Judith Gautier and her world

Press, 23 January 1988, Page 25

Judith Gautier and her world

Judith Gautier: a Biography. By Joanne Richardson. Quartet Books, 1987. 262 pp. Notes and index. $74.99. (Reviewed by Margaret Quigley) Judith Gautier was the elder daughter of Theophile Gautier, “that endearing brilliant Romantic” and consequently she spent her adolescence surrounded by the most eminent writers, composers, artists, and actors in France. Her mother, Gautier’s longtime mistress, was a tempestuous Italian singer, Ernesta Grisi, and Judith, after an infancy fostered by an adored and adoring nurse, spent two unhappy years in a sombre convent while both parents pursued their own careers. In 1856, when she was just eleven, she and her unknown younger sister Estelle, were taken by their mother to live in their father’s house at Neuilly “where Hugo was a familiar god and Baudelaire and Flaubert casual visitors.” Throughout her ’teens Judith delighted in the rich, exciting life of art, science, and music, and also in her close relationship with her father. Her astonishing beauty was remarked on by all who met her and she showed an equally astonishing intellectual ability. She early developed an intense interest in all

things Oriental and her translations of Chinese poetry and her novels set in the Orient (which she never visited) soon made her famous in her own right. An early disastrous marriage to Catulle Mendes ended in divorce and she resumed her father’s name. To her salon in Paris and her holiday villa in Saint-Enogat came all the literary, artistic, and music luminaries of the age; she championed Wagner’s music to an initially unimpressed French public, inspired Sargent to paint a wonderful series of portraits, became the first woman to be an Academician in France, found a late happiness with a younger woman, Suzanne Meyer-Zundel, and died in 1917 while the First World War destroyed the world she had enchanted.

Clearly she was a talented and fascinating woman, but this biography does not, alas, convey much of that fascination. It is solidly based on admirable and thorough research of the published works of Judith Gautier, the memoirs of her friend, Suzanne, and of many of her other friends and acquaintances, and a mass of unpublished papers and correspondence in the Gautier family archives and in libraries and museums in Paris. Yet all this painstaking effort has produced a rather pedestrian account of Judith Gautier’s life, with little impressions of the beauty, warmth, and wit of the woman who charmed all who met her. Joanne Richardson seems content to let the facts of her life and the quoted reactions of her contemporaries speak

for themselves and little attempt is made to convey her character and motivation. This is particularly evident as the biographer skates over the failure of the Mendes marriage with only a few dark hints as to the cause of the disillusionment. This is the first full-scale biography and it will no doubt, rightly be regarded as the definite and authoritative account of her life. Joanne Richardson’s qualifications are impeccable. She read, modern languages at Oxford and is well known for her nineteenth-century French studies which include a biography of Theophile Gautier, so there is no lack of knowledge of, or feeling for, the period or the subject. It is a thorougl. workmanlike and impressive book, but many readers will wish it has just a little more life and sparkle.