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It is by these that he is most widely known, and by these that he exercised the greatest influence on the literary life of his generation. Alfred-Victor, Count de Vigny, was born in Loches, Touraine, March 27, 1797. His father was an army officer, wounded in the Seven Years' War.
Yet a book like 'Les Noces Corinthiennes' ought to be classified among a group of earlier lyrics, inasmuch as it shows to a large degree the influence of Andre Chenier and Alfred de Vigny.
Alfred de Vigny they spoke of, and Victor Hugo, whom the Padre disliked. Long after the dulce, or sweet dish, when it was the custom for the vaqueros and the rest of the retainers to rise and leave the gente fina to themselves, the host sat on in the empty hail, fondly talking to his guest of his bygone Paris and fondly learning of the later Paris that the guest had seen.
For twenty years before his death Alfred de Vigny wrote nothing. He lived in retirement, almost a recluse, in La Charente, rarely visiting Paris. Admitted into L'Academie Francaise in 1845, he describes in his 'Journal d'un Poete' his academic visits and the reception held out to him by the members of L'Institut. This work appeared posthumously in 1867. He died in Paris, September 17, 1863.
Yet his lofty prose and poetry, interpenetrated with the stern despair of pessimistic idealism, will always be unintelligible to the many. As a poet, De Vigny appeals to the chosen few alone. In his dramas his genius is more emancipated from himself, in his novels most of all.
I raised my eyes to the portrait of Aunt Rose, and as I looked at her severe, wrinkled face, I thought of all those women's souls which we do not know, and which we suppose to be so different from what they really are, whose inborn and ingenuous craftiness we never can penetrate, their quiet duplicity; and a verse of De Vigny returned to my memory: "Always this comrade whose heart is uncertain."
Besides such remarkable essays as those on Civilization, on Armand Carrel, on Alfred de Vigny, on Bentham, and on Coleridge, which, with others, have been republished in his collection of minor writings, he contributed many of great importance. One on Mr. Tennyson, which was published in 1835, is especially noteworthy. Others referred more especially to the politics of the day.
Although there are the ruins of a castle of the same name quite near the Pile de Cinq Mars, the home of Henry d'Effiat, Marquis de Cinq Mars, seems to have been at Chaumont, where Alfred de Vigny placed the opening scenes of his novel.
The Romantic School of which the most important members were VICTOR HUGO, ALFRED DE VIGNY, THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, ALEXANDRE DUMAS, and ALFRED DE MUSSET was, as we have said, inspired by that supremely French love of Rhetoric which, during the long reign of intellect and prose in the eighteenth century, had been almost entirely suppressed.
He read De Vigny and other French poets of his generation, with an eye to their relations to the convulsed and struggling state of France, and because they were compelled by their surroundings to take life au sérieux, and to pursue, with all the resources of their art, something different from beauty in the abstract.
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