Background
Alfred de Vigny was born at Loches on March 27, 1797, the son of Léon, Comte de Vigny, a 60-year-old wounded veteran of the Seven Years War, and Marie Jeanne Amélie de Baraudin.
(At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a generation of French...)
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a generation of French soldiers found themselves haunted by defeat and disappointment. One of these soldiers was Alfred de Vigny, an aristocratic poet who also served as a garrison officer. The Warrior's Life consists of his enigmatic reflections, autobiographical anecdotes and philosophical meditations on the nature of war and the strange life of the soldier, vividly conveying the deprivation and discipline of military service, but also its comradeship, stoicism and stern code of duty. Looking back to a lost age of military valour, haunted by dreams of former glory, this is one of the great works of early nineteenth-century Romanticism. Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863) came from an ancient military family that was impoverished by the French Revolution. In 1814 he joined the royal bodyguard, in which he served for thirteen years, but he never saw serious action.The feeling of stasis and regret this engendered, of having been just too young to have been involved in the drama and high adventure of the Napoleonic Wars is the great theme of his most famous work, The Military Life (Servitude et grandeur militaires). Even before he had resigned from the army he was already famous as a key French writer of the Romantic movement, through such works as his Poèmes antiques et modernes (1826). Much of the remainder of his life was spent withdrawn from Parisian society, dogged by financial worries and caring for his mother and his invalid wife. His remaining major works were published posthumously: most notably Journal d'un poète and the poems Les Destinées. Roger Gard, who died in 2000, was educated at Abbotsholme School, Derbyshire, in the Royal Artillery and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.He was Emeritus Reader in English in the University of London. He was the author of books on Henry James, Jane Austen and the teaching of fiction in schools. He also edited Henry James's A Landscape Painter and Other Tales, The Jolly Corner and Other Tales and a selection of his literary criticism, The Critical Muse, for Penguin Classics.
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(Excerpt from Oeuvres Complètes de Alfred de Vigny, Vol. 2...)
Excerpt from Oeuvres Complètes de Alfred de Vigny, Vol. 2: Théâtre; (Pièces en Prose); La Maréchale d'Ancre; Quitte pour la Peur Chatterton; Notes Et Éclaircissements Une galerie du Louvre. Des seigneurs et gentilshommes jouent autour d'une table de trictrac à gauche de la scène. Au fond de la passent des groupes de gens de la Cour qui vont chez la reine mère. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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(Excerpt from Poëmes Antiques Et Modernes Le seul mérite ...)
Excerpt from Poëmes Antiques Et Modernes Le seul mérite qu'on n'ait jamais disputé à ces compositions, c'est d'avoir devancé en France toutes celles de ce genre, dans lesquelles une pensée philosophique est mise en scène sous une forme Épique ou Dramatique. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
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(Provenance; from the personal library of Professor Lloyd ...)
Provenance; from the personal library of Professor Lloyd Austin, University of Manchester. Series; Testi e saggi di letterature moderne ; 1. Physical description; xi, 392 p. 4 leaves of plates : facsims ; 25 cm. Notes; Bibliography: p. 365-381. Includes index. Subjects; Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863). Chatterton.
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Alfred de Vigny was born at Loches on March 27, 1797, the son of Léon, Comte de Vigny, a 60-year-old wounded veteran of the Seven Years War, and Marie Jeanne Amélie de Baraudin.
After early education at home under his mother's influence and later training at the Pension Hix, where he spent three miserable years, and at the Lycée Bonaparte, Vigny was admitted at the age of 17 into an aristocratic corps of the Gendarmes Rouges.
From 1816 to 1823 he served as an officer in the Royal Guard, but he became disillusioned with military life and in 1827 obtained his discharge from the army. Vigny's first volume of poems appeared anonymously in 1822 under the title Poèmes. It was republished in expanded editions in 1826, 1829, and 1837 as Poèmes antiques et modernes. After his literary debut, he wrote in various genres. In 1845 he was elected to membership in the French Academy after six refusals. In 1848-1849 he was defeated as a candidate for office in the Chamber of Deputies. His poèmes are characterized by lonely stoicism, compact form, fine resonance, visual imagery, and remarkable use of symbolic landscapes. Vigny's career as a dramatist began with adaptations from Shakespeare. These included Roméo et Juliette (1827), Shylock, le marchand de Venise (1828), and Le More de Venise (1829). La Maréchale d'Ancre (on the murder of Concini and his wife, Leonora Galigai) was played at the Odéon in 1831. His elegant one-act play Quitte pour la peur was presented in 1833. His finest drama, Chatterton, was first played at the Comédie Française on Feb. 12, 1835, with Marie Dorval a sensation as its heroine, Kitty Bell. In 1826 Vigny published Cinq-Mars, ou Une Conjuration sous Louis XIII, the first significant French historical novel of the period. An interesting preface of 1827 (Réflexions sur la vérité dans l'art) acclaimed artistic truth as more important than the facts of history. In later works-Stello (1832) and Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835)-he developed a "philosophic thought" (in each case in three episodes) much in the manner of his poèmes. Vigny's prose narrative Daphné on Julian the Apostate was published posthumously in 1912. The three tales of Servitude et grandeur militaires represent the sacrificial life of the soldier, whom Vigny sees, like the poet, as a martyr to an insentient society. He died on September 17, 1863.
(Excerpt from Poëmes Antiques Et Modernes Le seul mérite ...)
(At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a generation of French...)
(Provenance; from the personal library of Professor Lloyd ...)
(Excerpt from Oeuvres Complètes de Alfred de Vigny, Vol. 2...)
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Vigny's literary masterpieces are his best compositions in the form he called the poème, which he defined as "compositions in which a philosophic thought is staged under an epic or dramatic form. "
Quotations:
"Just as we descend into our consciences to judge of actions which our minds can not weigh, can we not also search in ourselves for the feeling which gives birth to forms of thought, always vague and cloudy?"
"The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart. "
"The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds. "
"No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart. "
"Silence alone is great; all else is feebleness . . . Perform with all your heart your long and heavy task. . . . Then as do I, say naught, but suffer and die. "
"A calm despair, without angry convulsions or reproaches directed at heaven, is the essence of wisdom. "
"Oh, I have a habit of letting myself be lectured on the things I know best. I like to see if they are understood in the same way I understand; for there are many ways of knowing the same thing. "
"I admit that I myself am far from having a complete command of every topic I touch on, but my knowledge of my subject is always greater than the interest or the understanding of my auditors. You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the mediocre masses make very few demands of the mediocrities of a higher order, submitting stupidly and cheerfully to their guidance. "
"To hold power has always meant to manipulate idiots and circumstances; and those circumstances and those idiots, tossed together, bring about those coincidences to which even the greatest men confess they owe most of their fame. "
"The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men. "
After he was defeated as a candidate for office in the Chamber of Deputies, he settled down on his estate at Maine-Giraud, where he grew grapes for cognac and lived as a country squire. Vigny's Journal d'un poète (1867 and later) shows at once his elegant and aristocratic qualities and his weaknesses; but above all it reveals the courage, sensitiveness, and moral elevation of the poet.
Alfred de Vigny was in love affair with Delphine Gay but their relations had been broken up by his mother and, in 1825, he had married Lydia Bunbury, the daughter of a wealthy and eccentric Englishman. His wife became a chronic invalid a few years after their marriage and remained in ill health until her death in 1862. Then he fell in love with the great actress Marie Dorval but that love affair culminated in disillusionment and bitterness, and Vigny had later liaisons with Louise Colet and, during the last years of his life, with Augusta Bouvard.