Sapho Reading Order

Sapho (1884) by Alphonse Daudet is his most psychologically concentrated novel, a portrait of a destructive passion between Jean Gaussin, a young Provençal newly arrived in Paris, and Fanny Legrand ('Sapho'), an aging artist's model and courtesan who has been the inspiration and companion of the Parisian artistic bohemia. The title is ironic: Fanny is called 'Sapho' because a sculptor made a famous statue of her in that pose, but Daudet's Sapho is everything that the ancient Lesbian poet was not — passive, manipulative by default rather than design, a woman whose power over men is the accumulated residue of twenty years of being desired rather than any active effort of will. Jean's passion for Sapho is one of the finest studies in French fiction of the psychology of obsession: he knows she is not worth what he is sacrificing, he watches himself sacrifice it anyway, and the lucidity with which he watches is precisely the mechanism of his destruction. The novel was ahead of its time in its psychological precision — Daudet is describing what would later be called repetition compulsion with the vocabulary of Naturalist analysis. The Paris milieu of artists, models, and journalists is rendered with the same insider accuracy as Le Nabab's political world, and the Provençal family scenes (the parents who wait for Jean to return to the south, the cousin Rosa who loves him decorously) give the obsession its context.