Ariadnê: The Story of a Dream (Ouida)

Overview

Ariadnê: The Story of a Dream (1877, three volumes, London: Chapman & Hall / Chatto & Windus) is a novel by the English writer Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé, 1839-1908), who lived in Italy. It is a story of art and love set in Rome, told by a first-person narrator. It opens in the Villa Borghese before a bust the narrator insists is an Ariadne, not the young Bacchus of the catalogue; the great sculptor Maryx is among the company, and the young heroine, whom everyone calls Gioja, is the face of Maryx's Nausicaa (Internet Archive full text of the 1877 edition, vol. 1 ch. I and X; Wikipedia, "Ouida", for the author). In chapter X of volume 1 (pp. 263-265) Maryx carves a marble Nausicaa with Gioja's face, and Ouida breaks off to say that, "for me, I always wish, sinfully perhaps, to strangle Penelope in her own web, and wed Ulysses to the sweet Phaeacian maid".

Marie and Ariadnê

Marie first read it in English a few years before 1882 and it affected her deeply as a woman who wanted to be a sculptor.

• 28 August 1882 (096.0141): "J'ai relu un livre d'Ouida, une femme de pas trop de talent, cela s'appelle Ariadne, c'est en anglais. Un livre qui est fait pour émouvoir au suprême degré; j'ai été sur le point de le relire vingt fois depuis trois ans ou quatre ans et j'ai toujours reculé sachant quelle agitation il m'a causée et devait me causer encore. Il s'agit d'art et d'amour et cela se passe à Rome."
• 29 August 1882 (096.0154): "Ce livre me bouleverse. Ouida n'est ni Balzac, ni Sand ni Dumas mais elle a fait un livre qui pour des raisons... professionnelles me donne la fièvre." She praises the author's "idées très justes en art" (that in true artists the conception is incommensurably superior to their power of execution) and "le grand sculpteur Marix (toujours dans le roman)", who, seeing the young heroine's first modelling, says that she should come and work. (Marie spells the sculptor "Marix"; the novel has "Maryx".)
• 22 March 1883 (098.0555): she writes of Penelope and Ulysses: "Je suis absolument de l'avis d'Ouida qui voudrait étrangler la vieille Pénélope et marier Ulysse avec cette idéale jeune fille appuyée à la colonne de marbre rose du palais de son père et s'éprenant de cet intrigant d'Ulysse au récit de ses aventures." This is the passage quoted above, in the chapter where Maryx's Nausicaa is made. It comes in the very entry in which Marie describes her own sculpture Douleur de Nausicaa (098.0553-0554), a weeping figure first meant for her painting Les Saintes Femmes; the diary does not say whether the novel prompted the choice of subject, but the same Nausicaa scene of the Odyssey is the point of contact.

Notes and doubts

• The identification of 098.0555 with Ariadnê is new: the text was found by reading the Internet Archive scan (vol. 1, chapter X). The existing Nausicaa entry says only "after Ouida".
• Marie's own statue project Ariane/Ariadne (098.0551: "en sculpture ma grande préoccupation c'est Ariadne") is a separate work (see Ariane, statue); whether the title of Ouida's novel played a part in it is not recorded.
• 096.0257 (18 September 1882), a description of her studio, was listed in the inventory but contains no explicit reference to the novel.

Sources

• Internet Archive scans of the 1877 edition (see `full_text`), vol. 1 pp. 263-265 and vol. 2, p. 53 ("Have you seen the Nausicaa?" ... "The last work of Maryx").
• Wikipedia, "Ouida": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouida