Two great French writers have had the privilege of diseases named after them and it is possible that there may be other ‘grands ecrivains’ out there queuing up for this dubious honour.
Alfred de Musset, who was an early lover of George Sand, had what became known as de Musset’s Syndrome: a continual bobbing of the head due to a deficient aortic heart valve. He died of heart failure in his sleep at the age of 37. He wrote plays, poetry, novels and was the English translator of, de Quincey’s: “Confessions of an Opium Eater." But his most beautiful and most famous oeuvre was: “Confession D’un Enfant du Siecle” (Confessions of a Child of the Century) He wrote about love, passion, loss of faith and honour. Reading this work one wonders whether the great first person narratives that came later, such as Knut Hamsun’s ‘Hunger’ and Italo Svevo’s ‘Confessions of Zeno’ and ‘A Life’ were in anyway influenced by de Musset. In advising readers to read “Confessions of a Child…’ one should be aware that you have to led slide over you the somewhat overheated and overblown rhetoric that was in lesser and grander degrees the flavour of the epoch and a rather dull general discourse on political events at the beginning of the novel, but once on the hero Octave’s journey, twice hooked into his despair. La crise existentielle in full flow. For the full monty on the overblown rhetoric of the ‘Romantics’ look no further than the composer Liszt’s (quite unreadable) “Life of Chopin” Today’s lean and mean writing does not give one a headache that one receives from the welter of insincere emotional bombast of some of the Romantics. Have we got something right? Or have we thrown out the baby (emotion) with the bathwater (restraint)?
Stendhal, or to give him his proper name Henri-Marie Beyle experienced on a visit to Florence in 1817 what became know as Stendhal’s Syndrome or Florence Syndrome. That is - faintness, excitability, rapid heartbeat etc. At the Basilica of Santa Croce seeing the Giotto frescoes for the first time he was quite overcome and to use his own words: “I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.” I particularly like his ‘celestial sensations’. Two other cities have been known to produce strange symptoms: Jerusalem and Paris. Although with these places the symptoms are more - irritability, paranoia and persecution. Not anywhere near as pleasant.
