Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (1808–1889)
Author of Les Diaboliques
About the Author
Image credit: Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly entre le 1860 et le 1865
Works by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
Une histoire sans nom, suivi de "Une page d'Histoire", "Le Cachet d'onyx" et "Léa" (1972) 14 copies, 1 review
Barbey d'Aurevilly. Oeuvres romanesques complètes : Textes présentés, établis et annotés par Jacques Petit (1964) 6 copies, 1 review
Der rote Vorhang. Drei Novellen 6 copies
Storia senza nome 2 copies
La stregata 2 copies
Laocoon 2 copies
Une vieille maîtresse ; L'ensorcelée ; Un prêtre marié ; Les Diaboliques ; Une page d'histoire (2011) 2 copies
Las diabolicas 1 copy
Memorandum troisième 1 copy
Diable sprawy 1 copy
Le bonheur dans le crime 1 copy
Η μαγεμένη 1 copy
Perde Arkası 1 copy
enatý kòaz 1 copy
A embruxada 1 copy
L'esprit de J. Barbey d'Aubrevilly, dictionnaire de pensees, traits, portraits et jugements tires de son oeuvre critique (1908) 1 copy
Lettres de Barbey d'Aurevilly à Trebutien, Vol. 2: Avec un Portrait Inédit de l'Auteur (Classic Reprint) (French Edition) (2017) 1 copy
Os grandes romances históricos - volume 10 : A enfeitiçada seguido de O cavaleiro des Touches 1 copy
Associated Works
The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France (1998) — Contributor — 146 copies, 2 reviews
Historie osobliwe i fantastyczne : nowela francuska od Cazotte'a do Apollinaire'a — Contributor — 4 copies
青銅時代 第16号 1973冬 — Contributor — 1 copy
青銅時代 第17号 1974冬 — Contributor — 1 copy
青銅時代 第18号 1975秋 — Contributor — 1 copy
青銅時代 第19号 1976夏 — Contributor — 1 copy
青銅時代 第20号 1977春 — Contributor — 1 copy
青銅時代 第14号 1971秋 — Contributor — 1 copy
青銅時代 第15号 1972冬 — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules
- Legal name
- Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules Amédée
- Other names
- Le Connétable des lettres
Syrène, Maximilienne de (Pseudonyme) - Birthdate
- 1808-11-02
- Date of death
- 1889-04-23
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Collège Stanislas de Paris
University of Caen - Occupations
- novelist
short story writer
literary critic
essayist - Organizations
- Le Réveil, Journal littéraire (Fondateur, 18 58
La Revue du Monde catholique, journal ultramontain (Rédacteur en chef, 18 47 | 18 48)
Le Moniteur de la mode, Revue (Collaborateur, 18 43)
Le Globe, Journal politique (Collaborateur, 18 42)
Le Nouvelliste, Journal politique (Collaborateur, 19 36)
Revue critique de la philosophie, des sciences et de la littérature (Fondateur, 18 34) - Relationships
- Barbey d'Aurevilly, Léon (Frère)
Méril, Edelestand du (Cousin) - Short biography
- Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly est un écrivain et journaliste français.
Il naît à Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte (Manche) le 2 novembre 1808 au sein d'une vieille famille normande de notables, catholique et monarchiste. Il est élevé à Valognes dès 1818, par un oncle médecin, libéral et athée ou il fait ses études au collège puis poursuit au collège Stanislas à Paris en 1827 et obtient son baccalauréat en 1929. Il suit ensuite des études de droit à l'université de Caen de 1829 à 1833.
En 1933, il s’installe à Paris et tente de s’imposer dans le monde littéraire. En compagnie de Maurice Guérin, il fréquente les cercles, mène une vie désordonnée et adopte jusqu’à l’extrême la mode dandy, qu’il illustre en 1844 dans un essai intitulé "Du Dandysme et de George Brummel". Dans le même temps, il se rallie peu à peu aux monarchistes et s’affirme comme un catholique convaincu.
Sans grand succès littéraire, Barbey d’Aurevilly travaille pour divers journaux et revues comme critique littéraire. Il y brille et se fait remarquer pour ses dons de polémistes et sa finesse d’esprit. Il se fait le défenseur des "prophètes du passé" dans un recueil d’études portant ce titre publié en 1851, dans lequel il aborde l’œuvre de Chateaubriand, de Joseph de Maistre ou encore de Lamennais, tout en reconnaissant aussi la valeur de « modernes » tels que Stendhal ou Baudelaire. Au delà, il s'attaque sans ménagement à Victor Hugo, auréolé alors de gloire, puis plus tard Emile Zola.
Son œuvre critique, est rassemblée sous le titre "Les Hommes et les œuvres" de 1860 à 1895, et lui vaut le surnom de "connétable des lettres".
Barbey d’Aurevilly poursuit également son œuvre romanesque, publiant Vellini ou Une vieille maîtresse en 1851, L’Ensorcelée (1854), Le chevalier des Touches (1864) et Un prêtre marié (1865). Son œuvre reste pourtant méconnue.
Les Diaboliques, considéré comme son oeuvre majeure, d’abord retiré des ventes en 1874 puis finalement publié en 1883, accède au succès mais aussi au scandale et à un procès. L’œuvre lui vaut l’admiration d’un petit groupe d’écrivains, parmi lesquels les Goncourt et Léon Bloy.
Malade, il meurt le 23 avril 1889 à Paris. D'abord inhumé au cimetière parisien de Montparnasse, ses cendres sont transférées en 1926 dans son village natal de Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, dans le cimetière des frères. - Nationality
- France
- Birthplace
- Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, Manche, France
- Places of residence
- Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, France
- Place of death
- Paris, France
- Burial location
- Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, Île-de-France, France
Churchyard, Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, France (reinterred ∙ 1926) - Map Location
- France
- Associated Place (for map)
- France
Members
Reviews
In a similar manner to "Les Liaisons Dangeruese", this collection of 7 long stories presents a 19th century French aristocratic milieu that is elegant, subtle, and cold as ice. The She-Devils in each story are women who exert some memorable and remarkable effect on a male raconteur. Each story is more violent, overwrought, and improbable than the one before; they're never less than engrossing, and even funny in a utterly caustic way (D'Aurevilly is chuckling as he writes, but no one IN the show more stories seems to have much sense of humor.) Love and sexuality are presented as absolutely cruel drivers with nothing redeeming about them; relationships even between parents and children are selfish and egoistic.
I loved reading this. I wouldn't want to live in the world of these stories, but they were hella entertaining. show less
I loved reading this. I wouldn't want to live in the world of these stories, but they were hella entertaining. show less
He felt that this woman was going to tell him about things the like of which he’d never heard. He was no longer thinking about her beauty. He was looking at her as if he wanted to attend her autopsy.
[“Il lui semblait que cette femme allait lui raconter de ces choses comme il n’en avait pas entendu encore. Il ne pensait plus à sa beauté. Il la regardait comme s’il avait désiré assister à l’autopsie de son cadavre.”]
I once heard someone explain what ‘rococo’ meant by show more saying that it’s what happens when the baroque out-baroques itself. Barbey d’Aurevilly is what happens when the Romantic movement out-Romantics itself. These stories are obsessed with the Romanticism of high emotion and the sublime – only here it’s all much darker and more ‘decadent’: le sublime de l’enfer, as Barbey calls it at one point.
Each story centres on a woman whose passions prove fatal, for her or for someone else. But although the women are so central to what happens, they are without exception remote and unknowable, with utterly mysterious motives – almost like characters from a Norse saga. We know them only through the men that endlessly discuss them, lust after them, or hate them. They are – brace yourself as I reach for this adjective – positively sphingine, by which I mean cool, beautiful, mysterious and deadly.
Nothing interior illumated the outside of this woman. And nothing from the outside had any effect on her interior.
[“Rien du dedans n’éclairait les dehors de cette femme. Rien du dehors ne se répercutait au-dedans !”]
In the first story, ‘The Crimson Curtain’, the woman around whom the entire plot revolves does not speak even a single line. Although not the most shocking, this tale was in some ways my favourite, and passed the test of a good short story – that it works perfectly as an anecdote. I told it to my wife over a pint in the pub and she had her hand over her mouth for much of it. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the ‘Vincent Vega and Marcellus Wallace’s Wife’ chapter of Pulp Fiction, in that they both concern an illicit liaison that takes a sudden (very similar) U-turn for the worse.
The ending of that piece is very artful – in that almost everything that matters is left unresolved and up in the air. It’s an effect I like very much, and which Barbey deploys at several points throughout the book. There is a very modern feeling that what is left unsaid is much more exciting than any resolution could ever be – ‘what is not known,’ the narrator says somewhere, ‘multiplies by a hundred the impression of what is known.’
‘Ah!’ said Mlle Sophie de Revistal passionately. ‘It is the same in music as it is in life. What gives expressiveness to both are the silences more than the harmonies.’
[“—Ah ! — dit passionnément Mlle Sophie de Revistal, — il en est également de la musique et de la vie. Ce qui fait l’expression de l’une et de l’autre, ce sont les silence bien plus que les accords.”]
So you end up in this rather oppressive world of suspicion, rumour, and frightful supposition, peopled by these strange sphinxy women and the Byronic protagonists who are fascinated by them.
All but one of the stories are bracketed in reported speech from one of the characters, and with some longish introductions you might be tempted to wonder why the author doesn’t just hurry up and get on with it. But after a while, there emerges a strong sense that having these stories come out ‘in conversation’ is very important to Barbey – Les Diaboliques is, among other things, a love letter to the art of sparkling conversation, what he calls ‘the last glory of the French spirit’. (The orignal title for the collection was Conversational Ricochets.) Conversation is the primary tool on display here, although ‘At a Dinner of Atheists’ does open on a wonderful descriptive passage about a Valognes church at dusk which makes me wonder what might be on offer in his other books.
For all that these conversations may seem hopelessly dated to some readers now, there is a real cumulative effect building as you work your way through, and the last couple of stories here pack quite a punch. Impossible to imagine anything like this being published in England in 1874. ‘A Woman’s Vengeance’, the final piece, takes the clichéd 19th-century narrative of the poor innocent girl forced into a life of prostitution (Fantine from Les Misérables, for instance – a book which Barbey loathed) and turns it on its head in the most remarkable way. It takes in a surprisingly frank sex scene and includes a moment of almost medieval violence and jealousy.
Barbey was basically a royalist disillusioned by France's endless social revolutions, and he was sceptical about life in a democratic future. Instead of cheap moralising and hookers with hearts of gold, he gives you deep emotional doubt and damaged, incomprehensible strangers. Passion may drive these people to excesses of lust, intrigue and horror – but at their worst, Barbey seems to feel they are also at their most essentially human – beyond society’s conventions, and perhaps even, in some way that we are not, free. show less
[“Il lui semblait que cette femme allait lui raconter de ces choses comme il n’en avait pas entendu encore. Il ne pensait plus à sa beauté. Il la regardait comme s’il avait désiré assister à l’autopsie de son cadavre.”]
I once heard someone explain what ‘rococo’ meant by show more saying that it’s what happens when the baroque out-baroques itself. Barbey d’Aurevilly is what happens when the Romantic movement out-Romantics itself. These stories are obsessed with the Romanticism of high emotion and the sublime – only here it’s all much darker and more ‘decadent’: le sublime de l’enfer, as Barbey calls it at one point.
Each story centres on a woman whose passions prove fatal, for her or for someone else. But although the women are so central to what happens, they are without exception remote and unknowable, with utterly mysterious motives – almost like characters from a Norse saga. We know them only through the men that endlessly discuss them, lust after them, or hate them. They are – brace yourself as I reach for this adjective – positively sphingine, by which I mean cool, beautiful, mysterious and deadly.
Nothing interior illumated the outside of this woman. And nothing from the outside had any effect on her interior.
[“Rien du dedans n’éclairait les dehors de cette femme. Rien du dehors ne se répercutait au-dedans !”]
In the first story, ‘The Crimson Curtain’, the woman around whom the entire plot revolves does not speak even a single line. Although not the most shocking, this tale was in some ways my favourite, and passed the test of a good short story – that it works perfectly as an anecdote. I told it to my wife over a pint in the pub and she had her hand over her mouth for much of it. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the ‘Vincent Vega and Marcellus Wallace’s Wife’ chapter of Pulp Fiction, in that they both concern an illicit liaison that takes a sudden (very similar) U-turn for the worse.
The ending of that piece is very artful – in that almost everything that matters is left unresolved and up in the air. It’s an effect I like very much, and which Barbey deploys at several points throughout the book. There is a very modern feeling that what is left unsaid is much more exciting than any resolution could ever be – ‘what is not known,’ the narrator says somewhere, ‘multiplies by a hundred the impression of what is known.’
‘Ah!’ said Mlle Sophie de Revistal passionately. ‘It is the same in music as it is in life. What gives expressiveness to both are the silences more than the harmonies.’
[“—Ah ! — dit passionnément Mlle Sophie de Revistal, — il en est également de la musique et de la vie. Ce qui fait l’expression de l’une et de l’autre, ce sont les silence bien plus que les accords.”]
So you end up in this rather oppressive world of suspicion, rumour, and frightful supposition, peopled by these strange sphinxy women and the Byronic protagonists who are fascinated by them.
All but one of the stories are bracketed in reported speech from one of the characters, and with some longish introductions you might be tempted to wonder why the author doesn’t just hurry up and get on with it. But after a while, there emerges a strong sense that having these stories come out ‘in conversation’ is very important to Barbey – Les Diaboliques is, among other things, a love letter to the art of sparkling conversation, what he calls ‘the last glory of the French spirit’. (The orignal title for the collection was Conversational Ricochets.) Conversation is the primary tool on display here, although ‘At a Dinner of Atheists’ does open on a wonderful descriptive passage about a Valognes church at dusk which makes me wonder what might be on offer in his other books.
For all that these conversations may seem hopelessly dated to some readers now, there is a real cumulative effect building as you work your way through, and the last couple of stories here pack quite a punch. Impossible to imagine anything like this being published in England in 1874. ‘A Woman’s Vengeance’, the final piece, takes the clichéd 19th-century narrative of the poor innocent girl forced into a life of prostitution (Fantine from Les Misérables, for instance – a book which Barbey loathed) and turns it on its head in the most remarkable way. It takes in a surprisingly frank sex scene and includes a moment of almost medieval violence and jealousy.
Barbey was basically a royalist disillusioned by France's endless social revolutions, and he was sceptical about life in a democratic future. Instead of cheap moralising and hookers with hearts of gold, he gives you deep emotional doubt and damaged, incomprehensible strangers. Passion may drive these people to excesses of lust, intrigue and horror – but at their worst, Barbey seems to feel they are also at their most essentially human – beyond society’s conventions, and perhaps even, in some way that we are not, free. show less
XIX. századi francia próza, időutazóknak való. Barbey d'Aurevilly történeteire jellemző, hogy az író-elbeszélő mintegy kiemeli magát a cselekményből azzal, hogy az nem vele, hanem valaki mással történt meg: egy ismerőssel, aki egy postakocsiban, vagy egy parkbéli padon ülve meséli el azt. Ez a módszer egyszersmind valamiféle finom időtlenséget is áraszt magából – lám, akkor még volt mód és idő arra, hogy egy barátra órákon át záporoztassuk azt, mi show more szívünket nyomja. (Franciás szellemességgel, persze.) Manapság az ilyen barátot pszichológusnak hívják, és szemrebbenés nélkül kiszámlázza a vele töltött időt. Ez tehát az, ami ismerős a korszak irodalmából, de akadt olyasmi is, amivel sikerült meglepnie.
Barbey d'Aurevilly irományainak egyik legsajátosabb eleme: a női főszereplő. Ezek a pompás termetű nőstény párducok, akik a magamfajta szende csávókat simán megennék reggelire, fokhagymás tejföllel. (Hogy, hogy nem, de úgy képzelem el őket, mint a női kajakozókat. Nem tudom, valaki látott-e már női kajakozóhoz tartozó hátat.) Írónknak valószínűleg holmi traumatikus élményei lehettek egy hasonló nőszeméllyel (tévedés lenne őt hölgynek nevezni), mert leitmotivként kísérik végig az életművet. Ennél is meglepőbb volt azonban az a nyíltság, mi több, helyenként brutalitás, ahogy Barbey d'Aurevilly a testiséggel, az erőszakkal kapcsolatban megnyilatkozik. (Nem csoda, hogy betiltották anno – inkább az a különös, hogy végül engedélyezték.) Különösen a kötet utolsó elbeszélése (Egy asszony bosszúja) gázol térdig a mocsokban* – és jól áll neki. Több, mint figyelemre méltó író.
* No persze nem mondjuk Irvine Welsh-hez viszonyítva. Hanem csak úgy Daudet-hez. show less
Barbey d'Aurevilly irományainak egyik legsajátosabb eleme: a női főszereplő. Ezek a pompás termetű nőstény párducok, akik a magamfajta szende csávókat simán megennék reggelire, fokhagymás tejföllel. (Hogy, hogy nem, de úgy képzelem el őket, mint a női kajakozókat. Nem tudom, valaki látott-e már női kajakozóhoz tartozó hátat.) Írónknak valószínűleg holmi traumatikus élményei lehettek egy hasonló nőszeméllyel (tévedés lenne őt hölgynek nevezni), mert leitmotivként kísérik végig az életművet. Ennél is meglepőbb volt azonban az a nyíltság, mi több, helyenként brutalitás, ahogy Barbey d'Aurevilly a testiséggel, az erőszakkal kapcsolatban megnyilatkozik. (Nem csoda, hogy betiltották anno – inkább az a különös, hogy végül engedélyezték.) Különösen a kötet utolsó elbeszélése (Egy asszony bosszúja) gázol térdig a mocsokban* – és jól áll neki. Több, mint figyelemre méltó író.
* No persze nem mondjuk Irvine Welsh-hez viszonyítva. Hanem csak úgy Daudet-hez. show less
This is not a dollop of fluff, or a fop's manifesto - it is an alchemical text, a tale of transformation. Barbey starts with the curious Regency personality, George "Beau" Brummel, to articulate a philosophy of dandyism, whose central tenet can be described thusly: in a world which is no longer shot through with moral/transcedental authority - those strong fictions which once upon a time served as the genetic code of the "soul" - one must undertake the careful fabrication of character.
Who show more can observe the occult workings of chance, which Jules Barbey identified as the purview of the devil? Our souls are crafted par hasard: culture, family, faith, genetics, chemical disposition, weather. Dandyism is taking what chance has provided us (whether clothing or language, etc.) and arranging it to our taste, creating a unique being out of the void of moral commonalty. It has nothing to do with color-coordination or knowing your designers. It is an alchemical project.
All must seek the grail, make the hadj, travel the via dolorosa. The dandy makes his own way, by his own light: to live as an instance of art, of perfect egotism; to actualize the possibility of self or soul as objet d'art, existential accessory: a boutonniere in the fabric of his nothingness. To Rilke's "You must change your life", Barbey might append: "start with that shirt!" show less
Who show more can observe the occult workings of chance, which Jules Barbey identified as the purview of the devil? Our souls are crafted par hasard: culture, family, faith, genetics, chemical disposition, weather. Dandyism is taking what chance has provided us (whether clothing or language, etc.) and arranging it to our taste, creating a unique being out of the void of moral commonalty. It has nothing to do with color-coordination or knowing your designers. It is an alchemical project.
All must seek the grail, make the hadj, travel the via dolorosa. The dandy makes his own way, by his own light: to live as an instance of art, of perfect egotism; to actualize the possibility of self or soul as objet d'art, existential accessory: a boutonniere in the fabric of his nothingness. To Rilke's "You must change your life", Barbey might append: "start with that shirt!" show less
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- 115
- Also by
- 17
- Members
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- Popularity
- #16,645
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
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- ISBNs
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