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To say that the 1830s in France were a decade preoccupied with the past is to state the obvious. After the July Revolution, the Parisian elite became obsessed with constructing and reconstructing their nation’s historical narrative. Despite their radical agenda, the young romantics of the 1830s not only turned to the past in their quest for a more fully authentic age, but did so in the knowledge that this move was itself belated, since the first generation of romantics had already established the trope. Chapter 4 begins with a broad survey of this generation—discussing writers such as Gautier and Désiré Nisard, and movements such as Saint-Simonianism and Neo-Catholicism—before focusing in detail on two exemplary French Romantics: Alfred de Musset and Chateaubriand. In the work of these two very different writers, lateness manifests itself—in a range of differing modes—as the defining sentiment of the era.

This chapter focuses on how George Sand made the acquaintance of Alfred de Musset at a dinner party in honor of Francois Buloz and a group of his authors. The second son of an aristocratic Parisian family, Alfred de Musset was a rising star in the Parisian literary galaxy at only twenty-three. His father had died the previous year, leaving Musset emotionally vulnerable despite his newly acquired title of viscount. In response to the flattering lines he wrote to Sand following their meeting, she sent Musset a copy of Indiana. Several days later, Musset wrote her an impassioned, praise-filled poem titled “After Reading Indiana”; soon he was sending notes pressing the illustrious author for further meetings.

This chapter examines the early nineteenth-century grisette as a literary type, and traces her reappearance on the cultural scene as a figure of nostalgia at the turn of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the century, the grisette of the 1830s and 1840s still regularly appeared throughout French popular culture as a sign of heightened romantic longing for a lost Paris, a France of small-scale industry, sentiment, and elegance. She was frequently conflated with contemporary garment workers, tethering living belle époque workingwomen to a figure of literary wistfulness. Parisian garment workers were repeatedly cast in the mold of a pleasing throwback, a woman at once thoroughly embedded in the modern Parisian landscape and yet, also, out of time, carrying within her the essence and soul of a lost or endangered France. The most popular grisette at the turn of the century was Musset’s Mimi Pinson, who was featured in songs, poems, postcards, ballet, vaudeville shows, short stories, novels, and films. This chapter also develops a physiognomy of the grisette’s belle époque descendant, the midinette, a modernized version of the type, and inheritor of both the grisette’s cultural significance and her limitations. From strike reportage to pulp novels to monuments, the Parisian garment worker found eroticized and socially useful shades of herself promoted around her city and nation in these years, shades which more often than not moved backward in time to the grisette of the 1830s and 1840s.

This chapter traces the complicated religious journey of George Sand, from an unorthodox education guided by her free-thinking grandmother to a mystical Catholicism while an adolescent, and finally to a form of social Christianity as an adult. It links Sand’s evolving religious ideas to her tumultuous personal life and her radical positions on social institutions, in particular marriage and the status of women. Although she moved away from Catholicism Sand continued to believe in a benevolent but inscrutable God who oversaw a universe marked by spiritual and material progress. This chapter presents Sand’s life as exemplifying the religion of humanitarianism that emerged in the post-revolutionary era.

In 1900, composer and philanthropist Gustave Charpentier founded the Oeuvre de Mimi Pinson, an association providing the workingwomen of Paris with free theater tickets, and free music and dance classes. What began as an effort to provide occasional free entertainment to female workers became a multifaceted conservatory, charity, and social network. The men (and some women) who organized and administered the OMP did so by relying on the trope of the gay, seducible, and tasteful young garment worker. These assumptions defined not only the work of the OMP and its relationship with its working-class members, but also reinforced the comforting notion of workingwomen’s pliability for journalists, politicians, reformers, and countless casual observers. Even as the OMP proffered a vision of emancipated French womanhood as a national renovator, it also deployed a powerful typology of the Parisian garment worker to temper its radical potential. Defined and confined by a nineteenth-century type, the female garment workers of Paris were exemplary targets for a benevolent effort which, at a moment in which feminist action and labor militancy were consolidating, reimagined women’s emancipation and working-class uplift as a matter entirely managed by bourgeois male authority and desire.

This chapter talks about the culmination of Marcel Proust's long quest both in love and in the writing of In Search of Lost Time. At the beginning of his transposing of his love affairs and infatuations into the novel, he looked to the letters of Alfred de Musset—his favorite poet in his adolescence—for inspiration. Proust's Narrator became a representative of the utopian figure of the artist, of successful men and women, who saves himself from aimlessness and also gifts his readers with the insight of his experience of his loves. This chapter thus takes a conclusive look at Proust's novel and how the events and relationships in his life have revealed truths to its readers. All this resulted in the literary success of the novel, that Edmund Wilson praised it for being the literary equivalent of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.