Louise Colet

Louise Colet ( born August 15, 1810 in Aix -en- Provence as Louise Révoil, † March 8, 1876 in Paris) was a poet of French romanticism.

Life

Louise was born as the seventh child of the post holder Antoine Révoil and his wife Henriette Leblanc in Aix, but later claimed she grew up in a castle. Her brother Pierre Révoil (1776-1842) was a painter. They even came at the age of fifteen years with poetic experiments show. After his father's death, she moved with his mother to Mouriès where they owned a farm. There married Louise on December 5, 1834 Musicians Hippolyte Colet to enter from the provinces to Paris. There she presented her first collection of poems, but found no first gracious audience.

She worked across numerous advocates and patrons a reputation in the Parisian literary scene. For breakthrough helped her close acquaintances and the philosopher Victor Cousin, for a short time Minister of Education. The revaluation of her work, she received admiration and cash prizes by the Académie française. In Paris, she continued to write numerous novels, travelogues, dramas and lyrical collections. Your promotions she received thanks to friends in the nobility and the royal court several regime changes of time. In her literary salon also Victor Hugo wrong. Multiple they gained literary prizes and awards of the Academy. Her daughter Henriette was born in 1840; neither Hippolyte Colet nor Victor Cousin acknowledged the paternity.

Colet was 1846-1854 the lover of the younger writer Gustave Flaubert; its correspondence to her is largely preserved. Flaubert was famous for his realistic works and saw shortcomings in Colets late Romantic poetry. He spent much time in the repair of bodies until he finally turned away from her. The final break was triggered by Flaubert's Madame Bovary, in which the title character is portrayed Colet and believed denigrated. Her novel Lui presented a biographical counter-attack on Flaubert dar. After Flaubert turned Colet, Alfred de Musset to which they also described after the end of the affair in the novel Une histoire de soldier. More mistress were Abel -François Ville Main and Alfred de Vigny. All these perverted lover in her salon.

After her husband's death in 1853 Colet earned their livelihood and that of their daughter by her literary writing, as well as petitions to various locations, which opened her up to old age new scholarships. She made 1859-1861 a two-year trip to Italy and visited, among others, Genoa, Turin, Milan, Naples and Rome. She made ​​close acquaintance with Belgiojoso and Garibaldi.

Reception

The contemporary Meyers Lexicon praised her poetry as "not without grace, the verses flow easily and at ease; but sometimes interfere too masculine accents and a certain affectation heroic feelings ".

Later critics of her work expressed the suspicion that Colet their contemporaries less convinced by the quality of her poems than by their " unparalleled beauty," with her ​​" decades of literary Paris is said to have bewitched ." Prices they should have surreptitiously through friends; her husband said to have been appointed only on her instigation professor of music.

Works

• Les fleurs du midi (1836 )
• Penserosa (1840 )
• Le poème de la femme (1853 )
• Cequ'on rève s aimant (1854 ),
• La jeunesse de Goethe (1839 ).
• Les derniers abbés, mœurs religieuses d' Italie ( 1868)
• Les devotees du grand monde; type it you Second Empire (1873 )
• Lettres de Beranger et détails sur sa vie ( 1857)

• Deux mois d' émotion (1843 )
• Staintes Folles (1844 )
• Hélène (1854 )
• Lui, roman contemporain (1859 )

• Promenade en Hollande (1859 )
• Deux mois dans les Pyrénées ( 1866)
• Naples sous Garibaldi (1861 )
• L'Italie of Italy ( 1862-64, 4 volumes)