TRANSLATION: The Little Duchess
The first English translation of a bestselling 19th Century French classic.
The Little Duchess by Zénaïde Fleuriot is this week’s new translation. It is the first-ever English translation of this once very popular novel, and was translated from the original French by Mme. Summer Charrette. The ebooks have already gone out to the subscribers. It’s now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and soon, audiobook.
LA PETITE DUCHESSE
When twelve-year-old Alberte de la Rochefaucon is pulled from her convent boarding school by her fashionable older sister, she tumbles headlong into a world she is entirely unprepared for: the drawing rooms, dinner parties, and dressmakers of Faubourg Saint-Germain society. Her sister Madeleine, the young Marquise de Valroux, means well but lives for pleasure, and her formidable great-aunt the duchess inhabits a crumbling mansion where the clocks seem to have stopped sometime before the Revolution.
Alberte is bright, proud, restless, and bored — bored at the convent, bored in society, bored with the professors hired to continue her education. Her companions have nicknamed her “the little duchess” for her haughty ways. But when a journey south to Cannes brings her into the orbit of a dying young soldier and a neglected Anglo-Indian boy, Alberte begins to discover what none of her tutors could teach her: that purpose is not given but chosen, and that the hardest freedom is the freedom to discipline yourself.
First published in Paris by Hachette in 1876, La Petite Duchesse was one of the most beloved novels by Zénaïde Fleuriot, the Breton author whose works shaped a generation of young French readers. Translated by Summer Charrette, this is its first appearance in the English language.
A story of sisterhood, stubbornness, and the slow education of a strong will, The Little Duchess is a lovely story for readers who appreciate the works of Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Charlotte Yonge.
About the Author
Zénaïde-Marie-Anne Fleuriot (28 October 1829 – 19 December 1890), was a French novelist. She wrote eighty three novels, all aimed at young women. She was born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany to a devoutly Catholic and Royalist family, faithful to the Bourbons. Her parents had sixteen children of which only five survived. Her father, Jean-Marie, having lost his mother as a child, was brought up by his uncle, a priest, who was shot by the Revolutionaries in Brest in 1794 for refusing to sign the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Her background gave her a deep respect for traditional Christian and family values, which infused her work. This helped to make her work very popular among the Catholic middle class.
Excerpt
In our own day, people have taken pleasure in degrading something perfectly respectable and perfectly worthy of respect; I mean the class of persons who serve us: domestic service.
It has been imagined that those who live under our roof, who share our daily life, who know our intimate habits, who penetrate willy-nilly the small mysteries of our household, should be transformed into enemies and adversaries. What folly. Was there ever anything more worthy of esteem than a faithful servant, a devoted attendant who gave her life to those whose existence she shared? What is gained by spoiling a calling whose true dignity lies in devotion? Why debase it, degrade it?
If this form of devotion sits ill, alas, with the excesses of modern pride, one may still be permitted to regret that so many souls disdain the humble happiness and security that attach to service in an honourable house, and do so merely to gorge themselves on a false and wretched independence.
But if faithful, honest, devoted servants are to be prized, nothing is more detestable than the depraved domestic service that flourishes in great cities and sometimes, alas, in great houses. From the cook who skims a dishonest margin from a respectable but modest household’s accounts, to the cordon bleu who concludes private agreements with her employers’ tradespeople; from the little maid who brutalises and neglects the poor child in her charge, to the schemer who tries on her mistress’s fine dresses in secret and the manservant who drinks his master’s best wines — I find them all absolutely bad. There is no greater danger for children than to come near these proud and cringing creatures, treacherous and flattering at once, who seem to make it their business to degrade an honest calling through a complete absence of conscience. And our little duchess was to learn this from experience.
No one had ever thought to put her on guard against a danger of this kind; her natural dignity kept improper familiarity at a distance, and it might have been supposed that in her sister’s house she would not be exposed to it. But the wisdom of nations has said it plainly: as the master, so the servant. The young marquise was frivolous; her women were light-minded; she disdained to keep an eye on her people, and they lived as they pleased, contriving by sheer adroitness to raise a true barrier between the salon and the servants’ hall, where they reigned as masters. When a mistress of a household does not regard herself as having charge of souls, the souls slip away from her, and she finds herself surrounded not by servants but by hired creatures who deceive her, rob her, and compromise her.
Though she had not the slightest understanding of such things, the little duchess nevertheless felt a very distinct unease of conscience when, on the following evening, Céline said to her: “The carriage is back, mademoiselle, will you come down?”
The word down made the child colour instinctively. She felt, without being able to reason it through, that one descends in the true sense only when one stoops toward those beneath one in order to do them some good; to serve them, even, according to the Gospel command. To go down in the other sense, mixing without reason or purpose in their pleasures, was a different matter altogether.
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