a requiem, a cantata, The Birth of Venus, produced at the Leeds festival in 1898, a quantity of piano music, and a large number of songs. Fauré occupies a place by himself among modern French composers. He delights in the imprévu, and loves to wander through labyrinthine harmonies. There can be no denying the intense fascination and remarkable originality of his music. His muse is essentially aristocratic, and suggests the surroundings of the boudoir and the perfume of the hot-house.
FAURIEL, CLAUDE CHARLES (1772–1844), French historian,
philologist and critic, was born at St Étienne on the 21st of
October 1772. Though the son of a poor joiner, he received a
good education in the Oratorian colleges of Tournon and Lyons.
He was twice in the army—at Perpignan in 1793, and in 1796–1797
at Briançon, as private secretary to General J. Servan de
Gerbey (1741–1808); but he preferred the civil service and the
companionship of his friends and his books. In 1794 he returned
to St Étienne, where, but only for a short period, he filled a
municipal office; and from 1797 to 1799 he devoted himself
to strenuous study, more especially of the literature and history,
both ancient and modern, of Greece and Italy. Having paid a
visit to Paris in 1799, he was introduced to Fouché, minister of
police, who induced him to become his private secretary. Though
he discharged the duties of this office to Fouché’s satisfaction,
his strength was overtasked by his continued application to
study, and he found it necessary in 1801 to recruit his health
by a three months’ trip in the south. In resigning his office in the
following year he was actuated as much by these considerations
as by the scruples he put forward in serving longer under
Napoleon, when the latter, in violation of strict republican principles,
became consul for life. This is clearly shown by the fragments
of Memoirs discovered by Ludovic Lalanne and published
in 1886.
Some articles which Fauriel published in the Décade philosophique (1800) on a work of Madame de Staël’s—De la littérature considerée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales—led to an intimate friendship with her. About 1802 he contracted with Madame de Condorcet a liaison which lasted till her death (1822). It was said of him at the time that he gave up all his energies to love, friendship and learning. The salon of Mme de Condorcet was throughout the Consulate and the first Empire a rallying point for the dissentient republicans. Fauriel was introduced by Madame de Staël to the literary circle of Auteuil, which gathered round Destutt de Tracy. Those who enjoyed his closest intimacy were the physiologist Cabanis (Madame de Condorcet’s brother-in-law), the poet Manzoni, the publicist Benjamin Constant, and Guizot. Later Tracy introduced to him Aug. Thierry (1821) and perhaps Thiers and Mignet. During his connexion with Auteuil, Fauriel’s attention was naturally turned to philosophy, and for some years he was engaged on a history of Stoicism, which was never completed, all the papers connected with it having accidentally perished in 1814. He also studied Arabic, Sanskrit and the old South French dialects. He published in 1810 a translation of the Parthenaīs of the Danish poet Baggesen, with a preface on the various kinds of poetry; in 1823 translations of two tragedies of Manzoni, with a preface “Sur la théorie de l’art dramatique”; and in 1824–1825 his translation of the popular songs of modern Greece, with a “Discours préliminaire” on popular poetry.
The Revolution of July, which put his friends in power, opened to him the career of higher education. In 1830 he became professor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne. The Histoire de la Gaule méridionale sous la domination des conquerants germains (4 vols., 1836) was the only completed section of a general history of southern Gaul which he had projected. In 1836 he was elected a member of the Academy of Inscriptions, and in 1837 he published (with an introduction the conclusions of which would not now all be endorsed) a translation of a Provençal poem on the Albigensian war. He died on the 15th of July 1844. After his death his friend Mary Clarke (afterwards Madame J. Möhl) published his Histoire de la littérature provençale (3 vols., 1846)—his lectures for 1831–1832. Fauriel was biased in this work by his preconceived and somewhat fanciful theory that Provence was the cradle of the chansons de geste and even of the Round Table romances; but he gave a great stimulus to the scientific study of Old French and Provençal. Dante et les origines de la langue et de la littérature italiennes (2 vols.) was published in 1854.
Fauriel’s Mémoires, found with Condorcet’s papers, are in the Institute library. They were written at latest in 1804, and include some interesting fragments on the close of the consulate, Moreau, &c. Though anonymous, Lalanne, who published them (Les Derniers Jours du Consulat, 1886), proved them to be in the same handwriting as a letter of Fauriel’s in 1803. The same library has Fauriel’s correspondence, catalogued by Ad. Régnier (1900). Benjamin Constant’s letters (1802–1823) were published by Victor Glachant in 1906. For Fauriel’s correspondence with Guizot see Nouvelle Rev. (Dec. 1, 1901, by V. Glachant), and for his love-letters to Miss Clarke (1822–1844) the Revue des deux mondes (1908–1909) by E. Rod. See further Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, ii.; Antoine Guillois, Le Salon de Mme Helvétius (1894) and La Marquise de Condorcet (1897); O’Meara, Un Salon à Paris: Mme Möhl (undated); and J. B. Galley, Claude Fauriel (1909).
FAUST, or Faustus, the name of a magician and charlatan
of the 16th century, famous in legend and in literature. The
historical Faust forms little more than the nucleus round which
a great mass of legendary and imaginative material gradually
accumulated. That such a person existed there is, however,
sufficient proof.[1] He is first mentioned in a letter, dated August
20, 1507, of the learned Benedictine Johann Tritheim or Trithemius
(1462–1516), abbot of Spanheim, to the mathematician
and astrologer Johann Windung, at Hasfurt, who had apparently
written about him. Trithemius, himself reputed a magician, and
the author of a mystical work (published at Darmstadt in 1621
under the title of Steganographica and burnt by order of the
Spanish Inquisition), speaks contemptuously of Faust, who
called himself Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior, as
a fool rather than a philosopher (fatuum non philosophum), a
vain babbler, vagabond and mountebank who ought to be
whipped, and who had fled from the city rather than confront
him. The insane conceit of the man was proved by his boast that,
were all the works of Aristotle and Plato blotted from the
memory of men, he could restore them with greater elegance, and
that Christ’s miracles were nothing to marvel at, since he could
do the like whenever and as often as he pleased; his debased
character by the fact that he had been forced to flee from the
school of which he had been appointed master by the discovery
of his unnatural crimes. The same unflattering estimate is contained
in the second extant notice of Faust, in a letter of the
jurist and canon Konrad Mudt (Mutianus Rufus), of the 3rd of
October 1513, to Heinrich Urbanus. Mudt, like Trithemius,
simply regards Faust as a charlatan. Similar is the judgment of
another contemporary, Philipp Begardi, who in the fourth
chapter of his Index sanitatis (Worms, 1539) ranks Faust, with
Theophrastus Paracelsus, among the “wicked, cheating, useless
and unlearned doctors.”
It was Johann Gast (d. 1572), a worthy Protestant pastor of Basel, who like Mudt claims to have come into personal contact with Faust, who in his Sermones convivales (Basel, 1543) first credited the magician with genuine supernatural qualities. Gast, a man of some learning and much superstition, believed Faust to be in league with the devil, by whom about 1525 he was ultimately carried off, and declared the performing horse and dog by which the necromancer was accompanied to be familiar and evil spirits. Further information was given to the world by Johann Mannel or Manlius (d. 1560), councillor and historian to the emperor Maximilian II., in his Locorum communium collectanea (Basel, undated). Manlius reports a conversation of Melanchthon, which there is no reason to suspect of being other than genuine, in which the Reformer speaks of Faust as “a disgraceful beast and sewer of many devils,” as having been born at Kundling (Kundlingen or Knittlingen), a little town near his own native town (of Bretten), and as having studied magic at Cracow. The rest of the information given can hardly be regarded as historical, though Melanchthon, who, like Luther,
- ↑ The opinion, long maintained by some, that he was identical with Johann Fust, the printer, is now universally rejected.
