Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, then as a writer, a career that led to his early success. Decades later, after the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851, Dumas fell from favour and left France for Belgium, where he stayed for several years. He moved to Russia for a few years and then to Italy. In 1861, he founded and published the newspaper L'Indépendent, which supported Italian unification. He returned to Paris in 1864. English playwright Watts Phillips, who knew Dumas in his later life, described him as "the most generous, large-hearted being in the world. He also was the most delightfully amusing and egotistical creature on the face of the earth. His tongue was like a windmill – once set in motion, you would never know when he would stop, especially if the theme was himself."
5097	dbpedia	0	48	https://txst.locate.ebsco.com/instances/db323bc5-d436-58d2-98f7-9df5eaa05343%3Foption%3Dsubject%26query%3DAuthors%252C%2520French--Biography%26sort%3D-publicationYear	en	EBSCO Locate	https://txst.locate.ebsco.com/favicon.ico	https://txst.locate.ebsco.com/favicon.ico	[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	EBSCO Locate	en	/favicon.ico		null
5097	dbpedia	1	7	https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/book-author/theophile-gautier/	en	Théophile Gautier Biography	https://www.readandcoboo…avicon-32x32.png	https://www.readandcoboo…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Read-and-Co-Books-Logo@1000x-8.png", "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Read-and-Co-Books-Logo@1000x-8.png", "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Author-Bio-Theophile-Gautier.jpg", "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/charles-baudelaire-gautier-9781409795988-cover.jpg", "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Newsletter-plane.png", "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-includes/images/spinner.gif", "https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cropped-Favicon.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Discover the books, life, and legacy of in a full biography from Read & Co. Books.	en	https://www.readandcoboo…avicon-32x32.png	Read & Co. Books	https://www.readandcobooks.co.uk/book-author/theophile-gautier/	First Name Email Address* I accept the terms and conditions Your e-mail address is only used to send you newsletters from Read & Co. Books. You can unsubscribe any time using the link included in the newsletter.
5097	dbpedia	1	53	https://www.librarything.com/author/gautierthophile	en	Théophile Gautier	https://www.librarything.com/favicon_lt_32.ico	https://www.librarything.com/favicon_lt_32.ico	[ "https://image.librarything.com/pics/lt1wordmark_150w.png", "https://image.librarything.com/pics/ltlogo_square_fff_trans.png", "https://image.librarything.com/pics/sbar_4.png", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/b2/4b/b24be731ee848ef6547542f76674330414c5141_v5.jpg", "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/1843910209.01._SX100_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg", "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/0140448136.01._SX100_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg", "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/225313645X.01._SX100_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg", "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/1419128914.01._SX100_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/b2/22/b22231eac0445d4636f4b4b6d77424c41457341_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/22/58/2258601b23ce17c636f692f7377424c41457341_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/b5/7e/b57e644e29e09bd656951424167426b41414141_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/e0/eb/e0ebb29e90113966549656c4151426b41414141_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/e3/d8/e3d8d16edccc96f657665574167426b41414141_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/6c/e0/6ce0cd82eeb298b656f57376667426b41414141_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/5d/f8/5df8b3d689a6b53654f44547677426b41414141_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/7b/e1/7be1fab8d7a50e8654f6e487777426b41414141_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/c6/3a/c63a879cfd8e558654b326e3777426b41414141_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/6f/99/6f99bb40da6e0e8654451334167426b41414141_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/31/39/3139b47a2ac592265694e747677426b41414141_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/10/77/10775eab5eebd5e65424b6c4151426b41414141_v5.jpg", "https://image.librarything.com/pics/er_page_banner9f_noLT_75w.png", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/88/24/8824864e009186c654a55314167417941444941_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/e2/98/e298e36055da16b654a51314167417941444941_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/01/57/015739a90a06674654a4d314167417941444941_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/ef/1b/ef1b78079745f59654a45314167417941444941_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/0a/2d/0a2d59fbf621349654a41314167417941444941_v5.jpg", "https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/46/3c/463c2af2e0cb71f656f546a4151417941444941_v5.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "librarything", "library", "thing", "catalog your books", "catalogue your books", "book cataloging", "library", "free book catalog", "catalogue" ]	null	[]	null	Théophile Gautier, author of Mademoiselle de Maupin, on LibraryThing	en	/favicon_lt_32.ico	LibraryThing.com	https://www.librarything.com/author/gautiertheophile