I don’t know if the portrait that appears in this book of Augusta Amiel-Lapeyre, in her adolescence, is the only one that exists or if there are others. His great-grandchildren confirm his ignorance of family history. Perhaps not much documentation is kept either. The big house remains in … VillegailhencAude, where he lived all his life without practically moving.
Berta Vias, to whom we owe this first editorial in which she produced a magnificent anthology of texts, an enlightening study and a translation worthy of her complexitiestells us that internally this property has changed a lot. In reality, it only retains the main staircase and is dedicated to hotel uses.
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Author
Augusta Amiel-Lapeyre -
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Returning to the portrait, the simply graceful young girl, with a serene face and penetrating gaze, wears a pendant with a cross. His left hand holds a small book which is probably a missal. While the one on the right illuminates a bouquet of flowers which rests on a small table, perhaps circular, where there is a reproduction of a Virgin of Lourdes lit by a candle on a crystal candelabra. The thoughts of this magnificent writer lie in a Catholic moral order and ethicsbut it is not at all a containment barrier to expand freely, whether rightly or wrongly.
These “wild thoughts” come from a daughter, a wife, a mother and an exemplary citizen, a person isolated in the Occitanie regionjust a few kilometers from Carcassonne, its capital. A medieval town rebuilt by Viollet le Duc. He was born there in 1858 and died in 1944. Almost no one in the family knew these papers written in pencil on which he recorded his thoughts or reflections.
The large garden and the forest accompanied him constantly. “Come, let’s talk in silence,” he told them. He silence This is one of the most repeated problems. One of his relatives, Paul Lapeyre, was a well-known Catholic writer who promoted the social doctrine of the Church of Pope Leo XIII. Oddly enough, our current pope is Leo XIV. Almost nothing is known about his childhood and youth. The very distant Franco-Prussian War and the death of his very young elder sister (“Those who do not receive a visit from happiness must offer hospitality to resignation”).
Be Catholic, the Lapeyre family She was a Republican. Augusta marries André Amiel, son of an industrialist. He was a person of great culture. Musician, art critic, bibliophile, philanthropist and archaeologist. He supported all these devotions thanks to the fact that he was president of the Société Mutuelle Saint-Roch de Villegailhenc.
It’s in a Catholic order, but it’s not a containment barrier at all
Augusta was surrounded by this world, but her intuition and personal ingenuity were enough for her. Your thoughts are not a sign of thunderous problems, but rather of everyday problems. There are also many thoughts about women. For example, she claims female literary authorship: “When a woman writer conceals her anonymity under a male name, she insults her sex. » She did it partially. He signed the first edition of Pensées sauvage (Paris, 1913) with the initials of his name AA-L. From another thought arises this other protest: “The man from Latin countries says to his wife: ‘You will be my slave besides my lover‘. These two words are excluded. Augustus feminist? Yes, very rebellious to certain social customs of her time with which she did not agree.
Berta Vias
In this edition of “Pensamientos Savages”, the writer and translator has produced an excellent anthology of texts and an in-depth analysis.
Some of the questions addressed by these great aphorisms are, for example, the painthe uselessness of glory, hope, memories, happiness, love, time, God (“He is sure to know the depths of certain souls…”), illusions, friendship, joy, sorrow, old agemisanthropy (“It is the bitter joy of being alone”), sincerity, deception, lies, prayer (“To pray is to abandon the earth”), dreams, literature (“In literature we only recognize talent in those who are dead”), thoughts (“A deep thought is a fragment of the soul” or “In front of a desk, thoughts fly away like starlings in front of the scarecrow”), death, nature (“To live in the field is to be preserved”), wickedness, ignorance, suicide (“The Heroism of Cowardice”), as well as an infinity of questions that cannot be addressed here.
Genius
Among his sons, Peter and Dionysius were the most famous. The latter, a successful playwright, was the one who taught Francis Jammes the first edition of “Pensées sauvage”. The poet was enthusiastic, prepared another one, submitted it for an Oscar and won it. The volume appeared in 1923 with its prologue. The author of “From the Point of Dawn to the Point of Prayer”, who knew her, describes her as discreet, ignorant of herself, shadow that speaks and smilespossessed by the genius of her thought in a remote and hidden village in Aude. Fairy, Sibyl or Reaper? The poet has not dispelled this doubt. Far from Paris, the literary world, the university, the press and publishers, he creates his work according to his desires. When it was published it had some impact but did not reach beyond its scope.
Nature and culture. Movement and statism. Reflections through everyday objects or bookish, still give these notebooks, notes or secret annotations exceptional value today. Augusta remained in limbo for decades. She herself has already admitted that she had done words like bittersweet honey. His texts shine like a beacon in the darkness. A cultivated writer, but overwhelmed by her great natural talent, she writes: “Many read to be able to say: ‘I have read.’ And others to say: ‘I’ve been thinking.'”
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