Vigny

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

ALFRED VICTOR, COMTE DE, a French author; born during his parents' imprisonment in the pris Loches (Indre-et-Loire), prison at March 27, 1797; entered the army at the Restoration; and served 14 years. Garrison life but his wearied a soul athirst for glory, pride found a solitary consolation in verse. As early as 1822 he published anonymously a small volume of verse, " or followed in 1824 by Eloa, the Sister of an Angel," an exquisite piece of mystic phantasy. Before the Revolution published his collected of July he had "Poems, Antique and Modern" (1826), containing "Mo ining "Moïse" and "Dolorida"; "Cing Mars" (1826), a historical rotranslation of "Othello" man mance; a (1829); and a drama "The Farrier of Ancré" (1830). After that year he published only works in prose: "Stello" (1832); "Grandeur and Military Ser- " (1835); and a drama, "Chatvitude ; terton" (1835) - the highest moment of his fame. From that time he ceased not to write but to print. He left a volume verse - "Destinées" - published in of 1864, which contains some of his finest and most virile work, and a collection of personal notes, printed with doubtful wisdom by Louis Ratisbonne under the title "Journal of a Poet" (1867). While stil young he attached himself to the Romanticists, with Hugo, Deschamps, Mme. Desbordes-Valmore, and Mdile. Delphine Gay. But he was never a militant or thorough-going member of the party "he retired," says Sainte-Beuve, "to his ivory tower before the heat of the day." His "Fifth of March" was a romance based on the most tragic of the crimes of Richelieu, inspired by Scott, but intended to be minutely true to history throughout. The author's ALFRED DE VIGNY connection with the theater led to an equivocal friendship with Mme. Dorval, commencing about the close of 1830, but the woman's heart soon found poetry a poor substitute for passion, and the tragedy left the poor idealist stripped of his last illusion. In 1845 Vigny was gratified by election to the Academy, on which occasion he made a long and wearisome address, which was listened to with unconcealed impatience. Thereafter till the close he lived but little in the world, in familiarity with no one, not even himself, his thought wrapped up in a pessimistic gloom from which he found escape only by the avenues of art. His was that profoundest kind of moral misery which needs no external reason for its being, incurable because itself its own poison. He died in Paris after the long agony of cancer, Sept. 17, 1863. Vigny's work was elegant but cold. No poet has had grander conceptions than the few fundamental ideas that inform his work, and it is not so much inspiration as meditation that gives the key note to all his poetry.