Le poëme de Saint-François

Le Poëme de Saint-François [Poem of St. Francis]
Librairie Poussielgue et Fils | Paris 1866 | 12 x 19 cm | half morocco
First edition.
Half red morocco (unsigned, but attributed to Canape), date at foot, original wrap
pers preserved with a few very minor repairs, top edge gilt.
Inscribed by Liszt to «Madame la Comtesse de Fleury – respectueux hommage d'un pauvre franciscain de tiers ordre [To the Countess de Fleury – in humble homage from a Poor Franciscan tertiary].»
A very good copy, nicely bound.
Provenance: from the library of the poet Armand Godoy.
This pious inscription on the work of another man combines, despite its apparent Franciscan humility, the three essential components of Liszt's Romantic spirit: mysticism, art, and above all, love.
A founding figure of the idea of the osmosis between man and nature, St Francis of Assisi very quickly won over the Romantics, in search of medieval heroes. Chateaubriand devoted some very fine passages to him in the second volume of Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, and he was an inspiration to Hugo, Lamartine, Vigny as well as Liszt, who joined the Franciscan order in 1865 and composed several works dedicated to him, among them the Cantico del sol di Francesco d'Assisi and Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds (both executed at the same time as the work by Anatole de Ségur that Liszt presented to the Countess de Fleury).
The Poem of St Francis is, in fact, one of the first works dedicated to the «Poverello», who experienced several centuries of neglect before this Romantic renaissance. Liszt, a keen observer of studies of, and artistic representations of, St Francis, had in his library several important works on the Franciscans, including a copy of this life of the Saint inscribed by Ségur to «the abbé Liszt», in «an homage of respectful admiration» (the work was catalogued as part of his library after Liszt's death).
Uniting spirituality and poetry, this verse hagiography could hardly fail to win over the composer of the Poetic and Religious Harmonies, freshly ordained a Franciscan tertiary.
Nonetheless this pious ex-dono from a «poor Franciscan» to a devout Countess herself withdrawn from the world, relit a more ancient and more sulphurous fire which had consumed the youth of the author of the Reminiscences of Robert the Devil and the Mephisto Waltzes.
The «Countess of Fleury» was in reality the «Duchess» de Fleury but Liszt had known her above all with the former title since, when he met her in 1831 in a Parisian salon, Adèle-Joséphine Quarré de Chelers was the Countess Adèle de La Prunarède.
After a significant mystical crisis, Liszt – then aged 19 – felt his first romantic stirrings. If «we know little about these various sentimental adventures...one name always stands out from this succession of crushes: that of the Countess Adèle de la Prunarède» (cf. Serge Gut, in Correspondance Franz Liszt et Marie d'Agoult).
The young composer's first real affair was to be with this «intoxicating woman», fifteen years his senior. «Barely six months after coming out of his contemplative lethargy, Liszt plunged himself into the delights and torments of a sensual and feverish passion» (op. cit.) which was to be interrupted only in 1832, when he met Marie d'Agoult.
Though Liszt had spent several months with Adèle in the Château de Marlioz in Haute-Savoie, this affair remains not very well known to biographers and historians.
Nonetheless, the importance of this lover is proved by the lively jealousy she inspired in Marie d'Agoult throughout her relationship with Liszt, as her correspondence and diaries show.
From the first years on, the letters of Liszt and Marie d'Agoult are pervaded by this menacing ghost.
The fears of Marie d'Agoult, who was tormented by Liszt's adventurous past, were particularly focused on Adèle (the only one to be referred to exclusively by her Christian name). Despite the care she took not to let her emotions show, Liszt's replies are explicit: «Miss Boscary is marrying Miramon, and I am pleased. Adèle in Geneva is devastated. That, too, is good.»
Marie d'Agoult's reply is entirely mutilated at the passage concerning Adèle: «Talk to me of Adèle. What more can she suffer still? You know that I love her» (the rest has been cut out, as is common with very sensitive passages).
In the couple's letters between 1833 and 1834, references to this Adèle are as frequent as they are enigmatic: «You have it in your power to do me a great service; my poor and miserable fate is in your hands...it is neither you nor me I refer to, but Adèle» (Liszt to Marie, August 1833).
In May 1834, responding to an explicit request: «tell me what you wrote to Adèle,» Liszt confirms to Marie d'Agoult her fears of the affection he bears for Adèle:
«I thought it better not to reply to her for the moment...The need to see her, to speak to her from the depths of my soul torments me sometimes...but rarely.»
Not much later, following a new outbreak of jealousy on the part of Marie, Liszt was forced to go back over his painful break with Adèle:
«It was a time of struggle, anguish, and lonely torment – a time where I broke, destroyed, violently annihilated the love of Adèle. It was then that I wrote: I am and I would rather not be – I must suffer, and suffer alone...»
In letter after letter, he confides in Marie his guilty remorse: «I was nothing but a coward and a miserable poltroon [Liszt underlined these two words] for Adèle.» Then he once more turns cruel: «What have I to say to her?...and what I have to say to her, would she understand?», or sarcastic: «Wolf told me a scandalous little story about Mr Ginestous and Adèle. The punchline was a few strokes with a riding crop, humbly borne by Adèle...That made me smile.» Some of his letters even seem cynical, like in the following passage about another conquest thrown aside: «I heard her cry from her very innards: ‘Love me, save me!', like Adèle, before.»
Adèle seems to disappear for a time from the lives of Liszt and d'Agoult, but when they settled in Italy in 1837, her presence in that country immediately began to worry Marie (she had already noted in her diary «Adèle's pilgrimage to Rome» the year before).
«Would Mme Pictet happen to know in which Italian town...Mme de la Prunarède is currently to be found...?» (letter to A. Pictet, October 1837).
From then on and until their separation in 1839, the proximity of this rival remained a constant threat to the couple:
«Mme de la Prunarède is here with the Cadores. She is separated from her husband and divides herself between her lovers and her confessors» (letter to Louis de Ronchaux, Rome, 18 March 1839).
During their mutual stay in Italy, Marie avoided meeting Adèle, but her correspondence bears witness to the fact that Liszt, much to her annoyance, saw her all the more assiduously. Hence this bitter missive to Adèle from July 1839:
«Like you said yesterday to Franz, you are held in very high regard in the world. The same world that holds you in high regard holds me in no regard at all, and the worst of it is that I care not a whit...The regard you have acquired is the fruit of a certain prudence that must never be compromised by meeting my insolent sincerity head on. Truthfully! They say also that you convert fishermen, that you walk victorious on the paths of salvation, dragging with you your subjugated souls. Will I, too, give in like the others, to the irresistible eloquence of your pretty blue eyes? But I fear not.»
Not much later, her diary tells us clearly of the fear that this first love of Liszt's still provokes in Marie:
«Adèle came...I received her in my room. My heart beat dreadfully. I recover when i see her. She has changed terribly. She is all out of shape, her eyes are shady, her lines grown dumpy, her color muddy. She has an air of excessive falseness...Franz thinks she's fat» (Diary, July 1839, in Marie D'Agoult, Correspondance générale, Volume II).
But what frightened Marie even more than the beauty of Adèle was her mysticism. In fact, Liszt's former mistress was on the same path as the lover of her youth; and having known, like him, «rather a tumultuous emotional life, she spent her final years in profound piety» (op. cit., p. 562)
Does Liszt's inscription therefore reveal a profound complicity with this woman whose sensuality bore her away from religion and with whom he reconnected once more after thirty-five years in their shared faith?
In 1877, Liszt summed up his life thus: «Having denied myself painfully for
thirty years, from 1830 to 1860, of the sacrament of penitence, it was with absolute conviction that, coming back to it again, I could tell my confessor...'My life was nothing but a long distraction from the feeling of love.' I should add: above all by music – the art both divine and satanic at the same time which, more than any other, induces in us temptation.»
A superb and very rare inscription combining the three great passions that consumed the heart of the Romantic composer – music, spirituality, and love.