Mademoiselle de Maupin

and One of Cleopatra’s Nights

Theophile Gautier

A triangle, with the strange — for the time — twist that two of the characters are engaged in a lesbian relationship. This has led to numerous bans and attempts to censor the book over the past century and a half, and these bans continue today in many countries.

Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) In September 1833, Gautier was solicited to write a historical romance based on the life of French opera star Mlle. Maupin, who was a first-rate swordswoman and often went about disguised as a man. Originally, the story was to be about the historical La Maupin, who set fire to a convent for the love of another woman, but later retired to a convent herself, shortly before dying in her thirties. Gautier instead turned the plot into a simple love triangle between a man, d’Albert, and his mistress, Rosette, who both fall in love with Madelaine de Maupin, who is disguised as a man named Théodore. The message behind Gautier’s version of the infamous legend is the fundamental pessimism about the human identity, and perhaps the entire Romantic age. The novel consists of seventeen chapters, most in the form of letters written by d’Albert or Madelaine. Most critics focus on the preface of the novel, which preached about art for art’s sake through its dictum that ‘everything useful is ugly’.

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Details

Genre	Pulp
Publication Date	1950
Publisher	Modern Library
Format	Hardcover
No. of Pages	332
Language	English
Rating	NotRated
Original Publisher	Renduel
Original Language
Subject	Lesbian Sleaze
BookID	7944

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Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier