Sicily Book

An almost cliff notes presentation on the life of Madame de Stael. It's odd that the author decided to write this book since it seems that she does not like de Stael or her works very much--or her parents and much of those in that circle. She pronounces de Stael a manic depressive bipolar with an opium addiction and blames these causes for her death (or it was "spinal marrow cancer" -- something I was unaware of). Well what the hell about the syphilitic Benjamin Constant? Seriously, he had syphilis since he was a young man--did de Stael get it during the long cringe-worthy romance? What about the many other women in his life? (Although it seems like the author was constantly slut shaming de Stael--who cares if younger men were throwing themselves at her and she occasionally reciprocated?) Could syphilis account for her backward, oddly shaped younger child? What about the mysterious gangrene? The hallucinations? Maybe advanced syphilis is why she married that guy 18 years younger than herself who was dying of tuberculosis and not other reasons.

You almost want to break into her tomb and have a team of doctors find out for sure. And why hasn't anyone peeked in? If her mother embalmed herself with a vat full of formaldehyde so she'd be perfectly preserved, it's a shame to never see if it worked. Beyond have her bones checked out, for total prurient reasons it would also be interesting to know how many leading personages had STDs back in the day, besides Mrs. Beaton--reading statistics in that WW1 book about how 9% of all children born at turn of the century had congenital syphilis blew my mind (and that 30% of babies were born out of wedlock). Anyways, now I'll probably have to read a book about Benjamin Constant, but after all these books on the time, I really don't want to. Like Chateaubriand, I find him annoying to the extreme but maybe the answers are there.

It seems like everything good de Stael did, there is some obnoxious carp. So she learned German, read a ton of German books, visited Weimar, palled around with Goethe and Schiller, hired the leading Shakespearean German expert to be her assistant/children's tutor/weird third wheel, wrote a famous book about German literature that started the field of Comparative Literature, but she never went into one Gothic cathedral when her carriage briefly stopped at some town. She had time to go in, but was disinterested in architecture. Gasp. Maybe she was sleepy with all the opium and young guys, maybe she didn't want to mess up her turban. Who knows? But the author cites this several times.

All the askance looks aside, I did enjoy parts of this book (which hopped around on a number of subjects and the layout is pretty jarring) because of its subject matter--and I think the author does pinpoint, in de Stael's own words, her philosophy that was the focus of her life and was at the root of everything she did: ENTHUSIASM. "The storm of passion passes, the pleasures of self-love wane, only enthusiasm is never altered. Enthusiasm is the emotion that offers us the greatest happiness, the only one that offers it to us, the only one able to sustain human destiny in whatever situation destiny places us...Enthusiasm is tolerant, not out of indifference, but because it leads us to recognize the value and beauty of things."

And it's that kind of enthusiasm, she brought to everything she did. Evading authorities all over Europe, in her sprawling entourage of refugees, dressed in a crazy turban, writing constantly, sleeping only a few hours a night (I did like that this author included her daily schedule), and contrary to all her contemporaries it seems, died leaving even more money than she inherited. With a title like "The First Modern Woman" by the way, I would expect that to be addressed in the book--which it is not at all in this. You could make a strong argument that she was the first liberated woman of her time--even though she lived in the Age of Despots. There's a good line where during one of her many fights with Napoleon (and the author does bring up that de Stael can be seen as the inverse of Napoleon which is interesting), where she says they might be able to censor what she writes (and she got plenty of non-censored copies published in England so not really an issue) but never what she thinks, and therefore is impossible to stop.