Jean de La Brète (1858–1945)
Autor(a) de My uncle and my curé
About the Author
Image credit: Jean de la Brète
Séries
Obras por Jean de La Brète
La source enchantée 1 exemplar
La Solitaire 1 exemplar
Les Tournants 1 exemplar
Conte bleu 1 exemplar
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Nome canónico
- Brête, Jean de la
- Nome legal
- Brète-Cherbonnel, Alice de La
- Outros nomes
- Brête, Jean de la
- Data de nascimento
- 1858
- Data de falecimento
- 1945
- Sexo
- female
- Nacionalidade
- Frankrijk
- Local de nascimento
- Saumur, Frankrijk
- Local de falecimento
- Breuil-Bellay, Maine-et-Loire, Frankrijk
Membros
Críticas
Listas
Prémios
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Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 8
- Membros
- 47
- Popularidade
- #330,643
- Avaliação
- 2.3
- Críticas
- 2
- ISBN
- 4
- Línguas
- 1
Conte bleu ("fairy-tale"), the main work in this volume, is a jolly little romantic comedy in epistolary form. The handsome young poet Antoine has had to sell off the family estate to pay off his late father's debts, and is now living incognito in a Paris garret, where his humble clerical job pays barely enough to keep him in postage stamps (of which he uses a great many...), let alone bread. Then one day he receives an anonymous donation of pâté — a kind lady has heard about the sad, handsome starving poet and spontaneously sent him a food parcel. Naturally, it turns out that the anonymous lady (who doesn't know his true identity) is his childhood sweetheart Chantal, who has married and been widowed since they last saw each other. Much enjoyable confusion results, happily stirred up by their various correspondents, especially the old Marquise de Lambelle, whose heart is still firmly in the 18th century, and who clearly models herself on an intriguing Marquise from a much better-known epistolary novel...
The Conte runs out with a hundred pages still to fill, so the publisher has added two shorter works. Amour lointain is in diary form, the story of an 18th-century young lady from Virginia who goes to Paris to be painted by Kneller and fall in love with the wrong English milord. It's supposed to be a tragic tale, but the charm and spontaneous bounce of Miss Evelyn's diary entries makes it difficult to take the sad ending seriously. Contes de Grand'mère is a somewhat over-sweetened tale of a young girl who talks to the flowers.
I can't think of any good reason why anyone would go out and look for this, unless you were writing a thesis about French romantic fiction ca. 1900, but it was fun to dip into. And Cherbonnel does handle the technical complexities of epistolary form very smoothly. The male nom-de-plume seems a bit pointless, though: it looks as though she has long since given up the pretence and is writing straightforwardly as a woman for a mostly female readership, but she's stuck with the name because of her early success.… (mais)