The Studio as Scene of Emulation: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's L'Atelier d'un peintre

The Studio as a Scene of Emulation:

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's L'atelier D'un Peintre

It is just one more of the misfortunes that have dogged the career of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, in her life-time and posthumously, that Roland Barthes should have captioned her portrait photograph by Nadar in La Chambre claire: 'Marceline Desbordes-Valmore reproduit sur son visage la bonté un peu niaise de ses vers'.¹ Evidently, for Barthes, the photograph gives us no more than we expected from the poet, but ought we to anticipate the same meagre dividend from her novel, L'Atelier d'un peintre, sub-titled (with an obvious allusion to Balzac) Scènes de la vie privée? The indications to the contrary are not, at first glance, particularly hopeful. Published in 1833 in an edition of not more than 500 copies, the work had little immediate impact and the publisher, Charpentier, remained deaf to her entreaties to republish a decade later when her finances, never too promising, were at one of their lowest ebbs. The sad story of her attempts to revive this cherished text was told in the introduction to the posthumous edition (limited to 439 copies) that finally appeared in 1922. There the solicitous editor, A. J. Boyer d'Agen, took occasion to express sympathy with her latest disaster, which was the unfortunate mishap of her bronze statue, erected in her home town of Douai in 1896, being cast into the river by retreating German troops in 1918. However, he himself had delivered a harsher blow to her reputation when he cut the text by a third and high-handedly renamed it: La Jeunesse de Marceline.²

One is tempted to add to this catalogue of mishaps the fact that Desbordes-Valmore's tormented life later fell prey to an omnivorous biographer, Francis Ambrière, who published the first volume (1786–1840) of what he grandly termed Le Siècle des Valmore in 1987. To the credit of this scholar can be put the point that no one could ever again equate the novel with an autobiography, as Boyer d'Agen had done. This meticulous narrative demonstrates how infrequent was her contact with her uncle, the painter Constant Desbordes, and how different her initially flourishing career as an actress was from the plight of the female painting student evoked in the novel. On the downside, it must be conceded that, like so many biographies devoted to figures not quite of the first rank, it tends to submerge the artist in a torrent of misadventures. We are informed that Desbordes-Valmore herself once began to write her Mémoires. The fact that she never got very far becomes comprehensible as we retrace this saga of oppression and penury.

So why bother with a novel that stops short of being a memoir, and few people would have read, at the time of publication or subsequently? The text to be adopted here is also in certain ways problematic, not just because it went out of print just after its regional publication in 1992, but because it follows the corrected version of the 1833 text, fully annotated in the author's hand, that Desbordes-Valmore planned to use for her second edition.³ However the full text of the original edition is now also available on CD-ROM with a miscellany of other French texts relating to art.⁴ Situating Desbordes-Valmore a little approximately-as falling between Rétif de la Bretonne and George Sand-the editor aptly characterizes the novel not as an autobiographical sketch but as 'une exploration de ce motif nouveau, pittoresque au plus haut point dans l'esthétique romantique: l'atelier'.⁵ This is helpful. Indeed it provokes a useful comparison with the pictorial genre of the studio picture, a rich source for artistic manners in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It...