Correspondance d'Alphonse de Lamartine, Deuxième série. 1807-1829. Tome 3: 1820-1823 (review)

The letters of the period from 1820 to1823 present a curious mixture of moods. The early correspondence reveals a writer confident of his powers and at ease in Parisian literary circles in the wake of the publication of the Méditations poétiques (1820), the collection that established Lamartine's reputation as a poet of the first rank. Even the King (p. 78) is reported as having made favourable comments. In 1820 Lamartine married Marianne Birch and took up a diplomatic posting in Naples. His situation was improving, personally and professionally. However, he soon returned to France and thereafter spent most of his time looking after the family estates. At best this focus on practical concerns produced an awareness of the 'bienheureuse fatalité' (p. 337) that governed his life but, more often than not, the mood of calm acceptance was disrupted by feelings of boredom and dissatisfaction. His health also remained poor. He suffered from gout and fevers and fell prey to a life-threatening pneumonia early in 1820. His spirits were lifted by the birth of a son but the child died in 1822, aged twenty months. He was also depressed by the lack of enthusiasm that greeted the appearance of the Nouvelles Méditations in 1823. Equally destabilizing was the return of the financial concerns that had only been staved off temporarily by his marriage. The result was that Lamartine soon found himself once again looking for paid employment. He turned to Chateaubriand for aid but received short shrift. Did he even have a future as a poet? Lamartine was concerned that the success that he had achieved with the Méditations now counted against him: 'C'est un grand malheur que d'avoir fait une fois quelques vers dans sa vie, on vous juge à jamais incapable d'autre chose' (p. 367). However, a letter sent to Virieu at the close of 1823 showed that he had lost nothing of his artistic ambitions, for Lamartine was already laying the plans for his metaphysical epic poem, Les Visions, a grandiose project that finally took concrete form as La Chute d'un ange. Elegance, wit and a facility with language remain the hallmarks of Lamartine's epistolary style in this volume, but only rarely, and most notably in his exchanges with Virieu, does he truly bare his soul.