Like a Carp on a Lawn

Graham Robb

• The Life of Marie d'Agoult, Alias Daniel Stern by Phyllis Stock-Morton
  Johns Hopkins, 291 pp, £33.00, July 2000, ISBN 0 8018 6313 9
• Marie d’Agoult: The Rebel Countess by Richard Bolster
  Yale, 288 pp, £16.95, September 2000, ISBN 0 300 08246 0

Marie Catherine Sophie de Flavigny, Comtesse d’Agoult (born Frankfurt, 1805; died Paris, 1876) is famous for two contrasting reasons. In 1835, she left her husband for Franz Liszt. The affair lasted about ten years and produced three children, the second of whom, Cosima, succeeded ‘where her mother had failed’, says Phyllis Stock-Morton, by ‘becoming the permanent muse of a great composer’ (Wagner). Marie d’Agoult is also known as ‘Daniel Stern’, the name under which she published a vivid and well-documented Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 (1850-53). Until the fall of the Second Empire, it was one of the very few books published in France to present a balanced and therefore critical view of the rise of Napoleon III. Flaubert used it in his research for L’Education sentimentale; historians still treat it as an important source on the revolution.