"Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.""But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.""Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the garden of France - that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven?""Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?""France, for example, loves at the same time history and the drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.""From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus, because it was not given him to see more than himself and nature, which surrounds him; but he created it true with a truth all its own.""I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.""Just as we descend into our consciences to judge of actions which our minds can not weigh, can we not also search in ourselves for the feeling which gives birth to forms of thought, always vague and cloudy?""No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.""Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.""Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?""On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.""One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.""The acts of the human race on the world's stage have doubtless a coherent unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the last man.""The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.""The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.""We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.""We shall find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two needs which seem at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a common source - the love of the true, and the love of the fabulous.""What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?""What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete."
Alfred de Vigny was born in Loches (a town to which he never returned) into an aristocratic family. His father was an aged veteran of the Seven Years' War who died before Vigny's 20th birthday; his mother, twenty years younger, was a strong-willed woman who was inspired by Rousseau and took responsibility herself for Vigny's early education.
As was the case for every noble family, the French Revolution diminished the family's circumstances considerably. After Napoléon's defeat at Waterloo, a Bourbon, Louis XVIII, the brother of Louis XVI, was restored to power. In 1814, Vigny enrolled in one of the privileged aristocratic companies of the Maison du Roi.
Always attracted to letters and versed in French history and in knowledge of the Bible, he began to write poetry. He published his first poem in 1820, published an ambitious narrative poem entitled Eloa in 1824 on the popular romantic theme of the redemption of Satan, and collected his recent works in January 1826 in Poèmes antiques et modernes. Three months later, he published a substantial historical novel, Cinq-Mars, based on the life of Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis of Cinq-Mars; with the success of these two volumes, Vigny seemed to be the rising star of the burgeoning Romantic movement, though this role would soon be usurped by one of Vigny's best friends, Victor Hugo. Vigny remained a Royalist in politics, and he observed of his erstwhile friend: "The Victor I loved is no more," said Alfred de Vigny, "... now he likes to make saucy remarks and is turning into a liberal, which does not suit him." Prolonging successive leaves from the army, he settled in Paris with his young English bride, Lydia Bunbury, whom he married in Pau in 1825.
An English theater troupe visiting Paris in 1827 having revived French interest in Shakespeare, Vigny worked with Emile Deschamps on a translation of Romeo and Juliet (1827). In 1831, he presented his first original play, La Maréchale d'Ancre, a historical drama recounting the events leading up to the reign of King Louis XIII. Frequenting the theater, he met the great actress Marie Dorval, his mistress until 1838. (Vigny's wife had become a near invalid and never learned to speak French fluently; they had no children, and Vigny was also disappointed when his father-in-law's remarriage deprived the couple of an anticipated inheritance.)
Alfred de Vigny was very jealous of Marie d'Orval and even made it follow by the famous VIDOCQ which created the first agency of private detective of the world .
In 1835, he produced a drama titled Chatterton, based on the life of Thomas Chatterton, and in which Marie Dorval starred as Kitty Bell. Chatterton is considered to be one of the best of the French romantic dramas and is still performed regularly. The story of Chatterton had inspired one of the three episodes of Vigny's luminous philosophical novel Stello (1832), in which Vigny examines the relation of poetry to society and concludes that the poet, doomed to be regarded with suspicion in every social order, must remain somewhat aloof and apart from the social order. Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835) was a similar tripartite meditation on the condition of the soldier.
Although Alfred de Vigny gained success as a writer, his personal life was not happy. His marriage was a disappointment; his relationship with Marie Dorval was plagued by jealousy; and his literary talent was eclipsed by the achievements of others. He grew embittered. After the death of his mother in 1838 he inherited the property of Maine-Giraud, near Angoulême, where it was said that he had withdrawn to his 'ivory tower' (an expression Sainte-Beuve coined with reference to Vigny). There Vigny wrote some of his most famous poems, including La Mort du loup and La Maison du berger. (Proust regarded La Maison du berger as the greatest French poem of the 19th century.) In 1845, after several unsuccessful attempts to be elected, Vigny became a member of the Académie française.
In later years, Vigny ceased to publish. He continued to write, however, and his Journal is considered by modern scholars to be a great work in its own right. Vigny considered himself a thinker as well as a literary author; he was, for example, one of the first French writers to take a serious interest in Buddhism. His own philosophy of life was pessimistic and stoical, but celebrated human fraternity, the growth of knowledge, and mutual assistance as high values. In his later years he spent much time preparing the posthumous collection of poems now known as Les Destinées (though Vigny's intended title was Poèmes philosophiques) which concludes with Vigny's final message to the world, L'Esprit pur.
Alfred de Vigny developed stomach cancer in his early sixties, which he endured with exemplary stoicism: Quand on voit ce qu'on fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse/Seul le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse. ('When we see what we were on Earth and what we leave behind/Only silence is great; everything else is weakness.') Vigny died in Paris on 17 September 1863, a few months after the passing of his wife, and is buried beside her in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris, France.
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