Corinne ou l'Italie (Madame de Staël)
Také známý jako: Corinne ou l'Italie, Corinne, l'auteur de Corinne, le Rome de Mme de Staël
Overview
Corinne ou l'Italie (1807) is the most famous novel of Germaine de Staël. It tells the love of Corinne, an Anglo-Italian poet and improvisatrice who is crowned on the Capitol in Rome, and the English nobleman Oswald, Lord Nelvil, who loves her but in the end gives in to his family's wishes and marries her half-sister. Much of the book is a guide to Rome, Naples, Florence and Venice and a reflection on Italian art, history and customs. (Wikipedia, "Corinne, or Italy".) It was the canonical literary evocation of Rome for the nineteenth century, and the model of the woman of genius whom society punishes.
Marie and this work
Corinne arrives at the moment when Marie is in love with Pietro Antonelli and longing for Rome, and she reads herself into it.
- 3 July 1876, Nice. Quoting a line from the first book, "Voyager est, quoi qu'on puisse dire, un des plus tristes plaisirs de la vie. Lorsque vous vous trouvez bien dans quelque ville étrangère c'est que vous commencez à vous y faire une patrie" (Livre I, chap. II; 062.0884), she adds: "C'est l'auteur de Corinne qui dit cela" and that she herself loathes new towns, new countries, new faces (062.0885).
- 4-5 July 1876, Nice to Paris. She reads "un volume de cinq cents pages" on the train (063.0015). She admires its "observations si justes" while finding its tone "trop romanesque", and says that her appetite for reading about Rome and Italy comes from "un intérêt particulier"; between the printed lines she dreams "un roman à moi". "Je me personnifiais dans Corinne et je cherchais dans Oswald des excuses pour Pietro" (063.0015; the note at the paragraph identifies Oswald with Pietro). She recalls that Corinne and Oswald first meet at the crowning of Corinne on the Capitol (063.0031, from Livre II), and sets "l'amour immense de Corinne" against Pietro's coolness (063.0020).
- 17 October 1876, Russia. She gives her "presque-frère" Corinne to read (067.0154) and copies out the sentence in which Lord Nelvil says that crossing the bridge of Sant'Angelo on his way back from the Capitol he thought of Corinne for the first time at length; it "m'a fait littéralement pâmer hier soir" and does so every time she reopens the book (067.0155). The sentence is not found word for word in the text on Wikisource, so it may be paraphrased; the bridge appears in Livres II, X and XV.
- 10 November 1876. Translating Gogol's description of Rome she finds "Le Rome de Mme de Staël" "affectée et presque faible" beside it (067.0928), see Gogol, "Rome".
- 13 September 1877, Soden (074.0332). Talking with "ces demoiselles" about travel, she says that it is "un plaisir assez triste dès que la curiosité est satisfaite" and cites "le vrai et charmant passage de Mme de Staël où elle parle de voyages": the same first-book passage that she quoted in 1876 (this identification was made by another batch of this project).
Notes
- The other Staël paragraphs of the diary (073.0015 and 074.0246) are from her De l'Allemagne, not this novel; see De l'Allemagne.
Sources
- Wikipedia, "Corinne, or Italy".
- fr.wikisource, Corinne ou l'Italie (Livre I, chap. II for the "tristes plaisirs" sentence); Project Gutenberg 60810.
- Diary paragraphs as cited above.