黎烈文 《藝文談片 》內有 福樓的"五人聚會"等短篇 古斯塔夫·福樓拜的沙龍，據龔古爾兄弟的日記： 福樓拜談他在上埃及碰到某女，其背部如冰冷....大家說他編出的故事.... 屠格涅夫是頭豬，豬一樣的性格，他的豬一樣的性格中夾雜著傷感……左拉是頭粗俗粗魯的豬，他的豬一樣的性格完全被塗鴉佔據……都德是頭病態的豬，腦子裡一時興起，有一個天可能會陷入瘋狂……福樓拜是頭假豬，自稱是豬，假裝是豬，和真正的豬一樣，嗨，朋友們……至於我，我時而像頭豬，由於肉體的挫敗感，因精子動物而瘋狂，我時而像頭豬 Turgenev is a Pig, piggishness, whose piggishness is tinged with sentimentality, ... Zola is a vulgar and brutish pig, whose piggishness is entirely taken up with scribbling....Daudet is a sicky pig, with the passing fancies of a brain where madness could someday enter in.... Flaubert is a fake pig, claimming to be a pig and pretending to be one, to be on the same level as the real and genuine pigs, hi friends....As for me I am a pig intermittently,, with bouts of swinishness, due to the frustrations of the flesh, frenzied by spermatic animalcule ,_prise_de_la_rue_Saint-Andr%C3%A9-des-Arts,_6%C3%A8me_arrondissement,_Pari,_PH808.jpg?uselang=fr) Le restaurant Magny au fond à droite de la rue de la Contrescarpe-Saint-André, vers 1865.馬尼晚宴（Magny dinner）始於1862年，匯聚了巴黎的一群記者、作家、藝術家和科學家，在馬尼餐廳舉行。 1870年普法戰爭後，這項活動在布雷班特餐廳舉行。 馬尼餐廳，位於聖安德烈孔特雷斯卡普街最右側，約攝於1865年。 該晚宴每月舉行兩次，僅限男士參加。唯一的例外是喬治桑，他猶豫再三後同意加入。主賓包括聖伯夫、保羅·加瓦爾尼、泰奧菲爾·戈蒂埃、古斯塔夫·福樓拜、居伊·德·莫泊桑、龔古爾兄弟、歐內斯特·勒南、馬塞蘭·貝特洛、伊波利特·泰納、儒勒·克拉雷蒂、伊凡·屠格涅夫、保羅·德·聖維克多等人。 Un dîner Magny est un repas qui réunissait à Paris, à partir de 1862, un cénacle de journalistes, d'écrivains, d'artistes et de scientifiques au restaurant Magny puis, après la guerre de 1870, au restaurant Le Brébant. Le dîner se tenait deux fois par mois et seuls les hommes y étaient admis. L'unique exception fut George Sand, qui accepta de se joindre au groupe après une longue hésitation. Les principaux convives étaient Sainte-Beuve, Paul Gavarni, Théophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, les frères Goncourt, Ernest Renan, Marcellin Berthelot, Hippolyte Taine, Jules Claretie, Ivan Tourgueniev, Paul de Saint-Victor... Histoire[modifier | modifier le code]Le dîner Magny est fondé à la fin de l'année 1862 par Paul Gavarni dans un restaurant parisien, rue de la Contrescarpe-Dauphine (actuelle rue André-Mazet)[1]. Après la mort de Sainte-Beuve, ce dîner a lieu, non-plus chez Modeste Magny, mais chez son beau-frère, Paul Brébant[1],[2]. The French have always made a fetish of conversation, unhesitatingly proclaiming themselves masters of this art. Between 1862 and 1872, a number of Paris's greatest causeurs met regularly for dinner at Magny's, a small restaurant on the Left Bank. They included Flaubert, the expatriated Turgenev, George Sand, Saint‐Beuve, Theophile Gautier, Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine and the Goncourt brothers, as well as a number of lesser lights. Robert Baldick, a writer deservedly known for his works on French literature, had the happy idea of researching these famous evenings and reconstructing six of them from journals, diaries, notebooks, memoirs, letters and actual recorded exchanges. If “Dinner at Magny's” is disappointing, it is not Mr. Baldick's fault. His part of the job is almost a tour de force: It is the principals who have let us down. At one moment, their conversation sounds like locker‐room talk after quite a few Scotches at the 19th hole; at another, they huff, puff and pontificate like so many old duffers in rockers on a porch. One of the displeasing things about the book is the way they posture and contort themselves for the sake of a mot. They sound as if they were trying to speak exclusively in definitions, or to enunciate epigrams they ghost‐wrote in advance. (This could be the fault of Mr. Baldick's method, but anyone familiar with their works or their biographies will be more inclined to blame the characters themselves.) Their speech rhythms are laden with a consciousness of their positions and strike our Cavett‐conditioned ears as terribly slow. Grunts in Impeccable Diction Exclusively male conversations tend to make the speakers sound as if they were each 50 pounds heavier and hung‐over as well. Grunts, wheezes, belches, hawkings are all decked out in impeccable diction, but women are needed—if only as a digestif—to keep the verbal gourmandizing to a decent level. Gautier, who is still in his 50's, boasts that he makes love only once a year. The Goncourt brothers, being younger, share mistress once a week. Balzac, who is not present, is mentioned as practicing coitus interruptus in order to conserve his creative powers. Flaubert is both better and worse, getting up to do a little dance in front of the mirror after each time. Only Turgenev sounds even remotely moved in a way we can empathize into: He says that, after lovemaking, he is reunited with nature, things look real once more. SaintBeuve, the reigning critic of the time, has never spent a whole night with a woman: His work schedule won't allow it. 法國人一直非常熱衷於交談，並毫不猶豫地宣稱自己是這門藝術的大師。 1862 年至 1872 年間，巴黎許多最偉大的談話家定期在左岸的一家小餐館馬尼餐廳共進晚餐。他們包括福樓拜、流亡國外的屠格涅夫、喬治·桑、聖伯夫、泰奧菲勒·戈蒂埃、歐內斯特·勒南、伊波利特·泰納和龔古爾兄弟，當然也少不了不少名不見經傳的人物。羅伯特·巴爾迪克是一位以研究法國文學而聞名的作家，他突發奇想，研究了這些著名的夜晚，並從日記、筆記、筆記本、回憶錄、書信和實際記錄的交流中重現了其中的六個夜晚。如果《馬尼餐廳的晚餐》令人失望，那不是巴爾迪克先生的錯。他的工作幾乎堪稱傑作：是校長們讓我們失望了。他們的對話一會兒聽起來像在第19洞喝了好幾杯蘇格蘭威士忌後在更衣室裡閒聊；一會兒又像一群坐在門廊搖椅上的老傢伙，氣喘吁籲，滔滔不絕地發表意見。 這本書令人不快的地方之一在於他們為了一句格言而擺出各種姿勢和扭曲的姿態。他們聽起來就像在竭力用定義說話，或是在念叨他們事先代筆的警句。 （這或許是巴爾迪克先生寫作方法的錯，但任何熟悉他們作品或傳記的人都會更傾向於責怪他們自己。）他們的說話節奏充滿了對自己地位的意識，在我們卡維特式的耳朵裡，聽起來慢得可怕。 吐字清晰，語調無可挑剔 純男性對話往往會讓說話者聽起來好像每個人都重了50磅，而且還宿醉未醒。咕嚕聲、喘息聲、飽嗝聲、呼嚕聲，所有這些詞句都完美無瑕，但女人是必不可少的——哪怕只是作為消化劑——來將這口口相傳的饕餮盛宴維持在一個相當不錯的水平。 年逾五十的戈蒂耶誇耀自己一年只做愛一次。年紀較小的龔古爾兄弟每週共用一個情婦。巴爾扎克（他不在場）被提及練習性交中斷以保存創造力。福樓拜則好壞參半，每次做愛後都會起身對著鏡子跳一小段舞。只有屠格涅夫聽起來略帶感動，讓我們能夠感同身受：他說，做愛之後，他與自然重聚，萬物再次顯得真實。聖伯夫，當時的權威批評家，從未與女人共度良宵：他的工作日程不允許。 Wisecracks abound, but they are positively architectural, built stone on stone like forts. The best remarks are all too often quoted from someone else. When speaking of literature, our great men all complain of too much work and too little appreciation. The old saw about new words for a new age is exhumed; the “pure” novel, the formally perfect, is relegated to second‐raters, on the assumption that true genius cannot be altogether tamed by art. When the theologian Ronan foolishly calls George Sand “the greatest artist of our times and the finest talent,” Saint‐Beuve gets off one or his better bits of malice: “Madame Sand has a great soul and a perfectly enormous bottom.” No quotable Talk of Polities On the subject of politics, our celebrities are hardly worth quoting. They are far more interested in prostitution, of which Flaubert says: “A man has missed something if he has never woken up in an anonymous bed beside a face he'll never see again, and if he has never left a brothel at dawn feeling like jumping off a bridge into the river out of sheer physical disgust with life.” “A glance into its [prostitution's] depths makes you dizzy and teaches you so much. It makes you so sad, and fills, you with such dreams of love!” Such hyperbole is more understandable if we remind ourselves that brothels were different sorts of places in those days. The siege of Paris during the war with Prussia finds our gourmets dining on dog and rat meat, stuffed donkey's head and elephant steak or consomme derived from the two former favorites of the Paris zoo.
Turgenev complains that he can't make love any more; Gautier is attracted only to chic, freaky, “modern” types; one of the Goncourts has died of syphilis and the. other's talk is a “litany of laments.” Paris, like every great city id the last hundred years, is changing for the worse: You have to buy your books standing up now. Magny's is overshadowed by a flashier place that offers a view of the boulevard and bad food. The new place is patronized by businessmen, politicians and military types. One wonders, irreverently, whether the conversations were better or worse. 俏皮話比比皆是，但它們確實像建築一樣，像堡壘一樣壘砌在石頭上。最精彩的言論往往被引用自他人。談到文學，我們的偉人無一例外地抱怨工作太多，欣賞太少。關於新時代新詞的古老格言被重新挖掘出來；「純粹」的小說，形式上完美的小說，被貶低為二流之作，因為他們認為真正的天才無法被藝術完全馴服。當神學家羅南愚蠢地稱喬治·桑為“我們這個時代最偉大的藝術家和最傑出的才華”時，聖伯夫便用他那句或幾句更貼切的惡意來表達自己的觀點：“桑夫人擁有偉大的靈魂和無比豐滿的臀部。” 政治話題無可引用 在政治話題上，我們的名人幾乎不值得引用。他們對賣淫更感興趣，福樓拜曾這樣評價：「如果一個人從未在一張無名的床上醒來，身旁是一張他再也見不到的臉，如果他從未在黎明離開妓院時，因為對生活的純粹生理厭惡而想從橋上跳進河裡，那他就錯過了什麼。 普魯士戰爭期間，巴黎被圍困，我們的美食家們享用著狗肉、老鼠肉、填餡驢頭和象排，或者用巴黎動物園以前最受歡迎的兩種動物做成的清湯。屠格涅夫抱怨他再也無法做愛；戈蒂埃只對時髦、怪異的「現代」類型感興趣；龔古爾兄弟中，有一人死於梅毒，另一人的談話則像在「哀悼」。巴黎，就像過去一百年裡所有偉大的城市一樣，正在變得越來越糟：現在你得站著買書了。馬格尼書店被一家更奢華的店所掩蓋，這家店可以欣賞到林蔭大道的景色，但食物很糟糕。這家新店的顧客包括商人、政客和軍人。人們不禁會不自覺地好奇，這些對話是更好了還是更糟了。 （法）居斯塔夫·福樓拜著丁世中譯 ISBN： 9787549554911 出版時間： 2020-10-01 定價： 58.00 責編：張玉琴、韓亞平 **** |
福樓拜的戲劇喜劇《候選人》（Le Candidat）於1874年3月11日在雜耍劇院（The Théâtre du Vaudeville）上演，其戲劇創作的嘗試之作。由於評論家抱怨其生硬的對話、平淡無奇、漫畫化的人物，導致觀眾紛紛離場，該劇於3月14日閉幕，僅演出四場。作為經典劇作《包法利夫人》（1857年）的作者，這是福樓拜唯一一部獨立創作的戲劇，也是唯一一部在他生前上演的戲劇。
在《候選人》被「噓」下台後，福樓拜似乎有意安排這些未來的劇作家們聚在一起，舉行他稱之為「噓聲作家晚宴」的活動，而他邀請的第一位同事正是左拉。最終，這個團體發展到五人，屠格涅夫為此取了「噓聲作家團」（le Groupe des Auteurs Sifflés）的綽號。五人小組（或簡稱「五人」），正如他們的名字，有時會在都德位於帕韋街24號拉穆瓦尼翁府邸聚會，偶爾也會在咖啡館聚會，但他們通常會在周日於福樓拜位於聖奧諾雷郊區街240號的家中聚會。那裡總是備有豐盛的美食美酒，而那些嘶聲嘶啞的作家們無疑也喝得酩酊大醉。 （嘿，他們是法國人，對吧？不過，還好！）屠格涅夫通常是第一個到達的，福樓拜會「像兄弟一樣擁抱他」。漫長而喧鬧的夜晚常常持續到凌晨兩三點。
我一直覺得，描寫這些非凡聚會的場景將會是一項卓有成效的任務。考慮到所涉及的人物和環境，它必須具有內在的戲劇性——一場流暢、廣泛、無拘無束、有文化的對話。也許沒有太多的動作，但智慧應該源源不絕地湧現！我甚至有一個與這個場景配套的作品：20 世紀 40 年代初的夏天，田納西威廉斯在馬薩諸塞州科德角的普羅溫斯敦度假。他和他的酒友過去常常在晚上聚集在傑克船長的碼頭，這是一個木製碼頭，伸入 P'town 港口，後面是一個酒吧，威廉姆斯在上面租了一個房間。這個團體由一個非常多元化的團隊組成，包括畫家傑克遜波洛克；漢斯霍夫曼 P'town 藝術學校的學生李克拉斯納，後來成為波洛克的妻子；威廉姆斯的舞蹈家愛人基普基爾南，他在霍夫曼的學校做模特；喬哈贊，另一位舞蹈家朋友，為霍夫曼的學生做模特；瓦萊卡·格特（羅伯特·德·格特（羅伯特·德·加Duncan）；弗里茨·布特曼（Fritz Bultman），這位出生於新奧爾良的畫家也是霍夫曼的另一位學生；布特曼的妻子珍妮（Jeanne）；音樂和舞蹈評論家埃德溫·登比（Edwin Denby）；甚至可能還有扮演元老的霍夫曼。 （威廉斯當時也和塔盧拉·班克黑德（Tallulah Bankhead）成為了朋友，當時她正在丹尼斯的開普敦劇院（Cape Playhouse）演出，所以她可以露面，只是為了增加戲劇效果。）遺憾的是，我不是劇作家，所以我並沒有真正嘗試過寫這些場景——只是想過。 （誰有全息甲板可以用嗎？）
Hotel Bel Ami
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Dec 26, 2024 — Another cherished location was the sophisticated Café Riche, near the Madeleine, where he mingled with journalists and intellectuals.
路易·比尼翁（Louis Bignon，1816年6月26日-1906年5月18日）是一位著名的法國廚師，他創辦的里什咖啡館（Café Riche）後來成為巴黎最時尚的咖啡館。他也是一位著名的農學家，其產品屢獲殊榮，並被授予法國榮譽軍團勳章
裡什咖啡館（Café Riche）
裡什咖啡館，約1890年的明信片
比尼翁隨後以100萬法郎的巨額收購了已經破敗的里什咖啡館（Café Riche）。它很快就成為巴黎最時尚的餐廳。 [1] 法國社會名流、偉大的藝術家和作家都經常光顧這裡。一些精美的菜餚最初是在裡什咖啡館（Café Riche）創作的，包括“裡什海鮮”（Sole à la Riche）和“裡什海鮮”（Bécasse à la Riche）。 [3]亞歷山大·仲馬是裡什咖啡館的常客，他在其《小烹飪詞典》[2]中引用了比尼翁的許多食譜。沃克蘭、費夫爾和塞魯勒接替了比尼翁擔任主廚。他們的名字刻在一塊牌匾上。 [1]約瑟夫·法夫爾後來憑藉自身實力成為了一位著名廚師，他於1869年左右在裡什咖啡館當學徒。 [4]
路易·比尼翁是衛生方面的先驅，他將這一點作為裡什咖啡館廚房設計和運營的重要考慮因素。 [5]比尼翁精心在他的酒窖中儲備了世界上最好的葡萄酒。他說他所有的葡萄酒都純淨無瑕，而且都是同類中最好的。他從不以假名出售葡萄酒。比尼翁一直維持高價。當被問及這一點時，他說這是為了顧客的利益，因為高價可以隔絕庸俗，並確保一種安靜親密的氛圍。 [1]
農學家
比尼翁在他的家鄉阿列省投資了農場和葡萄園，並積極參與對抗葡萄根瘤蚜蟲病。自1863年起，葡萄根瘤蚜蟲病摧毀了法國的許多葡萄園。 [2] 路易‧比尼翁是法國農業協會的創始會員、法國帝國和中央農業協會（後來更名為法國國家農業協會）的通訊會員，以及法國農業、商業和工業高級理事會的成員。 [5] 1862年至1880年間，他的葡萄酒和農產品在倫敦和巴黎的世界博覽會上獲得了極高的獎項。 1867年，他因其在農業領域的傑出貢獻而獲得榮譽軍團勳章。
Louis Bignon (26 June 1816 – 18 May 1906) was a famous French chef whose Café Riche became the most fashionable in Paris. He was also a noted agriculturalist, won prizes for his products and was awarded the Legion of Honour.
Early years[edit]
Louis Bignon was born on 26 June 1816 in Hérisson in the Allier department. He began work in Paris in the kitchen of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Quai d'Orsay. Later he was a waiter at "La Minerve" at the corner of the rue Montpensier.[1] He apprenticed as a cook in various fashionable restaurants.[2]
In 1843 Bignon acquired and reorganized the Café Foy. In a few years he had made it a leading center of gastronomy.[2] The Café Foy, which later became the Paillard, was at the corner of the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin and the Boulevard des Italiens. In 1847 Bignon handed over the Café Foy to his brother, who had recently married one of the directors of Les Freres Provencaux, another leading Parisian restaurant.[3]
Café Riche[edit]
Café Riche, postcard around 1890Bignon then bought the Café Riche, which had become run down, for the huge sum of one million francs. It soon became the most fashionable restaurant in Paris.[1] It was frequented by leading figures of French society, and by great artists and writers. Some splendid dishes were first created at the Café Riche, including Sole à la Riche and Bécasse à la Riche.[3] Alexandre Dumas was a frequent visitor, and used many of Bignon's recipes in his Petit dictionnaire de cuisine.[2] Bignon was succeeded as chef by Vauquelin, Fèvre and Seroulle. Their names were engraved on a plaque.[1] Joseph Favre, later to become a famous chef in his own right, apprenticed at the Café Riche around 1869.[4]
Louis Bignon was a pioneer in hygiene, and made this an important consideration in the design and operation of the kitchens of the Café Riche.[5] Bignon took care to stock his cellars with the best wines in the world. He said that all his wines were pure, and were each the best of their type. He had never served a wine under a false name. Bignon kept his prices high. When questioned about this, he said that it was in the interests of his clientele, since the high prices kept out the vulgar and ensured an atmosphere of quiet intimacy.[1]
Agriculturalist[edit]
Bignon invested in farms and vineyards in his native Allier, and took an active part in the fight against phylloxera, which destroyed many of the French vineyards from 1863.[2] Louis Bignon was a founding member of the Société des agriculteurs de France, a corresponding member of the Société impériale et centrale d'agriculture de France (later the Societe Nationale d'Agriculture), and a member of the Conseil supérior de l'agriculture, du commerce et de l'industrie.[5] He received high awards for his wines and agricultural products at the world exhibitions in London and Paris between 1862 and 1880. In 1867 he was awarded the Legion of Honour for his agricultural work.
被噓的作家群
1874年4月14日，星期二晚上，五位傑出的作家——小說家、短篇小說家、散文家、日記作家和詩人——齊聚巴黎意大利大道16號的Riche咖啡館，圍坐在一張“舒適的餐桌”旁。這四位法國作家——埃米爾·左拉、古斯塔夫·福樓拜、阿爾豐斯·都德和埃德蒙·德·龔古爾——以及一位法國榮譽市民伊凡·屠格涅夫——齊聚一堂，慶祝他們共同的失敗。你看，儘管他們在文學上取得了巨大的成功，但這些或許是當時法國最負盛名的作家們，都曾遭受過恥辱：他們為戲劇寫作的初次嘗試，卻在巴黎（或者，就屠格涅夫而言，則是在莫斯科和聖彼得堡）的舞台上遭到噓聲。
屠格涅夫的小說《父與子》（1862年）被認為是19世紀最優秀的小說之一。他的戲劇《鄉間的一個月》（1872年上演）取得了巨大的成功，並在他生前及死後一直是劇團的保留劇目。但他早期的戲劇嘗試明顯帶有浪漫主義色彩，通常以詩歌形式呈現，遠未受到廣泛好評。 1851年，《薄處，即斷處》在聖彼得堡亞歷山大劇院上演；1852年，《破產》（或《窮紳士》）也在亞歷山大劇院上演；1862年，《家庭負擔》（或《寄生蟲》）在莫斯科大劇院首演。這些作品都沒有成功——儘管都德曾對屠格涅夫戲劇生涯的失敗有過一番諷刺：“俄羅斯太遠了，我們沒法去那裡看看。” （都德觀察的正確性，恰好解釋了屠格涅夫早期戲劇首演細節難以確定的部分原因。雖然有法國作家舞台作品在巴黎首演的記錄，但19世紀莫斯科和聖彼得堡的記錄卻很難找到。問題的另一部分在於翻譯和音譯他的劇作標題：排列組合實在太多了。俄語版當然有更精確的信息，但我的法語作品不太精確的信息。
龔古爾兄弟——埃德蒙和他的弟弟朱爾斯——以他們的《龔古爾日記》而聞名，這本日記以引人入勝（且往往非常個人化）的視角，記錄了1851年至1896年他們那個時代的巴黎社會，堪稱當時的博客。他們也捐贈了法國最負盛名的文學獎——龔古爾獎。然而，1865年，埃德蒙的戲劇《亨利埃特·馬雷夏爾》在法蘭西喜劇院遭遇了猛烈批評（儘管它在1885年得以更成功地複排）。該劇於12月5日在莫里哀劇院開演，並於12月16日在一片敵意的反響後閉幕。
都德於1872年創作了《阿爾勒姑娘》（L’Arlésienne），該劇改編自他1869年創作的《磨坊來信》（Lettres de Mon Moulin）中的一幅速寫，但這部劇慘遭失敗（直到1885年，《卡門》的作曲家喬治·比才將其小譜曲，才使其有小譜曲）。本劇於1872年10月1日在雜耍劇院首演，演出15場後（10月21日）撤演。都德重拾小說創作，再也沒有嘗試創作其他戲劇。
左拉的首部代表作《特蕾莎·拉甘》出版於1867年。這位作家以文學自然主義的創始人而聞名（自然主義影響了易卜生，後者將這種寫作風格搬上了舞台）。左拉希望“為死氣沉沉的戲劇程序注入活力”，將自己的小說改編成舞台劇；該劇於1873年7月11日在文藝復興劇院開演，演出九場後便迅速停演。 《特蕾莎·拉甘》在最初的失敗後十年內未能重演，但之後仍繼續上演，並被公認為舞台自然主義的早期典範，是斯特林堡（他承認其影響）和易卜生的先驅。
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RickAfter college and the army, I studied acting and theater; I have an MFA in Acting and uncompleted Ph.D. in Performance Studies (ABD). I have worked as an actor, director, dramaturg/literary advisor, critic/reviewer, essayist, editor, and teacher of theater and acting (studio/conservatory, college, high school, and middle school). Several years ago, some theater friends who don't live in New York anymore asked me to keep them informed about what I see and I began sending them detailed, opinionated e-mails.View my complete profile
07 May 2009
The Group of Hissed Authors
On Tuesday evening, 14 April 1874, five illustrious writers--novelists and short-story writers, essayists and journal writers, and poets--gathered around a “table bien garnie” in the Café Riche at 16 Boulevard des Italiens in Paris. The men, four Frenchmen--Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet, and Edmond de Goncourt--and Ivan Turgenev, an honorary Frenchman, came together to celebrate, if you will, their common failure. You see, for all their success in letters, these men, perhaps the most renowned writers in France at the time, had all suffered the ignominy of hearing their first efforts at writing for the theater booed off the stages of Paris (or, in Turgenev’s case, Moscow and St. Petersburg).
Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is considered one of the finest pieces of 19th-century fiction ever written. His play A Month in the Country (produced in 1872) was a major success and remained in the repertoire of theater troupes throughout his life and after. But his early dramatic forays were of a decidedly romantic nature, often in verse, and were far less well received. Where It Is Thin, There It Breaks was produced at St. Petersburg’s Alexandrinsky Theater in 1851; Broke (or A Poor Gentleman), also at the Alexandrinsky, was staged in 1852; and The Family Charge (or The Parasite) premièred at the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater, Moscow, in 1862. None were successes--though Daudet quipped of Turgenev’s reported theatrical failures: “Russia’s far away, we can’t go there and see.”
(The truth of Daudet’s observation is, as it happens, part of the explanation for the difficulty in pinning down the details of the first productions of Turgenev’s early plays. While there is documentation for the Paris premières of the stage works of the French writers, 19th-century records from Moscow and St. Petersburg are hard to come by. The other part of the problem is translating and transliterating the titles of his plays: there are just too many permutations. More precise information is certainly available in Russian, but my computer doesn’t handle Cyrillic type very well and my Russian is weaker than my French.)
The Brothers Goncourt, Edmond and his younger brother Jules, were famous for their Journal des Goncourt, a fascinating (and often very personal) view of the Paris society of their age from 1851-96, the blog of its day. They also endowed the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. But in 1865, Edmond’s play Henriette Maréchal was panned at the Comédie-Française (though it was revived more successfully in 1885). It opened at the house of Molière on 5 December and closed after a hostile reception on 16 December.
Daudet wrote L’Arlésienne (The girl from Arles) in 1872, based on one of his sketches in Lettres de Mon Moulin (Letters from My Mill, 1869), and it failed miserably (until Georges Bizet, composer of Carmen, put it to music and it became a minor hit in 1885). It was first performed at the Théâtre du Vaudeville on 1 October 1872 and withdrawn after fifteen performances (21 October). Daudet returned to novel-writing and never tried to write another play.
Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin, his first major work, was published in 1867. The writer became renowned as the founder of literary Naturalism (which influenced Ibsen, who transferred the writing style to the stage). Zola, wanting “to kick life into the theatre's moribund procedures,” adapted his own novel for the stage; the play opened at the Théâtre de la Renaissance on 11 July 1873--and promptly closed after nine performances. Thérèse Raquin was not revived for ten years after its initial failure, but it continued to be played afterwards and has been recognised as an early example of stage Naturalism, a precursor to Strindberg (who acknowledged its influence) and Ibsen (who didn’t).
Flaubert’s attempt at playwriting, Le Candidat (The Candidate), a dramatic comedy, appeared on the stage at the Théâtre du Vaudeville on 11 March 1874 and, after critics complained of the wooden dialogue and flat, caricaturish characters and audiences stayed away in droves, it closed on 14 March after only four performances. It was the only play Flaubert, author of the classic Madame Bovary (1857), ever wrote on his own and the only one staged during his lifetime.
It was apparently Flaubert’s notion, after Le Candidat was “booed off the stage,” that the would-be dramatists meet at what he dubbed “Dinners for Hissed Authors” and the first colleague he invited to join him was Zola. The gang eventually grew to five and Turgenev came up with the sobriquet le Groupe des Auteurs Sifflés. The Group of Five (or simply “The Five”), as they were also called, sometimes met at Daudet’s home at the Hôtel de Lamoignon at 24 Rue de Pavée and occasionally at cafés, but they usually met on a Sunday at Flaubert’s house at 240 Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. There was always plenty of good food and drink, and the hissed authors were undoubtedly well lubricated with wine and brandy. (Hey, they were French, weren’t they? Mais, bien sûr!) Turgenev was usually the first to arrive, and Flaubert would “embrace [him] like a brother.” The long, raucous evenings often lasted until 2 or 3 a.m.
It has been in the back of my mind that writing the scene that depicts these extraordinary gatherings would be a fruitful task. It has to be innately theatrical given the personalities involved and the milieu--a well-oiled, wide-ranging, unrestrained, and literate conversation. Perhaps not a lot of action, but the wit should flow almost endlessly! I even have a companion piece for the scene: In the summers of the early 1940s, Tennessee Williams vacationed in Provincetown, Mass., on Cape Cod. He and his drinking buddies used to gather in the evening at Captain Jack’s Wharf, a wooden pier that jutted out into P’town Harbor behind a bar above which Williams rented a room. This group was composed of a really varied crew, including painter Jackson Pollock; Lee Krasner, a student of Hans Hofmann's P'town art school and later Pollock’s wife; Kip Kiernan, Williams’s dancer-lover who modeled at Hofmann’s school; Joe Hazan, another dancer friend who modeled for Hofmann’s students; Valeska Gert, a German immigrée nightclub owner who performed satirical political caricatures; poet Robert Duncan; Fritz Bultman, the New Orleans-born painter and another student of Hofmann; Bultman’s wife Jeanne; music and dance critic Edwin Denby; and maybe even Hofmann as the elder statesman. (Williams at this time also became friends with Tallulah Bankhead while she was appearing at the Cape Playhouse up the Cape in Dennis, so she could make an appearance, just for the theatricality of it.) Unhappily, I’m no playwright, so I haven’t really attempted to write the scenes--just imagine them. (Anybody got a holodeck I can use?)
The meetings of les Sifflés, full of wit and satire by all accounts, continued monthly until Flaubert’s death of a brain hemorrhage on 8 May 1880. The men were all more than mere colleagues and fellow writers--they were friends; Flaubert and Turgenev were even best friends and Zola was considered Turgenev’s spiritual son. Their stage failures only served as an excuse to tease one another and dream and theorize with great enthusiasm. “From three o’clock to six o’clock we went at a gallop through different subjects,” wrote Zola. De Goncourt, for example, once scolded Turgenev that he was “saturated with femininity,” to which the Russian writer replied, “With me neither books nor anything in the world could take the place of a woman. How can I make that plain to you?” (Turgenev, by the way, never married, but one of the reasons for his long stays in Paris is often said to have been his lifelong love of a married woman, the singer and actress Pauline Viardot whom he first met when he heard her sing in Russia in 1843. He followed her to Paris two years later.) On another occasion, de Goncourt records, “We began with a long conversation on the special aptitudes of writers suffering from constipation and diarrhea.” But much of the conversation was literary. According to Henry James, a friend and occasional visitor to the salon, the Dîners des Auteurs Sifflés went like this:
What was discussed in that little smoke-clouded room was chiefly questions of taste, questions of art and form; and the speakers, for the most part, were in æsthetic matters radicals of the deepest dye. . . . This state of mind was never more apparent than one afternoon when ces messieurs delivered themselves on the subject of an incident which had just befallen one of them. "L'Assommoir" of Emile Zola had been discontinued in the journal through which it was running as a serial, in consequence of repeated protests from the subscribers. The subscriber, as a type of human imbecility, received a wonderful dressing, and the Philistine in general was roughly handled. There were gulfs of difference between Turgenev and Zola, but Turgenev, who, as I say, understood everything, understood Zola too, and rendered perfect justice to the high solidity of much of his work.
Les Sifflés were a somewhat motley bunch, however, despite their connection as men of letters (and failed playwrights). For all Turgenev’s seriousness and intellectuality, Daudet, for instance, was something of a roué and reprobate. The youngest of the Five, born a month after Zola, Daudet lost his virginity at 12--and he is rumored to have slept with all his friends' mistresses. He died of apoplexy brought on by advanced syphilis at the age of 57.
Ivan Turgenev (1818-83) was something of the éminence grise among les Sifflés, it seems. Even as a foreigner, as one of les Cinq he was accepted almost as a French writer. An imposing figure--he was 6’ 3” with an athletic build--he was known among his comrades as “that Russian giant.” But he was soft-spoken, with an almost feminine voice. He was handsome and charming, but timid, restrained, and gentle. Despite the prominence of the others, however, even Zola seemed to feel Turgenev’s leadership. He cherished harmony and restraint, avoiding extremes of manner in both his life and his art, and remained a balanced, cultured gentleman all his life. He held himself aloof of political and philosophical creeds, and espoused a kind of agreeable atheism. Guy de Maupassant, another visitor, recounts:
Tourgenev [sic] used to bury himself in an arm chair and talk slowly in a gentle voice, rather weak and hesitating, yet giving to the things he said an extraordinary charm and interest. Flaubert would listen to him with religious reverence, fixing his wide blue eyes upon his friend's fine face and answering in his sonorous voice, which came like a clarion blast from under that veteran Gaul's moustache of his. Their conversations rarely touched upon the current affairs of life, seldom wandered away from literary history.
Turgenev was born into a wealthy, aristocratic, landed family and was sent abroad for his education; after studies at both the Universities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, he went to the University of Berlin where he read philosophy. (Most of the other Sifflés either left school at young ages or finished only a secondary education. Only Flaubert, the son of a successful surgeon, had a comfortable youth and was sent to Paris to study law--a profession for which he determined he was unsuited.) Fluent in French, German, Spanish, English, and Italian, the Russian would bring along books by Goethe, Pushkin, or Swinburne and translate poetry from them. He regarded Flaubert as the most extraordinary writer in France and Madame Bovary the most forceful piece of writing of the century. Like Zola, Turgenev wished to make his mark on the world as a dramatist rather than as a novelist (though his theatrical reputation is founded on a single play, A Month in the Country). The oldest among the Group of Five, Turgenev served as a sort of unofficial ambassador to the Russian émigré community in Paris, helping out young writers, often at his own expense. Like all the Five, he had a wide and varied circle of acquaintances, even in Paris: in 1879, he was, for example, invited by the actual Russian ambassador, Prince Nikolai Orlov, to lunch at the embassy with Czarevich Alexander--later Czar Alexander III (1881-94), father of the last Czar. (On the other hand, he feuded with two of the other most illustrious writers of Russia, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, until shortly before his death.) A lifelong hypochondriac, he was diagnosed with an actual fatal illness, spinal cancer, as early as 1876. He died of the disease just shy of the age of 65.
Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), it seems, liked to read aloud at the gatherings. He especially liked to read examples of bad writing and jeer at the author’s poor sense of rhythm. He’d point out needless repetition, clichés, and infelicitously resonant passages. The author of Madam Bovary had the build of a guardsman but his health had been precarious since childhood. He was neurotic and worked in hermit-like seclusion, devoted to his writing. Like Daudet and Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert was infected with syphilis. But it was bouts of epilepsy that endangered his life, and he was constrained from strenuous activity and, especially, emotional excitement. For this reason, he felt he must become an observer of life, not a participant, and he became a tireless worker who imposed upon himself high standards for his art. He worked in solitude, sometimes taking a week to complete one page. He was famous for persistently searching for le mot juste--the appropriate word. Flaubert was also shy, though extremely sensitive and arrogant. He could pass from silence to indignant rage, emitting a flow of language. Flaubert detested anything bourgeois, petty-respectable, platitudinous, or self-satisfied. He can be said to have made cynicism into an art form.
Edmond de Goncourt (1822-96) was the elder half of les Frères Goncourt, who collaborated so closely that even after the death of Jules (1830-70), they were almost never mentioned separately. Neither brother ever married, and they prided themselves on sharing a Rubenesque blonde mistress. Polished, aristocratic, neurasthenic, Edmond was of an artistic and nervous temperament and, with his brother, cultivated a sense of persecution. Their first novel, En 1851, was published the day after the coup of 2 December 1851 (which brought Louis Napoleon to power as Emperor Napoleon III and in which Daudet’s patron, the duc de Morny, had been instrumental) and quickly sank into oblivion; the next year, the brothers were arrested and tried (but acquitted) on the charge of outrage à la morale publique for quoting a mildly erotic 16th-century verse in an article; and when Henriette Maréchal opened in 1865, it generated anti-government demonstrations when students from the Latin Quarter lined up on opening night to jeer the play because the de Goncourts were considered anti-Republicans and intimates of Princess Mathilde, a niece of Napoleon I. The student-protesters believed that only the influence of the princess had made it possible to stage the play. Gradually the furor over the play died down, but then an attack was mounted from the opposite camp. Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III and an enemy of Princess Mathilde, succeeded in having the play banned on 17 December 1865. Between 1851 and 1870, the brothers published their famous Journal together, a chronicle of the Belle Époque in Paris as they witnessed it at first hand. As a last tandem effort in the Goncourt Journal, Edmond recorded the details of Jules’s excruciating death from syphilis. Edmond continued the Journal on his own until his own death, when he endowed the Académie Goncourt, a group of ten writers of great esteem in France who each December award the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious French literary award, given for "the best imaginary prose work of the year" in the French language. Winners have included Georges Duhamel, Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, Roman Gary, Michel Tournier, and Marguerite Duras.
Émile Zola (1840-1902) became friends with future Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne when they were youths, but the friendship foundered over Zola’s portrait of Cézanne in L’Œuvre (The Masterpiece, 1886). He worked as a political journalist and was very opinionated, a harsh and outspoken critic of the government (until the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870). Like Victor Hugo, to whom the younger writer was a sort of political apprentice and follower, Zola did not hide his dislike of Napoleon III, who had used his presidency of the Second Republic as a springboard to become emperor in 1852. At the same time, though an intense moralist, he was staunchly anti-Catholic. He was, nevertheless, a best-selling author and a French literary star in his day and appeared among the literary elite of Paris as a statesman and bon-vivant. Zola was intrigued by contemporary scientific theories, especially Darwin’s evolutionary system but also the writings of Prosper Lucas on heredity and the ideas of critic and historian Hippolyte Taine. He was struck with the relevance of Darwin's theories to everyday life, particularly the life of the poor, who had to struggle constantly to survive. (Zola’s early existence in Paris was direct experience of this reality.) The writer, considered the founder of the Naturalist literary movement (though he began writing as a Romanticist), believed that the tenets and methods of science were applicable to other disciplines, including art and writing, and that artists should use their art and other means to construct "the best society." Toward this end, Zola sought to reveal social injustices and societal failings in his novels and plays. Zola championed a "slice of life" drama presented with a minimum of artifice, applying what became known as “scientific naturalism.” He believed that the quickest and surest way for a budding author to achieve recognition was through a successful play so, like Turgenev, it was in the theater that Zola wanted to make his mark. In “L'Argent dans la littérature” (“The Influence of Money in Literature,” 1880; part of The Experimental Novel), Zola writes that financial rewards in theater are greater than a novelist could ever hope to achieve and such "bread-and-butter" considerations were as important in the author’s decision to write for the stage as was his genuine passion for the theater. At the end of his life, Zola’s most notable act was his advocacy for Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer accused in 1894 of treason and imprisoned on Devil’s Island, the only prisoner there. In behalf of Dreyfus, whose actual guilt was dubious from the start, Zola wrote “J’Accuse” (1898) and campaigned for Dreyfus’s exhonoration (which came in 1906, four years after Zola’s death). During the process of Zola’s advocacy, however, he became a target of the government himself and was sentenced to imprisonment for libel in 1898. He escaped to England, and only returned in 1899, after Dreyfus had been cleared and the charges against Zola had been dismissed. The great author died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty chimney (though there always remained suspicions that he had been murdered by political enemies). Dreyfus attended the funeral, but had to come in disguise.
Alphonse Daudet (1840-97) was short of stature: Dickens, to whom Daudet was often compared, called him "my little brother in France" and de Goncourt called him "mon petit Daudet." Born in Nîmes, he grew up in Provence (hence, L’Arlésienne--The girl from Arles), the same region that enraptured Vincent van Gogh. Daudet came to Paris in 1857, at the age of 17--and almost immediately contracted syphilis from a lectrice de la cour, a woman employed to read aloud at court. (At least, he bragged, his disease came from “a classier, indeed more literary, source” than that of his friends.) In 1861, Daudet became a private secretary to the duc de Morny, the Minister of the Interior and illegitimate half-brother of Napoleon III, then Emperor of the Second French Empire; he remained in that position until de Morny’s death in 1865. (De Morny had helped organize the coup d’état of 2 December 1851 which brought Louis Napoleon to the throne, a circumstance which Daudet’s future colleague, Zola, abhorred.) Daudet collaborated in writing a number of one-act plays (La Dernière idole, 1862; Les Absents, 1864; L'Œillet blanc, 1865), all helped toward the stage by de Morny's influence. Despite his reputation as a reprobate, however, Daudet was kind, generous, and sociable. He was a passionate observer of his surroundings and an unstoppable talker. He was an intimate friend of Edmond de Goncourt, who seemed to have adopted Daudet as a surrogate sibling after his younger brother, Jules, died of syphilis. (Ironically, de Goncourt would have to witness his dear friend suffer the same affliction that took his brother.) De Goncourt died in Daudet’s house, 18 months before Daudet himself died, collapsing at the dinner table and expiring almost instantly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Today, Daudet’s writings are mostly overlooked, though he kept a remarkable account of the progress of his illness which wasn’t published in France (as La Doulou, the Provençal word for la douleur, or ‘pain’) until 1930 and wasn’t translated into English (as In the Land of Pain) until 2002.
That’s the cast of characters. The setting would be Flaubert’s house, of course, around the dinner table and in the salon after the meal as the men smoked and drank and jousted. (All the participants being writers--most of them chroniclers and reporters of one sort or another as well--many of them recorded their accounts of this time one way or another; many also left letters that have been published.) The larger setting, however, the world of Paris and Europe around the Five, was a busy and tumultuous place during this period, giving the writers plenty of material to talk about. In the 30 years between 1850 and the end of les Dîners des Sifflés in 1880, much of their world shifted drastically. The Second Republic, born in 1848, came to an end in 1852 when Louis Napoleon took the title Emperor Napoleon III and launched the Second Empire. Napoleon III put a puppet emperor, Maximilian I, on the throne of Mexico in 1864, only to see him overthrown and executed in 1867. Shortly before the Dîners began, France was engaged in the Franco-Prussian War (1870) and Paris was occupied by German troops through 1872. This ended the Second Empire and the Third Republic, which would last until World War II, was declared in 1870. A year later, the Paris Commune, a coalition of the working class, took over the government of France for three months.
Turgenev’s native Russia went to war against France, England, and the Ottoman Turks in the Crimea from 1853 to 1856 and then saw the serfs freed, an act for which Turgenev had long campaigned, in 1861. Next door, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or the Dual Monarchy, was formed in 1867 and elsewhere on the continent, Italy was unified as a kingdom in 1861 and Germany as an empire in 1871. From 1877 to 1878, Russia was again at war with the Ottomans in the Russo-Turkish War. On the other side of the world, Japan, the Floating Kingdom, was somewhat forcibly opened to the West in 1852. Karl Marx published Das Kapital in 1867, a small event that would soon help change the world for decades.
Politics wasn’t the only field in which turmoil was enlivening the world in those few years. Science and medicine were making huge advances with discoveries by the likes of Pasteur, Lister, and Mendel. Darwin published On the Origin of the Species, a profound influence especially on Zola’s thinking, in 1859. Anthropologists and archeologists were making discoveries about the human past almost annually it seemed. And the world les Cinq were learning more and more about was getting smaller at the same time: steamships were replacing sail and increasing in size and speed; railroads were opening all over Europe and the rest of the world; the Suez Canal opened in 1869 shortening the time to travel between West and East by weeks. And communication was getting better and faster: the telephone was invented in 1876 and the telegraph was tying the world together ever more tightly: the Transaltlantic Cable was completed in 1866. Newspapers were proliferating: The New York Times was founded in 1851, Figaro became a daily in Paris in 1854, the Daily Telegraph began in London in 1855, the Atlantic Monthly was launched in 1857, The Nation in 1865, the same year as both the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner. At the same time, photography was becoming so simple that even amateurs were able to take pictures of all the new worlds they were visiting and show others exactly what things were like in exotic, far-way places.
The effect these technological developments had on the worlds of art and literature was shattering. The curiosity over what other parts of the earth looked like and how the people there really behaved and lived began to shift the perspective of writers from Romanticism, the world of dreams and flights of imagination, to Realism and Naturalism, the world of facts and observation. The Five were at the forefront of the shift, forming the conventions for the new writing and spreading the principals abroad and into the field of dramatic writing. Witnesses to the changes in politics, technology, and industry, les Cinq were the movers of the change in written art.
Around them, other changes were happening, too. In painting and sculpture, Realism was giving way to Impressionism--almost an opposite reaction to that of the writer’s art. My theory has always been that the spread of photography was greatly to blame for this. As long as it was decreasingly the responsibility of the artist to capture life as it is, and increasingly the job of the photographer, then the artist was driven to do what photographs didn’t do: portray the world as only an artist could see it. As objectivity became the domain of the photographer (and eventually the cinematographer), the artist turned to subjectivity: impressions. (There were other influences, too, of course. The focus on the middle and working classes, for example, and on the workaday world, the world of the street, the field, the café, were often the subjects of the Impressionists--but seldom of the Realists or the Romanticists.) In 1863, the official, established galleries in Paris mounted an exhibit of the approved artists, rejecting work by new aritists. Napoleon III decreed that these artists, who included Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, Camille Pissarro, and Zola’s school chum Paul Cézanne, should show their work in a gallery adjacent to the main Salon. It became known as the Salon des Refusés, the “exhibition of rejects.” (Zola wrote a fictionalized account of this event, L’Œuvre, the work that split him and Cézanne.) Eleven years later, the year les Sifflés began their gatherings, the Exhibition of the Impressionists--so titled by an art critic who took the name from one of Claude Monet’s paintings, Impression: soleil levant--was the sensation of Paris. The Impressionists had arrived and successfully stormed the gates of Paris.
This was the world in which les Cinq met each month, the world they wrote about, talked about, and argued about.
Posted by Rick at 3:43 PM
Labels: Alphonse Daudet, Auteurs Sifflés, Edmond de Goncourt, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Hissed Authors, Ivan Turgenev
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