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Cover art: Shows a detail from Woman with a Parrot by Delacroix in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyons (Photo: Giraudon)
Blurb: “TRANSLATED BY JOANNA RICHARDSON
This novel by Théophile Gautier (1811-72) is the story of a young poet, d'Albert, who finds that the delightful youth with whom both he and his mistress fall in love is in fact Mademoiselle de Maupin in
disguise.
Through the equivocal passion of his heroine, and her ability to rouse such double passions, Gautier suggests that beauty may be loved independently of sex, and for its own sake. This theme and the doctrine of l'art pour l'art - of the sovereignty of art and its independence of moral and social conditions - were to be central themes in his work. The Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin bears little relation to the novel, but it is Gautier's first and most impressive profession of l'art pour l'art. The novel itself is an expression of his passionate idealism,
his eager, wholehearted worship of beauty.
Mademoiselle de Maupin has an esthetic signifi-cance. It is not merely the earliest and the best-written of his novels; it is also the first, the most sustained, and one of the most brilliant of Gautier's professions of his creed.”
Author Bio: “Théophile Gautier was born at Tarbes, on the French side of the Pyrenees, on 31 August 1811. He was the son of a minor tax-official.
When he was three and a half, his father's nomination as receiver of taxes led the family to Paris. Gautier was educated, briefly, at the Col-lège Royal de Louis-Ic-Grand, and then at the Collège Charlemagne; before he finished his course, he was also learning painting in Rioult's studio in the rue Saint-Antoine. It was here, by chance, that he read Les Orientales by
Victor Hugo, turned from art to literature, and
became a fervent Romantic. In 183o he attended the historic first night of Hugo's Romantic drama, Hernani, and published his own first book, his Poésies.
This was followed by other Romantic works, poems and short stories, and, in 1835, by the supreme Romantic novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin.
In 1836 he was obliged to become a journalist. For nineteen years he wrote for La Presse; he then became a contributor to Le Moniteur universel and to Le Journal officiel. A critic of art and literature, theatre and music, he knew many of his famous contemporaries, and he left some brilliant portraits of them. He was an cager traveller, and the author of Voyage en Espagne and Voyage en Italie. He was also a lover of ballet, and he wrote Giselle and La Péri. He continued to produce novels, among them Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863); but he was above all a poet, and Emaux et Camées (1852) is his most distinguished and influential work.
A supporter of the Second Empire, Gautier was appointed librarian to the Emperor's cousin, Princess Mathilde. The fall of the Empire, and the Franco-Prussian war, largely destroyed his way of life. His Tableaux de Siege gives a moving account of the Siege of Paris (1870-
71); but the privations which he himself had suffered in the Siege had their effect on his health. He died on 23 October 1872.”