Recommendations
Books Like Volupté
Best books to read after Volupté by Sainte-Beuve
Readers who respond to Volupté's Catholic Romanticism, its analysis of the impossible love between the sensual and the spiritual, and its treatment of religious conversion as the resolution of Romantic crisis will find the wider tradition of French Romantic introspective fiction.
- 1Buy
Adolphe
by Benjamin Constant
The closest sibling of Volupté in the French Romantic tradition: Adolphe analyzes with the same precision the will that cannot sustain a love it genuinely feels, and the destruction that follows from the gap between the feeling and the commitment. Where Amaury finds resolution in the priesthood, Adolphe finds no resolution at all.
- 2Buy
Oberman
by Étienne Pivert de Sénancour
The most philosophically austere of the French Romantic novels of incapacity: Oberman refuses the Catholic resolution that Amaury achieves in Volupté, which is why reading both together shows the range of resolutions — or non-resolutions — that the French Romantic tradition found for the problem of the exceptional self.
- 3Buy
René
by François-René de Chateaubriand
René is the archetype of the Romantic hero who cannot find adequate experience, and his religious ending (his sister enters a convent, he dies obscurely among the Natchez) is a Catholic resolution that anticipates Amaury's priestly conversion in Volupté: both texts end in the Church as the only space available to the Romantic sensibility.
- 4Buy
Dominique
by Eugène Fromentin
Fromentin's 1863 novel is the secular version of the same story: where Amaury in Volupté achieves resolution through the priesthood, Fromentin's Dominique achieves resolution through retirement to his estate and the management of his land — both are Romantic men who find peace only by renouncing the ambitious love that animated their youth.
- 5Buy
The Abbé Constantin
by Ludovic Halévy
Halévy's 1882 novel is a lighter but thematically related treatment of the French Catholic world that frames Amaury's priestly vocation in Volupté: the portrait of a village priest and his young charges shows the same Catholic social world from the inside.
- 6Buy
The Charterhouse of Parma
by Stendhal
Stendhal's great novel ends with Fabrice del Dongo's retreat into a Carthusian monastery — the same Catholic resolution that Amaury achieves in Volupté, but arrived at after the most intensely active and passionate of Romantic lives rather than the most passively sensitive one.
- 7Buy
Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
La Nouvelle Héloïse is the founding text of the tradition of the love that must be renounced for a higher spiritual duty that Volupté inherits: Julie's renunciation of Saint-Preux for her husband and family is the secular version of the renunciation that Amaury makes when he enters the priesthood.
- 8Buy
Confessions of a Young Man
by George Moore
Moore's 1888 memoir is the English Decadent equivalent of Volupté: a young man's account of his aesthetic and erotic education in Paris, written with the same combination of personal confession and cultural analysis that characterizes Sainte-Beuve's novel.
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