Love in Five Temperaments: Five extraordinary woman of Eighteenth Century Parisian Society.
Herold, J. Christopher.
Place Published: New York:
Publisher: Atheneum,
Date Published: 1961.
Description: STATED FIRST EDITION. 338 pages with index plus 16 pages black and white plates. The book is in NEAR FINE condition with very small bump to front board edge. Very clean cloth board. The dust jacket is in VERY GOOD condition with minor edgew/shelf wear, abrasion to back wrapper edge at fold. NOT price-clipped. NOT remaindered. JMVINTAGE specializes in Books, Magazines and Treasures related to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor....and other curious people. This Dust jacket Reads: "The five women portrayed in the following pages all lived in the same century (their lives span the years 1682-1803), in the same country, and in the same society-the small world of the Parisian grand monde. They also have in common having been born or raised in circumstances most unpropitious for their subsequent careers, never having been married (Mademoiselle Delaunay's late marriage can scarcely be taken seriously), and having possessed an independence of character and judgment that made them in many ways atypical of their time. In all other respects, however, it would be difficult to find five persons more different from one another: an unfrocked nun; a Circassian slave girl transplanted to Paris; a singularly literate chambermaid, whose only happy times were spent in the Bastille; an illegitimate daughter of great family, who became the most influential bluestocking of her day and then destroyed herself by an intense and secret passion; an actress of genius, who in her private life sought to accord the sordid with the sublime. MADAME DE TENCIN, an unfrocked nun -ambitious, unscrupulous and serenely cynical- helped to make two cardinals (her brother and her lover), gave clandestine birth to a child, whom she abandoned and who became known as d'Alembert, and ended her career as the hostess of the most brilliant salon in Paris. MADEMOISELLE AISSE, bought at the age of four as a slave by the French ambassador to Turkey, was forced, on growing up, to become the ambassador's mistress. She fell in love with a Knight of Malta, to whom she bore a child, came under the influence of an older woman who made it her business to lead her back to virtue at the sacrifice of love, and died, at forty, tom by the conflict between her passion and her quest for saintliness. MADEMOISELLE DELAUNAY, lady's maid to the Duchesse du Maine, took a part in her mistress' treasonable machinations against the Regent and spent the two happiest years of her life imprisoned in the Bastille, where she conducted a platonic love affair with one of her jailers and a forthright one with a fellow prisoner. MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE, whose birth was noble but illegitimate and incestuous, served as companion to her aunt, whose salon she stole, including its brightest star, her lover d'Alembert. She embodied the Age of Sensibility at its most morbid and extreme; her letters to the Comte de Guibert are justly celebrated in the literature of passion. MADEMOISELLE CLAIRON succeeded, by her genius as well as by her exceptionally casual morals, in becoming the greatest actress of her day, whom Voltaire admired and whom Diderot considered the ideal exponent of the art of acting. She originated the intellectual school of acting and brought to her art a seriousness and respect that transcended her scandalous personal life. Resigning from the stage in her forties, she spent the rest of her life in two spectacular liaisons, and died -decrepit, forgotten and in poverty, yet still suffering from the urges of heart appropriate to a young woman. Although the lives of all five women would have taken quite different courses in another age and society, their passions and conflicts are timeless. None was typical of her age, though all were affected by it. The portraits are not a study of love in the eighteenth century, but a study of five hearts, minds and temperaments. The century and its society form the unifying background-and perhaps also the comic relief. "
Edition: First editionBinding: Cloth
Condition: Near Fine in Very Good dj
Book Id: 17836
Price: $16.50
