Nelida

by Marie de Flavigny Agoult

C’était au mois de juin ; le soleil, à son midi, inondait l’horizon de clartés ; pas un nuage ne voilait la splendeur du ciel. Une chaude brise glissait sur l’étang et se jouait dans les roseaux sonores. Près de la rive, à l’ombre d’un rideau de peupliers, sommeillait un couple de cygnes. Le nénuphar ouvrait ses ailes blanches sur le miroir des caux. Dans une barque, amarrée au tronc d’un saule dont les rameaux flexibles formaient au-dessus de leurs têtes une voûte mobile et fraîche, deux beaux l ai ; étaient assis, qui se tenaient par la main.

Fruit d’une sélection réalisée au sein des fonds de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, Collection XIX a pour ambition de faire découvrir des textes classiques et moins classiques dans les meilleures éditions du XIXe siècle.

Genres: French Literature

333 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 1846

Reviews

[Helynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nélida (1846) is the first of only two novels by the countess Marie d'Agoult, who wrote under the name Daniel Stern, and was mostly a historical and political writer. In this novel, which reads easily in French, but which is also available in English translation, d'Agoult wished to show that sensitive and intelligent women should be allowed to learn and excel creatively and intellectually on their own without a man in their lives. She achieves this partially through the eponymous heroine, but even more through Mère Elisabeth, Mother Superior at the convent where the adolescent Nélida was educated, and later the renegade leader of rural French groups that campaign for women's and workers' rights.
Mère Elisabeth is introduced early in the story (we learn of her background much later and that her given name is Faustine), as she is advising the departing young Nélida to stay pure and faithful to the law and love of Christ. "Vous allez entrer dans un monde où l'un et l'autre sont trop souvent outragés." Such counsel makes Nélida more sensitive to the ironies in conduct that she immediately encounters in society, where she has gone to live with her aunt, a society whose "pharisian" approach to interpreting holy scripture, includes, "tolérance pour le vice hypocrite . . . rigidité pour la passion sincère!"; that is, a society where one stones the adulterous woman, but champions the seducer, and where true love is banished everywhere—particularly from marriage (34).
Much later in the novel, this sense of realism and the self-respect that were instilled in her by Mère Elisabeth are a lifeline to Nélida in the dark days in Milan when her lover, the artist Guermann, increasingly ignores her in favor of his adoring public. Fortuitously, though, at this same time, Nélida is reunited with an young woman who was once a school friend, then with Mère Elisabeth, now an indefatigable lobbyist for women proletariat workers.
The former nun relates her life's story to Nélida: Ignored by her father and abused by a jealous and dominating elder half-sister, young Faustine turned to study, especially the revolutionary and feminist writings of Madame de Roland (who went to the guillotine during the Terror). She was awed at the power she realized a woman could have and the influence she could wield over male intelligence:
Faustine rejected marriage offers in favor of the greater freedom and the positive influence over other women, which she felt the convent offered. Therefore, Mère Elisabeth led a group of gifted women in a secluded convent. Mère Elisabeth wished to infiltrate hundreds of young hearts with the principles of equality, perhaps even to the point of causing of revolution.
Although she rose quickly to the rank of Mother Superior, Mère Elisabeth was tormented by her superior, Père Aiméry, a priest who felt threatened by her influence and popularity. Not long after Nélida’s departure, Elisabeth escaped the convent, fled to Switzerland, and began proselytizing in other nunneries, hoping to establish a new kind of order of sisters whose only vow would be that of charity (218), and awaiting the day when a woman would one day lead a new and modernized France. "C'est une femme qui a fait la France chrétienne; c'est une femme qui l'a sauvée du jong étranger; ce sera une femme encore, tout me le dit, qui allumera le flambeau de l'avenir" (219-20).
She still sought to unify women in ranks of Christian service. D’Agoult’s wording, with its quaisi-military tone of recruitment and determination, has the bold and straightforward simplicity of what might be termed “male” language.
Père Aiméry eventually tracks her down and undermines her influence everywhere. Nonetheless, Mère Elisabeth urges the devastated and suicidal Nélida to live to teach other women the ideals she herself can no longer disseminate—the falsity of marriage, the deception of free love, the skewing of religious dogmas, the general perfidy of society's concept of a woman's role.
D'Agoult's literary concept of the convent as a haven of feminist solidarity and progress is an ideal grounded in reality, but also doomed to failure both in her historical time and in her novel. Mère Elisabeth, expelled from the convent and stripped of her power, lends her philosophy to a hopeful Nélida, but faces an uncertain future cast at large with her idealistic goals on a harsh outside world.

[Ally Betts · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Bah Dante! Bah Beatrice! The Dantes create the Beatrices, and the real ones die at eighteen!”

Geez Marie…Beatrice? Yeah, okay…

[Elenute · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finally made it through, reading in my second language.
I couldn't help but wonder how much the fictional Nélida was an autobiographical creation of the author Marie d'Agoult, Franz Liszt's lover. Did the artist Guermann finally realize how much he loved Nélida as much as Marie d'Agoult wanted Liszt to love her?

[Laura]

Free download in French available at Project Gutenberg.