Alfred de Vigny

Alfred de Vigny
Vigny as a young officer of the royal guard. Portrait attributed to François Kinson.
Born	27 March 1797 Loches, France
Died	17 September 1863 (aged 66) Paris, France
Occupation	Poet, novelist, playwright
Nationality	French
Period	1820–1863
Literary movement	Romanticism
Notable works	Cinq-Mars Chatterton Servitude et grandeur militaires Les Destinées
Spouse	Lydia Bunbury (1825–1862, her death)
Signature

Alfred de Vigny (27 March 1797 – 17 September 1863) was a French poet, novelist and playwright.^[1][2][3] He was born at Loches, in western France, and died in Paris. He is one of the main writers of French Romanticism, together with Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine.^[4]

His best-known works are the historical novel Cinq-Mars (1826), the play Chatterton (1835), the soldier stories Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835), and the eleven poems of Les Destinées, printed after his death (1864).^[5][6] His works often deal with suffering, quiet courage, pity, honor, and faith in the human mind.^[7]

For a long time people called him "the poet in the ivory tower". The name comes from a playful verse by the critic Sainte-Beuve.^[8] Later scholars showed that this picture was too simple: Vigny followed the questions and troubles of his century very closely.^[9]

Vigny was born on 27 March 1797 in Loches, a small town in Touraine, in central France.^[1] His full name was Alfred-Victor de Vigny. His family belonged to the old nobility of the Beauce region.^[1]

His father, the chevalier (knight) Léon de Vigny, was an old soldier of sixty. Wounds from the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) had left him bent and almost unable to walk.^[10] His mother, Marie-Jeanne-Amélie de Baraudin, was about forty years old.^[1]

Her family had been governors of the royal castle of Loches for a long time. Her father, Didier de Baraudin, had been a squadron commander in the French navy at Brest.^[11] Through his mother, Vigny was also related to the explorer Bougainville.^[12]

Alfred was the fourth son in the family. His three older brothers, Léon, Adolphe, and Emmanuel, had all died when they were small children.^[13] Alfred was therefore the only child left. He was a weak child, and his parents raised him with great care.^[14]

His parents had lost money during the French Revolution and had lived through the fear of the Terror. In 1798–1799, the family moved to Paris.^[15][16] Vigny never went back to the town where he was born.^[1]

His mother taught him herself until he was eight years old.^[17] In the evenings, the boy asked his old father many questions about the kings and wars of the past.^[18]

In 1807, Vigny entered the Hix school near the family home.^[15] His school years there were difficult. Rough boys pushed him around because he "had a de in his name", which showed that he came from a noble family.^[13]

In 1811, he moved to the lycée Bonaparte.^[15] This was during the years of Napoleon's greatest victories. Paris was filled with the sound of military drums and of bells ringing for victories, and pupils shouted "Long live the Emperor!" during their lessons. Although Vigny came from a royalist family, he began, like the other boys, to dream of military glory.^[19]

His father died in July 1816, when Alfred was nineteen years old.^[15][17]

In 1814, Napoleon's Empire fell, and King Louis XVIII returned to France. Vigny was seventeen years old. Because of his family name, he received the rank of second lieutenant in the Gendarmes of the King, one of the "Red Companies" of the royal guard.^[15]

In March 1815, Napoleon returned from Elba, and the Hundred Days began. The king fled towards Belgium, and Vigny rode with the royal escort as far as Béthune, in northern France.^[20] It rained for four days and four nights. Vigny later remembered singing a popular song, Joconde, as loudly as he could.^[21] This was his first and last military campaign. A portrait of him from that year, now in the Carnavalet museum, shows a thin young man with fair curly hair.^[21]

After Waterloo, the Red Companies were disbanded, and in 1816 Vigny joined the foot guards.^[15] He then spent quiet years in the garrison towns of Vincennes, Courbevoie, and Rouen. A garrison town is a place where soldiers are stationed in time of peace. His life was filled with military exercises, lessons, parades, and boredom.^[22]

He became a lieutenant in 1822 and a captain in the 55th line regiment in 1823.^[15] That year, France sent an army into Spain. Vigny hoped that he would finally fight, but his regiment only guarded the border in the Pyrenees.^[22]

From the end of 1824, Vigny lived on leave from the army. On 22 April 1827, his name was removed from the army lists.^[23] That day, he wrote in his diary: "Le rêve de la gloire des armes a duré treize ans pour moi" ("The dream of the glory of arms lasted thirteen years for me"). He added: "I have just ended it with difficulty."^[24]

Vigny therefore left the army without ever having fought in a battle. Later, his years as a soldier gave him much of the material for Servitude et grandeur militaires.^[25]

Vigny began writing poetry when he was very young. His two earliest known poems are dated 1815.^[26] His first published poem, Le Bal, appeared in December 1820, the same year as Lamartine's Méditations.^[26][27] That same year, he also published his first article, a review of the works of Lord Byron.^[28] In March 1822, he published a small book called Poèmes, which contained ten poems.^[27] Sadness already appears strongly in these early poems.^[26]

In Paris, Vigny joined the group of young Romantic writers around Victor Hugo. They had their own literary magazine, La Muse française (1823–1824), and met in friendly salons, where poets read their new poems aloud to one another.^[29] Vigny became an important member of the group. He danced well and looked graceful in his military uniform. The writer Mme Ancelot described him as a Don Juan with the charm of a young page.^[30]

The poet Émile Deschamps wrote that Hugo had shown his greatest strength in the ode, Lamartine in the elegy, and Vigny in the poème, or short narrative poem.^[4] Hugo warmly praised Vigny's Éloa in the magazine.^[29] La Muse française ended after twelve issues. In July 1824, Vigny told Hugo that he would sincerely mourn the loss of their magazine.^[31]

At these literary meetings, Vigny fell in love with Delphine Gay, an eighteen-year-old poet. Her mother supported the idea of a marriage, and the poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore kindly helped the young couple. However, Vigny's mother stopped the plan. Delphine had no fortune and little hope of inheriting one later. Alfred obeyed his mother, but he kept a tender memory of Delphine for the rest of his life.^[32]

In April 1824, Vigny published Éloa, ou la Sœur des anges ("Eloa, or the Sister of the Angels").^[27] Éloa is a female angel born from a tear of Jesus. She hears about Lucifer, the fallen angel, also called Satan, and feels pity for him. She goes to find him. He speaks to her with gentle but false words. Because of her pure pity, she follows him and falls with him into the darkness.^[33]

Vigny carried the poem in his mind while his regiment marched from Strasbourg to Bordeaux.^[33] Éloa already contains one of the main ideas of his work: pity for every living being that suffers.^[34]

Moïse ("Moses"), written around 1823, expresses another important idea.^[35] Vigny read the Bible closely, but his Moses is different from the Moses of the Bible. He is a great man who is tired of being great. His power and knowledge have separated him from all other people, and he asks God to let him sleep "the sleep of the earth".^[36][37]

Vigny later explained the meaning of this figure. The great name of Moses is only a mask for "the man of genius" in every age, a person who is alone because he stands above other people.^[38]

These poems were later joined by others in Poèmes antiques et modernes ("Poems Ancient and Modern"), published in 1826. Larger editions followed in 1829 and 1837.^[27]

The 1829 edition has three parts: poems based on the Bible, poems about ancient Greece, and modern poems. Among the modern poems is Le Cor ("The Horn"), about the death of the hero Roland.^[27]

In April 1826, Vigny published Cinq-Mars.^[27] It was one of the first important French historical novels of the Romantic period. Vigny had loved history since childhood,^[18] and he greatly admired Walter Scott. Scott's kind of historical novel was popular in France during the 1820s, and several French writers had already tried to write in this form before Vigny.^[39][40]

The story takes place in 1642. The young marquis de Cinq-Mars, a favourite of King Louis XIII, takes part in a plot against Cardinal Richelieu, the king's powerful chief minister. The plot fails, and Cinq-Mars is put to death.

In the novel, Richelieu has destroyed the power of the old nobility. By doing this, he has also prepared the way for the fall of the kings themselves. The critic Pierre-Georges Castex therefore reads the novel as Vigny's expression of sadness at the decline of his own social class.^[41][42]

The novel was a great success. Thirteen editions appeared during Vigny's lifetime.^[43] A wide public welcomed him as "the French rival of Walter Scott".^[4]

The biographer Émile Lauvrière calls Cinq-Mars "une œuvre si discutée", a much-debated work. Vigny freely changed some historical facts, and this brought criticism. However, Louis Maigron, a historian of the historical novel, considered it the first French historical novel of real literary value.^[43][44]

Vigny later added a preface called Réflexions sur la vérité dans l'art ("Thoughts on Truth in Art"). In it, he defends the artist's right to change small historical facts in order to reach what he regards as the higher truth of ideas.^[39]

While he was in the army near Pau, Vigny fell in love with Lydia Bunbury, the younger daughter of a rich Englishman, Sir Hugh Mills Bunbury.^[45][46] At first, her father refused to allow the marriage. He had little respect for a poor army officer who wrote poetry. In the end, however, he gave his consent. He seems to have been taken by surprise. He gave Lydia no dowry. A dowry was money that a father usually gave to his daughter when she married.^[45] Vigny and Lydia were married at Pau on 3 February 1825.^[23]

Lydia never really learned to speak French, and her health became poor from the time of their wedding journey.^[45] She lost a baby in 1826 and another in 1829, and the couple never had children.^[47] Over time, Lydia became very heavy, and in the end she was almost unable to move. Some visitors even thought that the countess was a housekeeper.^[48] Lamartine said that Vigny loved her "like a sick child".^[49]

For more than thirty years, Vigny described himself as an "eternal sick-nurse". He wrote that caring for a sick person was usually seen as a woman's virtue, and that he was proud to have this quality himself.^[50]

Money also caused problems. Sir Hugh died in November 1838 and left almost all his property to the children of his second marriage.^[23][46] For six years, Vigny fought the case in the Court of Chancery, an English court known for working very slowly.^[source?] He travelled to London several times and called the case a torture.^[source?]

In December 1844, Vigny finally accepted an agreement. Lydia would receive a yearly income of 6,500 francs.^[51]

Around 1827, the Romantic writers became very interested in the theatre. English actors performed plays by Shakespeare in Paris in 1827 and 1828. They gave more than seventy performances, and the young French writers were very excited by these performances.^[52]

In 1828, Vigny translated three plays by Shakespeare: Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and, with Émile Deschamps, Romeo and Juliet. Only Othello was ever performed on stage.^[53]

Vigny's verse translation of Othello, called Le More de Venise (The Moor of Venice), was first performed at the Comédie-Française on 24 October 1829.^[27] It broke some of the old rules about the kind of language that could be used in tragedy. The simple word mouchoir ("handkerchief") caused a small scandal because people thought that such an ordinary word did not belong in a serious tragedy.^[54]

The play was successful and continued to be performed through the winter. Vigny wrote that the reform of theatrical language had now been confirmed by success.^[55] A few months later, Hugo's Hernani, first performed in February 1830, won an even greater victory for the same kind of change.^[54]

Vigny's own historical drama, La Maréchale d'Ancre, was first performed at the Odéon on 25 June 1831. It had only about fifteen performances.^[27][56] A short one-act comedy, Quitte pour la peur, followed in 1833.^[27]

In July 1830, a revolution forced King Charles X from the throne, and Louis-Philippe became "King of the French".^[28] Vigny did not fight for the old royal family. He believed that thirteen years of poorly paid military service had already been enough to pay what he owed to the fallen family.^[57]

However, Vigny was also critical of the growing power of money under the new government. For a time, he read the works of the social thinkers of his day, including the Saint-Simonians and Lamennais.

His poem Paris (1831) presents the city as a burning wheel of ideas, where there is no clear or certain road to follow.^[58]

During these years, Vigny began the longest love affair of his life. Marie Dorval was born in 1798 into a poor family of travelling actors. She later became one of the leading actresses of popular drama in Paris. Her acting was natural and full of feeling, very different from the cold classical style.^[59]

Vigny read La Maréchale d'Ancre at her home in October 1830, and their love affair began in 1831.^[23][59] It lasted for about eight years and was often difficult and full of arguments.^[59]

At this time, Vigny had to care for two sick people at home: his wife and his mother. Lauvrière explains his new love partly as a way of escaping from this sad home life.^[60]

Vigny and Dorval had very different characters. He was serious, jealous, and eager to control things. She was free, cheerful, and careless. She sometimes read his letters aloud to her friends, and this hurt him deeply.^[61]

In 1835, Dorval joined the Comédie-Française. There she first played the role of Kitty Bell in Vigny's Chatterton.^[61] Their relationship finally ended in 1838.^[23]

The following year, the pain of this separation helped to produce Vigny's bitter poem La Colère de Samson.^[62] When he heard about Dorval's death in 1849, he was deeply moved.^[63]

Vigny took the idea for Chatterton from the second story in his book Stello. The play is about the last day in the life of the young English poet Thomas Chatterton, who killed himself in 1770 at the age of seventeen.^[64] Vigny wrote the play partly because he wanted to give Marie Dorval an important role. He later reminded her: "Was it a great glory to put on the stage an idea from one of my books? It was for you."^[65]

The reading committee of the Comédie-Française did not want to accept the play at first. The Duke of Orléans, the king's son, had to intervene before it was accepted. Some actors also worked against Marie Dorval. On the day before the first performance, Vigny was very worried.^[66]

The first performance took place on 12 February 1835 and was a great success. At midnight, Vigny wrote about his happiness in his diary.^[27][66] He wrote that the success had been greater than even his friends had hoped.^[67]

The play was performed about forty times in Paris and was then taken to other parts of France.^[68] The newspapers did not agree about it. Le Moniteur criticised what it saw as tiresome praise of suicide, while Le National praised Kitty Bell as a pure and moving character.^[68]

Many young people were deeply moved by the play and cried during the performances. Other people accused Vigny of encouraging weak young men to kill themselves. Vigny answered that he had shown a sickness in society, not given people an example to follow.^[69]

Vigny's mother had a stroke in 1833, and he cared for her for several years. She died on 21 December 1837.^[23] His grief was very deep. Months later, he still saw her in his dreams and sometimes woke with tears on his face.^[70]

In September 1838, his relationship with Marie Dorval ended. Vigny then went to Maine-Giraud, an old country house in Charente that belonged to his family.^[23][71]

There, on 31 October 1838, he finished La Mort du loup (The Death of the Wolf), which he had begun at the end of August.^[62][72] The critic François Germain connects the poem with this time of grief. He says that the silent wolf can be understood as an answer to the death of Vigny's mother.^[73]

In November, Vigny's father-in-law died, and Vigny travelled to England, where he stayed for about six months.^[23] At Shavington, in England, on 7 April 1839, he finished La Colère de Samson. He had begun the poem at Tours in November and had originally called it Dalila.^[62][72]

Back in Paris, Vigny went on living in his flat at 6 rue d'Artois. He had lived there since 1833, and he would later die there.^[74] Every Wednesday, he welcomed poets, scholars, and visitors from other countries. The critic Fernand Baldensperger called these meetings "the third Cénacle" of Romanticism. A cénacle was a close group of writers. For Baldensperger, Vigny's group was a bridge between the Romantic poets and the later Symbolists.^[75]

Vigny also helped the literary world in quieter ways. He gave advice and practical help to writers who were young or poor. The young Provençal poet Joseph Roumanille was one of them.^[76]

Writers and important visitors from other countries also came to see him. In 1839, Prince Maximilian of Bavaria wrote to Vigny, rather than to the French Academy, and asked him to describe the spirit of French literature. The Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, famous for his fairy tales, also visited him in Paris.^[77][78] In 1841, Vigny sent the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the French parliament, a detailed plan to protect the rights of authors.^[79][80]

Vigny wanted to become a member of the French Academy. He put himself forward several times without success.^[81][82] When he stood for the seat left empty by his friend Charles Nodier, Vigny received three votes, while Mérimée received nineteen.^[83] Vigny was finally elected on 8 May 1845.^[23]

His formal reception into the Academy, on 29 January 1846, went very badly. Before the ceremony, a friend of the government ministers asked him to give up his old royalist views. Vigny politely but firmly refused.^[84]

Count Molé, who was then director of the Academy, answered Vigny's speech with cold and sharp words. He defended Richelieu against the picture of him in Cinq-Mars, and Napoleon against the criticism in Servitude et grandeur militaires.^[84] Some people in the hall smiled and clapped during this attack.^[85]

King Louis-Philippe himself was unhappy about what had happened. He said: "A man honoured in the country should not be received in this way."^[86][87] Vigny was later welcomed at the royal palace. He officially took his seat in the Academy on 2 July 1846, one day after Molé had left his position as director.^[86]

Dates are those of first publication. The links lead to the full French texts on Wikisource.

• Poèmes (1822), first collection.
• Éloa, ou la Sœur des anges (1824). French text on Wikisource.
• Cinq-Mars, ou une conjuration sous Louis XIII (1826), historical novel. French text on Wikisource.
• Poèmes antiques et modernes (1826; enlarged 1829 and 1837). French text on Wikisource.
• Le More de Venise (1829), verse translation of Othello.
• La Maréchale d’Ancre (1831), historical drama.
• Stello (1832). French text on Wikisource.
• Quitte pour la peur (1833), one-act comedy.
• Chatterton (1835), drama. French text on Wikisource.
• Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835). French text on Wikisource.
• Les Destinées, poèmes philosophiques (1864, after his death). French text on Wikisource.
• Le Journal d’un poète (1867, after his death). French text on Wikisource.
• Daphné (1912, after his death).

• Romanticism
• Victor Hugo
• Académie française
• Comédie-Française

• Media related to Alfred de Vigny at Wikimedia Commons
• Works related to Alfred de Vigny at Wikisource