#sainte beuve

[leromanduntricheur]

Vieillir est encore le seul moyen qu'on ait trouvé de vivre longtemps.

CHARLES-AUGUSTIN SAINTE BEUVE

[pilferingapples]

Victor Hugo in June 1832

I think it’s generally known that Hugo’s political sentiments underwent Some Change as he got older; in 1832, he was still a moderate of the day, insisting that he liked the the idea  of a republic But Not Yet.   Here’s a letter from him to Sainte-Beuve, whose friendship he was still trying to hold onto (for Reasons I guess?!?) at this point, from a collection of his letters :

12th June 1832  I am quite as indignant as you are, my dear friend, with these miserable political jugglers who put Article 14 up their sleeve, and keep the declaration of a state of siege all the time in the false bottom of their conjuring box!(1) 

I only hope they will not have the hardihood to blow out the brains of these hot-headed but generous young fellows. If these would-be keepers of the peace were to venture on a political execution, and four men of spirit were to get up a riot to save the victims, I would make a fifth.(2)

It is, indeed,a  sad, but at the same time a fine subject for a poem, all this folly steeped in bloodshed.(3)  We shall have a Republic some day, and when it does come it will be a good one.  But we must not gather in May the fruit which will not be ripe till August.  We must know how to wait.  The Republic proclaimed by France in Europe will be the crown of our old age.  But we must not let our flag be smeared with red by these blackguards,  For instance, a Frédéric Soulié, who a year ago was devoted to M. d’Argout’s dramatic quasi-censorship(4), must not be allowed to bawl out in the middle of a café that he is going to make bullets.  People of this kind throw back the political ideas which, but for them, would make progress.  They frighten the honest tradesman, who is made savage by reaction.  They make a bugbear of the Republic.  Ninety-three is not much of a bait. We ought to talk a little less of Robespierre and a little more of Washington. 

Farewell. We shall meet soon, I hope. I am working hard just now.  I approve of all you have done, and only regret that the protest(5) did not appear.  At any rate, my friend, keep my signature next to yours. 

Your brother, 

Victor

(1) There had been a brief state of siege declared in Paris in consequence of the uprising; it was not a popular move.

(2) I’m not sure how earnest Hugo was about being ready for active confrontation over this ; I’m not sure even he knew. But he was  entirely ready to fight legally or in the court of public opinion on behalf of anyone who was facing the death penalty; it was one of the few really consistent political opinions in his life. 

(3) of course, thirty years and a major political crisis or two later, “a poem” turned into about 100 solid pages of Barricade Action:P

(4) Frédéric Soulié was another French writer; he would die in 1847. Minister Argout was a moderate conservative politician and governor of the Bank of France from 1834 to 1857. I haven’t been able to find any reason why Hugo should particularly resent either of them; in his memoirs, Argout is a rather easygoing and reasonable figure, who got along fairly well with Hugo despite any political differences, and he was known at the time for having argued against the Four Ordinances;  and I can’t find other outstanding mentions of Soulié at all off the usual easy sources (though there may well be something in correspondence somewhere)--at any rate, he seems to have been a pretty minor author of the day?  Given the year, it seems very likely this was just a brief personal feud. 

(5) There had been plans to print a letter/petition, signed by many prominent public figures like Hugo, in defense of the arrested barricade fighters. 

(Hugo’s  general correspondence at the time shows an extremely mixed and often contradictory bag of social and political opinions and his decades-later edits of some of his work show that he knew full well it wasn’t the neatly unified philosophy the very much wanted to have.  My further opinions about his politically Pontmercying younger years I will save for other times, but I do think it deserves mention that this letter was not part of a particularly consistent political stance or anything-- aside from its obvious contradictions, and the real objection to the death penalty.)

[pilferingapples]

Awright someone asked  me for details about the Hugos and Sainte-Beuve  and why I’m calling S-B a jerkface forever now I will do my best! But remember that all of this is a story about people’s private lives with --for reasons that will become obvious-- VERY contradictory accounts in play, and major historian camps on various sides of the discussion. But having read A Few things that deal with this affair, this is the general shape of the thing as best as I’ve been able to tell.

- Okay, In the Beginning:  Victor Hugo married Adele in 1822, when they were both very young. They proceeded to have So Many Babies-- from 1823 to 1830 Adele had five full-term pregnancies (and four surviving children). This is important here, because all this (understandably!) affected Adele’s health.

- Meanwhile, in 1827, Hugo and Sainte-Beuve met through lit crit articles (esp. Sainte-Beuve’s articles about Hugo’s poetry) and  became Super Best Friends, Romantic Friendship Style-public  avowals of loyalty, boosting each other’s careers, hanging out to the point where Sainte-Beuve visited the Hugos so much he was practically living there.

- ...And starting in 1830 Adele and Victor Hugo were not Having Marital Relations, for reasons of her health. I haven’t read anything suggesting there were any other reasons or particular problems with their marriage before this--by most accounts, the Hugos had a famously idyllic domestic life.  But with Adele in one of those “okay maybe the next pregnancy will kill you” health situations, they stopped sleeping together, in both senses of the term.

-...ALSO starting in 1830--actually, starting more in 1829-- Victor Hugo was beginning to be much more of a public figure. His work was getting better known in general, and then after the censoring of Marion de Lorme his push to get Hernani done, accepted, in theater and supported had him running all over the place and spending a whole lot of time doing the socializing work required to pull it off. It was a lot!

-So Adele was at home alone, sick, with four kids, a whole lot.

- But luckily the family’s Good Friend Sainte-Beuve was there to keep her company.

- ....Yeah.

- You know where this is going. I know where this is going. Things that live in the deep sea vents know where this is going.

- There is some considerable debate as to How Far this actually WENT-- Adele really was struggling with her health, there are issues of time management and all, etc. But there definitely seems to have been at least an emotional affair.  Whatever happened, it was enough for Adele to feel super guilty, Hugo to feel super jealous and hurt, and Sainte-Beuve to...well...to be a giant jerk about it, frankly.

-I mean, like, cue several years of Sainte-Beuve writing letters to Hugo crying for forgiveness and lamenting what a horrible person he, Sainte-Beuve, was, and then writing new letters complaining about how his friends are Cruel and Unforgiving and He Is Being Deprived of Friendships and etc and etc and etc,

-also S-B publishing novels and poems that are very thinly  veiled accounts of how bad he wants to bang Adele Hugo/what a Terrible Person Hugo is for...like...existing and thus preventing this and NO SHE LOVES ME REALLY and so on. Maybe not every random reader would have known what he was talking about , but in the tiny literary circles of Romantic Paris people definitely did. So. That was real swell. 

- Hugo this whole time was all NO BUDDY IT’S OKAY WE CAN WORK PAST THIS, DON’T GIVE UP ON US BABY WE’RE STILL WORTH ONE MOOORRRRRE TRYYYYY

- (also by this point Hugo’s involved with Juliette Drouet and starting up the general string of affairs that’s going to be part of his life from then on , so like. Dude’s busy.) 

- Annnnd then in 1834 S-B, who was a rising critic, starts dragging Hugo’s poetry.  Which sounds like a joke-- mess with my spouse, sure, but MY POETRY, HDU-- except that the articles he’s using to do this are much more explicit about calling out the Hugo family’s domestic problems, saying that Hugo dishonored his wife by putting a poem about her in a book with poems about Juliette, etc. 

-...so Hugo challenged him to a duel. As you do. 

- Adele made sure the duel didn’t happen and then obviously after that they were on Formal Public Events Nodding Acquaintance Only and YOU WOULD THINK THAT WOULD BE IT but: 

-In 1843, only a few weeks after Leopoldine Hugo (the Hugo family’s oldest daughter) had drowned, Saint-Beuve went and published Livre de Amour,  which was poetic accounting of the whole affair, According To Him.  It had a very limited print run of just a few hundred and most people seem to have been pretty disgusted with it, but of course Hugo heard about it. And this wasn’t some sad accident of a publisher’s schedule, Sainte Beuve planned and paid for the publishing of this thing himself, it was totally up to him. 

-so Sainte-Beuve is kiiind of a jerkface with the face of a jerk, as far as any evidence I can find. 

-Sources: Graham Robb, Victor Hugo;  Matthew Josephson, Victor Hugo;  Joanna Richardson, Victor Hugo

[fucckitallandnoregrets]

Madurar... madurar... Uno se endurece por partes, se pudre en otras; jamás se madura

Charles Augustin Sainte- Beuve, Pensées et maximes.

[lostvenus]

"Excess is to abstain" 「過度 は慎む こと 。」Charles Augustin Sainte Beuve

[homilius]

To accept the 'naturalness' of our lives, for all the operations of what is called 'divine grace'--a sort of unreflective nakedness into which we relapse when following our natural inclinations, as though the soul had never been redeemed--to accept this Tahiti of the soul is also to accept Montaigne's empire, the realm in which he lived and wrote. We ought not to be surprised that Pascal had such difficulty disposing of Montaigne. The problem Montaigne poses is not one of philosophy but that of nature itself, of the individual self: he poses a philosophical problem only in the sense that he represents nature in all its purity.

Sainte-Beuve, "Montaigne" (from Port-Royal, Vol. II, 1842)

[homilius]

Renan, his imagination heated, fumbling for the words that would express a living whole, after profound digging into his brain and a long silence that bespoke the labor pains of genius; Renan, as seriously and religiously as a man could pronounce himself in this world, ultimately was able, before the gaping table, to compare his particular God with--guess what?--with an oyster and its vegetative existence. An oyster on a grand scale! This comparison finally sputtered forth, the whole table went off in a gale of laughter in which, after a moment of bewilderment over what he had himself said, Renan very good-naturedly joined. Whether or not it was this Homeric laughter that brought Homer to mind I cannot say, but in any case Homer was on the tapis. And in an instant all these great destroyers of faith, these demolishers of God, burst out in the most disgusting latria. With a single voice, every one of these critics proclaimed that there was a time and a country, at the beginning of humanity, when a work was written in which everything was divine and was above all discussion and even all scrutiny. They began to swoon over quotations. 'Cloud-marshaling Zeus!' Taine cried out enthusiastically. 'The unharvestable sea!' exclaimed Sainte-Beuve, his little voice swelling prodigiously; 'the grapeless sea! Could anything be more beautiful?' 'As a matter of fact,' Renan broke in; 'the thing doesn't make sense. The Germans have discovered that the words have a different meaning altogether.' 'Which is what?' Sainte-Beuve asked. 'I don't remember,' said Renan, 'but it is wonderful.'...I did not want to say anything, remembering very well the scene that had taken place at another of these dinners when we had spoken our mind about the ancients; but what with one after the other ragging me, I said as calmly as I could that I took more pleasure from reading Hugo than from Homer--using Hugo's name in order to fend off Saint-Victor's lightning. Nevertheless, at this blasphemy Saint-Victor became positively wild with fury and began to bawl and shriek in the tinny voice of a madman that this was too much; it was impossible for him to listen to such opinions; we were insulting the religion of all intelligent people.

The Goncourt Journals (22 October 1866)

[napoleonicrevival]

Jean Baudrillard, Sainte Beuve, 1990