Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny (27 March 1797 – 17 September 1863) was a French poet and early leader of French Romanticism. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare.
Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny (27 March 1797 – 17 September 1863) was a French poet and to the lead leader of French Romanticism. He along with produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare.
Vigny was born in Loches (a town to which he never returned) into an aristocratic family. His father was a 60-year-old veteran of the Seven Years’ War who died in the past 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 beforehand education. His maternal grandfather, the Marquis de Baraudin, had served as commodore in the royal navy.
Vigny grew happening in Paris, and took preparatory studies for the École Polytechnique at the Lycée Bonaparte, obtaining a good knowledge of French records and the Bible back developing an “inordinate love for the glory of bearing arms”.
As was the stroke for every noble family, the French Revolution diminished the family’s circumstances considerably. After Napoléon’s overwhelm at Waterloo, a Bourbon, Louis XVIII, the brother of Louis XVI, was restored to power, and in 1814 Vigny enrolled in one of the honored aristocratic companies of the Maison du Roi (king’s guard) as a second lieutenant.
Though he was promoted to first lieutenant in 1822 and to captain the next year, the military profession in grow old of goodwill bored him. After taking several leaves of non-attendance he unaccompanied military dynamism in 1827, having already published his first poem Le Bal in 1820 and an ambitious narrative poem Éloa in 1824 upon the popular tender theme of the redemption of Satan.
Prolonging successive leaves from the army, he established in Paris next his teen 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 higher he published the first important historical novel in French, Cinq-Mars, based on the simulation of Louis XIII’s favorite Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis of Cinq-Mars, who conspired against the Cardinal de Richelieu. With the attainment of these two volumes, Vigny seemed to be the rising star of the Romantic movement, though one of Vigny’s best friends, Victor Hugo, soon usurped that role. Vigny wrote of Hugo: “The Victor I loved is no more… now he likes to make saucy interpretation and is turning into a liberal, which does not raid him.” Unlike Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, who moved gradually to the center and then to the left during the 1830s, Vigny remained pliantly centrist in his politics: he well-liked the July monarchy, at first welcomed and subsequently rejected the Second French Republic, and then supported Napoleon III. Vigny higher denounced members of his inner circle whom he suspected of republican sympathies to the imperial police.
The visit of an English theater troupe to Paris in 1827 revived French concentration in Shakespeare. Vigny worked taking into account Emile Deschamps on a translation of Romeo and Juliet. In 1831 he presented his first indigenous play, La Maréchale d’Ancre, a historical performing arts recounting the happenings leading taking place to the reign of King Louis XIII. Attending the theater, he met the good actress Marie Dorval, and became her jealous devotee until 1838. (Vigny’s wife had become a near invalid and never assistant professor to speak French fluently; they had no children, and Vigny was moreover disappointed taking into consideration his father-in-law’s remarriage deprived the couple of an anticipated inheritance.)
In 1835 Vigny produced a substitute titled Chatterton, based on the simulation of Thomas Chatterton, with Marie Dorval starring 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 tab of Chatterton had inspired one of the three episodes of Vigny’s philosophical novel Stello (1832), in which he examined the membership of poetry to outfit and concluded that the poet, doomed to be regarded next suspicion in all social order, must remain somewhat aloof and apart from the social order. Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835) was a thesame tripartite meditation upon the condition of the soldier.
Although Vigny gained capability as a writer, his personal spirit was not happy. His marriage was a disappointment; his connection with Marie Dorval was plagued by jealousy; and his literary power was eclipsed by the achievements of others. He grew embittered. After the death of his mom in 1838 he inherited the property of Maine-Giraud, near Angoulême, where it was said that he had withdrawn to his ‘ivory tower’ (an discussion Sainte-Beuve coined on Vigny). 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 unproductive attempts to be elected, Vigny became a aficionado of the Académie française.
In difficult years, Vigny ceased to publish. He continued to write, however, and his Journal is considered by modern scholars to be a good work in its own right, though it awaits a definitive researcher edition. Vigny considered himself a thinker as competently as a college author; he was, for example, one of the first French writers to take a serious incorporation in Buddhism. His own philosophy of activity was pessimistic and stoical, but much-admired human fraternity, the addition of knowledge, and mutual assistance[citation needed] as high values. He was the first in bookish history to use the word spleen in the wisdom of woe, grief, gall, descriptive of the condition of the soul of advanced man. In his well along years he spent much time preparing the posthumous accrual of poems now known as Les Destinées, for which his expected title was Poèmes philosophiques. It concludes like Vigny’s complete message to the world, L’Esprit pur.
Vigny developed what is believed to have been stomach cancer in his before sixties. He endured its torments next exemplary stoicism for several years: ‘When we look 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.) Vigny died in Paris on 17 September 1863, a few months after the death of his wife. He was buried versus her in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris. Several of his works were published posthumously.