Sapho by Alphonse Daudet (1884)

Another French novel of bleared love. I am beginning to lose hope in finding a male writer of the late nineteenth century in France who doesn't have this Maupassantian attitude. The use the characters put each other to - utilizing each other while spouting all the (pseudo)poetry of love, the grim deceptions and hopeless misconceptions of what constitutes loyalty certainly bring me down. The astonishing capacity of knowing someone very deeply and intimately, benefiting from their care - and being able to throw them away when their looks fade, or you want some different advancement in society, beggars belief. But then perhaps I'm a crazed idealist when it comes to these sorts of questions, or perhaps Daudet's situations are set up as an effort which is in some essential way non-realistic, a dramatisation to serve some other end - a grim depressive notion, philosophically, of what life and love amount to. Sapho is Fanny Legrand, woman of the demi-monde, and artists' model, most famously for the sculptor Caoudal, whose Fanny-inspired piece, a sensuous representation of Sapho, is often copied and sits in many homes across Paris as one of the sculptures of the era. Fanny has a background in the streets, and from time to time we are reminded of her gutter-language and -ideas. She has been 'passed around' from artist to artist, and is now an ageing muse. Young Jean Gaussin falls for her still glowing embers of beauty, and so begins a seesawing scramble between his, his family's, and her wills as first he feels trapped, then returns to her, falls for someone else, is encouraged away by his family, falls for her again, suspects her of all sorts of chicanery, watches as she loses her looks even more and joins very dubious company, falls blindly for her while engaged to someone else, and finally loses her altogether. At the very end she says, tellingly, "I'm exhausted!". I'm not surprised that she would be. And better off out of it!