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Updated: May 5, 2025
But Madame Gervaisais has been represented as an uncommon woman in every way, and we are forced to allow the progress of undermining disease some share in her abasement. The last ten or a dozen chapters and the tragical conclusion are among the weaker portions of the book, which as a novel has many defects.
Madame Gervaisais, brought up of course a French Catholic, has gradually become a free-thinker of the serious kind, high-principled and earnest: she is described as a woman of elevated mind and character, the force of whose will and intelligence has kept her from being betrayed by a naturally loving disposition, which has expended itself in friendship and filial and maternal affection, the latter being her only passion.
Madame Gervaisais at first hardly listens, but a few words suddenly arrest her attention, and she hears the preacher say, "Rash and audacious woman and not only rash and audacious, but wretched and unhappy who dares to disdain the manifestations of the divine will, and declares that her own reason is the only light she needs!" proceeding to describe her habitual attitude of mind, and winding up with a terrible denunciation delivered with the authority which those alone can wield who believe themselves the mouthpieces of Infallibility.
Madame Gervaisais is the widow of a man who filled for years an important office under the government by dint of small gifts of precision and punctuality, being in himself an insignificant person. His position and wealth, and the beauty and superior endowments of his wife, attracted men of mark to the house, and her salon was long one of the most sought in Paris.
But, chance or calculation, it leads in the same direction; and after a year and a half in Rome, Madame Gervaisais, who has given up Lammenais for a book of her Russian friend's, and has fallen into a state of languid dejection, takes to attending the regular sermon at the Jesuits' church, where the music, the paintings, the architecture, corrupt in style as they are, gradually induce a sort of somnolent ecstasy.
I couldn't get many new books down in Galway. There were, of course, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot in the library, but that was all. I once got a beautiful book from Dungory Castle. I wonder if you ever read it? It is called Madame Gervaisais. From the descriptions of Rome it almost seems to me that I have been there.
It declines to have a creed of any kind slammed into its face so many new ones have palpably failed, and so many old ones have proved themselves possessed of forgotten virtues. Good and evil have proved to be omnipresent, and to pervade everything, like iron and sulphur. Madame Gervaisais. By Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. New Edition. Paris. This is in many respects a remarkable book.
The respectful distance which the author places between her and the rest of the world is indicated by her first name never being mentioned: she is only Madame Gervaisais. But she is not only a woman of reading: she is an artist and a musician, and these tastes increase her susceptibility to the soft masterdom of the place.
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