The Studio as a Scene of Emulation

It is just one more of the misfortunes that have dogged the career of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, in her life-time and posthumously, that Roland Barthes should have captioned her portrait photograph by Nadar in La Chambre claire: ‘Marceline Desbordes-Valmore reproduit sur son visage la bonté un peu niaise de ses vers’.1 Evidently, for Barthes, the photograph gives us no more than we expected from the poet, but ought we to anticipate the same meagre dividend from her novel, L'Atelier d'un peintre, sub-titled (with an obvious allusion to Balzac) Scènes de la vie privée? The indications to the contrary are not, at first glance, particularly hopeful. Published in 1833 in an edition of not more than 500 copies, the work had little immediate impact and the publisher, Charpentier, remained deaf to her entreaties to republish a decade later when her finances, never too promising, were at one of their lowest ebbs. The sad story of her attempts to revive this cherished text was told in the introduction to the posthumous edition (limited to 439 copies) that finally appeared in 1922. There the solicitous editor, A. J. Boyer d'Agen, took occasion to express sympathy with her latest disaster, which was the unfortunate mishap of her bronze statue, erected in her home town of Douai in 1896, being cast into the river by retreating German troops in 1918. However, he himself had delivered a harsher blow to her reputation when he cut the text by a third and high-handedly renamed it: La Jeunesse de Marceline.2

Allusion · Art · Art history · Humanities · Literature · Nonconformist · Politics · Portrait · Visual arts · French Literature and Critical Theory · French Literature and Criticism · French Literature and Poetry · Law