Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette

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Madame de Lafayette (etching by Étienne Fessard, ca.1734, after a painting by Louis Ferdinand Elle the Elder)

Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de La Fayette (born March 18, 1634 in Paris , † May 25, 1693 there ) was a French nobleman and writer. She is best known under the name Madame de Lafayette for her novel La Princesse de Clèves , which is considered the first historical novel in France and one of the first in European literary history.

Life

youth

She was born as the eldest of three daughters of the highly educated Marc Pioche de La Vergne, who came from an aristocratic family, and of the much younger Isabelle Péna, who came from similar backgrounds. Pioche had embarked on a military career and trained as a technical officer (fortress construction). He had married in 1619 but had no children. Around 1620 he had become the tutor of a nephew of Père Joseph , Cardinal Richelieu's right-hand man, in Paris . In 1622, after the death of his pupil, he returned to the army, but in 1630, now widowed, Richelieu hired him as a nephew's tutor. In the city palace of his new employer he met his second wife and married in 1633.

Due to his interests and abilities, but certainly also thanks to his proximity to Richelieu, Pioche found access to the intellectual circles of the capital; After he had built his own house for the family in 1635, which his daughter later lived in practically for life, he made the acquaintance of numerous Parisian intellectuals possible. In addition, even as a young girl he gave her access to aesthetic salons such as that of the Marquise de Rambouillet or, a little later, the novelist Madeleine de Scudéry , where her alert intellect did not go unnoticed and where she met the writer Gilles Ménage , who was 20 years her senior , who adored her and expanded her knowledge of Latin, Italian and literature.

Her father died in 1649. Her still young mother quickly remarried to a Chevalier de Sévigné, whom Marie-Madeleine had initially thought to be her own future. After all, this connection brought her a lifelong friendship, albeit never free from rivalry, with the Marquise de Sévigné , a niece of the Chevaliers by marriage.

While she herself advanced to the Queen's maid of honor through the recommendation of her godmother, a niece of Richelieu, and thus occasionally appeared at court, the stepfather, a supporter of Cardinal de Retz , made her parents' house a meeting place for the opposition frondeurs , who had been one since 1648 Partly operated armed resistance against the Cardinal Minister Mazarin . After the defeat of the Fronde in 1652, Sévigné was exiled to Anjou : a stroke of fate for 18-year-old Marie-Madeleine, for whom, as the stepdaughter of an exile, there was hardly a good match to be found. In 1655, a noble Parisian nun, by whom she was valued, referred her to her brother, the 18 years older, widowed and also heavily indebted Count de La Fayette . Their marriage - after all to the counts - was not cheap: the necessary dowry could only be raised by the fact that her energetic mother determined the two younger sisters to enter the monastery more cheaply.

After the wedding, Mme de La Fayette followed her husband to his estates in the province. Since a first pregnancy there had ended in a miscarriage, she traveled to Paris towards the end of the next. Here she gave birth to her first child, a son, in 1658. He was followed in 1659 by another, also in Paris, where she now mostly lived again, in the parental home that she inherited after her mother's untimely death.

While her husband was trying to manage the family's estates profitably, Mme de La Fayette took over the legal battle against his creditors immediately after the marriage, which she led with energy and increasing competence. She had initially appointed her old admirer Ménage as her representative, whom she instructed by letter. From 1658/59 she herself fought on site in Paris, where she reactivated the relationships that had remained to her and made new ones. In particular, she maintained good acquaintance with Henriette d'Angleterre , the daughter of King Charles I of England , who was beheaded in 1649 and who married the brother of Louis XIV , who grew up in the monastery of her sister-in-law . Through her friend, Mme de Sévigné, she also tried to interest the powerful Finance Minister Nicolas Fouquet in her cause.

Adult years and writing

Title page of the Zayde, first edition 1670
Title page of the Princesse de Clèves, first edition 1678

In addition, she made her debut in 1659 as an author with a literary portrait of Mme de Sévignés for an anthology prepared by two somewhat older writers, Pierre Daniel Huet and Jean Regnault de Segrais . Perhaps encouraged by them, but certainly with the support of Ménage, she wrote a historical novella in 1661, La Princesse de Montpensier , which she published anonymously in 1662, because she actually considered the letter to be beneath the dignity of a countess, which she now was. A second historical novella, La Comtesse de Tende , which only appeared posthumously in 1724, probably dates from the same period . Both texts deal with the subject of the great but problematic and ultimately unhappy extra-marital love of a woman who is married in a conventional marriage - a subject that should also interest Mme de La Fayette.

After that, she let her pen rest, successfully completed her legal demarches (after which, when she got a taste, she occasionally advised friends on their trials) and enjoyed the social and intellectual life that Paris offered in the 1660s. It was a time of new beginnings under the young Louis XIV and his new minister Colbert . B. Molières and the young Jean Racine , but also the violent quarrels between Molinists (partisans of the Jesuits) and Jansenists .

Appointed by Henriette as her lady of honor ( dame d'honneur ) in 1661 and also well-liked by the king himself, Mme de La Fayette had access to the court from 1661. At the same time she frequented circles of the fundamentally oppositional, strictly religious Jansenists. It was here in 1662 that she met the duke and literary figure La Rochefoucauld , 21 years her senior , who was hesitant to respond to her spontaneous sympathy, but then became her closest friend - undoubtedly without being her lover.

In 1668 she picked up her pen again and wrote, together with Segrais, a historical novel, Zayde , set in 9th century Spain and published under the name of Segrais (2 volumes 1670/71). Zayde became significant in literary history not least thanks to a "treatise on the origin of the novels" ( Traité de l'origine des romans ), which Huet contributed as a foreword and which is considered to be one of the first theories of the novel.

A year later, in 1669, she began a Histoire de Madame on behalf of Henriette , which, however, remained unfinished since Henriette died in 1670 at the age of 26 and was only printed posthumously in 1720 as Histoire d'Henriette d'Angleterre .

In 1678 Madame de Lafayette's most important work, begun in 1672, was published: the rather short historical novel La Princesse de Clèves (actually "The Princess of Cleves"). The action takes place around 1560, at the time of Henry II , at the French court and tells the story of the great love of the Princesse, married in a conventional marriage, for another man who also loves her, but whom she loves out of moral rigor and loyalty to her husband not heard and whom she will not marry even when she could actually do so after her early widowhood, giving him the reason that she loves him and does not want to be disappointed by his alleged later infidelity, but above all that she has found her meanwhile Do not want to jeopardize peace of mind.

The psychologically sensitive and (except for the beginning and the end) very exciting novel was immediately a great success and sparked heated discussions, especially about whether a woman is good to confess a love affair to her husband. Today it is considered one of the best French novels, even if modern readers hardly appreciate the Jansenistic uncompromising ending, according to which man should better secure his soul's salvation than strive for earthly happiness.

The late years

Around 1680, Mme de La Fayette, as a confidante of Minister Louvois, activated her longstanding correspondence with Maria Johanna von Savoyen , mother of the young Duke of Savoy and Piedmont and an aunt of Louis XIV, who had been regent in Turin since 1675 . On the one hand, she represented the Duchess's private interests in Paris, but at the same time the foreign policy interests of France, which hoped to take over, if not even annex, the then independent state of Savoy-Piedmont as a satellite state.

The death of La Rochefoucauld, who had been suffering from gout for a long time, marked a deep turning point for Mme de La Fayette, who had also been ailing frequently for a long time. However, after she had become wealthy through the inheritance of her mother, her stepfather and, in 1683, her husband too, she ran a house open to classmates and intellectuals and spent a lot of time at court, where she still enjoyed the favor of the king. In addition, in her capacity as head of a noble family, she took care of the future of her sons by providing the elder, who had become a monk, several abbot posts (which could be cumulated) and the younger, who had become an officer, helped to a regiment and (1689) to an excellent match.

Mémoires de la cour de France pour les années 1688 et 1689 , printed posthumously in 1720, were the last work Mme de La Fayette , in which she not only attempts a chronicle of the Versailles court life of the years mentioned, but also with a keen eye political and analyzed military problems. After that she withdrew from the court, especially since she had to consider her diplomatic mission to have failed in 1690, because the young duke, who was now ruling Turin himself, had decided to join an alliance against France.

Increasingly sickly, she experienced the fact that she became a grandmother, but no longer that her younger son succumbed to an illness at the age of 35 in the fortress of Landau / Palatinate held by the French .

Works

literature

  • Jean Firges : Madame de La Fayette: "The Princess of Clèves". Exemplary series literature and philosophy, 9. Sonnenberg, Annweiler 2001, ISBN 978-3-933264-16-9 .
  • Günter Berger: “Madame de Lafayettes 'Princesse de Clèves'. From scandal success to the classic of the novel ” . In: Romance journal for the history of literature - Cahiers d'histoire des littératures romanes , Ed. Henning Krauss. Carl Winter, Heidelberg 1989.
  • Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer : “ Cervantes and the tradition of the history of adultery. On the change in the concept of virtue in Marguerite de Navarre , Cervantes and Mme de Lafayette. ”In: Contributions to Romance Philology , special issue, 1967, pp. 52–60 and pp. 129–136.
  • Lieselotte Steinbrügge: "Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, Edgar Allan Poe and the circulating letter" . In: Change of Places. Studies on the change in literary historical consciousness. Festschrift for Anke Bennholdt-Thomsen, ed. Irmela von der Lühe and Anita Runge. Wallstein, Göttingen 1997, pp. 231-241.

In art and literature

Movies

Web links

Wikisource: Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette  - Sources and full texts
Wikisource: Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette  - Sources and full texts (French)

notes

  1. ↑ Also "LaFayette" or "La Fayette".
personal data
SURNAME La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mme de Lafayette
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French nobleman and writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1634
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH May 25, 1693
Place of death Paris