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Updated: May 14, 2025
By ANATOLE FRANCE The real name of the subject of this preface is Jacques-Anatole Thibault. He was born in Paris, April 16, 1844, the son of a bookseller of the Quai Malaquais, in the shadow of the Institute. He was educated at the College Stanislas and published in 1868 an essay upon Alfred de Vigny.
I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, René, Obermann, Thomson, Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard men burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge. And there are, I believe, peoples who possess this tragic sense of life also. It is to this that we must now turn our attention, beginning with this matter of health and disease.
Even if it should never come to anything, it will be good that it has been in your heart. But there is nothing else which is more likely to come to something. "What," says Alfred de Vigny, "is a great life? It is a thought conceived in the fervent mind of youth and executed with the solid force of manhood." G.A. Smith. These are Isaiah's images.
All this, it is true, is nothing but palliative, but in human society one cannot hope for more. Later. Alfred de Vigny is a sympathetic writer, with a meditative turn of thought, a strong and supple talent. He possesses elevation, independence, seriousness, originality, boldness and grace; he has something of everything.
Modern morals censure not people so much for their vices as for the display of them, as Aleibiades was blamed not for loving Nemea, but for allowing himself to be painted reposing on her lap. Finished the perusal of Cinq Mars, by Count Alfred de Vigny. It is an admirable production, and deeply interested me.
It was the hour of Hugo, Vigny, Musset, Gautier, Balzac, with their new sonorities and golden cadences, their new lyric passion and dramatic stress, their new virtuosities, their new impulse towards the strange and the magnificent, their new desire for diversity and the manifold comprehension of life. But, if we turn to the contemporaneous pages of Stendhal, what do we find?
Foreign noblemen are addressed viva voce as Monsieur. In speaking of a foreign nobleman before his face, say Monsieur le Comte, or Monsieur le Marquis. In his absence, say Monsieur le Comte de Vigny. Converse with a foreigner in his own language. If not competent to do so, apologize, and beg permission to speak English.
Marie Börner-Sandrini, who lived at Dresden before entering on her career as a famous opera singer, wrote a popular Ave Maria, besides other melodious songs. In the domain of sacred music, Louise von Vigny has done some good work. Ida Becker has won well-deserved success with her children's songs, which are inimitable in their way.
Alfred de Vigny was an early nineteenth century forerunner of Barbusse and Duhamel, and this record of the Napoleonic wars is curiously analogous to the books of these later men. I call attention to it here because it includes "Laurette," which is one of the great French short stories. This is the eleventh volume in the first collected English edition of Dostoevsky's works.
The play told one rapid breathless story of love, jealousy, despair, and death, and it told it directly and uninterruptedly, without any lighter interludes. Author and adapter alike had trusted entirely to the tragic force of the situation and the universality of the motives appealed to. The diction of the piece was the diction of Alfred de Vigny or of the school of Victor Hugo.
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