| Title | : | La Comtesse de Tende |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 22 |
| Publication | : | First published July 3, 2014 |
Extrait : MADEMOISELLE de Strozzi, fille du maréchal, et proche parente de Catherine de Médicis, épousa, la première année de la régence de cette reine, le comte de Tende, de la maison de Savoie, riche, bien fait, le seigneur de la cour qui vivait avec le plus d’éclat, et plus propre à se faire estimer qu’à plaire. Sa femme, néanmoins, l’aima d’abord avec passion. Elle était fort jeune ; il ne la regarda que comme un enfant, et il fut bientôt amoureux d’une autre. La comtesse de Tende, vive, et d’une race italienne, devint jalouse ; elle ne se donnait point de repos ; elle n’en laissait point à son mari ; il évita sa présence, et ne vécut plus avec elle comme l’on vit avec sa femme.
La beauté de la comtesse augmenta ; elle fit paraître beaucoup d’esprit ; le monde la regarda avec admiration ; elle fut occupée d’elle-même, et guérit insensiblement de sa jalousie et de sa passion. Elle devint l’amie intime de la princesse de Neufchâtel, jeune, belle, et veuve du prince de ce nom, qui lui avait laissé, en mourant, cette souveraineté, qui la rendait le parti de la cour le plus élevé et le plus brillant ...
La Comtesse de Tende Reviews
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She felt sure that shame was the most violent of all passions.
Love conquers all. Filling his casualties with uncontrollable desire, Amor’s power doesn’t unequivocally concide with romantic bliss. Unhappiness, loneliness, unrequited love, adultery, crimes of passion, the breaking up of marriages, the price one has to pay for a few volatile instances of rapture can be immeasurably high. Ce qu’il faut de regrets pour payer un frisson... (Louis Aragon)
Love is a perilous emotion. Whatever the strengths of the human mind, they are no match for its potency and unruliness, morally nor intellectually: reason, science, art, fame, power or religion – all fail miserably.
(Caravaggio, Amor Vincit Omnia)
The plot of this succinct story, published posthumously in 1724, is simple and dramatic. A married noble woman of great beauty, the countess of Tende, falls hopelessly in love with the Knight of Navarre, a handsome but not very fortunate man (evidently both are beautiful, who would believe in passionate love between ugly ducklings?). Fruitlessly attempting to fight her own feelings, she helps him into a well-heeded marriage with a prosperous and beauteous widow. However far for frivolous, the countess and the knight are not able to resist their feelings of mutual attraction and we swiftly see them heading for an unhappy ending of this ill-fated love.
Madame de la Fayette meticulously dissects the psychological effects of this overwhelming passion on her heroine who is desperately tormented by her illegitimate love and crushed by shame and repentance. Love is experienced as a dark passion begetting only disgrace and remorse, a passion inexorably growing into an a destructive force.
In this courtly world of elegance and refinement, individual sentiments and lives perish. De la Fayette’s moral drama chillingly illustrates the double moral standards for men and women regarding to adultery.
Romance and bliss wasn’t commonly found in wedlock for the aristocratic social milieu of the writer, but outside of it – at best love was an unintended, pleasant by-product of the arranged marriage. By problematizing the absence of love in aristocratic marriage, Madame de la Fayette can be seen as a precursor of the soon to come dominating bourgeois morals of the ideal of the love marriage.
As Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de La Fayette (1634 – 1693), also known as Madame de La Fayette is most famous for
La Princesse de Cleves, considered as one of the earliest and finest psychological novels and therefore a milestone in the history of the novel, this novella can be regarded as a leg up to her celebrated masterpiece. Brief it is, this story also encourages this reader to ruminate and read further on the role and place of love and marriage in society throughout the ages.
Madame de la Fayette’s objective dealing with the double standards concerning adultery reminded me of some chilling anecdotes in the history of family law. The plight of adulterous women in the 17th century might have been less harsh than with the Romans (death sentence for the woman; impunity for the husband ) or under Germanic Law (in the presence of the family of both spouses the adulterous woman was shaved off her hair, stripped naked and finally chased out of the house. The adultery of the man got no consequences), I remember well my outrage hearing that in Belgium the discriminatory treatment of male and female adultery in penal law (both in punishment and in definition of the concept of adultery) - was only abolished in 1974 (before getting wholly decriminalized in 1987): “La femme convaincue d’adultère sera condamnée à un emprisonnement de trois mois à deux ans. Le mari convaincu d’avoir entretenu une concubine dans la maison conjugale sera condamné à un emprisonnement d’un mois à un an.”
The road to equal treatment was a long and bumpy one, dear ladies.
An English translation of The Countess of Tende can be found
here (tranlated by Christy Sheffield Sanford). The French original can be found
here.
For a musical accompaniment dating from the time when this novella was written, you could listen to Jean-Baptiste Lully’s
Bourrée du Mariage Forcé(1664) (perhaps my favourite French baroque composition to dance to, together with his Marche pour la Cérémonie turque). -
Zo goed als perfecte novelle over de laagste der menselijke zwakheden: jaloezie.
De gortdroge maar sierlijke stijl bedwelmt, de emoties zwepen op, het leesplezier floreert. -
c'est hilarant, il y a une scène où le duc apprend que sa femme est malade, quand il arrive dans sa chambre elle est hystérique et n'arrête pas de pleurer et il se dit "hum je devrais lui raconter comment notre ami est mort et à quel point sa veuve est bouleversée pour lui changer les idées".
comedic genius.
tw: pensées suicidaires, perte d'un enfant, deuil, infidélité -
0,3 estrellas
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The most scandalous fifteen pages I've read this year :o It began the short story collection I was reading and it wasn't compelling enough to make me want to read the rest of the collection... but it certainly had quite a lot of shock value! (Needless to say I did not read this in French lol). Also now I'm feeling guilty about not reading the rest of the anthology because I never DNF books but new year new me!
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Citaat : De wens om te verhinderen dat mijn schande naar buiten komt is thans sterker dan mijn wraaklust, op een later moment zal ik bezien welke beslissing ik neem over uw onwaardig lot. Gedraag u alsof u altijd bent geweest zoals u had dienen te zijn.
Review : Mademoiselle De Strozzi trouwt zeer jong met de graaf van Tende, die haar van meet af aan bedriegt met andere vrouwen en nooit tijd voor haar heeft. Ze wordt verliefd op de chevalier van Navarra, van wie ze zwanger raakt; ze trekt zich radeloos terug op het platteland, biecht in een brief aan haar echtgenoot haar ontrouw op en sterft in het kraambed. Het bijzondere van deze (fictieve?) historische novelle schuilt in de enorme densiteit, de censuur van het vrouwelijke en de tragiek van het lot dat vrouwen duidelijker bewijzen aan overspel overhouden dan mannen. Ook kan men in dit werk duidelijk merken dat goddelijke dreigingen met hellevuur de mens niet kon weerhouden zijn gevoelens te beleven.
Madame De La Fayette [1634-1693] is vooral bekend als auteur van La Princesse de Clèves. In haar grotendeels anoniem verschenen oeuvre plaatst zij meestal een tragisch wereldbeeld waarin de vrouw onderdanig is aan de man en wel plaats is voor zijn wellust maar niet voor de hare. Een op en top Franse novelle maar wel geschreven vanuit een vrouwelijke wroeging en zondebesef. George Sand dacht er duidelijk anders over! De novelle werd knap vertaald en uitgegeven in de miniatuurreeks Perlouses. -
Easily the oldest French text I've read so far though French has changed much less than English in the same space of time so I didn't find it much harder than the material I've already been reading*. La Comtesse de Tende is a very short story about adultery, passion and shame with a surprisingly dark comic streak underlying it that I didn't really expect. An interesting appetizer for when I eventually take up La Princesse de Cleves in the near future.
*That said, this was a hell of a way to discover that "grosse" can also mean pregnant - I was very confused for a little while. -
everybody loves drama. there’s something so scandalous, so forbidden, to want to talk about such subject matter as the one presented. you have a story about forbidden love, but not just any, it involves a woman consumed by love for a man she can’t have, enabling his marriage to another woman, and throw in a pregnancy? it’s the type of hopeless, forbidden despair we love, no matter the time of its release.
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j’aurai aimé que son enfant survive et qu’iel devienne comme sa mère. son mari n’a pas voulu d’elle quand elle lui a tout donné, il n’a aucun droit de vouloir se venger de son ‘infidélité’ qui n’est que morale
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there’s truly nothing like princesses cheating on their husband and dying
