Gilded youth : three lives in France's Belle Époque /

THERE'S a touch of "Jules and Jim" - that seminal New Wave film about a femme fatale and the two best friends who fall for her - in Kate Cambor's dramatized study of the young heirs to three giants of 19th-century France. Léon Daudet loves Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Jeanne Hugo; Léon quarrels with Jean-Baptiste and marries Jeanne; Jeanne divorces Léon and marries Jean-Baptiste. The difference is this: While Truffaut's film offers scope for three fictional lives to diverge and return, forever entwining to suit the design of their ingeniously manipulative creator, the personalities of Léon Daudet, Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Jeanne Hugo were sufficiently strong and distinct to ensure that the break between them, when it came, was complete. Kate Cambor's "Gilded Youth: Three Lives in France's Belle Époque" is, therefore, less a group study than three monographs linked and unified by a well-chosen series of dramatic events: Victor's Hugo's monumental funeral ; the scandal surrounding the disastrous bankruptcy of the Panama Canal Company; the Dreyfus Affair; the death, in mysterious circumstances, of Daudet's teenage son; the final expedition of Charcot, the polar explorer who drowned when his ship sank in a storm off the coast of Iceland in 1936. The sense of inherited grandeur as both millstone and crown is best conveyed in Cambor's account of the union, on Feb. 12, 1891, of two great literary dynasties. Léon Daudet, a medical student who had just failed a crucial examination, was the son of the celebrated author, Alphonse Daudet. His bride, Victor Hugo's granddaughter, was a fresh-faced former handmaiden of that self-satisfied old fraud. (Cambor makes no secret of her own disdain for a man whose favorite chair bore the phrase: "Ego Hugo.") The wedding ceremony was a disaster. The Charcot family, among whose members the Daudets had numbered their closest friends, boycotted the occasion. Leon's mother had outraged them by claiming that Jean-Martin Charcot, France's pre-eminent neurologist, had influenced the board that failed her son in his medical exams (while passing his own) because Léon had stolen the young Charcot's intended bride. At the church, the Daudets were forced to listen to paeans of bombastic Hugolatry. "It is the celebration of Homer that we celebrate, . . . the spirit of the great poet, who is in the midst of us," croaked one elderly statesman, urging Jeanne to cherish her potential to breed a flock of Hugolets: "You have within you a real treasure," he declared, "and this treasure, my child, you must never exhaust." United mainly by a consuming desire for public approbation, the newly wedded Daudets were soon divided. Jeanne Hugo's subsequent marriage, in 1896, to the admirable and modest Jean-Baptiste - who had loved her since childhood - was equally doomed. In 1905, when he returned from his first polar expedition, Jeanne, already weary of spousal solitude, followed through on her threat to divorce him. Despite the many testimonies to her beauty and sweetness, to her loyalty to her family heritage (as a married woman, she signed her name Charcohugo), Jeanne can't escape sounding spoiled and vapid. And Jean-Baptiste comes to life only in Cambor's vivid accounts of his journeys. UNCOMPROMISING, aggressively emotional and fiercely reactionary, Léon Daudet occupies such a dominant place in Cambor's book that it made me wish she had simply focused on the Daudets: the promiscuous, syphilitic, inspired (and greatly loved) Alphonse, and Léon, his distorted mirror-image of a son, heir to all his father's faults and none of his virtues. Léon Daudet personifies an aspect of French culture that remains insufficiently acknowledged. After spending his early adult years as a failed physician and mediocre novelist, he turned to politics and journalism. A virulent anti-Dreyfusard, he rejoiced when his father's old friend, Émile Zola, was put on trial and condemned to prison. Passionately devoted to the nationalist, royalist cause, he joined his second wife in founding the daily newspaper of the extremist right-wing political movement Action Française. His views, articulated in his column and in his frequent lectures, helped pave the way for the Nazi Party in Pétain's France. It's hard to believe that Daudet, had he not died of an aneurysm in June 1942, would have resisted the temptation to collaborate, and fervently, with the occupier of his homeland. Monsters make for compelling reading. Cambor's group portrait is efficiently researched, and narrated with brio and style. But the star of "Gilded Youth," easily overshadowing the competition, is the grippingly unpleasant Léon Daudet. Miranda Seymour's most recent book is a memoir. "Thrumpton Hall."

The Belle Epoque, or beautiful era, commonly refers to the era in French history sandwiched between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. In addition to being a time marked by significant cultural and scientific advancements, it was also a giddy some would say gaudy period poised on the threshold of discontent, unrest, and social upheaval. Focusing on the offspring of three of France's most respected men of letters and science, Cambor's group portrait of Leon Daudet, son of writer Alphonse Daudet; Jean-Baptiste Charcot, son of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot; and Jeanne Hugo, granddaughter of France's dean of letters, Victor Hugo, attempts to capture the vibrant texture and inherent contradictions of the era. Though the author falls a bit short of her ultimate goal, she does provide a fascinating snapshot of three uniquely situated individuals who helped to define, and were in turn defined by, this fascinating juncture in European history.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2009 Booklist

In the belle epoque, which began in the final decade of the 19th century and lasted until World War I, cultural life in Europe thrived in a semi-Renaissance atmosphere, nowhere more so than in France. This book relates the stories of three individuals-Leon Daudet, son of popular writer Alphonse Daudet; Jean-Baptiste Charcot, son of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, mentor to Sigmund Freud; and Jeanne Hugo, granddaughter of Victor Hugo. With hints of glamour and decadence but also subject to scandal and gossip, the lives of the three celebrity heirs were in a sense the embodiment of a generation lost in the upheaval, social unrest, and disillusionment of the dawning century's tumultuous years. In her first book, Cambor, who has written for the American Scholar and the American Prospect, succinctly and masterfully offers an illuminating glimpse into belle epoque realities through the experiences of three childhood friends destined to do great things, who later saw the golden world of their childhoods disappear. Verdict This fascinating volume is highly recommended to a broad readership in 19th- and 20th-century French studies and literature.-Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Ill-focused look at the Belle poque in France. Cambor chooses three "gilded youth" to carry her storyLon Daudet, son of Provenal novelist Alphonse Daudet; Jean-Baptiste Charcot, son of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot; and Jeanne Hugo, granddaughter of legendary novelist Victor Hugo. The author quickly loses the thread of Jeanne, who didn't accomplish much more in her life than marry and divorce the previous two men, while Jean-Baptiste, after practicing medicine like his father, departs the narrative to pursue his real lovehigh-seas exploration. In contrast to their three wise, positivist forebears, who had championed "a hard-won faith in the human capacity for progress," the youth came of age in an unsettling time, as France faced the fallout from the Franco-Prussian War, foreign elements came under increasing suspicion and the Dreyfus Affair opened a suppurating vein of anti-Semitism. With the deaths of the aged parents in the late 1880s and '90s, the idols had fallen and darker days were rolling in. Lon, divorced from spoiled socialite Jeanne, took up with unsavory friends such as anti-Republic royalist Charles Maurras and douard Drumont, founder of the Antisemitic League of France. He became a bombastic polemicist and reactionary for the conservative publication Action Franaise, rallying public outrage against Marie Curie's election to the Academy of Sciences. Cambor's dense prose obscures much of the dynamism of this "age of extremes," and the lack of excerpts from these great authors' works seems like a missed opportunity for important contextual development. Diligent but tedious. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.