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Alfred de Vigny

October 15, 2023

Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny (27 March 1797 – 17 September 1863) was a French poet and early French Romanticist. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare.

Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny
Vigny, by Félix Nadar.
BornAlfred Victor, Comte de Vigny
(1797-03-27)27 March 1797
Loches, France
Died17 September 1863(1863-09-17) (aged 66)
Paris, France
OccupationPoet, translator, novelist
Literary movementRomanticism

Biography Edit

Vigny was born in Loches (a town to which he never returned) to an aristocratic family. His father was a 60-year-old veteran of the Seven Years' War who died before Vigny's 20th birthday; his mother, 20 years younger, was a strong-willed woman who was inspired by Rousseau and took personal responsibility for Vigny's early education. His maternal grandfather, the Marquis de Baraudin, had served as commodore with the royal navy.

Vigny grew up in Paris, and attended preparatory studies for the École Polytechnique at the Lycée Bonaparte, obtaining a good knowledge of French history and the Bible before developing an "inordinate love for the glory of bearing arms".

As was the case for every noble family, the French Revolution diminished the family's circumstances considerably. After Napoléon's defeat at Waterloo, a Bourbon, Louis XVIII, the brother of Louis XVI, was restored to authority, and in 1814 Vigny enrolled in one of the privileged aristocratic companies of the Maison du Roi (king's guard) as a second lieutenant.

 
Portrait of Vigny, attributed to François Kinson

Though he was promoted to first lieutenant in 1822 and to captain the next year, the military profession in time of peace bored him. After taking several leaves of absence he abandoned military life during 1827, having already published his first poem Le Bal during 1820 and an ambitious narrative poem Éloa in 1824 on the popular romantic theme of the redemption of Satan.

Prolonging successive leaves from the army, he settled in Paris with his young English bride Lydia Bunbury, whom he married in Pau in 1825. He collected his recent works in January 1826 in Poèmes antiques et modernes. Three months later he published the first important historical novel in French, Cinq-Mars, based on the life of Louis XIII's favorite Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis of Cinq-Mars, who conspired against the Cardinal de Richelieu. With the success of these two volumes, Vigny seemed to be becoming a major Romantic celebrity, though one of Vigny's friends, Victor Hugo, soon became much more famous. Vigny wrote of Hugo: "The Victor I loved is no more... now he likes to make saucy remarks and is turning into a liberal, which does not suit him."[1][2] Unlike Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, who became gradually liberal and then radical during the 1830s, Vigny remained pliantly centrist in his politics: he accepted the July Monarchy, at first welcomed and then rejected the Second French Republic, and then endorsed Napoleon III.[3] Vigny later denounced people he knew well whom he suspected of republican sympathies to the imperial police.[4]

 
Alfred de Vigny, by Antoine Maurin, 1832.

The visit of an English theater troupe to Paris in 1827 revived French interest in Shakespeare. Vigny worked with Emile Deschamps on a translation of Romeo and Juliet. During 1831 he presented his first original play, La Maréchale d'Ancre, a historical drama recounting events just prior to the reign of King Louis XIII. Attending the theater, he met the actress Marie Dorval, who became his paramour until 1838.[5] (Vigny's wife had become a near invalid and never learned to speak French fluently; they did not have any children, and Vigny was also disappointed when his father-in-law's remarriage deprived the couple of an anticipated inheritance.)

During 1835 Vigny produced a drama titled Chatterton, based on the life of Thomas Chatterton, an English poet who committed suicide while young, with Marie Dorval acting as Kitty Bell. Chatterton is considered to be one of the best of the French romantic dramas and is still performed regularly.[citation needed] The story of Chatterton had inspired one of the three episodes of Vigny's philosophical novel Stello (1832), in which he examined the relationship of poetry to society and concluded that the poet, doomed to be regarded with suspicion by people of every social order, must remain somewhat aloof from the social order.[6] Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835) was a similar tripartite meditation on the condition of a soldier. It is discussed by characters in the novel, The Valley of Bones, by Anthony Powell.

 
Sketch of Alfred de Vigny, by Prosper Mérimée.

Although Vigny gained success as a writer, his personal life was often unhappy. His marriage was a disappointment; his relationship with Marie Dorval was plagued by jealousy; and eventually even his literary fame was diminished by the achievements of others. After the death of his mother in 1838 he inherited the property of Maine-Giraud, near Angoulême, where it was said that he had withdrawn to his 'ivory tower' (an expression Sainte-Beuve coined with reference to Vigny).[7] There Vigny wrote some of his most famous poems, including La Mort du loup and La Maison du berger. Proust regarded La Maison du berger as the greatest French poem of the 19th century.[citation needed] In 1845, after several unsuccessful attempts to be elected, Vigny became a member of the Académie française.

 
Tomb of Alfred de Vigny, his mother and his wife at Montmartre cemetery, Paris.

During later years, Vigny ceased to publish. He continued to write, however, and his Journal is considered by modern scholars to be a great work in its own right, though it awaits a definitive scholarly edition.[8] Vigny considered himself a philosopher as well as a literary author; he was, for example, one of the first French writers to take a serious interest in Buddhism. His own philosophy of life was pessimistic and stoical, but valued human fraternity, the growth of knowledge, and mutual assistance[citation needed]. He was the first in literary history to use the word spleen in the sense of woe, grief, gall, descriptive of the condition of the soul of modern man. During his later years he spent much time preparing the posthumous collection of poems known now as Les Destinées, for which his intended title was Poèmes philosophiques. It concludes with Vigny's final message to humanity, L'Esprit pur.

Vigny developed what is believed to have been stomach cancer during his early sixties. He endured its torments with exemplary stoicism for several years: 'When we see what we were on Earth and what we leave behind/Only silence is great; everything else is weakness.' (A voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse/Seul le silence est grand ; tout le reste est faiblesse.)[9] Vigny died in Paris on 17 September 1863, a few months after the death of his wife. He was buried beside her in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris. Several of his works were published posthumously.

Works Edit

References Edit

  1. ^ Liukkonen, Petri. . Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 24 March 2014.
  2. ^ de Vigny, A.; Hazlitt, W. (1890). Cinq-Mars: Or, A Conspiracy Under Louis XIII. Little, Brown. Retrieved 20 August 2017.
  3. ^ Pearson, Roger (2016). Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France. Oxford University Press. pp. 508–509.
  4. ^ Poliakov, Léon (2003). The History of Anti-semitism: From Voltaire to Wagner. University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 364.
  5. ^ Price, Blanche A. (1962). "Alfred de Vigny and Julia," MLN, Vol. LXXVII, No. 5, p. 449.
  6. ^ "Alfred-Victor, count de Vigny | French author". Britannica.com. Retrieved 20 August 2017.
  7. ^ Bartlett, John (1968). Familiar Quotations. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, p. 615.
  8. ^ Bird, C. Wesley (1934). "Alfred de Vigny's 'Journal of a Poet'," The Modern Language Journal, Vol. XVIII, No. 8, p. 543.
  9. ^ La Mort du loup. In English Translation: The Death of the Wolf.

Further reading Edit

  • Bianco, Joseph (1990). "A Moveable Exile: Alfred de Vigny's 'Moise'," Modern Language Studies, Vol. XX, No. 3, pp. 78–91.
  • Chamard, Henri (1917). "Alfred de Vigny," The Modern Language Review, Vol. XII, No. 4, pp. 450–468.
  • Compton, C.G. (1903). "Alfred de Vigny," The Living Age, Vol. CCXXXVI, pp. 270–278.
  • Croce, Benedetto (1924). "Alfred de Vigny." In: European Literature in the Nineteenth Century. London: Chapman & Hall, pp. 131–144.
  • Denommé, Robert Thomas (1989). Nineteenth-century French Romantic Poets. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia
  • Dey, William Morton (1936). "The Pessimism and Optimism of Alfred de Vigny," Studies in Philology, Vol. XXXIII, No. 3, pp. 405–416.
  • Doolittle, James (1967). Alfred de Vigny. New York: Twayne Publishers.
  • Draper, F.W.M. (1923). The Rise and Fall of the French Romantic Drama. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company.
  • François, Victor E. (1906). "Sir Walter Scott and Alfred de Vigny," Modern Language Notes, Vol. XXI, No. 5, pp. 129–134.
  • Gauthier, Théophile (1906). "Alfred de Vigny." In: Portraits of the Day. New York: The Jenson Society, pp. 171–174.
  • Gosse, Edmund (1905). "Alfred de Vigny." In: French Profiles. London: William Heinemann, pp. 1–34.
  • Gribble, Francis (1910). The Passions of the French Romantics. London: Chapman & Hall.
  • Hay, Camilla H. (1945). "The Basis and Character of Alfred de Vigny's Stoicism," The Modern Language Review, Vol. XL, No. 4, pp. 266–278.
  • Higgins, D. (1949). "Social Pessimism in Alfred de Vigny," The Modern Language Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 3, pp. 351–359.
  • Hope, William G. (1939). "The 'Suffering Humanitarian' Theme in Shelly's Prometheus Unbound and in Certain Poems of Alfred de Vigny," The French Review, Vol. XII, No. 5, pp. 401–410.
  • Majewski, Henry F. (1989). Paradigm & Parody: Images of Creativity in French Romanticism. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
  • McLeman–Carnie, Janette (1998). "Monologue: A Dramatic Strategy in Alfred de Vigny's Rhetoric," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. XXVI, No. 3/4, pp. 253–265.
  • Mill, John Stuart (1859). "Writings of Alfred de Vigny." In: Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. I. London: John W. Parker & Son, pp. 287–329.
  • Rooker, J.K. (1914). "The Optimism of Alfred de Vigny," The Modern Language Review, Vol. IX, No. 1, pp. 1–11.
  • Saintsbury, George (1911). "Vigny, Alfred de" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 28 (11th ed.). pp. 61–62.
  • Smith, Maxwell (1939). "Alfred de Vigny, Founder of the French Historical Novel," The French Review, Vol. XIII, No. 1, pp. 5–13.
  • Sokolova, T.V. (1973). "Alfred de Vigny and the July Revolution, 1830–1831," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. I, No. 4, pp. 235–251.
  • Whitridge, Arnold (1933). Alfred de Vigny. London, New York: Oxford University Press.

External links Edit

 
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Alfred de Vigny
 
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October 15, 2023
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translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at fr Alfred de Vigny see its history for attribution You should also add the template Translated fr Alfred de Vigny to the talk page For more guidance see Wikipedia Translation Alfred Victor Comte de Vigny 27 March 1797 17 September 1863 was a French poet and early French Romanticist He also produced novels plays and translations of Shakespeare Alfred Victor Comte de VignyVigny by Felix Nadar BornAlfred Victor Comte de Vigny 1797 03 27 27 March 1797Loches FranceDied17 September 1863 1863 09 17 aged 66 Paris FranceOccupationPoet translator novelistLiterary movementRomanticism Contents 1 Biography 2 Works 3 References 4 Further reading 5 External linksBiography EditVigny was born in Loches a town to which he never returned to an aristocratic family His father was a 60 year old veteran of the Seven Years War who died before Vigny s 20th birthday his mother 20 years younger was a strong willed woman who was inspired by Rousseau and took personal responsibility for Vigny s early education His maternal grandfather the Marquis de Baraudin had served as commodore with the royal navy Vigny grew up in Paris and attended preparatory studies for the Ecole Polytechnique at the Lycee Bonaparte obtaining a good knowledge of French history and the Bible before developing an inordinate love for the glory of bearing arms As was the case for every noble family the French Revolution diminished the family s circumstances considerably After Napoleon s defeat at Waterloo a Bourbon Louis XVIII the brother of Louis XVI was restored to authority and in 1814 Vigny enrolled in one of the privileged aristocratic companies of the Maison du Roi king s guard as a second lieutenant nbsp Portrait of Vigny attributed to Francois KinsonThough he was promoted to first lieutenant in 1822 and to captain the next year the military profession in time of peace bored him After taking several leaves of absence he abandoned military life during 1827 having already published his first poem Le Bal during 1820 and an ambitious narrative poem Eloa in 1824 on the popular romantic theme of the redemption of Satan Prolonging successive leaves from the army he settled in Paris with his young English bride Lydia Bunbury whom he married in Pau in 1825 He collected his recent works in January 1826 in Poemes antiques et modernes Three months later he published the first important historical novel in French Cinq Mars based on the life of Louis XIII s favorite Henri Coiffier de Ruze Marquis of Cinq Mars who conspired against the Cardinal de Richelieu With the success of these two volumes Vigny seemed to be becoming a major Romantic celebrity though one of Vigny s friends Victor Hugo soon became much more famous Vigny wrote of Hugo The Victor I loved is no more now he likes to make saucy remarks and is turning into a liberal which does not suit him 1 2 Unlike Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine who became gradually liberal and then radical during the 1830s Vigny remained pliantly centrist in his politics he accepted the July Monarchy at first welcomed and then rejected the Second French Republic and then endorsed Napoleon III 3 Vigny later denounced people he knew well whom he suspected of republican sympathies to the imperial police 4 nbsp Alfred de Vigny by Antoine Maurin 1832 The visit of an English theater troupe to Paris in 1827 revived French interest in Shakespeare Vigny worked with Emile Deschamps on a translation of Romeo and Juliet During 1831 he presented his first original play La Marechale d Ancre a historical drama recounting events just prior to the reign of King Louis XIII Attending the theater he met the actress Marie Dorval who became his paramour until 1838 5 Vigny s wife had become a near invalid and never learned to speak French fluently they did not have any children and Vigny was also disappointed when his father in law s remarriage deprived the couple of an anticipated inheritance During 1835 Vigny produced a drama titled Chatterton based on the life of Thomas Chatterton an English poet who committed suicide while young with Marie Dorval acting as Kitty Bell Chatterton is considered to be one of the best of the French romantic dramas and is still performed regularly citation needed The story of Chatterton had inspired one of the three episodes of Vigny s philosophical novel Stello 1832 in which he examined the relationship of poetry to society and concluded that the poet doomed to be regarded with suspicion by people of every social order must remain somewhat aloof from the social order 6 Servitude et grandeur militaires 1835 was a similar tripartite meditation on the condition of a soldier It is discussed by characters in the novel The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell nbsp Sketch of Alfred de Vigny by Prosper Merimee Although Vigny gained success as a writer his personal life was often unhappy His marriage was a disappointment his relationship with Marie Dorval was plagued by jealousy and eventually even his literary fame was diminished by the achievements of others After the death of his mother in 1838 he inherited the property of Maine Giraud near Angouleme where it was said that he had withdrawn to his ivory tower an expression Sainte Beuve coined with reference to Vigny 7 There Vigny wrote some of his most famous poems including La Mort du loup and La Maison du berger Proust regarded La Maison du berger as the greatest French poem of the 19th century citation needed In 1845 after several unsuccessful attempts to be elected Vigny became a member of the Academie francaise nbsp Tomb of Alfred de Vigny his mother and his wife at Montmartre cemetery Paris During later years Vigny ceased to publish He continued to write however and his Journal is considered by modern scholars to be a great work in its own right though it awaits a definitive scholarly edition 8 Vigny considered himself a philosopher as well as a literary author he was for example one of the first French writers to take a serious interest in Buddhism His own philosophy of life was pessimistic and stoical but valued human fraternity the growth of knowledge and mutual assistance citation needed He was the first in literary history to use the word spleen in the sense of woe grief gall descriptive of the condition of the soul of modern man During his later years he spent much time preparing the posthumous collection of poems known now as Les Destinees for which his intended title was Poemes philosophiques It concludes with Vigny s final message to humanity L Esprit pur Vigny developed what is believed to have been stomach cancer during his early sixties He endured its torments with exemplary stoicism for several years When we see what we were on Earth and what we leave behind Only silence is great everything else is weakness A voir ce que l on fut sur terre et ce qu on laisse Seul le silence est grand tout le reste est faiblesse 9 Vigny died in Paris on 17 September 1863 a few months after the death of his wife He was buried beside her in the Cimetiere de Montmartre in Paris Several of his works were published posthumously Works EditLe Bal 1820 Poemes 1822 Eloa ou La Sœur des Anges 1824 Poemes Antiques et Modernes 1826 Cinq Mars 1826 Romeo et Juliette 1828 translation of Romeo and Juliet Shylock 1828 adapted from the original by William Shakespeare Le More de Venise 1829 translation of Othello La Marechale d Ancre 1830 L Almeh Scenes du Desert 1831 unfinished Stello 1832 Quitte pour la Peur 1833 Servitude et Grandeur Militaires 1835 Chatterton 1835 Daphne 1837 unfinished Les Destinees 1864 illustrated by Nicolas Eekman in 1933 Journal d un Poete 1867 Œuvres Completes 1883 1885 References Edit Liukkonen Petri Alfred de Vigny Books and Writers kirjasto sci fi Finland Kuusankoski Public Library Archived from the original on 24 March 2014 de Vigny A Hazlitt W 1890 Cinq Mars Or A Conspiracy Under Louis XIII Little Brown Retrieved 20 August 2017 Pearson Roger 2016 Unacknowledged Legislators The Poet as Lawgiver in Post Revolutionary France Oxford University Press pp 508 509 Poliakov Leon 2003 The History of Anti semitism From Voltaire to Wagner University of Pennsylvania Press p 364 Price Blanche A 1962 Alfred de Vigny and Julia MLN Vol LXXVII No 5 p 449 Alfred Victor count de Vigny French author Britannica com Retrieved 20 August 2017 Bartlett John 1968 Familiar Quotations Boston Little Brown and Company p 615 Bird C Wesley 1934 Alfred de Vigny s Journal of a Poet The Modern Language Journal Vol XVIII No 8 p 543 La Mort du loup In English Translation The Death of the Wolf Further reading EditBianco Joseph 1990 A Moveable Exile Alfred de Vigny s Moise Modern Language Studies Vol XX No 3 pp 78 91 Chamard Henri 1917 Alfred de Vigny The Modern Language Review Vol XII No 4 pp 450 468 Compton C G 1903 Alfred de Vigny The Living Age Vol CCXXXVI pp 270 278 Croce Benedetto 1924 Alfred de Vigny In European Literature in the Nineteenth Century London Chapman amp Hall pp 131 144 Denomme Robert Thomas 1989 Nineteenth century French Romantic Poets Charlottesville University Press of Virginia Dey William Morton 1936 The Pessimism and Optimism of Alfred de Vigny Studies in Philology Vol XXXIII No 3 pp 405 416 Doolittle James 1967 Alfred de Vigny New York Twayne Publishers Draper F W M 1923 The Rise and Fall of the French Romantic Drama New York E P Dutton amp Company Francois Victor E 1906 Sir Walter Scott and Alfred de Vigny Modern Language Notes Vol XXI No 5 pp 129 134 Gauthier Theophile 1906 Alfred de Vigny In Portraits of the Day New York The Jenson Society pp 171 174 Gosse Edmund 1905 Alfred de Vigny In French Profiles London William Heinemann pp 1 34 Gribble Francis 1910 The Passions of the French Romantics London Chapman amp Hall Hay Camilla H 1945 The Basis and Character of Alfred de Vigny s Stoicism The Modern Language Review Vol XL No 4 pp 266 278 Higgins D 1949 Social Pessimism in Alfred de Vigny The Modern Language Review Vol XLIV No 3 pp 351 359 Hope William G 1939 The Suffering Humanitarian Theme in Shelly s Prometheus Unbound and in Certain Poems of Alfred de Vigny The French Review Vol XII No 5 pp 401 410 Majewski Henry F 1989 Paradigm amp Parody Images of Creativity in French Romanticism Charlottesville University Press of Virginia McLeman Carnie Janette 1998 Monologue A Dramatic Strategy in Alfred de Vigny s Rhetoric Nineteenth Century French Studies Vol XXVI No 3 4 pp 253 265 Mill John Stuart 1859 Writings of Alfred de Vigny In Dissertations and Discussions Vol I London John W Parker amp Son pp 287 329 Rooker J K 1914 The Optimism of Alfred de Vigny The Modern Language Review Vol IX No 1 pp 1 11 Saintsbury George 1911 Vigny Alfred de Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol 28 11th ed pp 61 62 Smith Maxwell 1939 Alfred de Vigny Founder of the French Historical Novel The French Review Vol XIII No 1 pp 5 13 Sokolova T V 1973 Alfred de Vigny and the July Revolution 1830 1831 Nineteenth Century French Studies Vol I No 4 pp 235 251 Whitridge Arnold 1933 Alfred de Vigny London New York Oxford University Press External links Edit nbsp French Wikisource has original text related to this article Alfred de Vigny nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to Alfred de Vigny nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alfred de Vigny Works by Alfred de Vigny at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Alfred de Vigny at Internet Archive Works by Alfred de Vigny at LibriVox public domain audiobooks nbsp Works by Alfred de Vigny at Hathi Trust Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Alfred de Vigny amp oldid 1180007260, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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