Caroline Marbouty

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Julie Sophie Caroline Marbouty (born Pétiniaud , born July 8, 1804 in Paris , † February 16, 1890 in Clichy ) was a French writer who published under the pseudonym Claire Brunne . She wrote short stories and autobiographical novels .

Life

Caroline Marbouty came from an old Protestant family in Limoges ; a maternal ancestor was Jean-Aimé de Lacoste , La Rochelle MP for the National Legislative Assembly , later a member of the Council of the Elderly . Caroline's father François Pétiniaud was a judge in Limoges. “The enthusiastic, impulsive, ambitious girl had worried her respectable family from a very young age,” wrote André Maurois in his Balzac biography. “She made no secret of her disgust for provincial life and her contempt for bourgeois prejudice.” Caroline wrote at the time: “Since the provincial has got to know nothing and has felt nothing but loss or gain, his relationships are dry and uniform, is his Dasein is devoid of all poetry . ”Because of what he saw as disrespectful statements, her father hastened to marry Caroline soon; he chose Jacques-Sylvestre Marbouty, 13 years his senior, because he was the son of a royal prosecutor and landowner.

Guillaume Dupuytren, around 1842

Caroline Marbouty had already written poetry as a young girl; during her unsatisfactory marriage she wrote novels; in Limoges she created a literary salon where she recited her own verses. The "secretly in love invitees ... showered her with eulogies and called her the Muse of Limoges ." During these lectures, which were unflattering for her husband, he always left the salon, "because the muse described her desires and disappointments". The parents then made bitter accusations that Caroline would “receive anyone”, dress “too refined” and “play the superior woman”. But although Marbouty was heavily courted, she remained loyal to her husband until she was 28 years old.

In 1831 Marbouty met Baron Guillaume Dupuytren , who was the chief surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris and a member of the Institut de France . This appeared in the elections to the chamber in the Haute-Vienne department as a candidate and lived for a month with the Marboutys. A love affair developed that Caroline Marbouty wanted to continue with the move to Paris. She pretended to her husband that she would give her daughters better school lessons there. However, Dupuytren was not interested in continuing the love affair with a married woman in Paris as an "annoying liaison". Madame Marbouty had a brief affair in Paris with the writer Jules Sandeau , for whom George Sand had originally left her husband. She soon ended the relationship with Sandeau, but remained friends with him.

Portrait of Balzac by Pierre Jean David d'Angers (1843)

Marbouty then got it into her head to get to know the popular writer Honoré de Balzac , whom she had heard of Intimes in Limoges through her friend Lucielle Nivet, a sister of Zulma Carraud (a Balzac lover). The connection was therefore easy to initiate; Caroline was invited by Jules Sandeau to dinner at Balzac's in rue Cassini in the 14th arrondissement in 1833 ; he was very impressed by Mme Marbouty and gave her the opportunity to write an article for his magazine Chronique de Paris . In a letter to her mother, she confessed:

“I had made up my mind that I would have to seduce him on the day we met. My decision was made. I succeeded and I magnetized it . "

Balzac was interested in Marbouty's confidential confessions because he had a weakness for “the psychology of the provincial woman”. She wrote the children's book Les Jolis Contes vrais , and Cora published it in the Chronique de Paris in 1836 . When Balzac went to Touraine , he suggested that Caroline take her with him and show her the castles of the Loire , but she refused. Balzac mentioned them in a letter to Émile Regnault :

"You can even risk a blush, which I can see on the cheek of the beautiful Madame Marbouty, who, if she had wanted to visit the castles of Touraine with me, would hardly have regretted the beautiful trip ..."
The Correrie of the Grande Chartreuse

When Balzac was offered the opportunity to travel to Turin on July 25th in 1836 to settle an inheritance matter from his friend Emilio Guidoboni-Visconti, he invited Caroline Marbouty to accompany him. This time she agreed; to avoid the danger of the scandal , she should put on men's clothing and pretend to be Balzac's page or secretary named Marcel ; With the trouser role she imitated the writer George Sand, for whom she was also mistaken on the trip. The 26-day tour led u. a. past the Grande Chartreuse , where they went on mules . But the fathers were not fooled by Marbouty's disguise and only Balzac was allowed in alone. We continued over the Mont Cenis , with a five-day stay in Turin. There the couple stayed at the Hotel de l'Espagne. Other stops were Lake Maggiore , Lake Orta , the Simplon Pass , the Sion Valley , the Valserina Valley , Vevey , Lausanne , Geneva and Bourg-en-Bresse . Marbouty wrote to her mother on August 2, 1836: "I am alone with Balzac, without a waitress."

Perhaps Balzac's relationship with Caroline Marbouty on this trip was more of a platonic nature. Although the two bedrooms were connected, no one visited each other, which Caroline explained to her mother as follows:

“I have reserved the right to freedom . I have only consented to a pure, simple friendship as a bond. The rest should be in the mood, whatever I want. I consider myself all the happier because of the special form of love that I instill, as it is something rare in our time more than ever. Only the artist knows a little about it; the rest of the nation has no idea. "

She remained realistic about Balzac; “For him love is necessary as a physical game. Besides that, his whole life is work. Will I enjoy this state of being? And will he, above all, satisfy my desire for love? I'm afraid: no. ”The two had the opportunity to meet Piedmontese aristocratic circles, such as Comtesse Serafina Porcia Sanseverino and Count Federico Sclopis de Salerano. Marbouty took off her disguise only at a dinner for the marquise Henriette Carron de Saint-Thomas. After Balzac's death, Marbouty wrote a travel story in which she claimed it was a "ghost dictation" by the departed travel companion.

Balzac processed Caroline Marbouty with additions and reinterpretations in the figure of Dinah de la Baudraye in his story Muse de Départment (1837). Marbouty was very upset by Balzac's book; she feared repercussions in Limoges, "where she might be suspected of having secretly brought bastards into the world."

Balzac stayed in contact until 1839; that year he announced his book Beatrix to her in a letter . During this time, Marbouty frequented the literary circles of Sainte-Beuve , George Sand and Prosper Mérimée .

Amédée de Pastoret in a painting by Ingres

In response to Muse de Départment , Caroline Marbouty wrote her own novel under her pseudonym Claire Brunne, entitled Une fausse Position (1844). With this “sentimental social novella” she countered Balzac's positions in Lost Illusions from a female perspective. "The publication ... should cost Caroline-Claire Brunne the friendship of all those people who recognized themselves in this book and felt offended." Balzac never saw it again, and he even deleted the dedication to her in La Grenadière (1832), " To Caroline, the poetry of travel, the grateful traveler ” (A Caroline, à la poésie du voyage, le voyageur reconnaissant) .

Caroline Marbouty continued writing autobiographical novels in the later years; her liaison with the Marquis Amédée de Pastoret (1791-1857) inspired her to Marquis de Précieux, ou les Trois Epoques , who caused a scandal. “Amédée de Pastoret had entrusted the hats to his lover in a locked box in which he kept compromising papers, irrefutable evidence of his legitimist activities,” wrote André Maurois. Memoirs of the time claimed that at the end of this relationship, Marbouty sold documents from this cassette to the Louis-Philippe police force . In her diary, Marbouty-Brunne defended herself against allegations of blackmail; in her view, “it was simply exchanging love letters for compensation for the breakup. Be that as it may, the tape thing turned Madame Marbouty into a bad repute adventurer ”. She fell on February 16, 1890 at the age of eighty-five on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and was run over by an omnibus. She died that same day at the Beaujon Hospital in Clichy without having regained consciousness. Her grave is on the Père-Lachaise , not far from the tomb of Balzac.

Caroline Marbouty's tomb in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris

Works

All of Caroline Marbouty's publications appeared under the pseudonym Claire Brunne.

  • Ange de Spola. 1: études de femmes , Paris: Vict. Stomach 1842
  • Ange de Spola. 2: études de femmes , Paris: Vict. Stomach 1842
  • Dupuytren et Palissy, ou les Jolis contes vrais . Challamel, 1842
  • Une fausse position , Amyot, 1844
    • Une fausse position (2nd edition avec une nouvelle préface de l'auteur). Paris: Malassis, 1862.
  • Le Marquis de Précieux, ou les Trois époques, 1812-1820-1850 . H. Souverain, 1850
  • L'Unité du pouvoir, concordat politique, brochure servant de préface à la pièce “le Mariage”, destinée au Théâtre-français… , A. Ledoyen, 1859
  • L'Organisation des intelligences . Impr. De Poupart-Davyl, 1866

literature

  • Maurice Serval: Une amie de Balzac, Mme Marbouty , Émile-Paul frères, Paris 1925, OCLC 422709408 .
  • Stefan Zweig ; Richard Friedenthal (ed.): Balzac, a biography . Edited from the estate, with a comment by Knut Beck. 15th edition, Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2008 (first edition in 1946 by Bermann-Fischer Verlag, Stockholm), ISBN 3-596-22183-8 .
  • Arsène Arüss: Le joli page de Balzac (Madame Marbouty), documents inédits. Éditions Sansot, R. Chiberre, Paris 1924, OCLC 872251560 (= Bibliothèque historique des curiosités littéraire ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n André Maurois: Prometheus or the life of Balzac . Düsseldorf, Econ Verlag, 1966, pp. 310-318.
  2. ↑ Elizabeth Wilson: Bohemians (2003, 89)
  3. ↑ Aurée d'Esneval: Balzac et la Provinciale a Paris . 1976, p. 117.
  4. ^ Jean A. Gili, Ralph Schor: Hommes, idées, journaux: mélanges en l'honneur de Pierre Guiral . 1988
  5. ↑ Eric H. Boehm: Historical Abstracts: Modern history abstracts, 1775-1914 . 1993
  6. ^ Simone Bernard-Griffiths, Marie-Cécile Levet: Fleurs et jardins dans l'œuvre de George Sand . 2006, page 421.
  7. ↑ Stendhal club - issues 29–36 - 1965 page 355
  8. ^ Margaret Cohen: The Sentimental Education of the Novel . 1999, p. 20.
  9. ^ André Maurois: Prometheus or the life of Balzac . Düsseldorf, Econ Verlag, 1966, p. 448.
  10. ^ André Maurois: Prometheus or the life of Balzac . Düsseldorf, Econ Verlag, 1966, p. 569 f.
personal data
SURNAME Marbouty, Caroline
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brunne, Claire (author name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1804
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH February 16, 1890
Place of death Clichy