Abstract
It is deplorable in the 19th century, to go in search of images in Greek mythology: but I have never been so struck as I am with the powerful truth of these myths. (Balzac)1
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Notes
Balzac, Lettres à l’étrangère (Paris: Calmaun-Levy, 1899), I, p. 203.
Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Editions du Seuil 1970);
English edition, S/Z, trans. R. Miller (New York, 1972). The myth of Endymion has a number of variants; in some the hero is a grand and mature figure, son of Zeus and king of Elis; his eternal sleep comes either as punishment for his love of Hera or as a gift from Zeus because Endymion could not bear the prospect of growing old. In another his connection to the moon begins in astronomical observations. (Later in life Girodet would contribute an entry to a mythological dictionary discussing the multiple aspects of the myth: François Noël, Dictionnaire de la fable (Paris: Le Normant, 1803), I, pp. 475–6). In 1791, however, Girodet chose as a primary source a text of later antiquity which both flattered his erudition and allowed him the greatest freedom of interpretation. It comes from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods, the satire of mythology by the sceptical Greek writer of the second century ad (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA, VII, pp. 328–31). The source was first identified by George Levitine in ‘Girodet — Trioson: An Iconographical Study’, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1953; published New York, 1974, pp. 126–7. In one short passage, Aphrodite mockingly chides Selene for her uncharacteristic infatuation with the mortal boy, describing her as the victim of her mischievous son Eros: ‘What’s this I hear you’re up to, Mistress Moon? They say that every time you get over Caria, you stop your team and gaze at Endymion sleeping out of doors in hunter’s fashion, and sometimes even leave your course and go down to him’. Girodet renders the obsessive Selene as a fall of immaterial moonlight, whose passage is facilitated by the smilingly malign Eros disguised as Zephyr the wind. His treatment of her beloved follows directly from the description Lucian renders in her voice: I think he’s good-looking, Aphrodite, especially when he sleeps with his cloak under him on the rock, with his javelins just slipping out of his left hand as he holds them, and his right hand bent upwards round his head and framing his face makes a charming picture, while he’s relaxed in sleep and breathing in the sweetest way imaginable. Then I creep down quietly on tip-toe, so as not to waken him and give him a fright, and then — but you can guess; there’s no need to tell you what happens next. You must remember I’m dying of love.
Much of this, it should be noted, had already been observed by Jean Reboul in his article, ‘Sarrasine ou La Castration personnifiée’, La Psychanalyse. I (1956) pp. 92–3.
Fragoletta ou Naples et Rome en 1799 places the story in the setting of the brutal repression by the English and the local Bourbons of the Neopolitan republic. Balzac reviewed the book when it appeared (Mercure du XIXe siècle (June 1829), in Balzac, Oeuvres complètes: oeuvres diverses, eds M. Bouteron and H. Longnon (Paris, 1956), I, pp. 203–5), concentrating entirely on the political drama, saying of its author, ‘He had Voltaire and Lord Byron in his soul’. He returned to the book in a later short essay, ‘Du roman historique et de Fragoletta’ (Mercure du XIXe siècle (January 1831), pp. 205–7), in which he described the romantic plot in this way (p. 207): Imagine before you this inexpressible being, who has no complete sex and in whose heart contend a woman’s timidity and a man’s energy, who loves the sister and is loved by the brother, and can return nothing to either one. See all the qualities of woman gathered in this captivating Eugénie and all those of man in this noble Hauteville; place between them this startling and gracious Adriani as the transition between the two types; lavishly throw passion over these three figures and torture their three hearts with combinations never even conceived anywhere before; then, finding no balm for their inutterable sufferings, raise this unhappiness to its peak; imagine one last, insupportable sacrifice; finally wrench our every sensibility and you will have created a masterpiece: you will have created Fragoletta.
See Frédéric Ségu, H. de Latouche, un républicain romantique, (Paris: Societé d’edition ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1931), pp. 376ff.
Honoré de Balzac, Correspondance, ed. R. Pierrot (Paris: Garnier fréres, 1960), I, p. 46.
Ibid, p. 39.
See Pierre Laubriet, L’Intelligence de l’art chez Balzac (Paris: Didier, 1958), p. 398.
‘Letters to Fabre, (29 January 1829)’, Nouvelle Revue rétrospective, V (1896), p. 423.
Mérimée went on to say (ibid., p. 423): If an artist knowing how to draw and paint like Girodet had neglected correction to preoccupy himself with color, and if he had presented to the public grand sketches, brilliant in color and arresting in effect, there is no doubt that he would have gained a success that would have led the French school down this path to perdition and that our young artists would no longer want to learn to imitate la belle nature.
J.R.A., ‘Quelques Vues sur l’École de David, et sur les principes de la peinture historique’, Revue encyclopédique, XXXIV (June 1827), pp. 580, 591, 593.
E.J. Delécluze, Le Journal de Delécluze, ed. R. Baschet (Paris, 1948), pp. 50–64.
Ibid, p. 62.
Alexis-Nicolas Pérignon, Catalogue des tableaux, esquisses, dessins et croquis de M. Girodet-Trioson (Paris, 1825).
The contract between Coupin and Jules Renouard, the publisher of Girodet’s Oeuvres posthumes (Paris, 1829) is preserved in the departmental archives of Yvelines, Versailles, dossier J2072: Coupin signed a receipt for the papers on 10 March 1826, stating that the papers belonged to Renouard, and the latter countersigned the same document on 12 October 1828, stating that the papers had been returned. I am grateful to Alain Pougetoux and Philippe Bordes for pointing out the location of these documents.
J.L.J. David, Le Peintre Louis David 1748–1825: Souvenirs et documents inédits (Paris, 1880).
See Henri David, ‘Balzac italianisant autour de Sarrasine’, Revue de la littérature contemporaine, (1933), pp. 457–68;
Jean Seznec, ‘Diderot et Sarrasine’, Diderot Studies, 4 (1963), pp. 238–9;
Helen Borowitz, The Impact of French Art on Literature (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1985), p. 118.
See Lettres adressées au baron François Gérard, ed. H. Gérard (Paris, 1886), I, p. 152.
See Francis Haskell, ‘An Italian Patron of French Neo-Classic Art’, Past and Present in Art and Taste (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 44–64.
See Description du tableau du Pygmalion et Galatée exposé au salon par M. Girodet, suivi de l’entretien de Sa Majesté Louis XVIII avec Monsieur Girodet lors de la présentation de son tableau (Paris, 1819); C.P Landon, Annales du musée, II (1819), pp. 11–12.
See Quatremère de Quincy, ‘Éloge historique de M. Girodet, peintre’, Recueil de notices historiques (Paris, 1834), pp. 328–9.
See Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) pp. 3–12.
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Crow, T. (1995). B/G. In: Melville, S., Readings, B. (eds) Vision and Textuality. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24065-4_15
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