Théophile Gautier

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(b Tarbes, 30 Aug 1811; d Paris, 23 Oct 1872). French poet and critic. He created several ballets, among them the well-known Giselle (music by Adam, 1841), and contributed to the Moniteur universel. His daughter Judith Gautier (1845-1917), a writer on music, was an ardent partisan of Wagner.

Gautier, Théophile (b Tarbes, 30 Aug. (some sources say 31 Aug.) 1811, d Neuilly, 23 Oct. 1872). French poet, writer, ballet critic, and librettist. As art and drama critic of La Presse from 1836 to 1855 he wielded great influence on the development of French romantic ballet in the 1830s and 1840s. He also wrote as a critic for Le Moniteur universel (1855-68). He was Carlotta Grisi's greatest admirer (and married her sister) and, in collaboration with Vernoy de Saint-Georges, wrote the libretto of Giselle for her in 1841. He also wrote the librettos for La Péri (1843), Pâquerette (1851), Gemma (1854), and Sacountala (1858). Le Spectre de la rose (1911) is based on one of his poems; while Le Pavillon d'Armide (1907) is based on one of his stories. Some of his copious writings on dance were collected by C. W. Beaumont and published as The Romantic Ballet as Seen by Théophile Gautier (London, 1932, repr. London, 1973). Ivor Guest's 1986 collection entitled Gautier on Dance is considered the best English edition of Gautier's dance writings.

Gautier, Théophile (1811–72), French poet, critic, and author of fantastic tales. He abandoned art studies to pursue poetry after Nerval introduced him to Hugo, for whom he led the legendary defence of Hernani (1830). A member of Le Petit Cénacle (literary salon of extreme romantics), he embraced the bohemian lifestyle represented in Les Jeunes‐France (The Young‐France, 1833) and caused a scandal with the ‘art for art's sake’ manifesto‐preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). A lengthy journalistic career as a leading art critic followed, with success for his poetry: Émaux et Camées (1852; Enamels and Cameos, 1903) inspired the Parnassian poets and influenced Baudelaire, who dedicated to Gautier Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857).

Gautier also wrote novels (Le Roman de la momie, 1858/The Romance of the Mummy, 1863; Le Capitaine Fracasse, 1863/Captain Fracasse, 1880) and fantastic stories. They incorporate elements he defined in literary criticism on the fantastic (juxtaposition of realistic settings with mysterious phenomena, refusal to explain the impossible) and feature romantic quests for perfection and occult escapes from material worlds into altered states. His early stories show the influence of Cazotte and Hoffmann. ‘La Morte amoureuse’ (‘The Vampire’, 1836), for example, has a twisted ‘Sleeping Beauty’ motif: a young priest kisses the perfection of beauty—a ravishing corpse—and reanimates a vampire who falls in love with him. In this dark anti‐fairy tale, beauty no longer signifies goodness, the ideal is neither attainable nor permanent, no one lives happily ever after. The priest must also lead both a real life and a dreamlife. Gautier elsewhere explores this double conflict of real vs. ideal in relation to madness (‘Onuphrius, ou Les Vexations fantastiques d'un admirateur d'Hoffmann’ (‘Onuphrius’, 1832) and to time and space. Past and present mingle whenever Regency art comes to life to seduce protagonists (‘La Cafetière’ (‘The Coffeepot’, 1831); ‘Omphale’, 1834) or when objects take men back to Ancient Egypt or Pompeii (‘Le Pied de momie’, 1840/‘The Mummy's Foot’, 1900; Arria Marcella, 1852/Arria Marcella, 1900).

Gautier also wrote lighter fairy tales. ‘La Mille et deuxième nuit’ (‘The Thousand and Second Night’, 1842) is a pastiche of the oriental fairy tale written during the second phase of the oriental vogue in France (the first was occasioned by Galland's translation of Les Mille et une nuits (The Thousand and One Nights) (see Arabian Nights). Its frame story concerns Schéhérazade: she has run out of tales, begs one from the author, and learns about a man who has vowed to love a péri (a fairy in Middle Eastern mythology). Gautier later reworked this as a ballet (La Péri, 1843), written two years after Giselle, ou Les Wilis (1841). This acclaimed ballet reworked Slavic legends told by Heine: Gautier changed the wilis from fiancées' into dancers' spirits who lead men to their death. His other fantastic ballets dealt with alchemists, prophesying, and magic rings; unperformed scenarios treated undines, the Pied Piper, and the Pygmalion myth.

Bibliography

• Castex, Pierre‐Georges, Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant 1951).
• Richardson, Joanna, Théophile Gautier: His Life and Times (1959).
• Smith, Albert B., Théophile Gautier and the Fantastic (1977).
• Todorov, Tzevtan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (1973).

— Mary Louise Ennis

Gautier, Théophile (1811-72). Poet, novelist, and critic. He spent his whole life in Paris and was a central figure in the world of literature and art for nearly half a century, moving from the brash young Turk of the Petit Cénacle to the established member of Second Empire high society.

More than most other important writers, Gautier has suffered from being made to exemplify a series of positions and postures beloved of traditional literary history: youthful Romanticism at the time of Hugo's Hernani (chronicled in Gautier's own Histoire du romantisme, 1872); dandyish aestheticism in his Préface de Mademoiselle de Maupin; cold and formalistic Parnassianism in Émaux et camées (1852). Not that any of the traditional characterizations are exactly false; rather, they tell only a very small part of the story. Gautier's work is, in fact, rich and varied. His critical writings on literature, fine art, theatre, pantomime, ballet, and dance, for the most part originally published in the periodical press, fill many volumes, including Les Grotesques (1844—essays on writers such as Villon or Théophile), L'Art moderne (1855), Histoire de l'art dramatique depuis vingt-cinq ans (6 vols., 1858-9). The value and interest of this work has yet to be fully acknowledged, as has that of his large body of travel writing (including Voyage en Espagne, 1845).

His reputation for impersonal formalism or rococo sensuality has for too long perpetuated an image of Gautier as superficial, frivolous, and even heartless. In fact, even in his early self-dramatizing and provocatively risqué works, one can detect a writer who, while amply given to play and paradox, none the less shows himself to be engaged with a set of deep obsessions concerning sexuality and death which would continue to preoccupy him in all his later works. He displayed enormous virtuosity and self-assurance in his early works, and his assault on the utilitarianism and philistinism of bourgeois society in the Préface de Mademoiselle de Maupin remains a remarkably lively and pertinent piece of writing. It was here that Gautier put forward the aggressive version of l'art pour l'art with which he has most commonly been identified.

He was a successful exponent of many fashionable forms, from the two long narrative poems playing on fantastic or Byronic themes, Albertus (1832) and La Comédie de la mort (1838), to the Hoffmannesque fantastic tales such as ‘La Morte amoureuse’. But his success was not merely a fashionable one, and his importance was handsomely acknowledged by Baudelaire when he dedicated Les Fleurs du mal ‘au poète impeccable’, ‘au parfait magicien ès lettres françaises’. In Gautier a lifelong belief in the superior values of art and artifice went together with a readiness to work with the most difficult verse forms (particularly the octosyllabic quatrain). His aestheticism was at one with the themes of literary decadence, and he was to have a great influence upon English fin-de-siècle culture. He has also remained popular with the general public for his historical adventure novel, Le Capitaine Fracasse (1853).

[Brian Rigby]

Bibliography

• P. E. Tennant, Théophile Gautier (1975)

Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, a French romantic author, was born in southern France , the son of Antoinette Adélaide Cocard and Jean Pierre Gautier. As a child, he read Robinson Crusoe, and at school he associated with Gérard de Nerval (later translated Faust into French). As a young man, he was affected by E. T. A. Hoffmann's tales and Goethe 's "The Bride of Corinth." Gautier also became associated with the circle of writers around Victor Hugo. Throughout the early 1830s, he frequented a variety of literary gatherings, including one that gathered at the Hotel Pimodan; famous for its indulgence in opium.

A change in family fortune in the 1830s forced Gautier to work as a journalist; and he worked, somewhat unhappily, at it for the rest of his life. He authored thousands of reviews as a literary, theatre, and art critic. Gautier's long hours of work earned little more than a modest living and few honors during his lifetime. Apart from newspaper work, he wrote many romantic stories, although his role in the larger romantic movement was overshadowed by that of Victor Hugo. His own exploration of the psyche, in part stimulated by the use of opium, gained greater acknowledgement in the years since his death, when Gautier finally took his place among France's outstanding nineteenth-century writers.

Like the majority of other French romantic writers of note, Gautier found great inspiration in the vampire myth. His earliest and most famous vampire story, La Morte Amoureuse (literally, "the dead woman in love") appeared in 1836. An English translation appeared in The World of Theophile Gautier in 1907 and was published separately in 1927 as The Beautiful Vampire. The story used what was to become a recurring theme in Gautier's fiction. It told of a woman who returned from the dead to vampirize the male subject of the story. In The Beautiful Vampire, the dead woman, Clairmonde, made herself so attractive to her male lover, the priest Romuald, that he chose to bleed to death rather than lose her attention.

The theme would reappear, for example in Aria Marcella, which was directly inspired by Goethe's "The Bride of Corinth," in which Gautier declared, "No one is truly dead until they are no longer loved." The 1863 novel The Mummy's Foot was set among archaeologists in Egypt. In it a mummy, which retained the elasticity of living flesh and had "enamel eyes shining with the moist glow of life," was compared to a vampire lying in its tomb dead ... yet alive.

Another vampiric story, Spirite (1866), used the, then recent, fad of spiritualism as the setting. The story told of a man who experienced both the symbolic and actual death of his love. She first became a nun (and thus died to the world) and then physically died. When the woman took her vows, she gave herself to her love and vowed to be his beyond the grave. Contact was made in a seánce and she ultimately lured the man to his death.

During the last years of his life, Gautier lived in a Paris suburb, where he died from a heart condition in 1872. Most of his romantic tales have been translated into English.

Gautier, Théophile. The Beautiful Vampire. London: A. M. Philpot, 1927. 110 pp.
---. Spirite: Nouvelle fantastique. Paris: Bibliothéque Charpentier, 1967. Riffaterre, Hermine. "Love-in-Death: Gautier's `morte amoureuse.'" In The Occult in Language and Literature. New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980, pp. 65-74.
Smith, Albert B. Théophile Gautier and the Fantastic. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1977.