Reading Order
RaphaëlRaphaël Reading Order
Raphaël (1849) by Alphonse de Lamartine is an autobiographical novel of doomed love that recounts a version of Lamartine's relationship with Julie Charles, the woman who inspired his most famous poem, 'Le Lac' (1820) — a married invalid whom he met at Aix-les-Bains in 1816, with whom he spent the autumn, and who died the following year before they could meet again, leaving him with only the lake and the memory. Raphaël is the novelistic account of this relationship: the young poet Raphaël meets 'Julie' (named for Rousseau's heroine) at a Swiss spa, they fall in love during a month of extraordinary happiness, she returns to Paris and her dying husband, and she dies leaving only letters and the landscape. The book is highly literary, deliberately echoing La Nouvelle Héloïse and Werther, and is as much a meditation on memory, beauty, and the relationship between lived experience and its transformation into poetry as it is a love story. It appeared in 1849, when Lamartine was a major political figure (he had been effectively head of government in 1848), and its retrospective tenderness reads partly as an escape from the failed politics of the Second Republic into the pure world of youthful feeling.
Where to start
Read Raphaël after 'Le Lac' and the other early Méditations poétiques — the novel is most moving when read as the narrative context for poems the reader already knows. Readers who know La Nouvelle Héloïse will recognize the deliberate echoes and find an additional layer of meaning.
Complete Raphaël Book List
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Raphaël
Alphonse de Lamartine·1849·Available in French in Hachette, Garnier, and GF Flammarion editions; translated into English in the nineteenth century (various publishers). The Pléiade Oeuvres poétiques complètes includes the context of the poems it illuminates. - Buy
Méditations poétiques
OptionalAlphonse de Lamartine·1820·Contains 'Le Lac' and the other Julie poems that Raphaël retroactively narrates — best read first.
Raphaël — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Raphaël autobiographical?
Raphaël is very closely autobiographical, though Lamartine disguised the characters and altered some details. The 'Julie' of the novel corresponds to Julie Charles, the wife of the physicist Jacques Charles, whom Lamartine met at Aix-les-Bains in 1816 when she was convalescing from tuberculosis; they had an intense but apparently unconsummated love affair during the month of their shared convalescence. She died in December 1817 before Lamartine could return to Aix the following summer — the fact that he came back and found the lake and her absence gave him 'Le Lac,' his most famous poem. Julie Charles's letters to Lamartine survived and were eventually published, and they confirm the general accuracy of his account in Raphaël. Lamartine presented the novel as fiction but was transparent about its autobiographical basis, and contemporaries understood immediately that Raphaël was the story behind 'Le Lac.' The novel is one of several nineteenth-century French works (alongside Constant's Adolphe and Sand's Elle et Lui) that blur the line between memoir, novel, and confession.
What is the relationship between Raphaël and Lamartine's poetry?
Raphaël functions as an extended annotation to the early Méditations poétiques (1820) and Nouvelles Méditations (1823) — the lyric poems that Lamartine wrote in response to his relationship with Julie Charles and her death. 'Le Lac' is the most famous of these: it addresses the lake at Aix-les-Bains and asks it to preserve the memory of the hours Lamartine and Julie spent on its surface. Read without knowledge of the biographical context, 'Le Lac' is a beautiful meditation on time and loss; read after Raphaël, it is the concentrated lyric residue of the narrative the novel tells at length. This relationship — between the compressed intensity of lyric poetry and the expanded narrative of prose — was one that Lamartine was always interested in exploring. He wrote Raphaël partly to give his readers the story behind poems they had loved for decades, and partly to demonstrate that the experience the poems distilled was real and specific rather than conventional and literary.
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