The Breton chateau of Lamennais, two novels and two discordant novelists (Stendhal and the Duchess de Duras)

Abstract

The reason for writing this article was the correspondence of the French diplomat and industrialist Denis Benoit, in his younger years — a friend of Felicité Robert de Lamennais, with the Duchess Claire de Duras, hostess of a fashionable salon frequented by “all Paris” of the Restoration period. The letters are from the period 1818–1820, when Denis Benoit, passionately in love with Duras' daughter Clara, on the eve of her wedding is forced to leave Paris with his father. The high-society lady Claire de Duras dabbled in literature. The struggle between feeling and aristocratic duty ended with the fact that after marrying her daughter to a social “equal”, she writes a novel, Edouard, which is based on the family history. If, as both rumor and the literary critic Sainte-Beuve claimed, Denis Benoit became the prototype of Edouard in Duras' novel, then Edouard in turn became the prototype of the famous Julien Sorel (previously Stendhal had already once “rewritten” in his novel Armance another Duras novel — Olivier, or the Secret). This article analyzes the letters of Denis Benoit, which reveal the reality that was hidden behind the novel Edouard. The key moment was the month spent by Denis Benoit in 1819 in the chateau of La Chênaie. It can be assumed that walks in the park of La Chênaie, the landscapes of which will soon become vivid metaphors in Words of a Believer by Lamennais, were fateful for someone who was destined to become the prototype of two French novels. It was here, in the company of Lamennais, who was famous for healing “wounded souls” (for example, those of the poets Edouard Turkety and Maurice Guerain), that Denis Benoit's tragic vision of the world was replaced by a kind of resignation.