Reading Order
Dominique Reading Order
Dominique (1863) by Eugène Fromentin is often described as the last great French Romantic novel — a retrospective memoir in which a successful provincial landowner and retired gentleman recalls, at the request of a young friend, the one great love of his life: his unrequited passion for Madeleine, a married woman, and the years of impossible love he eventually renounced. Fromentin was best known as a painter (his North African canvases were among the most admired in the Salon of the 1850s and 1860s) and as an art critic (his Masters of Past Time, 1876, on Dutch and Flemish painting, remains a classic), and Dominique is marked by the painter's eye: the descriptions of the Charente landscape of Fromentin's childhood are among the most precise and beautiful in French Romantic prose. But Dominique is also a profoundly melancholic work — its protagonist has not merely renounced love but has renounced ambition, the city, and all the aspirations that animated the Romantic generation, retiring to his estate and the management of his land as the only life possible after the great Romantic hopes have been disappointed. The novel was immediately recognized as a masterpiece by Sainte-Beuve and George Sand, but its melancholic refusal of both dramatic resolution and comic consolation kept it from popular success; it has been a 'critic's novel' ever since, admired precisely by those who read Adolphe, Oberman, and Volupté for the same reason.
Where to start
Dominique (1863) — the novel is short (about 280 pages) and elegant; the retrospective memoir form gives it a controlled, slightly nostalgic tone from first page to last. The Edward Marsh English translation (1948) is the standard; the GF-Flammarion French edition is the best scholarly text. Read after Adolphe and Oberman to understand Dominique as the last and most peaceful of the Romantic novels of renunciation.
Complete Dominique Book List
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Dominique
Eugène Fromentin·1863·Published 1863 in the Revue des deux mondes; published as a book the same year. Fromentin's only novel; the Charente landscape is the landscape of his childhood in Saint-Maurice-la-Clouère. George Sand called it 'a masterpiece of observation and feeling'; Sainte-Beuve wrote a famous appreciation that helped establish its reputation.
Dominique — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Dominique the last great French Romantic novel?
The claim that Dominique (1863) is the last great French Romantic novel is a critical commonplace that is also, like most critical commonplaces, approximately true in a limited sense. The Romantic novel in France is usually understood as the tradition that runs from Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) through Chateaubriand's René (1802), Constant's Adolphe (1816), Sénancour's Oberman (1804), and Sainte-Beuve's Volupté (1834) — novels of introspective self-analysis, unrequited or renounced love, and the incapacity of the exceptional individual to find an adequate world. Dominique (1863) belongs to this tradition in subject, form, and temperament, but it was published at a moment when French literary culture had moved well past Romanticism: Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) and the Goncourts' realist novels had already established a new aesthetic, and Fromentin was writing consciously in a retrospective mode, as if the Romantic novel were already historical. The novel is 'last' in the sense that it is the last major French novel that could have been written by a Romantic — after Dominique, the tradition that produced Adolphe and Oberman was definitively over — but it is also a late and self-aware contribution to that tradition, which is why its melancholy is tinged with a kind of historical awareness that Adolphe and Oberman, written before the tradition was complete, could not have.
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