Notes

1 The Introduction to the Black Coat Press translation of Ahasuerus (2013, ISBN 9781612272146) contains a broader synoptic account of Quinet’s life and career, which there is no need to repeat in full here. 

2 This preface was added to the version of the work contained in the Oeuvres complètes, having evidently been written three years after the publication of the first edition but not previously used.

3 “The Florentine” is Giovanni Boccaccio, author of the Decameron.

4 Quinet adds a note at this point to say that this assertion is “in the tradition”—and, indeed, there is a very similar passage in Hersart de la Villemarqué’s own romance in the 1862 Myrdhinn, likewise derived from the Prose Merlin. However, Hermione also adds a note to the chapter saying that “this first scene in Hell is none other than the memory of a session of the Legislative Assembly on the eve of the coup d’état, of inextricable arguments between two camps of Reaction, each of which was attempting to damn the other. ‘In that chaos, only one voice was silent’—that of Louis Bonaparte: ‘a boa serpent who enlaced France in his coils.’ That prediction of Edgar Quinet’s dates from October 1848.” 

5 The reference is to the so-called Trioedd Ynys Prydein [The Triads of the Island of Britain], collections of which are contained in various 13th and 14th century manuscripts, although the notion that they are detached fragments of a monolithic work assembling the wisdom of the Welsh bards, as is tacitly assumed here, is dubious. They include fragments of Arthurian mythology appropriated from Anglo-Norman sources as well as Celtic materials.

6 Quinet adds a note saying that this speech is a literal translation of “a fragment of Gallic poetry.” Hermione’s notes comment that this chapter and the surrounding ones reflect Quinet’s “adolescent sentiments, poetic reveries [and] the influences that presided over his education,” and claims that Taliesin “recalls the scholar Kreuzer;” it is not obvious to whom she is referring, although either of the famous violinists named Kreutzer might be considered as a bard of sorts.

7 La Corne d’Artus—which Quinet’s alternative spelling makes more approximate to “Arthur’s Horn” is a hill in Beaubery, in Burgundy, at the top of which is what was long imagined to be a Druid monument, although more recent belief asserts that it is the ruins of one of the towers of a castle built by Artus, one of the original overlords of the Charolais. The young Quinet’s familiarity with the enigmatic artefact presumably occasioned his later decision to call his mythical king Arthus, and might well have helped formulate the notion of “the spirits of the ruins” that he subsequently refined in Greece.

8 This Blasius, Merlin’s teacher in the Prose Merlin, has no connection with the St. Blaise whose legend is featured in Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, who was not a hermit and has no connection with France, nor with the more obscure St. Blasius of Brittinis, who was a hermit but has no connection with Britain or Brittany—although it is not impossible that the author of the Prose Merlin might have thought that he did, and borrowed his name in consequence.

9 The temple to Poseidon on Cape Sounion, Latinized as Sunium; Lord Byron carved his name into one of the surviving stones, and Quinet probably saw the signature when he visited the ruins.

10 The reference is to the ancient Temple of Artemis [Diana in the Roman mythology] near Cefalu in Sicily. Viviane is credited with the celestial huntress Diana as a “godmother” on the warrant of the Prose Merlin, in which she is a huntress rather than the ethereal Lady of the Lake that she subsequently became in the Suite de Merlin and later texts, but Quinet’s Viviane does no hunting.

11 Herrmione’s notes record that these lines were written at Blankenberghe, near Ostend, in July 1852—thus predating the date that Quinet gave as the commencement of the book. Other pre-existent fragments might well have been incorporated into it as it developed; its composition might not have been strictly linear, although Hermione’s notes give no indication of any shuffling of the text.

12 Hoel of Armorica, or Hoel I Mawr, is depicted in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s imaginary history of Britain as a cousin of Arthur, who helps him repel the Saxon threat to Britain. Pharamond was a legendary Frankish king who allegedly reigned at the beginning of the fifth century; he is first mentioned in an 8th-century text, the Liber Historiae Francorum, which constructs an imaginary history for the Franks, much as Geoffrey invented one for England.

13 Le Roi des Aulnes [The Erl King, or King of the Alders] is the title of the French translation of J. W. Goethe’s ballad Der Erlkönig (1782), although the erl king in the poem is a supernatural being, barely glimpsed, which assaults a child being carried home by his father, and this reference is to the mythical prototype. Shakespeare based Lear and Macbeth on names mentioned in documentary sources, although the former is fictitious; similarly, Ossian is almost entirely the belated literary creation of James Macpherson, only faintly pre-echoed legendary material mentioning an Irish bard named Oisin.

14 Roland’s sword in the relevant cycle of romances. Hermione notes that this episode of the swords reflects Quinet’s regret in 1852 that France was still fascinated by “the Napoleonic tradition.”

15 The name Blanchefleur is featured in several different romances, but this one is presumably Perceval’s beloved in Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du graal. Isaure is also featured more than once, the name being best remembered in Quinet’s day by virtue of its attachment to Clémence Isaure, the legendary figurehead of the Floral Games of Toulouse, the supposed ideal of the Medieval troubadours. Enide is the heroine of the first of Chrétien’s romances, Erec et Enide.

16 This depiction of St. Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, carefully ignores her supposed prowess in battle, to which other versions of her legend call attention.

17 Owenn is the leading character of Owenn, ou la dame de la fontaine [Owenn; or The Lady of the Spring], one of the romances included by Hersart de La Villemarché in Contes populaires des ancient Bretons. The name is more usually rendered Owain. The same romance features the character that Quinet names as Gleouloued, known in Welsh documents as Glewlwyd Gafaelfawr.

18 Castor and Pollux.

19 Hermione’s notes say that the portrait of Isaline is “taken from life” but does not reveal the model’s identity, and Quinet might not have told her; she observes that this entire section reflects Quinet’s memories of his arrival in Paris in 1820 and his subsequent reactions to the city.

20 Ganieda is named as Merlin’s twin sister in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, and plays a major role in the narrative section of Hersart’s Myrdhinn, but it is perhaps surprising to find her mentioned here, as Quinet’s Merlin has no siblings. The name is adapted into the Welsh Gwenddydd when cited as Myrddin’s sister in a poem contained in the Red Book of Hergest, which dates from at least two hundred years later, although enthusiasts for the Celtic origin of the Arthurian mythos would argue that both must have been drawing on earlier Welsh sources. 

21 I have left this name as Quinet renders it, although Geoffrey of Monmouth renders it as Igerna, Malory as Ygrayne and other sources as Igraine; she was Arthur’s mother.

22 Again I have retained Quinet’s idiosyncratic spelling, although other sources render the name as Tegau or Tegau Eyfron [Tegau Golden-Breast]. She is mentioned in the Triads as the wife of Caradoc, one of the knights of the Round Table, whose fidelity is subjected to various tests, which she passes.

23 Hermione comments that many of the Books making up the novel commence with an “invocation” unconnected with the subject but designed to fix the memory of some event occurring at the time of writing; this greeting was allegedly offered to a “charming young woman, Marie de Guelle, since dead in the prime of life” who visited Quinet and Minna in Veytaux on the day he began this section. That implies a long gap in composition between the earlier sections of the narrative, compiled in 1852 or 1853, and the text from now on, dating from the late 1850s, though not necessarily written in the order in which they appear in the text.

24 Approximately “sadness makes the seer”. Although the phrase is not a quotation, a similar observation appears in the Vita Merlini.

25 Quatre Fils Aymon (The Four Sons of Aymon] is a 12th century verse romance, part of the Charlemagnian cycle, that exists in several versions, and which formed the basis of a 14th century prose romance. It appears to have been one of the most popular of all the works in the genre.

26 Brigliadoro and Valentine are really the same horse, the former being the rendering in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso of a name that had gone through various transitions but probably began as the French Veillantif [vigilant], that being the name given in the earliest version of the Chanson de Roland.

27 Angelica is a princess in the Orlando Furioso and its predecessor, Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, pursued by both Orlando [Roland] and Rinaldo [Renaud, one of the four sons of Aymon].

28 Clorinda is the warrior-maiden in Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata [Jerusalem Delivered] (1581)

29 The eponymous heroine of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or the Nouvelle Héloïse (1761).

30 Chimène is the leading female character in Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid (1637), who became the title character in Antonio Sacchini’s operatic version of 1783.

31 The original has “Herminie,” which is the title of an 1811 poem by Fidèle Delcroix based on the character of Erminia in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, who must be the intended reference.

32 The eponymous heroine of Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel, very popular in France.

33 From Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie (1788)

34 Charles Perrault’s version of the name of the heroine of a tale first published in Boccaccio’s Decameron, known in numerous English adaptations as “patient Griselda.”

35 In Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata.

36 The protagonist of Molière’s Le Misanthrope (1666), not to be confused with the heroine of two operas based on Euripides’ Alcestis.

37 In Lord Byron’s narrative poem (1814).

38 Julie’s counterpart in the Rousseau novel.

39 Veleda (or Velleda) was a Germanic priestess involved in the Batavian revolt against the Romans in the 1st century A.D., but this reference is surely to the equivalent character in the 1795 novel Velleda by the German Romantic novelist and folklorist Benedikte Naubert (née Christiana Hebenstreit)..

40 The sea-monster in Luis de Camões’ epic Os Lusiadas (1572).

41 The protagonist of the chivalric romance Morgant le Géant, who becomes Roland’s squire, heroic in spite of his size and violent inclinations

42 The eponymous protagonist of Lord Byron’s poem (1816-17).

43 Hermione’s notes refer the story of the rose and the nightingale to “a Persian legend…that embodies the most serious thoughts on marriage.” The allegorical folktale in question is the basis of much Sufi poetry and art, although it is now best-known in English by courtesy of Oscar Wilde’s mock-cynical adaptation.

44 The central characters of Le Roman du chatelaine de Coucy et de la dame du Fayel, subsequently adapted by Boccaccio and others.

45 The central characters in a legend recounted by Alphonse de Lamartine in A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1835).

46 Prince Marko, King of Serbia in the late 14th century, is the hero of much Serbian epic poetry, in which Rosanda occasionally features as a love interest,

47 The eponymous protagonist of a fragmentary chanson de geste newly discovered when Quinet wrote the novel.

48 The legend of St. Christopher, as Hermione points out in her notes.

49 The text contains several references of “Kylburn dragons,” but the original reference from which the phrase is derived, which probably involves a variant spelling, has proved evasive; there does not seem to be any determinable connection between Kilbourn Priory and a dragon, nor any connection between the white and red dragons symbolic of England and Wales to any place with a similar name.

50 Cagnazzo and Malacoda are both demons invented by Dante in order to play minor roles in the Inferno.

51 Hermione’s notes record that in 1858, when this passage was written, she and Quinet were living in the valley of the Linth at the foot of icy peaks, which provided the imagery for the entrance of the domains of Limbo

52 Maximilien de Robespierre.

53 William the Silent (1533-1584)—Guillaume le Taciturne in French—founder of the house of Orange and leader of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish that began the Eighty Years’ War.

54 The church of Brou, where Quinet was born, contains the tomb of Marguerite de Bourbon, wife of Philippe II; beneath the tomb are the small figures of four “pleureuses” [weeping women] generally considered to be exceptional examples of the art of sculpture.

55 Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, one of the principal architects of the Terror, was sentenced to be transported to French Guiana in 1795 when the Convention turned against him; the coastal town of Sinnamary was one of the earliest settlements founded there.

56 Descartes was not actually born in Brittany, but his father was a member of the Parlement de Bretagne at Rennes. This is the first time that Merlin insists on his Breton origins, the account given in Book One having been deliberately vague about the location of his birthplace.

57 Thomas Aquinas.

58 The poet and political activist Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), a central figure of Polish Romanticism.

59 Jules Michelet.

60 Hermione’s notes record that this line was written in the valley of the Linth, and subtly suggests that this passage is a transfiguration of the life that she and Quinet shared there, surely identifying herself more completely with Viviane, at this point in the story, than is justified.

61 The only comment made by Hermione’s notes on this chapter is: “Legend demands the rupture of Merlin and Viviane, as does the interest of the story.” She comments immediately thereafter that in the account of the pilgrimages, “autobiography reappears.” In one of the volumes of biography that she published after Quinet’s death, however, she quotes this scene as a figurative reflection of Quinet’s rupture with Minna in 1831.

62 “Jacques Bonhomme” is generalized nickname for French peasants, used to belittle them; the Latin populus means “the people.”

63 The traditional battle-cry of French armies, usually omitting the “et”; its origin is unclear, but St. Denis became the second patron saint of Paris, and its kings were buried in his basilica there. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable claims that Montjoie in a corruption of Mont Jovis, that being the name of mounds used are direction-markers, dismissing the alternative explanation that it derived from “mon joie” [my hope], but who knows?

64 The quotation from which the Latin phrase is taken, whose meaning is indicated in the previous phrase, is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but it was frequently quoted out of context, especially in Biblical commentaries.

65 Hermione’s notes repeat this paragraph in full, claiming that it relates to 11 December 1851, when Quinet’s banishment began, but notes that before describing symbolically his actual exile in Belgium and then Switzerland, it recalls journeys had had made long before, in the 1820s.

66 It is probably a coincidence that Thomas Love Peacock, the only English Romantic to write an Arthurian prose romance, in the Misfortunes of Elphin (1829)—in which Taliesin features much more prominently than Marrl—also wrote a prose romance featuring Robin Hood, Maid Marian (1822), which helped to formulate the modern version of the legend.

67 Mael was a Welsh hermit, subsequently canonized, who concluded his life on the island of Bardsey [i.e. the Island of the Bards], off the Llyn peninsula in north Wales, which was an important place of Medieval pilgrimage, and one of the many claimants to be Arthur’s place of burial. Quinet adds a longer note than usual to this passage, alleging that this “curse” is based on an old Breton popular song expressing the age-old French hatred of the English, but he hastens to add that it will not be Merlin’s last word on the subject. Hermione, by contrast, suggests that it is an alloy of the feelings that Quinet experienced when visiting England in 1825 and his “bitter indignation” of 1854 at English support for Napoléon III—represented in the interlude of the curse, she claims, by “Hengist the Pagan.”

68 Hermione’s notes make no specific reference to this correspondence, leaving it to the informed reader to wonder how closely it resembles Quinet’s communication with Minna during the period of their separation between 1831 and 1834.

69 The heroine of a Medieval legend that offers one of many variants of the tale of a chaste wife unjustly accused and condemned. She lived in a cave for six years until the truth came out. By the time Quinet published his story the legend had formed the basis of a comic opera by Jacques Offenbach performed in Paris in 1859, but he must have written this passage before then.

70 There does not seem to be any textual basis for the implication that Amphion, whose lyre moved the stones to build the walls of Thebes, was blinded, but it might be significant that Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus couples Amphion with “blind Homer” in the course of Faust’s invocations. Orpheus was not blinded ether, but did come to a sticky end.

71 Hermione’s notes record that this chapter recalls the impressions of the German people that Quinet formed during his sojourn in Heidelberg in 1827-8; Faust represents German idealist philosophy, although Hermione expresses it, a trifle uncharitably, as “the obscurity of the German mind.”

72 This list is slightly confused; the first sentence refers to kings supposedly beaten in battle by Arthur, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, but in the Historia Lot is king of the Orkneys before becoming king of Norway; Grunvasius is not mentioned and the name appears to be original to Quinet.

73 This might refer to the Arthurian enchantress Morgan le Fay, although she is referred to elsewhere in the text as Morgane, but there is also a subsequent reference to “Morgan, le médecin” [Morgan the physician], which suggests that there might be two different individuals.

74 Hermione’s notes state, baldly, that “Florica is the portrait of a friend.”

75 Tupin is the signature attached, apocryphally, to the Historia Caroli Magni, a twelfth-century document that pretends to have been written in the eighth century and to provide an account of the historical background to La Chanson de Roland, while actually being a scholarly fantasy derivative therefrom. It appropriates Turpin’s name because he is named in the Chanson as one of Charlemagne’s peers. The name also crops up, without any indication that it is referring to a similar character, in some versions of the story of Tristan and Iseult, thus forging a tenuous link to Arthuriana. There was an actual Archbishop of Reims with a similar name (Tiplin) in the 8th century, but Turpin is indeed a child of the Land of Legends, and a perfect candidate to become the symbolic representative of Medieval chroniclers in general.

76 Quinet had no way of knowing that cave-divers would eventually recover coins from the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse—the biggest spring in France—dating back as far as the 1st century B.C. He would, however, have been familiar with the legend that a hermit lived there in the Middle Ages who became Bishop of Cavaillon, and that the first monastery constructed there, ruined by the eleventh century, was replaced by another. Petrarch lived there in the 14th century, but the village was sacked not long after and returned to wilderness for hundreds of years. Hermione notes that Quinet had visited the spring in 1843.

77 The line, slightly misprinted in the original text, is from Dante’s Purgatorio; it was later to become a particular favorite of T. S. Eliot’s; he quoted it in more than one of his poems.

78 The etymology of the name Attila is obscure, but Etzel, the name used in the Nibelunglied, is unlikely to have been its original form. Turpin is correct in his observation that all the surviving writings about him were inscribed by his enemies, and are undoubtedly heavily biased.

79 Again, Dietrich von Bern was the name attributed in German legend to the 5th century Ostrogothic king Theoderic the Great, one of whose several residences was at Verona (Bern, in German).

80 Old Dokia, or Baba Dochia, is a character from Rumanian folklore, probably related to the Russian Baba Yaga.

81 The Sicambri were a Germanic people mentioned by Julius Caesar in his account of the Gallic Wars. The name was borrowed for application to the Salian Franks when they invaded Gaul in the sixth century, notably in a panegyric addressed by Saint Remigius to Clovis, who became the first of the Merovingian kings. In the imaginary history concocted in the anonymous 8th century Liber Historiae Francorum, refugees from Troy are reported to have founded a city called Sicambria, in order to link the Merovingians to Homeric mythology.

82 St. Potentiana was one of the multitude of early Christian martyrs, somewhat distinguished because the name also crops up in the Norse sagas, as that of a beautiful princess.

83 I have retained Quinet’s spelling for the name of one of the three legendary brothers who founded three Slavic nations: Lech (Poland), Czech (the Czech republics) and Rus (Russia). Palemon is given similar credit in the Lithuanian Chronicles, while Hagen is now best-known by virtue of his appearance in the Nibelung saga as Siegfried’s killer.

84 Few of these names actually come from Arthurian documents; some are borrowed from other legendary sources. Antar (Antarah ibn Shabbad) was a real 6th century poet, but his life was extensively mythologized. The deliberate mingling becomes explicit later in the passage, where contrasting mythologies are carefully juxtaposed. There are several references here and elsewhere in the chapter whose origins I cannot trace, some of which might be improvised or idiosyncratically derived from Welsh or other exotic sources.

85 The forename Humbert is said to drive from “bright Hun” but its attribution of a Hun king is purely symbolic.

86 Perceforest is the eponymous hero of a fourteenth-century prose romance, which recycles, transfigures and blends many of the elements of previous romances in a manner not unlike modern fantasy novels.

87 Gourdnei is otherwise known as Gwiawn Cat’s Eye, and Ghérent as Geraint, while Frollon is cited in Geoffrey of Monmouth as an Armorican rebel killed by Arthur. Golfin de Tours and Morgan the physician remain elusive.

88 Hermione’s notes state that this passage is a depiction of Quinet’s life in Veytaux, where he lived from 1858 until the events of 1870 caused him to hasten back to besieged Paris.

89 As Hermione notes, one of the many political causes that Quinet embraced while in exile himself was that of Italian exiles forbidden to return to their homeland, to whose successful campaign he thought that he had made a useful contribution.

90 More than one of the rulers of the tottering Western Empire had a name beginning “Max-” but this insistence on the title of Caesar is suggestive of Maximian, emperor from 286-305, who claimed that title with the permission of his superior co-emperor Diocletian, and subsequently began to term himself Augustus. This section of the text is, however, deliberately anachronistic, its subsequent references encompassing much later periods of time, based on Quinet’s reflections when he visited Italy in 1832, and this confusion is foreshadowed by the fact that the syllable Max- also connects to the Germanic “Holy Roman Emperors” of the 15th century named Maximilian.

91 Leodegarius, Count of Bologna, is one of the many fictitious European aristocrats cited by Geoffrey of Monmouth as contemporaries of Arthur, but one of very few who features in Merlin l’enchanteur as something moiré than a “spirit of the ruins.”

92 Suggestive of Taddeo Gaddi, a prolific painter of Madonnas who was placed at the head of a list of the most renowned Florentine painters in 1347.

93 Although a similar creature had been described by Virgil, the hippogriff was first named by Ariosto; one such mount is ridden in the Orlando Furioso by various enchanters and knights, including Astolpho, who flies to the moon thereon.

94 The “song of Brut the Breton” is presumably Wace’s verse rendering of the story told in Geoffrey’s Historia.

95 In the Latin version of the apocryphal Acts of Saint Peter, as Peter is fleeing Rome in fear of crucifixion he meets Jesus on the road and asks him “Quo Vadis?” [Where are you going], to which Jesus replies “Romam vado iterum crucifigi” [I’m going to Rome, to be crucified again]. The quotation was very well known even before the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz wrote his international best-seller Quo Vadis? (1895).

96 Raoul de Cambrai is a chanson de geste whose surviving versions date from the 13th-century, although almost certainly based on a 12th century original. Yvain is one of Chrétien de Troyes’ heroes. Titurel is an invention of a 13th century work by Wolfram von Eschenbach, which has only survived in fragmentary form.

97 All three swords are from La Chanson de Roland, Joyeuse being Charlemagne’s and Hauteclaire Olivier’s.

98 Quinet adds a note alleging that this contest is “in the tradition” [i.e. the Prose Merlin] and adds: “I could have borrowed a few more features from Latin prophecies, but they would perhaps have seemed excessive for our epoch so I abstained. The lines relating to the orchard of golden apples and Morgane are taken from Gallic songs.”

99 Approximately, “Creature of Hell named Merlin, go back to Hell.”

100 Lucius, sometimes named as Lucius Tiberius, is a fictitious Roman emperor cited in Geoffrey of Monmouth. He has no connection with the actual 2nd century Roman emperor Lucius Verus. Geoffrey claims that Arthur went to war against Lucius and his subservient (equally fictitious) kings, including Epistrophius of Greece and many of the others included in the list given below, which differs slightly but not significantly from Geoffrey’s. The subsequent list of fictitious senators is also reproduced, again with slight variations, from the same passage in Geoffrey.

101 A diviner rumored to be a descendant of Jupiter cited by several Latin authors, including Ovid and Cicero, whose revelations were allegedly recorded in the Etrusca Disciplina, no copies of which survive and which might well be fictitious.

102 Hermione’s notes observe that the journey described in the following section recalls Quinet’s own expedition to Morea, as a member of a governmental commission, in 1829, in the course of which he encountered the copious debris of buildings and statues and suffered the consequences of the famine afflicting the region at the time.

103 Although these reminisces are based on memories of personal experience, parallel experiences are dutifully summarized by other hands in Expédition scientifique de Morée: Relation, par M. Bory de Saint-Vincent (1836), in which these changes of name are scrupulously observed, along with numerous other details contained in this chapter.

104 Hermione’s notes repeat the last two paragraphs in full as an expression of Quinet’s passionate Hellensim. She notes that his final thought, as he lay dying on 27 March 1875, was of Greece. She also relates that this Book was Jules Michelet’s favorite, as an allegorical explanation of the origin of fairy tales.

105 In Quinet’s epic poem “Prométhée” (1838).

106 Hermione’s notes assert that there is much autobiography in this correspondence, conceding that Merlin’s letters draw on letters that Quinet had written in 1931 prior to his marriage to Minna, but also asserting that the “poetry of nature” contained in Viviane’s letters—wherein, she alleges, there is “no longer the distant echo of youth”—is hers, based on their life in Belgium and Switzerland. She does, however, point out that the earlier ones are supposedly dispatched from places where Quinet had lived in France, long before he met her. She goes into detail about the Swiss locations described in Viviane’s later letters, but avoids any comment on Viviane’s accusations of neglect and infidelity, and the surprising hostility and bitterness of some of Merlin’s personal comments. The reader is free to suspect, however, that there is far more of Minna, and the anguish caused to Quinet by his separation from her (albeit more than twenty years after the fact), in the representations of the letters than there is of Hermione, from whom he was never separated.

107 The constellation known in England as Charles’s Wain, the Big Dipper or The Plough.

108 The place near Hebron where Abraham is said in Old Testament mythology to have entertained three angels, revered by Jews and Christians for thousands of years. The tree on the site, rumoured to be five thousand years old, died in 1996, but it is unclear as yet whether the prophecy that that event would precede the advent of the Antichrist has been fulfilled.

109 This name is unusual, but its location overlooking the St. Gotthard pass implies that the reference is probably to Pizzo Centrale.

110 The reference is to Lord Bryon, here called “Manfred” after the title of one of the poems he wrote while staying in the Bernese alps.

111 Named as Viviane’s father in the Prose Merlin, and her link to Diana the huntress, who prophesies in the text that Dionas’ daughter will be loved by the most powerful magician in the world—hence becoming her “godmother,” in Quinet’s terminology.

112 The Fifth book of the Aeneid includes a description of funeral games, with prizes; Horace’s “Epistle to the Pisos,” [the addressees being Lucius Calpurnius Piso and his two sons] better known as Ars Poetica [Poetic Art] is an early work on literary theory, elaborating on themes in Aristotle’s Poetics, itself cast in poetic form, whose lessons were taken to heart by many French Classicist dramatists.

113 The Nemean games are mentioned, briefly, in Book VIII of Strabo, but there does not seem to be any mention in the relevant passage of a stream or a flower.

114 Alifantina is included in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s list of kings, but not Feravis of Gor or Garamon of Cappadocia. A King of Gor is briefly mentioned in Macpherson’s Ossian, but not named.

115 Hermione, after a long and rather superfluous comment on the manner in which the games illustrate the author’s disapproval of mendacity, hypocrisy and sophistry, notes that Euphrosine is another depiction drawn from life, as observed in Quinet’s youth.

116 Although this was written a hundred years before mouth-to-mouth ventilation entered conventional medical practice, the method had long been applied by midwives to help new-borns reluctant to take their first breath.

117 A Panagia is an icon of the Madonna—such images are commonplace in the Greek Orthodox religion—or a name applied to Mary herself.

118 René Chateaubriand and Lord Byron, the latter again disguised by the name of one of his heroes, in this case Childe Harold. This entire section is, of course, heavy with symbolism regarding the plight of the Greeks under Ottoman rule, which excited such indignation among French Hellenists that that pacifist Quinet has actually allowed Merlin to use his sword, albeit not to kill.

119 Ancient Greek literature features numerous sorceresses, of which Jason’s wife Medea is, after Circe, the most familiar. Canidia is featured in the Epodes of Horace. Simoetha is featured in Theocritus’ Idylls, where she calls upon the aid of Perimeda, who is also mentioned by Propertius, as if her reputation ought to be familiar.

120 A unit of distance, presumably cited here as the span of a race.

121 The legend of Prester John—the ruler of a Christian realm lost somewhere in the Orient—was first popularized in the 12th century, although its origins in oral tradition might be earlier; he cropped up repeatedly in fanciful literary references, many of which credited him with possession of various magical devices, and some of which placed his residence close to the Earthly Paradise.

122 There is an untranslatable pun here, the verb détremper meaning both “to soak” and “to put out of tune.”

123 In French, bengali is also the name of a kind of bird, known in English as a waxwing. I have retained the French term here and elsewhere because of the intended double meaning when it is used again.

124 Sacontala is one of many variant European spellings of the name of the heroine of one of the Sanskrit poems of the fifth century Indian writer Kalidasa, usually used as the title in translations into English and French.

125 The Sanksrit poet identified in the text as the author of the epic Ramayana.

126 Seville is the setting for Tirso de Molina’s early 17th century play El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra [The Seducer of Seville and the Stone Guest], much better known as the source-text of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (in which the “stone guest” is called Il Commendatore [The Commander]), in which the legend of Don Juan took on its definitive form.

127 Don Juan de Tenorio is the title of the second major Spanish drama based on the legend, written by José Zorrilla in 1844 and explicitly associated with the Romantic Movement; it is far more morally ambiguous than its predecessors; Quinet probably saw a version of it in Paris before his expulsion from France.

128 The Zegris were one of the leading parties of the Grenadan Moors, whose feud with the Abencerrages is featured in the famous ballad known in different English translations as “The Zegris’ Bride” or “The Zegri Maid.”

129 Alcina is an enchantress in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, while Armida plays a parallel role in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata.

130 Of this entire exchange of correspondence, Hermione’s notes have nothing to say, but it is hard to believe that the whimsically sarcastic letters from and to Diana of Sicily do not parody exchanges between Quinet and Minna’s mother. At this point, however, the author might have written himself into a corner by excessive transfiguration of his autobiography—because, of course, Quinet did marry Minna, whereas Merlin, in spite of present appearances, cannot marry Viviane. Authors should sympathize, although ungenerous readers would probably expect and demand some ingenious narrative device to solve the problem, which Quinet might have done his utmost to provide—or maybe not.

131 Creusa was Aeneas’ wife, from whom he became separated while they were fleeing from Troy. When he goes back to look for her he only meets her ghost, who offers prophecies regarding his future but remains ungraspable. There is no hint in Virgil’s text that Aeneas might have wanted to be rid of her.

132 Hermione adds a long note to the text saying that everything in this section is “taken from life.” The preceding chapters, she reports, had been written at Evian “in the midst of cheerful Savoyard grape-gatherers [with] the comet of 1858 shining over Lake Geneva,” but that “the year that followed was troubled by illness, the war in Italy, and finally the [offer of] amnesty”—an offer that Quinet was inevitably tempted to accept, but eventually refused. “It was,” she says, “after that interior conflict that he returned to his book, interrupted by other works.” She then decodes the following chapters as a metaphorical representations of the phases of Quinet’s exile, inevitably confused with the story of Arthus’ sleep required by “the tradition.” She claims, however, that Quinet’s “immutable soul never knew disenchantment,” even though circumstances condemned him to doubt the future. In effect, the narrative problem created at the end of the previous section is “solved” by a substitution of autobiographical infusion, moving that aspect of the text abruptly forward from the early 1830s to the aftermath of 1851. 

133 The same section of Dante’s Inferno that names the demons Malacoda and Cagnazzo also cites Farfarello, but the name is probably generic, referring to a kind of goblin; it also crops up in plays written for the Commedia dell’arte, from which the French version might well derive, although French has its own equivalent term in farfadet. Quinet’s consistent use of the term follet independently of its customary use in the term feu follet [will-o’-the-wisp] is probably also based on the Italian use of the term folletto [imp].

134 The goddess or Titan Dionea was sometimes referred to as one of the Pleiades; although her name is not conventionally used to name any of the seven major stars in that constellation, Quinet might be using it in that fashion here.

135 The reference is to Gottfried Bürger’s enormously popular ballad Lenore (1773; sometimes translated as “Ellenore” or “Leonora”); it was composed in response to a specific request from Johann Herder, one of the fathers of German Romanticism, whose work Quinet translated into French, and which had a tremendous influence on his thought and work.

136 The last words of Caesar’s murderer, as reported by Plutarch and repeated, among others, by the 17th century French historian Pierre Bayle (but not by Shakespeare) were: “O wretched virtue, how I have been deceived in your service! I believed you were a real being, and I dedicated myself to you in that belief; but you were only a vain name, a chimera, the victim and slave of fortune.”

137 Most of the names not previously are borrowed from the Prose Merlin, sometimes idiosyncratically varied; the usual form of Owain’s name is used here rather than the Hersart-derived Owenn. Ogrin, however, is presumably the hermit Orgin featured in some versions of the story of Tristan and Iseult

138 The Archbishop of Brice speaks at Arthur’s supposed death-bed in the Prose Merlin; in Malory he is replaced by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

139 Quinet adds a note here: “When I had the round table instituted by Merlin I did not know that legend had done so before me. It has often happened to me to invent incidents, details, even hazards, that I found subsequently in some twelfth-century work that it had been impossible for me to procure during my errant life. My thought thus went to join the poets of our origins without my knowing it. That coincidence, of which I have let more than one trace subsist, has proved to me that I remained in the intimate spirit of the legend in continuing it in the nineteenth century.” It cannot have been easy for Quinet to find new twelfth-century sources while living in Switzerland, although he was undoubtedly in communication with Jules Michelet, and perhaps in correspondence with Hersart, privy to at least some of their research.

140 These names are taken from one of the ballads in Hersart’s Barzaz Breiz.

141 Hermione’s notes suggest, improbably, that the scene of Arthur’s death is a presentiment of Quinet’s own, but also suggests, more plausibly, that his long sleep symbolizes the sensation of his long-drawn-out exile. Her note to the following section, however, offers the more obvious interpretation that it is a transfiguration of the history of France, seen as a progressive quest to reawaken something lost in the fictitious Golden Age already regarded nostalgically by its twelfth-century chroniclers.

142 Given the heavy symbolic loading of his passage, it is not irrelevant that dormants [sleepers], while clearly reminiscent of the legend of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, here transformed into symbols of European nations, has other meanings in French, with reference to architectural fixtures of various sorts and to heraldic figures.

143 Sigune, sister of Amfortes, appears to be borrowed from a Provençal ballad collected in Histoire de la Poésie Provençale (1848) by Claude Fauriel.

144 Brunissende is the beloved of the eponymous hero of Jaufre [Jaufry], the only surviving Arthurian romance written in Occitan, also discussed by Fauriel. Orbance is cited by Fauriel in the synopsis of a work in which she the wife of Feravis, there represented as the son of Perceval and brother of Lohengrin,

145 Floramie is, once again, mentioned by Fauriel in connection with Titurel, but Amide, alias Heliabelle, is not to be found there and remains enigmatic; Hélène is too common a name to permit specific identification.

146 This phrase, found in Geoffrey of Monmouth when describing Merlin’s retreat to live wild in the woods—this reconciling his story with that of Myrddin Wyllt—is repeated in more than one romance.

147 The King of Yvetot is a character in a humorous French ballad; Zerbino is the name of a character in the Orlando Furioso, but the juxtaposition of that name with Octavian in a list of fay princes might have been prompted by the fact that the German Romantic writer Ludwig Tieck, author of the classic “Die Elfen” [The Elves] used both names in the titles of other works.

148 An enchantress in the Spanish romance Amadis de Gaula, which is known to have existed in the 14th century by virtue of secondary references, although the surviving manuscripts are later; it probably originated from an earlier 13th century Portuguese text, and it became one of the most popular of all Medieval romances.

149 The Turul bird is the legendary divine messenger of the Magyars, whose image is still preserved in Hungarian emblems.

150 There was no emperor Dorotheus, but there was a Saint Dorotheus who was a chamberlain to the emperor Diocletian and perished during his bloody persecution of Christians at the beginning of the 4th century, and it is probably Diocletian that Turpin has in mind as the sometime custodian of the symbolic scourge.

151 Quinet adds a note crediting his version of this quotation to his own translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini. He had originally published it in the Revue de Paris in 1831 and Jules Michelet had reproduced it in his Histoire de France (1841). The term “Guintonhi” does not seem to exist anywhere else but this translation, and its meaning is enigmatic. The version of the prophecy reproduced in the Historia does not contain a parallel sentence that might cast some light on the matter.

152 Unfortunately, the substitution of demence [dementia] for the earlier immense does not allow the rhyme to be preserved in English.

153 Quinet adds a note identifying this passage as a reference to the site of the Battle of Zurich on the banks of the river Limmat—the second of that name, in which French forces defeated a Russian and Austrian army in September 1799.

154 Quinet adds a note saying that this tree is based on a “memory of an oak in the Ardennes in Belgium.” He does not say why, but Hermione’s notes to this section points out that this is where Merlin meets Viviane again—in effect, where Viviane ceases to be a reflection of Minna and becomes a reflection of Hermione—and it was in Belgium that Quinet and Hermione forged their relationship. “The imagination,” Hermione writes,” especially the heart, was able to magnify the scope of this book, but in reality, it is a depiction of our intimate life in the profound solitude in which the exile lived from 1858 to 1870. We called our residence in Veytaux ‘Merlin’s green mound.’ It was there, in spite of the absolute isolation, that the fortunate days of Merlin and Viviane recommenced; they ended up forgetting that time was marching, so much were they retrenched from the living and absorbed by eternal thoughts.” If Hermione realized that, in the context of the narrative, the Hermione-based Viviane is a pale shadow of the Minna-based Viviane (and how could she have failed to do so?) she did not see fit to mention it.

155 Quinet adds a note identifying this paragraph as a passage from his translation of the Prophetiae Merlini.

156 Hermione’s notes allege that legend dictates that people should come in pilgrimage to Merlin’s green mound, but the source she cites is the Orlando Furioso, which hardly qualifies as legend.

157 Gauvain [Gawain in Malory] has a slightly peculiar situation in the Arthurian documents because he is abundantly featured in the fragmentary manuscripts that Chrétien de Troyes left behind at his death, which were bundled together for copying, with the result that an incomplete account of the adventures of Gauvain was appended to the later and markedly different allegorical account of Perceval’s encounter with the Fisher King, and thus features in published versions of the Conte du graal, even though it is perfectly plain to anyone but a scholar that it does not belong there.

158 Perhaps Malory, as a Briton/Breton, is exempted from this charge of theft, having some presumed entitlement to the materials; it is, however, slightly odd that the parodist Cervantes is cited rather than the works to which he was reacting, as Quinet was certainly not unaware of Amadis de Gaula, the best-known of the imitative epic romances of the 14th century, even though he only mentions one character therefrom, and none at all from its companion-piece Palmerin de Inglaterra [Palmerin of England]. Perhaps he thought that they had no right to set their imitative fictions in Gaul and Britain.

159 Hersart’s Myrdhinn also has a long quasi-narrative section featuring these Rabelaisian characters, whose connections to the Arthurian mythos he exaggerates somewhat.

160 Poquelin was Molière’s patronymic.

161 Michelet, to whom this sentence is addressed, did prompt someone to say of him that no historian had ever cared less for accuracy, and said of himself that “I have drunk too deep of the black blood of the dead.” If that is not tantamount to an admission, what is?

162 Mort is a feminine noun in French, so the natural translation of the pronoun used here is “she,” but it is worth noting that Quinet had elaborately developed a female personification of Death in Ahasvérus, as the old crone Mob.

163 The emperor Diocletian was said, in many French sources, including a famous passage in Chateaubriand, to have boasted of preferring to cultivate “the lettuces of his garden at Salone” to continuing to rule the empire, as he handed it over—under duress—to his successor Galerius.

164 The title La Philosophie de la nature is most famously attributed to a translation of a book by G. W. F.  Hegel, although it is also employed by Jean Deslisle de Sales. Neither argues specifically that God began as the Devil. The attribution to “Benedict” recalls the fact that Merlin called the future spirit of Spinoza by that name in Limbo, and Spinoza did, indeed, adopt it late in life, but the description does not fit Spinoza’s Ethica either. The Bibliothèque Nationale catalogue has a book by the Swedenborgian surgeon Bénédict Chastanier entitled Le Livre de nature (1788), but that is unlikely to be the intended referent, which is probably generic rather than specific, the name Benedict (that of the founder of monasticism) being employed to mean meditative scholarship.

165 Hermione’s notes observe that the text from here onwards is no longer personal. What has concluded, in fact, is not the text per se (obviously) but its quasi-autobiographical component. It is, if not Quinet’s prophecy, at least his wish-list.

166 In French, ténèbres [darkness] is plural; hence the use of “we.” Translation thus creates occasional difficulties, which I have overcome in part by sometimes substituting “the shadows.”

167 This name is improvised, and is presumably intended to suggest a scorpion.

168 Zug and Uri are cantons in Switzerland, where Goldau is a mountain subject to avalanches

169 The phrase is derived from Homer, who sometimes calls the death that closes human eyes blue for the sake of scansion.