Countess of Ségur
The Countess of Ségur, Sophie Fiodorovna Rostopchine (in Russian), born August 1, 17992 in Saint Petersburg and died February 9, 1874 in Paris, is a French woman of letters of Russian origin, author of books for young people, notably the Sophie trilogy: "Les Misfortunes de Sophie", "Les Petites Filles MODELS" and "Les Vacances", which recount the blunders and trials of Sophie de Réan, the victim of a stepmother, Ms. Fichini, while her cousins and friends are both reasonable and provided with a loving mother.
She is also the author of children's stories published from the 1850s and several other novels, such as Le Général Dourakine and L'Auberge de l'Ange Gardien.
Biography
Family origins
The Rostopchin family from which she comes is a great family of the Russian nobility whose genealogy goes back to the Mongol Khans of the Golden Horde and the family of Genghis Khan.
His father was Count Fyodor Rostopchin ( 1763-1826 ), an infantry officer who reached the rank of lieutenant general, minister of foreign affairs to Tsar Paul I, then governor-general of Moscow, notably in 1812 at the time of Napoleon's offensive.
Her mother is Countess Catherine Protassova, a former maid of honor to Catherine II.
Sophie, the couple's third child, was baptized in the Orthodox religion, her godfather being the Tsar himself, son of Catherine II.
Youth in Russia
She spent her childhood in the Voronovo estate near Moscow ( 45,000 ha and 4,000 serfs), where Fyodor Rostopchine brought Scottish agronomists in order to improve agricultural techniques that were still backward in Russia, which is reported in several of his daughter's novels.
She received the education of the children of the Russian aristocracy who favored the learning of foreign languages, French in the first place. As an adult, she will be a polyglot, mastering five languages.
She is also a turbulent little girl, mistreated by her mother, who deprives her of food, drink, and warm clothes, punishes her by locking her in her room, humiliates her in public, and beats her cruelly. Influenced by Joseph de Maistre, plenipotentiary minister of the King of Sardinia to the Tsar, and by the Jesuits, Countess Rostopchine converted from Orthodoxy to Catholicism.
Sophie, since the age of thirteen, has been raised in the Catholic religion against the advice of her father, who remained Orthodox.
Napoleon's troops in Moscow.
In 1812, during the Grande Armée's invasion of Russia, his father served as governor of Moscow. He launches pamphlets against Napoleon, evacuates the fire engines, and frees prisoners with the mission of setting fire to each of the neighborhoods.
The resulting fire in Moscow made Sophie say: “I saw something like the aurora borealis over the city,” and forced Napoleon into a disastrous retreat.
The success of this plan, however, led to the hostility of those who had lost their homes, aristocrats and merchants alike, so much so that Fyodor Rostopchine, disgraced by the Tsar, went into exile, along with a servant in Poland in 1814, then in Germany., in Italy and, finally, in France in 1817. In all these countries, he was welcomed as a hero - savior of the monarchy.
Departure for France and marriage
He brought his family to Paris, and it was there that Sophie Rostopchine met, at nineteen, Eugène de Ségur (1798-1863), grandson of Louis-Philippe de Ségur, who was French ambassador to Russia and great-grandson of Marshal de Ségur who was Minister of War for Louis XVI. The marriage, arranged by Sophie Swetchine, a Russian who also converted to Catholicism, took place in Paris on the 13th and July 14, 1819. The following year, his parents returned to Russia.
This marriage is initially happy, but she is subsequently abandoned by a fickle husband, who notably cheats on her with his servant. Eugène's situation, penniless and idle, only improved in 1830, when he was named peer of France. He only visits his wife on rare occasions, at the Château des Nouettes, in Aube, offered by Fédor Rostopchine to his daughter in 1822 note 6. They had eight children, including Louis-Gaston de Ségur, future bishop. Eugène would have nicknamed his wife “Mother Gigogne.” Preferring her castle to Parisian society, she transferred all her affection to her children and, later, her grandchildren.
Sophie Rostopchine suffers from violent migraines. Some believe that she exhibits hysterical behavior, inherited from her mother or perhaps due to a venereal disease transmitted by her fickle husband with hysterical attacks and long periods of aphasia, forcing her to correspond with those around her using a slate. Above all, she is subject to pressure from her mother, her mother-in-law, both authoritarian and intransigent, and Ségur's family, who constantly complain that her dowry has not been paid in full.
A late vocation
She wrote her first book at over fifty years old. These are moral tales intended for his grandchildren.
The Countess of Ségur began to devote herself to literature by writing down the tales she told to her grandchildren and grouping them together to form what is today called Les Nouveaux Contes de fées. It is said that during a reception, she read a few passages to her friend Louis Veuillot to calm the atmosphere, which had become tense. It was the latter who would have had the work published by Hachette.
Other historians say that Eugène de Ségur, president of the Compagnie des chemins de fer de l'Est, met Louis Hachette, who was then looking for literature to entertain the children, with a view to a new collection of the "Library of the Railways", would then have told him about his wife's gifts and would have presented her to him sometime later.
She signed her first contract in October 1855 for 1,000 francs. The success of the New Fairy Tales encouraged him to compose a work for each of his other grandchildren.
Eugène de Ségur grants Louis Hachette the monopoly on the sale of children's books in train stations note 7. In 1860, Louis Hachette established the Pink Library collection, where the works of the Countess of Ségur were published.
Subsequently, she obtains that the royalties are paid directly to her and discusses her royalties more firmly when her husband cuts off her funds.
Recent years
In 1866, she became a Franciscan tertiary, Sister Marie-Françoise, but continued to write. His widowhood and the resulting collapse in sales of his books forced him to sell Les Nouettes in 1872 and to retire, the following year, to Paris, to 27 rue Casimir-Périer 10 ( 7th arrondissement ).
She died at this address at the age of seventy-four, surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She is buried in Pluneret ( Morbihan ), near her son Gaston. At the head of his grave, on a granite cross, is inscribed: “God and my children.” His embalmed heart is placed in the front choir of the chapel of the convent (or monastery) of the Visitation, at 110 rue de Vaugirard, where his daughter Sabine de Ségur, who also entered religion.
Novels of the Countess of Ségur
Presentation
The recurring theme of corporal punishment ( A Good Little Devil, General Dourakine, Sophie's Misfortunes, Little Model Girls, etc.), which perhaps echoes his own unhappy childhood with his mother, marks a break with previous models. Children's literature, notably the model of Perrault's tales or the tales of Madame d'Aulnoy. With the Countess of Ségur, the punishment is all the more crudely represented as the realism of the descriptions is without complacency. The use of corporal punishment is clearly condemned, meeting the disapproval of characters represented as models of morality (such as Mmes de Fleurville and de Rosbourg in Les Petites Filles MODELS ), lastingly traumatizing the children who are victims of it and comforting them in their vices which can be corrected in a completely different way, with an education that is certainly strict, but based on patience, trust, confessions and forgiveness.
Several other aspects of his work describe particularities that no longer exist today: for example, the care of parents and the presence and status of servants. Others are obsolete: medical treatments such as the abusive use of bloodletting, poultices “sprinkled with camphor” ( Les Petites Filles Modeles ), fresh gum water, salt water against rabies, and so on. Following the realism in the representation of everyday life and its details has earned the Countess of Ségur to be called “the Balzac of children” by Marcelle Tinayre.
His works present, through certain characters, caricatural and stereotypical characteristics of the morals of various peoples, as the French aristocracy imagined them: miserly and sordid Scots, mean and saber-like Arabs, drinking and filthy Poles, thieving and deceitful Vlachs and Gypsies, violent Russians knouting their wives, serfs and maids, and so on.
From their first years of publication to 2010, 29 million copies of his works were sold.
Sources of inspiration
The Countess of Ségur gave several of her characters names belonging to people around her, thus expressing her adage: “Write only what you have seen”. Here are some examples :
- Sophie: her own first name. He is a mischievous character, eager to experiment against adult guidelines (walking in quicklime, cutting his eyebrows, using a hot curling iron on his doll's hair and on his own hair; free a bullfinch which will be devoured...). The stories dealing with Sophie's life from the trip to America are much more painful for her (loss of her mother, then her father, remarried to a tyrannical shrew fond of physical abuse, return to France where Sophie is disillusioned, at both very fearful and courageous). The Countess put many of her own childhood memories into her character.
- Camille and Madeleine are the first names of two of his granddaughters, Camille and Madeleine de Malaret.
- Paul is that of his son-in-law, the father of Little Model Girls, Baron Paul de Malaret.
- Élisabeth Chéneau 16 corresponds to Élisabeth Fresneau, another of her granddaughters.
- Jacques de Traypi: Jacques de Pitray is one of the grandsons of the countess.
It is the blindness contracted by his eldest son Louis-Gaston de Ségur, an ecclesiastic, which inspires the blind Juliette in A Good Little Devil.
The names or first names of the characters allow you to quickly know what behavior they will adopt:
- “proper” or noble names for the “nice” ones: de Réan in Les Malheurs de Sophie, Bonard in Le Mauvais Génie, d’Orvillet in Diloy le chemineau, de Fleurville and de Rosbourg in Les Petites FillesModels and Les Vacances etc.
- ridiculous names for "uneducated" or tangent characters: Tourne-boule in Les Vacances, Innocent, and Simplicie as well as Courtemiche in Les Deux Nigauds, Dourakine (a character inspired by his father) in L'Auberge de l'Ange Gardien and Le Général Durakin ( Russian: дурак ( dourak ) means “fool”), etc.
- negative-sounding names for the “bad guys”: the Gredinet group, Fourbillon, Gueusard and Renardot in Le Mauvais Génie, MacMiche in Un bon petit devil, Fichini in Les Malheurs de Sophie, etc.
Moral lessons
The novels of the Countess of Ségur, strongly moralistic, were influenced by the rereading and corrections made by her eldest son, the prelate Louis-Gaston de Ségur. Right and wrong are used to convey what is the right path and how it is in everyone's interest to be courageous, gentle and without bad intentions.
In the novels of the Countess of Ségur, education is a determining factor in the evolution of the individual. Bad influences and a repressive environment can cause children to be naughty. Too much laxity and indulgence make them selfish and vicious.
The novels contrast examples of what to do and what not to do. The titles also express this duality, for example, Jean, who growls, and Jean, who laughs. The author often opposes an exemplary character to a child who is searching for himself: the exemplary little girls who are Camille and Madeleine to the unfortunate Sophie in Les Petites FillesModels, Blaise to Jules in Pauvre Blaise and Juliette to Charles in Un bon petit devil.
In certain cases, the young hero commits mistakes which result from a repressive and brutal education; the violence and injustice experienced by Charles, or Sophie, in Little Model Girls who is mistreated by her stepmother, Madame Fichini. In other cases, it is the parents who spoil and never punish their children or who systematically defend them, whatever their behavior, like Georges' father in After the Rain, the Good Weather, Jules' parents in Poor Blaise, or Gisèle in What a Child's Love!.
With children, nothing is decided definitively. Charles ( A Good Little Devil ) and Sophie ( Les Petites Filles Models ), once removed from the brutality of their environment, will be able to rely on the models around them to improve themselves, just like Félicie in Diloy the Tramp who can She can count on her cousin Gertrude, who by all accounts is sweetness incarnate.
On the other hand, it is sometimes too late for some, who then become mean and childish adults who will, in turn, bring misfortune to their children: Christine's parents in François the Hunchback; Madame Fichini in Little Model Girls and The Holidays, beats Sophie mercilessly, but, even in the presence of adults, ridicules herself through excessive coquetry, through her gluttony and through all the faults she should have gotten rid of as a child; Alcide in The Bad Genie - to be opposed to the good Julien and the kind, but weak Frédéric - will never repent, on the contrary, and will meet a sad end.
More than simple novels with autobiographical influence, the works of the Countess of Ségur strongly influenced a new idea of pedagogy.
Editions
The novels of the Countess of Ségur were first published and illustrated by Hachette between 1857 and 1872 in the Bibliothèque Rose from 1860.
The last major edition was that of 1990, in the “Bouquins” collection at Robert Laffont, with three volumes bringing together a large part of the works of the Countess of Ségur (edition established and annotated by Claudine Beaussant) 18.
Didactic works
- 1855: Children's Health, a pediatrics book of medical advice, published independently, republished in 1857
- 1857: Mass book for little children, by Douniol éd., republished in 2012 by St. Jude éd.
- 1865: Gospel of a Grandmother.
- 1867: The Acts of the Apostles (named after a book of the Bible: Acts of the Apostles ), work presented by the author as a sequel to Gospel of a Grandmother ).
- 1869: A grandmother's Bible.
- Dominique Martin Morin Editions republished in 1997, under the title The Bible of a Grandmother, the three works The Gospel of a Grandmother (1865), The Acts of the Apostles (1867), and The Bible of a Grandmother (1868)
In 2012, St Jude Editions partially reissued the Book of Mass for Little Children, published in 1858. The 1858 edition is preceded by 12 prayers and followed by the gospels of the major feasts, which are not reproduced in the 2012 reissue 20.
Novels
All of the following books have been published by Hachette, with in some cases, pre-publication in the columns of La Semaine des enfants (indicated by the acronym LSDE ):
- 1856: New Fairy Tales (December): a collection of tales including Histoire de Blondine, de Bonne-Biche et de Beau-Minon, Le Bon Petit Henri, La Petite Souris grise and Pooh.
- 1858–59: Trilogy centered on Sophie de Réan, sometimes referred to as the Fleurville Trilogy: Les Misfortunes de Sophie; Little Model Girls; Holidays.
- 1860: Memoirs of a Donkey ( LSDE, from December 17, 1859)
- 1861: Poor Blaise ( LSDE, from July 13, 1861)
- 1862: La Sœur de Gribouille ( LSDE, from March 22, 1862)
- 1862: The Good Children ( LSDE, from August 13, 1862)
- 1863: Les Deux Nigauds ( LSDE, from October 4, 1862).
- 1863: The Guardian Angel Inn ( LSDE, from April 8, 1863).
- 1863: General Dourakine ( LSDE, from November 14, 1863).
- 1864: François the Hunchback ( LSDE, from May 4, 1864)
- 1865: A good little devil ( LSDE, from December 14, 1864).
- 1866: Comedies and proverbs: a collection of short stories including Les Caprices de Gizelle, Le Dîner de Mademoiselle Justine, On ne ne pas catch les flies avec le vinegar, Le Convict, ou à tout sin merci and Le Petit De Crac.
- 1865: John who growls and John who laughs
- 1866: La Fortune de Gaspard, a novel with Balzacian accents, unlike the other novels of the Countess of Ségur
- 1867: What childish love!
- 1867: The Bad Genius
- 1868: Diloy le chemineau, initially titled Le Chemineau (April 11)
- 1871: After the rain, the good weather
== Cover of Letters from a Grandmother ==.
Correspondence
The correspondence of the Countess of Ségur has been the subject of fragmentary editions:
- Letters to the Viscount and Viscountess of Pitray (son-in-law and daughter of the Countess), published in 1891 by Hachette.
- Letters from a grandmother (to her grandson Jacques de Pitray), in 1898.
- Letters from the Countess of Ségur to her publisher (1855 to 1872), in 1990 in volume 1 of Œuvres chez Robert Laffont.
- Correspondence (with various correspondents), in 1993 published by Scala, with a preface by Michel Tournier.
Bilingual editions
- The Calambac Verlag editions ( Saarbrücken /Germany) have partially reissued Les Petites Filles Models (1858) and Pauvre Blaise (1861) in a bilingual French-German version.
- 2013: The Chickens/Die Hühnchen. Bilingual French-German edition. German translation by Elena Moreno Sobrino. Éditions Calambac Verlag, Saarbrücken. ( ISBN 978-3-943117-72-1 ).
- 2013: Revenge of an Elephant/Die Rache eines Elefanten. Bilingual French-German edition. German translation by Elena Moreno Sobrino. Éditions Calambac Verlag, Saarbrücken. ( ISBN 978-3-943117-75-2 ).
- 2013: The Robin/Das Rotkehlchen. Bilingual French-German edition. German translation by Elena Moreno Sobrino. Éditions Calambac Verlag, Saarbrücken. ( ISBN 978-3-943117-74-5 ).
- 2013: The Mad Dog/Der tollwütige Hund. Bilingual French-German edition. German translation by Elena Moreno Sobrino. Éditions Calambac Verlag, Saarbrücken. ( ISBN 978-3-943117-73-8 ).
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