Théophile Gautier: Correspondance générale 1872 et compléments. XII by Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre; Andrew GannReview by: Constance Gosselin SchickNineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3/4 (SPRING SUMMER 2002), pp. 403-405Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23537795 .

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hospitality and hunting in "Saint Julien," absolutist force in "Hérodias" (144). Abuses

of natural morality by the male protagonists suggest the need for interhuman

engagement.

Chapter six offers an analysis of Bouvard et Pécuchet as "êtres en retraite" in terms

of masculinity faced with early retirement, and of "Les Chavignolles" as a dystopian

space, mirroring the official society (172). The clerks' difficulty with relationships

(homosocial and homosexual) underlies several nexuses of failure (182). The explor

ation of the issues raised by codification of sex and gender for the male couple reveals

the novel's questioning not only of the legacy of the Enlightenment in terms of

knowledge, but also of patriarchy's control over relationships that differ from the

prescribed standards.

In her conclusions, Mary Orr distinguishes between two patterns for the mascu

line: those who conform to the ideal of masculinity as formulated by the State, on the

one hand, and negative and positive nonconformists, on the other. The latter reflect

the search for an authentic identity (Charles, Mathô, Frédéric, Antoine, Iokanann,

Julien, Bouvard and Pecuchet), and are positioned close to the dividing line separating

male and female spheres. Orr refuses to describe them as feminized, however, since

they willfully remain within masculine boundaries and lack the self-confidence of

Flaubert's strong women. Read through Foucault's concept of transgression as a

challenging of the limits beyond social place, the nonconformists' intensity

constitutes a threat to bourgeois culture and social standards (204).

Mary Orr's reassessment of Flaubert's characters in light of power structures

endorsing male status constitutes a valuable contribution to the body of scholarship.

Her elucidation of historical and social contexts, combined with insightful inter

textual analyses and a skillful methodological approach make for an engaging study.

Lacoste-Veysseyre, Claudine, ed. Théophile Gautier: Correspondance générale

1872 et compléments. XII. Ed. avec la collaboration d'Andrew Gann. Genève

Paris: Librairie Droz, 2000. Pp. 411. ISBN 2-600-00374-6

Constance Gosselin Schick, College of the Holy Cross

On August 30, 1872, Théophile Gautier writes one last time to Carlotta Grisi of "ces

désirs de m'envoler à Genève [... ] comme un instinct voyageur. Cet instinct a une telle

force qu'il produit une nostalgie dont on peut mourir" (70). Within two months, he

will die, perhaps not of the mortal nostalgia for those dream sites that was the

affliction / blessing of so many of his literary personae, but with nevertheless that

ironic and always movingly pathetic admixture of unexpectedness - for one who still

longed and lived for beauty, love and well-being, and of inevitability - for one whose

health had been so weakened by recent deprivations.

Having (barely) survived the difficult years of the Commune and the Prussian

occupation, Gautier attempts to return to the work of earning a living, and to the joys

of maintaining friendships. The correspondence of 1872 fittingly exhales that reti

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2002 403

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cence and personal discretion, which, in my opinion, are essential and fundamental to

the understanding and appreciation of Gautier's writing: his humor, his

understatement, his "objectivity," his deferment or dissemination to stylistic

spectacle. His correspondents in these last months of his life - again fittingly, these

include many of his lifelong attachments and/or reflect many of his lifelong pursuits - seem to respectfully join him in that communicative game played between the goals

of what is to be said and what is to remain unsaid. In response to a warmly appre

ciative letter from Victor Hugo in which he thanks Gautier for his review of a revival

of Ruy Blas, and in which the sincerity with which he proffers "mon plus tendre

serrement de main" is evident, Gautier sighs/smiles: "Me jeter une poignée de

diamants pour me récompenser d'une pauvre réclame de théâtre," and signs off:

"Votre ancien page Albertus qui n'est plus que le toujours déjoué Théophile Gautier"

(26-27). While the number of letters written in the year 1872 are understandably few, this

final volume of the Correspondance générale includes Gautier's undated corres

pondence: these letters are arranged in the alphabetic order of the correspondents'

name. The volume also offers a Complément des tomes I à XI: letters which were not

previously available and which are here numbered so that they can be easily placed in

the appropriate chronological context and order of the earlier volumes. One of the

most notable of these additions is a very long letter from Marie Mattei (#4414 bis),

written in 1870, in which she argues against what she perceives to be Gautier's faulty

aesthetics in Mademoiselle de Maupin (See 301-10).

As in the previous volumes, much valuable information and many relatively

inaccessible citations are provided in the editorial notes to individual letters and in the

"Index des correspondants." An excerpt from an article written by Gautier in the

Moniteur Universel and which annotates a letter written by the actress Siona Lévy

offers a wonderful insight into the orality of Gautier's poetics (See 272-73). There is a

moving quotation from a letter that Victor Hugo wrote to Jules Simon on the 24lh of

June, 1872, in which he pleads that more financial support be given to his ailing friend:

"Accablé des tortures d'une affection chronique inexorable, il est forcé, à travers la

souffrance et presque l'agonie, de travailler pour vivre" (348-49). In its identification

of Pierre Jules de Vabre, an old Jeunes-France comrade who writes to Gautier in April

of 1872 to let him know that he is indeed alive and well, the volume's Index quotes the

chapter in the Histoire du romantisme which Gautier devoted to this "Compagnon

miraculeux" and Shakespeare devotee. This excerpt is particularly appropriate and

significant in that it serves as a kind of homage to the sensitive, retrospective critical

work that Gautier was writing in 1872, namely, the Histoire du romantisme, which

was itself a kind of (auto)homage to Gautier's lifelong poetics (See 37, 370-73).

Similarly, substantial excerpts from the necrologies written at the occasion of

Gautier's death by three of the correspondents (Alexandre Dumas fils, Arsène

Houssaye, and Charles Yriarte) are offered, providing little-known yet widely held

contemporary appreciations of Gautier.

Depending on the needs, level of expertise, and interests of each individual reader of

the Correspondance générale, there are inevitably areas where lacunae, minor errors,

404 Reviews

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or unevenness may be detected. However, this twelve-volume monumental endeavor

must be applauded and valued for the wealth of material it provides researchers

interested in the cultural, aesthetic, and literary life of nineteenth-Century Paris as

seen, lived, and shaped by someone whom Hugo recognized to be "un des hommes

qui honorent notre pays et notre temps; il est au premier rang comme poète, comme

critique, comme artiste, comme écrivain" (Letter of June 24, 1872, to Jules Simon cited

in the "Index des correspondants" 348).

Roman, Myriam. Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique: Du « drame dans les

faits » au « drame dans les idées ». Paris: Champion, 1999. Pp. 826. ISBN 2-7453

0036-9/ISSN 1169-2944

Kathryn M. Grossman, The Pennsylvania State University

In celebration of the bicentenary of Victor Hugo's birth in 1802, a multitude of books

and articles devoted to his poetry, drama, prose fiction, essays, and drawings have

already come out, are currently in press, or will eventually be published in con

junction with the various Hugo symposia in planning both here and abroad. Myriam

Roman's recent single-volume study of the nine novels - Han d'Islande (1823), Bug

Jargal (1826), Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné (1829), Notre-Dame de Paris (1831),

Claude Gueux (1834), Les Misérables (1862), Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866),

L'Homme qui rit (1869), and Quatrevingt-treize (1874) - is the first to appear since

Victor Brombert's provocative exploration of Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel

(1984). Drawing on Descartes, Kant, and Hegel (as well as on both Hugo's own

philosophical writings and the eighteenth-century philosophical tradition embodied

by Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire), Roman reveals the wide array of strategies

employed by the novelist to engage what she calls "le lecteur pensif." In so doing, she

persuasively argues for a complex dialectics at the heart of Hugo's enterprise.

Following an introductory overview of the relations between romanticism,

philosophy, and the novel, Roman investigates Hugo from three major angles. First,

she focuses on theoretical considerations: the impact of the eighteenth-century

philosophes; the relation between le rire and Hugo's notion of the grotesque; the

writer's evolution from the historical novel in the early works to a romantic

"naturalism" in the later ones. As she shows: "Conçu comme une forme dramatique,

le roman hugolien se définit [...] comme un roman polyphonique qui jouera tour à

tour des implications philosophiques de l'ode, de l'épopée ou de la tragédie pour

signifier le «drame dans les idées», l'interrogation inachevée portée sur l'Histoire et la

nature, sur l'homme et Dieu, ou plus exactement, sur l'Histoire dans la nature, sur la

conscience humaine en Dieu" (227). Rather than remain diametrically opposed,

transcendence is realized through immanence, the ideal through the real.

In the second part of her study, Roman looks at the ways in which Hugo appro

priates a broad range of genres - the Gothic, historical, social, adventure, and

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2002 405

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