Charles-Victor Prévot, vicomte d'Arlincourt
Encyclopedia
Charles-Victor Prévot, vicomte d'Arlincourt (26 September 1788 — 22 January 1856) was a French novelist, born at the Château de Mérantais, Magny-les-Hameaux
, Yvelines
.
In the 1820s
the popularity of this author, upon whom was bestowed the epithet "the prince of the romantics", rivalled that of Victor Hugo
.
His father Louis-Adrien Prévost d'Arlincourt was guillotined on 8 May 1794, along with Antoine Lavoisier
and 26 other farmers-general
. At the beginning of the First Empire
, his mother pleaded his cause before Napoleon, who decided to name him écuyer ("squire") to Madame Mère
. At the age of 29, he married the daughter of a senator, and composed a tragedy, Charlemagne, which was declined by the Théâtre-Français. In 1811 Napoleon appointed him as a master (auditeur) at the Council of State, then as an intendant in the Spanish army. He participated in the Spanish campaign and was present at the capture of Tarragona
.
After the fall of Napoleon, he succeeded in ingratiating himself with Louis XVIII, who named him Master of Requests. He bought a chateau and adopted the title of viscount. In 1818 he orchestrated a huge publicity campaign for the publication of his epic poem, Charlemagne, ou la Caroléide, and presented himself before the Academy
, where his candidature obtained exactly one vote. Undiscouraged, he began work on a novel which he believed would bring him as great a reputation as Chateaubriand's.
Le Solitaire appeared in 1821 and achieved an "extraordinary, even colossal, celebrity." In the space of several months, the book was reprinted a dozen times; it was translated into ten languages; there were no fewer than seven operas based on its story, and twice as many dramatic adaptations; and it was the subject of innumerable songs, parodies, paintings and lithographs. The success of his next three novels, Le Renégat in 1822, Ipsiboé in 1823, and L'Étrangère in 1825, was almost as great.
Adulated above all by his female readership, who saw him as "the new Ossian
", he was harpooned by critics. His plot points were judged impossible, his characters cardboard, and his imagery grotesque. His taste for syntactic inversions, with which he generously adorned his prose, led to the nickname "the inversive Viscount", and the result was memorably parodied in Illusions perdues by Balzac (who, nevertheless, was strongly influenced in his first works by the gothic style of d'Arlincourt). The Academic Charles-Marie de Féletz
wrote that "Le Solitaire has so far been translated into every single known language, except of course French." Later assessments were no more favourable. His novels, now classified as "gothic", were then labelled frénétique: "containing a mysterious intrigue centred on some illustrious and guilty wretch who traipses through a thousand violent incidents towards a bloody catastrophe."
D'Arlincourt's vanity and egocentricity were the subject of many anecdotes, including a story of his attempts to persuade his portrait-painter, Robert Lefèvre
, to make his eyes look larger and larger, until they were "like those of an ox"; the result was still considered unsatisfactory by his wife, who confronted the painter, turning to her husband and telling him to "Do that thing with your eyes." (Mon ami, fais tes yeux.) He also posed for Jean-Baptiste Isabey
.
D'Arlincourt frequently defended himself in print, explaining that it was his goal to "spiritualize all the impressions of existence"; he presented a play he wrote in his youth, Le Siège de Paris, at the Théâtre-Français in 1826, but it was promptly torn to pieces by the critics. Not always justly: some of the most ridiculed extracts are not in fact by him.
He made two long journeys through Europe, in 1841 and 1844, visiting exiled princes, and on his return presented a new play, La Peste noire, which was received no more favourably than the first. In 1848, outraged by the events of June, he published Dieu le veut! ("God wills it!"), a pamphlet which led to legal troubles for the author but also increased his popularity. In 1850 he published L'Italie rouge, a hostile account of the Risorgimento. In the last years of his life, still "avid for acclaim", he was a frequent guest of salons.
Plays
Other works
Pamphlets
Magny-les-Hameaux
Magny-les-Hameaux is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France.-References:*...
, Yvelines
Yvelines
Yvelines is a French department in the region of Île-de-France.-History:Yvelines was created from the western part of the defunct department of Seine-et-Oise on 1 January 1968 in accordance with a law passed on 10 January 1964 and a décret d'application from 26 February 1965.It gained the...
.
In the 1820s
1820s
The 1820s decade ran from January 1, 1820, to December 31, 1829.- East Asia :* February 14, 1820 – Minh Mang starts to rule in Vietnam.* Java War * 1828 Siamese-Lao War: Siam invades and sacks Vientiane....
the popularity of this author, upon whom was bestowed the epithet "the prince of the romantics", rivalled that of Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
.
His father Louis-Adrien Prévost d'Arlincourt was guillotined on 8 May 1794, along with Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier , the "father of modern chemistry", was a French nobleman prominent in the histories of chemistry and biology...
and 26 other farmers-general
Ferme générale
The Ferme générale was, in ancien régime France, essentially an outsourced customs and excise operation which collected duties on behalf of the king, under six-year contracts...
. At the beginning of the First Empire
First French Empire
The First French Empire , also known as the Greater French Empire or Napoleonic Empire, was the empire of Napoleon I of France...
, his mother pleaded his cause before Napoleon, who decided to name him écuyer ("squire") to Madame Mère
Letizia Ramolino
Nobile Maria Letizia Buonaparte née Ramolino was the mother of Napoleon I of France....
. At the age of 29, he married the daughter of a senator, and composed a tragedy, Charlemagne, which was declined by the Théâtre-Français. In 1811 Napoleon appointed him as a master (auditeur) at the Council of State, then as an intendant in the Spanish army. He participated in the Spanish campaign and was present at the capture of Tarragona
Tarragona
Tarragona is a city located in the south of Catalonia on the north-east of Spain, by the Mediterranean. It is the capital of the Spanish province of the same name and the capital of the Catalan comarca Tarragonès. In the medieval and modern times it was the capital of the Vegueria of Tarragona...
.
After the fall of Napoleon, he succeeded in ingratiating himself with Louis XVIII, who named him Master of Requests. He bought a chateau and adopted the title of viscount. In 1818 he orchestrated a huge publicity campaign for the publication of his epic poem, Charlemagne, ou la Caroléide, and presented himself before the Academy
Académie française
L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...
, where his candidature obtained exactly one vote. Undiscouraged, he began work on a novel which he believed would bring him as great a reputation as Chateaubriand's.
Le Solitaire appeared in 1821 and achieved an "extraordinary, even colossal, celebrity." In the space of several months, the book was reprinted a dozen times; it was translated into ten languages; there were no fewer than seven operas based on its story, and twice as many dramatic adaptations; and it was the subject of innumerable songs, parodies, paintings and lithographs. The success of his next three novels, Le Renégat in 1822, Ipsiboé in 1823, and L'Étrangère in 1825, was almost as great.
Adulated above all by his female readership, who saw him as "the new Ossian
Ossian
Ossian is the narrator and supposed author of a cycle of poems which the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have translated from ancient sources in the Scots Gaelic. He is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to Finn McCool, a character from Irish mythology...
", he was harpooned by critics. His plot points were judged impossible, his characters cardboard, and his imagery grotesque. His taste for syntactic inversions, with which he generously adorned his prose, led to the nickname "the inversive Viscount", and the result was memorably parodied in Illusions perdues by Balzac (who, nevertheless, was strongly influenced in his first works by the gothic style of d'Arlincourt). The Academic Charles-Marie de Féletz
Charles-Marie de Féletz
Charles-Marie de Féletz was a French churchman, journalist and literary critic.-External links:* at Internet Archive...
wrote that "Le Solitaire has so far been translated into every single known language, except of course French." Later assessments were no more favourable. His novels, now classified as "gothic", were then labelled frénétique: "containing a mysterious intrigue centred on some illustrious and guilty wretch who traipses through a thousand violent incidents towards a bloody catastrophe."
D'Arlincourt's vanity and egocentricity were the subject of many anecdotes, including a story of his attempts to persuade his portrait-painter, Robert Lefèvre
Robert Lefèvre
Robert Jacques François Faust Lefèvre was a French painter of portraits, history paintings and religious paintings. He was heavily influenced by Jacques-Louis David and his style s reminiscent of the antique.-Life:Robert Lefèvre made his first drawings on the papers of a procureur to whom his...
, to make his eyes look larger and larger, until they were "like those of an ox"; the result was still considered unsatisfactory by his wife, who confronted the painter, turning to her husband and telling him to "Do that thing with your eyes." (Mon ami, fais tes yeux.) He also posed for Jean-Baptiste Isabey
Jean-Baptiste Isabey
Jean-Baptiste Isabey was a French painter born at Nancy.At nineteen, after some lessons from Dumont, miniature painter to Marie Antoinette, he became a pupil of Jacques-Louis David...
.
D'Arlincourt frequently defended himself in print, explaining that it was his goal to "spiritualize all the impressions of existence"; he presented a play he wrote in his youth, Le Siège de Paris, at the Théâtre-Français in 1826, but it was promptly torn to pieces by the critics. Not always justly: some of the most ridiculed extracts are not in fact by him.
He made two long journeys through Europe, in 1841 and 1844, visiting exiled princes, and on his return presented a new play, La Peste noire, which was received no more favourably than the first. In 1848, outraged by the events of June, he published Dieu le veut! ("God wills it!"), a pamphlet which led to legal troubles for the author but also increased his popularity. In 1850 he published L'Italie rouge, a hostile account of the Risorgimento. In the last years of his life, still "avid for acclaim", he was a frequent guest of salons.
Works
Novels- Une Matinée de Charlemagne, fragmens tirés d'un poëme épique qui ne tardera point à paraître (1810)
- Charlemagne, ou La Caroléide, poème épique en vingt-quatre chants (1818). Text 1 2
- Le Solitaire (2 volumes, 1821). Réédition : Slatkine, Genève, 1973. Text 1 2
- Le Renégat (2 volumes, 1822). Text 1 2
- Ipsiboé (2 volumes, 1823)
- L'Étrangère (2 volumes, 1825)
- Ismalie, ou la Mort et l'amour, roman-poëme (2 volumes, 1828)
- Le Chef des Penitens noirs, ou le Proscrit et l'Inquisition (5 volumes, 1828)
- Les Rebelles sous Charles V (3 volumes, 1832)
- Les Écorcheurs, ou l'Usurpation et la peste, fragmens historiques, 1418 (1833)
- Le Brasseur roi, chronique flamande du quatorzième siècle (2 volumes, 1834)
- Double Règne, chronique du treizième siècle (2 volumes, 1835)
- L'Herbagère (2 volumes, 1837)
- Les Trois Châteaux, histoire contemporaine (2 volumes, 1840)
- Ida et Nathalie (2 volumes, 1841)
- Les Anneaux d'une chaîne (2 volumes, 1845)
- Les Fiancés de la mort, histoire contemporaine (1850)
- La Tache de sang (5 volumes, 1851)
- Le Château de Chaumont (1851)
Plays
- Le Siège de Paris, tragédie en 5 actes, Paris, Théâtre-FrançaisComédie-FrançaiseThe Comédie-Française or Théâtre-Français is one of the few state theaters in France. It is the only state theater to have its own troupe of actors. It is located in the 1st arrondissement of Paris....
, 8 avril 1826. - La Peste noire, ou Paris en 1334, drame en 5 actes et 7 tableaux dont 1 prologue, Paris, Théâtre de l'Ambigu-ComiqueThéâtre de l'Ambigu-ComiqueThe theatre was rebuilt to plans by the architects Jacques Ignace Hittorff and Jean-François-Joseph Lecointe on the boulevard Saint-Martin, at the corner of rue de Bondy...
, 7 avril 1845.
Other works
- Le Pèlerin. L'Étoile polaire (2 volumes, 1843)
- Les Trois Royaumes (1844)
- L'Italie rouge, ou Histoire des révolutions de Rome, Naples, Palerme, Messine, Florence, Parme, Modène, Turin, Milan, Venise, depuis l'avènement du pape Pie IX, en juin 1846, jusqu'à sa rentrée dans sa capitale, en avril 1850 (1850)
Pamphlets
- Dieu le veut ! (1848)
- Suite à Dieu le veut, par le Vte d'Arlincourt. Place au droit. Première partie. La Révolution et l'Élysée. Seconde partie. La Royauté et Frohsdorf (1850)