Like a Carp on a Lawn 

Graham Robb

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.

Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.