Volupté Reading Order

Volupté (1834) by Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve is the only novel by the greatest French literary critic of the nineteenth century and one of the most important works in the tradition of French Romantic introspective fiction — an autobiographical novel about Amaury, a young man of sensitive religious temperament who is in love with the wife of his closest friend, cannot resolve his competing loves (romantic and divine, sensual and spiritual), and eventually becomes a priest. Sainte-Beuve was the dominant critic of French Romanticism and the intimate of all the major Romantic writers — he was Lamartine's friend, Chateaubriand's analyst, Hugo's companion (and, for a period, the lover of Hugo's wife Adèle), and Stendhal's most perceptive reader — and Volupté is saturated with the personal and literary experience of the whole Romantic generation. The novel belongs to the tradition of René, Adolphe, and Oberman in its treatment of the 'vague des passions' — the undefined longing of the Romantic soul — but adds a specifically Catholic dimension: Amaury's incapacity for decisive love is not merely psychological but spiritual, and his resolution into the priesthood is a genuine conversion rather than merely a social escape. Proust, who regarded Sainte-Beuve as his critical bête noire (the subject of his unfinished essay 'Contre Sainte-Beuve'), nevertheless acknowledged Volupté as one of the works that preceded and made possible his own kind of psychological analysis.