Leone Leoni: A New Translation
Juliette knows what Leone Leoni is. She has watched him gamble away fortunes that were not his to lose, charm his way out of consequences that would have destroyed anyone less beautiful, disappear without explanation and return without apology. She has no illusions about his fidelity, his honesty, or his capacity for the kind of love she deserves. She knows all of this with complete clarity.
She loves him anyway. She cannot stop.
Leone Leoni, published in 1835, is George Sand's deliberate answer to Manon Lescaut - the Abb Pr vost's great novel of a man destroyed by his love for an unworthy woman - with the roles precisely reversed. Where Pr vost gave us a man who loves past reason and past hope, Sand gives us a woman in the same position, and in doing so transforms the argument: this is not a story about a weak person and an irresistible one, but about what happens when the entire architecture of romantic feeling has been built, from the beginning, to make certain kinds of love feel inevitable.
Told by Al jo - a man who loves Juliette and cannot reach her, watching from the outside as Leone's magnetism does its work - the novel moves between France and Venice with the atmosphere of a city that has always understood the beauty of things that conceal their own foundations. Leone himself is not a villain in any simple sense. He is something more unsettling: a man whose charm is entirely real and whose constancy is entirely absent, and who cannot be held responsible for a power over others that he did not ask for and does not particularly notice.
Sand was thirty-one. She was in the middle of the most searching investigation of women's emotional lives that French fiction had yet attempted. Leone Leoni is its most intimate and most devastating installment.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
